Unchained Melanie (3 page)

Melanie had plenty going on in her own mind, work-wise, but as she didn’t commute daily into central London in a suit, possess a briefcase, a pension fund or a set-in-stone retirement date to look forward to, there wasn’t a hope in hell that her mother would ever call it A Job. Mel shared her working life with an invented woman: Tina Keen, the detective who starred in her novels and earned her a pretty good living. Tina specialized in solving gory murders of unlucky, downtrodden females, women who seemed to have been born victims, few being particularly grief-stricken at their loss, and whose grisly deaths required a stroppy champion like herself so that the men who’d carelessly
wiped them out wouldn’t walk free to smack someone else around just that bit too hard. Tina wasn’t as sharp and scathing as Lynda La Plante’s Jane Tennison, nor as forensically blood-soaked (or as bloody-minded) as Patricia Cornwell’s Kay Scarpetta. Nor was her creator anything like as successful, although the work more than paid the bills. Tina was foul-mouthed, feistily bright in a non-academic sort of way and much given to sitting on bar stools and assuming (rightly) that men with recently committed crime on their minds would find it hard to resist dropping telling little hints about their misdeeds, over a couple of gins, to a woman whose legs were well worth looking at. Tina had starred in seven books so far and the eighth,
Dying For It
, was taking shape in Melanie’s indigo i-Book upstairs in the study that looked out, through gaps between roofs and alleyways, towards the Thames. The room had once and too briefly been the nursery, ready to be decorated for Rosa’s little brother, who had launched himself out into the cold world far too early to survive. A mobile of painted shells she and Roger had bought in Tobago to hang over the cot now chattered and clattered lightly in the draught by the window.

Cohabiting with Tina was a bit like being a child again and having an imaginary friend. Melanie had invented Tina’s opinions (slightly dated Bolshie left-winger), her dress sense (skirts too tight for all the traditional police-style running about: she left that to the eager young detective constables) and her habit of smoking Panatellas over restaurant tables and being told off by smiling waiters on behalf of outraged but cowardly customers. Sometimes, out on a supermarket foray, Mel would drift off into Tina mode and start pulling from the shelves the kind of food her creation
kept stocked in her fictional fridge. At the checkout she’d then wonder if she’d somehow appropriated the wrong trolley, as she unloaded onto the conveyor belt packets of chocolate finger biscuits (for dunking into strong black coffee and sucking at rudely among impressionable male colleagues), giant bags of oven chips (‘virtually fat-free!’) and luridly packaged yogurts as well as magazines full of soap-opera gossip and shimmer-tights in vibrant American tan. Once, contemplating the research involved if Tina had to investigate the macabre murder of a slimming-club leader, she’d been caught by her neighbour Perfect Patty from number 14 sitting in the car park munching her way through a box of miniature doughnuts.

‘That your secret vice then?’ Patty had called, as she’d strolled past pushing her virtuous trolley full of organic veg and free-range pasta.

‘No, I’m thinking of joining Shape Sorters. Just fattening up first,’ Mel had replied, realizing too late how little sense this made. Patty (sprayed-on jeans and skimpy lilac cardi) simply smirked, which Mel hadn’t found too complimentary. Surely, by the woman-as-sister code, Patty should be protesting Mel’s perfect slenderness and absolute lack of need to lose weight. OK, Mel had thought, wait till the next time she needs to borrow the drain rods . . .

Rosa had once dared to be a bit sniffy about Tina. ‘Why’ve you made her such a gruesome old slag? You’ll never get a telly series if you don’t glam her up a bit,’ had been her scathing words, catching Melanie at just the wrong moment.

‘Because even old slags can have brains and intuition. This one’s not only a shit-hot detective, she’s paying all our bills and she’ll put you through
university, so a bit more respect please. And as for telly, she’s biding her time, she’ll get there.’ Melanie had sounded surer than she was, defending her creation, for Tina really was a bit rough round the edges and her language was frankly only suitable for Channel Five, late night. It was a sore point: seven books down the line and not one had been optioned for so much as a pilot. ‘It’ll need some work . . .’ her agent, Dennis, had said, without specifying exactly what sort of work he had in mind and whether it was down to Mel to do it, or someone else with TV-adaptation experience.

On this first morning of Roger-removed freedom, Mel shoved her huge white and black cat, Jeremy Paxman, off her legs and onto the floor so that she could climb out of bed. Now she was to be living entirely by herself without Rosa to wait up for at night, or needing to worry about whether she’d gone out and left her room full of burning candles, it occurred to her she could go on a course, learn the business of screenwriting and sort out Tina Keen’s future for herself. Meanwhile, there was Rosa to prise from beneath her duvet. This was the day she was leaving for Plymouth – the mountain of bags and boxes in the hallway had to be loaded into the car. There would be arguments about what was to be left behind (for it surely wouldn’t all fit into the Golf, even with the back seats down and parcel shelf out), some last-ditch bickering about money and then several hours of driving listening to music at a level that would shred her brain. Still, there was the wedding to discuss. If Rosa could be persuaded to part with information without Mel feeling like a Gestapo interrogator, that should keep them going almost as far as Exeter.

‘What time is Rosa leaving?’ Melanie’s mother Gwen phoned as Mel was getting her chocolate croissant out of the oven.

Melanie looked quickly at the clock on the front of the microwave. It was already nearly ten and Rosa’s thumpy footsteps had not yet been heard overhead, nor had water from the shower dripped through the ceiling lights onto the worktop – why did a plumber’s promise to turn up on any given Thursday always come with the sinister rider ‘All being well . . .’?

Mel replied, crossing her fingers that it would turn out to be true, ‘In about two hours I should think. Did you want to say goodbye to her? Shall I call her down?’

There was a sharp intake of breath down the phone. ‘Oh no! No! Just tell her I phoned, tell her good luck and to have a lovely time and work hard. I would send her a card, but you haven’t given me her new address yet, so I can’t.’

Melanie smiled to herself. ‘You could have just sent it here.’ She wished she hadn’t said that; whatever her mother had decided was the right thing to do, there was no point in suggesting anything different.

‘No dear, that wouldn’t have done at all. It’s so nice to have mail waiting for you when you move, it makes you feel at home. Just tell her what I said and that I’ll be writing to her soon.’ There followed a very firm click, as if the phone hadn’t quite been slammed down at the other end but had come pretty close to it. Melanie took herself to the mirror in the understairs cloakroom, forced herself to breathe evenly and calmly and arranged her face into a smile, trying to relax the tense grimace out of it.

She asked herself: a) why she felt she’d been told off
and b) what on earth her mother thought she knew about moving house, she and Howard having occupied their leaded-light mock-Tudor house with its pretend cat stalking a bird on the porch roof since 1961. Conversations with her mother often affected her like this, leaving her feeling wound up and ludicrously frustrated, as if she was on the losing end of some word game for which the rules hadn’t quite been explained.

‘You need to let your anger go, take it to the mirror, watch yourself relaxing, setting it free, and replace it with inner, centred, calm,’ Yvonne the masseuse at the gym had said the last time she’d attempted to knead a wodge of tension out of her shoulder blades. Reinterpreting it later, Mel had wondered if Yvonne had simply wanted her to shut up and listen to the whale music and leave her in peace to get on with her job, so she could drift away mentally to plan her holiday wardrobe.

Back in the kitchen, as centred and calmed as she was going to be for now, Melanie shoved half the cooling croissant into her mouth, choking slightly and sending a scattering of crumbs to the floor, which Jeremy Paxman pounced on and licked up greedily. Thoughts of her mother were still kicking about at the edges of her mind. Gwen Thomas tended to regard her older daughter as someone who had constantly failed to be the good example she should have been setting to her younger sister. She needn’t have worried though, Vanessa had inherited all the conformist genes that were available in the pool and was, as Rosa had pointed out, so close to a clone of her mother that secret scientific pioneering could not be ruled out. Mel had a quick gleeful moment anticipating showing her
parents and sister her garden when its makeover was finished, their horrified incredulity at the lack of flowers, lawn, bedding plants, proper British shrubs. They would chorus, ‘Oh what a shame!’ as if a gang of vicious vandals rather than the expert Max from Green Piece had ripped out and destroyed the shrivelled lavender and rooted out the matted clematis. They would predict gloom and failure for the graceful palms and chunky spiked agaves. Melanie, crossing her fingers briefly, hoped the climate wouldn’t prove them right and that she wasn’t relying too heavily on global warming not being a spiteful rumour.

‘Who phoned? Was it for me?’ Rosa, wearing one of her father’s long-abandoned Led Zeppelin tee shirts, appeared in the doorway. Her long legs were bare and had the faded tan of late summer, and her arms were wrapped across her front against the morning chill. The scent of stale cigarette smoke and crowded pub wafted from her. Mel hoped she was intending to shower it all away: at least on day one it might be an idea to present herself to her unknown flatmates as someone reasonably clean and appealing.

‘No, it was your Nana Gwen, wishing you luck.’

‘Oh. Is she going to send me some money?’ Rosa looked at Mel as if expecting the answer to be at least an instantly produced fifty-pound note.

‘I don’t know. Shouldn’t think so, would you?’

Rosa switched on the kettle and spooned instant coffee into a mug. ‘I don’t see why not. Her first grandchild to go to university, it’s a special occasion.’ She grinned at her mother. ‘I’ll send her a card, a postcard of the Hoe or something, let her know the address. I bet when the saintly Twitchy and Witchy cousins go to uni she’ll send them whopping great cheques.’

Melanie laughed. ‘Poor Tess and William, do they have any idea you call them that?’

‘Nah, though I wouldn’t care if they did. So no-one else called?’ Rosa was looking beady-eyed and eager over the top of her mug. Mel knew whom she meant: Alex might now be an ex-boyfriend but that ‘ex-ness’ hadn’t been Rosa’s choice. She kept hoping he’d change his mind, but he wasn’t going to: he was a boy for whom life was a list of Next Things that had to be sought out and ticked off. For him now, the current Next Thing was Oxford and then on to a career in law. He’d turn up at Christmas, after the first term – both she and Rosa knew it, and one slightly pissed evening had giggled about it – with a neat-haired girl in baby-blue cashmere, a single slender gold bangle and sleek black trousers with a crease down the front. Rosa and her charity-shop treasures, her multi-pocketed low-slung baggy trousers and her trainers that were so very past their best would be laughed off as early experimentation, simply a way of finding out how to do sex just about well enough before moving on to someone who might need to be impressed into a Good Marriage. That, she and Rosa had damningly decreed, would last until, as a big-name lawyer in bored middle age, Alex was tempted into the thrill of some career-jeopardizing sexual naughtiness and was caught by the tabloids.

‘Perhaps . . .’ Mel started, then thought better of it. She’d been about to suggest Rosa might meet someone else, someone in Plymouth, but it was both too obvious and too trite.

‘Perhaps what?’

‘Perhaps we’d better get going. You don’t want to be late.’
Melanie
didn’t want to be late. She’d planned an overnight stop on the way back in a hotel near Exeter
and she fancied a leisurely settling-in, a rustic walk in the late afternoon sun followed by a long hot bubbly bath with a couple of indulgent magazines, then a solitary delicious supper. She was going to practise hard this new art of being totally alone. Perfect Patty (who loved any chance to check out her neighbours’ decor) was away for the weekend but her sister Vanessa had promised to call in and feed the cat. Melanie had quite easily impressed on her the folly of driving to Plymouth and back in a day. She hadn’t mentioned the hotel with the 25-metre pool and Michelin-starred chef, for Vanessa didn’t much approve of the pursuit of a good time. In case of emergencies she would leave the hotel’s phone number, but wasn’t going to feel any guilt for Vanessa assuming she was making a sensible but reluctant stopover at a Travel Lodge.

Rosa was taking her time brushing her long coppery hair. Clouds of ciggy-scented dust danced in the sunshine from the open door of the cloakroom. ‘It’s not like school, Mum. No-one’s going to give me bloody detention if I’m a few hours after the deadline.’ Rosa slammed the loo door shut behind her and flung the brush into her battered suede bag. ‘Come on, help me load up. You can take the heavy stuff.’

Melanie shoved aside a box of books and picked up Rosa’s guitar case. ‘I don’t think so. I’m old and decrepit, I need to protect my bones.’

Rosa grinned. ‘God Ma, you’re not going all menopausal on me, are you?’

Melanie hadn’t even considered it. The very idea came as quite a shock. OK, so she wouldn’t see forty again (or forty-three) but she still felt and functioned like a twenty-year-old. Her heart still quickened at the
sight of a gorgeous young hunk, she’d never yet felt so out of place in Top Shop as to expect the Age Police to evict her at any moment and if she occasionally felt a bit hotter than usual she would put it down to excessive central heating, nothing more.