The Truth About Melody Browne (6 page)

Melody stopped at Marks and Spencer on the way to the tube station to pick up some spare ribs, a packet of salmon kebabs and a bottle of pink Cava. At the till she was served by a woman with a very short afro and a wide smiling face. ‘Good morning, my dear,’ said the woman, in a soft Southern African accent. ‘And how are you today?’

‘I’m fine, thank you,’ Melody said. ‘How are you?’

‘Oh, I am very well. Very well indeed.’

The woman smiled again and waved the Cava over the scanner. ‘Not a good day for a barbecue.’ She gestured towards the rain outside.

‘Not really,’ said Melody, ‘but I’m hoping it will have dried off by the time I get there.’

‘I will say a prayer for you,’ said the woman. Melody smiled again and glanced at the name badge pinned to her chest.

Emerald
.

She was about to say, what a beautiful name, when suddenly, there it was again, a vivid, Technicolor snapshot in her head. An open newspaper on a pine table. A blue and white striped mug. A woman’s legs in blue denim with a patch on the knee, a pair of women’s feet in oatmeal socks, a child’s voice saying: ‘Emerald?’

A woman’s voice saying, ‘Yes, like the green stone.’

And then the picture was gone, and Melody was standing at a till in Marks and Spencer with her mouth hanging open and a packet of salmon kebabs in her hand.

She gathered her carrier bags hastily, smiled at the woman called Emerald, and headed for the tube.

‘So,’ said Stacey, ‘how’d it go with your number fourteen man?’

Melody poured herself another glass of pink Cava and grimaced. ‘Hmmmm,’ she said.

‘Oh dear.’

‘No. It was fine. I mean, he was fine. But the night was, well, a bit bizarre.’

She told Stacey about being hypnotised and fainting on stage and she thought about telling her about the strange feelings she’d been having but couldn’t quite stomach the conversation that would follow. Stacey was scathing about anything that she perceived to be in any way ‘alternative’ or ‘spiritual’. She didn’t believe in ghosts or tarot or past lives and she certainly didn’t believe in hypnotism. Stacey believed only in the tangible and the visible. Anything else made her scowl disdainfully and say things like, ‘Bollocks’ or ‘Pile of old crap’. Stacey would have no time for the onset of inexplicable flashbacks. She’d say, ‘Get over yourself, it’s just your mind playing tricks on you.’

Stacey glanced at her questioningly. ‘You all right?’

Melody lit a cigarette and shrugged. ‘Of course I am.’

‘Right,’ said Stacey. ‘You seem a bit off, that’s all. You sure you’re not coming down with something?’

Melody nodded and inhaled. It was her first cigarette of the day, the first since yesterday afternoon, and, like her coffee that morning, it tasted strange. She glanced at the packet absent-mindedly, checking the brand, checking she hadn’t picked up the wrong ones. But they were hers, definitely, her Marlboro Lights. Her cigarette tasted musty and dusty, though, not like tobacco, but like
dirt
, the way cigarettes had tasted when she was just pregnant with Ed.

She stared at the cigarette distastefully and then stubbed it out.

‘What’s going on?’ said Stacey, eyeing the mashed up cigarette in the bowl.

‘Don’t know,’ said Melody. ‘It just tasted wrong.’

‘Ha!’ Stacey laughed, and banged her hand down on the tabletop. ‘That Julius bloke – he’s hypnotised you out of liking nicotine!’

‘Oh God,’ said Melody, staring at the ashtray. ‘Do you think?’

‘Well, I’ve never seen you do that before. Never in my life! Ooh, I wonder if he could hypnotise me out of liking chocolate?’

‘Yeah, and maybe into liking sex!’

Stacey laughed and her husband, Pete, grunted from the barbecue where he was turning burgers. ‘I’d pay for that,’ he said.

The air was still damp from the earlier shower, but was drying out quickly in a long stretch of sunshine. Their toddler, Clover, sat at a small plastic table arranging miniature teacups and saucers with fat hands while Mutley, their Norfolk terrier, snuffled at a stuffed toy on the decking by her feet. It was, as ever, a picture of domestic bliss.

Melody and Stacey had started their adult lives at exactly the same point: fifteen, pregnant, homeless and single, but within a year of their babies being born exactly a week apart, Stacey’s life had headed in a completely different direction, because when she was seventeen, she’d met Pete. Placid, strong and dependable Pete had stuck around and married her even with another man’s baby, and now as they neared middle age, she had a neat little house in Hackney, two teenagers, an unexpected baby girl and an eternal air of contentment. Stacey and Melody were similar in so many ways, and for a while it looked like their lives might have panned out the same way. But from the very moment that they both discovered they were pregnant at the age of fifteen, Stacey’s life had begun.

And Melody’s had hit rock bottom.

Rock bottom wasn’t a day or a week or a month. Rock bottom was a moment. And for Melody it looked like this:

A room, ten by ten, with ripped net curtains and a rusty Baby Belling.

A single, unmade bed and a chair covered in clothes.

Her hands, resting helplessly in her lap, holding a scrunched-up piece of tissue paper.

The sound of the front door slamming downstairs and Tiff’s scooter buzzing angrily away into the dark night air.

Sudden silence and a sudden desperate realisation.

She was alone, in a damp bedsit; and she was pregnant.

Her boyfriend had just dumped her.

And she wasn’t even sure it was his baby.

At her feet was a bottle of gin. On the bed next to her was a packet of paracetamols. She glanced from the gin, to the tablets and then back to her upturned hands. She tried to imagine a baby in those hands, a baby who might look like Tiff, or might look like a man whose name she didn’t know because there hadn’t been time to find out. She tried to imagine those hands rubbing cream onto a baby’s bottom, putting a safety pin into the corners of a terry nappy, clipping a parasol to the bars of a pram. She tried and she couldn’t.

After a while she picked up a teacup and filled it to the brim with gin. Then she poured ten paracetamols into the palm of her hand and tipped them into her mouth. She washed the tablets down with the gin, poured herself another and swallowed that down in three vile gulps.

Down the hall she could hear the bath water nearing the top. She tiptoed across the landing, clutching her towel. And it was there, halfway across the landing, her stomach full of gin and pills, the bathroom in front of her spewing steam through the open door, on her way to kill her baby, that she felt it; the cold, grimy, sharp surface of rock bottom.

Afterwards she sat on her bed, her knees drawn into her chest, damp tendrils of hair curling around her bare shoulders, and she wept soft, hot tears into the fur of a battered teddy bear.

The sun was shining and Bloomsbury was full of happy students from University College and office workers sunbathing on the grass. The summer air felt sweet against her clammy skin. Usually after work on these warm summer days Melody craved lager or chilled white wine, but today she had a sudden urge for a glass of lemonade.

She stopped at a café on Sicilian Avenue, took a table on the pavement and ordered one. It arrived in a tall condensation-coated glass with a yellow bendy straw and a crescent of lemon floating on the top. She stared at it for a while before bringing it to her lips and as she stared another picture appeared in her head. A Formica-topped table, a salmon-pink banquette, a rain-splattered crash helmet, a glass of lemonade and a huge glass globe of ice cream; three mounds of vanilla, a squirt of strawberry sauce, hundreds and thousands, a fan-shaped wafer, a long spoon and a man’s voice saying: ‘
Regrets are worse than any mistake you could ever make. Far, far worse
.’ And then a smaller voice, a girl’s voice: ‘
Will I still be here? In Broadstairs?
’

‘
Oh, I doubt that very much. Nobody should stay in Broadstairs for ever
.’

And then the vignette disappeared and a name flashed through her thoughts.

Ken.

That’s who that man was. The man with the crash helmet and the long fingers and the wise words about regret.

Ken.

But before she could grab hold of the memory and make any sense of it, it was gone and she was once more at a pavement table in Bloomsbury staring at a glass of lemonade. She pulled her bag onto her knee and opened it with shaking hands, taking out her cigarettes and lighter, but before she’d even lit it up, she knew she didn’t want it. She dropped the box back into her bag and sighed.

What was happening to her? She appeared to be going mad. All the signs suggested an encroaching state of insanity. Inexplicable flashbacks. Voices in her head. Paranoia. And a sudden dramatic aversion to coffee and cigarettes.

But no, there was something more to it than simple madness.
Broadstairs
. It meant something to her. It had always meant something to her. All her adult life, whenever she heard the name Broadstairs she had a reaction, a sense of nostalgic yearning, as if she’d like to go there. And then
Ken
. She knew someone called Ken. Ken was someone
important
. She just couldn’t bring his face to mind. Neither his face nor, indeed, any other detail about him. Except now she had something – a crash helmet. She focused her thoughts on the crash helmet and suddenly she felt a tightness around her skull, a deafening blast of wind in her ears, a rush of adrenalin, a thrill of excitement. And then it was gone.

She dropped two pound coins on the table and headed home, her lemonade untouched on the table, her head in turmoil.

Nobody smiled in Melody’s house any more. Not properly. Sometimes, if Melody tried really hard to be funny, her mum might squeeze her lips together and stroke her hair, and her dad smiled quite a lot when they went out together, when it was just the two of them, but at home, under normal circumstances, life was very staid.

They didn’t have parties any more and friends didn’t come over, not even for tea. But the strange thing was that nobody went around saying things that might make sense of the gloomy atmosphere, like, oh, I miss my dead baby, or, I wish Romany was here and not in that cold hole in the ground. Nobody talked about Romany, so Melody was left to conclude that they weren’t sad about Romany, but that they were sad about her. She tried as hard as she could to make up for whatever it was she’d done to make her parents so sad. She always put her plate in the sink after breakfast and tea, she never splashed in puddles in her school shoes and didn’t make a fuss when her mum brushed the knots out of her hair. But there were some things she couldn’t help, like falling over and laddering her tights, like spilling her milk, like sometimes getting cross when she had to go to bed.

One day, about three months after baby Romany’s funeral, Melody got
very
cross about having to go to bed. It was a Friday night, there was no school the next day, and earlier in the afternoon her mum had said specifically, ‘You can stay up late tonight if you like, for being such a good girl.’

But it seemed that Melody’s idea of late and her mother’s idea of late were incompatible, and even though she had only two more cats to colour in and said so really politely, her mum started shouting at her.

‘Why,’ she said, her eyes filled with tears, ‘can’t you just do what I ask you to do? Why?’

‘I am,’ began Melody. ‘I just –’

‘No “just”, Melody. No buts. Nothing. Please. I do not want to hear another word come out of your mouth. Not one!’

‘But –’

‘
No
! Enough! Get to bed now!’

Sparkles appeared inside Melody’s eyes then, and a big feeling of red and black flooded her head and she screamed at the top of her voice, ‘I JUST WANT TO FINISH MY CATS!!!’

But instead of screaming back, like she might have done in the past, her mother made a strange choking sound, ran from the room and slammed her bedroom door behind her.

Melody and her father looked at each other. Then her father put down his newspaper, cleared his throat and knocked gently on the bedroom door. ‘Janie, it’s me.’

When he had gone in, Melody rested her crayon on her play table and tiptoed towards her parents’ bedroom. She could hear them muttering urgently to each other.

‘She’s trying so hard not to annoy you, can’t you see that?’

‘I know she is, I know. She’s such a good girl. But I just can’t …’

‘What? What can’t you do?’

‘I can’t do it any more.’

‘Do what?’

‘This! Just – this! This life. This family.’

‘Janie, we need you. Melody needs you.’

‘Exactly. And I can’t take it any more. All the … all the
caring
. I don’t care any more, John, do you see? I just don’t care! I’ve lost the only thing that matters to me. I’ve lost my innocence.’