The Truth About Melody Browne (31 page)

What happened next was that Gloria shrilled, ‘The cake!’ and ran from the room, and that Clive helped Melody gently from the floor and folded her onto the sofa. She sat on the sofa in the very same form that Clive had placed her onto it, as if she were a pliable rubberised dummy. In her hand she clasped the cat toy and her gaze fixed onto a counter on the ludo board, blue, shiny, brittle. She leaned forward stiffly and picked it up. She could almost see her reflection in it, a tiny blue haze of features, not recognisably her own, spectre-like. It occurred to her that she had not thought about her mother being dead for quite a few moments and as she thought this she felt a pinch of pain in her stomach, like someone giving a Chinese burn to her insides. She dropped the ludo counter to the floor and allowed some external noises into her head.

‘Melody,’ she heard Clive saying, ‘Melody, love, please, talk to me.’

But she couldn’t. Talking seemed so very far away from anything that she would want to do. To talk would mean to resume her connection with the world, and she really didn’t want to, not when the world could do such mean things to her.

A column of smoke curled across the room and she could hear Gloria cursing gently in the kitchen.

‘Get her a glass of water, Gloria!’ Clive called out.

Gloria came back into the room and passed the water glass to Melody. Melody pushed it away. She didn’t want water. She wanted her mum.

‘I’m so sorry, love,’ said Gloria, pushing Melody’s hair away from her eyes. ‘So so sorry.’

‘Rum luck,’ sighed Clive. ‘More rum bloody luck.’

‘But don’t you worry about anything. We’ll sort everything out, we’ll make sure you get everything you need. We’re here for you, Clive and I, completely.’ Gloria pulled Melody’s numb body towards her own and kissed her on the shoulder. It was the first time she’d ever kissed her. Melody had been secretly hoping for a kiss from Gloria since her first night here, had been willing her to squeeze her tight at bedtime and kiss her hard on the cheek like Auntie Susie used to, like Ken used to, like Mum had sometimes done in her rare phases of contentment. But the kiss on her shoulder felt strangely unpleasant and Melody arched her body away from her.

‘Yes, we’ll sort everything out,’ agreed Clive.

‘Is there anything we can do for you now? Anyone you want to phone? Anyone you want to speak to?’

Melody rolled the cat toy around between the palms of her hands and stared through the window opposite. A high wind was blowing around the tops of the trees, a piece of litter flew by, someone in the house opposite was doing the housework. She looked at the toy and she thought about Puss, the cat she’d never met, she thought about him squashed under the fearsome tyres of the National Express Coach, then she imagined the horrified faces of the passengers on board the coach, all on their way for a nice day out in Canterbury, as they watched his fat orange body being crunched to a pulp. And then she thought about a freeway in LA, the sound of screeching brakes, the scream of twisting metal, her father’s face flattened against the shattered windscreen and then she felt that soreness in her stomach, the Chinese burn, and a small space opened up in her mind, a space she didn’t even know she had, like a little safety deposit box, and she thought it seemed like a good place to put the horrible picture of her dad on the freeway. So she slipped the thought into the box and pushed the box back into the hole in her head and the moment she did so, she felt the soreness in her stomach fade away.

‘Melody,’ she heard Gloria asking, softly, ‘Melody, please, say something.’

But Melody didn’t want to say anything. The thought of saying something made Melody feel like she was about to push her hand into an electric socket or a live flame. So she kept her mouth closed. It felt good. It felt smooth and gentle and strong. Words were messy. Thoughts, she now realised, were far superior. Thoughts could be arranged into boxes, filed away. Words were too public, too immediate. Words were for idiots.

She got to her feet and left the room, then climbed the stairs slowly and heavily to her bedroom.

She stayed up there for the rest of the day, finding new places in her head to put the things she didn’t want to think about any more and she didn’t come down until it was dark, until her tummy was rumbling so hard that the burned Victoria sandwich sitting on the kitchen counter looked good enough to eat.

‘You just got about a hundred text messages!’ Ed called out to her from the living room where he was restudding his football boots. Melody, who’d just had a shower, tucked her towel around herself and padded towards the kitchen, where her phone was recharging. She had four new texts. The first was from Ben. She opened it, presuming that he was cancelling their date, but he wasn’t.

‘Did you say it was your son’s birthday next week? Let me know, I have a plan … B x’

Melody grimaced, then smiled. How on earth had he remembered that? She smiled again and texted back: ‘Good remembering skills. I’m impressed. He’s 18 on Wednesday. But what’s this “plan”? You’re making me nervous …’

She pressed send and then looked at the next three messages. They were all MMS from the same number, one that she didn’t recognise. She took her phone into her bedroom and stepped quickly into her underwear while she waited for the attachments to download. Then she perched herself on the edge of her bed and opened them one by one. They were from Emily, each one annotated with the words ‘Proof that you were here!’

They were photographs, small and grainy, depicting a small girl and a baby sitting on a parquet floor, the bright pieces of a giant jigsaw puzzle on the floor between them, both staring upwards into the lens with dark, serious eyes.

Melody called Emily immediately.

‘Oh my God,’ she said breathlessly, ‘it’s us!’

‘Yes, I know!’ cried Emily. ‘Mom emailed them to me last night. Aren’t they the cutest?’

‘I love them!’ said Melody, ‘I really do. I used to have …’ She stopped, suddenly unsure of the provenance of what she was about to say, the substance of it, but then seeing it clearly, in her head, a faded Polaroid, its edges worn thin with tender handling. ‘I used to have a photo of us,’ she continued, sure now that she had. ‘You were in a high chair, I was standing next to you, orange blossom behind us. I’d forgotten it, and now I remember. It was one of my most precious things. And I suppose,’ she felt the sour tang of resentment rising in her throat, ‘I suppose it must have gone in the fire, gone with everything else.’

What else, she wondered, what else had been taken by that cruel and life-altering fire? What else had been lost? Which clues to her childhood, to herself?

A text from Ben arrived a few seconds after she hung up the phone to her sister. ‘Don’t be nervous,’ it read. ‘Also, shall I email you a photo, in advance of Monday, to remind you of what I look like?’

Melody smiled, then typed: ‘No need. Short, fat, bald and ugly, right?’

He texted back a moment later, a wink and a kiss.

Melody sat on her bed for a while in her underwear, the phone held close to her cheek, her heart aglow with some unknown joy.

The following day, Melody left the gloom of yet another disappointing summer’s day behind and caught a train to Folkestone, where the sun was shining happily upon the Kentish seaside resort.

Grace lived in a third-floor apartment in a slightly shabby 1950s block, two roads back from the seafront. Its architect had decided that a lack of sea view was no obstacle to adorning the front of the building with ungainly balconies and huge picture windows, which looked hopefully out towards the unpretty back end of a terrace of Georgian houses.

In a cool, faintly grease-scented corridor lined with green-marbled stone and threadbare carpets, Melody rang on a doorbell. She inhaled and prepared herself for an Art Deco vision of sinewy arms and opulent headdress, but what greeted her instead was a vaguely dishevelled-looking man in a dark-green polo shirt and baggy shorts with a half-smoked cigarette in one hand and a can of Diet Coke in the other.

‘Fuck,’ he said. ‘Melody fucking Ribblesdale!’

It took a moment for Melody to make sense of this man who knew her name. His cropped hair and clean-shaven face had thrown her slightly. But it was Matthew. Matty. The boy from the squat. The drunk from Broadstairs. Grace’s son.

‘Matthew!’ she said.

‘Wow. Fuck. You remember me?’

‘Yes, well, we met quite recently.’

‘We did?’

‘Yeah, in Broadstairs, about two weeks ago.’

‘No!’ He looked simultaneously aghast and unsurprised. ‘Christ, what did I say to you?’

‘Oh, nothing much, just asked me if I needed any help. I must have looked a bit lost.’

‘I hope I wasn’t obnoxious. I can be, you know, when I’m drinking like that.’

She shook her head and smiled. ‘You were fine,’ she reassured him, ‘really.’

‘Thank fuck for that!’ he said. ‘Christ, anyway, come in, come in, welcome.’

He led her barefoot down a narrow hallway, towards a bright room at the end. The flat was small and eclectically furnished, with objects from all the major continents: African masks and Indian wall-hangings and Chinese lanterns. The living room ended with a full plate-glass window and doors onto a balcony upon which sat a majestic lady with a cup of tea and a newspaper.

‘Melody!’ she exclaimed, unfurling herself from her deck chair and padding barefoot into the living room. ‘Oh, Melody!’

She was very slim and dressed in grey leggings and a purple blouse bunched in at the waist with a silk scarf. Her hair was pure white and cut short, in a pageboy style, and she wore heavy gold earrings that looked Indian in design.

She grasped Melody’s forearms with long, strong fingers and stared into her eyes urgently, as if she’d lost something inside them. ‘Beautiful!’ she exclaimed, after a moment. ‘Beautiful. I always knew you would be.’ She released Melody’s arms from her firm grip and sighed, almost with relief. ‘Come and sit down. What can I get you to drink?’

‘Oh, a Diet Coke would be nice,’ she said, gesturing towards the can in Matthew’s hand.

‘Matty – get Melody a Coke, will you, sweetheart? Here,’ Grace patted a scruffy sofa, dressed in a length of green sari silk, ‘sit. Let me look at you.’

Melody sat down and let Grace stare at her for a while. ‘Just exactly the same, but also so different. You look …’ she paused, ‘
mature
. You’ve lived a life, yes?’

Melody gazed at the woman, trying to find something familiar about her, trying to find a place in her head where a memory of this exotic woman might still be residing, but nothing came to her. ‘Well, that depends on what your definition of living a life is,’ she smiled. ‘I’ve lived a big life, in a small way.’

‘Children?’

‘Yes, one, Edward …’

‘Edward? Edward like the baby … ?’ Grace paused, uncertainly.

‘Like the baby my mother stole, yes. Completely unconnected, pure coincidence, though …’

‘… possibly subconscious in some way?’

‘Yes. Possibly.’

‘Interesting,’ Grace pulled one lithe leg up beneath herself. ‘And how old is he, your Edward?’

‘Seventeen,’ Melody replied, ‘eighteen on Wednesday.’

‘Huh! A man! You had him young.’

‘Fifteen, yes.’

‘Well, good for you. I always partly regretted not having my children earlier. Too busy “finding myself”. Thing is, I was too young to know what I was looking for. Should have had the kids first, when I was young and stupid, then found myself afterwards, but, there you are,
c’est la vie
. And what have you been doing together, you and your Edward?’

‘Oh, just drifting along really. In a rut. But a nice rut.’ Melody laughed nervously. There was something unsettlingly penetrating about this woman’s gaze, like she was trying to find some meaning behind Melody’s eyes.

‘Working?’

‘Yes. I work at Ed’s school. In the kitchen.’

‘You’re a dinner lady?’ asked Matthew with a smirk as he walked back into the room with Melody’s Coke.

‘Yes!’ she answered playfully. ‘And?’

‘God, of all the things I thought Melody Ribblesdale would become, a dinner lady was not on my list.’

‘What’s wrong with being a dinner lady?’ she countered, resisting the temptation to say that of all the things she’d thought Matthew would become, a pathetic drunk was not on
her
list.

‘Nothing,’ he said, putting his hands in front of his chest defensively and smiling. ‘God love ’em, where would we be without them? But I just always thought …’

‘What?’

‘I dunno, there was always something special about you. I always thought you might end up being famous, you know, that I’d switch on the telly one day, and there you’d be.’

‘Instead it’s your little brother!’

‘Yes, indeed, I am Brother of the More Famous Seth.’

Melody didn’t really know what to make of that so she said nothing and thought instead about the little girl called Melody Ribblesdale, who’d been of so much interest to everybody, the little girl of whom everybody appeared to have such high hopes, and wondered what on earth had happened to her.