The Truth About Melody Browne (5 page)

The day itself was bright and warm, just like the day before and the day before that, but the breeze outside her bedroom window seemed to have developed an extra auditory dimension, a kind of flat, humming undertone as it whistled through the leaves of the tree outside her windows.

Her mobile phone called to her from the kitchen counter where she’d left it to charge overnight. The caller ID came up as Unknown, but glad of the distraction she pressed answer. It was Ben.

‘Am I too early?’ he asked.

‘No, no, it’s fine,’ she replied. ‘I’ve been up for a while.’

‘I was just worried about you. Couldn’t really sleep last night. I was thinking about what happened. You don’t think it was anything to do with the trick, do you? Being hypnotised. You don’t think … ?’

‘What?’

‘That he
did
something, to your head?’

‘What makes you say that?’

‘Well, the timing. I mean, you passed out literally as he clicked his fingers. It just seems rather …’

‘I know. It’s weird. I feel a bit …
weird
.’

‘You do?’ he asked in a concerned tone. ‘In what way?’

‘Oh, I don’t know. A bit
undone
.’

‘Undone?’

‘Yes. Like a jigsaw or a ball of wool, or –’ She stopped abruptly. As the words ‘ball of wool’ left her mouth, something flashed through her mind. An image, as bright and focused as real life, a ball of pale blue angora wool in a basket, a small hand, a price sticker that said ‘20p’. As quickly as the image had arrived in her head, it had left. She breathed out.

‘Are you OK?’

‘Uh-huh,’ she replied, breathlessly.

‘Do you think you should see somebody?’

‘Like what? A shrink?’

‘No. Just a … I don’t know, someone who knows about this kind of thing. Just to be on the safe side.’

Melody had no intention of seeing anyone about this. She didn’t even know what ‘this’ was yet. ‘No,’ she said over-brightly. ‘I don’t think it’s that bad. It was probably just a combination of things – you know, wine, nerves, adrenalin.’

Ben paused. ‘Yeah,’ he said, sounding unconvinced. ‘Probably. But anyway, I just really wanted to make sure you were OK. You went off in such a rush I didn’t really have a chance to say goodbye properly.’

‘Yes, sorry about that.’

‘And there’s still so much I don’t know about you.’

‘Oh, trust me, there really isn’t much to know.’

‘Come on, you’re a single mother, you’re a dinner lady …’

‘
Kitchen
assistant.’

‘Oh, yes, sorry,
kitchen
assistant. You live in Covent Garden.’

‘On an estate.’

‘Yes, but it’s still in Covent Garden. And besides, there’s no such thing as a person without a story. Look, I’d really like to see you again. Without the magic man and the dramatic fainting episodes. Next week, maybe?’

Melody sat down and moved the phone to her other ear. This was a most unexpected turn of events and she didn’t know how to react.

Ben took her silence as a rebuff and sighed. ‘Right,’ he said, ‘I see …’

‘No!’ Melody replied. ‘It’s just, I didn’t think you’d want to and I’m a bit surprised. That’s all.’

‘Well, I don’t know why you’d be surprised,’ he laughed, ‘but if you can get over the shock of someone wanting to take you out for dinner, I’m free on Friday.’

Ed emerged from his bedroom just then, his thick black hair pressed into furrows and humps, his sinewy teenage chest bare and hairless, thin white legs poking out of a pair of grey jersey boxer shorts. He grunted at her, his normal morning greeting and she smiled and squeezed the back of his neck.

‘Erm, I’m not sure about Friday, actually,’ she continued. ‘I think I’ve got something on. I’ll give you a call, shall I, later in the week?’

‘Now that,’ said Ben, with another small laugh, ‘sounds suspiciously like a brushoff.’

‘No,’ said Melody, nervously, ‘not at all, not at all. I’ll speak to you later then, yeah?’

She hung up, hurriedly, her hands trembling slightly.

‘Who was that?’ asked Ed, shaking Honey Nut Corn Flakes into a bowl.

‘Ben,’ she said, ‘the guy from last night.’

‘So you didn’t put him off then?’

‘Apparently not. He wants to go out again. On Friday.’

‘Cool,’ said Ed, splashing milk into his bowl and carrying it through to the table in the living room. ‘And you, do you want to go?’

Melody considered the question. Ben was a real ‘what’s not to like?’ kind of a guy, easy-going, bright, considerate. He was the kind of man that a well-meaning friend would set you up with. He ticked all the ‘good guy’ boxes. And he was reasonably good-looking. But she just couldn’t face going through it all over again – the nerves, the apprehension, the awkwardness – and then what? Next time there’d be no convenient fainting episode to offer her a quick exit route. Next time the evening would have to play itself out towards a more conventional ending: a kiss, a coffee, full-blown sex, an awkward extraction. And after that, what? Someone would be bound to get hurt, and it sure as hell wasn’t going to be her.

‘No,’ she shook her head, ‘no. I don’t think so. He’s not really my type.’

Melody’s dad stood in her bedroom, rifling through her wardrobe, a look of slightly bemused deliberation on his face.

‘I don’t think it’s going to be warm enough for your green dress,’ he was saying. ‘I think you’ll need something with sleeves.’

‘No!’ she said. ‘I want to wear the green dress!’

‘OK, OK,’ he sighed, ‘relax. But you’ll need to wear something underneath it then. Where are your tops?’

Melody sighed too, and got to her feet. ‘They’re here,’ she said, ‘on this shelf.’

‘Well, can you pick one?’

Her mum would never ask her to pick a top. Her mum was always in a hurry and would just spin around the room pulling clothes out of cupboards and drawers and wedging Melody into them. Melody didn’t have to think much about clothes usually. But she was having to think about lots of things these days that she didn’t normally have to think about. Like whether it was tea time. And what day of the week it was. And how to make her mum feel happy again.

She looked through her bedroom window for a moment. It wasn’t what her mother would call a ‘gorgeous day’. It was a grey, purply sort of day, like a bruise. Like the bruise, in fact, that she had on her elbow when she’d fallen off her little chair in the kitchen the other day trying to reach out for a packet of Viscount biscuits because nobody came when she called and she was hungry. That bruise was not just grey and purple but had a bit of green in it too, and a red raw bit in the middle where the skin had scraped away. Her dad had put a plaster on it but it had come off in the bath the night before and she didn’t like to ask for another one. She didn’t like to ask for much at all really, as asking for things seemed to make everyone sigh a lot.

She chose a top with a pink chest and orange sleeves and a word printed on the front. That way, she thought, her mum would have something to look at that wasn’t purple or grey and that might just cheer her up.

‘You’ll need tights too,’ said her dad.

She pulled a pair of red tights from her tights drawer and a pair of yellow knickers. ‘I can wear my blue shoes,’ she said, ‘then everything I’ve got on is a different colour.’

‘Great idea,’ said her dad, pulling her nightdress over her head. ‘Fantastic.’

Her mum was brushing her hair when they went to show her what she was wearing a moment later. She turned sharply as they walked into the room.

‘Look,’ said Melody, ‘red, and pink and orange and green – and yellow pants and blue shoes.’

‘Fantastic,’ said her mother in the same unfantastic tone of voice that her dad had just used. ‘You’re a little rainbow.’

Melody smiled and hugged her mothers’ knees, pleased by the mention of little rainbows. Her mother stroked her hair absent-mindedly, and then stood up. She was wearing a voluminous grey pinafore dress with big pockets, which she’d worn when she was pregnant, and a black polo neck. Her hair was tied back, but had lots of grips in it to keep it neat because it wasn’t really long enough to be tied back any more.

‘Shall we go then?’ she said. Melody nodded and slid her hand inside her mother’s. But her mother didn’t keep a hold of it and it dropped from her fingers like a slippery bar of soap.

The graveyard was a horrible place. It was really big and straggly and full of weird pointy trees and statues with bits missing. Melody’s mood brightened when she saw her cousins, Claire and Nicola, and for a moment she felt like she wanted to run off with them and play, like she usually did. But then she looked at Maggie’s big black coat and down-turned mouth and remembered that this was the baby’s funeral and she probably wasn’t allowed to play. She turned down her own mouth and followed her parents to a hole in the ground with creamy-coloured silk inside it. On a normal day she’d have wanted to climb into the silky hole and pretend to be a naughty pixie, but she could absolutely imagine what her mum and dad would say if she tried that today. So instead, she made herself feel sad and grown up, and stood primly by the side of the hole and let all thoughts of play and fun leave her mind.

A black car pulled up on the road by the graveside and two men got out. They were wearing suits like businessmen and one of them had really strange hair, like a doll’s hair.

‘Dad,’ she whispered, tugging her father’s hem, ‘why’s that man got funny hair?’

‘Shhh,’ said her dad.

‘No, but what’s it like?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘I mean, is it like real hair? Or is it like pretend hair?’

‘I don’t know,’ he replied impatiently. And then he walked away from her, towards the man with the pretend hair and they said something to each other in very quiet voices and then they pulled a box out of the back of the car. It was a creamy colour with silver handles and flowers on the top. It was her. Her sister. The baby who never came home. And for a moment Melody didn’t need to make herself feel sad and grown up, because she just did.

They carried the box towards the hole in the ground and then the vicar said lots of serious things and all around were snuffling noises of grown-ups crying and sighing, and Melody found it hard to believe that there was a baby inside that box – a real, live, tiny baby, except that she was dead – and that she had never even seen her face.

A wind came from between the trees as the vicar spoke. It was low and strong and flipped the hem of Melody’s green dress up and down and threw the golden brown curls of her hair all over her face so that she couldn’t see what was happening. By the time she’d got it out of her eyes, she could see that the cream box was being lowered into the silky cream hole, and that Auntie Maggie was crying proper tears and that even Claire and Nicola were crying and they were only children, and the next thing she knew was that her mother was kneeling at the edge of the hole, getting mud all over her grey pinafore dress and making funny noises. They sounded a lot like the noises she’d made the day the baby came, a lot like a cow or a pony or even like the fox who sometimes screamed outside the windows of the cottage they’d stayed in that summer when the baby was still in her mummy’s tummy. The noises made Melody feel weird and uncomfortable, like maybe her mum was doing something wrong. And then she started shouting, ‘My baby, my baby!’ over and over again, which was funny to hear because that was what her mum had used to call her before the other baby hadn’t come home.

Auntie Maggie and her dad both went over to her mum and pulled her away from the hole and she hit at them with her hands, pushing them away. Her face was red and her dress was muddy and she looked like the lady who lived on the pavement near the church with the newspaper in her shoes and all her things in a shopping trolley. Melody’s dad pulled her to him, really tight, and wrapped his big strong arms around her and for a minute her mum looked like she was trying to push her way out of a straitjacket, like the man with all the chains she’d seen on the TV. But then she stopped pushing and went soft and floppy and let her dad hold her as if she was a big rag doll.

For a second, there was complete silence. Even the wind stopped blowing and nobody sniffed or snuffled. It felt as if they were all playing a game of musical statues. Melody stared at her mum and dad and thought how strange they looked, holding each other like that. Usually when they hugged they looked at each other, or smiled and made out like they were messing around. But this looked more like Dad was rescuing Mum from an accident, like she’d been floating underwater in a swimming pool and Dad had pulled her out.

It was the last time Melody ever saw her parents embrace.

By the time Melody left the house at midday it had started to rain, the kind of sad, disappointing rain that takes the edge off a bright summer’s day. She walked towards the tube, threading her way through the hordes of shoppers that descended on Covent Garden every Sunday. Her feet caught grey puddles as she walked, flicking pear-shaped drops of London dirt across her calves. She was going to a barbecue at her sister’s house in Hackney. Well, not her real sister, but as close as she had to one. She and Stacey had lived in adjoining rooms in the hostel when they were both fifteen and pregnant. Stacey was the same age as Melody but, unlike Melody, she was married with two teenage children and a toddler.