The Truth About Melody Browne (36 page)

‘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.

‘Where’s Dad?’ she changed the subject.

‘Oh, dear, he passed away, last June, yes, last June.’

‘Oh.’ Melody waited a beat for a feeling, any kind of feeling, but none came. ‘What happened?’

‘Alzheimer’s. On top of the strokes. Yes, it was a relief. It really was. The last few years had been very difficult. Very difficult indeed. But still, life seems sort of …
barren
. Without him. Lonely, you know?’

Melody nodded. She felt sorry for this woman, she really did. But she’d brought it all on herself. She’d lived a lie, the full extent of which was as yet unknown, but it was undoubtedly a lie. It was clear that Clive and Gloria Browne hadn’t deliberately wiped her memory clean of her life before she’d met them, but they certainly hadn’t done anything to help her unlock it.

‘What happened to your hair,’ she asked gruffly, almost spitefully.

‘Oh, yes,’ Gloria touched the hairpiece regretfully, ‘my hair, well, it was always so poor and then,’ she drew in her breath, ‘after your father passed away, well, it just sort of gave up altogether, a bit like me, really.’ She smiled, a watery smile. ‘It’s not nice being bald, you know, when you’re a lady, not nice at all …’ She pulled herself out of her sad reverie and smiled again. ‘And you, Melody? How have things turned out for you? Did you have any more children?’

‘No, I didn’t have any more children. Ed was enough for me, and apart from that I never met anyone I’d want to have children with.’

‘Oh, that’s a shame, so Ed’s father … ?’

‘Tiff was never Ed’s father. He didn’t even come to see him after he was born and the last I heard he was back in Cork, working on a pig farm.’

‘So, it’s just been the two of you, has it? All these years … ?’

‘Yes, just the two of us.’

‘And you’ve been happy?’

‘Well, yes, as happy as a person can be when their life is just a … a …
mirage
.’

‘A mirage?’ Gloria repeated dreamily.

Melody looked at Gloria Browne, blinking at her in confusion, as though she hadn’t the slightest idea what she was talking about, and snapped at her, ‘Oh, come on! You know exactly what I mean!’

‘Well, no, I’m not sure I do.’

‘Look, I didn’t come here today to make small talk, I came to get some answers. I know what happened. I know you’re not my real parents and I just want the truth now. I want you to tell me what happened after my mum died, what happened between Aunt Susie taking me to your house and the day I woke up on the grass outside our burning house.’

The small room fell silent again. The clock ticked on, oblivious. Her mother sighed. And then, finally, she began to talk.

The man with the black hair and the steel-rimmed glasses looked a bit like Mr Spock from
Star Trek
. His ears had a strange shape to them, almost floral. He smiled kindly at her and sighed.

‘So, Melody. My name is Dr Radivski, and I am a doctor who looks after children’s heads, do you see?’

She stared at him, wondering what would happen if she opened her mouth and issued forth a particularly large burp. The thought made her smile, which he seemed to find very interesting. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘I know that sounds strange, and, of course, I am not talking about this bit of your head,’ he knocked his knuckles against his own skull, ‘but this bit.’ He pointed at it. ‘Inside your head. Your mind. Your thoughts. What makes you tick. Do you know why you are here?’

She continued to stare at him. He had a very shiny nose and his eyelashes looked extra thick through the magnifying bits of his bifocals.

‘You are here because your foster parents are very concerned about you. You are here because you have not spoken for nearly three weeks. I understand you had some upsetting news and I understand that sometimes when we hear things we don’t like, it seems somehow easier and safer just to go …’ he rolled his hands towards him, ‘… inside. Is that what you have done, Melody? Have you gone inside?’

Inside, thought Melody. She liked that word. Inside meant warm. Inside meant safe. Inside meant sofas and telly and nice things to eat. She liked being inside this room. It was very nicely decorated and lined with books. It felt, in fact, a little like the inside of her own head, the little cubbyholes all filled neatly and snugly with interesting things.

There were some toys in the corner. She stood up and walked across the room, suddenly curious to know what they were.

‘Ah,’ said the doctor, ‘you’ve seen my little toy shop. Come,’ he got to his feet, ‘let’s look together.’ He was very tall when he stood up and it struck Melody that some children might actually be a bit scared of this tall man with his odd ears and his thick glasses and weird accent, and wondered why he’d decided to become the sort of doctor who looks after children’s heads. The toys were neatly laid out: wooden dolls, paper, pens, a small wooden house, a bed, a car, a bear.

‘I’ll just watch you playing for a moment, if I may?’

She glanced at him curiously, wondering why a grown man would want to watch an eight-year-old girl playing with dolls, and then picked up a small wooden doll with blonde hair and a red cotton dress. She picked up the car with the other hand and slid the blonde doll into the passenger seat. Then, not because it was something she really wanted to do for fun, but just because she knew it would make this doctor think all sorts of interesting things about the inside of her head, she pushed the car, with the doll in it, really, really hard and it zoomed across the varnished wooden floor and crashed into the skirting board on the other side of the room.

She turned to look at the doctor.

He smiled.

‘Melody,’ said Gloria, knocking gently against her bedroom door, ‘Melody, can I come in?’

She pushed the door open and stood with her back against it. Melody put down the book she was reading and glanced curiously at her.

‘We’ve had some news. Some good news. Would you like to come downstairs and we can tell you all about it before supper?’

Melody knew what she was going to say. She was going to say that their application to adopt her had been accepted. She picked up her book and carried on reading.

‘Melody, love, please, this is important.’

She put down her book again and folded her arms. If it was important, she thought, then she could tell her here.

Gloria sighed and perched herself on the edge of Melody’s bed. ‘We’ve had a call from the social services,’ she said. ‘We’ve been accepted. That means that you can be our little girl. Properly. Isn’t that wonderful?’

Melody turned her head to gaze out of the window. The news was neither wonderful, nor bad. She was bright enough to realise that the alternative to being adopted by the Brownes was to be put into foster care or into a children’s home and she knew that not many people wanted to adopt eight-year-old girls, especially ones with elective mutism (which is what the doctor with the funny ears had told them she was suffering from). She knew that Ken and Grace had had their application turned down weeks ago, that her auntie Susie was far too ill to be able to look after her and that her aunt Maggie had given her go-ahead to the Brownes’ application so obviously had no intention of stepping into the breach and taking her into her own broken little family. She knew all this. She was a bright girl. The Brownes were her only option. The Brownes were all she had.

She picked up her book and carried on reading.

Melody blew out the candles on the home-made chocolate cake. There were nine of them. It was November 1981 and she had been called Melody Browne for nearly six weeks. In the room were seven other people: Gloria (or ‘Mum’, as she was now known), Clive (otherwise known as ‘Dad’), Clive’s brother, Peter, his wife, Cheryl, and their two hyperactive children, Samantha and Daniel, who were currently kicking an empty cardboard box around the living room. Gloria’s elderly mother, Petunia (she liked to call herself ‘Granny’), sat on the wing chair, watching her grandchildren in bemusement. Melody herself sat at the head of the table, surrounded by extravagantly wrapped gifts and tried not to think about what she’d been doing this time last year, when she was still at Auntie Susie’s and the news had just arrived about her father. The memory of that day was still there, tucked away in its little compartment, but it was blurred, like a vivid dream, fading away as consciousness ascended. She couldn’t remember what was said, how she’d felt, the order in which things had happened. It was almost, but not quite, as if none of it had ever happened.

Gloria divided the thick chocolate cake into eight large slices and put them onto pink paper plates. Melody stared at her slice for a moment, relishing its dense brownness, the oily sheen on the butter-icing, the dry crumbs of a broken Flake bar sprinkled on top. Gloria made lovely cakes. Gloria also made lovely stews and lovely roast chickens, and made perfect replicas of Chelsea Girl pedal pushers on her Singer sewing machine. Gloria was a lovely, lovely mum, better than her real mother had ever been, when it came to things like cakes and hobbies and looking after her.

She stuck her fork into the cake and broke a chunk off. She slid it into her mouth and as the flavours hit her taste buds, a sound slipped from the depths of her lungs, a loud and quite surprising
Mmmm
. Everyone in the room turned to stare at her. She put the fork back into the cake and launched a second load towards her mouth. Again she let loose a guttural moan of pleasure as the cake slid down her throat. Sensing the sudden shift of focus in the room, the unexpected tension, she did the same again. She did it a total of twelve times until the slice of cake was gone from her plate and entirely inside her stomach. And then she dropped her fork onto her empty plate and smiled. Gloria and Clive stared at each other, in amazement, and then, slowly, and rather oddly, they gave her a round of applause.

* * *

Three days after Melody’s ninth birthday, Gloria and Clive were invited to a dinner party at the home of the new neighbours across the street. The new neighbours were young, and vaguely glamorous, and were called Sean and Janine. Gloria seemed to be in what she might call ‘a bit of a flap’ about the event, and had taken Melody on three separate shopping expeditions to find exactly the right dress. Now that Melody was able to utter sounds, she had been of at least a little help, making approving and disapproving noises every time Gloria emerged from behind the fitting-room curtain. Melody had begun to think about the possibility of speaking again, she’d been practising when she was alone in her bedroom, talking to the Spanish girl. And there was a girl in her class called Melissa, who was really pretty, but really kind, and she’d whispered some words into her ear at break-time, but made her promise not to tell anybody.

As the hour of the much-anticipated dinner party arrived, Gloria became slightly distracted, and kept running up and down the stairs, having forgotten something vital on her last journey. She appeared, eventually, at three minutes to eight, dressed in a pale blue dress with a high neck and leg-o’-mutton sleeves, with a band of blue rhinestones around the collar. Her hair had been teased, with the aid of a pair of newly purchased Babyliss curling tongs, into a veritable riot of blonde sausages, and her lips were tinted a hot salmon pink.

‘Well, my goodness, don’t you look special?’ said Clive, who himself was attired rather smartly in a brown suit with a wide velvet collar and a navy-blue ribbed wool polo neck.

Melody looked at them both and smiled. They looked nice. They weren’t her real parents, but they looked nice. She felt something tiptoeing across her consciousness that felt a bit like pride, and when they came to her to say good night, instead of just allowing them to hold her in their arms, she held them back, both of them. They smelled good, of Avon perfume and Brut aftershave.

A teenage girl from two doors down, called Rachel was being paid the princely sum of five pounds to sit with Melody for the evening and the two of them saw Clive, Gloria and a tissue-wrapped bottle of Blue Nun to the door at three minutes past eight, whereupon they returned indoors and, instead of going upstairs and allowing herself to be put to bed, Melody joined Rachel on the sofa and together they worked their way through a packet of After Eights and watched a particularly scary episode of
Within These Walls
.

Melody was fast asleep by the time Clive and Gloria returned from their dinner party at close to midnight, pink-cheeked and a little wobbly on their feet. She didn’t hear them make themselves a pot of coffee in the kitchen and she had no idea that they danced together a little, in the dark of the living room, Gloria giggling, her face lit up by the pearlescent glow of the fat, full moon. Thankfully, she was unaware that they’d tiptoed upstairs, holding hands and fallen clumsily into their king-size double bed where they’d begun breathing heavily and fumbling frantically with the fastenings on each other’s clothing. She had no idea that just as Clive had managed to wriggle his way out of his brown trousers and was halfway to relieving his wife of her brand-new royal blue silky camiknickers, Gloria sat bolt upright and said, ‘What’s that smell?’ And she was blissfully unaware of the ensuing panic as it was ascertained that the spare bedroom was, in fact, on fire. Because her bedroom was next door to the spare room and because she slept with her door open, her room was filled immediately with thick, plasticky smoke and within a moment or two Melody was entirely unconscious.