by Lisa Jewell
‘So, do you reckon you’ll stay around here, once you’ve left home?’
‘Ed’s not leaving home, are you, Ed?’ Melody smiled and winked at her son. He smiled back.
‘No. Why would I leave home? I’ve got the best mum in the world.’ He leaned over and kissed her on the cheek and Melody felt slightly embarrassed, unused to the intimate machinations of her relationship with her son being played out in front of anyone except Stacey and her family.
‘I can see that,’ said Ben, ‘and if I were you and I lived here with your mum, I wouldn’t leave home till I was forty.’
‘At least,’ said Ed, and they both laughed and clanked their beer bottles together.
Melody watched them and felt a small shiver of what she at first took to be apprehension, but then realised was actually anticipation. Something seemed to be happening here tonight, something that she had decided long ago would never happen. They were moving on, she and her son, slowly, inch by inch, and it looked as if this man, this tall, fit man with his golden glow and perfect teeth, might, against all her early instincts, be about to play a part in it.
In the kitchen, Melody poured herself a glass of wine and stared at the frying pan to ensure that it was issuing forth the required levels of smoke, to ensure a properly seared tuna steak. It was, so she threw the steaks into the pan and recoiled as they snapped and sizzled with alarming ferocity.
‘You don’t want to overcook those,’ Ben said, appearing behind her.
‘I know,’ said Melody, ‘three minutes each side.’
‘Hmm,’ he said, ‘they’re quite thin, I’d just give them a minute.’
‘Really?’
‘Yeah.’
‘You can cook, then?’
‘I’m reasonable,’ he said. ‘I can do the basics.’
‘What, you think searing tuna steaks is basic?’
‘Well,’ he shrugged and smiled, ‘yeah. Kind of. Ed tells me that you’re not exactly a natural in the kitchen?’
‘No, not my natural habitat.’
‘Which is strange, considering your occupation.’
‘Or maybe it’s exactly why,’ she smiled. ‘No,’ she said, ‘I don’t like cooking. But it’s something I want to work on. I always used to say I didn’t have time to cook, but now I’ve got all the time in the world. I’m running out of excuses. In fact, you know, I’m running out of excuses for everything.’
‘You are?’ he asked meaningfully.
‘Yes,’ she paused. ‘Shall I turn them now?’
Ben peered into the pan. ‘Yeah, and then, literally, thirty seconds on the other side. What sort of things?’ he continued.
She flipped the steaks over with a fork and sighed. ‘God, I don’t know. My whole life I felt like something was missing, and then Ed came along and filled in all the gaps for me. So that was me, you know, Ed’s mum, sorted. I haven’t really looked outside of that. And now, well … shall I take them out?’ He nodded, and she slipped them onto three waiting dinner plates. ‘Now, with everything that’s happened, and Ed turning eighteen, it’s forced me to re-evaluate and I’ve realised that there’s potentially much, much more to me than being Ed’s mum. You know, I discovered I’ve got a sister?’ She lowered her voice.
‘Wow! You did?’
‘Yes, I met her on Saturday and she’s just like this little ball of energy, full of plans and ideas, and she’s only five years younger than me but she just seems so much younger, and I thought, that could have been me. If all this stuff hadn’t happened to me, if the truth hadn’t been kept from me, I could have been like that, a girl about town, on the career ladder. But I don’t feel resentful, I feel great, like this couldn’t have happened at a better time. I met Grace, Ken’s wife, and she said to me how lucky I was to have had my family so young, because now I can find myself, and she was right. I’m only thirty-three, I’ve got this flat, I’ve got a fairly decent brain, I can be whatever I want to be.’
‘Well, hallelujah!’ said Ben.
‘What?’
‘Well, you’re just waking up to the woman I saw on a number fourteen bus three weeks ago.’
‘Ha! I thought you just saw a pair of shoulders?’
‘Yes, I saw a pair of shoulders, and then I saw a woman who looked not only incredibly gorgeous but also incredibly interesting.’
Melody turned and smiled at him. ‘That’s what my sister said, about a photo of me she had as a child. She said I looked like a really interesting little girl.’
‘And I bet you were. And thank God for Julius Sardo for doing whatever it was he did to your head to help you remember who you really are. To Melody Ribblesdale, a very interesting little girl.’ He raised his beer bottle towards her.
‘Yes,’ she said, ‘and to Ben whatever your surname is, for not giving up on me.’
‘Ben Diamond,’ he said, ‘my name is Ben Diamond.’
Ben Diamond. She should have guessed. She smiled and turned to light the gas beneath the noodles.
Ben stayed that night. He didn’t take his underwear off, just lay down next to Melody and embraced her with one smooth, heavy arm. ‘Dinner was excellent,’ he whispered, into the silence.
‘It was, wasn’t it? Thanks to you. Would have been a bit of shoe leather and some rank old noodles without you.’
‘Stop putting yourself down. You allowed me to take over. If I hadn’t been there you’d have made a fine job of it.’
‘You reckon?’
‘Definitely.’
Melody laid her hand against his forearm and stroked the soft fur. They had already agreed that there would be no sex, so she felt safe that her small display of affection wouldn’t be misconstrued as an overture of some kind.
‘Your son is great,’ he said, curling his arm through hers so that their arms were now tightly entwined. ‘Really great.’
‘He is, isn’t he? I’ve spent all these years worried I was doing it all wrong, and now here I am, two days away from his eighteenth birthday and I can suddenly see that I did everything right.’
‘And so, that’s it, you can pretty much write the whole story now, the story of you?’
‘Well, not quite.’
‘One more chapter to go?’ said Ben.
‘Mm,’ said Melody. ‘One more chapter to go.’ And then she reached for the switch of her bedside lamp and brought the room to a reassuring darkness. ‘Night-night, Ben Diamond,’ she whispered.
‘Night-night, Melody Ribblesdale.’ He leaned over and kissed her cheek in the darkness.
The moon outside was bright and full, and cast a purplish hue across the dark room and the undulating outline of Ben’s body. Melody could see the white stain of it showing through the thin cotton of her curtains and its perfect circle took her back to another night, twenty-five years ago, when she’d woken up from some strange, unknown slumber and found herself a hollow, insubstantial girl called Melody Browne with parents she didn’t belong to and a life she didn’t possess.
There was only one way to find out how she had ended up on the grass that night, staring at the moon. Only two people who could finish her story for her and they were the two people she had vowed never to see again. Her parents.
She closed her eyes against the thought and tried to pull herself towards sleep, but with her head full of her parents and her bed full of a strange man, sleep eluded her until well into the next day.
Chapter 50
Now
The weather forecasts on the radio the next day for Ed’s birthday were for a fine, bright day, with a high temperature of twenty-four degrees. Melody breathed a sigh of relief. Ed had turned down her offers of meals out, bowling alleys and go-kart racing and said that all he wanted was a picnic in Lincoln’s Inn Fields with some beer, some sandwiches, some mates and a Frisbee.
She walked to the tube with Ben that morning at nine o’clock, where they exchanged a small, but significant kiss, and then she walked slowly down to Tesco on Bedford Street to shop for the picnic. She glanced
at the time. It was 9.09 a.m. This time eighteen years ago, she recalled, she’d been in her tenth hour of labour. This time eighteen years ago she and Stacey had been in her new flat, unfurnished except for the second-hand sofa and the table and chairs, Stacey sitting cross-legged on the floor, desperately trying to get the screaming week-old Cleo to latch onto her breast, Melody doubled-over in silent agony on the other side of the room (the moment would have made quite a picture, two motherless children, trying to control new life, all alone). This time eighteen years ago, Melody was about to observe that her contractions were coming less than five minutes apart and Stacey was about to say, ‘Get in a cab and go, there’s a fiver in my jacket pocket.’ And this time eighteen years ago, Melody was fourteen hours away from pushing out an eight-pound baby boy in a small white room, with no one at her side but a midwife called June.
Those hours between leaving her flat and delivering Ed had been the loneliest of her life. She’d pined then, not just for her mother and father, but for any mother and father, until the midwife had put her baby into her arms and she’d known then, she’d known immediately, that she didn’t need anyone at all, least of all Clive and Gloria Browne. But now, here she was, eighteen years on from that moment and she needed them once more. The thought filled her with horror and dread.
She filled her basket aimlessly with pre-sliced cheeses, and processed hams, packets of cocktail sausages and large bags of Doritos. She knew where her parents’ phone number was. It was in an old diary from 1989 that she’d come upon the day before when she’d been clearing things out. She could go home now and phone them, her mum and dad. She could do it today, this morning. She had no idea what was awaiting her on the other side of the phone call. A disconnected number? A stranger’s voice? The news that her parents were dead? Or a conversation with her mother or her father that might finally explain how she’d been allowed to live her life as half a person.
Ed was eating his breakfast when she got back to the flat half an hour later.
‘You were up early,’ he said, tipping the cereal bowl to his lips to drink the sweetened milk.
‘Walked Ben up to the tube and then went to Tesco’s for your picnic stuff.’
‘Did you hear the weather forecast?’ He gestured towards the radio on the table.
‘I know,’ she smiled. ‘It’s great, isn’t it?’
‘Are you inviting him, tomorrow?’
‘What, Ben?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Do you want me to?’
Ed shrugged and got to his feet. ‘Yeah,’ he said, ‘yeah. I liked him.’
Melody glanced at her son. He was slightly pink, almost embarrassed. Melody took this to mean that Ed liked Ben more than he felt comfortable admitting and this thought left a soft feeling in the pit of her stomach. ‘Cool,’ she said circumspectly. ‘I will then. Though he might not be able to take the time off work.’
‘That’s cool,’ said Ed, disappearing into the kitchen with his empty bowl. ‘Whatever.’
Melody unpacked her shopping bags in the kitchen and noticed that it was spotless. ‘Did you clear the kitchen up?’ she asked suspiciously.
‘Yeah,’ Ed smiled, ‘me and Ben did it this morning, when you were in the bathroom.’
‘Blimey,’ she said drily, ‘and whose idea was that?’
‘Mine, of course,’ Ed winked at her.
‘Yeah, right.’ She smiled at him disbelievingly, and moved him out of the way of the fridge. ‘What are you up to today then, the last day of your childhood?’
‘Thought I’d go to the playground, go on the swings, then ride my scooter home and have a tantrum.’
‘Ha ha!’ Melody nudged him in the ribs.
‘I don’t know,’ he said, ‘I suppose I should do something, though maybe I’d be safer staying at home. Imagine if I got run over by a bus the day before my eighteenth – how tragic would that be?’
‘Oh, stop it!’ shrilled Melody. ‘Not even as a joke!’
Ed was about to leave the room when he turned back and opened his mouth. ‘Mum?’ he said.
‘Yes?’
‘Who’s Emily?’
She spun round from the open fridge. ‘What?’
‘Emily American-sounding. Called on your mobile, while you were out?’
Melody caught sight of her phone, plugged into the charger on the kitchen counter.
‘Oh, Emily, she’s just a friend.’
‘Oh, right, because she said a really weird thing. She said she was my aunt.’
‘She said what?’
‘Yeah, she said, you must be Ed, and I said, yeah, and she said, guess who I am, and I said, no idea, and she said, I’m your long-lost aunt, and I just sort of laughed and said, oh, right, ’cause I didn’t know what else to say, and she kind of laughed and that was that.’
Melody breathed in deeply. ‘What else did she say?’
‘Nothing really, just for you to call her back. What’s the deal with her, then, is she OK?’
‘Yeah, she is, she’s fine. She’s just …’ Melody was about to tell her son that the woman he’d spoken to on the phone was just a little weird, just a bit daft, but then she looked up at him, this man who was three inches taller than her, this man who’d cleaned up her kitchen while she wasn’t looking, who wanted the best for her, for his mum, and she suddenly wondered what exactly she was trying to protect him from. From the fact that the grandparents he’d never met and didn’t care about weren’t his real grandparents? From the fact that his mother had had a sad and terrible childhood that she’d only just remembered but that she actually felt better for knowing the truth, not worse? ‘She’s my sister,’ she said, exhaling with relief.
‘But you haven’t got a sister.’
‘No. I didn’t have a sister before, but I’ve got one now. Turns out my mum and dad weren’t my real mum and dad. Turns out you were right, I was adopted. Listen,’ she leaned across and took his hands from where they hung between his knees, ‘this is a really long story. And I don’t know the end of it yet. I need to make a phone call, and then I need to go and see somebody. Let me go and do that, and then I’ll take you out for a Nandos and tell you everything – how about that?’
‘OK.’ Ed shook his head and smiled bemusedly. ‘Shit,’ he said, ‘brain fuck.’
‘Yeah,’ agreed Melody. ‘Just a bit.’
Melody took her phone into her bedroom and arranged herself on her bed. She pulled open the musty little diary that started with the day she left her parent’s home for the last time and ended with a health visitor’s appointment when Ed was ten days old. The inscription on the inside cover said: ‘THIS DIARY BELONGS TO: Melody Browne, 4 Trojan Close, Canterbury, KENT, CT1 9JL.’ Written underneath was a phone number, seven familiar digits, written in red biro in her still immature handwriting. Melody took a deep breath and tapped the numbers into her phone.
She waited for three, four rings, until a click, a breath, a small girlish voice: ‘Hello?’ Her mother. Melody gasped and hung up.
No, she thought suddenly, she couldn’t start this on the phone; she needed them to see her face. And she needed to see theirs.
Melody stood outside 4 Trojan Close and looked up at the house. It was startlingly familiar, as if she’d only just left it. The cul-de-sac was silent, all the driveways empty except for this one, a small red car to Melody’s right. Her mother’s car. Not the car she’d had when Melody was growing up, but still, unmistakably, a car that belonged to Gloria Browne. Melody rang the doorbell, feeling strangely confident. It was opened almost immediately by a small old woman in a blonde wig. Melody didn’t recognise her at first. The wig was slightly askew, as though she had thrown it on in a hurry, and her features were pale and ill-defined. And she was smaller, much smaller than Melody remembered.
They stared at each other for a short moment. Gloria’s face started to smile, before suddenly falling. ‘Melody,’ she whispered.
Melody nodded.
‘You phoned earlier?’
She nodded again.
‘I knew it was you. I felt it. Come in. Please, please, come in.’ This was said not as an invitation, but as a plea.
Melody stepped inside the house. Gloria let her pass, her eyes never leaving her. ‘Sit down, sit down,’ she entreated as they entered the living room. Melody sat and looked around the room. It was all there, every last porcelain animal, cut-crystal decanter and gilt-framed reproduction. And there, on the mahogany sideboard, Melody Browne, astride a chestnut pony, legs in beige jodhpurs, a rosette pinned to her chest, eleven years old and every inch the privileged young Canterbury princess. It shocked her, the contrast, what she’d been, what she could have been, what she’d turned out to be. So many twists and turns, so many permutations. And now it had all boiled down to this: a ticking clock, a silent house, a small woman, the final pages of the book.
‘Are you OK?’ Gloria Browne’s pale eyes searched Melody’s face for clues to her sudden reappearance. ‘Is everything all right?’
‘Everything’s fine,’ Melody said, her voice flat. ‘How are you?’
‘Oh, me, I’m fine. You know. Fine as I can be, really. And it’s Edward’s birthday tomorrow?’ she smiled.
‘Yes,’ Melody felt a rush of surprise. ‘Yes, how did you know?’
‘How would I not know? He’s my grandson. I think of him all the time, especially on the second of August. And he’ll be eighteen?’
‘Yes, that’s right.’
‘And how is he? How is Edward?’
‘Ed’s great. Just waiting for his A level results, then working out what to do next.’
‘Oh.’ Her mother seemed relieved to hear this. ‘Oh, I’m so glad. And it’s so nice to see you, Melody. It’s wonderful. And you look very pretty …’
‘Well, I wouldn’t say that …’
‘No, you do, you’re a woman now. A beautiful woman. I’m very proud of you.’
Melody felt a burst of anger at these words. Gloria Browne had no right to be proud of her, no right at all.