by Lisa Jewell
He did.
And so the journey began.
Chapter 2
Now
Melody Browne lived in a flat in a Victorian block squeezed between Endell Street and Neal Street right in the middle of Covent Garden.
She lived with Edward James Browne, not her husband, but her seventeen-year-old son. Their flat was small and sunny, and had no garden, but a balcony overlooking a central courtyard. Having a flat in Covent Garden was not purely the preserve of the very rich. Camden Council owned large swathes of property in the area and Melody had been fortunate enough to have been offered one of their flats when she’d found herself a single mother at the age of fifteen. She and Ed had lived here alone, together, ever since, and the flat had taken on the look of a home that had evolved through times of change and growth. It was a home with layers and piles. They still had the same sofa that they’d been given by a charity for teenage mums when they moved in seventeen years ago, covered with a throw that she’d found in a charity shop when Ed was about ten and now decorated with smart cushions she’d bought from Monsoon in the sale two years ago when she won seventy-five pounds on the lottery.
Melody had bought pot plants when Ed was tiny. In the nineties everybody had pot plants. Most of them had died but one still remained, strong and determined and really quite ugly, sitting on a chipped saucer ringed with rust marks and ingrained dirt. If Melody were to move to a new flat the plant would go, but it was such a part of the fabric of the home she’d known for seventeen years that she didn’t see it any more.
The same was true of the piles of paperwork underneath her bed, Ed’s old trainers in the hallway, which hadn’t fit him since he was fifteen, and the ugly framed painting of a Spanish dancer on her bedroom wall that had come with her from her childhood home.
Melody’s home would not win any prizes for interiors, but it was warm and comfortable, and filled with the smell and feel of her and her son. It was a treasure box of memories; photographs, souvenirs, postcards pinned to a cork board. Melody and her son had grown up together in this flat and she wanted, consciously or not, to make sure that not one iota of that experience ended up in landfill. She wanted it all to hand, every friend’s visit, every school play, every Christmas morning, every last memory, because memory was something that Melody valued more than life itself.
Melody dressed carefully that night, the night her life both ended and began. Melody rarely dressed carefully, because she had no interest in clothes at all. Half the time she wore her son’s clothes. She didn’t go anywhere, apart from to work as a dinner lady at the school where Ed had been a pupil up until finishing his A levels last month, and she didn’t have enough money to buy anything nice, so she just didn’t bother. But today she’d been to Oxford Street, to the big branch of Primark, and spent thirty-five hard-earned pounds, because tonight she was meeting a man, her first proper date in eight years.
Melody pulled a necklace from her jewellery box, a pear-shaped pendant in jet and onyx hanging from a thick silver chain, one of the few things she had left of her mother. She looped it over her head and turned to face Ed who was watching her from the corner of her bed. He was wearing a white polo shirt, the collar turned up and a silver chain around his neck. His black hair was cropped and glossy with something out of a tube, his eyes were navy blue and his profile was Roman. He had been the best-looking boy in the sixth form: that wasn’t just her opinion, it was the opinion of half the girls at his school, and Melody knew it because she heard them whispering it when they thought no one who cared could possibly be listening.
He smiled and gave her the thumbs up. ‘You look hot,’ he said.
‘Thank you for lying,’ she said.
‘I’m not, honest. You look really good.’
‘Well, lying or not, I love you for it.’ She squashed his cheeks between her hands and kissed him loudly on the lips.
‘Urgh!’ he said, wiping his mouth with the back of his hands. ‘Lip gloss!’
‘I bet you wouldn’t be complaining if it was Tiffany Baxter’s lip gloss.’
‘Course I wouldn’t,’ he said. ‘She’s seventeen years old, she’s fit and she’s not my mother.’
She turned back to the mirror and appraised what she saw. Faded chestnut hair that had grown out of a short crop into a shaggy helmet. Teeth stained slightly from twenty years of smoking. Slim but un-toned physique. Primark tunic top; red, v-necked and sequined. Old Gap jeans. Primark diamanté sandals. And a slight look of terror in her hazel eyes.
‘You don’t think I should put some heels on,’ she said, standing on her tiptoes and examining herself in the full-length mirror, ‘to lengthen my legs?’
Ed crossed his arms in front of his body and shook his head. ‘Now we are entering “daughter-I-never-had” territory. I’m afraid I’m not actually gay.’
Melody smiled and stroked his cheek again.
‘Right,’ she said, picking up her handbag and putting it over her shoulder, ‘I’ll be off then. There’s pizza in the freezer. Or yesterday’s roast chicken in the fridge. Make sure you heat it through properly. And er …’
‘And er, goodbye.’
‘Yes,’ she smiled. ‘Goodbye. I’ll text you when I’m on my way back.’
Ben was waiting for her outside Leicester Square tube station, in a pale blue shirt and jeans. She breathed a sigh of relief. He’d come. And then she felt her heart sink with terror. He’d come.
She glanced at him from across the road, sizing him up before his darting eyes found her. He looked bigger than she remembered, taller and more masculine. But his face was so soft, like something freshly hatched and untouched by life. Subconsciously she lifted her fingertips to her own face and felt the roughness of her skin, the tiredness of it. She knew she looked older than her age (the same age as Kate Moss as she frequently reminded herself, cruelly and unnecessarily) and the thought repulsed her, somehow.
‘You look lovely,’ he said, touching her bare forearm as he leaned in to kiss her cheek.
‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘So do you.’ The unfamiliar sensation of being touched by a man, even on the chaste planes of her lower arm, left her feeling flushed and slightly breathless.
‘Shall we get a drink?’ he said. ‘The show doesn’t start for half an hour.’
‘Yes,’ she said, ‘let’s.’
They went to a small pub on Cranbourn Street and she ordered a large glass of white wine for herself and a gin and tonic for Ben.
‘So,’ he said, ‘a toast. To brazen strangers, beautiful shoulders and to warm summer nights.’
She knocked her glass gently against his and wondered if that was the kind of thing a normal bloke would say. Every time she looked at him, she found fault. His nose was too smooth, his chin was too square, he was too clean, too fresh, his hair was too fluffy, his shoes were too clean.
He was taking her to see Julius Sardo, the famous mind-controller and hypnotist. Ben’s brother worked for a ticket agency and had managed to get them seats even though it was sold out. Ed had been teasing her all week – ‘look into the eyes, not around the eyes, look into the eyes’ – and she knew what he meant. There was something silly and school-yardish about the idea of hypnotising somebody, the sort of thing that someone would only learn to do in order to get better-looking people to pay them attention.
‘So, have you ever seen his show before?’
‘Not live,’ he said, ‘just on the telly. You?’
‘Same,’ she said, ‘just on the telly.’
‘Did you see that show where he got that woman to rob a security van? And she was a community police officer?’
‘No.’ Melody shook her head. ‘I must have missed that one.’ She noticed a Tubigrip bandage peeping out from beneath his shirt cuff. ‘What have you done to your arm?’ she asked.
He touched the bandage. ‘Sprained my wrist,’ he said. ‘Three hours in casualty.’
‘Ow,’ said Melody. ‘What happened?’
‘Squash happe
ned,’ he said, miming a swing of the racket and wincing slightly. ‘Got a bit carried away.’
Melody narrowed her eyes. In the context of her entire existence, playing squash seemed such an arbitrary and random thing for a person to do. ‘That’ll teach you,’ she said, half meaning it.
‘Yes. It will.’ He smiled. ‘There must be a better way for me to release all my pent-up energy than battering a little rubber ball into submission.’
There followed a short but intense silence. Melody took a large sip of wine and tried to damp down her sense of rising panic. She’d known this was a mistake, right from the outset. She clearly had nothing in common with this clean, cotton-faced man. Her shiny new shoes twinkled at her, mocking her for her stupidity.
‘So,’ said Ben, breaking through the silence. ‘You work in a school? What do you do – teaching?’
Melody grimaced. She could either lie, or she could give him the bottom line and see what he did with it. ‘No,’ she said, bluntly. ‘I’m a kitchen assistant. Or, a dinner lady, in other words.’
‘No!’ Ben smiled. ‘Are you really?’
She nodded. ‘Yup, nylon overalls, hairnet, that’s me.’
‘Wow,’ he said, ‘that’s unbelievable! I didn’t know dinner ladies could look like you. They certainly didn’t in my day.’
‘Oh, I’m sure they did, but as far as kids are concerned, anyone over twenty is an old git, we all sort of merge together, into one mass of sadness. Anyway, how about you? You’re a … sorry,’ she said. ‘I can’t remember exactly …’
‘I’m a quantity surveyor. You don’t need to remember. It’s very dull, I can assure you.’
‘And do you enjoy it?’
‘Yes,’ he said, ‘I’m sorry to say that I do. I don’t know what that says about me as a person. Maybe I should lie and say it bores me to death and I’d secretly like to give it all up and become a … a rock star.’ He laughed. ‘But, no, I enjoy it. It pays the rent. And half my ex-wife’s rent.’ He laughed again. ‘So,’ he said. ‘Have you always lived in London?’
Melody shook her head. ‘No,’ she said. ‘I was brought up in Kent. Near Canterbury.’
‘So what brought you to London?’
She paused for a moment, unsure whether now was the time to launch into the Story of Her Misspent Youth. He must have worked out by now that she really wasn’t his type. Melody could picture Ben’s type: she was blonde, she was cute, she was sporty and she was probably called Isabel. This was just an experiment for Ben, something to make him feel better about the fact that his wife had gone off with a bloke with piercings; a small act of rebellion to balance out the scales (‘well, I went out on a date with a dinner lady, so there’). She had nothing to lose, she reasoned, so she may as well set the whole sorry picture out on the table and she may as well lay it on thick.
‘I ran away from home,’ she said, deadpan, ‘when I was fifteen. I was lured here by drugs, alcohol and an Irish gypsy called Tiff, and then I got pregnant and Tiff buggered off and my parents didn’t want to know. Well, they would have if I’d agreed to go back home and have an abortion, but I didn’t want to and that was that. I was put on an emergency list, lived in a hostel for a while, then got given a flat when I was nine months pregnant.’
Ben stared at her for a second.
‘Are you shocked?’ she asked.
‘No,’ he shook his head, ‘not, not shocked. Just surprised. You seem so – well, conventional. And what about your parents? Do you see them any more?’
She shrugged. ‘Not for years, since I left home. I spoke to them on the phone a couple of times after Ed was born, but that was it.’
‘That’s a shame.’
‘Do you think?’ Melody glanced at him, questioningly.
‘Yeah. I mean, you’ve got a son. Such a shame for him not to know his grandparents.’
She shrugged again. ‘I never really thought about it like that. I mean, in a way, they never really felt like my parents, they always felt like kindly strangers who’d taken me in off the streets. I was more than happy to leave them behind. Truly.’
Ben stared at her. ‘Wow,’ was all he could say.
And Melody knew then that less than an hour into their date, she’d already lost him.
* * *
They had good seats in the stalls. Too good, as it happened. It was the third foam ball launched from Julius Sardo’s giant airgun that landed in her lap. It was pink and had the number 3 printed on it. The entire population of the theatre turned to gaze at her, craning their necks to get a better look. Melody sat and stared at the pink ball, feeling shocked, yet strangely unsurprised.
‘What’s your name?’ Julius called up to her.
‘Melody,’ she called back.
‘OK, Melody, down you come.’
Melody got to her feet, numbly and in something of a state of shock. She made her way down the aisle and a man wearing an earpiece pulled her onto the stage. Suddenly she was standing next to Julius, dazzled by spotlights, staring into a sea of homogenous faces.
‘OK,’ said Julius, once all six audience members were gathered together on the stage, ‘now, this trick is called the Five Stages of Man. And what I want you good people to do is play out the life story of a man called – oh, I don’t know – Fred. Now, Fred is a nice man. Fundamentally. But, he has some, shall we say, quirks. So, I’m going to let you each choose another ball and inside that ball is a piece of paper and on that piece of paper is an age and a quirk I want you to apply to your performance of Fred.’
He passed around a bowl of more tennis balls and Melody took one. She pulled out the paper and unfolded it and read the words ‘Five years old and gassy’.
Melody would never be able to explain properly to anybody quite what happened to her during the next five minutes. But from the moment Julius counted down to the number one, she felt small. Small and gassy. She careered around the stage, farting and wiping her nose on the back of her arm and pretending to chase pigeons. Every time she made a farting noise the audience laughed, but she wasn’t really aware of them, other than as a kind of vague background noise, like the sound of traffic through an open window.
‘Go to sleep, Fred,’ said Julius, clicking his fingers in front of Melody’s nose, and there followed a lull in Melody’s consciousness, a void. Not the sort of muffled, hazy void that a state of sleep or drunkenness might bring about, but something different, as if a black hole had opened up in her head for a split second and let in something dazzling and alien, before slamming shut again. She felt her knees buckle beneath her and then she fell, sideways and really quite elegantly, into a pile on the stage floor.
The next thing Melody was aware of was Ben’s face close to hers, the citrus smell of his hair, a door with the word ‘EXIT’ illuminated above it and the scratchy wool of a blanket across her knees.
A woman in a green tunic hove into her line of vision. She had a very shiny forehead and large open pores on her nose.
‘Melody? Melody? Can you hear me?’
Melody nodded and the woman’s face disappeared again.
‘Are you OK?’ It was Ben. He had very neat stubble with tiny flecks of red in it.
Melody nodded again and attempted to get to her feet. Ben pulled her back down gently by the hand.
‘Where am I?’ she said.
‘You’re in First Aid,’ said Ben. ‘You passed out. Brought the whole show to a grinding halt. Single-handedly. They had to call for an early interval.’
Melody winced. She felt woozy and confused, too confused to process properly what Ben was saying to her. She touched her shoulder reflexively.
‘Where’s my bag?’ she said.
‘Here,’ Ben showed it to her. ‘I’ve got your jacket as well. I figured you probably didn’t want to go back and watch the rest of the show.’
‘No.’ She shook her head. ‘No. I don’t. I want to go home. Sorry …’ She felt strangely devoid of any sense of time or place, cut adrift from herself.
> ‘No, no, no, that’s fine. Of course. I totally understand. Maybe you’re coming down with something?’
‘No,’ she said in a voice that was two tones sharper than she’d intended. ‘No, it’s not that. It’s something else. It’s my head. Something’s happened to my head.’
She saw Ben and the first-aid woman exchange a glance and then she saw the door marked ‘EXIT’ open and there he was. Julius Sardo. Smaller than he’d looked on the stage, and much more orange.
‘Hey, Melody, you’re back. Thank God. You had me worried out there. Are you OK?’
She nodded distractedly. She didn’t want to talk to Julius Sardo. She just wanted to go home and get into bed.
‘What do you think it might have been?’ he continued. ‘Low blood sugar?’
‘I don’t know,’ she said, ‘but I’m fine now. I just want to go home. Can I go home?’
The first-aid woman nodded her assent and Ben helped her to her feet.
‘I want you to know,’ Julius continued, ‘that I’ve been doing live shows for nine years and that’s the first time anyone’s passed out on me.’ His smile was slightly too wide and Melody could tell that he was concerned, but she didn’t have the energy to discuss it with him.
‘It’s fine,’ she said, taking her jacket from Ben and sliding it on. ‘Don’t worry about it.’
‘Cool,’ he beamed again, flashing artificially white teeth at her. ‘Well, I’ve got to get back now, but talk to the people in the office next door and they’ll arrange tickets for you both for another night, make up for what you missed, yeah?’
She smiled, wanly. She had no intention of going within a hundred feet of Julius Sardo ever again. ‘Yeah,’ she said.
The air outside the theatre was cool and chilled now that the sun had set and Melody shivered slightly in her open shoes and thin jacket.
‘I’m really sorry,’ she said. ‘What a disaster!’
‘No, I’m sorry. It was my idea to bring you here. Next time we’ll just go for a nice meal, eh?’
Melody threw him a curious glance. Next time? It was unthinkable that he would want to see her again. She smiled tightly, assuming that he had just said that to be polite, and headed for the tube.