The Truth About Melody Browne

by Lisa Jewell

  ‘Now that,’ said Ben, with another small laugh, ‘sounds suspiciously like a brushoff.’

  ‘No,’ said Melody, nervously, ‘not at all, not at all. I’ll speak to you later then, yeah?’

  She hung up, hurriedly, her hands trembling slightly.

  ‘Who was that?’ asked Ed, shaking Honey Nut Corn Flakes into a bowl.

  ‘Ben,’ she said, ‘the guy from last night.’

  ‘So you didn’t put him off then?’

  ‘Apparently not. He wants to go out again. On Friday.’

  ‘Cool,’ said Ed, splashing milk into his bowl and carrying it through to the table in the living room. ‘And you, do you want to go?’

  Melody considered the question. Ben was a real ‘what’s not to like?’ kind of a guy, easy-going, bright, considerate. He was the kind of man that a well-meaning friend would set you up with. He ticked all the ‘good guy’ boxes. And he was reasonably good-looking. But she just couldn’t face going through it all over again – the nerves, the apprehension, the awkwardness – and then what? Next time there’d be no convenient fainting episode to offer her a quick exit route. Next time the evening would have to play itself out towards a more conventional ending: a kiss, a coffee, full-blown sex, an awkward extraction. And after that, what? Someone would be bound to get hurt, and it sure as hell wasn’t going to be her.

  ‘No,’ she shook her head, ‘no. I don’t think so. He’s not really my type.’

  Chapter 5

  1977

  Melody’s dad stood in her bedroom, rifling through her wardrobe, a look of slightly bemused deliberation on his face.

  ‘I don’t think it’s going to be warm enough for your green dress,’ he was saying. ‘I think you’ll need something with sleeves.’

  ‘No!’ she said. ‘I want to wear the green dress!’

  ‘OK, OK,’ he sighed, ‘relax. But you’ll need to wear something underneath it then. Where are your tops?’

  Melody sighed too, and got to her feet. ‘They’re here,’ she said, ‘on this shelf.’

  ‘Well, can you pick one?’

  Her mum would never ask her to pick a top. Her mum was always in a hurry and would just spin around the room pulling clothes out of cupboards and drawers and wedging Melody into them. Melody didn’t have to think much about clothes usually. But she was having to think about lots of things these days that she didn’t normally have to think about. Like whether it was tea time. And what day of the week it was. And how to make her mum feel happy again.

  She looked through her bedroom window for a moment. It wasn’t what her mother would call a ‘gorgeous day’. It was a grey, purply sort of day, like a bruise. Like the bruise, in fact, that she had on her elbow when she’d fallen off her little chair in the kitchen the other day trying to reach out for a packet of Viscount biscuits because nobody came when she called and she was hungry. That bruise was not just grey and purple but had a bit of green in it too, and a red raw bit in the middle where the skin had scraped away. Her dad had put a plaster on it but it had come off in the bath the night before and she didn’t like to ask for another one. She didn’t like to ask for much at all really, as asking for things seemed to make everyone sigh a lot.

  She chose a top with a pink chest and orange sleeves and a word printed on the front. That way, she thought, her mum would have something to look at that wasn’t purple or grey and that might just cheer her up.

  ‘You’ll need tights too,’ said her dad.

  She pulled a pair of red tights from her tights drawer and a pair of yellow knickers. ‘I can wear my blue shoes,’ she said, ‘then everything I’ve got on is a different colour.’

  ‘Great idea,’ said her dad, pulling her nightdress over her head. ‘Fantastic.’

  Her mum was brushing her hair when they went to show her what she was wearing a moment later. She turned sharply as they walked into the room.

  ‘Look,’ said Melody, ‘red, and pink and orange and green – and yellow pants and blue shoes.’

  ‘Fantastic,’ said her mother in the same unfantastic tone of voice that her dad had just used. ‘You’re a little rainbow.’

  Melody smiled and hugged her mothers’ knees, pleased by the mention of little rainbows. Her mother stroked her hair absent-mindedly, and then stood up. She was wearing a voluminous grey pinafore dress with big pockets, which she’d worn when she was pregnant, and a black polo neck. Her hair was tied back, but had lots of grips in it to keep it neat because it wasn’t really long enough to be tied back any more.

  ‘Shall we go then?’ she said. Melody nodded and slid her hand inside her mother’s. But her mother didn’t keep a hold of it and it dropped from her fingers like a slippery bar of soap.

  The graveyard was a horrible place. It was really big and straggly and full of weird pointy trees and statues with bits missing. Melody’s mood brightened when she saw her cousins, Claire and Nicola, and for a moment she felt like she wanted to run off with them and play, like she usually did. But then she looked at Maggie’s big black coat and down-turned mouth and remembered that this was the baby’s funeral and she probably wasn’t allowed to play. She turned down her own mouth and followed her parents to a hole in the ground with creamy-coloured silk inside it. On a normal day she’d have wanted to climb into the silky hole and pretend to be a naughty pixie, but she could absolutely imagine what her mum and dad would say if she tried that today. So instead, she made herself feel sad and grown up, and stood primly by the side of the hole and let all thoughts of play and fun leave her mind.

  A black car pulled up on the road by the graveside and two men got out. They were wearing suits like businessmen and one of them had really strange hair, like a doll’s hair.

  ‘Dad,’ she whispered, tugging her father’s hem, ‘why’s that man got funny hair?’

  ‘Shhh,’ said her dad.

  ‘No, but what’s it like?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I mean, is it like real hair? Or is it like pretend hair?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ he replied impatiently. And then he walked away from her, towards the man with the pretend hair and they said something to each other in very quiet voices and then they pulled a box out of the back of the car. It was a creamy colour with silver handles and flowers on the top. It was her. Her sister. The baby who never came home. And for a moment Melody didn’t need to make herself feel sad and grown up, because she just did.

  They carried the box towards the hole in the ground and then the vicar said lots of serious things and all around were snuffling noises of grown-ups crying and sighing, and Melody found it hard to believe that there was a baby inside that box – a real, live, tiny baby, except that she was dead – and that she had never even seen her face.

  A wind came from between the trees as the vicar spoke. It was low and strong and flipped the hem of Melody’s green dress up and down and threw the golden brown curls of her hair all over her face so that she couldn’t see what was happening. By the time she’d got it out of her eyes, she could see that the cream box was being lowered into the silky cream hole, and that Auntie Maggie was crying proper tears and that even Claire and Nicola were crying and they were only children, and the next thing she knew was that her mother was kneeling at the edge of the hole, getting mud all over her grey pinafore dress and making funny noises. They sounded a lot like the noises she’d made the day the baby came, a lot like a cow or a pony or even like the fox who sometimes screamed outside the windows of the cottage they’d stayed in that summer when the baby was still in her mummy’s tummy. The noises made Melody feel weird and uncomfortable, like maybe her mum was doing something wrong. And then she started shouting, ‘My baby, my baby!’ over and over again, which was funny to hear because that was what her mum had used to call her before the other baby hadn’t come home.

  Auntie Maggie and her dad both went over to her mum and pulled her away from the hole and she hit at them with her hands, pushing them away. Her face was red and her dr
ess was muddy and she looked like the lady who lived on the pavement near the church with the newspaper in her shoes and all her things in a shopping trolley. Melody’s dad pulled her to him, really tight, and wrapped his big strong arms around her and for a minute her mum looked like she was trying to push her way out of a straitjacket, like the man with all the chains she’d seen on the TV. But then she stopped pushing and went soft and floppy and let her dad hold her as if she was a big rag doll.

  For a second, there was complete silence. Even the wind stopped blowing and nobody sniffed or snuffled. It felt as if they were all playing a game of musical statues. Melody stared at her mum and dad and thought how strange they looked, holding each other like that. Usually when they hugged they looked at each other, or smiled and made out like they were messing around. But this looked more like Dad was rescuing Mum from an accident, like she’d been floating underwater in a swimming pool and Dad had pulled her out.

  It was the last time Melody ever saw her parents embrace.

  Chapter 6

  Now

  By the time Melody left the house at midday it had started to rain, the kind of sad, disappointing rain that takes the edge off a bright summer’s day. She walked towards the tube, threading her way through the hordes of shoppers that descended on Covent Garden every Sunday. Her feet caught grey puddles as she walked, flicking pear-shaped drops of London dirt across her calves. She was going to a barbecue at her sister’s house in Hackney. Well, not her real sister, but as close as she had to one. She and Stacey had lived in adjoining rooms in the hostel when they were both fifteen and pregnant. Stacey was the same age as Melody but, unlike Melody, she was married with two teenage children and a toddler.

  Melody stopped at Marks and Spencer on the way to the tube station to pick up some spare ribs, a packet of salmon kebabs and a bottle of pink Cava. At the till she was served by a woman with a very short afro and a wide smiling face. ‘Good morning, my dear,’ said the woman, in a soft Southern African accent. ‘And how are you today?’

  ‘I’m fine, thank you,’ Melody said. ‘How are you?’

  ‘Oh, I am very well. Very well indeed.’

  The woman smiled again and waved the Cava over the scanner. ‘Not a good day for a barbecue.’ She gestured towards the rain outside.

  ‘Not really,’ said Melody, ‘but I’m hoping it will have dried off by the time I get there.’

  ‘I will say a prayer for you,’ said the woman. Melody smiled again and glanced at the name badge pinned to her chest.

  Emerald.

  She was about to say, what a beautiful name, when suddenly, there it was again, a vivid, Technicolor snapshot in her head. An open newspaper on a pine table. A blue and white striped mug. A woman’s legs in blue denim with a patch on the knee, a pair of women’s feet in oatmeal socks, a child’s voice saying: ‘Emerald?’

  A woman’s voice saying, ‘Yes, like the green stone.’

  And then the picture was gone, and Melody was standing at a till in Marks and Spencer with her mouth hanging open and a packet of salmon kebabs in her hand.

  She gathered her carrier bags hastily, smiled at the woman called Emerald, and headed for the tube.

  ‘So,’ said Stacey, ‘how’d it go with your number fourteen man?’

  Melody poured herself another glass of pink Cava and grimaced. ‘Hmmmm,’ she said.

  ‘Oh dear.’

  ‘No. It was fine. I mean, he was fine. But the night was, well, a bit bizarre.’

  She told Stacey about being hypnotised and fainting on stage and she thought about telling her about the strange feelings she’d been having but couldn’t quite stomach the conversation that would follow. Stacey was scathing about anything that she perceived to be in any way ‘alternative’ or ‘spiritual’. She didn’t believe in ghosts or tarot or past lives and she certainly didn’t believe in hypnotism. Stacey believed only in the tangible and the visible. Anything else made her scowl disdainfully and say things like, ‘Bollocks’ or ‘Pile of old crap’. Stacey would have no time for the onset of inexplicable flashbacks. She’d say, ‘Get over yourself, it’s just your mind playing tricks on you.’

  Stacey glanced at her questioningly. ‘You all right?’

  Melody lit a cigarette and shrugged. ‘Of course I am.’

  ‘Right,’ said Stacey. ‘You seem a bit off, that’s all. You sure you’re not coming down with something?’

  Melody nodded and inhaled. It was her first cigarette of the day, the first since yesterday afternoon, and, like her coffee that morning, it tasted strange. She glanced at the packet absent-mindedly, checking the brand, checking she hadn’t picked up the wrong ones. But they were hers, definitely, her Marlboro Lights. Her cigarette tasted musty and dusty, though, not like tobacco, but like dirt, the way cigarettes had tasted when she was just pregnant with Ed.

  She stared at the cigarette distastefully and then stubbed it out.

  ‘What’s going on?’ said Stacey, eyeing the mashed up cigarette in the bowl.

  ‘Don’t know,’ said Melody. ‘It just tasted wrong.’

  ‘Ha!’ Stacey laughed, and banged her hand down on the tabletop. ‘That Julius bloke – he’s hypnotised you out of liking nicotine!’

  ‘Oh God,’ said Melody, staring at the ashtray. ‘Do you think?’

  ‘Well, I’ve never seen you do that before. Never in my life! Ooh, I wonder if he could hypnotise me out of liking chocolate?’

  ‘Yeah, and maybe into liking sex!’

  Stacey laughed and her husband, Pete, grunted from the barbecue where he was turning burgers. ‘I’d pay for that,’ he said.

  The air was still damp from the earlier shower, but was drying out quickly in a long stretch of sunshine. Their toddler, Clover, sat at a small plastic table arranging miniature teacups and saucers with fat hands while Mutley, their Norfolk terrier, snuffled at a stuffed toy on the decking by her feet. It was, as ever, a picture of domestic bliss.

  Melody and Stacey had started their adult lives at exactly the same point: fifteen, pregnant, homeless and single, but within a year of their babies being born exactly a week apart, Stacey’s life had headed in a completely different direction, because when she was seventeen, she’d met Pete. Placid, strong and dependable Pete had stuck around and married her even with another man’s baby, and now as they neared middle age, she had a neat little house in Hackney, two teenagers, an unexpected baby girl and an eternal air of contentment. Stacey and Melody were similar in so many ways, and for a while it looked like their lives might have panned out the same way. But from the very moment that they both discovered they were pregnant at the age of fifteen, Stacey’s life had begun.

  And Melody’s had hit rock bottom.

  Chapter 7

  1988

  Rock bottom wasn’t a day or a week or a month. Rock bottom was a moment. And for Melody it looked like this:

  A room, ten by ten, with ripped net curtains and a rusty Baby Belling.

  A single, unmade bed and a chair covered in clothes.

  Her hands, resting helplessly in her lap, holding a scrunched-up piece of tissue paper.

  The sound of the front door slamming downstairs and Tiff’s scooter buzzing angrily away into the dark night air.

  Sudden silence and a sudden desperate realisation.

  She was alone, in a damp bedsit; and she was pregnant.

  Her boyfriend had just dumped her.

  And she wasn’t even sure it was his baby.

  At her feet was a bottle of gin. On the bed next to her was a packet of paracetamols. She glanced from the gin, to the tablets and then back to her upturned hands. She tried to imagine a baby in those hands, a baby who might look like Tiff, or might look like a man whose name she didn’t know because there hadn’t been time to find out. She tried to imagine those hands rubbing cream onto a baby’s bottom, putting a safety pin into the corners of a terry nappy, clipping a parasol to the bars of a pram. She tried and she couldn’t.

  After a while she picke
d up a teacup and filled it to the brim with gin. Then she poured ten paracetamols into the palm of her hand and tipped them into her mouth. She washed the tablets down with the gin, poured herself another and swallowed that down in three vile gulps.

  Down the hall she could hear the bath water nearing the top. She tiptoed across the landing, clutching her towel. And it was there, halfway across the landing, her stomach full of gin and pills, the bathroom in front of her spewing steam through the open door, on her way to kill her baby, that she felt it; the cold, grimy, sharp surface of rock bottom.

  Afterwards she sat on her bed, her knees drawn into her chest, damp tendrils of hair curling around her bare shoulders, and she wept soft, hot tears into the fur of a battered teddy bear.

  Chapter 8

  Now

  The sun was shining and Bloomsbury was full of happy students from University College and office workers sunbathing on the grass. The summer air felt sweet against her clammy skin. Usually after work on these warm summer days Melody craved lager or chilled white wine, but today she had a sudden urge for a glass of lemonade.

  She stopped at a café on Sicilian Avenue, took a table on the pavement and ordered one. It arrived in a tall condensation-coated glass with a yellow bendy straw and a crescent of lemon floating on the top. She stared at it for a while before bringing it to her lips and as she stared another picture appeared in her head. A Formica-topped table, a salmon-pink banquette, a rain-splattered crash helmet, a glass of lemonade and a huge glass globe of ice cream; three mounds of vanilla, a squirt of strawberry sauce, hundreds and thousands, a fan-shaped wafer, a long spoon and a man’s voice saying: ‘Regrets are worse than any mistake you could ever make. Far, far worse.’ And then a smaller voice, a girl’s voice: ‘Will I still be here? In Broadstairs?’