The Truth About Melody Browne (24 page)

‘I’ll be at yours first thing tomorrow morning for school,’ said Ken, his eyes looking damp with tears even though he was trying to sound stern.

Matty put his mouth to the car window and blew his cheeks right out. ‘
Arrivederci
, Melody Ribblesdale!’ he shouted through the glass and Melody laughed, but inside she was wishing that he hadn’t done it because it reminded her too much of what a funny boy he was and how much she was going to miss him.

She craned her neck as the car headed away from the house and watched the small group of waving people recede from view. And then she turned her head to face the front. To face her new future.

‘What are you up to?’

It was Ed, back from a day in the park with his mates. His face was pink from too much sunshine and too much beer. The sunshine worried Melody more than the beer.

She quickly shuffled the photocopies into a pile and put her wine glass down on them. ‘Nothing much,’ she said, stretching out her tense neck muscles, ‘just some bills and stuff. You look happy.’

‘Yeah, I am. Tiffany Baxter just stroked my hair.’

Melody smiled. ‘Did she?’

‘She did. Like this …’ He put the palm of his hand against Melody’s head and shook it.

‘More of a ruffle, really,’ said Melody.

‘Yeah, I guess it was a ruffle. But it was a meaningful ruffle.’

‘So things are moving on, are they?’

Ed smiled and pulled a can of Coke from the fridge. ‘Kind of,’ he said. ‘I’ve invited her to my birthday party. She says she’ll come. And that other bloke, the one with the car, he’s going to stay with his dad up north for a month, which means
no competition
.’

‘Yay!’ said Melody, pulling an old copy of Exchange & Mart over the pile of papers and moving the whole thing to the other side of the table.

‘So,’ he said, pulling up a chair and sitting down next to her, ‘how was Broadstairs? Did you find the Matthew bloke?’

‘Nope,’ she said. ‘Looked everywhere. Not a trace. I asked about him and apparently he often disappears, goes home somewhere to dry out.’

‘Oh,’ said Ed, looking slightly deflated. ‘Anything else?’

She shook her head, hating the feeling of lying to her son. He was so keen to get involved. He thought it was some great adventure, like a storyline in
Hollyoaks
, and she wanted to share this with him, but she needed to know how it was all going to end first. She needed the full picture. The truth would have to wait. ‘No,’ she said smiling regretfully, ‘nothing else.’

‘Did you try the library?’

‘Uh-huh. Nothing there. Just loads of old shipping news and stuff.’

‘Well, then,’ he said simply, getting to his feet. ‘Looks like you’ll just have to call your parents. Either that or spend the rest of your life in blissful ignorance.’

When he had gone Melody glanced down at the table and let her gaze wander across the edges of a headline, the headline of a story she hadn’t read yet, but that suggested a truth so awful that maybe blissful ignorance would be the better state to choose.

Another memory:

Basil Brush on the TV.

Boom boom
.

A half-peeled satsuma in her hand.

The late afternoon sun shimmering through Aunt Susie’s net curtains, alighting on motes of dust and filling the air with sparkles.

A hole in her tights, her only pair of tights.

The fearsome smell of supper being prepared, a smell that would turn out to be Sole Meunière and honey-glazed carrots.

The phone ringing in the hallway.

Aunt Susie’s laboured footsteps.

‘Good afternoon, Susan Newsome speaking. Who is calling?’

Then, a silence.

‘I see. I see. Yes, I see. How did this happen? Oh, I see.’

Her aunt Susie standing in the doorway, in a rose-print apron, clutching a blue and white striped tea towel and uttering the words, ‘Sweetheart, I have some bad news for you. Some very bad news.’

Boom boom
.

* * *

Jane’s court case was heard three months later, at Canterbury Crown Court. Except nobody called her Jane any more. She was now known as the Broadstairs Baby Snatcher. Or Evil Jane. Similarly, nobody really referred to Melody as simply Melody any more. She was poor Melody. Or tragic Melody. Or poor, tragic daughter of Evil Jane, Broadstairs Baby Snatcher.

Her whole world had been assigned new adjectives. She was now part of a ‘Cursed Family’ to whom ‘Tragic and Terrible’ things happened. Including three days after her mother’s arrest, and on the eve of Melody’s long-anticipated seventh birthday, the arrival by telephone of the news that her father had been killed in a multiple pile-up on the freeway out of Hollywood and towards Los Angeles International Airport.

And it was for this fact, more than for the years of indifferent mothering, more than for not loving her the way a lovely little girl deserves to be loved, more than for being so horrible to her father that he’d left her and gone to live in America with Jacqui, and more than for stealing somebody else’s baby and letting her believe that she finally had a sister she could keep, that Melody now despised her mother. Because if her mother hadn’t got herself arrested then her father wouldn’t have been on his way to the airport to fly home to look after her, and he would still be alive, and everything else in her life might, eventually, have rearranged itself into something vaguely resembling normality. As it was, normality, even of the living-in-a-squat-with-strangers-and-strange-sexual-practices type seemed a nebulous and unlikely state of affairs.

Parents, Melody realised, were the linchpin of normality, even when they were far from normal themselves. Parents, even distracted, slightly ambivalent parents, acted as kind of a strainer through which life got poured. They were there, in essence, to catch the lumpy bits. Without a parent, life felt oblique and directionless. Without a parent, the world was too close for comfort.

Melody had a dozen people looking out for her. She had Aunt Susie, Aunt Maggie, Ken, Grace, Kate and Michael. The teachers at school were extra nice to her and even Penny seemed to think it beyond the pale to torment a girl who’d lost both parents within a week of each other. Beverly the social worker visited regularly and her grandmother on her father’s side had even come to spend a week with her at Susie’s house, the first time she’d set foot outside of Ireland since her husband had died twenty-two years previously.

Everyone cared about her. And Susie was, in some ways, a better carer than her mother ever was, especially since Beverly had explained to her that duck and grape fricassee wasn’t really a suitable supper for a seven-year-old, and that she’d probably be happier with sausages and mash. Susie didn’t seem to realise that children should be encouraged to look after themselves and did everything for Melody, including doing up the buckles on her shoes and brushing her teeth. Sometimes Melody felt like she should tell Susie that it was OK, that she could do those things for herself, but she didn’t because deep down inside, she liked being treated like a three-year-old.

But in spite of all the fuss and attention, and in spite of all the grown-ups who cared about her and worried about her, Melody still didn’t feel safe. She still felt like she was tiptoeing blindfold around the perimeter of a very large, very deep hole. She still wanted her mummy.

But sadly, access to her mummy was somewhat restricted.

Jane’s conditional bail had been overturned after she’d told the police that if they let her go, she’d go straight to Ramsgate and throw herself off the cliffs, and she’d been held in a secure unit in Rochester pending trial ever since.

Of course, Melody didn’t actually know that her mother had threatened suicide. She also didn’t know that her mother barely thought about her between visits and mainly sat in her bedroom thinking about her lost babies (she included Melody in this category, having read somewhere that a child leaves the opaque and semi-formed world of infanthood and enters the clearer, more unyielding world of adulthood around their seventh birthday). There were, as ever, a million things that Melody didn’t know about her life, cogs and wheels turning in dark corners that would affect her entire existence for ever more. But for now all she knew was this: it was Wednesday. It was January. It was cold. She’d had kedgeree for breakfast. And today instead of PE and science, she was going to visit her mother in prison.

Once upon a time there was a little girl called Melody. She had long wavy hair the colour of conkers and eyes the colour of burnished gold and she lived by the seaside in a big house with a smiling face with her mummy, Jane, and a man called Ken. Melody had a daddy too. He was a printer and he lived in London with a makeup artist called Jacqui, jacqui’s daughter, Charlotte, and a lovely little baby called Emily Elizabeth, who was Melody’s only sister. Melody sometimes stayed with her other family in the house in London and always felt sad when she had to come back to the seaside, because, you see, Melody’s mum wasn’t very happy and didn’t give Melody many cuddles or kisses. But Melody was happy by the sea because of Ken, who was kind and good, and took her for ice cream every week on a motorbike with a sidecar
.

Then one day, a very sad thing happened. John and Jacqui went away to a far distant land and they took Melody’s little sister with them. Melody was very sad, and cried and cried for days. But then something happened to make her feel happy again. Her mummy made her a new baby sister. Everyone loved the new baby sister, especially Ken, but Melody knew that there was something wrong. The new baby didn’t look like it was brand new. And then the newspapers said that a baby had been stolen from outside a shop and Melody knew that that was what had happened
.

The next day the police came and took the baby away and then they took Melody’s mum away. They said she was very unwell and that she couldn’t come home, because if she did she might hurt herself. Melody’s daddy wanted to come to the seaside then, to take Melody away with him to the far distant land, but a terrible thing happened and he died on the motorway trying to get to her. So now Melody had nobody at all, except for her strange Auntie Susie
.

After three months Melody’s mum went to a court and the judge told her that she was to be sent to prison for two years
.

Melody never saw her again
.

The next thing she knew, she was lying on her back outside a burning house with some other people called Mum and Dad
.

And they all lived happily ever after …

The following day was Cleo’s eighteenth birthday party. Melody opened up a carrier bag and put inside it two wrapped gifts: a set of lingerie from Ted Baker and a crystal-encrusted silver cross from H. Samuel. Then she opened a card on the kitchen table and let her pen hover above it for a moment while she tried to find the right words. She didn’t know where to start. That person, the one called Melody Browne, who’d stood at the side of Stacey’s hospital bed all those years ago, fifteen years old, nine months pregnant, scared and elated, holding this new life in her arms, this tiny little scrap of stuff that was destined to become a woman called Cleo – that person didn’t exist any more. She’d been erased, taken out with a click of Julius Sardo’s fingers and the swoosh of a photocopying machine in Broadstairs Library.

There was no such person as Melody Browne, so who was this, writing a birthday card to the firstborn child of her oldest and dearest friend? She tried to imagine what she’d have written two weeks ago, before her life had been whipped up into a sensational maelstrom, but couldn’t put herself there. She wanted it to be poignant, meaningful, loving. She had watched Cleo grow from a scrappy, tufty-haired infant, into a skinny, knock-kneed child, and then blossom from a gangly adolescent into a stunning five-foot-ten flame-haired beauty with a double-D chest. She had loved her as her own. And that was when it came to her, an echo of something that Ed had said to her before everything had changed. She put the biro to the card and she wrote: ‘To Beautiful Cleo, the daughter I never had and could only have dreamed of. I am so proud of you. Happy Birthday, from your loving auntie Mel xxx’.

As always, Pete and Stacey had found the money from somewhere to hire a function room above the smartest Italian restaurant in Hackney and fill it with helium balloons, banners and Easter lilies (Cleo’s middle name was Lily). Tall sash windows opened out on to the noise of Mare Street and paper-covered trestle tables bowed under the weight of bowls of pasta, platters of cold meat and piles of whole ciabatta. Melody and Ed were the first to arrive, a full half an hour before the designated start time of seven thirty.

Cleo’s remarkable eighteen-year-old body was wrapped up in a tight purple satin dress from TK Maxx and her red hair had clearly been arranged by a professional hairdresser into intricate snakes that twisted around themselves and left the nape of her neck naked, except for the clasp of a stunning Swarovski necklace. Her eyes were heavily kohled, and she looked to Melody like a creature directly off the pages of one of the daft celebrity magazines that Stacey always had lying around at her house.