The Truth About Melody Browne (22 page)

The baby turned at the sound of her voice and put one small fat hand out towards Melody’s cheek and for a moment the two sisters stared deeply and thoughtfully into each other’s eyes. Melody offered her sister a finger and the baby took it in her small fist, grasped it tightly. Melody stared at the fleshy tangle that their hands had made and felt a deep, dark yearning, for continuity, for meaning, for something everlasting.
Stay with me
, she willed the tiny girl,
stay with me. Please
.

But then Amber started to cry and Jane whisked her away from Melody and Ken was sent down to the kitchen to make up a bottle and Grace came in to coo at the baby and the spell was broken. But for one moment in time Melody had made a connection with this little person, a connection that would stay with her for far longer than Amber would.

The first Melody heard of the baby who’d been stolen from outside the newsagent’s on Nelson Place was two days after Amber was born. There were news posters all over Broadstairs emblazoned with the headline ‘10-Week-Old-Baby Snatched While Mum Shopped’.

The baby in question was called Edward Thomas Mason and he’d been taken while his mum was in the newsagent’s buying a paper and a packet of envelopes. The mother’s haunted face peered out at Melody from the front cover of every newspaper that day. She was young – only nineteen years old – and she clutched a blurred photograph of her lost baby to her chest. Her husband was a sallow-faced eighteen-year-old with a pudding-bowl haircut and wire-rimmed glasses. ‘I only popped in for a minute,’ she said at a press conference in London. ‘Broadstairs is such a safe place. I never thought that something like this could happen.’

The baby was described as being dressed in white trousers, a blue jacket and blue bootees and was wearing a ‘very distinctive’ cream woollen hat, knitted by his maternal grandmother. He had brown hair and blue eyes and weighed approximately fourteen pounds. The baby-thief had taken just the baby and left behind a large Silver Cross perambulator, a quantity of baby bedding and a wooden rattle.

‘Somebody must have seen something,’ said a Detective Inspector Philip Henderson. ‘This occurred on a busy shopping street at ten o’clock in the morning. The baby was taken out of its perambulator so the sight of a person, possibly in a state of high excitement, carrying a small baby through the streets of Broadstairs could have struck somebody as peculiar in some way. If anybody remembers seeing such a sight on the morning of Wednesday the twenty-fourth of October, please do get in touch with Scotland Yard.’

There was a small black-and-white photograph of baby Edward beneath the article, a bit creased and a bit blurred. It showed a newborn baby in a knitted hat looking blankly into the middle distance.

‘And he was fast asleep too,’ said Kate, passing the newspaper to Grace across the breakfast table. ‘I mean, what sort of person would lift a sleeping baby out of its pram?’

Grace eyed the photo of the missing baby and sighed. ‘Poor wee thing,’ she said. ‘Imagine that. One moment you’re fast asleep, the next you’re staring at some stranger’s face. Horrific, quite horrific.’

Melody’s mum sat at the head of the table, baby Amber asleep on her shoulder, nodding her agreement.

‘I mean, to think, you can’t even leave your baby outside a shop for a moment. I don’t know what the world is coming to.’ The three women all sighed and shook their heads and Melody stared from one to the other and asked herself the question:
Don’t you know?
Doesn’t one of you women know what’s going on here?

Because Melody knew. She knew exactly what was happening. Baby Amber wasn’t baby Amber at all. She was baby Edward. And this she didn’t just suspect, but she knew, because last night when her mum wasn’t looking she’d unpopped the poppers on the baby’s babygro, and she’d hooked one finger inside the damp terry towelling of its nappy and she’d seen, with her own eyes, a small pair of leathery red testicles and a tiny penis.

She’d then, spurred on by the details coming to light in the news reports, searched her mum’s room when she was in the bathroom and found, in her wastepaper basket, underneath yesterday’s newspaper and a ball of old hair, a small knitted woollen hat and a pair of blue bootees.

She hadn’t shared this knowledge yet with anybody. It was living in her head, like a ball of fire, burning and gnawing and eating away at her consciousness. She had never before in her life been privy to such an extraordinary secret. It felt bigger than everything that had happened to her in her whole life added together and timesed by a hundred. She didn’t know what to do with it. It felt so big that it might just burst out of her head and spill all over the floor, flooding the streets of Broadstairs with pure undiluted sensation. She wanted to tell Ken, but Ken would be so disappointed that the baby wasn’t really Amber. And she wanted to tell her dad, but he was in America, and today, for a split second in PE, she’d even wanted to tell Penny, just to see her face do that weird thing where it looked like her features were trying to run away, just to know that she’d said the most shocking thing to Penny that anyone had ever said to her in her life.

Melody knew she shouldn’t be excited about her discovery. Every time she thought about that poor mother in the newspapers she felt bad because she knew that all that stood between her heartbreak and her ecstasy was Melody and her secret. But she didn’t want to let go of it. And she didn’t want to let go of the baby and the excitement that his/her arrival had brought into this strange house.

But what seemed strangest of all to Melody was that nobody else seemed to have noticed that something was so very, extraordinarily wrong. Nobody had noticed that the baby could smile and that the baby could hold things in its hands and that the baby could see things across the room. Nobody noticed the way that Jane turned down every offer to change the baby’s nappy or to help her bathe it at night. And nobody wondered why Jane had had her baby all alone at the hospital on
the very same day
that baby Edward was stolen from the shops.

It seemed she would be carrying her shocking secret around with her in overwhelming solitude until late that night, when she awoke to find Matty hissing in her ear.

‘What?’ she said.

‘Wake up,’ he said.

‘I am wake. What do you want?’

‘It’s the baby,’ he hissed. ‘I know something about the baby.’

Melody sat up in bed and switched on her bedside lamp.

Matty looked scarecrow-haired and wide-eyed. ‘Your mum’s baby! It’s him! The one that was stolen!’

Melody sighed. Those were her words, that was her secret, her remarkable declaration of fact. ‘I know,’ she said. ‘I’ve known for ages.’

Matty looked deflated. ‘How?’ he said.

She shrugged. ‘I just had a feeling. So I looked inside his nappy, and he had a you know, a …
boy’s thing
.’

Matty’s eyes boggled.

‘And I found the blue bootees and the hat in my mum’s bin. How did you know?’

‘Because I heard my mum saying something.’

‘Saying what?’

‘She was talking to Kate in the kitchen after your mum went to bed and I was in the toilet and they didn’t know and I heard my mum saying: “Something’s not right about that baby. Are you thinking what I’m thinking?” and then I accidentally banged the chain against the wall and they heard it and shushed each other, and that was all they said, but it got me thinking because it doesn’t seem right, does it? I mean, for a kick off, that baby is way too big to be new, so just now I snuck into your mum’s room and I took Seth’s piggywig because I remember that piggywig was exactly the same size as Seth when he was born and I put piggywig next to the baby in the cot and the baby was just
massive
compared to it. And now it’s clear, isn’t it? Cut-and-dried case? Your mum stole that baby from the shops, Melody Ribblesdale, and we’re the only people who know about it.’

Melody gulped and nodded.

‘You know that the grown-ups are about to work it out though, don’t you? And once they’ve worked it out they’ll go to the police and the police will take the baby away and put your mum in prison, and Ken too, for being a willing accomplice? It’s all about to come crashing down, the whole thing, and you need to decide what you’re going to do about it.’

‘Do about it?’ Melody felt her breath catch.

‘Yes. Are you going to run and hide, or stay and face the music?’

‘I don’t know,’ she whispered, breathlessly. ‘What would you do?’

‘Run,’ he said, ‘run for the hills.’

‘But what about the baby?’

Matty shrugged. ‘Leave the baby here,’ he said matter-of-factly. ‘The police will sort it all out. But you and your mum should pack a bag and just go. Now. Tonight. As far away as you can get. I won’t tell a soul.’ He zipped his lips with his fingertips and stared at her solemnly.

Melody’s heart was racing. Her big secret no longer felt like a showy gift but like mouldering poison. She hadn’t thought about her mum going to prison. She’d only thought about her being sad that the baby was gone. If her mum went to prison and Ken went to prison then who’d look after her? She’d have to go to America and share a room with the maid and not go to school and wear ragged clothes, like Cinderella. Or she could go and live with sad Auntie Maggie in London, which wouldn’t be so bad, although they didn’t have a bedroom for her either, so she might end up sleeping on the floor, and their house wasn’t all clean and luxurious like the house in Hollywood. There was Auntie Susie, of course, who had plenty of room for her, but didn’t know anything about children, or she could stay here with Grace and Seth and Matty, but that might not be allowed on account of them not being related to her.

She sighed heavily and stared back at Matty. ‘You’re right,’ she said. ‘I’ll go and wake her up.’

Her mother was nestled right next to the baby in the little single bed and if you didn’t know better you’d say that they were the perfect mother and child, slumbering peacefully, sharing each other’s breath. Jane stirred as the door opened and then awoke with a start.

‘Shhh,’ she said, ‘don’t wake the baby!’

‘Mum,’ said Melody, ‘we’ve got to go. We’ve got to go now. We know about the baby. Everyone knows about the baby. And if we don’t go now, they’ll call the police and you and Ken will be sent to prison!’

‘Melody, what are you talking about?’

‘We know the baby is Edward Mason. I know. Matty knows. And I know Grace and Kate are thinking it too. Leave the baby and let’s go!’

‘I really have no idea what you’re talking about.’

‘
They’re going to call the police! They’ll put you in gaol
!’ she cried tugging at her mother’s arm. ‘Don’t you understand? Mum! Don’t you understand?’

Jane tutted and pulled her arm from Melody’s grip. ‘Honestly, Melody. Please will you be quiet? You’ll wake Amber.’

Melody stopped then and looked at her mother, really looked at her. She was mad. It was suddenly horribly and utterly clear to her. Not unstable. Not imbalanced, but actually properly mad like the old lady on the sea front with the stuffed ferret and the crinoline. She was quiet for a moment while she considered her next move. She realised that even if she were to stand here for the next hour and a half repeating over and over the words, ‘That baby is Edward Mason,’ it would make no impact at all in her mother’s current delusional state of insanity. So instead she sighed and stroked her mother’s cheek and said, ‘It’s OK. Why don’t you go back to sleep?’

Her mother stared back at her, breathing heavily, a look of panic starting to fade from her features. ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘yes. I will. I’ll see you in the morning, darling. Get some rest.’

Melody backed out of the room, watching as her mother laid her head back on the pillow and pulled the blanket closer around the baby’s shoulders.

She tiptoed slowly back to her bedroom.

Matty sat bolt upright in his bed as she walked in. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘what happened? Are you going?’

Melody shook her head. ‘No,’ she said sadly. ‘She didn’t want to go. I’ll try again tomorrow.’

Matty tutted impatiently. ‘There won’t be a tomorrow, don’t you realise that? Tomorrow is officially cancelled, on account of your mum being arrested and carted off in a bloody great Black Maria!’

‘Yes, I know that,’ she said defiantly, ‘but she won’t go and there’s nothing I can do to make her. We’ll just have to let it happen.’

Matty tutted again and shook his head. ‘Your lookout, Melody Ribblesdale,’ he said, ‘your life. But you’ll regret this when you’re in a children’s home sleeping on a thin mattress and eating slops. You really will.’

He turned over then and Melody contemplated the curve of his back for a while and thought about what he’d said. The idea of a children’s home chilled her to the bone. But then the idea of disappearing into the cold, dark night with her unhinged mother, with just a change of clothing and not a penny between them, chilled her even more. She closed her eyes and let sleep carry her away.

The next morning, it was tempting for a while for Melody to believe that everything that had happened last night had been a dream. Her mother sat at the kitchen table with the baby asleep on her shoulder, while she ate a slice of wholemeal toast and read the papers. Grace poured tea from a giant pot into mugs for the adults. Seth sat on his shaggy dog and wheeled himself up and down the terracotta floor. Kate sat on Michael’s lap while they both read dog-eared paperbacks. And Ken polished his big old army boots with a yellow cloth and a tin of Cherry.