The Truth About Melody Browne (25 page)

She hugged her to her and breathed in her perfume, looking for that smell of smallness and newness that she’d exuded for so long, which was, of course, long gone now, and anyway indistinguishable beneath the overwhelming aroma of Agent Provocateur, her signature scent.

‘Happy birthday,’ Melody said, stroking the bare skin of her back, the same back she’d rubbed all those years earlier from time to time, trying to dislodge a bubble of gas. ‘You look absolutely beautiful, Clee, seriously, like a film star!’

‘Oh, thanks, Mel!’ Cleo hugged her back.

Stacey was scurrying around in a tight red rip-off of the Roland Mouret Galaxy dress from ASOS, her hair also professionally preened and a cigarette hanging from her painted lips. She kissed Melody distractedly and directed her to a table on the other side of the room where gifts were to be deposited. Ed was talking to Cleo. Melody watched them fondly. Her boy and her best friend’s girl. Of course she and Stacey had fantasised over the years that they would become teenage sweethearts, get married and make them both beautiful grandchildren to share, but inevitably a lifetime of living in each other’s pockets, of bickering, rowing and stubborn ignoring had put paid to that, and now they rarely saw each other. Besides, Cleo had a boyfriend now, a man of twenty, tall and sinewy with a fine-boned face and very thick hair, called Jade, with whom she was deeply in love.

‘You all right?’ Stacey narrowed her eyes at her.

‘Yes, I’m fine.’

‘You sure? You seem a bit …’

‘What?’

‘I don’t know. A bit
off
.’

‘Honestly,’ said Melody. ‘I’m fine.’ She wanted to tell Stacey about everything, now that she knew that she wasn’t mad, now that she had hard evidence that her mind was sound, but she couldn’t, not tonight, not here.

‘Oh, Mel,’ said Stacey, pulling her towards her for a hug, ‘my baby! Look at her! She’s not a baby any more.’ She smelled of nicotine and beer and felt tiny inside Melody’s embrace.

‘Oh!’ Melody had remembered something, something so important that she could barely believe she hadn’t already asked. ‘The test! Did you do it?’

Stacey let go of her and put her finger to her lips. ‘No,’ she said softly, ‘not yet. I want to get this week out of the way first. I’ll do it on Monday. Another few days isn’t going to hurt.’

Melody nodded distractedly. She didn’t agree. This baby, if it was a baby, was yet another gift in Stacey’s overflowing basket of life. She should treasure it, nurture it, respect it, if for no other reason than to show gratitude for her myriad blessings.

Stacey looked at her pursed-up mouth and smiled. ‘Don’t you go all moral majority on me, Melody Browne! You know as well as I do that there’s nothing there yet, just a bunch of bubbles. I can’t get my head round the idea of a baby right at this very moment. And tonight is my
first
baby’s big night and I am not going to miss out on that when for all I know I might not even be pregnant. So, unpurse those lips and go and get yourself a beer!’

Melody felt detached from the celebrations that night. The whole affair came to her like a painting in a gallery, like a scene from a stage play. She saw the guests as characters, who she stood and observed from somewhere in the gods. She saw Cleo, the beautiful princess, her mother, Queen Stacey, and her father, King Pete, in his Burton suit and the Paul Smith shirt that Stacey had bought for him in the sale last summer. She watched as Princess Cleo moved to her father’s side and pulled herself into him, she saw King Pete lean down and kiss her head, not his daughter in any biological way, but his daughter none the less. She saw the new princess, Clover, in a mauve velvet dress from Monsoon that she had helped Stacey pick out last Saturday, her hair held back with a velvet rose, dancing with her cousins, her tiny face alive with excitement. She saw Stacey’s mum, Pat, the Queen Mother, looking ragged and confused, leaning into her walking frame on a chair in the corner, and she saw Stacey’s brother, Paul, looking chipper, cheery and whippet thin in jeans and a Nike sweatshirt, underdressed as ever. His pregnant wife stood next to him, clutching a glass of Coke with both hands and watching her children dance with Clover, her eyes filled with pride.

Melody absorbed the scene, and then began, subconsciously, to paste strange, new faces over the familiar faces in front of her. She put the gentle, equine face of a man called John Ribblesdale over the face of Pete and the startled, bloated, but distinctively pretty face of a woman called Jane Ribblesdale over the face of Stacey. The children she transposed with the faces of a baby called Edward Thomas, bald and creased and freshly hatched, and a lovely little girl called Emily Elizabeth, whose face she had to invent because there’d been no pictures of her. She saw the sad, faded faces of her parents, the other ones, the ones who’d saved her from the fire, and she saw a man called Ken, beautiful and kind, just as she’d pictured him, with a face like Jesus Christ. Her family. Her real family. Not this borrowed family that she’d lived vicariously through for the past eighteen years, and not the tiny family she’d made for herself, the one that consisted of just her and Ed, but another family, a big one, one that belonged exclusively to her, a family with roots and feet and legs and arms, a family that had crumbled into pieces and been blown across the world by a cruel breeze.

This could have been her life, she thought, this rich, dizzying whirl of humanity with all its faults and foibles and oddness. But something sad and irreversible had happened when she was too young and unformed to understand or even to remember, and now she was left here, in limbo, between a place she thought she knew and a place she might have known. She looked again at Pete, big and strong, kind and shy, and she thought of the man who’d died on an American freeway twenty-seven years ago on his way to get her, and she wanted, more than anything in the world, for him to walk through the door, in his best suit and shoes, smile at her, and say,
Hello, Melody, where’ve you been?

The party went on until past midnight, until the tightly coiled snakes of Cleo’s hair had unfurled into shaggy tendrils and the kohl around her eyes had smudged into greyness. Melody got into a minicab and let out a sigh of relief. Ed had stayed behind, invited back to Stacey’s house to carry on the party, and Melody was glad to be alone. The driver was Asian, and silent. Feeling softened with the warmth of celebration, Melody pulled her mobile phone out of her handbag and opened up the last text message from Ben, the one she’d read on the train on the way to Broadstairs yesterday. She pictured Ben as she read it – his name suited him so well – Gentle Ben, a gentle man. She smiled. And then she imagined him waiting for her in her flat, cross-legged on her sofa, reading a book (he seemed the type of man who would read). She imagined him glancing up at the sound of her footsteps in the hallway, putting down his book, smiling:
How are you? How was your night?
And then she imagined herself kicking off these stupid heels, curling up next to him, resting her tired heavy head against his strong shoulder and saying:
Lovely, really lovely. I wish you’d been there, though
. And she felt it, for the first time in her adult life: a hole, a space – room for someone in her life. And soon, when she knew exactly who she was, she’d press ‘reply’ and let fate dictate the rest.

She switched off her phone, and let it rest in her lap while she turned to face the moving scenery.

Out there, she mused, as the neon lights of an East End Saturday night flashed and flickered at her through the window of the cab, out there was a girl called Emily, a girl who was her sister. And out there was a man called Edward, who’d been stolen from his mother by her own mother. Out there, right now, maybe there, in that Turkish restaurant, there was a woman called Jacqui who’d lived with her father for two years. And out there, maybe, was another woman called Jane who’d given birth to her.

She’d read her story again and again over the past few days, gone through the copied cuttings until they were worn through by her inquisitive fingertips, and now she knew nearly everything. She knew what had happened to her from the ages of four till seven. But she still didn’t know what had happened before. And she still didn’t know what happened next. What twisted knot of fate had brought her to a Broadstairs squat, and how had she ended up living in a Canterbury cul-de-sac with a pair of strangers called Mum and Dad?

Ken took her to see her mum in prison, in his sidecar.

Ken had put in a few hours over the past months, sweet-talking Auntie Susie, who was now no longer of the opinion that he was ‘an unsuitable companion for a young child’, and now thought of him as a ‘fine young man’, and even ‘a sweetheart’. She allowed Ken to take Melody to school every morning and bring her home every afternoon (particularly after an attempt to walk there had been marred by people stopping and staring at Melody and saying things in stage whispers, like, ‘That’s her, the baby-snatcher’s kid!’) and twice a week to take her out for ice cream at Morelli’s, or back to the house in town for tea with Matty and Seth.

Her mum was sitting in a big patterned chair with plastic sleeves on the arms when they were let into the visiting room at the prison. Melody and Ken sat on stools without backs and drank water out of plastic cups.

‘How are you, darling?’ asked her mother.

‘I’m fine,’ Melody said, trying not to be put off by her mother’s strange demeanour. Ken had said that they’d had to give her special medicine to stop her feeling so sad and that she might not seem quite herself, but she hadn’t expected her to look quite so swollen and grey. Her face was all shiny and tight, and her eyes were all sunken and beady, like raisins stuck in dough. Her hair was scraped back into a greasy ponytail and she was wearing grey prison clothes that made her look like a street-cleaner. But what was worse was that she was wearing lipstick, just a touch, peachy pink and poorly applied. Melody’s mum hardly ever wore lipstick and Melody knew she’d put it on, a) because she was mad, and b) because she thought it would make her look nice. Which it didn’t. It just made her look like a fat, mad, greasy woman in lipstick.

‘And how is school?’

‘School’s fine,’ Melody replied.

‘Is everyone being kind to you?’

‘Yes,’ she said, ‘even Penny.’

‘Penny?’ said her mother vaguely. ‘Do I know Penny?’

‘I shouldn’t think so,’ Melody said. ‘I didn’t tell you about her because I thought you might make a scene. She was picking on me for ages, about living in the squat with you and Ken and everything. But since you stole the baby, she’s been all right to me.’

‘Good.’ Her mother nodded distractedly and looked mildly pleased with herself for having relieved Melody of Penny’s attentions. ‘And how are you getting on with Auntie Susie?’

‘Fine,’ said Melody, staring at a swirl on the worn-out Axminster carpet and thinking that it looked a bit like a Red Indian’s face. ‘She makes me proper food now sometimes. And she bought me some clothes for Christmas. Nice clothes.’

‘Oh,’ said Jane, ‘that’s nice. I’m glad it’s working out. And did she give you the gift from me?’

‘Yes,’ Melody nodded, thinking of the far-too-babyish cuddly chimpanzee that had arrived in the post three days after Christmas in a slightly battered, poorly wrapped parcel and a note that said, ‘With love from Mum (& Father Christmas)’, when everyone knew that there was no such thing as Father Christmas. ‘Thank you.’

‘Sorry it was a bit late, but it’s hard to get organised in this place. You know. So many rules and regulations.’ She laughed and put her hand to her hair, and Melody squirmed and thought that she wanted to go now. The woman sitting in front of her was not her mother. She was not the mother she’d lived with in London, who’d had a job and a throaty laugh and a penchant for rum punch, and neither was she the mother she’d lived with in Broadstairs, who was pensive and sad and prone to doing absent-minded things like forgetting to cook her tea. This woman was like someone in a rubber suit doing a poor impersonation of her mother. No, in fact this woman was just like a rubber suit without a body in it at all. This woman was
empty
.

‘And how are you, Ken?’ Jane turned and fixed her unsettling smile upon him.

‘Good,’ he said. ‘Well. Fine.’

‘And how’s everyone else? Grace? Matty?’

‘Fine,’ he said again, ‘everyone’s fine.’

It fell silent for a moment and Melody looked around the room. She wasn’t the only kid here. All the people in this prison were women, so quite a few had their children here to see them. There was a girl, just by the window, about the same age as Melody, with a much younger brother of about two. Their mother didn’t have the same strange, glassy look that Jane had. Their mother was crying, and trying to look brave all at the same time. Their mother had a scrunched-up tissue in her hand and kept squeezing both her childrens’ hands. Their mother looked horrified to find herself talking to her children in a prison lounge.

Melody stared at her mother’s hands for a while. They were very pale and she had a little bruise on the top of one of her veins and a little scab. ‘What’s that?’ she asked, pointing at the mark.

Her mother glanced down, vaguely. ‘That? Oh, I don’t know, some kind of injection. They’re always injecting you with something or other in this place. If it’s not going down your gullet it’s being pumped down your veins.’ She laughed inappropriately.