by Lisa Jewell
‘But, there’s no room for a cot in Matty’s room, so you’ll have to sleep somewhere else and …’
‘Melody! For God’s sake! Please!’
‘But –’
‘Argh!’ Her mother threw down her newspaper and pen. ‘Melody – there is not an answer for every question! I do not know what is going to happen! I do not know anything! I barely know what my own name is half the bloody time! Now please, be quiet and leave me alone.’
Melody closed her mouth, really hard, so that no more questions came tumbling out of it and let the bamboo chair spin her, very slowly, away from her mother.
Late in October when Melody was almost seven and her mother was fit to pop, Ken took her out for ice cream.
It was a strangely balmy day, a soft breeze being blown across the drear and deserted town from somewhere far away with white beaches and palm trees. Ken’s bike was broken and a man called Pablo was fixing it for him, so they walked the short distance together in a companionable silence. That was one of the best things about Ken – unlike most other adults, he didn’t think it was necessary to keep talking all the time. He waited until he had something interesting to say or to ask, and then he said it. Or mostly, he just let Melody do all the talking.
But today his silence seemed more pointed, like he was being quiet on purpose. He didn’t say anything until they were sitting down in their usual booth at Morelli’s, and then it seemed to take him a long time to say it.
‘So,’ he began, ‘your mum’s nearly ready to have the baby then?’
Melody nodded and nibbled on a biscuit wafer.
‘The baby in there is very big now, you know. If she had the baby now it would be big enough to cuddle.’
Melody nodded again.
‘It’s funny, isn’t it, when mums’ tummies get all big and fat like that? Looks quite strange, like a huge balloon!’
Melody giggled.
‘So, have you felt the baby moving yet?’
Melody looked at Ken to see if he was joking, but he wasn’t. ‘How could I do that? she said.
‘Like this,’ he said, cupping his hand to his own stomach. ‘When babies get as big as your mum’s baby, you can feel them moving around inside.’
‘No,’ Melody shook her head, ‘I don’t think that’s true.’
‘Oh, but it is. I used to feel Seth when he was in Grace’s tummy all the time. He used to kick me,’ he said, ‘and once I even saw the outline of a little foot through Grace’s skin.’
‘No!’ Melody looked at Ken in wonder.
‘Yes. Honestly. So, your mummy hasn’t let you feel the baby move then?’
Melody shook her head.
‘Well, babies move around the most when their mummies are sitting still, so tonight, when she’s relaxed and everything’s quiet, ask her if you can feel it.’
‘OK,’ said Melody, ‘but I don’t think she’ll let me.’
‘Why not?’
She shrugged. ‘Don’t know. Just don’t think she will. Maybe she thinks I’ll hurt it.’
Ken laughed. ‘You can’t hurt a baby by feeling it moving.’
She shrugged again. ‘Well, you know that and I know that but Mum, well, she’s just a worrier, isn’t she?’
Ken smiled and patted her hair.
‘She is that,’ he said. ‘She certainly is that.’
Melody’s mum didn’t let her feel her bump that night.
‘No,’ she said, ‘the baby’s sleeping. I don’t want you to wake it up.’
She didn’t let her feel it the next night either.
‘No,’ she said, ‘the baby’s sleeping again. There’s nothing to feel.’
Thinking that this baby seemed to like a nap in the evenings, Melody asked again the following morning.
This time her mother smiled. ‘Why the sudden need to feel the baby?’ she asked.
Melody shrugged. ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘I just want to.’
‘Well, I tell you what, this baby isn’t much of a wriggler, not like you were. You wriggled and kicked nearly twenty-four hours a day! But this one,’ she patted her big belly gently, ‘this one just seems to like lying around, contemplating its navel. But when I feel it kick, I’ll let you know. OK?’
Melody smiled and kissed her mum’s tummy. ‘OK,’ she said. ‘And you,’ she said, addressing the bump, ‘wake up!’
Her mum laughed then and the two of them walked to school slowly and contentedly.
Chapter 34
1979
The baby arrived the next day. No one was expecting it as the baby wasn’t due for another three weeks, but there she was, pink and fat and surprisingly alert for a newborn.
Ken had come to get Melody from school, in the middle of the day. She’d been pulled out of science; twenty-eight curious pairs of eyes followed her as she left the classroom.
‘She’s here!’ Ken had said, hopping around the corridor, grinning from ear to ear. ‘The baby’s here!’
They’d run home, the whole way, breathless and panting by the time they reached the house, but still taking the stairs up to Jane’s room two at a time.
Jane was sitting up in bed, wearing a voluminous nightgown and drinking a cup of tea. The baby, dressed in a pink babygro and knitted hat, was lying at the foot of the bed, staring at the ceiling and kicking its fat legs in the air.
‘Well,’ said Jane, smiling groggily, ‘what do you think?’
Melody stared at the corpulent creature on the bed and thought how different she looked from Emily when she’d first seen her. Emily had looked diaphanous, otherworldly, like a mystical creature from fairyland. This baby looked solid and fully formed. The baby caught Melody’s gaze and stared at her. Then the baby smiled and Melody knew then that something wasn’t right. But she didn’t say anything. Instead she smiled and stroked the baby’s soft brown hair and said, ‘I think she’s beautiful.’
‘Your mother,’ said Ken, perching on the side of the bed and stroking the baby’s foot, ‘is a goddess. Do you know why?’
Melody shook her head.
‘Well, just after she dropped you at school this morning, her waters broke and she walked all the way to the hospital, on her own, which is mad, but also quite spectacular. Then she pushed out this magnificent baby – all eleven pounds of her – had a cup of tea and came home! I have never known anything like it!’
Melody stared at the baby and then at her mother. She couldn’t remember the last time anyone had said anything so complimentary about her mother, the last time her mother had looked so proud and so happy. She liked the idea of her mother being a goddess, a creature worthy of worship and respect. She liked the atmosphere in this room, the joy on Ken’s face, the enervating scent of new life, the way that new babies seemed to come along and temporarily clean the stains out of everything. So she smiled and she lay down on the bed next to her new sister and she kissed her cheek and tried to put the strange things she was feeling to the furthest corners of her mind.
‘Are we going to call her Emerald?’ she asked, even though she wasn’t sure that it actually suited the big doughy-faced baby on the bed.
Her mother smiled and shook her head. ‘No,’ she said, ‘not Emerald. But close. It’s a precious stone. Can you guess what it is?’
‘Er, Diamond?’
‘No. Try again.’
‘Ruby? Sapphire?’
‘No – we’re going to call her Amber. Amber Rose Newsome. Do you like it?’
Melody glanced once more at her baby sister and considered it. It wasn’t quite as thrilling as Emerald Stone but it suited her better she thought. She nodded and kissed the baby’s cheek again and said, ‘Yes, I like it. I like it a lot.’
The baby turned at the sound of her voice and put one small fat hand out towards Melody’s cheek and for a moment the two sisters stared deeply and thoughtfully into each other’s eyes. Melody offered her sister a finger and the baby took it in her small fist, grasped it tightly. Melody stared at the fleshy tangle that t
heir hands had made and felt a deep, dark yearning, for continuity, for meaning, for something everlasting. Stay with me, she willed the tiny girl, stay with me. Please.
But then Amber started to cry and Jane whisked her away from Melody and Ken was sent down to the kitchen to make up a bottle and Grace came in to coo at the baby and the spell was broken. But for one moment in time Melody had made a connection with this little person, a connection that would stay with her for far longer than Amber would.
Chapter 35
1979
The first Melody heard of the baby who’d been stolen from outside the newsagent’s on Nelson Place was two days after Amber was born. There were news posters all over Broadstairs emblazoned with the headline ‘10-Week-Old-Baby Snatched While Mum Shopped’.
The baby in question was called Edward Thomas Mason and he’d been taken while his mum was in the newsagent’s buying a paper and a packet of envelopes. The mother’s haunted face peered out at Melody from the front cover of every newspaper that day. She was young – only nineteen years old – and she clutched a blurred photograph of her lost baby to her chest. Her husband was a sallow-faced eighteen-year-old with a pudding-bowl haircut and wire-rimmed glasses. ‘I only popped in for a minute,’ she said at a press conference in London. ‘Broadstairs is such a safe place. I never thought that something like this could happen.’
The baby was described as being dressed in white trousers, a blue jacket and blue bootees and was wearing a ‘very distinctive’ cream woollen hat, knitted by his maternal grandmother. He had brown hair and blue eyes and weighed approximately fourteen pounds. The baby-thief had taken just the baby and left behind a large Silver Cross perambulator, a quantity of baby bedding and a wooden rattle.
‘Somebody must have seen something,’ said a Detective Inspector Philip Henderson. ‘This occurred on a busy shopping street at ten o’clock in the morning. The baby was taken out of its perambulator so the sight of a person, possibly in a state of high excitement, carrying a small baby through the streets of Broadstairs could have struck somebody as peculiar in some way. If anybody remembers seeing such a sight on the morning of Wednesday the twenty-fourth of October, please do get in touch with Scotland Yard.’
There was a small black-and-white photograph of baby Edward beneath the article, a bit creased and a bit blurred. It showed a newborn baby in a knitted hat looking blankly into the middle distance.
‘And he was fast asleep too,’ said Kate, passing the newspaper to Grace across the breakfast table. ‘I mean, what sort of person would lift a sleeping baby out of its pram?’
Grace eyed the photo of the missing baby and sighed. ‘Poor wee thing,’ she said. ‘Imagine that. One moment you’re fast asleep, the next you’re staring at some stranger’s face. Horrific, quite horrific.’
Melody’s mum sat at the head of the table, baby Amber asleep on her shoulder, nodding her agreement.
‘I mean, to think, you can’t even leave your baby outside a shop for a moment. I don’t know what the world is coming to.’ The three women all sighed and shook their heads and Melody stared from one to the other and asked herself the question: Don’t you know? Doesn’t one of you women know what’s going on here?
Because Melody knew. She knew exactly what was happening. Baby Amber wasn’t baby Amber at all. She was baby Edward. And this she didn’t just suspect, but she knew, because last night when her mum wasn’t looking she’d unpopped the poppers on the baby’s babygro, and she’d hooked one finger inside the damp terry towelling of its nappy and she’d seen, with her own eyes, a small pair of leathery red testicles and a tiny penis.
She’d then, spurred on by the details coming to light in the news reports, searched her mum’s room when she was in the bathroom and found, in her wastepaper basket, underneath yesterday’s newspaper and a ball of old hair, a small knitted woollen hat and a pair of blue bootees.
She hadn’t shared this knowledge yet with anybody. It was living in her head, like a ball of fire, burning and gnawing and eating away at her consciousness. She had never before in her life been privy to such an extraordinary secret. It felt bigger than everything that had happened to her in her whole life added together and timesed by a hundred. She didn’t know what to do with it. It felt so big that it might just burst out of her head and spill all over the floor, flooding the streets of Broadstairs with pure undiluted sensation. She wanted to tell Ken, but Ken would be so disappointed that the baby wasn’t really Amber. And she wanted to tell her dad, but he was in America, and today, for a split second in PE, she’d even wanted to tell Penny, just to see her face do that weird thing where it looked like her features were trying to run away, just to know that she’d said the most shocking thing to Penny that anyone had ever said to her in her life.
Melody knew she shouldn’t be excited about her discovery. Every time she thought about that poor mother in the newspapers she felt bad because she knew that all that stood between her heartbreak and her ecstasy was Melody and her secret. But she didn’t want to let go of it. And she didn’t want to let go of the baby and the excitement that his/her arrival had brought into this strange house.
But what seemed strangest of all to Melody was that nobody else seemed to have noticed that something was so very, extraordinarily wrong. Nobody had noticed that the baby could smile and that the baby could hold things in its hands and that the baby could see things across the room. Nobody noticed the way that Jane turned down every offer to change the baby’s nappy or to help her bathe it at night. And nobody wondered why Jane had had her baby all alone at the hospital on the very same day that baby Edward was stolen from the shops.
It seemed she would be carrying her shocking secret around with her in overwhelming solitude until late that night, when she awoke to find Matty hissing in her ear.
‘What?’ she said.
‘Wake up,’ he said.
‘I am wake. What do you want?’
‘It’s the baby,’ he hissed. ‘I know something about the baby.’
Melody sat up in bed and switched on her bedside lamp.
Matty looked scarecrow-haired and wide-eyed. ‘Your mum’s baby! It’s him! The one that was stolen!’
Melody sighed. Those were her words, that was her secret, her remarkable declaration of fact. ‘I know,’ she said. ‘I’ve known for ages.’
Matty looked deflated. ‘How?’ he said.
She shrugged. ‘I just had a feeling. So I looked inside his nappy, and he had a you know, a … boy’s thing.’
Matty’s eyes boggled.
‘And I found the blue bootees and the hat in my mum’s bin. How did you know?’
‘Because I heard my mum saying something.’
‘Saying what?’
‘She was talking to Kate in the kitchen after your mum went to bed and I was in the toilet and they didn’t know and I heard my mum saying: “Something’s not right about that baby. Are you thinking what I’m thinking?” and then I accidentally banged the chain against the wall and they heard it and shushed each other, and that was all they said, but it got me thinking because it doesn’t seem right, does it? I mean, for a kick off, that baby is way too big to be new, so just now I snuck into your mum’s room and I took Seth’s piggywig because I remember that piggywig was exactly the same size as Seth when he was born and I put piggywig next to the baby in the cot and the baby was just massive compared to it. And now it’s clear, isn’t it? Cut-and-dried case? Your mum stole that baby from the shops, Melody Ribblesdale, and we’re the only people who know about it.’
Melody gulped and nodded.
‘You know that the grown-ups are about to work it out though, don’t you? And once they’ve worked it out they’ll go to the police and the police will take the baby away and put your mum in prison, and Ken too, for being a willing accomplice? It’s all about to come crashing down, the whole thing, and you need to decide what you’re going to do about it.’
‘Do about it?’ Melody felt her breath catch.
&nb
sp; ‘Yes. Are you going to run and hide, or stay and face the music?’
‘I don’t know,’ she whispered, breathlessly. ‘What would you do?’
‘Run,’ he said, ‘run for the hills.’
‘But what about the baby?’
Matty shrugged. ‘Leave the baby here,’ he said matter-of-factly. ‘The police will sort it all out. But you and your mum should pack a bag and just go. Now. Tonight. As far away as you can get. I won’t tell a soul.’ He zipped his lips with his fingertips and stared at her solemnly.
Melody’s heart was racing. Her big secret no longer felt like a showy gift but like mouldering poison. She hadn’t thought about her mum going to prison. She’d only thought about her being sad that the baby was gone. If her mum went to prison and Ken went to prison then who’d look after her? She’d have to go to America and share a room with the maid and not go to school and wear ragged clothes, like Cinderella. Or she could go and live with sad Auntie Maggie in London, which wouldn’t be so bad, although they didn’t have a bedroom for her either, so she might end up sleeping on the floor, and their house wasn’t all clean and luxurious like the house in Hollywood. There was Auntie Susie, of course, who had plenty of room for her, but didn’t know anything about children, or she could stay here with Grace and Seth and Matty, but that might not be allowed on account of them not being related to her.
She sighed heavily and stared back at Matty. ‘You’re right,’ she said. ‘I’ll go and wake her up.’
Her mother was nestled right next to the baby in the little single bed and if you didn’t know better you’d say that they were the perfect mother and child, slumbering peacefully, sharing each other’s breath. Jane stirred as the door opened and then awoke with a start.
‘Shhh,’ she said, ‘don’t wake the baby!’
‘Mum,’ said Melody, ‘we’ve got to go. We’ve got to go now. We know about the baby. Everyone knows about the baby. And if we don’t go now, they’ll call the police and you and Ken will be sent to prison!’