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“Un café…” she said, her face wrinkling when she realized she couldn’t even remember the word for please—por favor? Pourquoi? She smiled extra politely at the waiter, hoping that this would make up for not saying please, and pulled the soft top from her cigarettes. She lit one up and stared through the window for a while. The town was bleakly pretty in the clear December sun. Streetlamps were festooned with white Christmas lights, and a layer of glittery encrusted frost lay over everything. A week before Christmas. Her favorite time of year. Usually. She sighed and pulled the supplement from inside her newspaper. She flipped through it absentmindedly, half-heartedly. The usual end-of-year lineup. Pages of moody black-and-white photojournalism. A picture of Challenger disintegrating over Cape Canaveral, heartbreaking portraits of Chernobyl victims, a joyful one of a jubilant Desmond Tutu. And then lists.

Who died.

What was hot.

What was not.

Trends. Stars. Films.

Music. The Hits. A-ha. Madonna. The Communards. The Housemartins. The Misses. Starship. Nick Berry. The Worst of the Worst. The hits that made us scared to switch on the radio.

She smiled with a satisfying schadenfreude at pictures of Doctor and the Medics and Nu Shooz and various other one-hit wonders before turning the page.

And there she was. Oh God. She felt color flood her face. A huge quarter-page picture of her, looking sulky in a black-satin puff-sleeved jacket with backcombed hair and a red pussy bow tied around her neck. It was one of her most hated publicity pictures. The makeup artist had given her all this Siouxsie Sioux eyeliner and cupid-bow lips, and she just looked… she looked like a complete cow, a horrible, hard-nosed bitch-cow. They’d obviously selected it on purpose.

“What a difference a year makes,” ran the text.

This time last year Bee Bearhorn was being hailed as the face of new pop, Britain’s answer to Madonna, a star in the ascendant. “Groovin’ for London” was a classic pop hit and Bee herself made a more than acceptable popstar. With her striking image and bolshie interview persona she was a pinup for the boys and a heroine for the girls. And then came “Space Girl.” It was bad. It was very bad. And just when you thought it couldn’t get any worse, along came “Honey Bee.” A lesson for upstart popstars everywhere. Just because you’re pretty and look good in black PVC, doesn’t mean you can write songs. Leave it to the professionals, eh? As for Bee—well, since she’s just been dropped by her label like the proverbial warm tuber, we can confidently look forward to seeing her in the “Whatever Happened To’s” by the decade’s end.

Bee dropped the magazine on the tabletop and felt her eyes fill up with tears. This was too much. This was much, much too much. Her waiter returned with her coffee. She pulled out her purse and grabbed a handful of random coins, letting them drop noisily onto the saucer. The Times, she thought in horror. The most popular broadsheet in the country. Her friends read the Times. Her fans read the Times. Her mother read the Times. Everybody read the fucking Times and now everybody would know. As if it hadn’t been humiliating enough having two flop singles in the space of six months, being slagged off in the music press, Woolworths and Our Price sending back crates of seven-inch records to Electrogram’s distribution center, being the butt of company jokes. As if just failing in the first place hadn’t been bad enough, now this. In a national newspaper.

She stumbled from the café and back to her car. She wanted to go back to her dad’s now. She wanted him to tell her that everything was all right. She didn’t want to be on her own. She reversed out of her chevron parking space and started the drive homeward. Tears kept spilling down her cheeks as she drove, and her heart began to race again. She kept thinking of everyone at home, all those people who’d been taking her so seriously a year ago, laughing at her now. Laughing behind her back. Laughing at her spectacular lack of talent. And then she thought of Dave Donkin’s face. The way he tried to look like he cared. Like it broke his heart to let her go. Like if it had been up to him…

“Bollocks,” she shouted out loud to herself, wiping away tears with the back of her hand, “big hairy bollocks.”

Mucus trickled from her nostrils and over her lips. She wiped it away. She took deep breaths. Her heart raced and raced and raced. Everything was falling apart. It really was. Falling apart at the seams. And her heart, she thought. There was definitely something wrong with her heart. She put her hand on her chest. It was beating hard, irregularly. She couldn’t breathe. She was having a heart attack. She was. She knew it. A heart attack at the age of twenty-two. She was dying. She was going to die. Here. In France. In a Fiat Panda. Jesus. Jesus Christ. She had to get back. She had to get home. To her father. She put her foot on the accelerator and rolled down her window. Fresh air. The road started to twist and turn as she drove through woodland. She heard her tires squeaking against the tarmac. She had to get home. She couldn’t die here. Not here. Not in a car. All on her own.

She turned a corner, her wheels just gripping the slushy road. She turned another. And then—Jesus Christ. What… a white van was hurtling toward her. A big white van. On the wrong side of the road. It was on the wrong side of the road. She hit her horn with the heel of her hand and turned the steering wheel, violently, 90 degrees. The white van turned, too, and as it veered off the road she came to an abrupt stop about two inches from the trunk of a huge oak tree. Her head bounced off the windshield and her breath left her with a jolt as her breasts hit the steering wheel.

For a moment everything was eerily silent. She rubbed at her forehead and then at her ribs. But she was fine. And then, just as she was about to put the car back into gear and carry on, she heard a strange, muted thud. And then another one. She twisted her head to look behind her. Clouds of dirt hung in the air. The white van was nowhere to be seen. The sides of the road fell away in a steep incline. No, she thought. No—it couldn’t have. She was sure. There would have been more noise. No, she decided, the van was fine, on its way into town. The van was fine.

She put the car into first, took a deep breath, and began the journey back to her father’s. And it was only as she pulled back onto the road and found herself automatically taking the left-hand lane that she realized that the van hadn’t been driving on the wrong side of the road.

She had.

BABY’S MIRACLE ESCAPE AS FAMILY PERISH

A six-month-old child was the only survivor of a tragic road accident that killed four other members of his family yesterday. Two members of the Roper family from Tenterden in Kent and two members of the Wright family from Tunbridge Wells were on their way to a rented farmhouse in the Dordogne region of France, where they were planning to spend the Christmas and New Year holiday together. Their rented van came off the road at a sharp turn on a road just outside the town of Ruffec and tumbled more than eighty meters down a rock-and-dirt-covered ravine. Baby Alexander Roper was thrown free of the van in a child’s car seat. His condition today was described as critical.

His parents, Joanne and Rupert Roper, and aunt and uncle Beverly and Tim Wright, were all killed immediately by the explosion, which destroyed the van.

French authorities will be launching an inquiry into the accident. No one else is being sought in connection with the incident.

chapter thirty-seven

A chill ran down Ana’s spine and she let the newspaper cutting fall onto the bed.

“Oh my God,” she murmured.

“Fuck,” said Flint, sitting heavily on Zander’s bed. He ran his fingers through his hair and exhaled loudly. Outside a child screamed with laughter.

Zander looked from Ana to Flint and to Ana again, his face alert with anticipation. But they remained silent, absorbing the full horror of what they’d just read.

“I kept expecting her to call,” said Zander. “I had it all planned, what I was going to say to her. How I was going to make her feel. I was going to destroy her. Because I knew exactly how to get to her, you know? We had this… connection—and I knew just how to hurt her. I was going to take what little hope she had left and annihilate it. I was going to tell her I hated her. That she was ugly. And old. That I wanted her to be dead…” He petered out pensively. “But she didn’t phone. And after a while I just… It doesn’t read like a suicide note, does it?” he said urgently. “I mean—there was no way of knowing from that that she was about to do something so terrible? And even if it had been more explicit, it would have been too late because it didn’t get here until the following Monday, so she must have posted it that day, you know, that exact day, so…”

Zander fell silent again and he looked desperately from one to the other, waiting for some kind of response. But Flint and Ana were still too shocked to speak.

“I was going to forgive her, you know?” Zander said quietly.