Unchained Melanie

by Judy Astley

  ‘Sorry,’ he mumbled. ‘Forgot – Mum said you had someone coming.’

  ‘It’s all right, Ben. Come in.’ She stepped aside and he came into the hallway, clutching a couple of school files.

  ‘Lot of work on?’ she asked him, pointing at the files. He was looking twitchy, shuffling from foot to foot and not meeting her eyes.

  ‘Er . . . actually . . .’ he started, then hesitated, his face twisting with the effort of choosing words.

  ‘What’s wrong?’

  ‘It’s Mum. She’s spying on me, watching where I’m going.’

  ‘Well, she thinks you come here. Has she said something?’ The odd conversation in the delicatessen came into her mind. Perhaps Patty had caught on that her son was seeing more of Canadian Lee-Ann than Rosa’s computer.

  ‘I told her I was coming here to do some work and she started clucking about the place, going on. I mean you’d think she’d be glad I was getting on with it, wouldn’t you?’ He shrugged. ‘Dunno what her problem is. Thing is, though . . .’ He hesitated, giving her a sideways glance. ‘She was watching me so I couldn’t, like, go straight to Lee-Ann’s. And I’m s’posed to be meeting her.’ He speeded up now, sure he was safe from being interrupted. ‘So would it be OK if I just go out your back door and through the fence gate into hers?’

  At that moment the doorbell rang again. ‘Of course it is, hang on, though, the latch is a bit tricky. I’ll come and . . . just let me . . .’ She opened the door. Neil was on the step, clutching several Sainsbury’s bags. He followed her and Ben into the kitchen, and Mel opened the back door. By the time she’d seen Ben safely through the side gate, Neil had unloaded a feast’s worth of goodies and was searching in the drawer by the sink. ‘Bottle opener?’ he asked.

  Eleven

  Mel didn’t have a hangover – that was a surprise. Between them, she and Neil had got through two and a half bottles of wine, so if she was feeling OK she was willing to bet Neil had an absolute stonker of a headache. One of the bottles had been champagne, though, which she didn’t really count, from a longstanding and potentially dangerous habit of classing all fizzy drinks in the same harmless category as Coca-Cola. Neil had brought it with him. ‘To celebrate,’ he’d said, which was rather sweet, as they were both way past the age for getting excited at a bottle full of bubbles.

  ‘So . . . tell us everything!’ Sarah and Cherry were waiting in Costa Coffee for Mel to give them a full and unexpurgated account of her evening.

  ‘You two, it’s like being with a pair of teenagers!’ she said, sipping the powder from the froth on her hot chocolate. ‘Anyone would think none of us had ever spent an evening with a man before!’

  ‘We don’t do hot dates any more – so you’re having to do it for all of us. We’re therefore entitled to details,’ Sarah insisted.

  ‘I don’t want to do hot dates,’ Cherry said with a slight shudder. ‘Can’t think of anything worse, in fact.’

  ‘So you won’t want to know, then . . .’ Mel teased.

  ‘Well, of course I do!’ she said. ‘So go on . . . did you end up in bed with him . . . again?’

  Sarah turned to her, puzzled. ‘Again?’

  Mel groaned. ‘Thanks, Chezz.’

  ‘You mean you still haven’t told Sarah? Oh, me and my big mouth! Sorry!’ Cherry was wide-eyed. Mel suspected she was overdoing the innocence. Betrayal: that’s what best friends are for, she thought, wondering when would be a good moment to let Sarah know that Cherry’s idea of fun was injecting pungent preservatives into dead wildlife.

  ‘You had sex with Mr Nicholson (geography)? When?’ Sarah demanded. A pair of baby-encumbered women at the next table had tuned in and were listening shamelessly. One was tucking her hair behind her ears for maximum reception. Freed from full attention, their infants launched themselves from lap to table. One slammed a fat fist into the sugar bowl, the other dabbled its fingers and the end of a pink woolly sleeve in puddles of slopped coffee.

  ‘Um . . . at the reunion.’

  ‘But how? Where? When?’

  ‘I’ll say it fast and just once, which is just the way it happened. It was in the old sanny, remember, that scary little cell of a room with no windows? And it was while you lot were down in the hall singing “Jerusalem” and hearing the old headmistresses talking about their glory days. There’s nothing more to tell, honestly, except I now know why it’s called a “quickie”. I’m not exactly proud of myself but it was a useful experiment. Quite fun, too.’

  The women on the next table briskly mopped their babies and gathered their buggies and handbags together noisily and speedily. Mel brazenly stared them out as they gave her many not-quite-covert glances. She half-expected them to put their hands over their children’s ears, to protect them from further corrupting revelations.

  ‘How to clear a café in thirty seconds,’ she said after they’d swiftly manoeuvred the buggies out of the door and given her sly backward looks.

  ‘So when you came to supper the night your skirt went up in flames . . .’ Sarah was putting two and two together.

  ‘Yes, I’m sorry. But you were so excited about thinking you’d set up a big surprise, I couldn’t just come out with it, could I?’

  ‘Well, not with exactly what you’ve just told us, no – I can quite see that, but . . . oh, never mind. But from now it’s truth time, OK?’

  ‘Brownies’ honour,’ Mel agreed, humbly. ‘Anyway, in case you’re still keen to know, Neil cooked a delicious chicken tarragon thing with cream and wine.’

  ‘So fattening . . .’ Sarah interrupted, putting her hand to her concave stomach.

  ‘And we had lots to drink and a silly chat about When We Were Young and old teachers from school, that kind of stuff. It was weird, you know, it was almost as if he’d been one of the pupils, not a teacher. I don’t think he ever identified himself with the folks on the far side of the staffroom door.’

  ‘Well, he was always like that, wasn’t he,’ Sarah agreed. ‘You almost expected to find him smoking behind the bugs lab like we did. He was the only gorgeous bloke in a girls’ school. Men have fantasies about situations like that. But anyway, what happened and are you seeing him again?’

  ‘He’s coming to put up my shelves. I didn’t want him to but he was very insistent. I can do that, I’ve got a neat little Black and Decker, but that’s one of those things they never can believe. Nothing sexy happened – truly; I poured him into a taxi at half past twelve. End of evening.’

  As the drink disappeared and midnight approached, Neil had been closing in on the sofa. Just when he was near enough for her to pick up the scent of rosemary soap and wayward intentions, Ben had rapped on the window, keen to retrace his steps and go back home by way of the door he’d arrived through. His mother was bloody paranoid, he’d said. He wouldn’t put it past her to be sitting outside in the car waiting for him to slink home from the pub with his mates and then lie to her. If there’d been a spell to break, Ben had done it pretty effectively.

  On his way out Neil had spotted a flat-pack box waiting to be dealt with. It was a truth universally acknowledged by most men, it had occurred to Mel as she’d climbed into bed, switched on her TV and snuggled down with Jeremy Paxman purring cosily across her feet, that a woman who lived alone couldn’t possibly put up a shelf. If only they thought it through, the lone women were the ones most likely to be able to.

  Christmas was sneaking across the town, shop by shop. Melanie wondered if it was a sign of age to seethe about its appearance before November 5th was over. That was the sort of thing her mother tut-tutted about, even though Gwen would also have had, for at least a month by now, a juicily traditional Christmas cake secure inside greaseproof paper, foil and Tupperware in the cupboard. It would be reverently taken out each Sunday morning to have its bottom pierced with a knitting needle (size 3 mm) and the holes saturated with brandy. When Mel was a child, the same bottle had been brought out several years in a row, but now, with her father’s new-found taste for
drink, she wondered if her mother was discovering the level going down faster than any cake could absorb it.

  Mel had only once made a Christmas cake. She’d been going through a Happy Families phase in which she assumed that if she did all those proper, traditional, wifey things, as if she was following instructions as per some 1950s situation comedy, her marriage would be magically repaired. Roger had never quite understood that most wives tended to expect fidelity in a husband, and that if this wasn’t forthcoming they regarded the relationship as a damaged one. His idea of being faithful was to sleep at home each night. That anyone might object to anything he got up to off the domestic premises never failed to be a genuine mystery to him.

  Melanie thought of Leonora, newly married and glowing with joyous optimism. She, full of her baby and fruitful thoughts, would certainly have made a Christmas cake – Roger had hinted that Leonora more than made up for Mel’s domestic deficiencies. Odd, she’d considered, in one so young: perhaps she’d read a self-help book about how to keep a second-hand husband and decided that good old-fashioned homecraft could be the key. Cake-wise, Leonora would have followed Delia Smith to the letter and be planning an intricate design for the icing by now. She would have drawn it out on graph paper. There would be a timetable for The Big Day and she’d be thumbing through magazines that were far too old for her in search of ideas for table decorations. In her bitchier moments, Mel imagined her keeping a ring-bound folder, as if her first married Christmas was a school project. It would be decorated with pink Hello Kitty stickers.

  Melanie’s cake had never been eaten. Her mother had arrived on Christmas Day toting her Tupperware box containing her own cake (‘I know you won’t have made one, Melanie’), followed by Vanessa with yet another cake in a tin with a picture of Balmoral Castle on the lid. ‘Never mind, it’ll keep,’ both Vanessa and Gwen had said of Mel’s offering, not giving a second’s thought to the possibility of taking theirs home again. But it hadn’t kept, not really. She had been careless with the wrapping and it had been discovered weeks later, rotting pungently at the back of the dresser cupboard, a pale blue-grey mould crusting its iced top quite prettily. Roger had sneered and declared this ‘typical’, by which she realized that the domestic disinterest that he’d originally considered refreshing and charming now thoroughly annoyed him. He was like a scratch card, she thought: scrape away the potentially exciting surface and beneath you’d find nothing more than a man who longs to be mummied. And of course there were no prizes for that.

  She’d have to sort out the Christmas thing. There were two possibilities: either forget about it and simply endure the day at Vanessa’s, or arrange something thrilling and non-festive far, far away from it all. She’d ask Rosa.

  * * *

  Mel hadn’t climbed into any kind of truck since she’d been a teenager and had hitch-hiked with her friend Anna to visit Anna’s boyfriend at Magdalen College in Oxford. That time she’d worried about being a gooseberry – about what she was to do all day while Anna and Gerry took to his grubby single bed and made up for several weeks of lost groping time. Anna, fearful of hitching alone, had bribed Mel to come with her, giving her unlimited borrowing rights over her fabulous Mr Freedom lime-green velvet jeans with purple contrast stitching. Mel thought of these as she settled in the seat next to Max. How confident, how long and thin and sod-you-all she must have been to strut the streets in such a garment. How safe she played it these days (apart from the tragically ruined net skirt), when all trousers (apart from ancient comfort jeans), an unwritten past-forty rule told her, had to be black.

  ‘Ready?’ Max asked, switching on the engine.

  ‘Ready,’ she agreed, fastening the seat belt. It was her credit card they both referred to. A trip out to buy a garden’s worth of palms and exotics, well-grown enough to survive a British winter, was something that she’d needed to brace herself for financially.

  The cab of Max’s pickup truck was identifiably Max. It was untidy but not filthy, the dashboard had recently been dusted but fresh mud and curled-up crispy leaves were scattered on the floor mats. From the rear-view mirror, where a cab driver would hang a pungent citrus air freshener, there dangled a twiggy bunch of dried rosemary and sage. Hundreds of tickets from the borough’s parking machines were stuck around the windscreen, a deliberate ploy to confuse and delay the district’s tyrannical traffic wardens. In the gap in front of the gear stick was a collection of cassette tapes – not music but radio favourites: Alan Bennett’s Talking Heads, she noticed, along with an old Hancock series (same one she had) and some Alan Partridge and Dead Ringers episodes. There was no hint of wife or family – no photos, no forgotten dolls, Pokémon cards or plastic aliens poking out from under the seats.

  Max was a bossy road user, steering his truck in and out of traffic lanes as if it was a hot baby hatchback. Melanie’s braking foot instinctively shoved its way to the floor, hard, as they raced round a corner and pulled up sharply behind a line of cars.

  ‘You’re surely not nervous?’ Max laughed.

  ‘Course not, it’s just force of habit. It’s ages since I was driven by someone else,’ Melanie told him. ‘You tend to think you’re still in charge of the vehicle.’

  ‘You do, you mean. I love being driven. I just relax and let whoever’s driving take me where and how they will. I figure they don’t actually want to die, so they’ll get us to where we’re going just as safely as I would.’

  ‘I must be some kind of control nut, then,’ Mel conceded.

  ‘Yes, you probably are.’ He was looking straight ahead, concentrating on whether the hesitant Cherokee Jeep in front of them was intending to turn at the left filter, so she couldn’t see if his eyes had their trademark mocking look or not. What she could see was his soil-encrusted hand on the wheel. Even when he’d washed them his hands kept a mildly muddied tone, as if the lines on them had been lightly tattooed with soft pale earth. His clothes were the same: earthy but not unclean. He never smelled repulsively sweaty but you wouldn’t catch a hint of biological detergent either. There was something sort of . . . organic was the word that came to mind, about him. She didn’t know which newspapers he read (a fair guess would be not the Daily Mail), didn’t know anything of his past: not his education, marital arrangements, sexual orientation, nothing. He was just there in her garden, being a perfectly integrated part of the outdoors, smoking neat but skinny roll-ups and passing the odd friendly comment with the cat and the stroppy robin that turned up every time a spade hit the earth. He didn’t ask questions about her, either – he was the first person she’d come across since she’d been living alone who hadn’t questioned her situation. Perhaps he was just like her, completely content to have a solitary existence and assuming it was as normal as cosy coupledom. As they neared the Palm Centre, she caught herself watching his left leg as it operated the clutch pedal. The thigh was long, encased in denim, at the end of which was an ancient sheepskin boot that had once been purple. She watched the muscles tense and relax as he changed gear. It had been raining and there was a misty, oily scent of damp wool from his sweater.

  ‘Hey, wake up, we’re there.’ Max was grinning at her as he turned the truck round a sharp bend and pulled up outside a vast glasshouse. Mel, caught daydreaming, was flustered and fumbled with her seat belt. Max took her hand in his, moved it away and unfastened the catch. ‘You were miles away,’ he said. ‘What were you thinking about?’

  ‘Oh, er, nothing. The dreaded Christmas, just stuff like that.’

  ‘Not going to spend it with your new man, then?’

  ‘Don’t!’ Mel could hear her voice sounding fiercely defensive. ‘I haven’t got a new man. Or an old one.’

  ‘Just kidding!’ Max opened the door and slid to the ground. ‘Want a hand out or are you too independent for that as well?’

  But Mel was already out, gazing round at a row of towering Cordylines. Across the path was a massive Queen palm in the biggest pot she had ever seen, its huge, graceful stems waving gently
in a breeze that must surely be too chill for it.

  ‘It would be easy to feel bad about this,’ Melanie said to Max as they walked towards the covered section where the Phoenix palms were kept. ‘These poor plants have been kidnapped from their natural habitat and forced to survive in a hostile climate. It’s beginning to feel like keeping an exotic animal caged up in an inadequate vivarium with lights instead of sunshine.’

  ‘Oh God, are you one of those people who thinks plants have souls?’ Max groaned. ‘Because if you are, I wish I’d known sooner. I’d have ticked the box marked “nutter” the first day I met you and never come back.’

  Melanie laughed. ‘I’m not even sure that people and animals have souls.’

  ‘Ah, but you might think plants are superior beings to them.’

  ‘Well, some of them are better-looking . . .’

  ‘Thanks a lot! I mean, I know I’m a scruffy sod but I think I compare OK to a turnip.’

  ‘Only just, mate, only just. Come on, let’s spend lots of money.’

  And it was lots of money. If Melanie ever let her mother know that she’d spent nearly £2,500 on plants all in one go, she was sure Gwen would drop dead on the spot. Dying For It was going to have to sell in untold quantities if she had any plans to repeat this kind of cash offload. It felt far more exciting than a tour of posh clothes shops. She was buying something that she’d never be bored with, that would make itself at home and grow (fingers crossed) and fill her garden space.

  ‘Think of it as a piece of art, sculpture or something,’ Max said as she looked, with some dismay, at the final tally.

  ‘I am, I am. Though a big metal Anthony Gormley wouldn’t keel over and die on me,’ she said.

  ‘It might rust, though, given time. Everything’s got its lifespan.’

  Pink ‘Reserved’ tags had been placed round the sturdy stems of a good selection of plants, ready for delivery. From the glasshouse Mel had also chosen agaves in various forms, fat-leaved, lethally spiky succulents that were reputed to be easy-going about cold weather, and a selection of phormiums ranging from almost shocking pink (just the colour she needed to recover her ancient chair) to a deep murky maroon. Banana plants, which Mel fancied to fill in gaps, would have to wait now till the spring.