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“What?”
“Just come and have a look, will you?” Lol grabbed Ana’s hand and dragged her up the stairs. “Look. There’s a fucking door in the bath, Ana. What’s that all about, then? A door. In the bath. And look at the size of the flush on that toilet. And these railings, look. Here. And here. And all these fucking buttons everywhere. And have a look at this.” Lol pulled Ana into a small bedroom at the other end of the corridor. “Look!” The room was painted bright blue. Posters of Radiohead and Teenage Fanclub, Buffy the Vampire Slayer and The X-Files decorated the walls. There was a TV and a sound system and an enormous chest of pine drawers with fat handles. And a large, white, and distinctly surgical-looking bed tucked into a bay window.
“I mean—what the fuck is this, Ana? Was Bee shacked up with Christopher Reeves or summat?”
Flint walked in, looking more animated than Ana had seen him looking all day. “This is totally fucking weird. Look what I just found in Bee’s wardrobe.”
“No way,” gasped Lol.
Flint was holding aloft a pair of trainers. Trainers. “Uh-huh,” he said, “and look at this.” With his other hand he held out a sweatshirt. A grubby sweatshirt with mud on the front.
“OK,” said Lol, collapsing onto an armchair, “now I’m seriously spooked. We’ve entered the Twilight Zone, d’you realize that? We’re in Tales of the fucking Unexpected. My head hurts.”
The three of them fell silent.
“This is Bee’s house, in’t it?” said Lol.
Flint and Ana nodded.
“Right,” said Flint eventually, slapping his large-hock-of-Norfolk-ham thighs with his five-Cumberland-sausages-on-a-dinner-plate hands. “I think we should take a couple of rooms each and search them for anything else out of the ordinary. Then in an hour or so we’ll meet downstairs and take a look at what we’ve found. OK?”
“OK?”
Ana took the bedrooms, Flint took the living room and the garage, and Lol took the bathroom, kitchen, and garden shed. For an hour no one spoke. Instead the cottage was filled with the sounds of floorboards creaking, the toilet being flushed every now and then, and general industriousness. It was a strange hour or so as Ana once again found herself sifting through Bee’s underwear, picking through her books and CDs, feeling her clothes, and examining her toiletries. But this was so different from clearing out the flat on Baker Street. On Thursday her sister had been a stranger. Apart from the moment when she’d stood and stared at Bee’s pubes in the bath, there’d been an unsettling numbness to her activities. But things had changed, already, just three days later. Ana herself felt unburdened, particularly after her tears at Bee’s grave, and now every object, every item felt imbued with some kind of magical, desperate poignancy. And Bee was growing in her head moment by moment, turning from a two-dimensional cartoon character into a real human being. She opened a bedside drawer and passed her hand over the contents. Bobby pins, one with a black hair still attached, elastic hairbands, sleeping pills, crumpled-up tissues, toenail clippers, a photo of Gregor. In Bee’s wardrobe were more clothes, but simple clothes here—jeans, sweaters, a long denim skirt, walking boots, even some thermal underwear.
A thorough search of Bee’s bedroom revealed nothing, so Ana moved along the corridor toward the blue bedroom. There was a smell in here—a sort of stale smell. Nothing gut-churning, just the whiff of bedclothes a couple of weeks past their wash-by date. It smelled like the bedroom of a teenage boy. It was the bedroom of a teenage boy. There were socks on the floor, trainers under the bed, CDs out of their cases, dirty mugs on the TV. Ana pulled open drawers and found several more pairs of unsophisticated underpants plus various items of male clothing of the casual and unfashionable variety—old T-shirts, unbranded jeans, shapeless jumpers.
She fiddled with the bed a bit, pressing levers, until it suddenly boinged upright and scared her half to death. “Jesus,” she muttered, clutching her heart. The evidence was mounting up very rapidly. The wheelchair ramp, the weird bath, the elevator, and the hydraulic bed—who lives in a house like this, indeed?
She sat down on the bed and went through the bedside drawer. An empty spectacle case. A dead fly. A calculator. A CD-ROM. There were books piled on top of the unit, books like Conspiracy Theories—Secrecy and Power in America, The Case for Mars: The Plan to Settle the Red Planet and Why We Must, and Apollo 12: The NASA Mission Reports.
In the cabinet underneath were textbooks with titles like Elementary Linear Algebra with Applications, Schaum’s Mathematical Handbook of Formulas and Tables, and Applied Linear Statistical Models. A few notebooks underneath were full of scribbled algebra that looked too technical and complicated even to bother flicking through. And there at the bottom sat a school exercise book with a typed label attached that nearly made Ana gasp out loud. “Zander Roper, Form 5L.”
Zander.
The same Zander Bee had written a song for.
He wasn’t a man at all. He was a child. She grasped the exercise book to her chest and ran downstairs.
All three of them sat blankly in the living room, surrounded by an assortment of disparate and eclectic objects. It felt like they were playing some very surreal, very somber parlor game. Even Lol was quiet for once.
Lol had found some bird-spotting handbooks that had been well-thumbed, a pair of binoculars, a whole heap of prescription drugs, a pile of plastic sheets, and another set of notebooks covered in algebra. And Flint had collected some watercolors, painted directly into a pad of cartridge paper, watercolors of the garden, the view, the cottage, and Bee. Bee sunbathing on a deckchair, Bee at the kitchen table, Bee asleep in front of the fire.
“Jesus,” said Lol, picking one up, “these are just beautiful. Just absolutely beautiful.”
She let it drop to the floor and held her head in her hands, sighing loudly. “Well,” she said, “it’s all crystal-fucking-clear now, in’t it? Bee spent every weekend for the last three years with a teenage, bird-watching mathematician called Zander who had a crush on Gillian Anderson and could paint like Michelangelo. Oh—and she wrote a love song for him, too. Of course. It all makes perfect fucking sense. It’s as clear as the fucking North Circular in the rush hour… Jesus…”
“D’you think…?” began Ana, about to form the most obvious of all possible questions.
“Don’t even go there, Ana,” said Lol, using her hands to demonstrate her confusion. “I don’t even want to think about it. If this Zander kid was her son, then it throws the last fifteen years of my life into complete mayhem. If she had a kid and didn’t tell me, then nothing in the world makes sense anymore…”
Flint got to his feet and stretched. Bits of his huge body audibly cracked and Lol winced. “And where are you off to?” Flint was reaching for his car keys.
“The pub.”
Lol rolled her eyes. “Oh—that’s typical, that is. We’ve come all the way down to Broadstairs, we’ve found out that our best friend was living a secret bloody life, we’ve got all this stuff to do, and you’re going to the fucking pub!”
Flint rolled his eyes back at Lol. “How about you just stop talking, just for a second, and think. Just for once, Tate.”
