The Truth About Melody Browne (9 page)

‘No, I know you’re not, not physically, but emotionally, you’ll need me less and less every day. And even my job – I only took it so I could be near you, so that I could be around at the holidays, but I don’t need to be a dinner lady any more. I could be anything now. I’m free, you see, I’m free. And I’m really, really scared.’

‘Oh, Mum, God, you don’t need to be scared! What are you scared of? I’ll still be around. And you’re brilliant – there’s loads of things you could do.’

‘Oh, yes, like what?’

‘I dunno, like teaching? You’d be a great teacher. I would never have got my GCSEs without you, and I wouldn’t have bothered with A levels. Or you could even get married to someone, have some more kids …’

‘What!’

‘Yeah, seriously. Why not? You’re only young. You should have some more kids. You’re the best mum out there – wouldn’t you want to? You know, like Stacey?’

Melody smiled wryly. ‘No,’ she said, placing her hand on Ed’s knee. ‘No. One’s enough for me.’

‘But what about this Ben bloke? He hasn’t got any kids, has he? Doesn’t he want some?’

‘I don’t know.’ She laughed again. ‘Probably.’

‘So, then, you know, maybe you and him …’

She shook her head slowly. ‘No, there is no me and him.’

‘What – it’s finished?’

‘Well, no, not finished, but not really even started.’

‘But why not?’

‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘I just can’t quite get my head around him.’

‘Around him, or around having a man in your life?’

Melody paused and glanced at her son in surprise. What an astute question. Was it possible, she wondered for just a moment, that she’d raised a good man?

‘Look, Ed,’ she said uncertainly. ‘There is something going on in my life now and it’s got nothing to do with Ben. It’s got to do with …’ She paused, feeling that she didn’t know enough to start sharing this with Ed, feeling that she wanted to be able to give him more: more absolutes, more facts, more black-and-whites. That was her role, as a mother, to paint the world in the cleanest lines, the brightest colours, to protect him from the vagaries and uncertainties of life. She took a deep breath, chose the right words. ‘It’s to do with my childhood and what happened at the Julius Sardo show.’

Ed threw her a confused grimace.

She sighed and continued, ‘Ever since I fainted that night, I’ve started remembering things.’

‘What sort of things?’

‘Well, I’m not sure really. They’re more like little snatches of time, rather than proper memories, but they’re to do with my life, you know, the bit I can’t remember, before the fire. I haven’t quite made sense of them but I know this much – I used to live in Broadstairs. I went there today. I found the house, and everything.’

‘What?’ said Ed. ‘You mean, where you lived with your mum and dad?’

‘Yes. No. I don’t know. I can’t remember. I just know that it was a squat and I remember this man called Ken. He had a motorbike. And there was a woman called Jane, and I think …’ She was about to say,
I think I called her Mum
, but stopped, as she still hadn’t properly absorbed the full implication of the memory. ‘I mean,’ she moved on, ‘I even recognised a knot in the floorboards, you know, that kind of detail. I can’t be imagining it. It’s almost like … like I lived a different life.’

‘You mean like you were adopted or something?’

Melody caught her breath. The possibility had already occurred to her in the deep, muddy darkness of her night-time ruminations, but she’d discounted it as too far-fetched, even given the unusually pale outline of her childhood recollections.

‘No,’ she said quietly, ‘nothing like that. But I think I might have been sent away for a while, sent to the seaside, for some reason …’

‘Oh shit.’ Ed put down his pint and threw her a nervous look. ‘You don’t think, you know, like those books, that bloke, those, you know, those fucked-up things that can happen to kids?’

‘What, you mean
abuse?
’

‘Well, yeah.’ He shrugged unhappily. ‘What’s it called when kids forget bad stuff and then they go to a head doctor and it all comes out and then their dads get sent to gaol when they’re, like, really old men?’

‘
Regression?
’

‘Yeah. Because that’s like what that Sardo guy did to you, isn’t it? He made you think you were five, and maybe when you were five something really bad happened and you shut it all away, and now it’s coming back. I mean, seriously, I know it’s not very nice, but your dad, do you think … ?’

‘No!’ exclaimed Melody, half amused. ‘No way!’

‘Yeah, well, you say that, but they all look like nice old men, these kiddy-fiddlers. How do you know? If your memory got broken, how do you know?’

‘I just do,’ she replied.

‘Well, it might explain some stuff, if it was true.’

‘Like what?’

‘You know, like not wanting a man …’

‘I
do
want a man!’

‘No you don’t. And you being so anti your parents …’

‘You
know
why I’m so anti my parents.’

‘Well, I know why you
say
you’re anti your parents.’

‘Christ, Ed, stop it, will you! My dad did not abuse me, OK?’

‘Then what were you doing living in a squat in Broadstairs with a bloke called Ken?’

Melody sighed and let her head flop into her chest. ‘I don’t know,’ she said, looking up again. ‘I don’t know, OK?’

‘What was it – like a commune, or something?’

She shrugged. ‘I don’t really remember. I remember the man called Ken. He had …’ she squeezed her eyes shut, ‘a tattoo on his hand – it was a symbol – and he smelled …’ she sniffed the air, ‘of rolling tobacco. And his hair, it was long, but shaved off at the sides, like an overgrown Mohican.’

‘Mmm,’ said Ed, ‘sounds really
nice
. You’ll have to phone them, then.’

‘What – Mum and Dad?’

‘Yeah. You’ll have to phone them and say, “Mummy, Daddy, what
on earth
was I doing in Broadstairs?”’ He said this in the put-on plummy accent he always used when he talked about the grandparents he’d never met, imagining them to be far more genteel than they actually were.

‘I can’t phone them,’ Melody sighed.

‘Why not?’

‘Because,’ she sighed again, ‘if they lied to me then, then they’ll just lie to me again. I need to know the truth. And I think I need …’ she paused for a moment to find the right words, ‘I think I need to let this happen bit by bit, you know, like a jigsaw. I think that if I knew everything, all at once, I might just …’

‘
Explode?
’

‘Yes. Or implode. Or maybe both. So,’ she said quietly, ‘what do you think I should do next?’

‘Go back to Broadstairs,’ said Ed. ‘Go back and see what else you can get.’

‘Pregnant?’

Her mother rolled the word off her tongue like an unexpected piece of gristle.

‘Yes,’ said Melody, pulling at the skin around her fingernails.

‘
Pregnant?
’ her mother repeated. ‘But I –’

‘It’s OK,’ said Melody, ‘I’m dealing with it.’

‘You’re
dealing
with it?’ Her father rose from his armchair like a mantis reaching for a fly on a distant branch, his neck wattles quivering, his shiny forehead gleaming in the early evening light.

‘Sit down, Clive.’ Her mother threw him a fearsome look.

He leaned back into the Dralon upholstery and shook his head slowly from side to side. ‘Whose is it?’ he asked. ‘That boy, is it? The one with the scooter?’

‘Yes,’ Melody said. ‘Who else would it be?’ She hated the inference that she might have slept with someone other than her boyfriend, even though she had.

Her mother turned to gaze through the window. Her blonde hair was brittle in the low sun, translucent like the tufts of horsehair and cotton inside an old sofa. Her pretty face looked old, as though someone had unstitched the skin from the bone and let it land where it fell. And her eyes, Melody was pained to see, were glazed over with tears.

‘How far gone are you?’ she said, turning back abruptly, her tears dried up.

Melody shrugged. ‘I’m not sure,’ she said. ‘I’m five weeks late.’

‘
Five weeks?
’

‘Nearly six.’

‘Oh my God.’

‘What? It’s fine.’

‘Fine! How can you say it’s fine? We’ll have to take you to the doctor’s as soon as possible, get this sorted out. I mean, it could be that you’re just late.’

‘I’ve been sick every day this week.’

‘Well, then …’ Her mother paused and pursed her lips. ‘We’ll just have to ask him about …
options
.’

‘You mean about abortions?’

‘Yes, about
abortions
. Oh God, Melody, what were you thinking, what on earth were you
thinking?
’

Melody shrugged again.

‘She wasn’t thinking, Gloria, that’s patently obvious, otherwise she wouldn’t be in this hideous mess.’ Her father rearranged his legs beneath his blanket, slowly and painfully.

‘How could you do this to us, Melody? How could you do this to your father after what he’s been through these last months? After everything we’ve done for you?’

‘This has got nothing to do with you! This is about
me
!’

‘No! It’s not! Don’t you see? This is about all of us! This affects the whole family!’

‘This isn’t a family!’ Melody yelled. ‘This is just an old people’s home with a teenage girl living in it!’

The words hung there in the still air, cruel and irretrievable. She glanced at her father, at his broken body, his hairless pate, then thought of those strong arms all those years ago, pulling her from her bed, carrying her to safety, saving her life. He didn’t deserve her harsh words. But then she didn’t deserve these people, this life.

‘Fine,’ said her mother, the hard word sounding incongruous in her small-girl voice, ‘fine. If that’s how you really feel, then go.’

Melody gazed at her, half smiling.
As if
. ‘Go where?’ she said with a gruff laugh.

‘I don’t know. Somewhere else. Somewhere
cool
. Tiff’s caravan? The street? You tell me!’

Melody stared at her mother, waiting for her to soften like she always did, but her jaw remained solid, her arms tight across her ribcage. ‘I mean it, Melody. I’m serious. This is the limit. This is the end of the road. We’ve had as much as we can take …’

Melody turned to her father. He stared resolutely through the window at the cul-de-sac outside. Melody breathed in deeply. This moment had been coming for months, for years. She’d been pushing them away since her fourteenth birthday, and they’d been letting her. It was almost as if they didn’t recognise each other any more, as though, in the way of jaded lovers, they’d become strangers.

That night she packed a bag with a few clothes, her mother’s best jewellery, fifty pounds in notes and coins from the ‘secret’ stash at the bottom of their wardrobe, her teddy bear and the portrait of the Spanish girl and she waited outside on the pavement impatiently for Tiff to appear. Her breath was thick and cloudy in the midnight air, her feet cold in cheap Dolcis pumps. Finally the dense silence was broken by the sound of a scooter approaching the cul-de-sac. Without looking at him, Melody climbed onto the moped, wrapped her arms around his waist and whispered in his ear the words, ‘Let’s get out of here.’

She never saw her parents again.

The following day, Melody and Stacey went shopping. Cleo, Stacey’s eldest, was turning eighteen a week on Wednesday, and Ed’s eighteenth was a week later, so they were meeting up to help each other buy gifts. They’d always used shopping as an excuse to spend time with each other. In the early years of their friendship they’d meet up in Oxford Circus with buggies and spare nappies, babies slumbering in fat snowsuits, while they stormed in and out of Mothercare and the John Lewis toy department. As the kids had got older they’d meet up while they were in nursery or school, and now that their kids were nearly adults, they could meet at their own convenience.

It was a cool day, sunny but fresh, more like April than July. Melody walked the half a mile across town, feeling glad that today she was doing something so mundane and familiar after the weirdness of her trip to Broadstairs the previous day.

She saw Stacey’s reassuring birdlike figure scampering up Oxford Street towards her, and smiled. Stacey was a tiny creature, who ballooned to the size of a country cottage every time she got pregnant, then deflated back to a frail size six within a couple of months. She was dressed in her usual uniform of cut-off combats and hooded jacket, her copper hair tied up in a ponytail, sunglasses on her head and a cigarette burning between her fingers. From behind she looked about fourteen, but from the front her face was prematurely aged by stress, cigarettes and too many Spanish holidays. If Melody had used a condom on the two occasions she’d had sex in October 1987 she’d never have met Stacey, and chances are she’d have had a best friend she’d met at university who lived in a three-bed terrace in Clapham Junction with mushroom-coloured walls and an Audi estate parked outside. But fate had brought her to this place, and Stacey was not just part of her story, but one of the few things that had kept her sane for the past eighteen years.