Page 96 of One-Hit Wonder

“Please, darling. Please don’t say things like that. Please.”

“I couldn’t bear it. If anything happened to you, Dad, I think I’d die. I really, really do.”

Her father reached into his enormous fridge and brought out a large ceramic dish. In it was a creamy-looking confection covered in curly chocolate shavings. He held it toward Bee and smiled.

“Cheesecake, darling?”

Bee woke up at four in the morning, sweating and barely able to breathe. She’d been having a nightmare. Dave Donkin had been straddling her father with a huge syringe in his hand. His face was painted red and he was wearing leather knickers. Her father had been crying and Bee herself had been trapped somehow and unable to do anything to help.

She looked around her as she awoke and couldn’t remember where she was for a second. Then she remembered. Her heart started racing. Her neck was damp. She tried to swallow but there was no spit in her mouth. She grabbed a glass. Her hands were shaking. She spilled water all over the top of her duvet. Her heart started beating faster. An image of her father, jaundiced and emaciated, stretched out and wired up across a hospital bed, flashed through her mind. Her heart raced again. She clutched her chest. Another image flashed through her mind, of midnight toilets. She could smell the urine, hear the drip drip drip of a leaking pipe, and she could see Joe, skulking around. Squeaky-clean Joe. Quiet-life Joe. Joe, who she’d known since she was twelve years old. He’d infected the man who’d given him everything. Her father. The kindest, most generous, big-hearted, and gentle man that Bee had ever known.

She clutched her chest again as her heart started beating so hard that she could feel it banging against her rib cage. She was going to be all alone. Her father was going to die. A long, painful, protracted death, and then she was going to be all alone. And her career—her career was over. She’d have nothing and nobody. She was going to end up all alone, all alone in a horrible flat somewhere. She’d probably die, too. Die young. And nobody would care. And why should they, she thought, pulling the duvet tightly around her with shaking hands, why should anyone care about her?

Her head filled more and more quickly with thoughts and images. All negative. All black. All telling her that the good times were over. Forever. Life now was going to be about illness and death and failure and poverty. She leapt from her bed and began to pace around the room. She paced and she paced, her head thick with panic. She put her hand over her chest and felt the insistent pounding. She was dying. She knew it. She could barely breathe. She was having a heart attack. Should she wake her father? Wake him? Tell him she was dying? No, she thought, no, don’t disturb Dad, just take deep breaths. Deep… deep… breaths. In—and out. In—and out. Her vision started to blur. Her breath was short and tight. She had no lung capacity whatsoever. She sat on the edge of her bed. Her heart was beating so fast now that she couldn’t distinguish individual pulses. Her chest felt like it was going to burst. The sides of the room turned into a blue-black fuzz, her body began fizzing like electricity was running through it. Everything was closing in, everything was just…

“Morning, darling.” Gregor strode into the room, holding a tray. On it was an individual cafetière, a large blue mug, three slices of thick-cut toast, a pot of quince jam, and a single fat white rose with pink-marbled petals.

He put it on the table by her bed and then pushed open the oatmeal curtains.

“Urgh. God. Dad. Do you have to?” Bee opened her eyes and then immediately forced a pillow over her face. “What time is it?”

“It’s half-past ten.”

Bee sat bolt upright. “Really?” she said.

“Yes. And it’s really a rather beautiful day. Not much cloud around…” He peered upward through the window.

Bee felt like she’d been hit over the head with a mallet.

“How are you feeling?”

“Shit. I hardly slept. And I think I”—her thoughts fugged over as she tried to remember exactly what had happened last night—“I think I fainted.”

Her father turned around in alarm. “Fainted?”

“Yes,” she said, plunging her cafetière, “in the middle of the night. I was… worrying about things and then I think I sort of blacked out. I feel terrible.”

“What were you worrying about?”

Bee raised her eyebrows. Typical Dad. Mustn’t make a fuss. Let’s pretend everything’s all right. “You, you dickhead,” she teased. “I was worrying about you.” She stirred milk into her coffee and took a sip. She paused before making her next comment. “I wish I didn’t know so much, Dad.”

“What do you mean?”

“About AIDS. I wish I didn’t know so much. It makes it worse. All those times you took me to see Geoffrey and Bobby at Westminster. All those guys. Those guys who’d been spinning around to Donna Summer a year before in their satin shirts, without a care in the world. Lying there looking thirty years older than they were, like they were already dead. I wish I hadn’t seen them. Maybe it wouldn’t seem so real, otherwise…”

“Oh, darling. It’s not really real, you know. Not yet. Not now.”

Bee clanked her cup down heavily on the bedside table. “But it is real, Dad. It is so unbelievably real. It doesn’t get much more real than this.”

Gregor shrugged and picked the rose off the tray. He put it to his nose and sniffed it. His eyes closed and his face lit up with pleasure. “You know what, though, my sweet. It doesn’t feel real. It really doesn’t. And I much prefer it that way.”

He put the rose on her lap, smiled at her, and quietly left the room.

chapter thirty-six

Bee drove to the shops for her father that morning. He’d tried to dissuade her, especially after the fainting incident, but she wanted to get away. Sit somewhere and have a coffee on her own. She had so much to think about.

She eschewed the exotic and enticing boulangerie, boucherie, and patisserie for the supermarché, where she wouldn’t be required to use her excruciating, schoolgirl French. She picked up a mold-covered cured sausage in a strangulating net and a great hunk of stinky cheese, a jar of murky fish stock, and floury loaves of crisscrossed bread. At the till she pointed at a carton of Marlboros and bought a copy of the English Times. She loaded her groceries into the back of her car, took the papers and the cigarettes, and found herself a seat in the front window of a small café.