The Truth About Melody Browne

by Lisa Jewell

  ‘I don’t think,’ said Ken, gently grinding the burned-out tip of his roll-up into the soil beneath the Brownes’ neat lawn and putting the butt into his inside pocket, ‘that your mother is really well enough to feel cross about anything. Come on,’ he held out his hand for hers, ‘I’d better go. Come and wave me off.’

  Melody had to use all her strength not to cry when she saw Ken putting on his old crash helmet and straddling his bike a moment later. She stared longingly at the empty sidecar and pictured herself squashed into it, wearing the furry coat that Aunt Susie had bought her from Fenwicks last month, and her new Fair Isle mittens, taking off on an adventure, one that would inevitably involve lemonade and ice cream, and then going back to the house in Broadstairs with pink cheeks and a belly full of sugar.

  She smiled bravely as Ken revved up the engine and she waved at him as hard as she could. When she couldn’t see him any more she turned and ran inside, straight up to her bedroom, where she landed cross-legged on her bedroom floor and began to wail. She stared round the room through tear-soaked eyes, and her gaze alighted upon the Spanish girl. She stared back at Melody, reassuringly, her wide eyes still the same improbable, iridescent shade of blue as the wings of an Emperor butterfly, her hair still as dark and glossy as a saucepan of melting chocolate, her dress still as vibrantly scarlet as raspberry sauce.

  ‘It’s not fair,’ Melody sniffed between gulps, ‘it’s not fair. None of it. None of it. None of it.’ The Spanish girl smiled at her sympathetically. ‘I want to go home,’ sobbed Melody, ‘I want to go home. I want my mummy and I want my daddy and I want to go home!!!’

  Melody closed her eyes, and let the tears run down her face. When she opened them again, she saw Gloria, her face set with sadness, closing her own bedroom door very slowly behind her and heading away across the landing and towards the stairs.

  Chapter 46

  Now

  Melody blow-dried her hair on Saturday morning, not her usual hasty, heavy-handed flurry with her fingers, but a proper blow-dry, with a cylindrical brush that had come free with the hairdryer. She teased it and rolled it until it fell to her shoulders in shiny layers. Then she pulled out her old makeup bag and applied some eyeliner, some cover-stick to her under-eyes and a coat of brown mascara. It was a fresh morning again, with no evidence of summer in the air, so she put on some jeans, a white camisole top and a heavy ribbed cardigan in baby blue. On her feet she wore her brand-new Geox trainers, and in her ears, a pair of large silver hoops. She appraised herself in the mirror, wondering what sort of impression she would make. She didn’t look like a dinner lady, nor did she look like a single mum who lived on a council estate, but she didn’t look like a girl from LA called Emily who worked for the BBC and whose mother was an Oscar-nominated makeup artist, either. She sighed and pushed her shiny hair behind her ears. Her clock radio told her that it was 11.58. She was late.

  * * *

  She met Emily on a bench outside a café in Ladbroke Grove.

  ‘Hello,’ she said, approaching her softly. ‘Emily?’

  Emily turned and smiled, and Melody’s heart turned over. Chestnut hair, hazel eyes, soft, round face, light eyebrows and a smile that turned her from haughty to sweet. It was like looking in a mirror: a rather flattering mirror.

  ‘Melody! Oh, oh, omigod!’ Emily got to her feet and Melody discovered that they were exactly the same height. Emily stood for a moment and stared at her, her eyes taking in the details of Melody’s face, her mouth agape. ‘This. Is. Un. Real.’

  Melody nodded, absorbing her sister, taking in her shiny white teeth, her double-pierced ears, her pointy green pumps and skinny grey jeans. ‘Wow. This is amazing,’ she agreed.

  ‘You look exactly like I expected. You look just like Dad, just like …’

  ‘You?’

  Emily laughed. ‘Yeah,’ she said, ‘just like me.’

  ‘So, how old are you now?’

  ‘I’m nearly twenty-eight. Getting old!’

  ‘Oh, no, twenty-eight – you’re still a baby.’

  ‘Well, it doesn’t really feel like it. Though my lifestyle might suggest someone considerably younger. Hey, look, I thought we might go for a coffee?’

  They headed into a café around the corner, full of Saturday families and Portobello shoppers. Melody ordered a cappuccino and Emily ordered a herbal tea.

  ‘That was the most amazing phone call of my life,’ said Emily, taking off her denim jacket and revealing a plum cotton vest top and a pinstripe waistcoat.

  ‘Seriously. I was with my roommates and they were all like, omigod, I can’t believe that just happened, and I was like, yeah, I know, my actual sister, and we were all screaming, because, wow, you’re like a legend, you know?’

  Melody smiled and pushed up the sleeves of her cardigan. ‘Well,’ she said, ‘I’m not sure that’s exactly how I’d describe myself.’

  ‘No, seriously, when I was growing up, there was this picture of you, in my sister’s room –’

  ‘What – Charlotte?’

  ‘Yeah, in Charlotte’s room, in her, like, her dressing mirror thing, and you’re wearing this like gypsy dress and you have a camellia in your hair and you’re smiling at the camera and you look like the most interesting girl, you know, like someone who you’d want to know, want to talk to. And I just … oh, shit, this is really embarrassing … I made you into my imaginary friend. Seriously. I would talk to you all the time, in my bedroom, I would tell you what I was doing with my dolls and I swear you talked back to me. My mother sent me to a therapist, because she thought I was nuts. And I guess I was kind of a weird kid … I didn’t have any real friends, just you …’ She smiled at Melody, almost apologetically. ‘So, you can imagine how freaky this is for me. My imaginary friend – come to life. Wow.’

  Melody looked at her in amazement. ‘This photo,’ she said, ‘where did it come from?’

  ‘God, I don’t know. My dad – well, shit, I mean our dad – took it, when you came to stay?’

  ‘I came to stay? You mean in Goodge Place?’

  ‘No, in LA.’

  ‘I came to stay in LA?’

  ‘Yeah! You came on your own, on a plane. I always thought that made you the bravest, coolest girl ever, to get on a plane on your own.’

  ‘I went on a plane, to LA?’

  ‘Yeah! You don’t remember?’

  Melody shook her head, and picked up her coffee cup. ‘No,’ she said, ‘I really don’t remember anything about it at all.’ She paused and stared at the table-top for a moment, feeling for the first time the dreadful reality of her broken memory. Forgetting another mother, another father, another house, another life, that was one thing, but to forget a trip to LA struck her as strangely appalling in every way.

  ‘Wow. That’s bizarre. I mean, you stayed for like, two weeks. You slept on the floor in my nursery.’

  ‘I did?’

  ‘Uh-huh. Mom always talks about it. She said you were “the little babysitter”, that you sat with me, like, all the time, didn’t leave my side.’

  And then it hit her: a white room, Tweetypie stuck to the wall, a mobile swaying gently in the breeze, an open window, the lazy symphony of cicadas, ruffled palms, the bubble of a swimming pool filter and murmur of just-heard adult conversation. She felt the stone floor, hard beneath her body and felt the presence of something precious, a small life, beneath the cut-out animals of the wooden mobile. Her sister.

  ‘I remember!’ she said, slamming down her coffee cup, dizzy with the joy of remembering, ‘I remember! You had Tweetypie on your bedroom wall. And there was a swimming pool and the air … it smelled like …’ She sniffed the air, ‘it smelled like …’

  ‘Jasmine?’ said Emily.

  ‘No, not jasmine – chlorine! I do remember.’

  ‘Wow, I can’t believe you remember the Tweetypie decal! There was Minnie Mouse too, on the other wall. Remember that? They were there until I was like, nearly ten! Then I scraped them off myself with a palette kn
ife and painted the whole room aubergine. Mom was not impressed. So, do you …’ Emily cast her eyes down towards the floor, ‘do you remember much about Dad?’

  Melody smiled wistfully. ‘Not really,’ she said, ‘and anything I do remember is pretty new to me, but I remember he had a kind face, that he was tall, that he really loved us both, a lot.’

  Emily smiled and fiddled with a tube of sugar. ‘Yeah,’ she said, ‘that’s what Mom’s told me. I mean, I was, like, one when he died. I don’t remember him at all, you know, not even a little bit. Just what I’ve seen in photos. And he looks like the nicest, kindest man. I wish I’d known him.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Melody, ‘so do I.’

  ‘Well, you got, you know, six years?’

  Melody shook her head sadly. ‘Not really,’ she said. ‘I don’t remember anything about the first nine years of my life.’

  ‘What, like nothing at all?’

  ‘No,’ she shook her head and smiled wryly. ‘Up until a week ago I thought my name was Melody Browne and that my parents were called Clive and Gloria and that I’d spent my whole life in a house in Canterbury.’

  Emily threw her a confused look. ‘What, seriously?’

  ‘Uh-huh. I had some kind of amnesia and it seems like while this was happening, my mother got sent to prison, my dad died in a pile-up and I got adopted by a pair of strangers who lied to me my whole life.’

  ‘You’re kidding, right?’

  ‘No,’ said Melody, ‘no. I’m not. But I really wish I was.’

  They spent another hour in the café, ordered more tea, more coffee, and talked ferociously and almost manically about absolutely everything. Emily lived in a flatshare off Golborne Road with three other girls, she worked for the BBC in their marketing department and she was writing a novel in her spare time, about a girl trying to find her long-lost sister.

  ‘You know,’ she said, ‘I came to live in London to be near you. I wanted to breathe the same air as you. I wanted to give serendipity a head start …’

  She really liked her mother’s new partner, and her two younger half-brothers, but she couldn’t get on with Charlotte, however much she tried. ‘She’s just, like, a diva. And she’s so smart but she plays it dumb all the time. I can’t connect to her, you know?’

  She liked cooking and socialising and she had a boyfriend of fourteen months whom she was thinking about splitting up with because ‘he’s nearly thirty-one and he’s ready for, like, having a family and settling down, and I’m like twenty-seven going on seventeen and that’s just not what I’m about right now.’

  She was amazed to hear about Melody’s son. ‘You’re a mother? Omigod! That means I’m, like, an aunt! And you were fifteen? Jees, you know, I just knew that you would be different and amazing, and you are, you just totally are!’

  By the time they left the café Melody felt like all the strange and dreadful fragments of her forgotten childhood, all the sad revelations and bleakly gothic truths that had emerged from the shadows of her mind and shown their awful selves to the light had somehow come together and formed a new bright, glossy picture, embodied in this girl, this bouncy, beautiful, sweet, silly and unblemished girl. It was as if it had all been distilled down to one small shiny pearl of goodness: her sister. And in this new person she saw not only a person she might have been close to had fate sent her down a less pot-holed road, but another person too – the person she might have been if her father had not died on the freeway coming to bring her home, if he’d made it to London, helped her pack a bag, and brought her back to Los Angeles.

  ‘Do you have to rush off?’ said Emily, grabbing hold of Melody’s hand.

  ‘No,’ she replied. ‘Not at all.’

  ‘Good,’ said Emily, ‘there’s something I really, really want to show you.’

  By the time they reached Tooting, it was raining heavily and they huddled together beneath a small Hello Kitty umbrella pulled out from the bowels of Emily’s roomy shoulder bag. Emily wouldn’t tell Melody where they were going, but she seemed quieter as they approached the cream stone walls of Lambeth Cemetery.

  ‘Here we are,’ she said.

  Melody threw her a questioning look.

  ‘We’re going to see Dad,’ said Emily. ‘Are you OK with that?’

  Melody gulped. She’d planned on spending a day at the Family Records Centre in Clerkenwell, thought about finding her father’s death certificate, discovering where he’d been buried, but she hadn’t found the impetus. Now she was here, a moment away from his final resting place. She took a deep breath and nodded.

  ‘Good,’ said Emily, ‘that’s good.’

  ‘I come here once a month,’ said Emily as they meandered through the pretty cemetery, dodging puddles. ‘At least once a month. This was another reason I came to London. So that I could see him whenever I wanted. And I always half-hoped that maybe one day I’d come along and find you here, you know, just paying your respects … But I guess, now I know a bit more about you, that that wasn’t ever going to happen.’

  As they walked, Melody felt shivery waves of familiarity. She saw a stone angel and a chipped crucifix, ivy-draped walls and pointy conifers and she knew she’d seen them before. And then she felt a wall of sadness, a bleak certainty – this was a place of personal tragedy and of desperation.

  ‘Here,’ said Emily, pausing between two rows of small stone plaques, embedded into the earth. ‘Here he is. Dad.’

  Melody stopped and gazed at the ground. His plaque was dark grey and the words were hammered out in cream:

  John Baxter Ribblesdale

  1944–1979

  Beloved father, stepfather and husband

  Taken from us much too soon

  Will remain forever loved

  She put her hand to the damp stone and stroked it gently. And as she touched the stone she felt the world start to wrap itself around her head, darkly and softly, and she closed her eyes and saw a hole in the ground, and a tiny white coffin and a woman in an old grey dress trying to climb into the hole. She opened her eyes and the image was gone, but there were tears in her eyes.

  ‘I’ve been here before,’ she said.

  ‘Yes, of course you have,’ said Emily, ‘you must have been here for the funeral.’

  ‘Yes, I suppose I must have.’ She looked around and saw a familiar tree, ‘But it feels like it was something else. A different funeral … maybe a …’ And then she stopped and gasped, because she had just seen the inscription on the plaque to the left of her father’s – a small cream plaque, streaked green in places:

  Romany Rosebud Ribblesdale

  4 January – 6 January 1977

  The sweetest rose

  Plucked before her time

  Our hearts forever darkened

  It took a moment for Melody to absorb the full meaning of the inscription. At first she thought perhaps it was the grave of an ancient ancestor, a tragic child born and perished in some other century, unconnected to her life, but then she absorbed the numbers properly and realised that this was a baby born when she was four years old and that probably, given the nature of her recent flashback, the woman she’d pictured trying to climb into the hole in the ground must have been her mother, Jane Ribblesdale, the Broadstairs Baby Snatcher and that she therefore must also have been the baby’s mother and suddenly everything made a kind of blinding, awful sense.

  Emily saw her staring at the baby’s headstone and touched her arm. ‘Poor little baby, huh?’ she said softly.

  ‘Did you know?’ Melody asked. ‘Did you know she was my sister?’

  ‘Our sister. Yes, uh-huh. I knew before I came to London. My mom always said that was the start of everything. You know.’

  Melody shook her head. ‘No,’ she said, ‘I don’t know. Start of what?’

  ‘Well, you know, your mom and dad splitting up, your mom going nuts, taking you to live in that dive by the sea, stealing that baby, killing herself …’

  Melody gasped, her body rocked. Her mother was
dead. She’d suspected it, but not known it, and knowing it hurt more than she’d imagined.

  ‘Oh God.’ Emily paused and stared at her. ‘I thought you knew?’

  ‘No, no, I didn’t.’

  ‘Oh, shit, Melody, I’m so sorry. I just assumed because you knew all about what happened with snatching the baby and everything …’

  ‘I knew she took the baby and I knew she went to prison but I thought maybe … I don’t know what I thought.’

  ‘There,’ said Emily, pointing to the other side of their father’s grave. ‘Look.’

  Melody followed her arm to a small grey plaque, framed in soft green moss.

  Jane Victoria Newsome

  1948–1981

  A Mother above all else

  Loved and missed

  She fell to her haunches then, and let her head drop in her chest. The rain was falling heavier now, running down her crown and over her face. She looked up and glanced from left to right at the three small rectangles of stone, marking three small boxes of dust and ash. Her mother, her father, her sister. Her family. Shadowy, unknown strangers, faces seen only in smudgy black-and-white photocopies, a baby she’d never known, dead at two days, leaving her parents with ‘hearts forever darkened’, a tiny world pinched out by the fingers of fate in less than five years.

  ‘What happened to the baby?’ she asked.

  ‘Um, I’m not sure. Heart defect, I think. I’d have to check with Mom, But that sounds right to me.’

  ‘And what happened to Jane? What happened to my mum?’

  Emily shrugged and grimaced. ‘She hanged herself,’ she said, apologetically, ‘I think.’

  Melody inhaled, suddenly, as though she had been kicked in the chest. An image flashed through her mind, a featureless woman in a big grey dress hanging from the ceiling in a prison cell. Had she been there? No, of course she hadn’t. It was just an offering from her imagination. But she must have been told. Who would have told her? How did she feel? Had her mother left her a note? Had she made any provision at all for her only daughter?

  ‘And what … what happened to me?’