The Truth About Melody Browne Read online

  ‘You know, in some ways I’m really glad you had to have a Caesar,’ her dad had said to Jacqui. ‘It’s forced you to sit still and enjoy this time.’

  Jacqui had smiled at him and said, ‘I know, I know, you’re right. I’d have been trying to do the hoovering. And I’m glad too, because this is the nicest time. This is the time you look back on when they grow and want to snatch back …’

  Melody wanted to snatch it back already. She wanted to absorb her sister, drop by drop, into her own skin, and keep her there. She didn’t want to leave her in London, to wait a week before she could see her again. She wanted to live with her, sleep with her, watch her wake up in the mornings. She wanted to see her grow, day by day, each sliver of fingernail, each millimetre of hair. She wanted Emily to know her, the same way she would know Charlotte.

  She glanced up into Ken’s soft grey eyes and felt her jaw go soft and wobbly. Then she started crying, silently and heavily.

  ‘Oh, now, now, now,’ Ken passed her a paper napkin. ‘Oh, Melody, your poor, sweet thing.’

  ‘I love her so, so much,’ she sobbed. ‘I love her and she lives in London and I live here and she’ll forget all about me.’

  ‘Oh, she won’t.’

  ‘But she will. All she’ll see is Charlotte and she’ll think Charlotte’s her only sister and when I come she’ll cry because she won’t know who I am!’

  ‘No, honestly, I promise you. Babies are very clever. She’ll remember your smell, and then, when she gets older, she’ll remember your face and, you know, she’ll save all her best smiles for you, because when she sees you it’ll be like a special treat. Not like Charlotte.’

  ‘Do you think?’

  ‘Yes, I think. And because you won’t see her that often, you’ll be much nicer to her than Charlotte. In fact, I’ll bet you anything that you and Emily end up being best friends.’

  Melody sniffed and stirred her spoon in circles around the base of her sundae glass. She liked what Ken was saying. She liked the idea of being Emily’s best friend.

  It occurred to her that this was the first time in as long as she could remember that anyone had said anything to her that had made her feel better rather than worse, something that made sense of her world, and she felt something hard and heavy lifting from her chest that she hadn’t really noticed was there until that very moment. She felt a lightness come upon her, a sense that there was a centre to everything after all. And as she sat there, in the steamy warmth of Morelli’s Ice Cream Parlour, her dismantled world spinning around her head in a dozen separate pieces, she suddenly knew what that centre was. It was Ken.

  She wiped a tear from her cheek with the back of her hand and smiled at Ken. Then she took his hand in hers and squeezed it, really hard.

  ‘Are you my friend?’ she said.

  ‘Of course I am,’ he said.

  ‘Will you always be my friend?’

  ‘I’ll be your friend for as long as you’d like me to be.’

  ‘Well,’ said Melody, ‘that will be for ever then.’

  Ken squeezed her hand back and smiled.

  ‘Good,’ he said. ‘Good.’

  They got back to the house at nine o’clock. Melody had pictured her mum on the front step, pale with worry, pacing and panicking, wondering where her daughter was. But she wasn’t on the front step. Neither was she in the kitchen or in the bathroom or in their room in the attic. Melody and Ken ran around the whole house twice, looking in all the rooms, and in strange places like airing cupboards and larders. Then Melody noticed that her handbag wasn’t in the hallway. And Laura said she’d heard the front door slam at about five o’clock, so they all calmed down and assumed she’d gone out for dinner, or to see Auntie Susie.

  Melody washed herself in the chilly bathroom that evening and tried to picture her mother sitting at her auntie Susie’s table, laughing and giggling and forgetting the time. It didn’t seem right at all, so she tried to imagine her mother sitting alone in a restaurant, at a table for two, her face in flickering candlelight, tucking into a steak and chips. That was completely wrong too.

  As she slipped under her quilt and closed her eyes, the silence in her room overwhelmed her and she started to picture different things. Her mother squashed flat by the wheels of a juggernaut. Her mother face down and blue in the sea. Her mother sliced into segments by the metal wheels of an express train. She didn’t know where these images had come from. She’d never thought about things like that before. But then she’d never not known where her mother was before.

  She fell asleep after a long, long time and then, before she knew it, she was awake again, and it was still dark and her mother’s bed was still empty. She decided that she felt scared and alone and that she needed to see a face, so she tiptoed quietly down the stairs and up the landing towards Ken and Grace’s room.

  A remarkable vignette greeted her upon pushing open the door. Ken and Laura lay on the big white bed, naked and wrapped around each other, while Grace, in a long blue nightdress, lay on a mattress on the floor with Seth by her side. The window had no curtains and a fat white moon bathed them all in an inky light. Although altogether wrong, there was something beautiful about the scene, something like the production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream that Jacqui and her dad had taken them to see at Regent’s Park Open Air Theatre that summer.

  The only person to hear her come in was Laura, who gazed at her glassily through one open eye. She rubbed her eyebrows with her fingertips and rolled towards her. Her breasts were small and pointy, like little fairy cakes and her ribcage was bony like a chicken’s carcass. As she stared at her, Melody could see that she was still asleep. Her open eye fell shut, she rolled over onto her back, and Melody tiptoed quietly out of the room.

  Matty’s room was next door. She knocked gently and let herself in. Matty was on his side, one leg hanging off the edge of the bed, snoring very gently.

  She watched him for a while and wondered what he was dreaming about. And then, deciding that he looked far too peaceful to disturb, lay down on his scruffy sheepskin rug, covered herself with his bath towel and finally fell asleep.

  Ken called the police the next morning. Two men in helmets arrived at the door and came in to ask questions, to which nobody seemed to have any answers. No, she hadn’t told anyone where she was going; no, nobody had seen her leaving. They took down Melody’s description of where Auntie Susie lived (‘in a bungalow, with hedges round it, not near the sea, but not far from the sea, with a blue front door and floaty curtains’) and then they looked at all her mum’s stuff in the bedroom.

  ‘Did she have any reason to disappear?’ asked the younger of the two policemen.

  Melody looked at Ken, who looked at her. ‘Well,’ he ventured, ‘she has been under some stress. Her husband is living with another woman, who has just given birth to his child. And, er, I think she’s been suffering from, well …’ he glanced again at Melody, ‘some other issues. Of the emotional variety.’

  ‘So you’re saying she’s unstable?’

  ‘Well, not exactly unstable, but …’

  ‘Right, I think in that case we should give it twenty-four hours and then check the beaches. Particularly around Ramsgate.’

  ‘You mean, you think … ?’

  This time the policeman and Ken both looked at Melody.

  ‘I don’t know, sir, but it is possible. We see a lot of it, you know, with women. Hormones can be powerful things. If there is no news about Mrs Ribblesdale’s whereabouts by this time tomorrow, we will start a search.’

  They took Melody’s dad’s phone number, which was the only phone number in the whole world that Melody knew off by heart, and then they left.

  Matty wanted to know every last thing that the police had said when he came downstairs five minutes later. ‘I was trying to listen at the door, but it was too muffled!’

  ‘They think she might be on the beach. Because of her hormones.’

  ‘What – dead?’

  ‘No, I don�
��t think so, just upset. But they’re not going to look until tomorrow.’

  ‘Why not?’

  Melody shrugged. ‘Don’t know,’ she said.

  ‘Well, that’s rubbish,’ said Matty. ‘Anything could happen between now and tomorrow. It could be the difference between life and death. I say bollocks to waiting. I say, let’s go now.’

  He disappeared for a few moments and returned clutching a cloth bag, which he hung across his chest.

  ‘What are we going to do?’ said Melody.

  ‘We’re going to find your mum.’

  They walked together through town to the damp, seaweed-strewn sands of Viking Bay. It was completely empty. They tramped up and down the quay, past the deserted café. Matty stopped every now and then to scan the horizon with a pair of battered army surplus binoculars that he’d stashed in his big bag.

  ‘Any idea what she was wearing?’ he said.

  Melody shook her head. ‘She was still in her nightdress when Ken took me to London.’

  ‘Colour?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Her nightdress. What colour was it?’

  ‘Green. With a cream bit, here.’ She touched her chest.

  ‘Right. And her hair is brown. And she’s of medium build. Right?’

  ‘Right,’ said Melody.

  ‘OK. Nothing here, let’s keep moving.’

  He let the binoculars drop and turned back towards town.

  Melody followed him, silently, for what felt like a very long time. He stopped every now and then to examine small fragments of flotsam and oddments of litter.

  ‘What kind of things does your mother like doing?’ he asked, in due course.

  ‘Erm, reading?’

  ‘Hmm, we could try the bookshops, or the library, but I don’t suppose she’d have been there all night. Anything else?’

  Melody gave it some thought. ‘She likes cats.’

  ‘No, that’s not going to help. Christ. This is tough. Think, Matty, think.’ He tapped his head with the palms of his hands. ‘A woman, thirty years old, feeling sad, what would she do? Where would she go? I know! I know! Come on, follow me.’

  It started raining as they approached the train station and Melody was tired and hungry. She hadn’t had any breakfast and she hadn’t had any lunch and it was now nearly two o’clock.

  She was excited and glad to be spending time with Matty, but she also wanted to get back to the house, because the more she thought about it, the more convinced she was that her mother was probably there waiting for her. But she didn’t want to annoy Matty so she followed him along the platform, down the sidings, over the bridge and down into the undergrowth, and she waited patiently while he rooted around amongst empty beer cans and old carrier bags with a big stick.

  Matty finally gave up his search at about four o’clock.

  Melody’s feet were rubbed raw inside her too-tight plimsolls and her stomach had given up growling and resigned itself to hunger.

  They wandered slowly back into town, and up the High Street. Melody caught sight of their reflection in the window of Woolworths. They looked bedraggled and thin, like two little orphans. Melody gulped at the thought. This was as close as she’d ever been to having no parents and it felt terrifying.

  They were almost home, two streets away from the house, when something caught Melody’s eye. It was a fragment of fabric, just glimpsed through the steamed-up windows of the coffee shop. It belonged to a jacket that was very familiar to her. A blue jacket with black flowers on it. Her mother’s.

  ‘Matty! She’s in there! Look!’

  They cupped their hands to the glass and peered through. Jane sat with her back to the window, a red mug by her left hand, a bunch of dead flowers by her right. She sat alone and motionless, the angle of her head suggesting that she was watching someone, intently.

  They stepped into the shop and as they got closer, Melody saw that she wasn’t in fact watching someone, but that she was staring into nothingness, so deeply that at first she didn’t notice the two small children by her side.

  ‘Mum.’ Melody touched her arm.

  Jane continued to stare into the distance.

  Her jacket was grubby and her hair looked matted and tangled. There was mud under her fingernails and she smelled briny and damp.

  ‘Mum.’ Melody tugged at her sleeve, a bit harder.

  Jane finally broke her gaze and turned very slowly towards Melody.

  ‘Yes?’ she said.

  ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘What?’ she replied, vaguely.

  ‘What are you doing? Where’ve you been?’

  ‘Melody?’

  ‘Yes. It’s me.’

  ‘Why are you here?’

  ‘We’ve been looking for you. You’ve been lost. We called the police! Where have you been?’

  ‘Oh, here, mostly. I think.’

  ‘But all night, last night – where were you?’

  Her mother paused, and rubbed her elbow. ‘Somewhere, I think. The beach … ?’

  Melody paused and tried to make sense of the situation. Her mother was smelly and vague, and sitting in a café all on her own, having spent the night sleeping on the beach. In October.

  She stared at her mother’s muddy fingers and then at the dead flowers and then she said, ‘Mum, are you unstable?’

  It was nice having her mum back in the bedroom with her that night, seeing the hump of her sleeping body across the room, hearing her rhythmic breathing and the rustle of her bed sheets as she moved around. But Melody couldn’t sleep. Every time her eyelids got heavy, every time her thoughts grew unfocused, she snapped back to a state of awakeness. She didn’t want to sleep, because if she slept, she might wake up and find her mother’s bed empty. So she lay, just five years old, in her bunk bed, under the eaves, staring at her sleeping mother until the sun came up the next morning.

  Chapter 25

  Now

  Melody sucked the last traces of English fudge ice cream off the back of the spoon and let it drop into the goblet. She’d forgotten breakfast this morning and hadn’t realised how hungry she was until she’d stepped inside Morelli’s Ice Cream parlour five minutes ago.

  Of all the places that Melody had been since the unlocking of her memory two weeks earlier, Morelli’s held the greatest resonance. Her certainty of place here was stronger than anywhere else. She knew this place had been special – an oasis of happiness in what, she was becoming increasingly certain, had been a turbulent and uncertain childhood. She had sat in every booth in this parlour, she could picture herself at each and every one of them, her long spoon held in her small right hand, her lemonade on a paper coaster, candy sprinkles on her tongue and Ken at her side.

  Her resolve to unearth the secrets this town held strengthened by her visit to Morelli’s, she turned and headed for the library. The local history section. It had been Ed’s idea. ‘It’s not just books in a library, you know, Mum. They have other stuff too. Papers and stuff. And lots of local history.’ She cut back through Chandos Square, through a couple of streets she hadn’t ventured down before and as she walked, Melody felt it again, a sense of pattern to the lefts and rights of the route, a cadence to the soft beat of her feet against the pavement and the way it changed when they crossed the tarmac road. This was a walk she’d done before, she decided, and not just once, but numerous times. She knew exactly where she was going.

  Melody remembered everything, the moment she saw the squat yellow brick façade of Upton Junior School. She saw a grey duffel coat, a rip in a jacket pocket, a playground brought to silence by the poisoned taunts of a tall sad girl with her hair in plaits.

  Chapter 26

  1978

  Penny Clarke was a big girl. She was a year behind, because she was educationally subnormal, but she would have been big anyway. She had coarse blonde hair, which she wore in two fat plaits over her shoulders, and a very greasy forehead with a crease in it.

  ‘For a child of seven to have a frown li
ne is a very worrying sign indeed,’ said Melody’s mother the first time she saw Penny outside the school gates.

  Penny had befriended a girl called Dana, who was half her size and painfully thin and always had a stain down the front of her school jumper. The two of them stood in the corner of the playground at break times, looking cross and staring at people. Sometimes they chewed gum. They rarely spoke to each other.

  One morning, shortly after the day she and Matty had found Melody’s mum in the café, Penny and Dana approached her in the playground. Dana was wearing a grey duffel coat and her thin hair was in a ponytail. Penny was wearing a black Harrington jacket with a rip above the pocket.

  ‘What’s your name again?’ said Penny.

  Melody thought this was a strange question, as Penny had been in her class for nearly two months and was there every morning when Mrs Knott read out the register. ‘Melody,’ she said.

  ‘Oh, yeah, that’s right. Knew it was something posh.’

  They shuffled around in front of her for a moment, and as they shuffled, Melody suddenly knew without a doubt that something bad was about to happen.

  ‘Where you from then?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Melody.

  The two girls exchanged a contemptuous look. ‘You don’t know where you come from?’ said Penny.

  ‘No.’

  Penny laughed, a dreadful sound like a metal girder landing on a small dog. ‘But that doesn’t make any sense,’ she said. ‘Everybody knows where they come from.’

  Melody gulped. She knew she had to say something sensible, and say it quickly. ‘My dad lives in London. I live here.’

  ‘Right then. So your mum and dad are divorced?’

  She shook her head and stared at her feet.

  ‘Then why don’t they live in the same place?’

  ‘Because they’re cross with each other.’

  ‘Right.’ Penny sniffed and gave Melody a strange look. ‘You live in that hippy place in town, don’t you?’