The Truth About Melody Browne (34 page)

She peered at it, but could see nothing at all familiar. ‘Nope,’ she said. ‘What am I supposed to be looking at?’

‘That. The name of the shop.’ He pointed at the sign.

It said ‘E. J. Mason Photographic Services’. It still meant nothing to her.

‘E. J. Mason,’ said Matthew. ‘Edward. James. Mason. Otherwise known as baby Amber Rose.’

‘Oh my God,’ said Melody, ‘you mean that’s his shop? The baby?’

‘Yes. That’s his shop. Fine upstanding member of the community, our Eddie. He is a Rotarian. And a keen golfer. And I’m pretty sure he’s married with two point four kids …’

‘How do you know all this stuff?’

‘Mum. Mum knows everything about everything. If Mum doesn’t know about it, it hasn’t happened. And oh, look, there he is! The man himself …’

They both turned and watched as a tall, casually dressed man walked out of the shop, clutching an aluminium box and with two cameras hanging from his neck in nylon cases. He had fine hair, and thin-rimmed glasses and walked with a sense of purpose.

‘God,’ said Melody, watching him climb into a silver Honda Civic, ‘you’d never guess it to look at him …’

‘What, that for three days he was called Amber Rose Newsome and lived in a squat in Broadstairs? No, you really wouldn’t. But I tell you what, I don’t suppose it’s done him any harm. In fact, it’s probably made him feel special. Look, you can tell just by looking at him that he thinks he’s a bit special, a legend in his own grey little seaside town. A bit like me, I suppose, you know, not famous, but
infamous …
the Legendarily Pissed and Appalling Matthew Hogan. And you too, I suppose, Melody Ribblesdale, the Girl Who Came Back From the Past.’ He put the car back into gear and started to pull away from the kerb. ‘And I wonder,’ he said, turning and smiling at her, ‘I wonder if maybe, just maybe, you’ve come back for a reason …’

Melody didn’t open the box from her mother when she got home that evening. There were some things she wasn’t ready to know.

Despite spending her working days in a kitchen, Melody had no interest in cooking. Her son had been raised on a diet of fish fingers, toasted sandwiches, microwave meals and the occasional takeaway from the fish-and-chip shop up the road. She’d once attempted a home-made Bolognese, inspired by one that Stacey had cooked for the kids’ tea when they were all about five years old, and it had been disastrous. She didn’t have any of the right knives and had resorted to slicing an onion with a dinner knife and because she’d left its preparation until the last minute she’d only cooked it for quarter of an hour. Ed had eaten one forkful and spat it out. ‘I don’t like it!’ he’d cried. ‘You liked it at Stacey’s house last week,’ she’d responded. ‘Yes,’ he’d said, ‘but that was different.
That
was nice.’

She never cooked for him again. In fact, she’d never cooked for
anyone
again. So it was with some surprise that she found herself in Marks and Spencer on Monday morning bypassing the ready meals department and heading towards the fresh produce. She’d seen a recipe in one of her magazines for seared tuna and spicy noodles and had thought it sounded both delicious and easy to cook, and decided, on a whim, that she would attempt to reproduce it for Ed and Ben tonight. She wasn’t sure where this sudden, unexpected culinary inspiration had come from, but she embraced it none the less, as she now embraced every new and uncharted sensation. The old Melody, the one who didn’t look in the mirror before she left the house, who wore her son’s football shirts, who smoked and stayed in and kept the world at arm’s length, was beginning to fade away, and in her place was the beginning of a new Melody, not yet formed, but feeling her way cautiously along the pathway. She felt like she’d been subtly upgraded, in her sleep, and was just starting to try out her new features, one by one. And so here she was, handling a bunch of fresh spring onions and wearing a skirt. Not a big deal by most calculations, but big enough to give her a slightly fluttery sensation in the pit of her belly.

She took her carrier bags home and as she walked she did something else she hadn’t done before – she made eye contact with the people she passed. It amazed her how few people even noticed her attention, and that those who did weren’t appalled by it. She felt like a creature born to reside on the bottom of the ocean floor, dark and flat and half-blind, slowly rising through the icy water to the glittering light above.

She appraised her flat when she got home, this home that she had allowed to accumulate so many layers and piles. She saw it for the first time through the eyes of someone who didn’t really know her and wondered what it said, and she realised with a shock that it didn’t speak only of a loving mother and a small but happy family, but also of an obsession with the past, a fear of letting go and a lack of pride and imagination. The clear-out that she’d always feared would strip her home of all its ‘memory’ would, in fact, breathe new life into this pretty set of rooms. What would happen if she threw away Ed’s trainers, the ones she’d kept for two years because he’d been wearing them the day he got his GCSE results, and therefore she associated them with the proudest moment of her life? Would she forget all about her pride? Would she forget the feeling of warm satisfaction that had suffused her body, the smell of sixteen-year-old scalp in her nostrils as she held her to him, the relief that the ordeal was over and done with, and they could move on to the next stage? No, of course she wouldn’t. Those things would stay with her for ever. Her memory was not as puny and unreliable as she’d thought. It was all there, in colour and detail. It had just needed a kick-start.

She went to the kitchen and pulled out a large bin bag. She flapped it open and then she filled it. She filled it with old trainers and clothes she hadn’t worn in five years and dinner plates that always stayed on the bottom of the pile and calendars from 1998 and blankets that she would never get round to cleaning and saucepans without handles and paperbacks she wouldn’t read, and, finally, the aged, overgrown spider plant, sad and resentful, done with life and ready to go. She tied a knot in the bin bag and she hauled it downstairs to the putrid concrete room where the paladins were stored, and she heaved it over the top and listened to it land at the bottom with a satisfying metallic boom. Then she went back to her flat, washed her hands, and started on the dinner, feeling in some way as though she had exhaled her way another few feet higher, towards the warm golden sun at the top of the ocean.

Melody took off the high heels. That looked better she thought, appraising her reflection in the mirror, not like she was trying too hard, not like she wanted to be wanted. And besides, she had pretty feet, why not show them off? She was wearing an ankle-length tiered skirt in brown cheesecloth, and a turquoise vest top and she looked very nice. Not amazing, not spectacular, just nice. She jumped at the sound of the intercom buzzing and glanced at the time: 8.01 p.m. One minute late. A man who remembered birthdays. A man who kept good time.
Too good to be true
.

Melody shook the negativity from her head. She was done with all that. She took a deep breath and went to meet him at the door. He looked better than she remembered. He hadn’t shaved and she thought he suited a slightly rougher look. He wore a grey jersey hooded top and jeans that were just the right side of trendy. He’d brought Ed a gold envelope with his name on it.

‘What’s this?’ she asked. ‘The Plan?’

‘Yes,’ he smiled, ‘this is the plan.’

‘Oh, Ben, God, you didn’t have to get Ed a present.’

‘Why not?’ he said easily.

Melody couldn’t answer that question so she just smiled and watched as Ed opened it. It was a pair of tickets to see Prince at the O2 later in the month. ‘I don’t know if you’re a fan or not, you’re probably a bit young, but if you don’t want them you could get a good price for them on eBay. They’ll be good seats: my brother works for a ticket agency.’

Ed smiled at the tickets. ‘Cheers,’ he said.

‘I don’t know,’ said Ben, addressing both of them, ‘do eighteen-year-olds like Prince?’

Ed shrugged. ‘I don’t really know his stuff, but I reckon I’ll go – could be a bit like missing Elvis otherwise.’

Ben laughed and Melody felt her stomach softening. The worst bit was over, and it seemed to have gone all right. In the kitchen she put the dressing onto a salad, and lit the flame underneath a frying pan lined with olive oil. She took two bottles of beer from the fridge and brought them through to Ben and Ed.

‘What a brilliant place to live!’ said Ben, ‘I mean, God, you’ve just got everything on your doorstep. It must be amazing.’

People had been telling Melody that living in Covent Garden must be amazing for as long as she could remember, but she’d never really seen it that way. Melody didn’t live in Covent Garden, she lived in this flat. Her life was about these four walls and what happened within them. Her location was wasted on her. She may as well, she mused, have stayed in Canterbury, her life would have been every bit as mundane. ‘I can’t say I really make the most of it,’ she said. ‘I could be anywhere.’

‘What a shame,’ said Ben, and Melody realised that that was the second time he’d used those words about her since their first date.

‘What about you?’ He addressed Ed. ‘What’s it been like for you, growing up around here?’

Ed shrugged. ‘Don’t know any different,’ he said. ‘It just feels normal to me. I’ve got my school up the road, my friends round the corner, I’ve got the gym and the pool, football in Lincoln’s Inn.’

‘So, do you reckon you’ll stay around here, once you’ve left home?’

‘Ed’s not leaving home, are you, Ed?’ Melody smiled and winked at her son. He smiled back.

‘No. Why would I leave home? I’ve got the best mum in the world.’ He leaned over and kissed her on the cheek and Melody felt slightly embarrassed, unused to the intimate machinations of her relationship with her son being played out in front of anyone except Stacey and her family.

‘I can see that,’ said Ben, ‘and if I were you and I lived here with your mum, I wouldn’t leave home till I was forty.’

‘At least,’ said Ed, and they both laughed and clanked their beer bottles together.

Melody watched them and felt a small shiver of what she at first took to be apprehension, but then realised was actually
anticipation
. Something seemed to be happening here tonight, something that she had decided long ago would never happen. They were moving on, she and her son, slowly, inch by inch, and it looked as if this man, this tall, fit man with his golden glow and perfect teeth, might, against all her early instincts, be about to play a part in it.

In the kitchen, Melody poured herself a glass of wine and stared at the frying pan to ensure that it was issuing forth the required levels of smoke, to ensure a properly seared tuna steak. It was, so she threw the steaks into the pan and recoiled as they snapped and sizzled with alarming ferocity.

‘You don’t want to overcook those,’ Ben said, appearing behind her.

‘I know,’ said Melody, ‘three minutes each side.’

‘Hmm,’ he said, ‘they’re quite thin, I’d just give them a minute.’

‘Really?’

‘Yeah.’

‘You can cook, then?’

‘I’m reasonable,’ he said. ‘I can do the basics.’

‘What, you think searing tuna steaks is
basic?
’

‘Well,’ he shrugged and smiled, ‘yeah. Kind of. Ed tells me that you’re not exactly a natural in the kitchen?’

‘No, not my natural habitat.’

‘Which is strange, considering your occupation.’

‘Or maybe it’s exactly why,’ she smiled. ‘No,’ she said, ‘I don’t like cooking. But it’s something I want to work on. I always used to say I didn’t have time to cook, but now I’ve got all the time in the world. I’m running out of excuses. In fact, you know, I’m running out of excuses for everything.’

‘You are?’ he asked meaningfully.

‘Yes,’ she paused. ‘Shall I turn them now?’

Ben peered into the pan. ‘Yeah, and then, literally, thirty seconds on the other side. What sort of things?’ he continued.

She flipped the steaks over with a fork and sighed. ‘God, I don’t know. My whole life I felt like something was missing, and then Ed came along and filled in all the gaps for me. So that was me, you know,
Ed’s mum
, sorted. I haven’t really looked outside of that. And now, well … shall I take them out?’ He nodded, and she slipped them onto three waiting dinner plates. ‘Now, with everything that’s happened, and Ed turning eighteen, it’s forced me to re-evaluate and I’ve realised that there’s potentially much, much more to me than being Ed’s mum. You know, I discovered I’ve got a sister?’ She lowered her voice.

‘Wow! You did?’

‘Yes, I met her on Saturday and she’s just like this little ball of energy, full of plans and ideas, and she’s only five years younger than me but she just seems so much younger, and I thought, that could have been me. If all this
stuff
hadn’t happened to me, if the truth hadn’t been kept from me, I could have been like that, a girl about town, on the career ladder. But I don’t feel resentful, I feel great, like this couldn’t have happened at a better time. I met Grace, Ken’s wife, and she said to me how lucky I was to have had my family so young, because now I can find myself, and she was right. I’m only thirty-three, I’ve got this flat, I’ve got a fairly decent brain, I can be whatever I want to be.’