The Truth About Melody Browne (17 page)

A cold January morning, Melody’s breath in icy clouds around her face.

A revolving door, a pile of suitcases, a cab driver in a grey sweatshirt and early morning stubble, smoking a cigarette and slamming the boot of his car.

Charlotte in a long brown fur coat and a purple bobble hat, complaining about how cold she was.

Her father looking sad and tired, pulling out his battered wallet and sliding out a ten-pound note.

Emily in a white, all-in-one zip-up suit, regal and upright in Jacqui’s arms.

The sudden heat of the terminal as they walked through the revolving doors.

Her father’s arm around her shoulders, the thunder of Tannoy announcements, the swirling bustle of a thousand people.

Melody’s first ever time at an airport.

But she wasn’t going anywhere.

Melody’s dad went to live in Hollywood with Jacqui, Charlotte and Emily when Melody was six and a bit.

Jacqui had signed a contract with a big film studio to work as a makeup artist on three back-to-back movies that would be filming over the next year. She would be earning more in a year than Melody’s dad would earn in a decade, so there never seemed to be any question that they would take Charlotte out of school, request a sabbatical for her father, rent out the Fitzrovia house and emigrate immediately.

‘You’ll come over at Easter. And we’ll be back here in July for a fortnight. A year is not all that long, not really, not in the big scheme of things.’

Melody nodded, mutely, wishing that that was true, but knowing instinctively that a year was a very, very long time indeed, especially for a baby.

A sign on a TV screen said that they had to go through customs immediately, and all of a sudden it was time to say goodbye, and Melody felt it was much, much too soon.

She kissed Jacqui on her perfumed cheek, then she hugged Charlotte, who squeezed her back hard enough to suggest that she might actually be a little bit sad. She threw her arms around her father’s neck and let him swing her about for a while and then she turned to Emily.

Emily was four months old. She had a neat helmet of golden-brown hair and the beginnings of hazel eyes. She was a serious, quiet baby, who liked staring at people and looking at books. ‘I have no idea where this baby came from,’ Jacqui would say. ‘So still, so quiet. Nothing like me.’

Melody didn’t really understand why Jacqui expected her baby to be just like her. It was as if she’d forgotten that Melody’s dad had had anything to do with her existence, as if she felt that her genes were so powerful and superior that they should be stamped, brand-like, all over everything she came into contact with. But it was clear to Melody where Emily had come from. She’d come from her. They were made of the same stuff, the same ingredients, like two identical cakes.

Melody did everything she could to imprint herself upon the baby. She rubbed her nose against her nose, she tickled her with her hair, she blew raspberries into her tummy and cuddled her almost constantly. Her dad thought it was cute. ‘Look,’ he’d say, ‘it’s mini-mum.’

But Jacqui didn’t feel the same way.

‘Too rough! Be gentle! Don’t poke her! Don’t stroke her! Leave her be! Leave her be!’

This had been the almost constant refrain for the first few months of Emily’s life as Melody had attempted, in her own slightly overenthusiastic childlike way, to get to know her sister. She could see the fear in Jacqui’s eyes, especially in the early days. Jacqui would look at her as if she were a drooling, be-fanged wolf, about to rip the meat from her baby’s bones. She could almost smell the disgust that Jacqui felt for her, hear it in the terminology she used.

‘Get your huge feet out of her cot.’

‘Keep your grubby hands away from her face.’

‘Melody, you’re breathing garlic all over her. She doesn’t like it.’

Charlotte, on the other hand, appeared to have little interest in the baby aside from choosing outfits for her occasionally, showing her off when her friends came for tea after school, and complaining when she’d been crying in the night. When Melody was at Jacqui’s house, she had Emily all to herself. And that was just the way she liked it. She didn’t want to share her. She didn’t even really like it when Jacqui touched her, though she never let Jacqui sense this in case it made her cross and stop her from coming to see her.

When her dad had told her that they were leaving the country, Melody’s first thought had been: Emily, what about Emily? It had taken a second or two to digest the fact that she’d also be losing her father, and another long moment before it dawned upon her that now there was nowhere else to be but Broadstairs, and no one else to be with but her mother.

Melody lunged forward and buried her face into Emily’s neck. ‘Bye-bye, Milly,’ she said, ‘I love you, my Milly.’

Melody tried as hard as she could not to, but the smell of Emily’s baby breath and the soft touch of her hands against her skin was too much to bear, and her shoulders started heaving and her jaw started wobbling, and right there, in front of a thousand strangers, Melody started to cry.

She cried as they turned and wheeled their towering trolley towards the customs queue, she cried as she headed back towards the taxi and the stubbly driver and she cried the whole way back to Victoria Station in the back of his car, silently and heavily, with every fibre of her being.

Her mother met her at the station, but even the unexpected sight of a forced smile and a bag of chocolate peanuts wasn’t enough to soothe her pain, because every time Melody closed her eyes she saw the back of Emily’s head, her neat golden head nodding up and down, her little body zipped into its cosy white suit, absorbed into the core of her family and heading away from her. And every time she looked at her mother’s sallow, haunted face, she felt more and more alone in her strange and unpredictable world.

Melody’s mum was whistling.

Melody stopped what she was doing and stared across the kitchen at her.

She was sweeping the kitchen floor, and she was whistling.

She hadn’t whistled for two years.

‘Mum? Are you all right?’

Her mum looked up at her and smiled. ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘I’m fine.’

‘Then why were you whistling?’

‘Was I?’

‘Yes. You were whistling a hymn.’

‘Oh,’ she said airily. ‘I didn’t realise.’

Whistling wasn’t the only strange thing her mother had done recently. On Tuesday she’d worn lipstick. And yesterday she’d made a cake. It was clear to Melody that her mother was feeling happier, and the only possible explanation that Melody could find for this was that her father, Jacqui and baby Emily were no longer a part of their lives.

It had been twenty-one days since they’d left for America and twenty-one days since Melody had felt complete. The fact that something that made Melody feel so gnawingly sad could also make her mother want to whistle and bake, struck her as somewhat unfair. But the vision of her mother bustling with a broom, the lightness of her actions, the flick of her hair, worn loose and finally long again, these things overrode any sense of injustice and made Melody want to turn a cartwheel of anticipation. Suddenly things that had seemed impossible for the past three years, unfurled themselves from the darkest corners of her imagination:

Made-up stories at bedtime.

Swinging side by side in the playground, seeing who could reach the clouds first.

Bowls of cake mixture.

Cat’s cradle.

Hugs.

Kisses.

Conversations.

‘Can we go to the wool shop?’ she asked, seizing the moment.

‘Of course,’ replied her mother. ‘Let me just finish off in here. We can go for tea and a sticky bun at the cake shop after, if you like?’

Melody caught her breath and nodded. For a moment swapping her baby sister for her proper mother seemed like a fairly good deal.

In the wool shop she chose a length of pale blue angora that was on sale for 20p and a big ball of white wool for 48p. Grace had been teaching her how to knit. It was very difficult and she wasn’t very good at it, but she wanted to try to knit a scarf for her Baby Blue Eyes (charitably passed down to her from Charlotte during one of her occasional and unsettling agreeable moods) and a hat for the rabbit she’d had since she was small. Her mother chatted to the shop assistant while she ferreted around in the big bins and Melody thought how long it had been since she’d heard her mother talk so warmly with a stranger and how different her mother’s voice sounded when she was happy.

For so long the opening of her mother’s purse for any reason whatsoever had been a painful event, accompanied by tuts and groans, and expressions of dreadful discomfort, so Melody could hardly believe it when her mother passed a pound note to the shop assistant without even glancing at it.

Melody hugged her paper bag of wool to her chest as they left the shop.

‘Here,’ said her mum, ‘I’ll take that.’ She gently took the bag from Melody’s arms and smiled at her, before slipping it into her big shoulder bag. ‘Come on,’ she said, grabbing hold of Melody’s shocked, unexpecting hand, ‘let’s get that sticky bun.’

Melody felt proud as she walked through the chilled, busy streets of Broadstairs that Saturday afternoon, holding her mother’s hand, proud and hopeful.

In the tea shop they talked about school and Aunt Susie and hairstyles, and anything at all in fact that Melody could think of to talk about that wouldn’t puncture her mother’s new-found buoyancy.

‘You know,’ said her mum, sliding a bit of snowy icing off her plate with the tip of her finger, ‘you’re a very good girl. A very good girl indeed. You do know that, don’t you?’

Melody shrugged.

‘I know I don’t say it very often and I know that a lot has happened these last few years and I haven’t always been very …
present
. But however it may sometimes seem, I really do love you and I really do treasure you. I couldn’t have got through any of this without you.’

Melody allowed herself a smile. ‘I love you too,’ she said.

‘Ah, but do you still think that I’m the best mummy in the world?’ Her mum smiled tightly and Melody gulped. That’s what she used to say, back in the past, back in London, back when her dad was there and they had parties and everyone seemed to like each other. ‘You’re the best mummy in the world!’ And Jane would smile and hug her and say, ‘And you’re the best girl in the world!’

Melody glanced at her mum. She didn’t look like the same mummy any more. She was still fatter than she’d been before and her hair wasn’t as nice, even though she’d started growing it out of the square shape, and she looked older and sadder and less likely to break into a huge spontaneous grin at the merest glimpse of her, but still, thought Melody, she was a nice mum. She didn’t hit her or shout at her and she’d bought her exactly the Pippa doll she’d asked for for her birthday and she always said sorry if she pulled a knot in her hair when she was combing it. But ‘the best’? Was she the best? Melody thought of Jacqui, of her state of perpetual motion, the way she zoomed in and out of Charlotte’s bedroom on a tidying blitz without stopping to say hello, zoomed in and out of the house without stopping to say goodbye, the way she only ever noticed if something had gone wrong, been spilled, been broken, but never when something had been done rather well, and she decided that yes, all things considered her mother probably was still the best mummy in the world.

But only just.

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Definitely. The best!’

Jane smiled and Melody saw her eyes fill up with tears. ‘Thank you,’ she said, ‘thank you.’

They hugged across the table, Jane’s sleeves hanging in the sugar bowl, Melody’s face buried in her mother’s soft shoulder and Melody felt safe for the first time since she was three years old.

Jane’s good mood lasted for eight weeks. During the fourth week of happiness, Jane and Melody got the train up to London, then sat on a tube for half an hour and ended up at Aunt Maggie’s house in Ealing. This was the first time that Melody had been to Aunt Maggie’s house since they’d left London and it gave her a strange sense of remove from herself to be in a place that hadn’t changed at all, when everything else had.

Maggie met them at the ornate stained-glass door and held them both for what felt like ages. She smelled of cats and candle wax, and her hair was too long. Nicola and Claire had grown into leggy adolescents with ideas about clothes and pictures of boys on their bedrooms walls. But the house was exactly the same, from the vase of silk orchids on the windowsill, to the Chinese paper balls that covered the ceiling lights and the green Trimphone on the hallway table.

‘It’s been far, far too long,’ Maggie said, ushering them through into the living room at the back of the house, which overlooked the apple trees and fig trees in her garden. ‘Two years.
Two years
, Janie!’

‘Well,’ said Jane, draping her coat across the back of the sofa, ‘it doesn’t feel that long.’

‘Doesn’t it?’