Unchained Melanie

by Judy Astley

  When you’re a grown-up it is permissible to ignore a ringing doorbell if you feel like it. It could be sheer bad manners. It might be a huge mistake if it’s the man from the Premium Bonds with your cheque for one million pounds and an offer of counselling, but it is an option. Melanie thought of this as she picked her way past Rosa’s supermarket boxes of university-ready baggage in the hallway, opened the front door and wished she hadn’t. Sarah (whose favourite phrase was ‘I’m your best friend’, words with which she excused an alarming number of frank personal remarks) stood there brandishing a bottle of champagne (God, another one), a couple of takeout bags from The Good Earth and a sickening sympathetic smile plastered on like too much drunkenly applied lipstick.

  ‘Er, I was just going out.’ Melanie really didn’t want to see anyone. There was still some of the Bollinger, a whole tube of cheese and onion Pringles to be got through without guilt, and for later she’d been looking forward to a whopping great soft fluffy omelette stuffed with crisp little flecks of bacon and some squelchy butter-sizzled mushrooms. It was too late now. Sarah had pushed past her in a flurry of long lion-tinted hair and a waft of Opium and was already in the kitchen, while Mel stood with the door still open as if expecting a retinue of Sarah’s elfin helpers to file in after her.

  ‘You can’t fool me, you know.’ Sarah’s head was slightly on one side and the grin now went rather strangely from north-east to south-west. ‘I know you must be suffering inside. You’re doing Brave Face.’

  Melanie felt herself scowling like a cross child. ‘No, I’m not doing Brave Face, I’m doing Very Happy Face. I’ve just won fifty-six quid on the gee-gees and I was going out to collect my winnings. If Second Honeymoon hadn’t been such an idle nag I’d have netted over a hundred. Still, it was an outsider, it’s what you get.’

  ‘Second Honeymoon?’ Sarah raised her perfectly sculpted eyebrows and pursed her lips. ‘There you are. You were thinking about him. You’re all alone and wallowing in misery while your Roger’s swanning about out there getting married to his little back-office slapper. I knew it. Hug?’

  Sarah’s flabless arms (Melanie couldn’t help thinking of a wingspan, Sarah was so like a long pale bird, an ibis or crane perhaps) stretched all the way from the dishwasher right past the microwave. It was hard to move out of reach, but Mel didn’t fancy a hug. She wasn’t in the slightest need of sympathy so she ducked out of the way and opened the fridge, murmuring, ‘He’s not my Roger. Hasn’t been for ages. In fact I don’t think he’s capable of being anyone’s, not properly. Leonora will find out in time – he’s one of those men who always has one foot out of the door.’

  As there was no chance of Sarah leaving without sustenance, and the smell of the classy Chinese takeout was too tempting, she might as well be hospitable. ‘Here, put your bottle in the ledge thing, I’ve already got one open.’ She unstoppered the Bollinger, poured a glass for Sarah and topped up her own.

  ‘And drinking alone? That’s not a good sign.’ Sarah reached up to the rack beside the sink and took down a couple of plates.

  ‘It’s a perfectly good sign. How insecure and pathetic do you have to be to need the permission of other people’s company when you fancy a glass of something?’ Melanie rummaged in the cutlery drawer. ‘I hope you’ve got some of those sickly little lemon chicken things in that bag.’

  ‘Of course I have. I’ve got the duck and pancakes and the prawn toasts and the pak choi thing with the gloopy sauce. I’m your best friend, I know all your favourites. So what were you doing? Drowning your sorrows?’

  ‘Joining in. If I couldn’t go to the wedding and have a gander at all the frocks and stomp about being the Bad Luck Fairy and upsetting people, I could at least have my share of the booze. I had sweeties instead of cake. Anyway I do wish them well. Now that he’s finally gone and done it he won’t be coming round here every five minutes asking me if he’s doing the right thing, wondering where it all went wrong or if his blue cashmere sweater might still be in the back of the wardrobe.’

  ‘Is that what he was doing? You know that could have been a cry for help, he probably wanted to come back. If you’d played your cards right, Mel, you could have got him back.’

  Mel snorted into her drink. ‘Back? What would I want him back for?’

  ‘Company now that Rosa’s going? Your old age? Sex? To buy you nice little bits and pieces and to go on holiday with and . . .’

  ‘Enough!’ Melanie laughed. ‘All irrelevant, has been for some time, probably since way before Luscious Leonora was on the scene. No, I’m on my own and happy. I’m going to be fine. I’ve done my bit as half a couple. Rosa’s off to university tomorrow so I reckon I’ve also done my bit as the downtrodden parent. From now on I’m going to celebrate being the Whole, Sole, Me.’

  ‘Absolutely.’ Sarah stabbed her fork into a piece of duck. ‘But you won’t want to be the whole sole you for long, you’ll get bored, frustrated and lonely. So now all we have to do is find you some nice new man. I’ll start shopping around for one for you right now.’

  Two

  When Melanie woke up the next morning she stretched out starfish-style in her kingsize steel-framed bed and looked at the telephone on the table beside her. She didn’t need to unplug it at night any more for fear of hearing ‘Hello sweetie, small problem . . .’ from Roger with something on his mind at six in the morning. Time after bloody time she’d told him it was a) too early and b) nothing to do with her any more, but neither message had penetrated his brain. He was so much a creature of habit it still amazed her that he’d broken out of his neat routines (and so frequently too) in order to go about the business of adultery.

  It was now twenty-four hours since his last call. Then he’d been a worried divorcé, still thinking it was a good idea to rely on his ex-wife to get things right for him. Now it was just bliss to know he was safely on his honeymoon a whole continent away, and enormously unlikely to find an excuse to phone. Of course, it could be quite funny (for her, but not for the new Mrs Patterson) if he did: she could just imagine Leonora on the last day of the holiday, scanning the itemized phone calls listed under ‘Extras’ and realizing he’d called his ex-wife on a daily basis. Probably, though, given the age gap, Leonora’s sweet blond little head wouldn’t be allowed to be troubled by the sight of a bill, and she certainly wouldn’t be asked an opinion on whether it would be a better deal to pay with Visa or Amex, as Mel had been over the honeymoon booking.

  Roger’s call on the morning of the wedding had been to ask Melanie if you were supposed to give a present to the young woman acting as Matron of Honour even when it was just a registry office wedding and supposed to be completely informal, and if you were, would a silver yo-yo from Tiffany be all right or should it be something less frivolous, seeing as a wedding was supposed to be quite a serious event. That had been only the last of a constant stream of doubts and questions he’d presented her with ever since he’d moved out all those months ago. She’d been hugely amused by the bit about a wedding being ‘serious’, given that he’d taken a determinedly flighty attitude towards marriage itself. Still, she’d been outstandingly patient with him and his phone calls, even the time he’d phoned late at night (and more than a bit drunk) to ask whether it was usual for pregnant women to feel sick in the evenings instead of the mornings. She’d pointed out at the time that as a way of informing her that his new girlfriend was pregnant it lacked a certain something in the subtlety-and-sensitivity department. His genuinely bemused response of ‘Oh does it? Sorry,’ scuppered any final doubts as to whether she might be better off with rather than without him.

  Sarah really hadn’t got it entirely wrong. Possibly if Melanie had made all the right moves Roger might be lying next to her at this moment under the goosedown duvet. He’d be doing that thing with his foot, the thing she hated, running his calloused sole up and down her calf as if checking how efficient her last leg-waxing had been. He was one of those men who took no notice at all if you mentioned that some
thing annoyed you and would they please stop, which in itself was way up on the List of Annoying Things, possibly at number one. He refused to keep any telephone numbers stored in his head either, even frequently asking Mel, phone already in his hand, for his own mother’s number, as if it was entirely her responsibility to keep track of that sort of thing. Her mother had been completely on his side when she’d grumbled about that one, coming out with her famed, ‘Well, men have so much to think about . . .’ as if it was a wife’s job to scoop up all the sundry bits of domestic information that men couldn’t be bothered to file in their memories and have them ready for instant reference, like an in-brain Psion. Men, of course, had to keep their intellects free for the kind of work that earned the household money.

  Melanie had plenty going on in her own mind, work-wise, but as she didn’t commute daily into central London in a suit, possess a briefcase, a pension fund or a set-in-stone retirement date to look forward to, there wasn’t a hope in hell that her mother would ever call it A Job. Mel shared her working life with an invented woman: Tina Keen, the detective who starred in her novels and earned her a pretty good living. Tina specialized in solving gory murders of unlucky, downtrodden females, women who seemed to have been born victims, few being particularly grief-stricken at their loss, and whose grisly deaths required a stroppy champion like herself so that the men who’d carelessly wiped them out wouldn’t walk free to smack someone else around just that bit too hard. Tina wasn’t as sharp and scathing as Lynda La Plante’s Jane Tennison, nor as forensically blood-soaked (or as bloody-minded) as Patricia Cornwell’s Kay Scarpetta. Nor was her creator anything like as successful, although the work more than paid the bills. Tina was foul-mouthed, feistily bright in a non-academic sort of way and much given to sitting on bar stools and assuming (rightly) that men with recently committed crime on their minds would find it hard to resist dropping telling little hints about their misdeeds, over a couple of gins, to a woman whose legs were well worth looking at. Tina had starred in seven books so far and the eighth, Dying For It, was taking shape in Melanie’s indigo i-Book upstairs in the study that looked out, through gaps between roofs and alleyways, towards the Thames. The room had once and too briefly been the nursery, ready to be decorated for Rosa’s little brother, who had launched himself out into the cold world far too early to survive. A mobile of painted shells she and Roger had bought in Tobago to hang over the cot now chattered and clattered lightly in the draught by the window.

  Cohabiting with Tina was a bit like being a child again and having an imaginary friend. Melanie had invented Tina’s opinions (slightly dated Bolshie left-winger), her dress sense (skirts too tight for all the traditional police-style running about: she left that to the eager young detective constables) and her habit of smoking Panatellas over restaurant tables and being told off by smiling waiters on behalf of outraged but cowardly customers. Sometimes, out on a supermarket foray, Mel would drift off into Tina mode and start pulling from the shelves the kind of food her creation kept stocked in her fictional fridge. At the checkout she’d then wonder if she’d somehow appropriated the wrong trolley, as she unloaded onto the conveyor belt packets of chocolate finger biscuits (for dunking into strong black coffee and sucking at rudely among impressionable male colleagues), giant bags of oven chips (‘virtually fat-free!’) and luridly packaged yogurts as well as magazines full of soap-opera gossip and shimmer-tights in vibrant American tan. Once, contemplating the research involved if Tina had to investigate the macabre murder of a slimming-club leader, she’d been caught by her neighbour Perfect Patty from number 14 sitting in the car park munching her way through a box of miniature doughnuts.

  ‘That your secret vice then?’ Patty had called, as she’d strolled past pushing her virtuous trolley full of organic veg and free-range pasta.

  ‘No, I’m thinking of joining Shape Sorters. Just fattening up first,’ Mel had replied, realizing too late how little sense this made. Patty (sprayed-on jeans and skimpy lilac cardi) simply smirked, which Mel hadn’t found too complimentary. Surely, by the woman-as-sister code, Patty should be protesting Mel’s perfect slenderness and absolute lack of need to lose weight. OK, Mel had thought, wait till the next time she needs to borrow the drain rods . . .

  Rosa had once dared to be a bit sniffy about Tina. ‘Why’ve you made her such a gruesome old slag? You’ll never get a telly series if you don’t glam her up a bit,’ had been her scathing words, catching Melanie at just the wrong moment.

  ‘Because even old slags can have brains and intuition. This one’s not only a shit-hot detective, she’s paying all our bills and she’ll put you through university, so a bit more respect please. And as for telly, she’s biding her time, she’ll get there.’ Melanie had sounded surer than she was, defending her creation, for Tina really was a bit rough round the edges and her language was frankly only suitable for Channel Five, late night. It was a sore point: seven books down the line and not one had been optioned for so much as a pilot. ‘It’ll need some work . . .’ her agent, Dennis, had said, without specifying exactly what sort of work he had in mind and whether it was down to Mel to do it, or someone else with TV-adaptation experience.

  On this first morning of Roger-removed freedom, Mel shoved her huge white and black cat, Jeremy Paxman, off her legs and onto the floor so that she could climb out of bed. Now she was to be living entirely by herself without Rosa to wait up for at night, or needing to worry about whether she’d gone out and left her room full of burning candles, it occurred to her she could go on a course, learn the business of screenwriting and sort out Tina Keen’s future for herself. Meanwhile, there was Rosa to prise from beneath her duvet. This was the day she was leaving for Plymouth – the mountain of bags and boxes in the hallway had to be loaded into the car. There would be arguments about what was to be left behind (for it surely wouldn’t all fit into the Golf, even with the back seats down and parcel shelf out), some last-ditch bickering about money and then several hours of driving listening to music at a level that would shred her brain. Still, there was the wedding to discuss. If Rosa could be persuaded to part with information without Mel feeling like a Gestapo interrogator, that should keep them going almost as far as Exeter.

  * * *

  ‘What time is Rosa leaving?’ Melanie’s mother Gwen phoned as Mel was getting her chocolate croissant out of the oven.

  Melanie looked quickly at the clock on the front of the microwave. It was already nearly ten and Rosa’s thumpy footsteps had not yet been heard overhead, nor had water from the shower dripped through the ceiling lights onto the worktop – why did a plumber’s promise to turn up on any given Thursday always come with the sinister rider ‘All being well . . .’?

  Mel replied, crossing her fingers that it would turn out to be true, ‘In about two hours I should think. Did you want to say goodbye to her? Shall I call her down?’

  There was a sharp intake of breath down the phone. ‘Oh no! No! Just tell her I phoned, tell her good luck and to have a lovely time and work hard. I would send her a card, but you haven’t given me her new address yet, so I can’t.’

  Melanie smiled to herself. ‘You could have just sent it here.’ She wished she hadn’t said that; whatever her mother had decided was the right thing to do, there was no point in suggesting anything different.

  ‘No dear, that wouldn’t have done at all. It’s so nice to have mail waiting for you when you move, it makes you feel at home. Just tell her what I said and that I’ll be writing to her soon.’ There followed a very firm click, as if the phone hadn’t quite been slammed down at the other end but had come pretty close to it. Melanie took herself to the mirror in the understairs cloakroom, forced herself to breathe evenly and calmly and arranged her face into a smile, trying to relax the tense grimace out of it.

  She asked herself: a) why she felt she’d been told off and b) what on earth her mother thought she knew about moving house, she and Howard having occupied their leaded-light mock-Tudor house with its pretend cat s
talking a bird on the porch roof since 1961. Conversations with her mother often affected her like this, leaving her feeling wound up and ludicrously frustrated, as if she was on the losing end of some word game for which the rules hadn’t quite been explained.

  ‘You need to let your anger go, take it to the mirror, watch yourself relaxing, setting it free, and replace it with inner, centred, calm,’ Yvonne the masseuse at the gym had said the last time she’d attempted to knead a wodge of tension out of her shoulder blades. Reinterpreting it later, Mel had wondered if Yvonne had simply wanted her to shut up and listen to the whale music and leave her in peace to get on with her job, so she could drift away mentally to plan her holiday wardrobe.

  Back in the kitchen, as centred and calmed as she was going to be for now, Melanie shoved half the cooling croissant into her mouth, choking slightly and sending a scattering of crumbs to the floor, which Jeremy Paxman pounced on and licked up greedily. Thoughts of her mother were still kicking about at the edges of her mind. Gwen Thomas tended to regard her older daughter as someone who had constantly failed to be the good example she should have been setting to her younger sister. She needn’t have worried though, Vanessa had inherited all the conformist genes that were available in the pool and was, as Rosa had pointed out, so close to a clone of her mother that secret scientific pioneering could not be ruled out. Mel had a quick gleeful moment anticipating showing her parents and sister her garden when its makeover was finished, their horrified incredulity at the lack of flowers, lawn, bedding plants, proper British shrubs. They would chorus, ‘Oh what a shame!’ as if a gang of vicious vandals rather than the expert Max from Green Piece had ripped out and destroyed the shrivelled lavender and rooted out the matted clematis. They would predict gloom and failure for the graceful palms and chunky spiked agaves. Melanie, crossing her fingers briefly, hoped the climate wouldn’t prove them right and that she wasn’t relying too heavily on global warming not being a spiteful rumour.