Unchained Melanie (17 page)

Mel laughed. ‘Mum would say that was the road to ruin!’

‘Sssh! Just don’t tell her!’

‘Now I’ve mentioned Christmas,’ Gwen came back into the room with a chocolate cake, plates and her big silver cake-knife, ‘it’s been decided this year it’s at Vanessa’s.’

Christmas. Melanie hadn’t even thought about it. It seemed to be a far-ahead group of weeks whose real high point was that Rosa would be back for a while. Last year the family had gathered on the big day at her house. Roger had been there, pretending for a day that he more or less still lived on the premises, for the sake of family peace, but not fooling anyone. Rosa had had a hangover and uttered barely more than a growl all day before hogging the bathroom for an hour, so she could slink out to see Alex in the evening. William and Theresa, Vanessa’s children, had eaten their turkey in silence and then immersed themselves in computer games. Howard had fallen asleep with a paper hat over his eyes, while Melanie, Vanessa, Roger and Gwen had kept up a bright and purposeless discussion about falling/rising standards of television programmes. Vanessa’s husband Lester had followed her into the kitchen with a view to sympathizing about Roger. He’d got too close, hand squidging her hip, saying, ‘Any time you want a little chat, that’s what family is for.’

Now, thanks to her mother getting in quickly, it
seemed Melanie was wrong-footed with no alternative Christmas planned and therefore no escape. If she went to Vanessa’s, this Christmas would be spent being new, misunderstood things to those she was with. None of these new definitions was superficially attractive: she was, variously, a spinster daughter, a maiden aunt, a lone divorcée, the in-law to be taken in for the day and patronized. If she wanted to be her more positive, single happy self, she and Rosa would have to take off somewhere else. Easier said.

Mrs Jenkins’s house overspilled noisy activity. With Brenda and her family in residence, Melanie could hear constant signs of occupation. From Melanie’s side of the dividing wall it was very much like having a television on somewhere in the house that you couldn’t find to switch off. Usually Mrs Jenkins was the quietest possible neighbour, but now Mel was being treated to a kind of running, thumping commentary on this long-awaited visit. This was a family that existed at full pelt. Their footsteps pounded up and down the stairs, the front and back doors were crashed shut, the TV was on day and night at a volume that ensured it could be heard from any room in the house, and Barty and Lee-Ann preferred to share their teenage taste in music with everyone within a hundred-yard radius, rather than selfishly keeping it to themselves via headphones. Perfect Patty commented with disapproval to Mel that the neighbourhood was becoming ‘rowdy’. Mel couldn’t find it in her to agree (they were only visiting for a short while, surely a bit of leeway wasn’t much to ask), but it was true that when the family all ventured out, taking in London’s
sights in the quiet post-tourist-season days, the silence felt unnaturally and eerily profound.

Mrs Jenkins was beginning to look tired. Her jaunty lilac hair was becoming wispy and wild and her shoulders sagged. This visit, longed-for as it was, overwhelmed her by the sheer bulk of her home’s extra occupants. Hal and Brenda and their teenage children were built on a bigger scale altogether, as if they’d expanded to occupy the extra space afforded by their vast home nation. Where Mrs Jenkins had small, fragile bones that were almost visible through parchment-thin skin, the visitors’ bodies were thickly insulated from the Canadian winters by meaty flesh. Their limbs were chunky and heavy, fervently over-nourished by Brenda. She had taken over her mother’s kitchen and cooked vigorously, bashing pots and pans around and yelling questions to her daughter, who tormented the poodle in the garden, offering it sticks and stealing them back again till the dog added its voice to the overall volume and yapped itself into a frenzy.

‘D’you wanna sandwich, Lee? How about a soda?’ Mel could hear it all, for Brenda kept the back door wide open, presumably because the late October chill was considered mild fresh air compared with a Toronto autumn.

Hal was eager to be busy and found things to mend around the house. As he fixed the downpipe back to the wall and cleared pigeon nests from the guttering he exchanged manly comments about tools and ladders across the fence with Max, who toiled below in Mel’s garden.

From her study window Melanie could see that Max’s fair dreadlocks were darker now, as the sun no longer bleached them. He was turning up in sweaters
for a colder season, ones with felted wool, clotted and faded by years of outdoor weather. He would be leaving soon, like a migrating bird, returning (he’d promised) to finish the job in spring. The work for now was almost done – there was little left to do except buy the plants and get them into place. There was, though, a problem with Melanie’s garden wall, down at the far end. ‘It needs repointing,’ Max told her one lunchtime. ‘Look, all this section where I’ve pulled the ivy away, all the mortar’s coming out.’

Mel peered at it as if she knew what she was looking for. It was easier just to take Max’s word for it, though even she could see that the wall looked as if someone had been stingy with the stuff holding the bricks together. It reminded her of a cake, a Victoria sandwich that had been meagrely filled with the kind of cream that disappears to nothing.

‘Will you be able to fix it?’ She hoped he would. She’d got used to having him around. Like the best kind of domestic pet, Max was no trouble, even quite a comfort on occasions. He kept his distance in the mornings, answered the phone if Mel was out, and had fixed the dripping kitchen tap without fuss and without being asked. He’d buried the badger, too, when the ground he’d previously dug so thoroughly had been too fine and mobile and refused to stop caving back into the hole. She knew he liked coffee with no sugar but two spoonfuls in tea, and that he had to stop doing anything noisy at 12.55 p.m. to listen to the shipping forecast on Radio 4. The idea of bringing in a set of new workmen and getting used to their preferences did not appeal at all.

‘Of course I can do it. Hey, I’m a landscaper, walls come with the territory. It’s whether you mind me
being around even longer. I mean, plant-wise we’re nearly there. We can have the outing to the Palm Centre and do the buying next week. We can’t put many of them in the ground, of course, but we can get them into position and just leave them for the winter and then when frost danger is past, that’s the time to plant them.’

‘If they make it through the coldest bit. It would be typical crap luck if we get one of those “coldest winters on record”.’ Mel was feeling glum. Tina Keen was having problems with the pursuit of her murderer. There might have to be one last victim so that things would shake up enough to be possible to resolve, and Mel was feeling unusually squeamish about the idea of setting up another killing. It would have to be someone who was already in the book – she was too far in to introduce a new major character. It could be the café victim’s best friend, perhaps: the girl she’d run away from the children’s home with and who’d managed to give up heroin against all odds and pressures. It seemed a wicked betrayal to kill her off after all her good efforts, but it might have to be done.

‘The plants will be fine. Cold damp wind is the worst enemy and you’re really sheltered here.’ Max was reassuring. ‘There’s just one thing, though. I have to take some time out, I can’t be here every day.’

‘Another job?’ Melanie imagined him, suddenly, making himself at home in some other woman’s kitchen, leaving his unmatched wellies by a different back door before padding across an unknown floor in his tweedy socks to fill a kettle. It would be like . . . what? Not infidelity?

Max grinned, gazed at the floor and looked as sheepish as a caught-out child. ‘Not exactly. I’m going on
Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?
Bit embarrassing really.’ He was practically shuffling his feet around now. ‘I don’t suppose I’ll get past that first eliminator speed-round but if I do . . .’ he went on, ‘would you consider . . .’

Oh, not the frantic-partner-in-audience role, she thought immediately, before just as quickly dismissing the idea: he’d have a wife somewhere for that one, or a girlfriend, boyfriend, she didn’t know. Perhaps she should know, by now. He knew an awful lot about her – things were a bit lopsided here.

‘Would you consider being one of my Phone A Friends? We’re allowed up to five. I thought you might take on the dodgy literature questions? Book-wise I only really know about sci-fi.’ He finally got the words out.

She laughed, part relief and part amazement. ‘What, me? That’s a dire responsibility!’

‘Is it? I mean, don’t if you’d rather not. But I won’t hold it against you if you get a question you can’t handle. I mean, that’ll make two of us, won’t it, by definition.’

‘Well yes, I guess it would. But if you win a million you won’t want to come back and finish my garden, will you? Or anyone else’s. So if I get asked who the madwoman in the wedding dress was in
Great Expectations
, I could just decide to plump for “Miss Faversham” instead of Miss Havisham.’

‘I trust you,’ he said. ‘You’re a book person, who better?’

‘Could be a big mistake!’

On the day that Neil Nicholson was to come to her house in the evening and cook, Melanie went early to
the gym. On the way she picked up Ben from the bus stop. He was huddled into a fat puffa jacket, staring at the pavement as she pulled up beside him.

‘Getting colder,’ she commented to him, wondering why it had evolved as a British habit to make pointless observations about the weather.

‘Too right. Not that the school cares. We got a lecture yesterday about wearing “the right sort of coat”.’

‘Well that one’s OK, isn’t it?’

‘Not according to them.’ Ben laughed. ‘You wouldn’t believe the verbal circles our head went round in, trying to avoid saying that we’re not allowed to look as if we go to the comprehensive!’

‘What are you supposed to wear, then? A big tweed coat? A Barbour?’

‘Well, a few of us thought we might go round the charity shops and see if we could find those big camel-type things like Del Boy wears in the programme.’

‘You’d need a cigar to match. And a flat cap.’

Ben laughed again. ‘Great. That would wind them up.’

Nothing seemed to change over the years, school-wise, Mel thought after she’d dropped Ben off. When she’d been at school there’d been a craze for short PVC macs, the sort she still selected occasionally for tarts patrolling wet night streets in her books. They’d been noisy, slippery garments. She remembered one late after-school afternoon when she’d had a play rehearsal –
Antony and Cleopatra
, a bit part as Charmian, a handmaiden. Neil Nicholson had been leaving the school late, too, and had stopped at the bus stop in his slinky MG, telling her to get in, quick. She assumed the urgency was to do with the pouring rain getting into his adored car. As Rosa would put it: naive or what?
He’d had music on loud, a cassette belting out Whitesnake. The car, the music were exciting stuff, in a highly fancied young teacher. When he’d dropped her off outside her house, that had been the first time he’d kissed her – nothing to object to (well, not back in those days), just a brief electrifying brush of his lips against the corner of hers. His hand had rested on her leg, pale against the black shiny fabric. And she’d felt selected, special. Her seventeen-year-old ego never questioned whether there were others picked out like this. He’d been, for Mel and her hormonally-pent-up peers, the very stuff of solo sexual fantasy – the perfect aid to sleep. She hadn’t thought at the time to question the state of
his
ego, the confidence he must have had that his chosen girls wouldn’t fail to keep the secret. How carefully had he chosen them, she wondered?

At the gym there were further signs of winter. On the notice board as she went in was a huge poster depicting fat snowflakes and an even fatter Santa Claus, advertising the Christmas party. Christmas was a sneaky thing, Melanie had decided over the past few years – tricking its way in from September onwards, while families were still adjusting to Back to Skool. The earliest signs were workmen taking apart corners of department stores, lugging in bare plastic-leaved Christmas trees and boxes of baubles that were left around in innocent piles, still closed, for a few days, waiting for their moment. Before you knew it entire shop floors were transformed into grottos, awash with glitter and tat and the tinny background of carols. Melanie stared at the poster and wondered whether Roger should be still on her present list. What would the Gift Guides suggest as perfect for the ex-husband? Perhaps someone made an alimony-payment reminder,
a silver beeper that went off when a cheque was due.

‘Can I sell you a couple of tickets for the party? You and your husband?’ chirpy blonde Tanya on the reception desk asked Mel.

‘I don’t think so, thanks all the same,’ Mel told her, imagining a bar full of overexcited twenty-somethings drunk on Bacardi Breezers and the probability of sexual conquest. It was at just that kind of party (amazing what happened backstage at staid insurance underwriters) that Leonora had shown Roger her own Christmas stockings, beneath a boardroom table.

‘Oh, shame!’ Tanya’s bright lipsticked smile faded for a second, then revived quickly. ‘Or are you going away? Somewhere nice?’

‘No, no I’m not going anywhere. Just to my sister’s on the dreaded big day.’ The smile hovered uncertainly as Tanya sympathized, ‘Oh a nice quiet time for you then,’ which somehow managed to sound as if there’d been a death. Mel hurried away to stash her bag in the locker room and found Sarah drying her hair.

‘Hi! So tonight’s the big night! Looking forward to it?’ Sarah yelled over the sound of the hairdryer. Heads swivelled to look, women towelled less vigorously, sensing gossip.

‘Ssh! It’s no big deal! Only supper. In fact . . .’

‘What? Tell me!’ Sarah switched off the hairdryer and replaced it in its holder on the counter top. ‘Do you want knicker advice? All I can say is don’t wear those big beige pants. In fact, throw them away.’ She shuddered. ‘How Neil can still want to see you again after he’s seen those . . .’