by Lisa Jewell
Her depression started to lift from that moment but the memory of it never left her and she vowed that she would never again bring something as fragile and flimsy as a baby into the world. She had a coil fitted a year after Ed’s birth and lavished her love instead on to Stacey’s babies, the second, third, fourth babies of the mothers at Ed’s school, the babies of strangers she passed in the street. She felt nothing but happiness at the arrival of every new baby, and nothing but joy for their blessed parents. But for herself, she was done. The very fact that her boy had survived the first eighteen years of his life was a miracle. She didn’t want to push her luck.
She’d been wandering aimlessly as she absorbed the possibility of another baby, maybe, probably, taking shape in her friend’s body, another baby in her life, another small person to talk about and wonder at, and had found herself, not in Soho, as she’d imagined, but just north of Goodge Street in a tiny cobbled turning called Goodge Place. At the mouth of the turning were two mobile units selling CDs and DVDs in dodgy wrappings and around the bend a terrace of narrow Georgian town houses, some with the external appearance of temporary housing, some smarter with thick curtains at the windows and nickel-plated door knobs. Melody followed the curve of the street and felt it again, a certainty of place, of time, of having been here before. She stood for a moment, her eyes closed and let the feeling impress itself upon her.
She saw a bike, and a man, the same man she’d seen with the knickerbocker glory and the crash helmet. He had long hair tied back in a ponytail, and he was waving goodbye. She opened her eyes and looked up at the sky, and then down again at a house in the middle of the terrace. She closed her eyes again and saw this:
A beautiful girl, in a pink tutu, at the top of a flight of stairs.
The sun shining through the window behind her, turning her into a silhouette.
Expensive carpet beneath her bare feet.
A dog, barking somewhere else in the house.
‘Melody smells of poo, Melody smells of poo.’ The girl’s face contorted with pleasure, her thin body twisting around itself in a strange dance of loathing. ‘Melody is a fathead, and she smells of poo.’
Then the girl falling, one thin leg turned around the other thin leg, her elbow on one step, her bottom on the next, her head bouncing off the banisters, her tutu tearing with a sound like ripped newspaper.
A woman appearing at the bottom of the stairs, wearing a smocked dress with billowy sleeves and thick coral lipstick.
‘Oh my God, Charlotte! Charlotte! What happened?’
Melody’s mouth, glued closed, words bubbling in her head but not coming out.
‘She pushed me, Mummy. Melody pushed me!’
The woman’s face, pursed and furious, her coral lips snarling, her blue eyes sniping, bundling Charlotte into her arms.
Charlotte’s screams, shrill and exaggerated, getting further and further away as Jacqui carried her through the house.
A small shred of pink netting, on the floor by Melody’s feet.
Then the words finally leaving her mouth, two seconds too late. ‘It wasn’t me. She just tripped.’
Chapter 15
1978
Jacqui Sonningfeld lived in a tall, thin house in a quiet turning just off Goodge Street. It was decorated in a very plush way, with whole zebra skins clinging to walls, leopard-print cushions thrown all over velvety sofas, Tiffany lamps with dragonfly wings, piles of heavy books arranged like pyramids on low coffee tables and every floor thick with the softest, bounciest, most luxuriant cream carpet Melody had ever encountered.
Jacqui was a makeup artist and Charlotte was her seven-year-old daughter. Charlotte went to a private girls’ school in Westminster and had friends with names like Amelia and Sophie and Theodora.
Had Melody thought to ask, she would have discovered that her father had met Jacqui on a blind date set up for him by his boss, who was Jacqui’s ex-brother-in-law. And if Melody had ever met her father’s boss, he might have disclosed to her that he’d set them up, primarily because he’d suspected they might hit it off, but also, and significantly, to get Jacqui off his brother’s back, financially, emotionally and, on occasion, physically.
But Melody was only five and although she thought about things a lot, she rarely asked about things, because sometimes it was just really hard to know what the right question was. So she took on board the fact that her father no longer lived on his own in a rented room in a big house in Brixton, and now lived in a beautiful house in Fitzrovia with Jacqui and her daughter, without demanding to know why. She accepted that she only got to live in the Fitzrovia house with her father for three or four days a month, while Charlotte, who barely knew him, got to see him every single day. And she was resigned to the fact that when she got back to Ken’s house by the seaside her mother would ply her with the rare reward of hot chocolate and ask her two hundred questions about Jacqui’s house and Jacqui’s clothes and Jacqui’s makeup and what Jacqui had said and what her father had said and what they’d eaten and where they’d been.
‘Why don’t you and Daddy live together any more?’ Melody had asked this question once, a few weeks earlier.
Jane had furrowed her brow and grimaced. ‘Well,’ she’d said, ‘we stopped being friends.’
‘You mean, you had a fight?’
‘Not just one fight. Lots of fights. About lots of silly, silly things. And we thought we might just get along a bit better if we lived apart.’
‘But couldn’t you just have lived apart for a little while? Not for so many months and months and months?’
Her mother sighed. ‘Sometimes,’ she said, ‘sometimes, in life, things happen, things that change things for ever. And once things have changed for ever, it’s hard to go backwards.’
‘What things had changed for ever?’
‘Oh, everything, sweetheart, absolutely everything.’
Feeling slightly dissatisfied by this response, Melody had waited a couple of days and then asked the same question again.
‘Mummy, why don’t you and Daddy live together any more?’
This time her mother hadn’t sighed and paused to think of the right words to answer her question. This time she’d thrown her hands up into the air and stormed out of the room yelling, ‘Stop with the questions, will you, for God’s sake!’
So Melody had changed tack and asked her father instead.
‘Daddy, why do you live here with Jacqui and Mummy lives at the seaside with me?’
There followed a long-drawn-out silence, during which Melody wondered if her father too would leave the room and shout at her. ‘That’s a very good question,’ he said eventually.
Melody nodded.
‘The thing is,’ he said, drawing her up onto his knees, ‘when bad things happen, sometimes grownups can’t find a way to make each other feel better. Sometimes they can actually make each other feel worse. And after baby Romany died, Mummy and Daddy both felt too sad to be nice to each other. Does that sound strange?’
Melody nodded again.
‘Yes, I guess it does. But then grown-ups can be very strange. But you do know, don’t you, that it had absolutely nothing to do with you? That Mummy and Daddy still love you so much, just as much as they did before, and in fact, a load more?’
She nodded again, but inside she was thinking that she wasn’t entirely sure that that was true. She felt pretty certain that her mother in particular had loved her much, much more before the baby died. But she didn’t say that. Instead she looped her arms around her father’s neck and clung onto him for a very long time indeed.
One Saturday afternoon, during the month of March, when her dad was in the kitchen cooking lunch and Charlotte was at her ballet class and Melody was sitting in a window seat on the top landing, watching people passing by on the street below, Jacqui walked up to her and squeezed her shoulder.
‘Hello there,’ she said. ‘You look very pensive.’
Melody had no idea what pensive meant but thought it mi
ght be something like sad, or worried.
‘That means thoughtful,’ Jacqui said, smoothing down the back of her skirt and sitting next to her. ‘I’ll give you a penny for them.’
Melody knew what that meant. Aunt Susie always said it to her. ‘A penny for your thoughts.’ She’d never actually given her a penny, so Melody assumed it was just one of those things that grown-ups said because they liked the sound of the words.
She shrugged and turned to look out of the window again. ‘I’m just looking at all the people. They look really small from up here.’
Jacqui glanced down and nodded. ‘Like little ants,’ she said. ‘One day, when you and Charlotte are older, we’ll take you both to Paris, to the tour Eiffel.’ She said this in a strange voice. ‘Have you heard of the Eiffel Tower?’
Melody nodded. ‘It’s in France,’ she said.
‘That’s right. And you can climb right to the very, very top of it and see the whole of Paris below. And you look down and see all these tiny, weeny little people, and tiny weeny little cars and it looks like Toyland!’
Melody tried to look interested, just to be polite, but the conversation was making her feel a bit strange. Not because of the subject matter, but because it was Jacqui, and Jacqui had never really spoken to her before because she was usually too busy organising everybody.
‘It’s very romantic,’ she continued. ‘In fact, that was where Charlotte’s father proposed to me.’
Melody knew that Charlotte had a father. He was called Harry and he was big and garrulous, with very thick hair and hairy hands, and he had a tiny wife from China called Mai. Every so often he’d turn up on a Saturday morning, in a roaring MG Midget, roof down whatever the weather, and announce that he was taking Charlotte shopping. She’d come home a few hours later, laden with big paper bags from posh department stores full of things like cassette players and high-heeled shoes and perfume and teddy bears. It was clear to Melody that he allowed her to choose absolutely anything she wanted without a hint of restraint. It was also clear to Melody that Charlotte didn’t appreciate his extravagance in the slightest, as the bags would sit unopened and forgotten about underneath her bed for months afterwards.
‘Back when I was a young foolish girl of twenty with a head full of marshmallows and fluff, Harry seemed like the most exciting man in the world,’ Jacqui continued. ‘I soon learned that exciting men don’t make good husbands. But still, if I hadn’t married Harry, I wouldn’t have had Charlotte, so I’m glad I did. And I’m sure that’s exactly how your father feels about your mother, isn’t it?’
Melody nodded, not because she knew for sure that that was the case, but because she’d seen no evidence to the contrary.
‘You see, children are the most precious thing in all the world, more precious and important than anything, and even though your mummy and daddy aren’t friends any more, they’ll always be glad they used to be, because it meant that they made you. And I happen to know for a fact that your daddy adores you. And, you know, it’s really important to your dad that you’re happy. And sometimes he worries about how you are when you’re not with him. Because he knows you’re a brave little girl and you don’t always want to worry anyone with your thoughts. So it would be great if I could tell him that I’d had a little chat with you and that you were OK with everything.’
‘I am,’ Melody said. ‘I am OK with everything.’
‘At home? With your mum? Is everything OK there?’
Melody shrugged and nodded.
‘So it’s a kind of commune, is it?’
Melody smiled nervously. ‘I don’t know,’ she said.
‘A commune,’ Jacqui said, ‘is a house where lots of different people who aren’t necessarily related to each other live together. Is that what it’s like where you live?’
Melody thought about the big, sparsely furnished house by the sea, about Ken and Grace and Seth and Matty, and the fact that Matty wasn’t Ken’s son and Matty’s dad lived in London and so did her dad, and decided that no, although it wasn’t a normal house, it certainly wasn’t whatever that word was that Jacqui had just used.
She shook her head. ‘No,’ she said, ‘it’s just a house. It’s Ken’s house.’
‘And this Ken – is he a friend of your mum’s?’
Melody nodded. ‘Yes. He talked to us on the street, when we went to get my shoes, and he said that Mum looked sad, and then Mum had a big row with Aunt Susie and Ken said we could live in his house.’
‘And Ken, is he married?’
‘Yes, he’s married to Grace, and she’s a lot older than him and she’s got a son called Matty, who’s ten, and they’ve got a little baby called Seth, who’s eight months old.’
‘So Ken’s not … your mum’s boyfriend?’
‘No!’ Melody laughed.
‘So they don’t … hold hands, or anything like that?’
‘No!’ she laughed again.
‘Oh,’ said Jacqui, ‘that’s interesting to know. And does Ken have a job? Does he go out to work?’
‘I think so,’ Melody replied. ‘I think he writes books. But not books about stories, but books about … feelings.’
‘Goodness,’ said Jacqui, ‘that sounds interesting. What sort of feelings?’
‘I don’t really know,’ Melody said. ‘Happy feelings, I think.’
‘Well, I suppose they must be very good books if he can afford to have a big house by the seaside and pay for lots of people to live there.’
‘Yes,’ agreed Melody, ‘they must be brilliant.’
Melody felt like Jacqui was trying to make her say more words than she was able to say. She had a look on her face like someone who wants another slice of cake but is feeling too shy to ask.
There was a short silence until Jacqui sighed, and said, ‘Anyway – I really hope that as the years go by, you’ll feel more and more comfortable with the way things have turned out. And that we can all kind of think of each other as one big, unusual, happy family. Because,’ she leaned in towards Melody’s ear and whispered, ‘I love your daddy so much I ache and all I want is for us all to be happy. For ever.’ Then she leaned over and kissed Melody on the cheek, stood up and walked away, her shoes making no sound at all against the thick, spongy carpet, a smudge of coral lipstick on Melody’s cheek and the smell of l’Air du Temps the only evidence that she’d ever been there.
Chapter 16
Now
Melody walked past the house on Goodge Place a total of eight times over the next two days. Each time she remembered something new. A large, bearded man in a tiny sports car; the girl, Charlotte, in oversized sunglasses carrying a dozen carrier bags; herself and Charlotte’s mother, silhouetted side by side in the small dormer window in the eaves of the house, the smell of sweet perfume; a Girls’ World; patchwork jeans; a lime hairband and more significantly than any of that, a room with a cot and the brand-new baby. It was up there, one of only two things she remembered about her life before the fire. The room with baby in it was in there somewhere, still carrying traces within its walls of the sweet honeyed scent of new baby and breast milk.
It wasn’t an accident that Melody had found herself outside this house. Her newly aroused subconscious had pulled her here, step by step, while her thoughts were otherwise engaged. And she hadn’t lived here, she knew that much, but she had stayed at this neat little house, tucked away in a quiet corner of central London. She had stayed here often. She remembered a man now too. Charlotte’s father? He was tall and solid, with a long face, soft eyes, a deep, gentle voice. She felt warm when she thought about this man; she felt loved.
Melody tried to find a way to fit these new memories in with the memories her parents had given her to fill in the gaps in her world, but she couldn’t. The world her parents had told her about was a small world, conducted in the hushed environs of a Canterbury cul-de-sac. It was a world peopled by an aloof auntie, a scary uncle, a pair of dumpy cousins and a friend called Aubrey who turned out to be a sex tourist with
a particular liking for green-eyed Moroccan boys. In the verbally reproduced world of her forgotten infancy, there were occasional holidays to a villa in Spain, visits to grandparents in Wales and Torquay, and Easter breaks at a B & B in Ramsgate.
There were no glamorous women with extravagant Fitzrovian town houses, no bearded hippies on motorbikes, no beautiful girls in tutus and yeasty smelling newborn babies. In the childhood that Melody had previously thought of as her own, London was a place visited infrequently, and under duress. Her parents disliked London, fearing its sophistication, the sheer velocity of its pace of life. It was certainly not somewhere they would have allowed her to stay, unchaperoned. Unless, of course – the thought hit her like a thunderclap – there had been a different time, before her parents.
The moment the thought went through her head, she knew it was true. She’d always known it was true and she’d always wanted it to be true.
Suddenly all the fragments of her newly remembered life started to swirl around her head, demanding to be put into some kind of order. She turned that very moment to face the front door of the town house, she breathed in, and then she rang the doorbell.
Chapter 17
1978
‘I wish your dad had never been born.’ Charlotte dragged a plastic brush through the tangled nylon hair of her Girls’ World. ‘And you. I wish you’d never been born either.’
Charlotte was wearing purple corduroy jeans with a flower appliquéd onto each knee. Her black hair was parted in the middle and tied in bunches with lengths of thick pink wool. She was a beautiful girl. Much more beautiful than Jacqui, who was only just pretty and made the best of herself with lots of makeup and attitude. Charlotte had Harry’s dark colouring and aquiline nose, and also looked likely to have inherited his height. Beside her, Melody always felt very small and very ordinary. Melody’s hair was lovely, everyone always said so. It hung down her back in thick ropes of chestnut, but she wasn’t a particularly nice shape (she had her father’s legs, apparently) and her face wasn’t all symmetrical like Charlotte’s. Charlotte’s face looked like someone had sat down with a protractor and a very sharp pencil and spent ages designing it. Melody’s face was more slapdash. Unconventional, according to her mother. Melody wasn’t sure she liked the idea of unconventional. Anything with an ‘un’ in front of it tended to be a bad thing, as far as she could tell.