Before She Was Mine (13 page)

‘I’m
so
fucking angry. Apparently he does
care
for me, but he’s not “ready for anything long-term”. Can’t cope with it, it does his head in. I
told him, a bit fucking late in the day to be making statements like that. And he said he’d never signed up for the family package, he never would have, he’s too young for all that. The
baby was a unilateral decision.’

Well, it was, I thought.

‘So that leaves me and this kid. I mean, fucking hell.’ She put her hands over her eyes, and when she took them away there were coal smudges on both cheeks. It made her look like a
refugee.

‘It might be temporary,’ I said. ‘A wobble.’

‘It isn’t. He’s fucked off, gone. Bastard. ’S like I’ve told you before, don’t ever get properly involved with anyone. Don’t do it, Frey. Always keep
them at a distance, then you can never be hurt. Because if you don’t,
this
happens. Why I ignored my own advice—’

‘Put your slippers on,’ I said.

Back in the kitchen I dried the floor with a paper towel – the last thing we needed was a skidding incident to add to the mix – and filled the kettle. The rain had eased right off
till it was barely spitting, so I thought I might try clearing up the worst of the coke while Melody dried herself. There was a brush in the cupboard under the sink, but I needed a dust pan to
scrape the nuggets into. Squatting, I peered inside and located the brush straight away on top of a jumble of silk roses, DVDs, a battery-operated nail polishing kit and seven or eight poster
tubes. I moved the tubes aside, uncovering a bottle of Parazone and a single sprouted potato, but nothing shovel-shaped.

‘What do you use to bring the coal in?’ I asked her.

She wouldn’t answer.

I stepped outside and had a quick shufti around the bunker; turned up a child’s enamel pail with a painted duck motif and a Victorian crumb tray. I looked down at the brush dangling from
my hand by its string and reasoned that I could at least sweep the coal into one corner, then she wouldn’t be treading it into the house or turning her ankle on a stray nugget.

So I got to work. It was satisfying to flick at the little pieces and send them skidding across the stone flags. Some of them I kicked, viciously, when they lodged between the cracks.
Skippity-skip thock, they went. Ker-pang. Smash. Never underestimate the therapeutic effect of violence against the powerless.

By the time I’d finished – she hadn’t half done a thorough job – Michael had arrived. I glanced through the window and she had her arms round him, her head against his
chest. It’s moments like this I remember they’re not blood-related, for all she calls him ‘brother’.

I went in and closed the back door behind me. Then I stood at the sink and washed the dust off my arms and hands, brushed my trousers, gave my shoes a wipe with a tea towel. There was grittiness
between my teeth when I clenched them.

‘All right, Frey?’ said Michael as I came into the lounge. Melody relaxed her grip on him and he stepped away. I did a double take when I saw his face; under his eyes were great
weals, as though he’d been branded.

‘Have you hurt yourself?’ I said.

‘How do you mean?’

‘Round your eye sockets, you’ve got red marks.’

‘That’s from my goggles. I was in the middle of welding when you rang. Just dropped everything and jumped in the van.’

‘Were they OK at the garage about you going?’

‘We’re slow this week, it’s been really quiet.’ He indicated Melody, now slumped on the sofa. ‘What’s the deal, then, Melly?’

‘I’ve been dating a bastard.’

‘So I heard. You want me to take out a contract on him?’

‘It’s not funny!’

‘Shall I make us a cup of tea?’ I asked.

‘Fucking tea,’ I heard Melody grumble.

‘Oy oy,’ said Michael warningly. ‘Don’t get shirty with us. We’re the rescue squad.’

He pulled up a footstool and sat down opposite her.

‘You
knew
what was coming,’ she said. ‘I
saw
you and Freya whispering together. You could have warned me!’

‘No, Mel, I’m not having that. You must have known as well, or you’d never have picked up on what me and Frey thought.’

I took myself back into the kitchen and began assembling mugs and spoons. I heard Melody say, ‘I really, really
wanted
him to be right.’

Michael’s voice: ‘I know you did.’

‘He wasn’t like anyone else. You could see that, couldn’t you?’

‘I could see you were keen.’

‘Him, though. He was different.’

‘Was he? Was he really?’

Nothing, and then Michael spoke again. ‘I’ll tell you what I think, shall I?’

I flicked the kettle on. Above the flex was a calendar on which Melody had been marking off the weeks of her pregnancy with little biro hearts. ‘Joe’, she’d written in every
other night. Joe, Joe, Joe.

‘The real difference,’ Michael went on, ‘the only real difference was that he got you pregnant. Just that. And you wanted the father on the scene, you wanted to make everything
fit together. Obviously. You convinced yourself it was a serious thing you had going. But you were wrong. Your heart’s not broken, it’s your pride that’s hurt. You’re angry.
Be angry. There’s a lot of energy to be had off the back of anger, and you need all the energy you can get.’

The spoons rattled as I poured boiling water into the cups.

‘It
was
more than the baby,’ said Melody.

‘I don’t think so.’

‘Before—’

‘Ssh.’

‘—when I was a kid and I got caught with Frey—’

He spoke again, but too softly for me to make out the words. I opened the fridge, took out the milk, unscrewed the lid, watched the tea blanch. I wondered whether I ought to take the drinks
through, or simply stay in this kitchen forever.

Michael solved the problem for me by appearing in the doorway. The imprints from his goggles were still there, giving him a comic surprised look. ‘Is there any beer in that
fridge?’

‘There’s a bottle of wine.’

‘Let’s have it out, then. Yeah, bring the tea as well. Biscuits, anything. We’ll get some sugar and alcohol down her.’

‘We can’t have her drunk. The baby.’

‘Shit, yeah. Well, PG Tips’ll have to do. Load it up.’

We used a chopping board in lieu of a tray and he carried it through.

Melody had at last peeled off her wet sweater and was sitting in her shirt, leggings and slippers. She sat with her hand across her belly protectively, her head drooping, the picture of an
abandoned maiden. ‘What am I going to do?’ she said.

‘At any rate, he’s liable,’ said Michael, doling out the food and drink. ‘However much of a slippery beggar he is, he has to support you financially. We can take him to
court if he won’t cough up. You know where he lives.’

‘I told him that. I told him he’d have to pay towards it.’

‘What was his response?’

She lowered her head.

I drew a deep breath and said, ‘What actually happened, Melody?’

‘I was being practical, that was all! I’ve never talked about the future with a boyfriend before. I’ve not been bothered, there’s never been any need. But this time
– how can you not, with a baby on the way? I showed him the scan photo and then I said I was thinking of selling this place and moving to Wrexham. To his. You can’t be ferrying a baby
back and forth between two houses, can you? It makes no sense. I wanted everything tidy. Not like before.’

A glance in my direction.

‘You were going to move in with him?’ I asked cautiously.

‘I was going to . . .’

‘What?’

‘All I said was, if we got married, yeah, it would be a lot simpler with benefits and stuff. I only meant legally, to tie off any loose ends. It was half a joke anyway.’

‘Married! Oh my God. But you always—’

‘That would have made sense,’ Michael broke in over my protests. ‘Once you have kids on the scene, a marriage certificate straightens out everyone’s legal position.
It’s daft not to at least look into it. Plus, coping with a baby’s a hell of a lot easier if there’s two of you on hand. I imagine. So it was a sensible suggestion. Yes, it was,
Mel. Come on, now. You’ve no call to think you did the wrong thing. If he felt he couldn’t cope, that’s not your fault.’

‘If I hadn’t rushed him, though,’ she said. ‘I don’t know why I said it.’

‘The clock began ticking the minute you got pregnant.’

‘
What
am I going to do?’

Michael shifted closer and took her hand. He nodded at me to take the other and we posed for a moment in a kind of defensive circle. ‘You’ll be fine. You’ve got us,
you’ve got a roof over your head. Your mum’ll see you don’t starve. Hasn’t she sent you some money already?’

Melody nodded.

‘OK, then. Why don’t you ask her over for a visit to help out? Abby would come, I know she would. And you’ll manage. Trust me. It’s a baby you’re having, not a
nuclear bomb.’

‘It’s better to be on your own than with someone unreliable,’ I added. God knows, I’d been told that enough times myself.

She’d drawn her knees up under her chin and was rocking herself gently among her bird cushions. Her eyes were fixed beyond us, into the distance somewhere. I thought,
It’s
unbelievable she’s going to produce a child before the end of the summer. Whatever kind of set-up is the poor kid going to find when it emerges?

‘My head needs to catch up,’ she said.

‘Yeah,’ said Michael. ‘’Course. We’ve all the time in the world.’

Out in the yard it began to rain again.

Melody went to bed at nine-thirty, saying she was tired out.

‘I’ll stay for an hour or so,’ I told Michael when I came back downstairs, ‘check she’s settled. Have you got to rush off?’

‘I’m OK,’ he said.

‘You sort out another brew, then, and I’ll stick a DVD on.’

‘Here we go. Two hours’ extreme screen violence,’ he said, but took himself off to the kitchen anyway.

The film I chose was
Grave Break
because it was a while since I’d seen it and I was in a nostalgic mood. The case was still shrink-wrapped; I admit I’d probably been thinking
more of myself when I gave it to Melody as a birthday present. I drew off the cellophane and stuck the disc straight in because I knew there were at least four minutes of trailers and piracy
warnings to wade through.

‘Ah, zombies,’ said Michael. He put the cups down and came to sit next to me.

‘It’s a zombie kind of evening, don’t you think?’

‘Not really. Since you’re asking.’

The film began with a grainy aerial shot of a lorry driving across a moorland landscape during a storm. The camera moved in every now and again with snapshots of windscreen wipers labouring
against the downpour, wheels slooshing over waterlogged tarmac, the MOD logo on the cab door, the anxious face of the driver. Cut to wind turbines on the horizon, then swoop ahead to a waterfall
crashing down some jagged slate. Sheep’s skull, crows’ bodies left to hang on barbed wire. Back to truck interior, driver’s finger against map. Then the camera pulling right out
to show us a stone bridge coming up and a river in spate. A dead cow lying bloated in the middle of the road. The lorry swerving, a sequence shot first from above and then from tarmac-level, played
out so the crash took twice as long as it would have done in real life. We saw the wheel arch smash into the bridge, the driver’s face smack against the side window, then the vehicle
careering to the opposite side of the road, bursting through the low wall and pitching forwards. The instant where the lorry entered the river was done in slow motion against quavering violin
music. Then, at the last second, everything speeded up again and we heard the roar of the water, saw the tailgate buckling and the cargo of deadly-looking canisters cracking together, rolling out
and sinking into the murky depths.

After that the titles started. More aerial views in one continuous edit of the river in daylight, following the course downstream as it wound between villages and towns to settle at the finish
in a huge reservoir.

I said, ‘Do you think we’re always going to come running every time Melody has a disaster?’

Michael shrugged. ‘That’s what families are for.’

‘Don’t you mind?’

‘Nope. Mel was very good to me when I was growing up. She was just about the only person who ever took an interest. I owe her.’

He looked at me searchingly, and the silence said,
Don’t you?

Not like you, I thought. Not the way I owe Liv. But I remembered Nicky admiring my new Melody-inspired clothes and hairstyle, telling me,
Your birth mum’s really changed you, you know.
She’s kind of relaxed you. Finished you off.

On the TV screen, black clouds rolled.

‘Is it too late to ask for something more upbeat than people having their limbs gnawed to shreds?’ said Michael.

‘Horror films
are
upbeat.’

‘Right.’

‘No, they are.’

‘How do you work that one out?’

DANGER DEEP WATER read the sign on the reservoir gate. Two teenage boys leaned their bikes up against it, laughing at a shared joke. They had swimming gear under their arms.

‘Do you remember,’ I said, ‘when we visited Hack Green and saw a simulation of the effect of a four-hundred-kiloton thermonuclear weapon dropped on Birmingham? Afterwards we
came out into the sunshine and you were like, “My God, the world’s so beautiful.” You were sniffing handfuls of grass and stopping to ogle clouds.’

‘It had been a disturbing couple of hours. Touring a decommissioned nuclear bunker isn’t everyone’s idea of a grand day out, Frey.’

‘The point is, by the end of this zombie film, we’ll be so glad our drinking water isn’t actually turning everyone into the living dead, and society isn’t collapsing into
hideous violent chaos, our own problems’ll have dwindled to nothing. We’ll go home after this just relieved and happy that the world’s still normal.’

‘Normal? My ex-wife squirts perfume through my letterbox and superglues my locks. I wouldn’t describe my world as normal.’

‘She’s not ripping your head off and drinking your blood, though, is she?’