The Truth About Melody Browne Read online

  ‘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.’

  Chapter 13

  1989

  ‘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.

  Chapter 14

  Now

  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.

  ‘Hello! Hello! Sorry I’m late!’ Stacey leaned in for a hug, breathing her last inhalation of tobacco all over Melody and gripping her arms with thin fingers. ‘The tube stopped in a tunnel at Bethnal Green for eight minutes. Thought I was going to faint, so hot down there.’

  They marched into Selfridges and towards the luxury goods department on the ground floor.

  ‘So,’ said Melody, ‘what are you getting for Cleo?’

  ‘She wants a Mulberry something or other,’ she said, reaching into her handbag and pulling out a piece of paper. ‘A Mulberry Bayswater,’ she read. ‘Over here.’ They walked towards the Mulberry concession and asked the assistant, who, to her credit, didn’t look at all fazed by the two of them in their Primark and New Look and Nice’n Easy home-dyed hair.

  ‘God, is that it?’ Stacey looked at the bag disdainfully. It was chestnut brown leather with a flap and two handles. It was beautiful. But Stacey had a penchant for anything with a logo on it. She couldn’t see the point in spending hundreds on a bag if it didn’t have something written on it to tell the casual observer where it had come from. She turned the bag this way and that, trying to find something redeeming in it, but failed. She pulled her purse out of her bag and began peeling fifty-pound notes out, one by one, into the assistant’s upturned hand. ‘Fuck a duck,’ she muttered.

  Melody didn’t want to ask where the money had come from. Stacey always seemed to have just enough money for whatever she needed, and not a penny more, and always in crisp new notes. So if she needed new shoes, she had £50, if she needed fags she had a fiver and if she wanted two weeks in an all-inclusive resort in the Dominican Republic then she had £2,500. It was as if she had some magic money pot hidden away somewhere.

  ‘Well, that’s me done. What about you? What you getting for Eddie?’

  ‘Oh, guess.’

  ‘An iMac?’

  ‘Yes, an iMac.’

  ‘You could get it cheaper on-line, you know?’

  ‘Yeah, I know, but I never go on-line, do I? And this is more fun, anyway. Also, I want to get him something special too – you know, something he can keep for ever.’

  Stacey raised her eyebrows at her. She always teased Melody for her sentimentality, her need for every single object to mean something. ‘Get him a watch.’

  She wrinkled her nose. ‘He’s got a watch. I was thinking of something more … I don’t know, something like a pen.’

  ‘A pen? What does he want a pen for?’

  ‘I don’t know. Just to keep. Just to have. So that he can think of me, you know.’

  ‘Why don’t you get him a tattoo, instead? “MUM”. In a heart.’ Stacey made the shape of a heart with her hands, then nudged Melody and laughed. ‘Kids today don’t want stuff to keep, Melody. They just want stuff to use. Instant gratification. Get him a bottle of Calvin Klein. And a bag of draw.’ She nudged her again and they made their way to the electronics department.

  Melody felt slightly deflated as they sat down half an hour later, surrounded by yellow bags, at the sushi bar in the food hall. She felt hollow and robbed of something but she wasn’t sure exactly what it was. This was her only child’s eighteenth birthday. She wanted more for him than a box full of gadgets. She wanted meaning. It was different for Stacey. Cleo wasn’t her only child. She still had Charlie and Clover to live for. She could give her firstborn a leather bag and know that there was more to come, more meaning, more milestones. But for Melody, this was the end of the road.

  ‘So,’ said Stacey, pulling a plate of noodles off the conveyor belt and breaking open a pair of chopsticks, ‘have you heard from your man again?’

  ‘Yeah,’ said Melody, eyeing the plates passing clockwise and anticlockwise before her without enthusiasm. ‘He’s texted me a few times.’

  ‘And? You going to see him again? Do you like him?’

  ‘He’s all right,’ she said, reaching absent-mindedly for a bowl of chicken teriyaki and taking off the plastic dome. ‘He’s a bit …’

  ‘What? Nice? Kind? Good?’

  ‘No, well, yes, he is all that, but he’s just a bit … middle class.’

  Stacey snorted with laughter. ‘But so are you!’

  ‘No I’m not!’

  ‘Course you are. Look at you! And anyway, being “middle class” is not a good enough reason not to want to go out with someone.’

  ‘He plays squash, Stace. Squash. I mean, who the fuck plays squash?’

  ‘OK, I’ll grant you that. Squash is a bit, you know. But on the plus side, means he’s fit. Anyway,’ she sighed, ‘this is just you, Melody Browne, doing what Melody Browne does best. Keeping yourself safe. Keeping those gates locked. Keeping it all out. But I tell you this, Mel, as your best friend, you’re not getting any younger. Your boy’ll be off soon and then it’ll be just you. Just Melody. And unless you think that’s enough to keep you going for the next forty or however many years, then that’s fine. But if you don’t, well,’ she paused, ‘you need to spread your horizons a bit wider. You need to stop making excuses. And I say that,’ she laid a gentle hand upon Melody’s arm, ‘as your best friend in all the world because all I want is what’s best for you.’

  ‘I’m late,’ said Stacey, over coffee and pancakes later that afternoon.

  Melody could tell from the look on her face that she wasn’t talking about the time. ‘What, you mean … ?’

  ‘Yeah, only four days, but you know me, regular as clockwork. Only times I’ve ever been late have been when I was pregnant.’

  ‘Oh my God, Stace, are you … was it planned?’

  Stacey shook her head and pulled her cigarettes out of her handbag. ‘No, but it wasn’t unplanned.’

  ‘Are you going to … ?’

  ‘Keep it? Yeah, I reckon. Haven’t decided yet for sure, but it would be nice wouldn’t it, a little brother or sister for Clove, stop her turning into the spoiled baby? And my contract is up in March anyway. I don’t know, what do you think?’

  Melody breathed in. ‘God, yeah, of course! Funny, I always thought of Clover as your happy accident, you know, but of course, you should have another one, definitely. It would be so nice for Clover.’

  ‘She wouldn’t know what had hit her.’ Stacey lit a cigarette and Melody glanced at her.

  ‘I’m giving up after I’ve done the test,’ she said defensively. ‘But God, the thought of being pregnant again, so scary. And I’m older now …’

  ‘You’re only thirty-four!’

  ‘Yeah, but still. I could feel the difference with Clove compared to the big ones, and I don’t know where we’ll put it.’

  ‘Put it in a drawer!’ Melody smiled at her friend. ‘By the time it grows out of the drawer Cleo will probably have moved out.’

  ‘Yeah, you’re right, I suppose. But still, another ba
by, Mel. Another baby.’

  Melody took her time walking home that afternoon. It was perfect walking weather, dry, bright and cool, and London, away from the tourist-laden pavements of Oxford Circus, was still and peaceful. Stacey’s words kept echoing through her head as she walked. ‘Another baby. Another baby.’ They brought a song to her mind, a song from her youth that played round on a loop with every few paces: ‘All that she wants is another baby.’

  Melody loved babies. She loved their formless faces and doughy thighs, their tiny skulls and pathetic sloping shoulders. But babies scared her too. They were so tenuous, diaphanous. One mistake, one missed breath, one blow to the head and they were gone. And babies, Melody believed, could take with them an entire life’s worth of happiness. After Ed was born she’d suffered from what was now known to be post-natal depression. From the moment she realised the depth of her love for her new son and the power he held inside each and every tiny breath to devastate her life, she began obsessing about the myriad ways in which he could die, pictured herself harming him in some way: letting him go under the water in the bath, letting go of his pushchair at the top of a hill, falling down the concrete stairs of her flat with him in her arms. But worse than that was her fear that someone would take him away from her. Every time the phone rang she thought it would be someone from the social services telling her that they were coming for him; when a kindly lady in the supermarket held his tiny hand, she pulled away, fearing that she was about to snatch him from her. She didn’t tell anyone how she was feeling, not even Stacey, who had seemed to be having a completely different experience with the infant Cleo.

  When Ed was ten months old he’d fallen off the sofa. Melody heard the sickening thud from the kitchen where she was preparing his tea. She rushed into the living room and found Ed lying on the floor, on his back, beaming at her. His own sense of pride in his part in the accident, his delight at finding himself one moment on the sofa, the next on the floor, had at first disgusted her and then, the moment after, unburdened her. Her baby could fall! He could fall and still exist!