The Truth About Melody Browne (16 page)

‘Then why don’t they live in the same place?’

‘Because they’re cross with each other.’

‘Right.’ Penny sniffed and gave Melody a strange look. ‘You live in that hippy place in town, don’t you?’

Melody wasn’t entirely sure what a hippy place was, but suspected that she was referring to Ken’s house.

‘I live at Ken’s house,’ she said.

‘Yeah, that hippy bloke who hangs around town. I know the one. Looks like he could do with a good wash. Always trying to get people to give him money for his crappy leaflets. My mum says he’s a pervert.’

‘What’s a pervert?’ said Dana.

Penny threw her a disdainful look. ‘You know,’ she said, ‘someone who does dirty things to people. Sex and stuff.’

Melody shook her head. ‘No,’ she said. ‘You’re wrong. Ken’s really nice.’

‘Well, that’s not what my mum says. She says he’s got women in and out of his bed the whole time, sometimes two at a time. Mum says he brainwashes them and makes them his
disciples
and then uses them for dirty stuff. Mum says he’s disgusting. And you live with him. And that makes
you
disgusting.’

Melody gulped.

‘And your mum too,’ added Dana.

‘Yeah,’ said Penny. ‘And your mum too.’

They stood there for a moment, staring at her expectantly.

Her head throbbed with words she wanted to say, with indignation and with terror. She knew what they were saying wasn’t true. She knew that Ken was a good, kind man. But she also knew that there were things that happened in her house that she couldn’t explain, things that she knew were wrong, but that seemed, in the context of Ken and his house, perfectly all right.

‘It’s not like that,’ she said eventually. ‘It’s just not like that.’

‘Oh, right, then what is it like?’

‘Ken’s really kind. He let us come and live with him when my mum was feeling sad and he takes me to London on his motorbike to see my dad and he’s got a lovely wife who cooks for everyone and he’s gentle and generous.’

‘Oh my God,’ said Penny, a cadaverous smile playing around her mouth, ‘you’re in love with him, aren’t you? Oh my God, do you do stuff with him too? You do, don’t you? You and your mum and that hippy, all together. God, that’s
disgusting
.’

Melody had become aware that a kind of stillness had fallen upon the playground as other children interrupted their play to hear what Penny was saying.

Penny noticed her audience and addressed them. ‘She’s
dirty
,’ she exclaimed, pointing at Melody. ‘Don’t go anywhere near her. You’ll get the clap.’

The other children stared at her, blankly, while Penny’s eyes flashed triumphantly.

The silence lingered for a long-drawn-out moment until it was shattered by the sound of the end-of-break bell being shaken.

Penny and Dana threw Melody one last dreadful look before turning away and Melody made her way slowly, and numbly, to her classroom.

Melody’s mum moved out of their bedroom shortly after that. She was never very specific about where exactly she was going to sleep, but it didn’t take long for Melody to work it out when Grace and Seth moved into her bedroom the following night.

Asking Grace questions about things was much easier than asking her mum questions about things, so she waited until she was on her own with her in the kitchen the next day and said: ‘Grace?’

Grace looked up from Seth’s elbow, which was grazed and bleeding from a fall in the yard.

‘Yes, sweetheart?’

‘Why are you and Seth sleeping in my room and Mum’s sleeping in Ken’s room?’

‘Ah, well.’ Grace paused for a moment and tore the paper wrapper off an Elastoplast. ‘Your mother’s going through a bit of a bad patch.’ She stuck the plaster onto Seth’s elbow. ‘She’s feeling a bit confused and Ken wants to keep her close to hand. So that’s why she’s going to be sharing his bedroom. And I hope you don’t mind me and Seth taking over your mother’s bed. Just for a little while.’

Melody nodded, though she was far from happy about this new development.

‘Don’t you mind, though?’ she said. ‘Don’t you mind that someone else is sleeping in your bed?’

‘Well, beautiful girl, the thing is, we don’t really think of things in this house as “ours”. Or anyone else’s. We don’t believe in possessions. The bed that Ken and I sleep in belongs to
everybody
. And right now, your mum needs it more than I do.’

Melody pondered this. As far as she could tell, the bed in their attic room was very comfortable. In fact, she remembered her mother commenting on more than one occasion on what a comfortable bed it was. So why did she need to sleep in another one?

‘Is Ken’s bed very comfortable?’ she asked eventually.

Grace smiled, one of those strange smiles that adults used that were impossible to interpret and therefore very unsettling. ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘it is. It’s very firm.’

‘And is that why my mum wants to sleep there?’

‘Well, I’m sure that’s one of the reasons.’

Melody paused for a moment. If there were ‘other’ reasons for her mother being in Ken’s bed she wanted to know what they were. ‘So why else?’

‘I told you,’ Grace said, ‘she’s feeling a bit confused. Ken wants to … comfort her.’

Melody squirmed. That word, comfort, seemed suddenly imbued with all sorts of shadowy submeanings and undercurrents.

‘Why does Laura want to sleep with Ken too?’ she asked. ‘Does she need comfort?’

Grace gave her that smile again, but this time it just made Melody feel angry. She may have been only six years old, but she really wasn’t stupid.

‘Yes,’ said Grace, ‘sometimes. Sometimes Laura feels lonely and then she comes into our room to sleep.’

‘Hmm.’ Melody picked up one of Seth’s rattles from the kitchen table and squeezed it into the palm of her hand. There was something soothing about the feel of the baby’s toy, something reassuring about the gentle chickachicka of the beads rolling around inside it. ‘What’s the clap?’ she asked.

‘What?’

‘A girl at school said it.’

‘A girl at school? What sort of girl?’

‘Penny. She’s a year older than us. She’s nearly seven. Is it a disease?’

‘The clap? Well, yes. It is. It’s one that only adults can get, though.’

Melody nodded and moved the rattle into her other hand. She wanted to tell Grace that Penny had said that people could catch it off her, but she had a strong feeling that this would lead to even more trouble. ‘What happens when you get the clap?’

‘Well, there are lots of different types of … clap. But they’re generally all around the fanny area.’

‘The fanny?’

‘Yes. The vagina. And the penis. And women catch it off men and men catch it off women. But only grown-ups.’

‘Grown-ups who share a bed?’

‘Yes, that’s right. Grown-ups who share a bed.’

‘So could my mum catch it off Ken?’

Grace laughed and lifted Seth off her knee. ‘No,’ she said. ‘No. That’s highly unlikely. I wouldn’t worry about that. But really, I’m quite shocked that a six-year-old girl should be talking about things like that at school.’

‘Well, she’s nearly seven. She’s the oldest girl in the class.’

‘But still. Have you told a teacher?’

Melody shook her head and passed the rattle to Seth, who was standing at her feet, looking at it expectantly.

‘Well, next time this girl comes talking to you about things like that, you just walk away. Just walk away immediately. And you tell me. Because that’s not right. That’s not right at all. There is nowhere else in the world where you could be safer or more loved than this house, and anyone who says differently is just talking out of their big fat derrière, OK?’

Melody smiled and nodded.

‘Good things are happening here,’ Grace continued, ‘happy things. Everything is on the up. Now come over here and let me give you a big hug, you precious, precious thing.’

Melody stepped into the long, tangled embrace of Grace’s arms and allowed herself to be held, appreciating the gesture but wishing more than anything that instead of Grace’s bony ribcage and pancake breasts, her face was being held warm and safe against the yielding and slightly pungent bosom of Jane Ribblesdale.

Broadstairs Library was an ugly red-brick building. Melody found the local history section and started to leaf, somewhat randomly, through obscure-looking books with titles like
Broadstairs and St Peters During The Great War of 1914–1918
. It struck Melody as an entirely pointless activity. She wanted to know about a squat in the late eighties, not fishing in Viking Bay in the 1800s. She caught the eye of a middle-aged woman, small and neat in grey trousers and a polo neck, her eyeglasses on a chain around her neck, leafing through a book about the local area.

‘Excuse me,’ Melody said, ‘do you live in Broadstairs?’

‘Yes,’ said the woman, ‘I do.’

‘Oh, good, I wonder if you could help me. I lived here for a short time when I was a child. I lived in Chandos Square, just behind here. Do you remember much about Chandos Square, thirty years ago?’

‘Well, that depends …’

‘The house I lived in – it’s a guesthouse now –it’s called the House on the Square. You know, it’s very smart?’

‘Oh, yes, I remember that house all right.’ The woman chuckled and closed the book she’d been looking at. ‘That house was the bane of everyone’s life.’

‘That’s right, it was a squat, wasn’t it?’

The woman leaned forward conspiratorially. ‘That,’ she said, ‘was only the half of it.’

Melody caught her breath, readying herself for the unknown.

‘There was this man, like a hippy, he was kind of like the boss of the house, if you like …’

‘What was his name?’

‘Ken,’ she replied, immediately, ‘Ken Stone.’

Melody inhaled sharply. There it was again, another gleaming piece of the jigsaw, another flighty notion turned to fact.

The woman continued, ‘He was some kind of, what do they call it, like a political activist, always off on some march or other, always shouting off about stuff, but never actually changing anything, you know the type. And he believed in what they used to call “free love”. All very 1970s. He wrote all these daft pamphlets about freeing the mind, about letting go of the shackles of conformity. All that rubbish. All talk and no action except when it came to the ladies … Here,’ said the woman, taking off her reading glasses and letting them fall to her lap, ‘this Ken fellow, was he anything to do with you?’

‘Well, I lived there as a child, and he was my friend.’

‘But you’re not related to him, then?’

‘No, no, I’m pretty sure I’m not.’ Melody laughed brittlely as the realisation that, heaven knew, she might be, suddenly dawned upon her.

‘Well, anyway, he had this wife, at least she called herself his wife, though I can’t imagine that they ever did anything as conventional as getting married, you know. And she was a strange creature, always looked to me like one of those Art Deco figurines, all sinewy, wrapped up in scarves and bangles. They had a little boy together …’

‘When?’

‘God, I don’t know when. I suppose it must have been around the time our youngest was born, so about thirty years ago.’

The baby on the floor, sucking the plastic spoon
.

‘Anyway, there were always people coming and going, odds and ends of people, and the talk around town was that they were all having a mass orgy, you know, like a love-in.’

Melody thought about the woman called Laura she’d remembered this morning. Had she been part of this strange orgiastic commune? And then, of course, another thought struck her: was it possible that something terrible had happened to her in this unsavoury house? Was it possible that Ken Stone had violated her in some way, that she had been involved in something dark and unspeakable, and that was why her memory had ceased to function? Was it possible that she had been abused, not, as Ed had suggested, by her father, but by this stranger she barely remembered? Suddenly a dozen dreadful scenarios sprung to mind – she had been kidnapped from her safe Canterbury home by this woman called Jane and brought to this place to be used by adults in the most terrible way imaginable. And if that was the case then maybe the same had been true of the house in Fitzrovia. Maybe she had been given to the man with the kind face by the woman called Jacqui. Maybe there were more houses, more stories, maybe she’d been passed from place to place, maybe – it was unthinkable, but they wrote about these things in the newspapers – maybe her parents had been behind it all. It would explain her abnormal ambivalence towards them, the gaps in their history. But even as soon as these notions appeared in her head, she quashed them. That wasn’t right. It just wasn’t. She couldn’t remember much but she remembered that Ken was good, she remembered that the man in Fitzrovia was good, and she remembered, more than any of that, that however strained her relationship with her parents had been, they both cared about her deeply and truly. There was another story behind the doors of the houses on Chandos Square and Goodge Place and Melody was pretty sure that this neat little woman with her seaside accent and her Marks and Spencer slip-on pumps was about to turn the page to the next chapter.