by Lisa Jewell
Melody wasn’t entirely sure what a hippy place was, but suspected that she was referring to Ken’s house.
‘I live at Ken’s house,’ she said.
‘Yeah, that hippy bloke who hangs around town. I know the one. Looks like he could do with a good wash. Always trying to get people to give him money for his crappy leaflets. My mum says he’s a pervert.’
‘What’s a pervert?’ said Dana.
Penny threw her a disdainful look. ‘You know,’ she said, ‘someone who does dirty things to people. Sex and stuff.’
Melody shook her head. ‘No,’ she said. ‘You’re wrong. Ken’s really nice.’
‘Well, that’s not what my mum says. She says he’s got women in and out of his bed the whole time, sometimes two at a time. Mum says he brainwashes them and makes them his disciples and then uses them for dirty stuff. Mum says he’s disgusting. And you live with him. And that makes you disgusting.’
Melody gulped.
‘And your mum too,’ added Dana.
‘Yeah,’ said Penny. ‘And your mum too.’
They stood there for a moment, staring at her expectantly.
Her head throbbed with words she wanted to say, with indignation and with terror. She knew what they were saying wasn’t true. She knew that Ken was a good, kind man. But she also knew that there were things that happened in her house that she couldn’t explain, things that she knew were wrong, but that seemed, in the context of Ken and his house, perfectly all right.
‘It’s not like that,’ she said eventually. ‘It’s just not like that.’
‘Oh, right, then what is it like?’
‘Ken’s really kind. He let us come and live with him when my mum was feeling sad and he takes me to London on his motorbike to see my dad and he’s got a lovely wife who cooks for everyone and he’s gentle and generous.’
‘Oh my God,’ said Penny, a cadaverous smile playing around her mouth, ‘you’re in love with him, aren’t you? Oh my God, do you do stuff with him too? You do, don’t you? You and your mum and that hippy, all together. God, that’s disgusting.’
Melody had become aware that a kind of stillness had fallen upon the playground as other children interrupted their play to hear what Penny was saying.
Penny noticed her audience and addressed them. ‘She’s dirty,’ she exclaimed, pointing at Melody. ‘Don’t go anywhere near her. You’ll get the clap.’
The other children stared at her, blankly, while Penny’s eyes flashed triumphantly.
The silence lingered for a long-drawn-out moment until it was shattered by the sound of the end-of-break bell being shaken.
Penny and Dana threw Melody one last dreadful look before turning away and Melody made her way slowly, and numbly, to her classroom.
Melody’s mum moved out of their bedroom shortly after that. She was never very specific about where exactly she was going to sleep, but it didn’t take long for Melody to work it out when Grace and Seth moved into her bedroom the following night.
Asking Grace questions about things was much easier than asking her mum questions about things, so she waited until she was on her own with her in the kitchen the next day and said: ‘Grace?’
Grace looked up from Seth’s elbow, which was grazed and bleeding from a fall in the yard.
‘Yes, sweetheart?’
‘Why are you and Seth sleeping in my room and Mum’s sleeping in Ken’s room?’
‘Ah, well.’ Grace paused for a moment and tore the paper wrapper off an Elastoplast. ‘Your mother’s going through a bit of a bad patch.’ She stuck the plaster onto Seth’s elbow. ‘She’s feeling a bit confused and Ken wants to keep her close to hand. So that’s why she’s going to be sharing his bedroom. And I hope you don’t mind me and Seth taking over your mother’s bed. Just for a little while.’
Melody nodded, though she was far from happy about this new development.
‘Don’t you mind, though?’ she said. ‘Don’t you mind that someone else is sleeping in your bed?’
‘Well, beautiful girl, the thing is, we don’t really think of things in this house as “ours”. Or anyone else’s. We don’t believe in possessions. The bed that Ken and I sleep in belongs to everybody. And right now, your mum needs it more than I do.’
Melody pondered this. As far as she could tell, the bed in their attic room was very comfortable. In fact, she remembered her mother commenting on more than one occasion on what a comfortable bed it was. So why did she need to sleep in another one?
‘Is Ken’s bed very comfortable?’ she asked eventually.
Grace smiled, one of those strange smiles that adults used that were impossible to interpret and therefore very unsettling. ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘it is. It’s very firm.’
‘And is that why my mum wants to sleep there?’
‘Well, I’m sure that’s one of the reasons.’
Melody paused for a moment. If there were ‘other’ reasons for her mother being in Ken’s bed she wanted to know what they were. ‘So why else?’
‘I told you,’ Grace said, ‘she’s feeling a bit confused. Ken wants to … comfort her.’
Melody squirmed. That word, comfort, seemed suddenly imbued with all sorts of shadowy submeanings and undercurrents.
‘Why does Laura want to sleep with Ken too?’ she asked. ‘Does she need comfort?’
Grace gave her that smile again, but this time it just made Melody feel angry. She may have been only six years old, but she really wasn’t stupid.
‘Yes,’ said Grace, ‘sometimes. Sometimes Laura feels lonely and then she comes into our room to sleep.’
‘Hmm.’ Melody picked up one of Seth’s rattles from the kitchen table and squeezed it into the palm of her hand. There was something soothing about the feel of the baby’s toy, something reassuring about the gentle chickachicka of the beads rolling around inside it. ‘What’s the clap?’ she asked.
‘What?’
‘A girl at school said it.’
‘A girl at school? What sort of girl?’
‘Penny. She’s a year older than us. She’s nearly seven. Is it a disease?’
‘The clap? Well, yes. It is. It’s one that only adults can get, though.’
Melody nodded and moved the rattle into her other hand. She wanted to tell Grace that Penny had said that people could catch it off her, but she had a strong feeling that this would lead to even more trouble. ‘What happens when you get the clap?’
‘Well, there are lots of different types of … clap. But they’re generally all around the fanny area.’
‘The fanny?’
‘Yes. The vagina. And the penis. And women catch it off men and men catch it off women. But only grown-ups.’
‘Grown-ups who share a bed?’
‘Yes, that’s right. Grown-ups who share a bed.’
‘So could my mum catch it off Ken?’
Grace laughed and lifted Seth off her knee. ‘No,’ she said. ‘No. That’s highly unlikely. I wouldn’t worry about that. But really, I’m quite shocked that a six-year-old girl should be talking about things like that at school.’
‘Well, she’s nearly seven. She’s the oldest girl in the class.’
‘But still. Have you told a teacher?’
Melody shook her head and passed the rattle to Seth, who was standing at her feet, looking at it expectantly.
‘Well, next time this girl comes talking to you about things like that, you just walk away. Just walk away immediately. And you tell me. Because that’s not right. That’s not right at all. There is nowhere else in the world where you could be safer or more loved than this house, and anyone who says differently is just talking out of their big fat derrière, OK?’
Melody smiled and nodded.
‘Good things are happening here,’ Grace continued, ‘happy things. Everything is on the up. Now come over here and let me give you a big hug, you precious, precious thing.’
Melody stepped into the long, tangled embrace of Grace’s arms and allowed he
rself to be held, appreciating the gesture but wishing more than anything that instead of Grace’s bony ribcage and pancake breasts, her face was being held warm and safe against the yielding and slightly pungent bosom of Jane Ribblesdale.
Chapter 27
Now
Broadstairs Library was an ugly red-brick building. Melody found the local history section and started to leaf, somewhat randomly, through obscure-looking books with titles like Broadstairs and St Peters During The Great War of 1914–1918. It struck Melody as an entirely pointless activity. She wanted to know about a squat in the late eighties, not fishing in Viking Bay in the 1800s. She caught the eye of a middle-aged woman, small and neat in grey trousers and a polo neck, her eyeglasses on a chain around her neck, leafing through a book about the local area.
‘Excuse me,’ Melody said, ‘do you live in Broadstairs?’
‘Yes,’ said the woman, ‘I do.’
‘Oh, good, I wonder if you could help me. I lived here for a short time when I was a child. I lived in Chandos Square, just behind here. Do you remember much about Chandos Square, thirty years ago?’
‘Well, that depends …’
‘The house I lived in – it’s a guesthouse now –it’s called the House on the Square. You know, it’s very smart?’
‘Oh, yes, I remember that house all right.’ The woman chuckled and closed the book she’d been looking at. ‘That house was the bane of everyone’s life.’
‘That’s right, it was a squat, wasn’t it?’
The woman leaned forward conspiratorially. ‘That,’ she said, ‘was only the half of it.’
Melody caught her breath, readying herself for the unknown.
‘There was this man, like a hippy, he was kind of like the boss of the house, if you like …’
‘What was his name?’
‘Ken,’ she replied, immediately, ‘Ken Stone.’
Melody inhaled sharply. There it was again, another gleaming piece of the jigsaw, another flighty notion turned to fact.
The woman continued, ‘He was some kind of, what do they call it, like a political activist, always off on some march or other, always shouting off about stuff, but never actually changing anything, you know the type. And he believed in what they used to call “free love”. All very 1970s. He wrote all these daft pamphlets about freeing the mind, about letting go of the shackles of conformity. All that rubbish. All talk and no action except when it came to the ladies … Here,’ said the woman, taking off her reading glasses and letting them fall to her lap, ‘this Ken fellow, was he anything to do with you?’
‘Well, I lived there as a child, and he was my friend.’
‘But you’re not related to him, then?’
‘No, no, I’m pretty sure I’m not.’ Melody laughed brittlely as the realisation that, heaven knew, she might be, suddenly dawned upon her.
‘Well, anyway, he had this wife, at least she called herself his wife, though I can’t imagine that they ever did anything as conventional as getting married, you know. And she was a strange creature, always looked to me like one of those Art Deco figurines, all sinewy, wrapped up in scarves and bangles. They had a little boy together …’
‘When?’
‘God, I don’t know when. I suppose it must have been around the time our youngest was born, so about thirty years ago.’
The baby on the floor, sucking the plastic spoon.
‘Anyway, there were always people coming and going, odds and ends of people, and the talk around town was that they were all having a mass orgy, you know, like a love-in.’
Melody thought about the woman called Laura she’d remembered this morning. Had she been part of this strange orgiastic commune? And then, of course, another thought struck her: was it possible that something terrible had happened to her in this unsavoury house? Was it possible that Ken Stone had violated her in some way, that she had been involved in something dark and unspeakable, and that was why her memory had ceased to function? Was it possible that she had been abused, not, as Ed had suggested, by her father, but by this stranger she barely remembered? Suddenly a dozen dreadful scenarios sprung to mind – she had been kidnapped from her safe Canterbury home by this woman called Jane and brought to this place to be used by adults in the most terrible way imaginable. And if that was the case then maybe the same had been true of the house in Fitzrovia. Maybe she had been given to the man with the kind face by the woman called Jacqui. Maybe there were more houses, more stories, maybe she’d been passed from place to place, maybe – it was unthinkable, but they wrote about these things in the newspapers – maybe her parents had been behind it all. It would explain her abnormal ambivalence towards them, the gaps in their history. But even as soon as these notions appeared in her head, she quashed them. That wasn’t right. It just wasn’t. She couldn’t remember much but she remembered that Ken was good, she remembered that the man in Fitzrovia was good, and she remembered, more than any of that, that however strained her relationship with her parents had been, they both cared about her deeply and truly. There was another story behind the doors of the houses on Chandos Square and Goodge Place and Melody was pretty sure that this neat little woman with her seaside accent and her Marks and Spencer slip-on pumps was about to turn the page to the next chapter.
Chapter 28
1979
A cold January morning, Melody’s breath in icy clouds around her face.
A revolving door, a pile of suitcases, a cab driver in a grey sweatshirt and early morning stubble, smoking a cigarette and slamming the boot of his car.
Charlotte in a long brown fur coat and a purple bobble hat, complaining about how cold she was.
Her father looking sad and tired, pulling out his battered wallet and sliding out a ten-pound note.
Emily in a white, all-in-one zip-up suit, regal and upright in Jacqui’s arms.
The sudden heat of the terminal as they walked through the revolving doors.
Her father’s arm around her shoulders, the thunder of Tannoy announcements, the swirling bustle of a thousand people.
Melody’s first ever time at an airport.
But she wasn’t going anywhere.
Melody’s dad went to live in Hollywood with Jacqui, Charlotte and Emily when Melody was six and a bit.
Jacqui had signed a contract with a big film studio to work as a makeup artist on three back-to-back movies that would be filming over the next year. She would be earning more in a year than Melody’s dad would earn in a decade, so there never seemed to be any question that they would take Charlotte out of school, request a sabbatical for her father, rent out the Fitzrovia house and emigrate immediately.
‘You’ll come over at Easter. And we’ll be back here in July for a fortnight. A year is not all that long, not really, not in the big scheme of things.’
Melody nodded, mutely, wishing that that was true, but knowing instinctively that a year was a very, very long time indeed, especially for a baby.
A sign on a TV screen said that they had to go through customs immediately, and all of a sudden it was time to say goodbye, and Melody felt it was much, much too soon.
She kissed Jacqui on her perfumed cheek, then she hugged Charlotte, who squeezed her back hard enough to suggest that she might actually be a little bit sad. She threw her arms around her father’s neck and let him swing her about for a while and then she turned to Emily.
Emily was four months old. She had a neat helmet of golden-brown hair and the beginnings of hazel eyes. She was a serious, quiet baby, who liked staring at people and looking at books. ‘I have no idea where this baby came from,’ Jacqui would say. ‘So still, so quiet. Nothing like me.’
Melody didn’t really understand why Jacqui expected her baby to be just like her. It was as if she’d forgotten that Melody’s dad had had anything to do with her existence, as if she felt that her genes were so powerful and superior that they should be stamped, brand-like, all over everything she came into contact with. But it was clear to Melody where E
mily had come from. She’d come from her. They were made of the same stuff, the same ingredients, like two identical cakes.
Melody did everything she could to imprint herself upon the baby. She rubbed her nose against her nose, she tickled her with her hair, she blew raspberries into her tummy and cuddled her almost constantly. Her dad thought it was cute. ‘Look,’ he’d say, ‘it’s mini-mum.’
But Jacqui didn’t feel the same way.
‘Too rough! Be gentle! Don’t poke her! Don’t stroke her! Leave her be! Leave her be!’
This had been the almost constant refrain for the first few months of Emily’s life as Melody had attempted, in her own slightly overenthusiastic childlike way, to get to know her sister. She could see the fear in Jacqui’s eyes, especially in the early days. Jacqui would look at her as if she were a drooling, be-fanged wolf, about to rip the meat from her baby’s bones. She could almost smell the disgust that Jacqui felt for her, hear it in the terminology she used.
‘Get your huge feet out of her cot.’
‘Keep your grubby hands away from her face.’
‘Melody, you’re breathing garlic all over her. She doesn’t like it.’
Charlotte, on the other hand, appeared to have little interest in the baby aside from choosing outfits for her occasionally, showing her off when her friends came for tea after school, and complaining when she’d been crying in the night. When Melody was at Jacqui’s house, she had Emily all to herself. And that was just the way she liked it. She didn’t want to share her. She didn’t even really like it when Jacqui touched her, though she never let Jacqui sense this in case it made her cross and stop her from coming to see her.
When her dad had told her that they were leaving the country, Melody’s first thought had been: Emily, what about Emily? It had taken a second or two to digest the fact that she’d also be losing her father, and another long moment before it dawned upon her that now there was nowhere else to be but Broadstairs, and no one else to be with but her mother.