The Truth About Melody Browne Page 3

  Ed was stretched out on the sofa watching TV when she got home at nine thirty. He jumped as she walked into the room.

  ‘What are you doing back so early?’ he said.

  She sighed and perched herself on the arm of the sofa. ‘Disaster struck,’ she said.

  ‘What – he stood you up?’

  ‘No, he didn’t stand me up,’ she replied indignantly. ‘I got picked on for a trick. Julius Sardo made me pretend to be a five-year-old boy with gas. So, as if running around a stage in front of hundreds of people pretending to fart wasn’t bad enough, I then passed out …’

  ‘What?’

  ‘… collapsed. In front of everybody. Had to be carted off backstage and given first aid.’

  ‘No way!’

  ‘Yes way, unfortunately.’ She sighed and ran her hands through her hair. ‘Jesus. This could only happen to me. To Melody Browne. And this,’ she continued, ‘is exactly why I have spent the last eight years at home.’

  ‘God, Mum, are you all right?’

  Melody shook her head. Then she nodded. She didn’t know if she was all right. She just knew that she had to sleep ‘Yeah. I’m fine. I think it was just too much adrenalin plus a big glass of wine. I’m off to bed.’

  ‘Are you sure you’re OK? Maybe you should have something to eat?’

  She smiled, touched and surprised by the sound of her baby boy attempting to mother her. ‘No. I just need to sleep. Don’t forget to lock all the windows before you head for bed.’

  She left Ed there, on the sofa, no longer her baby but a strapping boy of seventeen, and headed to her room.

  In the darkness she listened to the sounds of a summer night playing out on the estate, the sounds of hot car engines coming and going, voices carrying through open windows, distant music. It was surprising to her that she had so recently been a part of the fabric of this Saturday night. She had been a person on a pavement in the West End in sparkly shoes and lipstick. She had been a person in a pub with a man and a glass of wine. And she had, more unexpectedly, been a person on a West End stage being watched by hundreds of people, a person who would be talked about long after the moment itself: ‘There was this woman and she fainted!’ She had left her mark on the night, but now she was here, as ever, in her double bed, alone and sober, a single mum, as if none of it had ever happened.

  The red LED of her radio alarm clicked from 9.50 to 9.51 and Melody fell into a deep and immediate sleep.

  Chapter 3

  1976

  When Melody Browne was three years old, she was called Melody Ribblesdale and she lived in a big red house right in the very middle of London. At least, that is how her three-year-old consciousness saw it. She lived, in fact, in one corner of the second floor of a big red mansion block squatted unprepossessingly on a busy junction in Lambeth, south London.

  To get to their corner of the big red building, Melody and her parents had either to walk up two flights of cold, bleach-scented stairs or cram themselves into a tiny lift with a crisscross sliding door that was nearly impossible to push open, even for her father with his big hairy arms.

  Their flat was bright and airy, though, with huge sash windows in every room overlooking the chaos below. When Melody climbed onto the back of the sofa in the living room and stood on her tiptoes, she could even see a bit of the River Thames.

  She slept in a small yellow bedroom with blue curtains and a mobile with wooden butterflies on it and every morning her mother strapped her onto the back of her bicycle and took her to a house on Walnut Tree Walk to be looked after by a lady called Pam while she went to work. At five o’clock her mother would return, smelling of coffee and cigarettes, and take her home again, sometimes stopping at the convenience store on the corner of their road for a pint of milk or a packet of ham.

  Melody’s mum was a marketing manager for a contemporary dance company and her dad was block setter at a print works. They both worked regular hours. Neither of them travelled. It was a quiet life. It was a predictable life. Melody knew what to expect on a day-to-day basis. She liked it like that, bobbing around in the warm, buoyant waters of routine. Sometimes her parents threw parties in the big flat in Lambeth, parties that started at lunchtime and went on until breakfast. Her dad played the piano and her mum doled out a raspberry-hued punch with a big plastic ladle. People stood on the fire escape outside the kitchen to smoke pipes and cigarettes, and Melody woke up with other people’s children asleep on her bedroom floor, but she didn’t mind. It was normal. It was her life, her family, her world. But when she was three and a half her life, her family and her world changed for ever.

  And all because of the baby who never came home.

  Her mother told her about the baby growing in her tummy one soft May morning. Even though Melody’s life had been nice before the announcement about the baby, it seemed to get even nicer afterwards. They went on holiday together to a cottage in the countryside that summer. There was a very big rabbit in a hutch in the garden outside their cottage. He was called Mr Flopsicle and he liked eating celery out of Melody’s hands. Her mum and dad kept hugging each other and holding hands all the time and when they came back to London, Melody stopped going to Pam’s house and started going to a nursery school on Lollard Street where she got her milk in a carton instead of a bottle.

  One day her mother came to collect her from school and told her that she’d just felt the baby moving for the first time. This seemed to make her mother even happier. After that her mum got really big, not just on her belly, but all over. When Melody shared the bath with her she could feel the extra weight of her, the way she squished up against the sides of the bath like a big soft cork. After Christmas Melody’s mum had her hair cut into a sort of square shape with a fringe. It had been long and tangly before, almost down to her bottom, and Melody wasn’t sure if she liked it or not, particularly now that her mum’s face was a different shape. But her mum said that when the baby came the last thing she’d want to be bothered with was all that hair.

  And then, one night, when Melody’s mum was the biggest thing that she’d ever seen, so big that she couldn’t even go to work any more and could barely get off the sofa, she started to make a lot of noise and locked herself in the bathroom and her dad told her that the baby was coming. A lady called Marceline came a little while later and sat in the bathroom with her mum and for a while everyone was really excited and Melody was allowed to stay up even though it was, as her dad kept telling her, the middle of the night. Eventually Melody fell asleep on the sofa and someone put her blanket over her and when she woke up again it was the morning and her mum was still having the baby. Nobody said anything about going to nursery or eating cereal or getting dressed, so Melody just sat at her little wooden table in the corner of the living room and did colouring-in with her big box of crayons.

  A few minutes later, her aunt Maggie arrived with Claire and Nicola, her big cousins. Maggie was her mum’s sister and they looked exactly the same usually, but not any more because of her mum’s new haircut and new shape. They stayed until the ambulance came and then they took Melody back to their house in Fulham. Melody waved at her mum as they wheeled her into the ambulance and her mum waved back and looked a bit like she might start crying.

  ‘Be good for your auntie,’ she said, ‘and I’ll see you later, when you’re a sister!’

  Melody stayed at Aunt Maggie’s for two whole days and two whole nights. Nobody really explained why she wasn’t at home, sitting on her mum’s bed, staring at the new baby and wondering what she thought about it.

  On her third morning she awoke to find Maggie’s cat, Boots, rubbing her face with his fishy whiskers. He then lay down on her chest which she found vaguely alarming.

  ‘Off, Boots,’ she said in a loud whisper, not wanting to wake her cousin. ‘Off, Boots.’

  In the distance, she could hear the phone ringing. She pushed the cat off her chest and sat up. She could hear Maggie’s voice, muted, sleepy, through the wall of Nicola’s bedroom.
There was a painting of a Spanish girl on the wall. She had black hair and dark blue eyes and a rose tucked behind her ear. Her lips were all red, like she’d been eating blackberries straight from a bush, and her dress was covered in white spots, like it had been snowing. Melody stared at the picture as she listened to Maggie through the wall, heard her voice turn from sleepy to confused to urgent, from quiet to loud and then to a slow, heavy incantation of the word ‘no’.

  The Spanish girl seemed to peer at Melody curiously, as if she too were wondering what the phone call could be about. Melody smiled at the Spanish girl, a hopeful smile, as if to reassure her that everything would be all right.

  A few minutes later Maggie came into Nicola’s bedroom. She was wearing a blue dressing gown with birds embroidered on it and her long hair was in a plait. Her eye makeup, which was usually quite neat, was smudged all under her eyes, like she’d been rubbing them and she didn’t look as pretty as she did normally, during the day.

  ‘Oh,’ she said, smiling, ‘you’re awake.’

  ‘Yes,’ Melody said, ‘I heard the phone ringing.’

  Maggie nodded. ‘That was your dad.’

  ‘Is the baby coming home now?’

  ‘No,’ said Maggie, stroking Melody’s cheek with her thumb. ‘No, the baby’s not coming home …’

  Melody glanced away from Maggie and up at the Spanish girl, hoping that she would do something dramatic to make this horrible feeling go away. But she didn’t. She just stood there in her spotty dress, looking curious.

  ‘The baby wasn’t very well when it came out. The doctors tried to make the baby better, but nothing they tried to do worked. And the baby tried really hard too. But she was too small and too unwell and she stopped breathing. Do you know what happens when you stop breathing?’

  Melody did know what happened when you stopped breathing, so she nodded. ‘You get dead,’ she said.

  ‘Yes,’ said Maggie, ‘you get dead. And I’m so sorry my precious girl, but that’s what happened to your baby sister. She stopped breathing. And your mummy and daddy are very, very sad. And you know what they said, they said, the only thing that will make them feel better will be to see their big, brave girl. So shall we get ready? Shall we get you dressed and take you home to see your mummy and daddy?’

  Melody considered this. If she stayed here she could stare at the Spanish girl a little longer and see if she might somehow show her a way to reverse the last two minutes of her life. Then she could go downstairs and have sugary cereal with her big cousins and walk with them to school and then go for a slice of cake with Maggie and then go home to a nice happy place with a new baby sister in it.

  ‘I’m very hungry,’ she said, eventually. ‘Can we have breakfast first?’

  Maggie gave her Sugar Puffs with a strange-shaped plastic spoon and Melody tried her hardest not to spill them down her T-shirt, but a couple landed in her lap and Maggie cleared them off for her with a damp cloth. Nicola and Claire ate toast in their grey school uniforms and were not as noisy as they usually were.

  After she’d dropped the girls off at school, Maggie drove Melody back to Lambeth and stood with her in the little creaky lift as it made its way up to the second floor. Melody reached out and held her hand as they approached the front door of her flat, feeling suddenly shy and nervous. Her dad came to the door. His chin was all furry and his eyes were all red and his T-shirt looked sort of tired and floppy, like an old person’s skin. ‘Hello, sweetpea.’ He leaned down and scooped her up and squeezed her. He smelled like an old tea-towel, but she squeezed him back anyway, because she knew he wanted her to.

  ‘Where’s Mummy?’ she said.

  ‘She’s in bed. Do you want to see her?’

  Melody nodded and he put her down and took her by the hand. ‘Mummy’s very tired,’ he said, ‘and very sad.’

  She nodded again.

  At her parents’ bedroom door she stopped for a moment, because even though she was only four, in some unfathomable way she knew that on this side of the door lay her past and on the other side of that door lay her future and that this was the very last moment she would ever spend in the old order.

  As the door opened and she approached her mother in bed, and saw her funny square hair all squashed flat against her head and her T-shirt all creased and grimy, smiling blankly at her like she’d forgotten who she was, Melody knew she was right.

  She was in a different place now. A different place altogether.

  Chapter 4

  Now

  The strange feeling was there the moment Melody opened her eyes the next day.

  She didn’t mention it to Ed as she couldn’t think of a good enough way to explain it, and it was so fleeting and peripheral that the moment her thoughts turned to anything even slightly distracting she forgot all about it. It was as though someone had opened her up, made a mess in her head and then tidied it all away again before sealing her closed. But they hadn’t quite put everything back in the right place and Melody felt strangely disordered.

  Objects seemed to carry an extra resonance. She stared at her toothbrush for a while before putting it in her mouth that morning, feeling oddly as if it wasn’t hers, but at the same time feeling almost as if she’d only brushed her teeth a moment earlier. Her coffee tasted strange, as though she were tasting it for the very first time and only just noticing the pungent bitterness. When she looked at her reflection that morning, trying to decide whether or not she needed to wash her hair, there was a split second of objectivity, the oddness that accompanies an unexpected sighting of yourself in a shop window. Melody recognised some of the sensations she was experiencing. Ed had only slept for two hours at a time from his six-month birthday until he was eighteen months old and for a year Melody had lived her life in a feathery state of sleep deprivation, the edges of her consciousness constantly blurred, the pull of lag and delay on all her actions and reactions. She had similar feelings now. She felt hollowed out and temporary. She felt wrong.

  The day itself was bright and warm, just like the day before and the day before that, but the breeze outside her bedroom window seemed to have developed an extra auditory dimension, a kind of flat, humming undertone as it whistled through the leaves of the tree outside her windows.

  Her mobile phone called to her from the kitchen counter where she’d left it to charge overnight. The caller ID came up as Unknown, but glad of the distraction she pressed answer. It was Ben.

  ‘Am I too early?’ he asked.

  ‘No, no, it’s fine,’ she replied. ‘I’ve been up for a while.’

  ‘I was just worried about you. Couldn’t really sleep last night. I was thinking about what happened. You don’t think it was anything to do with the trick, do you? Being hypnotised. You don’t think … ?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘That he did something, to your head?’

  ‘What makes you say that?’

  ‘Well, the timing. I mean, you passed out literally as he clicked his fingers. It just seems rather …’

  ‘I know. It’s weird. I feel a bit … weird.’

  ‘You do?’ he asked in a concerned tone. ‘In what way?’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know. A bit undone.’

  ‘Undone?’

  ‘Yes. Like a jigsaw or a ball of wool, or –’ She stopped abruptly. As the words ‘ball of wool’ left her mouth, something flashed through her mind. An image, as bright and focused as real life, a ball of pale blue angora wool in a basket, a small hand, a price sticker that said ‘20p’. As quickly as the image had arrived in her head, it had left. She breathed out.

  ‘Are you OK?’

  ‘Uh-huh,’ she replied, breathlessly.

  ‘Do you think you should see somebody?’

  ‘Like what? A shrink?’

  ‘No. Just a … I don’t know, someone who knows about this kind of thing. Just to be on the safe side.’

  Melody had no intention of seeing anyone about this. She didn’t even know what ‘this’ was yet. ‘No,’ she
said over-brightly. ‘I don’t think it’s that bad. It was probably just a combination of things – you know, wine, nerves, adrenalin.’

  Ben paused. ‘Yeah,’ he said, sounding unconvinced. ‘Probably. But anyway, I just really wanted to make sure you were OK. You went off in such a rush I didn’t really have a chance to say goodbye properly.’

  ‘Yes, sorry about that.’

  ‘And there’s still so much I don’t know about you.’

  ‘Oh, trust me, there really isn’t much to know.’

  ‘Come on, you’re a single mother, you’re a dinner lady …’

  ‘Kitchen assistant.’

  ‘Oh, yes, sorry, kitchen assistant. You live in Covent Garden.’

  ‘On an estate.’

  ‘Yes, but it’s still in Covent Garden. And besides, there’s no such thing as a person without a story. Look, I’d really like to see you again. Without the magic man and the dramatic fainting episodes. Next week, maybe?’

  Melody sat down and moved the phone to her other ear. This was a most unexpected turn of events and she didn’t know how to react.

  Ben took her silence as a rebuff and sighed. ‘Right,’ he said, ‘I see …’

  ‘No!’ Melody replied. ‘It’s just, I didn’t think you’d want to and I’m a bit surprised. That’s all.’

  ‘Well, I don’t know why you’d be surprised,’ he laughed, ‘but if you can get over the shock of someone wanting to take you out for dinner, I’m free on Friday.’

  Ed emerged from his bedroom just then, his thick black hair pressed into furrows and humps, his sinewy teenage chest bare and hairless, thin white legs poking out of a pair of grey jersey boxer shorts. He grunted at her, his normal morning greeting and she smiled and squeezed the back of his neck.

  ‘Erm, I’m not sure about Friday, actually,’ she continued. ‘I think I’ve got something on. I’ll give you a call, shall I, later in the week?’