The Truth About Melody Browne Read online

  ‘Oh, I doubt that very much. Nobody should stay in Broadstairs for ever.’

  And then the vignette disappeared and a name flashed through her thoughts.

  Ken.

  That’s who that man was. The man with the crash helmet and the long fingers and the wise words about regret.

  Ken.

  But before she could grab hold of the memory and make any sense of it, it was gone and she was once more at a pavement table in Bloomsbury staring at a glass of lemonade. She pulled her bag onto her knee and opened it with shaking hands, taking out her cigarettes and lighter, but before she’d even lit it up, she knew she didn’t want it. She dropped the box back into her bag and sighed.

  What was happening to her? She appeared to be going mad. All the signs suggested an encroaching state of insanity. Inexplicable flashbacks. Voices in her head. Paranoia. And a sudden dramatic aversion to coffee and cigarettes.

  But no, there was something more to it than simple madness. Broadstairs. It meant something to her. It had always meant something to her. All her adult life, whenever she heard the name Broadstairs she had a reaction, a sense of nostalgic yearning, as if she’d like to go there. And then Ken. She knew someone called Ken. Ken was someone important. She just couldn’t bring his face to mind. Neither his face nor, indeed, any other detail about him. Except now she had something – a crash helmet. She focused her thoughts on the crash helmet and suddenly she felt a tightness around her skull, a deafening blast of wind in her ears, a rush of adrenalin, a thrill of excitement. And then it was gone.

  She dropped two pound coins on the table and headed home, her lemonade untouched on the table, her head in turmoil.

  Chapter 9

  1977

  Nobody smiled in Melody’s house any more. Not properly. Sometimes, if Melody tried really hard to be funny, her mum might squeeze her lips together and stroke her hair, and her dad smiled quite a lot when they went out together, when it was just the two of them, but at home, under normal circumstances, life was very staid.

  They didn’t have parties any more and friends didn’t come over, not even for tea. But the strange thing was that nobody went around saying things that might make sense of the gloomy atmosphere, like, oh, I miss my dead baby, or, I wish Romany was here and not in that cold hole in the ground. Nobody talked about Romany, so Melody was left to conclude that they weren’t sad about Romany, but that they were sad about her. She tried as hard as she could to make up for whatever it was she’d done to make her parents so sad. She always put her plate in the sink after breakfast and tea, she never splashed in puddles in her school shoes and didn’t make a fuss when her mum brushed the knots out of her hair. But there were some things she couldn’t help, like falling over and laddering her tights, like spilling her milk, like sometimes getting cross when she had to go to bed.

  One day, about three months after baby Romany’s funeral, Melody got very cross about having to go to bed. It was a Friday night, there was no school the next day, and earlier in the afternoon her mum had said specifically, ‘You can stay up late tonight if you like, for being such a good girl.’

  But it seemed that Melody’s idea of late and her mother’s idea of late were incompatible, and even though she had only two more cats to colour in and said so really politely, her mum started shouting at her.

  ‘Why,’ she said, her eyes filled with tears, ‘can’t you just do what I ask you to do? Why?’

  ‘I am,’ began Melody. ‘I just –’

  ‘No “just”, Melody. No buts. Nothing. Please. I do not want to hear another word come out of your mouth. Not one!’

  ‘But –’

  ‘No! Enough! Get to bed now!’

  Sparkles appeared inside Melody’s eyes then, and a big feeling of red and black flooded her head and she screamed at the top of her voice, ‘I JUST WANT TO FINISH MY CATS!!!’

  But instead of screaming back, like she might have done in the past, her mother made a strange choking sound, ran from the room and slammed her bedroom door behind her.

  Melody and her father looked at each other. Then her father put down his newspaper, cleared his throat and knocked gently on the bedroom door. ‘Janie, it’s me.’

  When he had gone in, Melody rested her crayon on her play table and tiptoed towards her parents’ bedroom. She could hear them muttering urgently to each other.

  ‘She’s trying so hard not to annoy you, can’t you see that?’

  ‘I know she is, I know. She’s such a good girl. But I just can’t …’

  ‘What? What can’t you do?’

  ‘I can’t do it any more.’

  ‘Do what?’

  ‘This! Just – this! This life. This family.’

  ‘Janie, we need you. Melody needs you.’

  ‘Exactly. And I can’t take it any more. All the … all the caring. I don’t care any more, John, do you see? I just don’t care! I’ve lost the only thing that matters to me. I’ve lost my innocence.’

  ‘Jane, you’ve lost a baby. But you’ve still got another one. One who needs you. One who loves you.’

  ‘Yes, but she’s not a baby, is she? She’s four years old. I know her. I know her hair. I know her voice. I know that she likes Viscount biscuits and colouring-in and that she prefers your mother to my mother. I know she’s got hazel eyes and legs like yours. I know her. That’s what I’ve lost. Not a baby. Not a child. Potential. I’ve lost potential. All the things I will never, ever know. And it kills me, John, kills me every time I close my eyes.’

  There was a long pause then, and Melody held her breath.

  ‘Melody may not be your only baby, Jane, but you’re her only mother. You need to find a way out of this, because you owe it to her. You owe her a mother.’

  ‘But that’s exactly it. That’s exactly, precisely it! If I can’t be Romany’s mother, then I don’t want to be anybody’s mother at all, do you understand? Nobody’s mother at all.’

  Melody exhaled silently, and very slowly, very quietly, tidied away her crayons and went to bed.

  Chapter 10

  Now

  The summer term finished on Thursday and Melody felt a sense of enormous relief as she left through the school gates that afternoon. Her head was overflowing with memories and ideas. The memories didn’t come in a neat, chronological stream, however. They came in fits and bursts, unconnected to each other, as if someone had taken a pair of scissors to her life, thrown the pieces in the air and let them float slowly back down to earth, scrap by scrap.

  The following day, hoping to put some order to the fragments, Melody packed herself a small bag, dressed herself in jeans and trainers and got on a train to Broadstairs. She stood on the platform at Victoria Station and glanced up and down nervously, almost as if she were expecting someone to appear. A Tannoy message announced the imminent arrival of her train and with the announcement came another memory. Cold, bare hands in her lap. Bobbly, navy tights and a denim skirt. A woman’s voice saying, ‘You’ll have to freeze then.’ A wave of sadness.

  Melody shivered, suddenly cold in spite of the diesel-tinged summer heat.

  She took a window seat on the near-empty train that arrived a moment later. She was hoping that she might see something from here that would give her some sense of direction but the view through the window seemed ordinary and insignificant. It wasn’t until she found herself in Broadstairs town that her subconsciousness began to stir again.

  Broadstairs was a pretty town, full of slender maritime town houses, squat clapboard cottages and stucco Regency villas. The streets were tiny and cobbled, and lined with touristy gift shops with striped awnings. It was the first day of the summer holidays and the town was packed with fresh-faced families. Melody didn’t recognise anything, but she did feel herself being pulled along in a particular direction, as if being led by the hand by an excitable child.

  On the high street she stopped for a moment to peer through the window of a coffee shop. It was old-fashioned, with an ornate Victorian fa�
�ade and gingham curtains strung across the window. She felt a burst of surprise as she stood there, as though she’d just seen something wonderful and surprising. She stood for a while, mesmerised slightly by the way she was feeling and waiting for something to come to her, something colourful and full of explanations. But it didn’t, and she moved along and waited to see where else she would be taken.

  She began to feel a sense of disappointment as she wandered around over the next half an hour or so. She was having no flashbacks and no sense of remembering. She was beginning to think that she was wasting her time, until two things happened within a short time of each other. First of all she saw a house, a tall white house with thin windows and a curved balcony like a sad smile. Her memory opened up and gave her this:

  Rain, soft against her skin like feathers.

  Three seagulls circling overhead, so close she could see the scales on their feet.

  Splat. Like a broken egg. Seagull poo, grey and murky, all over the pavement, just inches from her black plimsolls.

  A doorbell that sounded like a clock chiming.

  And then a man at the door, a man with long hair, shaved bald above the ears, and a kind face.

  He smiled, first at Melody’s companion, and then at her. His eyes were grey and his teeth were white. He was wearing a blue shirt without a collar and baggy linen trousers.

  ‘Hello, Jane,’ he said to her companion, ‘and hello, Melody. Welcome,’ he said, ‘welcome to your new home.’

  She sat down on the kerb for a moment, to steady herself. This was the strongest flashback yet, vivid and overwhelming. Here was fact, strong and irrefutable. She had lived here. With someone called Jane. This had been their home.

  She gazed at the house for a while, drinking in the details, the windows, the door, the freshly painted ironwork. It was a beautiful house, elegant and well cared for, very different from the one that had just presented itself to her in her head. That house had been shabby and run down, its stucco work streaked green, its ironwork peeling and pockmarked. And that man with the long hair. She knew him. She really knew him.

  A notice in the bottom window caught her eye then and she got to her feet.

  ‘Rooms available.’

  She rang the doorbell. A woman of around her own age came to the door. She had a yellow duster and a can of Mr Sheen in her hands and was wearing an apron. She looked distracted and slightly cross.

  ‘Hello,’ said Melody, ‘I was just …’ She paused for a moment, unsure exactly what she was doing.

  The woman stared at her impatiently.

  ‘Do you have a room available?’ Melody asked eventually.

  ‘Yes,’ said the woman brusquely, ‘but only for tonight. We’re fully booked from tomorrow for the rest of the season.’

  ‘Could I see it?’

  ‘Yes. Of course.’

  The woman opened the door and allowed her in. The hallway was neat and elegant, with a tessellated tiled floor and beige walls with lots of framed black and white photos of Broadstairs. The house was double-fronted and doors went off both sides of the entrance hall. Every angle, every corner of the house meant something to Melody, in some unfathomable way.

  ‘It’s only small,’ said the woman, ‘but if it’s just for you, just for one night …’

  ‘Oh, I’m sure it’ll be fine,’ Melody said, hoping she sounded like an ordinary woman doing an ordinary thing, rather than someone in the throes of existential mayhem.

  ‘Have you lived here long?’ she asked the woman.

  ‘Well, we bought the place six years ago, but it took us two years to put it back together.’

  ‘Was it derelict?’

  ‘As good as, yes. It was in a terrible state. We lived in a caravan for over a year.’

  ‘Wow.’ Melody couldn’t imagine this prim, pristine woman living in a caravan. ‘So who was living here before then?’

  ‘No one, as far as we know. It was a squat in the seventies and then the owner reappeared in 1980 to reclaim it, kicked the squatters out, boarded it up and left it to rot. We bought it at auction. An act of love. And madness.’

  She turned and smiled at Melody. ‘OK, well, this is the room,’ she pushed open the door to a small boxroom overlooking the back garden. It was beautifully presented, a cut above the usual guesthouse fare of floral quilts and cheap pine wardrobes. It housed a single bed with a white duvet and pillow case and two black and white cushions, a white French antique bureau and wardrobe and a framed monochrome photo of Paris at night above the bed. The floorboards were stripped and varnished and full of whorls and knots.

  ‘It’s beautiful,’ Melody said, ‘really beautiful. But I’m not sure I can really stay tonight. I think I should really get home. I’ve got a son … I’ve got to …’ She paused as her eye was caught by a particularly large whorl in the floorboards, and there it came again, memory, clear and fresh: a matted sheepskin rug, a scrunched-up paper tissue, floorboards painted brown, a dark bed with someone in it, her own voice, whispering urgently: ‘They’re going to call the police! They’ll put you in gaol! Mum! Don’t you understand?’

  Melody gasped. ‘My mother!’ she whispered, louder than she’d expected.

  ‘Oh,’ said the woman, looking slightly confused. ‘That’s fine.’

  ‘Um, I have to go now,’ said Melody, trying to regain her composure. ‘But thank you.’

  ‘Well, as I say, I am fully booked until the end of summer now …’

  ‘Oh, yes, that’s right. Never mind. Maybe in the autumn?’

  ‘I’ll give you a brochure.’

  Melody let her eyes take in as much details as they could hold as she passed back through the house and down to the entrance hall, but the owners had done such a beautiful job of restoring the house that only the layout offered any sense of remembrance.

  ‘So, this place, when it was a squat – any idea who lived here then?’

  The woman looked at her sadly, as if the very notion of her house ever having been home to something as unsavoury as squatters was too much for her to bear. ‘No idea whatsoever,’ she said sniffily. She handed Melody a very tasteful brochure and saw her to the door. ‘Remember,’ she said, ‘book in advance. We’re busy all year round.’

  Melody turned to leave the house, and that was when she saw him. A man – battered-looking, time-ravaged, bearded and dirty, clutching a can of Diamond White and careening towards her.

  ‘Are you lost?’ he said, breathing putrid cider into her face.

  ‘No, I’m fine,’ she said, trying to get past him.

  ‘You look lost to me. You sure you’re not lost? I can tell you where to go. I’ve lived here since I was seven. I know this place like the back of my hand.’

  The man was of average height and probably only a bit older than her. If he wasn’t so unkempt and so drunk she might have liked to ask him about the town and what it was like when he was growing up.

  ‘No, honestly,’ she said, ‘I’m fine. I’m just wandering.’

  ‘Me too,’ he smiled. His teeth were discoloured but surprisingly straight and intact for a man of the street.

  She smiled back at him, willing him to go away, to leave her alone.

  ‘My name’s Matthew. What’s yours?’

  ‘Mel,’ she said, not wanting to give her full name in case he found it interesting and prolonged the conversation.

  ‘Nice to meet you, Mel. And what brings you to Broadstairs?’

  She shrugged. ‘Just fancied a day away from London,’ she said.

  He smiled again and passed his can of cider from one hand to the other. ‘Nice day for it,’ he said. He looked as though he were planning to join her so she drew herself away from him. He peered at her through slanted eyes, still smiling. ‘Off you trot, then,’ he said.

  She threw him a nervous smile and headed off.

  ‘Nice talking to you!’ he called after her.

  ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘you too.’ She gave him another smile and watched as he turned away from
her. And it was then that it hit her:

  A grubby tennis ball, a brick wall painted white, a painting of a flying boy, the sound of … a cricket? No, not a cricket, but a scratchy noise, like wood being whittled. And a child’s voice saying, ‘Get your mum away from him before she’s giving him baths and having babies for him too.’

  She stopped to catch her breath.

  By the time she’d recovered herself the man called Matthew was gone, swallowed up by the crowds, taking with him, Melody was sure, some vital clue about her childhood.

  Chapter 11

  1977

  Everything about Melody’s old life had been stripped away, not all in one go, but slowly, torturously, layer by layer. First her dad had gone to live in a room in Brixton with mice behind the skirting boards, then her mum had resigned from her job and started getting the dole, which meant that they couldn’t afford things like nice cereal and going to the zoo. Then Melody had been taken out of nursery because her mum couldn’t afford to pay for it and then they’d packed up all their stuff, left the flat in London and moved in with Melody’s aunt Susie, who didn’t have any children and lived in a bungalow on the Kentish coast, just outside Broadstairs.

  Susie was Jane’s oldest sister and she was known as ‘the Quiet One’. She’d never married and had lived in the same rather damp bungalow for twenty years. She read the Bible for fun and experimented a lot in the kitchen. She was also very, very fat and moved so slowly that she rarely left the house. She was only four years older than Jane, but looked like she might be her mother.

  Melody didn’t like staying at Aunt Susie’s house. There was nothing to do and nothing to play with and nothing to see out of the windows, except another bungalow and some ragged hedges. Plus, there was no normal food any more, because Jane couldn’t afford to go shopping so they just ate what Aunt Susie cooked – things with weird names, like rissoles and soufflés and confits and tagines, things with sauces and herbs and blobs of cream, and even, once, with a whole lemon in it. There didn’t seem to be a plan in the offing, or any kind of future goal. Routine, such as it was, revolved around Susie and her church-going and TV viewing. Days spilled over into more slippery days without anything solid to hold on to.