The Truth About Melody Browne (10 page)

‘Hello! Hello! Sorry I’m late!’ Stacey leaned in for a hug, breathing her last inhalation of tobacco all over Melody and gripping her arms with thin fingers. ‘The tube stopped in a tunnel at Bethnal Green for eight minutes. Thought I was going to faint, so hot down there.’

They marched into Selfridges and towards the luxury goods department on the ground floor.

‘So,’ said Melody, ‘what are you getting for Cleo?’

‘She wants a Mulberry something or other,’ she said, reaching into her handbag and pulling out a piece of paper. ‘A Mulberry
Bayswater
,’ she read. ‘Over here.’ They walked towards the Mulberry concession and asked the assistant, who, to her credit, didn’t look at all fazed by the two of them in their Primark and New Look and Nice’n Easy home-dyed hair.

‘God, is that it?’ Stacey looked at the bag disdainfully. It was chestnut brown leather with a flap and two handles. It was beautiful. But Stacey had a penchant for anything with a logo on it. She couldn’t see the point in spending hundreds on a bag if it didn’t have something written on it to tell the casual observer where it had come from. She turned the bag this way and that, trying to find something redeeming in it, but failed. She pulled her purse out of her bag and began peeling fifty-pound notes out, one by one, into the assistant’s upturned hand. ‘Fuck a duck,’ she muttered.

Melody didn’t want to ask where the money had come from. Stacey always seemed to have just enough money for whatever she needed, and not a penny more, and always in crisp new notes. So if she needed new shoes, she had £50, if she needed fags she had a fiver and if she wanted two weeks in an all-inclusive resort in the Dominican Republic then she had £2,500. It was as if she had some magic money pot hidden away somewhere.

‘Well, that’s me done. What about you? What you getting for Eddie?’

‘Oh, guess.’

‘An iMac?’

‘Yes, an iMac.’

‘You could get it cheaper on-line, you know?’

‘Yeah, I know, but I never go on-line, do I? And this is more fun, anyway. Also, I want to get him something special too – you know, something he can keep for ever.’

Stacey raised her eyebrows at her. She always teased Melody for her sentimentality, her need for every single object to mean something. ‘Get him a watch.’

She wrinkled her nose. ‘He’s got a watch. I was thinking of something more … I don’t know, something like a pen.’

‘A pen? What does he want a pen for?’

‘I don’t know. Just to keep. Just to have. So that he can think of me, you know.’

‘Why don’t you get him a tattoo, instead? “MUM”. In a heart.’ Stacey made the shape of a heart with her hands, then nudged Melody and laughed. ‘Kids today don’t want stuff to keep, Melody. They just want stuff to use. Instant gratification. Get him a bottle of Calvin Klein. And a bag of draw.’ She nudged her again and they made their way to the electronics department.

Melody felt slightly deflated as they sat down half an hour later, surrounded by yellow bags, at the sushi bar in the food hall. She felt hollow and robbed of something but she wasn’t sure exactly what it was. This was her only child’s eighteenth birthday. She wanted more for him than a box full of gadgets. She wanted
meaning
. It was different for Stacey. Cleo wasn’t her only child. She still had Charlie and Clover to live for. She could give her firstborn a leather bag and know that there was more to come, more meaning, more milestones. But for Melody, this was the end of the road.

‘So,’ said Stacey, pulling a plate of noodles off the conveyor belt and breaking open a pair of chopsticks, ‘have you heard from your man again?’

‘Yeah,’ said Melody, eyeing the plates passing clockwise and anticlockwise before her without enthusiasm. ‘He’s texted me a few times.’

‘And? You going to see him again? Do you like him?’

‘He’s all right,’ she said, reaching absent-mindedly for a bowl of chicken teriyaki and taking off the plastic dome. ‘He’s a bit …’

‘What? Nice? Kind? Good?’

‘No, well, yes, he is all that, but he’s just a bit …
middle class
.’

Stacey snorted with laughter. ‘But so are you!’

‘No I’m not!’

‘Course you are. Look at you! And anyway, being “middle class” is not a good enough reason not to want to go out with someone.’

‘He plays squash, Stace.
Squash
. I mean, who the fuck plays squash?’

‘OK, I’ll grant you that. Squash is a bit, you know. But on the plus side, means he’s fit. Anyway,’ she sighed, ‘this is just you, Melody Browne, doing what Melody Browne does best. Keeping yourself safe. Keeping those gates locked. Keeping it all out. But I tell you this, Mel, as your best friend, you’re not getting any younger. Your boy’ll be off soon and then it’ll be just you. Just Melody. And unless you think that’s enough to keep you going for the next forty or however many years, then that’s fine. But if you don’t, well,’ she paused, ‘you need to spread your horizons a bit wider. You need to stop making excuses. And I say that,’ she laid a gentle hand upon Melody’s arm, ‘as your best friend in all the world because all I want is what’s best for you.’

‘I’m late,’ said Stacey, over coffee and pancakes later that afternoon.

Melody could tell from the look on her face that she wasn’t talking about the time. ‘What, you mean … ?’

‘Yeah, only four days, but you know me, regular as clockwork. Only times I’ve ever been late have been when I was pregnant.’

‘Oh my God, Stace, are you … was it planned?’

Stacey shook her head and pulled her cigarettes out of her handbag. ‘No, but it wasn’t
unplanned
.’

‘Are you going to … ?’

‘Keep it? Yeah, I reckon. Haven’t decided yet for sure, but it would be nice wouldn’t it, a little brother or sister for Clove, stop her turning into the spoiled baby? And my contract is up in March anyway. I don’t know, what do you think?’

Melody breathed in. ‘God, yeah, of course! Funny, I always thought of Clover as your happy accident, you know, but of course, you should have another one, definitely. It would be so nice for Clover.’

‘She wouldn’t know what had hit her.’ Stacey lit a cigarette and Melody glanced at her.

‘I’m giving up
after
I’ve done the test,’ she said defensively. ‘But God, the thought of being pregnant again, so scary. And I’m older now …’

‘You’re only thirty-four!’

‘Yeah, but still. I could feel the difference with Clove compared to the big ones, and I don’t know where we’ll put it.’

‘Put it in a drawer!’ Melody smiled at her friend. ‘By the time it grows out of the drawer Cleo will probably have moved out.’

‘Yeah, you’re right, I suppose. But still, another baby, Mel. Another baby.’

Melody took her time walking home that afternoon. It was perfect walking weather, dry, bright and cool, and London, away from the tourist-laden pavements of Oxford Circus, was still and peaceful. Stacey’s words kept echoing through her head as she walked. ‘
Another baby. Another baby
.’ They brought a song to her mind, a song from her youth that played round on a loop with every few paces: ‘All that she wants is another baby.’

Melody loved babies. She loved their formless faces and doughy thighs, their tiny skulls and pathetic sloping shoulders. But babies scared her too. They were so tenuous, diaphanous. One mistake, one missed breath, one blow to the head and they were gone. And babies, Melody believed, could take with them an entire life’s worth of happiness. After Ed was born she’d suffered from what was now known to be post-natal depression. From the moment she realised the depth of her love for her new son and the power he held inside each and every tiny breath to devastate her life, she began obsessing about the myriad ways in which he could die, pictured herself harming him in some way: letting him go under the water in the bath, letting go of his pushchair at the top of a hill, falling down the concrete stairs of her flat with him in her arms. But worse than that was her fear that someone would take him away from her. Every time the phone rang she thought it would be someone from the social services telling her that they were coming for him; when a kindly lady in the supermarket held his tiny hand, she pulled away, fearing that she was about to snatch him from her. She didn’t tell anyone how she was feeling, not even Stacey, who had seemed to be having a completely different experience with the infant Cleo.

When Ed was ten months old he’d fallen off the sofa. Melody heard the sickening thud from the kitchen where she was preparing his tea. She rushed into the living room and found Ed lying on the floor, on his back, beaming at her. His own sense of pride in his part in the accident, his delight at finding himself one moment on the sofa, the next on the floor, had at first disgusted her and then, the moment after, unburdened her. Her baby could fall! He could fall and still exist!

Her depression started to lift from that moment but the memory of it never left her and she vowed that she would never again bring something as fragile and flimsy as a baby into the world. She had a coil fitted a year after Ed’s birth and lavished her love instead on to Stacey’s babies, the second, third, fourth babies of the mothers at Ed’s school, the babies of strangers she passed in the street. She felt nothing but happiness at the arrival of every new baby, and nothing but joy for their blessed parents. But for herself, she was done. The very fact that her boy had survived the first eighteen years of his life was a miracle. She didn’t want to push her luck.

She’d been wandering aimlessly as she absorbed the possibility of another baby, maybe, probably, taking shape in her friend’s body, another baby in her life, another small person to talk about and wonder at, and had found herself, not in Soho, as she’d imagined, but just north of Goodge Street in a tiny cobbled turning called Goodge Place. At the mouth of the turning were two mobile units selling CDs and DVDs in dodgy wrappings and around the bend a terrace of narrow Georgian town houses, some with the external appearance of temporary housing, some smarter with thick curtains at the windows and nickel-plated door knobs. Melody followed the curve of the street and felt it again, a certainty of place, of time, of having been here before. She stood for a moment, her eyes closed and let the feeling impress itself upon her.

She saw a bike, and a man, the same man she’d seen with the knickerbocker glory and the crash helmet. He had long hair tied back in a ponytail, and he was waving goodbye. She opened her eyes and looked up at the sky, and then down again at a house in the middle of the terrace. She closed her eyes again and saw this:

A beautiful girl, in a pink tutu, at the top of a flight of stairs.

The sun shining through the window behind her, turning her into a silhouette.

Expensive carpet beneath her bare feet.

A dog, barking somewhere else in the house.

‘Melody smells of poo, Melody smells of poo.’ The girl’s face contorted with pleasure, her thin body twisting around itself in a strange dance of loathing. ‘Melody is a fathead, and she smells of poo.’

Then the girl falling, one thin leg turned around the other thin leg, her elbow on one step, her bottom on the next, her head bouncing off the banisters, her tutu tearing with a sound like ripped newspaper.

A woman appearing at the bottom of the stairs, wearing a smocked dress with billowy sleeves and thick coral lipstick.

‘Oh my God, Charlotte! Charlotte! What happened?’

Melody’s mouth, glued closed, words bubbling in her head but not coming out.

‘She pushed me, Mummy. Melody pushed me!’

The woman’s face, pursed and furious, her coral lips snarling, her blue eyes sniping, bundling Charlotte into her arms.

Charlotte’s screams, shrill and exaggerated, getting further and further away as Jacqui carried her through the house.

A small shred of pink netting, on the floor by Melody’s feet.

Then the words finally leaving her mouth, two seconds too late. ‘It wasn’t me. She just tripped.’

Jacqui Sonningfeld lived in a tall, thin house in a quiet turning just off Goodge Street. It was decorated in a very plush way, with whole zebra skins clinging to walls, leopard-print cushions thrown all over velvety sofas, Tiffany lamps with dragonfly wings, piles of heavy books arranged like pyramids on low coffee tables and every floor thick with the softest, bounciest, most luxuriant cream carpet Melody had ever encountered.

Jacqui was a makeup artist and Charlotte was her seven-year-old daughter. Charlotte went to a private girls’ school in Westminster and had friends with names like Amelia and Sophie and Theodora.

Had Melody thought to ask, she would have discovered that her father had met Jacqui on a blind date set up for him by his boss, who was Jacqui’s ex-brother-in-law. And if Melody had ever met her father’s boss, he might have disclosed to her that he’d set them up, primarily because he’d suspected they might hit it off, but also, and significantly, to get Jacqui off his brother’s back, financially, emotionally and, on occasion, physically.

But Melody was only five and although she thought about things a lot, she rarely asked about things, because sometimes it was just really hard to know what the right question was. So she took on board the fact that her father no longer lived on his own in a rented room in a big house in Brixton, and now lived in a beautiful house in Fitzrovia with Jacqui and her daughter, without demanding to know why. She accepted that she only got to live in the Fitzrovia house with her father for three or four days a month, while Charlotte, who barely knew him, got to see him every single day. And she was resigned to the fact that when she got back to Ken’s house by the seaside her mother would ply her with the rare reward of hot chocolate and ask her two hundred questions about Jacqui’s house and Jacqui’s clothes and Jacqui’s makeup and what Jacqui had said and what her father had said and what they’d eaten and where they’d been.