The Truth About Melody Browne (30 page)

‘Wow, I can’t believe you remember the Tweetypie decal! There was Minnie Mouse too, on the other wall. Remember that? They were there until I was like, nearly ten! Then I scraped them off myself with a palette knife and painted the whole room
aubergine
. Mom was
not impressed
. So, do you …’ Emily cast her eyes down towards the floor, ‘do you remember much about Dad?’

Melody smiled wistfully. ‘Not really,’ she said, ‘and anything I do remember is pretty new to me, but I remember he had a kind face, that he was tall, that he really loved us both, a lot.’

Emily smiled and fiddled with a tube of sugar. ‘Yeah,’ she said, ‘that’s what Mom’s told me. I mean, I was, like,
one
when he died. I don’t remember him at all, you know, not even a little bit. Just what I’ve seen in photos. And he looks like the nicest, kindest man. I wish I’d known him.’

‘Yes,’ said Melody, ‘so do I.’

‘Well, you got, you know, six years?’

Melody shook her head sadly. ‘Not really,’ she said. ‘I don’t remember anything about the first nine years of my life.’

‘What, like nothing at all?’

‘No,’ she shook her head and smiled wryly. ‘Up until a week ago I thought my name was Melody Browne and that my parents were called Clive and Gloria and that I’d spent my whole life in a house in Canterbury.’

Emily threw her a confused look. ‘What, seriously?’

‘Uh-huh. I had some kind of amnesia and it seems like while this was happening, my mother got sent to prison, my dad died in a pile-up and I got adopted by a pair of strangers who lied to me my whole life.’

‘You’re kidding, right?’

‘No,’ said Melody, ‘no. I’m not. But I really wish I was.’

They spent another hour in the café, ordered more tea, more coffee, and talked ferociously and almost manically about absolutely everything. Emily lived in a flatshare off Golborne Road with three other girls, she worked for the BBC in their marketing department and she was writing a novel in her spare time, about a girl trying to find her long-lost sister.

‘You know,’ she said, ‘I came to live in London to be near you. I wanted to breathe the same air as you. I wanted to give serendipity a head start …’

She really liked her mother’s new partner, and her two younger half-brothers, but she couldn’t get on with Charlotte, however much she tried. ‘She’s just, like, a
diva
. And she’s so smart but she plays it dumb all the time. I can’t connect to her, you know?’

She liked cooking and socialising and she had a boyfriend of fourteen months whom she was thinking about splitting up with because ‘he’s nearly thirty-one and he’s ready for, like, having a family and settling down, and I’m like twenty-seven going on seventeen and that’s just not what I’m about right now.’

She was amazed to hear about Melody’s son. ‘You’re a
mother?
Omigod! That means I’m, like, an
aunt
! And you were fifteen? Jees, you know, I just knew that you would be different and amazing, and you are, you just totally are!’

By the time they left the café Melody felt like all the strange and dreadful fragments of her forgotten childhood, all the sad revelations and bleakly gothic truths that had emerged from the shadows of her mind and shown their awful selves to the light had somehow come together and formed a new bright, glossy picture, embodied in this girl, this bouncy, beautiful, sweet, silly and unblemished girl. It was as if it had all been distilled down to one small shiny pearl of goodness: her sister. And in this new person she saw not only a person she might have been close to had fate sent her down a less pot-holed road, but another person too – the person she might have been if her father had not died on the freeway coming to bring her home, if he’d made it to London, helped her pack a bag, and brought her back to Los Angeles.

‘Do you have to rush off?’ said Emily, grabbing hold of Melody’s hand.

‘No,’ she replied. ‘Not at all.’

‘Good,’ said Emily, ‘there’s something I really, really want to show you.’

By the time they reached Tooting, it was raining heavily and they huddled together beneath a small Hello Kitty umbrella pulled out from the bowels of Emily’s roomy shoulder bag. Emily wouldn’t tell Melody where they were going, but she seemed quieter as they approached the cream stone walls of Lambeth Cemetery.

‘Here we are,’ she said.

Melody threw her a questioning look.

‘We’re going to see Dad,’ said Emily. ‘Are you OK with that?’

Melody gulped. She’d planned on spending a day at the Family Records Centre in Clerkenwell, thought about finding her father’s death certificate, discovering where he’d been buried, but she hadn’t found the impetus. Now she was here, a moment away from his final resting place. She took a deep breath and nodded.

‘Good,’ said Emily, ‘that’s good.’

‘I come here once a month,’ said Emily as they meandered through the pretty cemetery, dodging puddles. ‘At least once a month. This was another reason I came to London. So that I could see him whenever I wanted. And I always half-hoped that maybe one day I’d come along and find you here, you know, just paying your respects … But I guess, now I know a bit more about you, that that wasn’t ever going to happen.’

As they walked, Melody felt shivery waves of familiarity. She saw a stone angel and a chipped crucifix, ivy-draped walls and pointy conifers and she knew she’d seen them before. And then she felt a wall of sadness, a bleak certainty – this was a place of personal tragedy and of desperation.

‘Here,’ said Emily, pausing between two rows of small stone plaques, embedded into the earth. ‘Here he is. Dad.’

Melody stopped and gazed at the ground. His plaque was dark grey and the words were hammered out in cream:

John Baxter Ribblesdale
1944–1979
Beloved father, stepfather and husband
Taken from us much too soon
Will remain forever loved

She put her hand to the damp stone and stroked it gently. And as she touched the stone she felt the world start to wrap itself around her head, darkly and softly, and she closed her eyes and saw a hole in the ground, and a tiny white coffin and a woman in an old grey dress trying to climb into the hole. She opened her eyes and the image was gone, but there were tears in her eyes.

‘I’ve been here before,’ she said.

‘Yes, of course you have,’ said Emily, ‘you must have been here for the funeral.’

‘Yes, I suppose I must have.’ She looked around and saw a familiar tree, ‘But it feels like it was something else. A different funeral … maybe a …’ And then she stopped and gasped, because she had just seen the inscription on the plaque to the left of her father’s – a small cream plaque, streaked green in places:

Romany Rosebud Ribblesdale
4 January – 6 January 1977
The sweetest rose
Plucked before her time
Our hearts forever darkened

It took a moment for Melody to absorb the full meaning of the inscription. At first she thought perhaps it was the grave of an ancient ancestor, a tragic child born and perished in some other century, unconnected to her life, but then she absorbed the numbers properly and realised that this was a baby born when she was four years old and that probably, given the nature of her recent flashback, the woman she’d pictured trying to climb into the hole in the ground must have been her mother, Jane Ribblesdale, the Broadstairs Baby Snatcher and that she therefore must also have been the baby’s mother and suddenly everything made a kind of blinding, awful sense.

Emily saw her staring at the baby’s headstone and touched her arm. ‘Poor little baby, huh?’ she said softly.

‘Did you know?’ Melody asked. ‘Did you know she was my sister?’

‘Our sister. Yes, uh-huh. I knew before I came to London. My mom always said that was the start of everything. You know.’

Melody shook her head. ‘No,’ she said, ‘I don’t know. Start of what?’

‘Well, you know, your mom and dad splitting up, your mom going nuts, taking you to live in that dive by the sea, stealing that baby, killing herself …’

Melody gasped, her body rocked. Her mother was dead. She’d suspected it, but not known it, and knowing it hurt more than she’d imagined.

‘Oh God.’ Emily paused and stared at her. ‘I thought you knew?’

‘No, no, I didn’t.’

‘Oh, shit, Melody, I’m so sorry. I just assumed because you knew all about what happened with snatching the baby and everything …’

‘I knew she took the baby and I knew she went to prison but I thought maybe … I don’t know what I thought.’

‘There,’ said Emily, pointing to the other side of their father’s grave. ‘Look.’

Melody followed her arm to a small grey plaque, framed in soft green moss.

Jane Victoria Newsome
1948–1981
A Mother above all else
Loved and missed

She fell to her haunches then, and let her head drop in her chest. The rain was falling heavier now, running down her crown and over her face. She looked up and glanced from left to right at the three small rectangles of stone, marking three small boxes of dust and ash. Her mother, her father, her sister. Her family. Shadowy, unknown strangers, faces seen only in smudgy black-and-white photocopies, a baby she’d never known, dead at two days, leaving her parents with ‘hearts forever darkened’, a tiny world pinched out by the fingers of fate in less than five years.

‘What happened to the baby?’ she asked.

‘Um, I’m not sure. Heart defect, I think. I’d have to check with Mom, But that sounds right to me.’

‘And what happened to Jane? What happened to my mum?’

Emily shrugged and grimaced. ‘She hanged herself,’ she said, apologetically, ‘I think.’

Melody inhaled, suddenly, as though she had been kicked in the chest. An image flashed through her mind, a featureless woman in a big grey dress hanging from the ceiling in a prison cell. Had she been there? No, of course she hadn’t. It was just an offering from her imagination. But she must have been told. Who would have told her? How did she feel? Had her mother left her a note? Had she made any provision at all for her only daughter?

‘And what … what happened to me?’

Emily shrugged again. ‘That’s the biggest mystery of all. One minute we knew where you were, the next we didn’t. It was like you just disappeared. It was like,’ she said, staring through the stirring trees into the brightening sky, ‘it was like we’d just dreamed you.’

The news about Melody’s mother came via a phone call from Auntie Susie, one breezy Sunday afternoon, while Melody was playing ludo on the coffee table with Clive and awaiting the removal of a fragrant Victoria sandwich from the oven in the kitchen.

‘Oh, darling, darling thing,’ said Susie, her breath laboured and thick. ‘I can’t believe I have to say these words to you, not after everything you’ve already been through, but a terrible, terrible thing has happened and I need you to be terribly, terribly brave.’

She was calling from the recovery ward of the Queen Elizabeth Hospital, having suffered a minor heart attack upon hearing the news. Her words were punctuated with beeps and tears and gulps and other unsettling noises that made her sound less like an auntie and more like a creature from
Doctor Who
. The words made no sense at first. She used terms like ‘gone’ and ‘passed away’, and Melody thought maybe she was trying to tell her that her mother had escaped from gaol. But once the truth of her garbled words hit her, Melody felt gravity being sucked from the room, her legs soft as jellies, her head filled with mist, everything leaving her, drop by drop, until all that was left was a small heap on the floor, not crying, but slowly seeping away.

Melody had a good mind; she’d always managed to make sense out of most things. And she was a flexible girl: she went with the flow, she tried not to get in the way of other people’s plans. If a man in a courthouse had decided that what her mother had done when she took the baby from the newsagent’s was bad enough to warrant two years in gaol, then Melody would just have to wait two years for her mother to be released. If her mother was too sick to see her, or even to write her letters or funny little postcards, then Melody would have to stop fantasising about letters and funny little postcards and accept that there wouldn’t be any, and if her auntie Susie had decided that her home was not a safe enough place for her to be and that she would be better living with her ‘dear old friends’ here in Canterbury, then that was fair enough. Melody could even justify the fact that her mother had stolen the baby in the first place, reasoning that she’d only done it to make herself feel happier and that if she’d felt happier maybe she would have been a better mother to Melody. Melody could accept most of the unpleasant things that had happened to her over the past few years, as she knew that fundamentally, everyone was just doing what they thought was best. But it didn’t matter how hard she thought about it, or how much she tried to understand it, nothing about the fact that her mother had decided that she didn’t want to be alive any more made the slightest bit of sense. How could being dead possibly help anyone, or make anything in life better or easier? How could leaving Melody all alone with strangers be the right thing to do, for her or for anyone?

Melody’s mind lost all clarity as it fought to make sense of this development, and for a while as she lay there on the muted Axminster carpet, her cheek pressed down into its scratchy fibres, her fingertips tracing the silky fringed trim of the floral sofa, she lost her connection with the world. She knew it was there, she was aware on some level that Gloria was stroking her hair, that Clive was trying to persuade her to stand up, that there was a half-played game of ludo on the table behind her, that Gloria’s Victoria sandwich would probably burn if she didn’t take it out of the oven now, but couldn’t think where these facts bore any relevance to her. Underneath the sofa, she could see a small ball with a bell attached. She assumed that it must have belonged to the fat marmalade cat called Puss, who’d played the role of Gloria’s surrogate child until his demise last year under the wheels of a National Express coach full of tourists. She stretched out her arm and reached for the ball, and pulled it towards her, held it close to her cheek, rolled the cool metal of the bell across her hot skin and tried to imagine what would happen if she were ever to stand up again. It didn’t seem possible to her that she could do such a thing. The idea of her legs supporting her head, this heavy, numb lump on her shoulders, seemed unthinkable. No, she decided, she would just lie down here, lie here and wait to see what happened next.