The Truth About Melody Browne

by Lisa Jewell

‘How long has she been here?’ asked Melody while they waited.

  Matthew shrugged. ‘Years,’ he said. ‘Pretty much since you were adopted. Since the heart attack.’

  ‘Heart attack?’

  ‘Yes. She had a weak heart. There was all the stress with the court case, then she had a minor attack after your mum’s suicide, and then a massive heart attack when she heard about the fire at your place, when you went missing. She was clinically dead for four minutes, came out of it with brain damage, affected her sight, her bowel control. Now she can’t see, and she poos in a bag, and she’s been in here ever since. Mum’s been really good about keeping in touch with her. She visits quite a lot, I think.’

  ‘Miss Newsome’s in the residents’ lounge,’ said the nurse.

  Melody followed Matthew down a corridor and into a large, heavily plastered room overlooking a manicured garden. A television was on in the corner, showing Deal or No Deal, and a dozen or so elderly people sat staring at it from over-sized chairs. In a chair under a window sat an extraordinary-looking woman, fat as a walrus, fluffy white hair backcombed into points. Wearing a lime-green tracksuit and dark glasses, she looked more Hollywood Hills than suburban Kent.

  ‘Well, hello, Miss Susie Newsome. It’s me, Matty.’

  Susie looked up towards him, unseeingly, large wattles of crêpey flesh flapping from side to side as she did so. ‘Matty. That’s nice. Who are you with?’

  ‘You’ll never guess.’

  ‘No,’ she agreed, ‘I don’t suppose I will.’

  ‘Someone you haven’t seen for a very long time. Someone you’ve thought about for thirty years. Someone really special.’

  ‘Let me feel,’ said Susie, holding out two plump white hands. Melody moved towards her and let her touch her face. It was an odd sensation but not altogether unpleasant. ‘No,’ smiled Susie, running her hands down Melody’s hair, ‘no idea, you’ll have to tell me. Who are you?’

  ‘I’m Melody.’

  Susie stopped then, her face frozen in surprise. ‘Melody?’ she gasped. ‘My Melody?’

  Melody nodded. ‘Yes.’

  Tears sprang to the old lady’s eyes. ‘Oh, my! But where did you come from?’

  ‘We came from Grace’s flat. We’ve just –’

  ‘No no no!’ she cried, ‘I mean – where have you been?’

  Melody explained everything, from the Julius Sardo show to the trips to Broadstairs and her visit to her mother and fathers’ graves the day before with her sister.

  ‘And this is all new to you? All this, this other world?’

  Melody nodded, then remembered to speak. ‘Yes. I thought it was just me and my son. I thought I was alone, but, well,’ she paused, emotion stopping the words halfway up her throat, ‘I’m not.’ She started to cry then, tears of hope and tears of gladness, because it was true. She wasn’t alone, not any more.

  Susie took her hand between hers and squeezed it.

  ‘So what happened to you?’ she asked. ‘All those years ago, after the Brownes took you in, what happened?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Melody replied, ‘I’m a bit of a mystery.’

  ‘I’d say,’ said Susie. ‘Those bloody people, promised me they’d stay in touch, but all I got every year was a cheap Christmas card, no return address, no news about you, but always signed, Clive, Gloria and Melody. And then even they stopped.’ Her voice cracked. ‘You know, I’d never have left you with them, never have supported the adoption if I’d known they would steal you away like that, away from me, away from Grace and Ken, your poor little sister in America, everyone who cared about you! It was the saddest thing that ever happened to me, and believe me, a lot of sad things have happened to me.’ She forced a smile with trembling lips. ‘But this,’ she continued, ‘this is happy! This is my Melody, back from the dead! This is like a miracle.’

  She took Melody up to her room, the weight of her terrible, bloated body being supported by a metal walking frame as she shuffled slowly towards a small passenger lift. ‘Here,’ she said, pushing open her bedroom door and heading for a chest of drawers, ‘here. I’ve kept this all these years, hoping that one day I’d have the chance to give them to you, and in all honesty, I’d just about given up on that day ever coming. But now you’re here, and I can finally pass it on. Here …’ She pulled a cardboard box from one of the drawers and laid it on the bed. ‘Come. Come and see.’

  Melody stared at the box. ‘What is it?’ she asked, perching herself on the edge of Susie’s bed.

  ‘It’s your mother’s things, what they gave me when she passed on. And a letter, for you.’

  ‘From … ?’

  ‘Yes, from your mother. Still sealed.’

  Melody paused for a moment. She wasn’t sure if she could do this. The past twenty-four hours were starting to make themselves felt around the edges of her mind. Her thoughts were becoming dense and unfathomable. Her heart felt like a clockwork toy that had been overwound. She needed space from this experience. This elderly, overweight woman with the candy-floss hair seemed like a very nice person, but Melody had no recollection of the weeks that she’d spent living in her home, she couldn’t remember the bedtime stories or sitting on her soft lap to watch the television, or her gentle hands plaiting her hair in the mornings. She felt moved that she was related to this woman, and a sense of fascination about being with someone who shared her DNA, but beyond that, there was nothing. She didn’t want to share this moment with this woman, she didn’t want to share this moment with anyone. She wanted to take her box home and open it sitting on her own bed, far away from this parallel world of strangers and revelations.

  ‘You don’t have to open it now,’ said Susie, reading her hesitation. ‘Take it home. Open it when you’re ready. But will you do one thing for me? Will you tell me what the letter said? I’d love to know, just as a kind of final goodbye, you know. Because I never really spoke to her, not after she was taken away; she was never really there, not the real Jane. And this,’ she touched the box, ‘this was written by the real Jane, I know it was …’

  Aunt Susie touched Melody’s hair as she held her to say goodbye a few moments later. ‘Mmm,’ she said, rubbing it between her fingers. ‘Such good hair, you always had such good hair. And tell me, does it still have that lovely auburn shimmer, in the sunlight, your hair?’

  ‘No,’ smiled Melody, ‘not any more. The red faded a long time ago.’

  ‘Ah, well, yes,’ said Susie, letting the hair drop, ‘red does tend to do that. Red does tend to fade.’

  Melody stroked her aunt’s hand, just once, and then kissed her on the cheek. ‘Thank you,’ she said, ‘thank you for everything you’ve done for me, even if I can’t remember it.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Susie, ‘I don’t think I was awfully good at it, but I did the best I could. I’m just so sorry I let you go. If I’d been healthier I would have found a way to track you down, but after the attack, well …’

  ‘You did the best by me,’ said Melody, ‘that’s all that matters.’

  Susie smiled sadly, ‘I hope that’s true,’ she sighed, ‘I really do hope that’s true, otherwise I shall go to my grave with a pain in my heart and a stain on my soul. I love you, Melody. I always did. And I always will. Now stay in touch. I’ve lost you once, I’m not about to lose you again.’

  Melody and Matty left the home at four o’clock and drove towards the train station.

  ‘Weird, huh?’ said Matthew.

  ‘Mm,’ agreed Melody. ‘Very weird indeed.’

  ‘Your mum’s sister and you don’t even remember her.’

  ‘Do you remember her?’ she asked.

  ‘God, yeah, you don’t forget someone that fat in a hurry. She was the fattest person I’d ever seen! And she invited me over for tea once, when you were living there, and do you know what she made us to eat, bearing in mind that I was, what, ten and you were seven? She made us a smoked salmon and quails’ eggs salad, seriously, with, like tinned anchovies and watercress and stuff. You
and I just sat there making vomit faces at each other behind her back and trying to stick quails’ eggs up our noses. It was really fucking funny. But hey,’ he turned to her and smiled, ‘I guess you had to be there.’

  A short distance from the train station, Matty pulled the car up to the kerb and peered over Melody’s shoulder at a small shop. ‘Look at that,’ he said. She glanced out of the window. It was a photography shop, with a small bay window filled with slightly startling photographs of unpretty children and stiff businessmen in suits.

  ‘What?’ she said.

  ‘Ring any bells?’ he asked, pointing at the shop front.

  She peered at it, but could see nothing at all familiar. ‘Nope,’ she said. ‘What am I supposed to be looking at?’

  ‘That. The name of the shop.’ He pointed at the sign.

  It said ‘E. J. Mason Photographic Services’. It still meant nothing to her.

  ‘E. J. Mason,’ said Matthew. ‘Edward. James. Mason. Otherwise known as baby Amber Rose.’

  ‘Oh my God,’ said Melody, ‘you mean that’s his shop? The baby?’

  ‘Yes. That’s his shop. Fine upstanding member of the community, our Eddie. He is a Rotarian. And a keen golfer. And I’m pretty sure he’s married with two point four kids …’

  ‘How do you know all this stuff?’

  ‘Mum. Mum knows everything about everything. If Mum doesn’t know about it, it hasn’t happened. And oh, look, there he is! The man himself …’

  They both turned and watched as a tall, casually dressed man walked out of the shop, clutching an aluminium box and with two cameras hanging from his neck in nylon cases. He had fine hair, and thin-rimmed glasses and walked with a sense of purpose.

  ‘God,’ said Melody, watching him climb into a silver Honda Civic, ‘you’d never guess it to look at him …’

  ‘What, that for three days he was called Amber Rose Newsome and lived in a squat in Broadstairs? No, you really wouldn’t. But I tell you what, I don’t suppose it’s done him any harm. In fact, it’s probably made him feel special. Look, you can tell just by looking at him that he thinks he’s a bit special, a legend in his own grey little seaside town. A bit like me, I suppose, you know, not famous, but infamous … the Legendarily Pissed and Appalling Matthew Hogan. And you too, I suppose, Melody Ribblesdale, the Girl Who Came Back From the Past.’ He put the car back into gear and started to pull away from the kerb. ‘And I wonder,’ he said, turning and smiling at her, ‘I wonder if maybe, just maybe, you’ve come back for a reason …’

  Melody didn’t open the box from her mother when she got home that evening. There were some things she wasn’t ready to know.

  Chapter 49

  Now

  Despite spending her working days in a kitchen, Melody had no interest in cooking. Her son had been raised on a diet of fish fingers, toasted sandwiches, microwave meals and the occasional takeaway from the fish-and-chip shop up the road. She’d once attempted a home-made Bolognese, inspired by one that Stacey had cooked for the kids’ tea when they were all about five years old, and it had been disastrous. She didn’t have any of the right knives and had resorted to slicing an onion with a dinner knife and because she’d left its preparation until the last minute she’d only cooked it for quarter of an hour. Ed had eaten one forkful and spat it out. ‘I don’t like it!’ he’d cried. ‘You liked it at Stacey’s house last week,’ she’d responded. ‘Yes,’ he’d said, ‘but that was different. That was nice.’

  She never cooked for him again. In fact, she’d never cooked for anyone again. So it was with some surprise that she found herself in Marks and Spencer on Monday morning bypassing the ready meals department and heading towards the fresh produce. She’d seen a recipe in one of her magazines for seared tuna and spicy noodles and had thought it sounded both delicious and easy to cook, and decided, on a whim, that she would attempt to reproduce it for Ed and Ben tonight. She wasn’t sure where this sudden, unexpected culinary inspiration had come from, but she embraced it none the less, as she now embraced every new and uncharted sensation. The old Melody, the one who didn’t look in the mirror before she left the house, who wore her son’s football shirts, who smoked and stayed in and kept the world at arm’s length, was beginning to fade away, and in her place was the beginning of a new Melody, not yet formed, but feeling her way cautiously along the pathway. She felt like she’d been subtly upgraded, in her sleep, and was just starting to try out her new features, one by one. And so here she was, handling a bunch of fresh spring onions and wearing a skirt. Not a big deal by most calculations, but big enough to give her a slightly fluttery sensation in the pit of her belly.

  She took her carrier bags home and as she walked she did something else she hadn’t done before – she made eye contact with the people she passed. It amazed her how few people even noticed her attention, and that those who did weren’t appalled by it. She felt like a creature born to reside on the bottom of the ocean floor, dark and flat and half-blind, slowly rising through the icy water to the glittering light above.

  She appraised her flat when she got home, this home that she had allowed to accumulate so many layers and piles. She saw it for the first time through the eyes of someone who didn’t really know her and wondered what it said, and she realised with a shock that it didn’t speak only of a loving mother and a small but happy family, but also of an obsession with the past, a fear of letting go and a lack of pride and imagination. The clear-out that she’d always feared would strip her home of all its ‘memory’ would, in fact, breathe new life into this pretty set of rooms. What would happen if she threw away Ed’s trainers, the ones she’d kept for two years because he’d been wearing them the day he got his GCSE results, and therefore she associated them with the proudest moment of her life? Would she forget all about her pride? Would she forget the feeling of warm satisfaction that had suffused her body, the smell of sixteen-year-old scalp in her nostrils as she held her to him, the relief that the ordeal was over and done with, and they could move on to the next stage? No, of course she wouldn’t. Those things would stay with her for ever. Her memory was not as puny and unreliable as she’d thought. It was all there, in colour and detail. It had just needed a kick-start.

  She went to the kitchen and pulled out a large bin bag. She flapped it open and then she filled it. She filled it with old trainers and clothes she hadn’t worn in five years and dinner plates that always stayed on the bottom of the pile and calendars from 1998 and blankets that she would never get round to cleaning and saucepans without handles and paperbacks she wouldn’t read, and, finally, the aged, overgrown spider plant, sad and resentful, done with life and ready to go. She tied a knot in the bin bag and she hauled it downstairs to the putrid concrete room where the paladins were stored, and she heaved it over the top and listened to it land at the bottom with a satisfying metallic boom. Then she went back to her flat, washed her hands, and started on the dinner, feeling in some way as though she had exhaled her way another few feet higher, towards the warm golden sun at the top of the ocean.

  Melody took off the high heels. That looked better she thought, appraising her reflection in the mirror, not like she was trying too hard, not like she wanted to be wanted. And besides, she had pretty feet, why not show them off? She was wearing an ankle-length tiered skirt in brown cheesecloth, and a turquoise vest top and she looked very nice. Not amazing, not spectacular, just nice. She jumped at the sound of the intercom buzzing and glanced at the time: 8.01 p.m. One minute late. A man who remembered birthdays. A man who kept good time. Too good to be true.

  Melody shook the negativity from her head. She was done with all that. She took a deep breath and went to meet him at the door. He looked better than she remembered. He hadn’t shaved and she thought he suited a slightly rougher look. He wore a grey jersey hooded top and jeans that were just the right side of trendy. He’d brought Ed a gold envelope with his name on it.

  ‘What’s this?’ she asked. ‘The Plan?’

  ‘Ye
s,’ he smiled, ‘this is the plan.’

  ‘Oh, Ben, God, you didn’t have to get Ed a present.’

  ‘Why not?’ he said easily.

  Melody couldn’t answer that question so she just smiled and watched as Ed opened it. It was a pair of tickets to see Prince at the O2 later in the month. ‘I don’t know if you’re a fan or not, you’re probably a bit young, but if you don’t want them you could get a good price for them on eBay. They’ll be good seats: my brother works for a ticket agency.’

  Ed smiled at the tickets. ‘Cheers,’ he said.

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Ben, addressing both of them, ‘do eighteen-year-olds like Prince?’

  Ed shrugged. ‘I don’t really know his stuff, but I reckon I’ll go – could be a bit like missing Elvis otherwise.’

  Ben laughed and Melody felt her stomach softening. The worst bit was over, and it seemed to have gone all right. In the kitchen she put the dressing onto a salad, and lit the flame underneath a frying pan lined with olive oil. She took two bottles of beer from the fridge and brought them through to Ben and Ed.

  ‘What a brilliant place to live!’ said Ben, ‘I mean, God, you’ve just got everything on your doorstep. It must be amazing.’

  People had been telling Melody that living in Covent Garden must be amazing for as long as she could remember, but she’d never really seen it that way. Melody didn’t live in Covent Garden, she lived in this flat. Her life was about these four walls and what happened within them. Her location was wasted on her. She may as well, she mused, have stayed in Canterbury, her life would have been every bit as mundane. ‘I can’t say I really make the most of it,’ she said. ‘I could be anywhere.’

  ‘What a shame,’ said Ben, and Melody realised that that was the second time he’d used those words about her since their first date.

  ‘What about you?’ He addressed Ed. ‘What’s it been like for you, growing up around here?’

  Ed shrugged. ‘Don’t know any different,’ he said. ‘It just feels normal to me. I’ve got my school up the road, my friends round the corner, I’ve got the gym and the pool, football in Lincoln’s Inn.’