‘I’m not hungry.’
‘You haven’t eaten.’
‘I’ll eat later.’
‘Well I am.’
‘You just had a sandwich before we left.’ You’ve still got a bit of mayonnaise on your chin, she stops herself from adding.
‘Come on, it’ll take your mind off it.’ He has taken the keys out of the ignition and is opening the door.
‘How will a pizza in a busy restaurant with kids tearing around and screaming take my mind off it? How do you even know what is on my mind? Can you read it? Is that why you don’t feel the need to talk to me or ask me anything, because you’ve got some magical power that means you just know? Sam knows what’s best, Sam is always fucking right? Is that what they teach you at medical school, to know everything?’ She realises she’s shouting. Sam slams the door closed again. He looks beaten, shrunken, which makes her feel guilty, which in turn makes her angry because she doesn’t want to feel guilty. She wants the upper hand for once. She should have the upper hand. He deserves this.
‘What is it you want me to do, Mel? Because I’m trying, I really am. I’ve not asked you because you said you didn’t want to talk about it, you wanted to make it go away. You said you were through with running it round and round in your head. YOU said that. And now it’s my fault for not talking. What the hell do you want me to do?’
She’d like to scream. She could scream louder than every child in that fucking pizza restaurant, scream a scream that would snap her vocal cords. Why does he not get it? No, she didn’t want to talk about it. She wanted to move on. Let’s design a dream house together (though she knows she never dreamt of that house), let’s get married, they said so she could switch her obsession from soft furnishings and colour schemes to seating plans and menus and lace that doesn’t catch the light in the right way, could you find another one that does, please? Give Mel something to do, keep her mind off it. Like a child handed a rattle. It worked, but it was only ever going to work to a point. This is obvious now. That point came yesterday in a phone call from Polly. Although really the point, if she wanted to be precise, came earlier, when Eve Elliot was murdered the week before. The same day she was choosing table settings for her wedding.
It’s clear now that nothing has gone away. Those thoughts have just been lying there dormant, like little kernels of corn waiting for the moment the heat catches them and they start popping in her head.
She thought she could forget. Now she can’t. She didn’t want to talk. Now she does. Why is that so difficult for him to get his head around? Has she ever said it was fixed in stone?
‘You want to talk, let’s talk.’ He has knitted his eyebrows together in concern, which makes him look like he has a monobrow. She struggles to take him seriously. ‘How are you feeling?’
She groans, contemplates banging her head on the shiny new dashboard. No one ever asks that question expecting an honest answer. Of all the questions she can think of, how are you feeling? is the least sincere. I’m shit, but thanks for asking. Or, I feel like I want to slap your face, in fact I feel like I should have slapped it a long time ago. What does he want her to say? And come to think of it, why does he get to set the parameters of their conversation?
A group of mums tumble out of Mama Rosa’s pulling kids with balloons tethered to strings behind them. Please God, don’t let Siobhan be one of them. I’m not up to faking happiness right now.
How is she feeling? Like a bag of cats, her dad would have said. She is feeling that something is bothering her and for once she is going to say what is on her mind.
‘You didn’t seem very surprised,’ she says, because his reaction has been bugging her for hours.
‘By what?’
‘When DI Rutter told us that Eve Elliot had been trying to help him.’ She still can’t bring herself to say his full name. ‘You didn’t seem shocked by it.’
‘Didn’t I? Well I was … God, what is this? What was I supposed to say?’
‘So you didn’t know?’
‘You think I knew? Is that what you’re suggesting?’ Sam does this regularly, answers a question with a question.
‘If you’re investigating a case, you interview witnesses, don’t you?’
‘I wasn’t a witness, was I?’
‘Friends or relatives, anyone. You … you would speak to people, wouldn’t you? How else are you going to investigate?’ She’s beginning to flounder, can feel the fire going out of her argument. Does she sound paranoid, like the madwoman she suspects Sam believes her to be? This is why she doesn’t speak her mind, because the result is rarely coherent. She gazes out across the car park and watches a mother kick a buggy after trying and failing to collapse it.
‘Honey,’ he says, ‘it’s been a tough day, a shitty couple of days in fact. I know that. But I’m on your side, whether you like it or not.’ He raises a smile, which makes her feel dirty with guilt. He’s the closest to her so she takes it out on him every time.
She sighs, puffs air out of her cheeks. ‘I know, I know. I’m sorry …’ He puts his finger to her lips to silence her then brushes his hand through her hair, following the contour of her face to her chin. He squeezes it affectionately. Melody lifts her gaze upwards towards him. Her body gives an involuntary shiver. She has seen that look in his eyes before, can pinpoint exactly where and when.
‘You’re tired. Come on, let’s go home.’ He pulls out of the car park. He must still be looking at her as he does, because he appears not to see the little girl in a purple party dress, head obscured by a pink balloon, saved only by her mother’s quick reflexes.
The look.
It’s late August 2007. She sees everything through a mist, thinks for a moment that she is dead and that this is heaven. The momentary delusion is dispelled by a voice that doesn’t sound like God’s, unless God happens to be female and speaks with a familiar Dorset accent. ‘She’s opened her eyes.’ The words perforate the membrane of silence that has surrounded Mel’s world for … how long? Years? A lifetime?
‘Someone tell the nurses, quickly.’ A door opens and slams, footsteps running. Voices distant, then louder, deafening. Every noise is amplified, throbs through her eardrums, echoes through her brain. She’d like to turn down the volume. She could ask, couldn’t she? But her throat is raw, swollen, like someone’s been feeding her splinters of glass.
Her eyes move towards the voice. Just a few degrees, that does it. The woman’s outline is fuzzy, a sweep of dark hair falls from her head. As she leans in closer, Melody feels the hair feather across her arm, like a breeze it’s so light.
‘Can you hear me? It’s me, Honor.’
At first she thinks that Honor is her own name, because it carries such a strong ring of familiarity. But the woman keeps repeating Melody, Melody, like a tune to stir her, and she knows that must be her name.
She’d like to keep her eyes open, but her lids are weighted, and the effort of staying awake is too much.
The cycle of time: dark evaporates into light which dissolves into night again. Curtains open, curtains drawn. Routine is important, the voices say, though to whom they are talking she doesn’t know. ‘She’s coming round.’
Then her eyes open, the muscles in her lids stronger; she can keep them open for oh, at least ten minutes, half an hour, a whole morning.
‘I’m very happy with her progress,’ the doctor says to the woman in the armchair, her mother, but not to her. No one seems to address themselves to Melody any more.
Except the police.
Her progress is being noted. They arrive after she’s had a whole morning of eyes open.
They have questions for her, if she doesn’t mind.
‘Five minutes, that’s all,’ a voice in the room says. Melody could have sworn she hadn’t moved her lips.
She was attacked, what does she remember?
She was found next to Richmond Park six days ago. By a dog walker.
Can she remember being in that area? Richmond Park, or Rich
mond town centre on the evening of 17 August. Or in Ham Village? It was a Friday.
Can she give them a description of her attacker?
Does she remember his face?
What did he look like?
Was he white or black or Asian?
Something. Whatever she can remember.
Was he known to her?
Can she … does she … remember … anything at all?
Why did she leave the pub and walk past her house?
Was she meeting someone?
They’ve checked her phone records: there were no calls, no texts, no emails in the hours before she left the pub. How did she make the arrangement? Was there an arrangement at all?
Her head is filled with slurry, thick and viscous. No, she can’t give them a description. No, she can’t say whether he was black, white or Asian. She doesn’t remember seeing his face. Just a car pulling up and footsteps, she says. She waits for their reaction. Footsteps and a car she can’t describe, this will get them nowhere. They need her memories to be sharp and defined. But how can she explain to them that they are not easily liberated. She closes her eyes. Lets the questions linger, waits for them to stir something in her subconscious. A name surfaces and forms on her lips. She catches it in time, remembers it is a secret, although not the reason why it is a secret. But she is aware that it carries consequences were it to get out.
Her lids are heavy again, too heavy to stay open. Sleep beckons.
Sometimes she wakes and will find her mother fussing around the bed covers, talking to her dad, telling him off for not taking the bins out or still not having fixed the bathroom door handle. ‘I got stuck in there this morning,’ she hears her say. It makes her smile, although whether the smile reaches her face she can’t be certain. She must be getting better if her parents are squabbling.
Honor visits again, this time accompanied by Sam. Later she finds out a rota was devised so she was never alone at visiting time, which meant she was rarely alone at all. If anyone had asked her she would have said she’d like to have more time to herself, to find some peace to search her memory, peel back the layers that are obscuring it to reveal … what? She doesn’t know. But no one did ask her. They assumed she would want company. Now she thinks about it, the assuming has been a defining characteristic of her life since then.
Back to the visit. Honor and Sam. She wakes up to find two figures by her bedside, a gentle murmur of chatter. It takes a moment for her eyes to clear the dust of sleep, pull them into focus. Between them is a bunch of grapes encased in plastic, sweating under cellophane. Her eyes lock with Sam’s.
‘She’s awake.’ He nudges Honor, who is leafing through a magazine.
‘Hey,’ she says. ‘What time do you call this?’
They talk about hospital food and her mother’s insistence on planning a recovery menu ‘because no one is going to get well on the stodge they serve here’. About Patrick, who plans to visit tomorrow. He was the one who reported her missing. ‘I never thought I’d say this, but thank God he’s so anal,’ Honor chirps. They remind her that they are both doctors (she hasn’t forgotten this fact) and that if there is anything she wants to know about her injuries (which aren’t extensive) she should ask them.
Honor, she realises, is talking very quickly.
She is talking so quickly Mel has stopped processing the information and lets the words swim around the room without trying to catch them.
She stares at each of them in turn. The scene jars with her though she can’t say why. Like a spot-the-difference picture. She knows something is wrong but can’t put her finger on it. There is also something she’d like to do to satisfy a deep need stirring inside her, but she can’t make the connection as to what it is.
At last Honor takes a breath, pauses. ‘We thought we’d lost you, Mel, I shouldn’t have let you walk home alone.’ There’s a noise in the room like a chair scraping along the floor. ‘I’m so sorry.’ The noise is coming from Honor. Melody has known her since they were eleven. Never before has she heard her cry like this.
Sam puts his hand on her knee. ‘Come on, Honor.’ He passes her a tissue. Melody doesn’t hear him say ‘pull yourself together’, but the tone of his voice conveys the sentiment. ‘Why don’t you go and get us all a cup of tea?’
They exchange a look she can’t decipher.
‘I’m sorry, would you look at me? I’m supposed to be here to cheer you up.’ Honor rises from the chair and disappears through the door before Melody has time to tell her she’s gone off tea.
Sam draws his chair in towards the bed. His eyes are wet and glassy. His head dips. It’s quiet between them, just the beep of the monitor and the occasional click of the drip feeding drugs into her bloodstream. She feels him take her hand, carefully so as not to disturb the cannula. With his finger he strokes it. Just a touch, an electrifying touch that rewires the loose connection in her brain.
Now she knows what it was she wanted to do when she opened her eyes and saw him.
‘Can you remember anything, Mel?’ The same question the police asked her. Shadows rising to the surface again.
‘Very little,’ she says. ‘They want to know why I had walked past my house, why I was out so late. They asked me if I was meeting anyone.’ She waits, attempts to scrutinise his face, but he is looking down at her hand, his finger gently circling the purple bruising around the cannula. ‘I must have been, right? Why else would I have gone there? But it’s all hazy.’ He looks up now; she has his attention. What is it she’s hoping to find in his face? She can’t read the look.
‘What did you tell them?’
‘I keep thinking back to the pub. I was there with Patrick and Honor, then I went to the toilet and I left afterwards. I thought someone must have called me or texted me.’ She stops. The dredging of memories is hurting her head; a tight band of pressure surrounds it. ‘They’ve checked my phone, I didn’t receive any texts or messages that night.’
‘You’ve suffered severe trauma. Don’t underestimate the impact it will have. It’ll take time for everything to settle. You’re bound to be confused.’
She nods, no idea if this is true or not, if it’s simply a stock phrase doctors use to reassure patients.
He lifts her hand, kisses it. What is it that she can’t access? She needs to join the dots in her head to make a complete picture, but this is beyond her.
‘Let’s not talk about it now, let’s wait until you’re better. I thought I had lost you … I don’t know what I would have done.’
‘Why would I have had two phones?’
‘Two phones?’ His face is scrunched up into a question.
‘It’s just that I remember one being in a black cover and the other in a white one.’
‘Maybe you’re remembering your old phone. You shouldn’t worry about these things, Mel. You need to concentrate on getting well.’ He reaches his hand out towards her face, touches her hair and runs his finger down her cheek. ‘It’s understandable that things are a bit mixed up.’
The look.
Moments later Honor returns with a tray of teas, the happy mask back in place. They sit and talk some more, Honor playing with a thin thread in her hands, twisting it around her fingers so the flesh bulges through it, cutting off the blood supply. She doesn’t touch her tea.
Only when her mother comes in to take over the reins does Melody realise why the air between them has been so charged.
Tess is in the corridor talking to Honor, the door ajar. ‘Thanks for coming,’ she says. ‘You’ve been great really, with so much on your plate, work and planning for your big day.’
Honor gives a nervous laugh. ‘Oh that,’ she says, ‘that can wait.’
Melody looks at Sam but he is squeezing her hand too tightly, pressing on the bruise.
At home, he makes her a cup of tea, offers to cook dinner, but she’s not hungry. ‘A sandwich will do me,’ she tells him, cutting a slice of cheese and wedging it in a bread bun. It’s barely seven o’clock,
but tiredness is heavy on her body, her eyes sting, her bones ache. All she wants to do is put on her pyjamas, lie in bed and cocoon herself in the duvet. Sam is sitting in front of the TV watching The One Show, although technically he’s not watching it. He has his iPhone in his hand, scrolling down. On Twitter probably, a medium made for a man who can say everything he wants in one hundred characters, never mind one hundred and forty. She once read an article that said that if you check your emails before you get out of bed or take your phone to the loo you should consider yourself addicted. On this basis she considers Sam addicted. She’s seen him on the loo, tweeting and crapping. ‘Multitasking,’ he laughed, when he realised he’d left the door ajar and saw the look of disgust on her face.
Shame the Japanese haven’t invented a toilet that washes and blow-dries your phone as well as your arse.
She looked at Sam’s timeline once to see what was so fascinating and couldn’t get her head around it: the incessant noise, the hashtags, the inane one-way conversations. What was the point of it? If she was honest, she interpreted it as a slight on her, because their time together was finite, allocated in evenings and the weekends which weren’t taken up with work. She viewed this as a meaningless distraction that encroached upon it.
‘I’m off to bed,’ she tells him, hanging her head around the door.
‘Already? It’s only …’
‘I know, I’m knackered.’
‘I thought you wanted to talk.’
‘Tomorrow,’ she says, ‘when I’ve had some sleep.’
Tomorrow he’ll be back at work.
She has brought her coat upstairs to the bedroom, her phone too. Once she has undressed and crawled into bed, she opens her Facebook app, scrolls down. There is one entry today from Honor, two photographs that were posted this morning but actually taken on a night out yesterday. A picture of her grinning in front of cocktails, with two other women Melody has never seen.
Just like the old days, except it isn’t her who Honor is having fun with.
There’s a familiar clenching in her stomach. She has no right to be jealous. This is your fault. How else did you think it was going to pan out?
The Life I Left Behind Page 13