The Truth About Melody Browne (2 page)

‘She opened her eyes! Did you see? Just for a second!’ Another voice. The man with the bald head. Her father.

Melody breathed in. Her throat and her nose felt like they had been doused in acid, the smoky air burned like fire as it passed down into her lungs. It stuck for a while, halfway to her gullet, like a lit match. She held it there and waited a heartbeat for her body to expel it. But for that tiny moment, lying on the pavement in front of her house, the moon shining down on to her, her thoughts muffled and her parents at her side, she felt suspended somewhere both dark and light, painful and comfortable, a place where her life finally made some sense. She smiled again and then she coughed.

They were smiling at her, her mother and father, smiling with sooty faces and frazzled hair. Her mother put her hand to her hair and stroked it. ‘Oh thank God!’ she cried breathlessly. ‘Thank God!’

Melody blinked at her and tried to talk, but she had no voice. The fire had taken it. She turned to look at her father. There were tear tracks running through the dirt on his face. He held her hand inside his.

‘Don’t try to talk,’ he said. His voice was raw and gravelly, but full of tenderness. ‘We’re here. We’re here.’

In her peripheral vision, Melody could see the strobe of blue lights playing out in the splintered windows of the house. She allowed her mother to pull her into a sitting position and she gazed around her at an altogether unexpected vision. A house, her house, roaring and alive with flames. Crowds of people, huddled together in dressing gowns and pyjamas, watching the fire as though it was a Guy Fawkes Night offering. Two big red engines drawing up in the middle of the street, men in yellow helmets unfurling thick hosepipes and rushing towards them and the moon still hanging there, fat and bright and oblivious.

She got to her feet and felt her knees trembling precariously beneath her.

‘She was unconscious for a while,’ she heard her mother saying to somebody. ‘Out cold for about five minutes.’

Somebody took her elbow and moved her gently towards the bright light of an ambulance. She was wrapped in a blanket and fed oxygen through a strange-smelling plastic mask. Her eyes were riveted by the mayhem around her. Slowly reality seeped through the layers of smoke and chaos and something hit her like a thunderbolt.

‘My painting!’

‘It’s OK,’ said her mother. ‘It’s here. Clive saved it.’

‘Where? Where is it?’

‘There.’ She pointed at the kerb.

The painting was propped up against the pavement. Melody stared at it, at the Spanish girl with the huge blue eyes and the polka-dot dress. It moved her in some strange, unknowable way. It soothed her and reassured her like it had always done, ever since she was a small girl.

‘Can you look after it?’ she croaked. ‘Make sure it doesn’t get stolen?’

Her parents glanced at each other, clearly reassured by her preoccupation with a shoddy junkman laughed backshop painting.

‘We’ll have to take her into hospital,’ said a man. ‘Get her checked over. Just to be on the safe side.’

Her mother nodded.

‘I’ll stay here,’ said her father. ‘Keep an eye on things.’

All three of them turned then, as one, to acknowledge the shocking sight of their home disintegrating in front of their very eyes, to ash and rubble.

‘That’s my house,’ said Melody.

Her parents nodded.

‘And you’re my mum and dad.’

They nodded again and pulled her towards them into an embrace.

Melody felt safe there, inside her parents’ arms. She remembered a few moments ago, lying in her bed, a pair of strong arms pulling her, carrying her through the roasting house, towards the fresh air. And that was all she could remember. Her father saving her life. The moon staring down at her. The Spanish girl in the painting telling her that everything was going to be all right.

She lay down on the crisp white sheets of the emergency bed and watched as the doors were pulled shut. The noise, the lights, the crackle of destruction all faded away and the ambulance took her to hospital.

When she was nine years and three days old, Melody Browne’s house burned down, taking every toy, every photograph, every item of clothing and old Christmas card with it. But not only did the fire destroy all her possessions, it took with it her internal memories too. Melody Browne could remember almost nothing before her ninth birthday. Melody’s early childhood was a mystery to her. She had only two memories of it, both as vague and as fleeting as a flurry of snow. The first was of standing on the back of a sofa and craning her head to see out of a tall window. The second memory was of a perfumed bed in a dimly lit room, a puff of cream marabou and a tiny baby in a crib. There was no context to these memories, just two isolated moments of time hanging pendulously and alone, side by side, in an empty, echoing room that should have housed a thousand more moments just like them.

But when she was thirty-three years old, and the past was just a dusty fragment of what her life had turned out to be, something unpredictable and extraordinary happened to her. On a warm July night, one of only a handful of warm nights that summer, Melody Browne’s life turned in on itself, stopped being what it was and became something else entirely.

* * *

Melody Browne would have been home that night, the night everything started to change, if she hadn’t decided, upon feeling a fat droplet of summer rain against her bare arm, to hop onto a number 14 bus after work one afternoon, instead of walking. She would also, most probably, have been at home that night, if she hadn’t chosen to put on a sleeveless vest top that morning, revealing her bare shoulders to the world.

‘You have the most amazing shoulders,’ said a man, slipping onto the seat next to her. ‘I’ve been staring at them since you got on.’

‘Are you taking the piss?’ was her poetic response.

‘No, seriously. I’ve got a bit of a thing about shoulders and yours – they’re incredible.’

She touched her shoulders, self-consciously, and then threw him a suspicious look. ‘Are you a fetishist?’

He laughed, full-throated, showing the three silver fillings in his back teeth. ‘Not that I know of,’ he said. ‘Unless fancying women because they’ve got nice shoulders makes me one.’

She stared at him, agog. He fancied her. Nobody fancied her. Nobody had fancied her since 1999, and even then she wasn’t sure if he had or if he’d just felt sorry for her.

‘Do I look like a pervert?’ he asked in amusement.

She appraised him, checked him out from his loafers, to his pale blue shirt, to his shampoo-fresh hair and his stone-coloured trousers. He couldn’t look more normal.

‘Who says that perverts look like perverts?’ she said.

‘Well, look, I promise you, I’m not. I’m totally normal. I’ll give you my ex-wife’s phone number if you like. She found me so incredibly normal that she left me for a bloke with a stud through his eyebrow.’

Melody laughed and the man laughed back. ‘Look,’ he said, getting to his feet. ‘I’m getting off here. Here’s my card. If you fancy a night out with a fetishistic pervert, give me a ring.’

Melody took the card from his tanned fingers and stared at it for a moment.

‘I won’t hold my breath,’ he said, smiling. And then he picked up his rucksack and disappeared through the puffing hydraulic doors and out onto the busy pavement.

The woman sitting in front of Melody turned round in her seat. ‘Bloody hell,’ she said, ‘if you don’t call him, I will!’

She didn’t call him. She waited a full seven days and then she texted him, not because she particularly wanted to – the last thing Melody Browne needed in her life was a man – but because everyone, from her son to her best friend to the women at work, wanted her to.

‘Hello,’ her text read, ‘I am the woman whose shoulders you were perving over on the no. 14 bus last week. This is my number. Do with it as you will.’

Less than five minutes later he replied.

‘Thanks for the number. Not sure what to do with it. Any ideas?’

She sighed. He wanted to banter.

Melody didn’t want to banter. Melody just wanted to get on with her life.

She texted back, somewhat abruptly. ‘I don’t know – ask me out?’

He did.

And so the journey began.

Melody Browne lived in a flat in a Victorian block squeezed between Endell Street and Neal Street right in the middle of Covent Garden.

She lived with Edward James Browne, not her husband, but her seventeen-year-old son. Their flat was small and sunny, and had no garden, but a balcony overlooking a central courtyard. Having a flat in Covent Garden was not purely the preserve of the very rich. Camden Council owned large swathes of property in the area and Melody had been fortunate enough to have been offered one of their flats when she’d found herself a single mother at the age of fifteen. She and Ed had lived here alone, together, ever since, and the flat had taken on the look of a home that had evolved through times of change and growth. It was a home with layers and piles. They still had the same sofa that they’d been given by a charity for teenage mums when they moved in seventeen years ago, covered with a throw that she’d found in a charity shop when Ed was about ten and now decorated with smart cushions she’d bought from Monsoon in the sale two years ago when she won seventy-five pounds on the lottery.

Melody had bought pot plants when Ed was tiny. In the nineties everybody had pot plants. Most of them had died but one still remained, strong and determined and really quite ugly, sitting on a chipped saucer ringed with rust marks and ingrained dirt. If Melody were to move to a new flat the plant would go, but it was such a part of the fabric of the home she’d known for seventeen years that she didn’t see it any more.

The same was true of the piles of paperwork underneath her bed, Ed’s old trainers in the hallway, which hadn’t fit him since he was fifteen, and the ugly framed painting of a Spanish dancer on her bedroom wall that had come with her from her childhood home.

Melody’s home would not win any prizes for interiors, but it was warm and comfortable, and filled with the smell and feel of her and her son. It was a treasure box of memories; photographs, souvenirs, postcards pinned to a cork board. Melody and her son had grown up together in this flat and she wanted, consciously or not, to make sure that not one iota of that experience ended up in landfill. She wanted it all to hand, every friend’s visit, every school play, every Christmas morning, every last memory, because memory was something that Melody valued more than life itself.

Melody dressed carefully that night, the night her life both ended and began. Melody rarely dressed carefully, because she had no interest in clothes at all. Half the time she wore her son’s clothes. She didn’t go anywhere, apart from to work as a dinner lady at the school where Ed had been a pupil up until finishing his A levels last month, and she didn’t have enough money to buy anything nice, so she just didn’t bother. But today she’d been to Oxford Street, to the big branch of Primark, and spent thirty-five hard-earned pounds, because tonight she was meeting a man, her first proper date in eight years.

Melody pulled a necklace from her jewellery box, a pear-shaped pendant in jet and onyx hanging from a thick silver chain, one of the few things she had left of her mother. She looped it over her head and turned to face Ed who was watching her from the corner of her bed. He was wearing a white polo shirt, the collar turned up and a silver chain around his neck. His black hair was cropped and glossy with something out of a tube, his eyes were navy blue and his profile was Roman. He had been the best-looking boy in the sixth form: that wasn’t just her opinion, it was the opinion of half the girls at his school, and Melody knew it because she heard them whispering it when they thought no one who cared could possibly be listening.

He smiled and gave her the thumbs up. ‘You look hot,’ he said.

‘Thank you for lying,’ she said.

‘I’m not, honest. You look really good.’

‘Well, lying or not, I love you for it.’ She squashed his cheeks between her hands and kissed him loudly on the lips.

‘Urgh!’ he said, wiping his mouth with the back of his hands. ‘Lip gloss!’

‘I bet you wouldn’t be complaining if it was Tiffany Baxter’s lip gloss.’

‘Course I wouldn’t,’ he said. ‘She’s seventeen years old, she’s fit and she’s not my mother.’

She turned back to the mirror and appraised what she saw. Faded chestnut hair that had grown out of a short crop into a shaggy helmet. Teeth stained slightly from twenty years of smoking. Slim but un-toned physique. Primark tunic top; red, v-necked and sequined. Old Gap jeans. Primark diamanté sandals. And a slight look of terror in her hazel eyes.

‘You don’t think I should put some heels on,’ she said, standing on her tiptoes and examining herself in the full-length mirror, ‘to lengthen my legs?’

Ed crossed his arms in front of his body and shook his head. ‘Now we are entering “daughter-I-never-had” territory. I’m afraid I’m not actually gay.’

Melody smiled and stroked his cheek again.

‘Right,’ she said, picking up her handbag and putting it over her shoulder, ‘I’ll be off then. There’s pizza in the freezer. Or yesterday’s roast chicken in the fridge. Make sure you heat it through
properly
. And er …’