by Lisa Jewell
She quickly shuffled the photocopies into a pile and put her wine glass down on them. ‘Nothing much,’ she said, stretching out her tense neck muscles, ‘just some bills and stuff. You look happy.’
‘Yeah, I am. Tiffany Baxter just stroked my hair.’
Melody smiled. ‘Did she?’
‘She did. Like this …’ He put the palm of his hand against Melody’s head and shook it.
‘More of a ruffle, really,’ said Melody.
‘Yeah, I guess it was a ruffle. But it was a meaningful ruffle.’
‘So things are moving on, are they?’
Ed smiled and pulled a can of Coke from the fridge. ‘Kind of,’ he said. ‘I’ve invited her to my birthday party. She says she’ll come. And that other bloke, the one with the car, he’s going to stay with his dad up north for a month, which means no competition.’
‘Yay!’ said Melody, pulling an old copy of Exchange & Mart over the pile of papers and moving the whole thing to the other side of the table.
‘So,’ he said, pulling up a chair and sitting down next to her, ‘how was Broadstairs? Did you find the Matthew bloke?’
‘Nope,’ she said. ‘Looked everywhere. Not a trace. I asked about him and apparently he often disappears, goes home somewhere to dry out.’
‘Oh,’ said Ed, looking slightly deflated. ‘Anything else?’
She shook her head, hating the feeling of lying to her son. He was so keen to get involved. He thought it was some great adventure, like a storyline in Hollyoaks, and she wanted to share this with him, but she needed to know how it was all going to end first. She needed the full picture. The truth would have to wait. ‘No,’ she said smiling regretfully, ‘nothing else.’
‘Did you try the library?’
‘Uh-huh. Nothing there. Just loads of old shipping news and stuff.’
‘Well, then,’ he said simply, getting to his feet. ‘Looks like you’ll just have to call your parents. Either that or spend the rest of your life in blissful ignorance.’
When he had gone Melody glanced down at the table and let her gaze wander across the edges of a headline, the headline of a story she hadn’t read yet, but that suggested a truth so awful that maybe blissful ignorance would be the better state to choose.
Chapter 40
1979
Another memory:
Basil Brush on the TV.
Boom boom.
A half-peeled satsuma in her hand.
The late afternoon sun shimmering through Aunt Susie’s net curtains, alighting on motes of dust and filling the air with sparkles.
A hole in her tights, her only pair of tights.
The fearsome smell of supper being prepared, a smell that would turn out to be Sole Meunière and honey-glazed carrots.
The phone ringing in the hallway.
Aunt Susie’s laboured footsteps.
‘Good afternoon, Susan Newsome speaking. Who is calling?’
Then, a silence.
‘I see. I see. Yes, I see. How did this happen? Oh, I see.’
Her aunt Susie standing in the doorway, in a rose-print apron, clutching a blue and white striped tea towel and uttering the words, ‘Sweetheart, I have some bad news for you. Some very bad news.’
Boom boom.
* * *
Jane’s court case was heard three months later, at Canterbury Crown Court. Except nobody called her Jane any more. She was now known as the Broadstairs Baby Snatcher. Or Evil Jane. Similarly, nobody really referred to Melody as simply Melody any more. She was poor Melody. Or tragic Melody. Or poor, tragic daughter of Evil Jane, Broadstairs Baby Snatcher.
Her whole world had been assigned new adjectives. She was now part of a ‘Cursed Family’ to whom ‘Tragic and Terrible’ things happened. Including three days after her mother’s arrest, and on the eve of Melody’s long-anticipated seventh birthday, the arrival by telephone of the news that her father had been killed in a multiple pile-up on the freeway out of Hollywood and towards Los Angeles International Airport.
And it was for this fact, more than for the years of indifferent mothering, more than for not loving her the way a lovely little girl deserves to be loved, more than for being so horrible to her father that he’d left her and gone to live in America with Jacqui, and more than for stealing somebody else’s baby and letting her believe that she finally had a sister she could keep, that Melody now despised her mother. Because if her mother hadn’t got herself arrested then her father wouldn’t have been on his way to the airport to fly home to look after her, and he would still be alive, and everything else in her life might, eventually, have rearranged itself into something vaguely resembling normality. As it was, normality, even of the living-in-a-squat-with-strangers-and-strange-sexual-practices type seemed a nebulous and unlikely state of affairs.
Parents, Melody realised, were the linchpin of normality, even when they were far from normal themselves. Parents, even distracted, slightly ambivalent parents, acted as kind of a strainer through which life got poured. They were there, in essence, to catch the lumpy bits. Without a parent, life felt oblique and directionless. Without a parent, the world was too close for comfort.
Melody had a dozen people looking out for her. She had Aunt Susie, Aunt Maggie, Ken, Grace, Kate and Michael. The teachers at school were extra nice to her and even Penny seemed to think it beyond the pale to torment a girl who’d lost both parents within a week of each other. Beverly the social worker visited regularly and her grandmother on her father’s side had even come to spend a week with her at Susie’s house, the first time she’d set foot outside of Ireland since her husband had died twenty-two years previously.
Everyone cared about her. And Susie was, in some ways, a better carer than her mother ever was, especially since Beverly had explained to her that duck and grape fricassee wasn’t really a suitable supper for a seven-year-old, and that she’d probably be happier with sausages and mash. Susie didn’t seem to realise that children should be encouraged to look after themselves and did everything for Melody, including doing up the buckles on her shoes and brushing her teeth. Sometimes Melody felt like she should tell Susie that it was OK, that she could do those things for herself, but she didn’t because deep down inside, she liked being treated like a three-year-old.
But in spite of all the fuss and attention, and in spite of all the grown-ups who cared about her and worried about her, Melody still didn’t feel safe. She still felt like she was tiptoeing blindfold around the perimeter of a very large, very deep hole. She still wanted her mummy.
But sadly, access to her mummy was somewhat restricted.
Jane’s conditional bail had been overturned after she’d told the police that if they let her go, she’d go straight to Ramsgate and throw herself off the cliffs, and she’d been held in a secure unit in Rochester pending trial ever since.
Of course, Melody didn’t actually know that her mother had threatened suicide. She also didn’t know that her mother barely thought about her between visits and mainly sat in her bedroom thinking about her lost babies (she included Melody in this category, having read somewhere that a child leaves the opaque and semi-formed world of infanthood and enters the clearer, more unyielding world of adulthood around their seventh birthday). There were, as ever, a million things that Melody didn’t know about her life, cogs and wheels turning in dark corners that would affect her entire existence for ever more. But for now all she knew was this: it was Wednesday. It was January. It was cold. She’d had kedgeree for breakfast. And today instead of PE and science, she was going to visit her mother in prison.
Once upon a time there was a little girl called Melody. She had long wavy hair the colour of conkers and eyes the colour of burnished gold and she lived by the seaside in a big house with a smiling face with her mummy, Jane, and a man called Ken. Melody had a daddy too. He was a printer and he lived in London with a makeup artist called Jacqui, jacqui’s daughter, Charlotte, and a lovely little baby called Emily Elizabeth, who was Melody’s only s
ister. Melody sometimes stayed with her other family in the house in London and always felt sad when she had to come back to the seaside, because, you see, Melody’s mum wasn’t very happy and didn’t give Melody many cuddles or kisses. But Melody was happy by the sea because of Ken, who was kind and good, and took her for ice cream every week on a motorbike with a sidecar.
Then one day, a very sad thing happened. John and Jacqui went away to a far distant land and they took Melody’s little sister with them. Melody was very sad, and cried and cried for days. But then something happened to make her feel happy again. Her mummy made her a new baby sister. Everyone loved the new baby sister, especially Ken, but Melody knew that there was something wrong. The new baby didn’t look like it was brand new. And then the newspapers said that a baby had been stolen from outside a shop and Melody knew that that was what had happened.
The next day the police came and took the baby away and then they took Melody’s mum away. They said she was very unwell and that she couldn’t come home, because if she did she might hurt herself. Melody’s daddy wanted to come to the seaside then, to take Melody away with him to the far distant land, but a terrible thing happened and he died on the motorway trying to get to her. So now Melody had nobody at all, except for her strange Auntie Susie.
After three months Melody’s mum went to a court and the judge told her that she was to be sent to prison for two years.
Melody never saw her again.
The next thing she knew, she was lying on her back outside a burning house with some other people called Mum and Dad.
And they all lived happily ever after …
Chapter 41
Now
The following day was Cleo’s eighteenth birthday party. Melody opened up a carrier bag and put inside it two wrapped gifts: a set of lingerie from Ted Baker and a crystal-encrusted silver cross from H. Samuel. Then she opened a card on the kitchen table and let her pen hover above it for a moment while she tried to find the right words. She didn’t know where to start. That person, the one called Melody Browne, who’d stood at the side of Stacey’s hospital bed all those years ago, fifteen years old, nine months pregnant, scared and elated, holding this new life in her arms, this tiny little scrap of stuff that was destined to become a woman called Cleo – that person didn’t exist any more. She’d been erased, taken out with a click of Julius Sardo’s fingers and the swoosh of a photocopying machine in Broadstairs Library.
There was no such person as Melody Browne, so who was this, writing a birthday card to the firstborn child of her oldest and dearest friend? She tried to imagine what she’d have written two weeks ago, before her life had been whipped up into a sensational maelstrom, but couldn’t put herself there. She wanted it to be poignant, meaningful, loving. She had watched Cleo grow from a scrappy, tufty-haired infant, into a skinny, knock-kneed child, and then blossom from a gangly adolescent into a stunning five-foot-ten flame-haired beauty with a double-D chest. She had loved her as her own. And that was when it came to her, an echo of something that Ed had said to her before everything had changed. She put the biro to the card and she wrote: ‘To Beautiful Cleo, the daughter I never had and could only have dreamed of. I am so proud of you. Happy Birthday, from your loving auntie Mel xxx’.
As always, Pete and Stacey had found the money from somewhere to hire a function room above the smartest Italian restaurant in Hackney and fill it with helium balloons, banners and Easter lilies (Cleo’s middle name was Lily). Tall sash windows opened out on to the noise of Mare Street and paper-covered trestle tables bowed under the weight of bowls of pasta, platters of cold meat and piles of whole ciabatta. Melody and Ed were the first to arrive, a full half an hour before the designated start time of seven thirty.
Cleo’s remarkable eighteen-year-old body was wrapped up in a tight purple satin dress from TK Maxx and her red hair had clearly been arranged by a professional hairdresser into intricate snakes that twisted around themselves and left the nape of her neck naked, except for the clasp of a stunning Swarovski necklace. Her eyes were heavily kohled, and she looked to Melody like a creature directly off the pages of one of the daft celebrity magazines that Stacey always had lying around at her house.
She hugged her to her and breathed in her perfume, looking for that smell of smallness and newness that she’d exuded for so long, which was, of course, long gone now, and anyway indistinguishable beneath the overwhelming aroma of Agent Provocateur, her signature scent.
‘Happy birthday,’ Melody said, stroking the bare skin of her back, the same back she’d rubbed all those years earlier from time to time, trying to dislodge a bubble of gas. ‘You look absolutely beautiful, Clee, seriously, like a film star!’
‘Oh, thanks, Mel!’ Cleo hugged her back.
Stacey was scurrying around in a tight red rip-off of the Roland Mouret Galaxy dress from ASOS, her hair also professionally preened and a cigarette hanging from her painted lips. She kissed Melody distractedly and directed her to a table on the other side of the room where gifts were to be deposited. Ed was talking to Cleo. Melody watched them fondly. Her boy and her best friend’s girl. Of course she and Stacey had fantasised over the years that they would become teenage sweethearts, get married and make them both beautiful grandchildren to share, but inevitably a lifetime of living in each other’s pockets, of bickering, rowing and stubborn ignoring had put paid to that, and now they rarely saw each other. Besides, Cleo had a boyfriend now, a man of twenty, tall and sinewy with a fine-boned face and very thick hair, called Jade, with whom she was deeply in love.
‘You all right?’ Stacey narrowed her eyes at her.
‘Yes, I’m fine.’
‘You sure? You seem a bit …’
‘What?’
‘I don’t know. A bit off.’
‘Honestly,’ said Melody. ‘I’m fine.’ She wanted to tell Stacey about everything, now that she knew that she wasn’t mad, now that she had hard evidence that her mind was sound, but she couldn’t, not tonight, not here.
‘Oh, Mel,’ said Stacey, pulling her towards her for a hug, ‘my baby! Look at her! She’s not a baby any more.’ She smelled of nicotine and beer and felt tiny inside Melody’s embrace.
‘Oh!’ Melody had remembered something, something so important that she could barely believe she hadn’t already asked. ‘The test! Did you do it?’
Stacey let go of her and put her finger to her lips. ‘No,’ she said softly, ‘not yet. I want to get this week out of the way first. I’ll do it on Monday. Another few days isn’t going to hurt.’
Melody nodded distractedly. She didn’t agree. This baby, if it was a baby, was yet another gift in Stacey’s overflowing basket of life. She should treasure it, nurture it, respect it, if for no other reason than to show gratitude for her myriad blessings.
Stacey looked at her pursed-up mouth and smiled. ‘Don’t you go all moral majority on me, Melody Browne! You know as well as I do that there’s nothing there yet, just a bunch of bubbles. I can’t get my head round the idea of a baby right at this very moment. And tonight is my first baby’s big night and I am not going to miss out on that when for all I know I might not even be pregnant. So, unpurse those lips and go and get yourself a beer!’
Melody felt detached from the celebrations that night. The whole affair came to her like a painting in a gallery, like a scene from a stage play. She saw the guests as characters, who she stood and observed from somewhere in the gods. She saw Cleo, the beautiful princess, her mother, Queen Stacey, and her father, King Pete, in his Burton suit and the Paul Smith shirt that Stacey had bought for him in the sale last summer. She watched as Princess Cleo moved to her father’s side and pulled herself into him, she saw King Pete lean down and kiss her head, not his daughter in any biological way, but his daughter none the less. She saw the new princess, Clover, in a mauve velvet dress from Monsoon that she had helped Stacey pick out last Saturday, her hair held back with a velvet rose, dancing with her cousins, her tiny face alive with excitement. She saw S
tacey’s mum, Pat, the Queen Mother, looking ragged and confused, leaning into her walking frame on a chair in the corner, and she saw Stacey’s brother, Paul, looking chipper, cheery and whippet thin in jeans and a Nike sweatshirt, underdressed as ever. His pregnant wife stood next to him, clutching a glass of Coke with both hands and watching her children dance with Clover, her eyes filled with pride.
Melody absorbed the scene, and then began, subconsciously, to paste strange, new faces over the familiar faces in front of her. She put the gentle, equine face of a man called John Ribblesdale over the face of Pete and the startled, bloated, but distinctively pretty face of a woman called Jane Ribblesdale over the face of Stacey. The children she transposed with the faces of a baby called Edward Thomas, bald and creased and freshly hatched, and a lovely little girl called Emily Elizabeth, whose face she had to invent because there’d been no pictures of her. She saw the sad, faded faces of her parents, the other ones, the ones who’d saved her from the fire, and she saw a man called Ken, beautiful and kind, just as she’d pictured him, with a face like Jesus Christ. Her family. Her real family. Not this borrowed family that she’d lived vicariously through for the past eighteen years, and not the tiny family she’d made for herself, the one that consisted of just her and Ed, but another family, a big one, one that belonged exclusively to her, a family with roots and feet and legs and arms, a family that had crumbled into pieces and been blown across the world by a cruel breeze.
This could have been her life, she thought, this rich, dizzying whirl of humanity with all its faults and foibles and oddness. But something sad and irreversible had happened when she was too young and unformed to understand or even to remember, and now she was left here, in limbo, between a place she thought she knew and a place she might have known. She looked again at Pete, big and strong, kind and shy, and she thought of the man who’d died on an American freeway twenty-seven years ago on his way to get her, and she wanted, more than anything in the world, for him to walk through the door, in his best suit and shoes, smile at her, and say, Hello, Melody, where’ve you been?