The Truth About Melody Browne (37 page)

Between her state of sleep, her state of unconsciousness and her state of consciousness as she lay beneath the moon, on the lawn, in front of her burning house twenty minutes later, something very peculiar happened inside Melody’s head, a sort of housekeeping. By the time she awoke from a deep sleep in her uncle’s spare room twenty-four hours later, Melody could remember nothing about the tangled mess of her previous life. She couldn’t remember Ken, or Broadstairs, or her mother or her father. She couldn’t remember LA, or Charlotte or her baby sister called Emily. All she could remember was that her mum and dad had saved her from a burning house, that she was nine years old and her name was Melody Browne.

It was the Babyliss tongs that had caused the fire, carelessly left switched on in the spare bedroom, next to a used tissue, on the nylon quilted bed, by her socially anxious mother.

The only question that now remained was why they had left her with a broken memory. The answer was unsurprising.

‘We thought it was for the best,’ said Gloria.

‘I knew you’d say that!’ Melody growled.

‘Well, it wasn’t an easy decision to make. You’d been so unhappy before. You wouldn’t talk, your behaviour was very worrying – I felt you’d already compartmentalised the whole terrible saga even before the fire. So when you came round and you smiled and you called us Mum and Dad, well, it would have been heartbreaking to have taken a step backwards from that. You came out of that fire as a different child. And we waited and we waited for you to say something about the past, you know, about your mum or Ken, and you just didn’t. It took months for us to realise that
you just didn’t remember
. And, you know, it just seemed a perfect opportunity to make a fresh start, what with the house gone, and you happy at last.’

‘But my family!’ Melody cried. ‘My aunts! My sister! Ken!’

‘I know,’ sighed Gloria, ‘I know. As I say, it wasn’t an easy decision to make. It was the hardest decision I’ve ever had to make, in fact. Apart from the decision to let you go …’

‘What do you mean, let me go?’

‘Well, eighteen years ago. If you love someone, set them free, if they love you, they’ll come back.’ Her voice began to crack. She paused and smiled sadly, then pulled in her breath to continue. ‘And you never did. So I had to resign myself to the fact that you’d never loved me. And I had to ask myself if I was to blame, for the decisions I made –
we
made – all those years ago.’

‘Well, I think you probably know the answer to that question. How could you possibly have thought it was OK for me to go around my whole life not knowing who I was?’

‘We didn’t,’ Gloria replied, matter-of-factly. ‘We didn’t think it was “OK”. We just thought of the two possible options, both of which were nigh on unpalatable, it was the best.’

‘For you, you mean?’

‘No, not for us, for
all of us
. So that we could be a happy family.’

Melody stared at Gloria Browne, aghast. Is that really what she believed, this silly, kind, nervous little woman, that their tiny suburban unit was the happier option?

‘A happy family?’ she shouted. ‘What the fuck is a happy family? A family without a history? A family without roots? A family stuck in a cul-de-sac in Canterbury, too scared to let anyone in in case they spoiled the mirage? We weren’t a happy family, we were just three people going through the motions. And you know what’s so sad? If you’d let me know,
allowed
me the privilege of keeping my identity, I might have been happy to be with you, because I would have known what you’d done for me. And I wouldn’t have felt trapped with you. I’d have had people, other people, to care about me too. I’ve met them now, the people you stole from me, and they all remember me and they all care about me, and I already feel a million times more special than I ever did before because of them, and if I’d felt that way my whole childhood I might have ended up being more than a teenage mum and fucking dinner lady, and you and I might still have been, you know,
a mother and daughter
.’

There was a short silence, and Gloria issued a small sob. ‘I know,’ she said. ‘I knew from the moment you left our house that night, I knew we’d done the wrong thing. And I’ve lived with that ever since. It’s the greatest regret of my life. And now, well, I don’t expect us to be able to salvage anything from his terrible mess but it would really help me if I thought you might be able to, well, not to forgive us, but to maybe just try to
understand
why we did what we did.’

Melody paused. Her head of steam was subsiding. She thought of this woman, small and broken, all alone in her cul-de-sac, surrounded by photos of her long-lost family, her beloved husband and her truant daughter, and she felt something inside her soften. She thought of the electric-blue harem trousers and white cotton pirate shirt that Gloria had made for her for her first school disco when she was thirteen years old, the outfit that had been the envy of every girl at the school; she thought of the private exhilaration of their trip to Boots, the following summer, to buy her a packet of jumbo-sized sanitary towels when her first period had arrived. She thought of her fourteenth birthday party, how she’d managed to persuade Clive and Gloria to let her host it alone and how proud Gloria had been to return home at ten o’clock to an empty house, clean and tidy, a small smudge of Um Bongo on the living-room floor and a smudge of blue eyeliner on the tablecloth the only evidence of the festivities that had preceded. ‘It’s so nice to know that we can trust you, Melody,’ she’d said, surveying her tidy home, ‘it means so much to us.’ And then she thought of her face less than a year later when she first saw Tiff turn up in the cul-de-sac on his buzzing scooter, full of attitude, face hard as wood. ‘He’s not what I’d have hoped for you,’ she’d said gently. ‘You could do so much better.’

She thought of a dozen different moments where Gloria had been patient, proud, attentive and loving and she realised that even though this woman wasn’t her mother, and even though her feelings towards her had never been those of a daughter towards a mother, this woman had, in actual fact, been a very good mother indeed. And with that thought she took a deep breath and said, ‘OK, I’ll try. But I can’t promise anything.’

Before Melody left, Gloria gave her an envelope. ‘For you,’ she said.

‘What is it?’ Melody asked.

‘Open it.’

Melody opened the envelope and pulled out a sheet of cream parchment.

‘It’s your birth certificate,’ Gloria said. ‘I’ve kept it all these years, always thought you’d come back for it, that you’d need it. For a passport application or for a job. Thought that would be the moment, that would be when I’d tell you everything.’

Melody had never been abroad. She’d never needed a passport. If only she had, she thought, staring at the details penned in thirty-three-year-old ink, of her real parents, the name of the hospital in South London where she’d really been born, an address in London, SW8 where she’d really spent the first few years of her life.

She could have known all this time. All she’d needed to do was ask for this piece of paper and she’d have known everything. But she never had. She folded the certificate back into a rectangle and put it in the envelope. ‘Thank you,’ she said, ‘I’ll be needing this. Thank you.’ And then she kissed the little lady in the wig, just once, on a powder soft cheek, and left her there on her Canterbury doorstep, alone once more, but no longer wondering.

Melody sat for a while, after she got home that afternoon, and tried to decide how she was feeling. The sun flooded her bedroom with light and sparkled off her mirror. Hanging from the corner of her mirror was the necklace, the one she’d stolen from Gloria’s jewellery box all those years ago, the one she’d taken to a pawn shop when Ed was two months old to get some cash to pay her bills and had been told was worth about five pounds. She’d almost taken the five pounds but something had stopped her, something had made her snatch the necklace back off the counter and stuff it into her handbag. She’d never really thought about that moment before now, but now she knew what it was. It was about her
mother
, the very essence of who she was and what she represented. She needed to keep something, one small thing, something that had touched her skin that still, remarkably, smelled of her. The necklace was a talisman. It was there, in the absence of an actual mother, in some strange, unknowable way, to protect her.

And with that thought, Melody got up from her bed, opened her wardrobe door and kneeled down to pick something up from the bottom. The box, the one her auntie Susie had given her. The box that contained, she imagined, the essence of her other mother, her
real
mother. She brought the box back to her bed and, very slowly, with her heart gently racing, she sliced open the tape that secured it. The flaps popped open and Melody peered inside. She removed the contents, slowly, one by one. First a large pair of jeans, pale blue, scuffed at the knees and hems, a label in the back that said they were Lee jeans and in a size 36. Then a loose tunic top, navy polyester with a pale blue print, slightly stained under the arms, with a greying satin label in the back that said ‘Dorothy Perkins’. After the dress came a coat. It was blue denim with a black splodgy print and a matching belt. Melody recognised it immediately. The thought flashed through her mind in a nano-second.
It’s Mum’s coat
.

She put her hands into the pockets, and brought out a creased tissue, a tube of Lipsyl and a Polo mint. She held these objects in her open hand for a moment and stared at them. Where had her mother been when she’d bought the mints? When had she last wiped her nose on this tissue, rubbed this balm on her lips?

Beneath the clothes (which included, also, a full set of underwear, from Marks and Spencer, and a pair of oatmeal socks with holes in both heels) was a floral wash-bag containing a jar of deodorant, a tube of Crest toothpaste, a rather battered turquoise toothbrush, a damp terracotta emery board and a wooden hairbrush, filled with wiry brown hairs. Finally, at the bottom of the box, Melody found a large manila envelope. She unpeeled it and let the contents fall onto the bed.

There were three small envelopes, one with the name Romany, written on it, one with the name Amber and the other with her name, Melody, in a neat handwriting very similar to her own. Melody shivered slightly with the kind of excited anticipation that had once accompanied the unwrapping of childhood gifts. What would she find – locks of hair, fallen teeth, letters filled with words of tender mother love?

She couldn’t decide which envelope to open first. Amber’s, she thought. She wasn’t real. She peeled apart the ancient tacky seal and pulled out the contents with shaking hands: a photograph of Edward James Mason, taken from a newspaper, a pink bootee and a lock of brown hair, sellotaped to a piece of card.

Next she opened the envelope with her own name on it. She could feel through the manila the outline of an A5 envelope, the lines of a letter, and she’d waited long enough, long enough to hear what Jane Ribblesdale had to say about everything. Sweat crackled on the palms of her hands as she pulled apart the flap. Inside was a lock of soft auburn hair, a tiny white mitten, a plastic hospital bracelet with the words ‘FI of Jane Ribblesdale 3 November 1972, 5.09 a.m.’ written on it. There was also a smaller envelope, her name written on it again, in a less confident script. Melody took a deep breath and opened it. It was written on lined paper, but the words didn’t follow the lines. They ran around the page erratically, almost as if they were drunk. Melody had to concentrate to decipher the scrawl.

My dearest, most darling Melody
,

How are you? I have been meaning to write for a long time now but the days here are so complicated somehow and as soon as I’ve started it’s time to go somewhere or sleep or eat or take some more infernal pills it’s all I ever do. But how are you? I think of you often my lovely girl and wonder about you with your new family. Are they kind to you? I’m sure they must be, I think they are my cousins so they are as good as family and one day soon maybe they’ll let me out of this place and you and I could be together again. Would you like that? they are trying to make me better but I’m not so sure about it. I wish I could explain to you how it’s been for me these last few years but I’m not sure I can. It’s been a blur, baby girl, a big long blur and you’ve been so good. It’s something to do with babies, you see, something to do with all the time and effort it takes to make them, all the waiting and the hoping and the way they feel when they’re inside you and all the dreaming and wondering and the anticipation and then fate comes along and takes them away from you, takes away everything good, leaves you with nothing, an empty hole, empty arms, an empty heart you know maybe some people could find things to fill themselves up with again but I never could not even you, you were always so good at finding other people to take care of you, such an appealing little girl you are
.

I do miss you all I miss Ken, I miss the house, but its better for me here. I want to get better but I’m not so sure it will happen, so many black holes in my head baby girl, so many bad things. Thank god you’re not like me, you are daddy’s girl, you always were if only he hadn’t gone and left you, should never have gone away in the first place with that woman at least she managed to make you a sister though, not like me, poor Romany, and then poor little baby Amber, gone at twelve weeks, all over the bathroom floor, how could I tell Ken that I’d lost his baby, poor little baby Amber and then my terrible sin, to take that girls baby, what a terrible person I have become, no good for you, no good for anyone. I think this pen is running out of ink. Sorry. I do love you Melody, you are my baby girl. Be good. Mummy xxx