by Lisa Jewell
The party went on until past midnight, until the tightly coiled snakes of Cleo’s hair had unfurled into shaggy tendrils and the kohl around her eyes had smudged into greyness. Melody got into a minicab and let out a sigh of relief. Ed had stayed behind, invited back to Stacey’s house to carry on the party, and Melody was glad to be alone. The driver was Asian, and silent. Feeling softened with the warmth of celebration, Melody pulled her mobile phone out of her handbag and opened up the last text message from Ben, the one she’d read on the train on the way to Broadstairs yesterday. She pictured Ben as she read it – his name suited him so well – Gentle Ben, a gentle man. She smiled. And then she imagined him waiting for her in her flat, cross-legged on her sofa, reading a book (he seemed the type of man who would read). She imagined him glancing up at the sound of her footsteps in the hallway, putting down his book, smiling: How are you? How was your night? And then she imagined herself kicking off these stupid heels, curling up next to him, resting her tired heavy head against his strong shoulder and saying: Lovely, really lovely. I wish you’d been there, though. And she felt it, for the first time in her adult life: a hole, a space – room for someone in her life. And soon, when she knew exactly who she was, she’d press ‘reply’ and let fate dictate the rest.
She switched off her phone, and let it rest in her lap while she turned to face the moving scenery.
Out there, she mused, as the neon lights of an East End Saturday night flashed and flickered at her through the window of the cab, out there was a girl called Emily, a girl who was her sister. And out there was a man called Edward, who’d been stolen from his mother by her own mother. Out there, right now, maybe there, in that Turkish restaurant, there was a woman called Jacqui who’d lived with her father for two years. And out there, maybe, was another woman called Jane who’d given birth to her.
She’d read her story again and again over the past few days, gone through the copied cuttings until they were worn through by her inquisitive fingertips, and now she knew nearly everything. She knew what had happened to her from the ages of four till seven. But she still didn’t know what had happened before. And she still didn’t know what happened next. What twisted knot of fate had brought her to a Broadstairs squat, and how had she ended up living in a Canterbury cul-de-sac with a pair of strangers called Mum and Dad?
Chapter 42
1980
Ken took her to see her mum in prison, in his sidecar.
Ken had put in a few hours over the past months, sweet-talking Auntie Susie, who was now no longer of the opinion that he was ‘an unsuitable companion for a young child’, and now thought of him as a ‘fine young man’, and even ‘a sweetheart’. She allowed Ken to take Melody to school every morning and bring her home every afternoon (particularly after an attempt to walk there had been marred by people stopping and staring at Melody and saying things in stage whispers, like, ‘That’s her, the baby-snatcher’s kid!’) and twice a week to take her out for ice cream at Morelli’s, or back to the house in town for tea with Matty and Seth.
Her mum was sitting in a big patterned chair with plastic sleeves on the arms when they were let into the visiting room at the prison. Melody and Ken sat on stools without backs and drank water out of plastic cups.
‘How are you, darling?’ asked her mother.
‘I’m fine,’ Melody said, trying not to be put off by her mother’s strange demeanour. Ken had said that they’d had to give her special medicine to stop her feeling so sad and that she might not seem quite herself, but she hadn’t expected her to look quite so swollen and grey. Her face was all shiny and tight, and her eyes were all sunken and beady, like raisins stuck in dough. Her hair was scraped back into a greasy ponytail and she was wearing grey prison clothes that made her look like a street-cleaner. But what was worse was that she was wearing lipstick, just a touch, peachy pink and poorly applied. Melody’s mum hardly ever wore lipstick and Melody knew she’d put it on, a) because she was mad, and b) because she thought it would make her look nice. Which it didn’t. It just made her look like a fat, mad, greasy woman in lipstick.
‘And how is school?’
‘School’s fine,’ Melody replied.
‘Is everyone being kind to you?’
‘Yes,’ she said, ‘even Penny.’
‘Penny?’ said her mother vaguely. ‘Do I know Penny?’
‘I shouldn’t think so,’ Melody said. ‘I didn’t tell you about her because I thought you might make a scene. She was picking on me for ages, about living in the squat with you and Ken and everything. But since you stole the baby, she’s been all right to me.’
‘Good.’ Her mother nodded distractedly and looked mildly pleased with herself for having relieved Melody of Penny’s attentions. ‘And how are you getting on with Auntie Susie?’
‘Fine,’ said Melody, staring at a swirl on the worn-out Axminster carpet and thinking that it looked a bit like a Red Indian’s face. ‘She makes me proper food now sometimes. And she bought me some clothes for Christmas. Nice clothes.’
‘Oh,’ said Jane, ‘that’s nice. I’m glad it’s working out. And did she give you the gift from me?’
‘Yes,’ Melody nodded, thinking of the far-too-babyish cuddly chimpanzee that had arrived in the post three days after Christmas in a slightly battered, poorly wrapped parcel and a note that said, ‘With love from Mum (& Father Christmas)’, when everyone knew that there was no such thing as Father Christmas. ‘Thank you.’
‘Sorry it was a bit late, but it’s hard to get organised in this place. You know. So many rules and regulations.’ She laughed and put her hand to her hair, and Melody squirmed and thought that she wanted to go now. The woman sitting in front of her was not her mother. She was not the mother she’d lived with in London, who’d had a job and a throaty laugh and a penchant for rum punch, and neither was she the mother she’d lived with in Broadstairs, who was pensive and sad and prone to doing absent-minded things like forgetting to cook her tea. This woman was like someone in a rubber suit doing a poor impersonation of her mother. No, in fact this woman was just like a rubber suit without a body in it at all. This woman was empty.
‘And how are you, Ken?’ Jane turned and fixed her unsettling smile upon him.
‘Good,’ he said. ‘Well. Fine.’
‘And how’s everyone else? Grace? Matty?’
‘Fine,’ he said again, ‘everyone’s fine.’
It fell silent for a moment and Melody looked around the room. She wasn’t the only kid here. All the people in this prison were women, so quite a few had their children here to see them. There was a girl, just by the window, about the same age as Melody, with a much younger brother of about two. Their mother didn’t have the same strange, glassy look that Jane had. Their mother was crying, and trying to look brave all at the same time. Their mother had a scrunched-up tissue in her hand and kept squeezing both her childrens’ hands. Their mother looked horrified to find herself talking to her children in a prison lounge.
Melody stared at her mother’s hands for a while. They were very pale and she had a little bruise on the top of one of her veins and a little scab. ‘What’s that?’ she asked, pointing at the mark.
Her mother glanced down, vaguely. ‘That? Oh, I don’t know, some kind of injection. They’re always injecting you with something or other in this place. If it’s not going down your gullet it’s being pumped down your veins.’ She laughed inappropriately.
Melody paused then and waited, to see whether if she was quiet for a moment her mother might say something about her father, but she didn’t. Instead she smiled at Ken and said: ‘So, how’s everyone?’ for the second time, as if she’d forgotten that she’d already asked him.
‘Did you know?’ Melody interrupted impatiently. ‘Did you know about Dad?’
‘Yes,’ said Jane. ‘It’s very, very sad. And you …’ she looked at Melody quizzically, as if something had just occurred to her, ‘you must be feeling very sad, I suppose. Are you?’
Melod
y nodded sulkily.
‘But you know, he should never have been there in the first place, should never have followed her over there, given up his job, his livelihood, his daughter, just to idle by a pool all day long.’
‘And you,’ shouted Melody, ‘you should never have stolen a baby and made him come back for me!’
‘Well,’ said her mother, softly and in a considered tone, ‘perhaps not. But now we’re all paying the price for our mistakes, aren’t we?’ She said this with an air of great wisdom, as if there were some kind of divine justice at work in all of their lives rather than just chaos, madness and tragedy.
Melody didn’t want to hug her mother when they left ten minutes later. She didn’t even want to kiss her on the cheek. She just wanted to get into Ken’s sidecar and feel the icy wind against her hot skin. She wanted to feel clean and she wanted to feel free. A lot had happened to Melody over the past few years, but she barely thought about the three-year-old girl in the yellow bedroom in Lambeth these days. She had a vague recollection of a funeral and a man with funny hair and another slight feeling of having been present when her mother was in labour, but, like most children, Melody lived mostly in the present and in the future, with the occasional foray into last year, and she was old enough now to know that she would never again live a normal life with her mother and her father, and that what lay ahead of her was unconventional and slightly scary. There was no point in wallowing around in thoughts of what might have been. Clearly what might have been wasn’t going to be, and so for now her main concerns revolved around whether or not the woman from the social services would let her live with Ken and Grace and save her from a life of Jesus and too much central heating with Auntie Susie. Melody didn’t want perfection, she just wanted second best.
But even that option was going to be cruelly snatched from her that afternoon, for as Ken’s bike rounded the twists and turns of the country lanes, heading back towards the coast, something terrible was happening at Auntie Susie’s house, something that would rip gentle destiny from Melody’s hands one more time and scatter it to the winds.
‘Oh God, get her away, Ken, get her away now!’ Aunt Susie was standing outside the house, ashen, in a summer dress and sandals, and wrapped up in a blanket. ‘For God’s sake, don’t let her see!’
But it was too late. Melody had already seen.
The front of Aunt Susie’s immaculate cream bungalow had been daubed from top to toe in red and white paint with words like ‘Rapist’s spawn!’ and ‘Accursed child!’ and ‘Blood is thicker than water!!’ But worse than that was the fact that the front porch had been ripped apart by some kind of explosion.
‘It was a petrol bomb!’ sobbed Auntie Susie, sipping sweet tea given to her by a kindly neighbour. ‘Imagine that! Someone made a bomb and put it through my letterbox! Here, in my house, with me inside, and thank God Melody wasn’t here!’
The wall around where Susie’s front door had been was jet black, and there was still smoke coming out of the exploded side windows. ‘Look!’ she said, pointing at the gaping holes. ‘My stained glass! Gone! That was original you know, you can’t replace stuff like that. I mean, what sort of person, what sort of person … ?’
A few neighbours milled around on the cold pavement, the fire brigade had been and gone, and the police were coming back later to take a statement. But for now, Susie was left here, cold and alone, outside her violated, insecure home.
‘OK,’ said Ken, ‘let’s get some timber, get that door boarded up. Here,’ he turned to face the appalled neighbours, ‘have any of you got some old timber?’
Ken was taken to a neighbour’s shed, while Susie and Melody were soothed and comforted in the teak-lined front room of an elderly lady called Evelyn.
‘Dreadful thing,’ she tutted quietly, ‘a dreadful, dreadful thing,’ in a tone of voice that suggested that she was always half expecting dreadful things to happen so when they did she was only half surprised.
But Melody was concerned not so much with the dreadfulness of the situation as with the detail of it. Why had someone called her a rapist’s spawn? She knew what a rapist was. Grace had told her one day when she’d heard them say it on the radio. A rapist was a man who had sex with someone who didn’t want to have sex. A rapist was a bad, bad man. And it was as she was wondering about this strange detail and thinking that she might ask, but feeling that it wasn’t very nice to talk about things like that in front of an old lady, that she saw a copy of the Kentish Gazette on Evelyn’s armchair and saw a headline that nearly took her breath away.
BABY SNATCHER IS AU PAIR RAPIST’S SISTER-IN-LAW!
Melody discreetly perched herself on the armchair and turned to read the text beneath the headline:
It emerged today that Jane Ribblesdale, the Broadstairs Baby Snatcher is in fact the sister-in-law of Michael Radlett, the infamous Au Pair Rapist. Radlett, 41, is married to Mrs Ribblesdale’s older sister, Margaret Radlett, 37. Last year Radlett was convicted in the Crown Court of six counts of rape committed against young women. He has been dubbed the Au Pair Rapist due to the occupation of five of his victims. He was sentenced to life imprisonment and is currently carrying out his term at Pentonville Prison in north London. Mrs Radlett refused to comment on this story from her home in Ealing, West London.
Melody couldn’t read everything but she absorbed enough to understand why there was paint on Aunt Susie’s house. She put her hands in her lap and sighed. She thought of her cousins, Nicola and Claire, and wished she could see them again. She thought of poor, sad Auntie Maggie, and of the last time she’d seen her. She thought about all the adults she knew and how difficult they all made it seem, just the ordinary business of getting on with life. And then she thought of Ken, the only person she knew who made being a grown-up look like something she might one day want to do, and hoped that this terrible unfolding of events might just have a silver lining, that it might make someone at the social services think she’d be much better off being taken away from her aunt and sent back to the house by the sea.
Melody was taken away from her aunt, a few days later, after someone posted a packet of human excrement through the letterbox of the newly refitted front door, but she wasn’t sent to Ken’s house by the sea, she was sent somewhere altogether different. She was sent to Canterbury to live with a couple called Clive and Gloria Browne.
Chapter 43
Now
Melody had never been into an internet café before. She’d never even been on the internet before. Stacey, who worked in an office and did most of her shopping on-line, always teased her about it: ‘You’re a sodding troglodyte, Melody Browne!’
So she felt slightly nervous as she set her handbag down on the worn blue carpets of the easylnternet Café at Trafalgar Square on Sunday afternoon. The café was half full: European teenagers in generic jeans and T-shirts, their hair and skin dulled by insufficient showering facilities in scruffy hostels; tourists in shorts and sandals; immigrants applying for jobs and instant-messaging their friends and families.
She looked at the computer screen. She’d paid in advance for an hour. An hour should be enough, she assumed, though having never really used a computer before she had no idea how long this was going to take. She really didn’t know where to start and the clock in the corner of the screen was ticking down the minutes.
‘Excuse me,’ she said to an overweight Chinese teenager sitting to her left. ‘How do I look things up on the internet?’
The girl eased herself away from her computer and silently pressed a few buttons on Melody’s keyboard.
‘There,’ she pointed at a box in the middle of the screen, ‘put in what you want find there. Put these …’ she made quotes with her fingertips, ‘around words for make it more acoorut. OK?’
Melody nodded gratefully. ‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘You saved my life.’
‘No probs,’ said the girl, returning to her seat and to a website that appeared to be selling dancewear.
Melody opened
her pad, the one she’d written in on the fire escape this morning whilst fending off her hangover with full-fat Coke and four slices of toast:
People to Find
Emily Elizabeth Ribblesdale/Sonningfeld?
Charlotte (Sonningfeld?)
Jacqui Sonningfeld
Ken Stone
Grace (Stone?)
Seth (Stone?)
Matty ??
JANE RIBBLESDALE (NEWSOME?)
Susie/Susan Newsome
Mum and Dad (?)
She started to type. Nothing came up for Emily Elizabeth, nor for Charlotte (though without her surname, she hadn’t expected it to). Jacqui Sonningfeld on the other hand, brought up a few pages.
As she read through the results, Melody learned that Jacqui was born in Leicester in 1950, that she’d been nominated for an Oscar in 1994 for her makeup effects in a film called Beatlemania and that she lived in Beverly Hills with her husband, a film editor called Tony Parry, and their two teenage children. There was no mention, that Melody could see, of any former husbands or older children, but the picture that accompanied one of the articles showed a dyed-blonde woman in designer glasses with a slightly leathery mouth and very thickly applied mascara who was, Melody was absolutely certain, the woman with whom she’d stayed in the thin house in Fitzrovia.
She made a note of Jacqui Sonningfeld’s agent’s phone number and address and then began to look for Ken Stone. This was harder, as where there was only one Jacqui Sonningfeld, there seemed to be dozens of Ken Stones. There was no way Melody would be able to uncover precisely the Ken Stone she needed from amongst the hundreds of results that came up, so she tried Grace Stone instead. This brought up an interesting selection of results – including barbecues and duvet covers – but one in particular caught Melody’s eye – a yoga instructor in Folkestone. The location was right, as was the occupation. She made a note of the accompanying mobile phone number and then took a breath. She was about to search for her mother.