Unchained Melanie (21 page)

The pub was shabby and scuffed round the edges. No-one had yet seen an opportunity here for gutting
and theming. Its buttercream paint peeled and flaked and the carpet was faded and threadbare. The smell of disinfectant saturated the air, overlaid with the scents of a century of spilled ale and exhaled tobacco. Sunlight streamed in through the frosted windows onto the freshly polished oak tables. It was early-morning quiet – Mel could hear no sounds of occupation apart from the rhythmic swish of a floor-mop beyond the door marked ‘Gents’. Across the sticky carpet, beneath a lifeless fruit machine, her father sat wearing his reading glasses, immersed in the
Telegraph
’s Deaths column. A few other elderly men were dotted around singly, looking as if they’d been deliberately placed at equal distances from each other, each with a newspaper, some also with dogs lying beneath the tables, both dogs and humans tired from their walks. There were no women: this scruffy pub seemed almost to have had its air of neglect cultivated deliberately, to turn it into a male refuge. It was, it occurred to Melanie, the opposite of the spruce, clean home her mother had created. Perhaps there was a theme here, after all – a kind of grubby anti-domestic atmosphere cleverly designed to appeal to over-fussed retired men like her father, who were forever being asked to move their feet out of the way of a vacuum cleaner.

‘Dad? How are you doing?’ Howard looked up in astonishment as Melanie sat down next to him. The dog shambled to its feet, wagged its tail briefly and flopped down again.

‘Melanie! What are you doing here? Is Gwen . . .’

‘It’s OK, Dad, there’s nothing wrong. I can’t pretend I was just passing, so I’ll be honest – I wanted to see you without Mum.’

‘Oh.’ He looked down at the obituary column again, reminding Mel of a sulky child avoiding all-seeing parental eyes.

‘It’s about Christmas.’

‘Christmas?’ He looked as if he’d never heard of the word. Mel felt bad – he obviously thought she’d pursued him to his sanctuary on special orders to find out if he was up to no good. It was as if he imagined she’d been following him, sent by Gwen to body-search him for porn mags, and then report back so she could evict him to spend his remaining days in his shed.

‘Christmas,’ she insisted quietly. ‘I don’t particularly want to go to Vanessa’s. I’m too old to play the failed single daughter – I just can’t be doing with it. It was bad enough last year, everyone knowing Roger and I were just about over. Vanessa kept giving me those
looks
. So I’m making a grown-up choice: I’m not going. How do you think that will go down with Mum? She seems to think it’s a
fait accompli
. She’s not very easy to . . .’

‘I know, I know.’ For Howard it didn’t need saying. ‘Melanie, as you just said, you’re an adult. You live on your own, you run your own life. You can do what you like.’ He sighed heavily, and reminded himself with a wry grin, ‘I’m a grown-up too, of course.’

‘Do you mean you don’t much want to go to Vanessa’s either?’ She grinned. ‘Let’s both not!’

‘Well. No. Hand on heart, I love to see both my daughters. But it’s not as if I have to do anything but turn up in a suitable outfit and sit where I’m told to sit. But . . . that Lester’s a dull old bugger, isn’t he? And there’s something odd about those children. Never a word out of them, a pair of Midwich Cuckoos.’

‘So you prefer Boxing Day?’

‘Oh, I do!’ His face lit up. ‘There’s racing on the telly, leftovers to eat as and when . . . no fuss. Yes, I much prefer that.’

‘We could go to Kempton this year if you like, lose a few quid on some no-hopers, in real life instead of by way of the box. What do you think?’

Howard laughed. ‘We could! Let’s! What a brilliant idea. Now that really gives me something to look forward to.’

She realized immediately that this meant she couldn’t now go away. She couldn’t book into a madly expensive health spa or a Maldives diving centre. It was probably just as well. Getting away from Christmas was an idea that only seemed to work in theory. The thing tended to follow you, to get to you wherever you tried to hide. Why else were holidays a hundred per cent price-inflated during the Christmas/New Year fortnight? It was so that hotels frequented by Western travellers at every corner of the planet could justify rigging out their premises with plastic fir trees and glittery baubles. It was so that hotel staff could ‘entertain’ guests with carol singing and turkey barbecues and Santa in a scarlet and white fun-fur bikini.

So, instead, Mel and Rosa probably would spend the day chez Vanessa after all. Vanessa had a Christmas book that she brought out every October in which she checked off all the things to be done. She always sent out Christmas cards with the current year’s specially organized family photo on the front. When the children had been little she’d got them to wear cardboard antlers, angel haloes or Santa hats. Now there was just body language that wasn’t even remotely ho-ho-ho. On last year’s, William had been scowling, Theresa’s vacant eyes had been avoiding the camera and
Vanessa’s smile had looked frantic. In this year’s, Vanessa could well be hiding a sharp knife behind her back to warn against one of the perfect family smiles slipping. She peeled and prepared the sprouts on 22nd November and stashed them in the freezer. Her stuffing was ready by 15th December. She was probably the one person of her generation who insisted on silence for the Queen’s speech. But hell, this wasn’t for life, it was only for Christmas. It was just one day. How much could it hurt?

Tina Keen and Melanie were pretty sure by now who had committed the grim café murder. The victim’s friend, the young reformed junkie, had been allowed (just) to keep her life, but not before enduring a terrifying, torturous night shackled to a barred window in a cellar. The chill, airless room was beneath a hospital where body parts – amputated limbs, defunct livers, infected, useless kidneys and aborted foetuses – waited like a butcher’s special offer on steel trays in irreverent uncared-for heaps, to be bagged up and taken away for incineration. The hooded killer simply sat and watched her, silent, sinister and dangerous. For amusement he played with his knife, testing the blade by slicing a lobe from a diseased lung, then cutting a finger from a hand severed in a meat-processing accident.

Melanie’s own fingers hovered over her keyboard, just giving one last moment to deciding which way to take it: whether to condemn the secretive young constable (with the sister-fixated past), or the mortuary attendant with his morbid obsession for making holes in people, to a life sentence of wary terror in gaol. It’s not real, she reminded herself; it’s only pretend.
Neither of these was a flesh and blood man who was really about to pass many fearful years in a miserable cell. She could flip a coin, let the fates decide which one of the pair was to star in the book’s cataclysmic finale.

Mel finished the second-to-last chapter satisfied that as she’d scared herself to the point where she was almost afraid to leave her study, her readers would find it quite gruesome enough. She switched off the i-Book and looked down into the garden. It was dark – a smoky-damp late afternoon. Most of the gardens on either side of hers had long pools of light leaking out from downstairs rooms. Hers didn’t – she hadn’t been downstairs since the daylight started to fade, and no lights were on. Below, as she left her study, there was a rattle and clatter that almost made her heart stop, but it was only Jeremy Paxman racing in through his catflap. He was being chased, Mel thought, as the adrenalin subsided, either that or it was later than she’d imagined and he was in urgent need of food.

Melanie switched on the kitchen light, opened a sachet of Jeremy’s favourite food for him, then took the vodka and tonic bottles out of the fridge and ice from the freezer. She smiled to herself as she pictured Roger with his eyebrows high up like a viaduct arch, commenting, ‘Spirits before six, Melanie?’ as if she was only a single measure away from joining the winos under the bridge. She poured herself a good strong drink (thinking as she did so of Sarah’s useful maxim that if you pour the vodka over ice, you can kid yourself it’s only a small one) and sat facing the black, blank window. A branch from next door’s buddleia was scratching against the glass. The teenage addict she’d just been writing about, the murderer’s chosen
final victim, had been watched through an uncurtained window like this one. She too had fed her cat, taken a drink from her fridge, and all the time there’d been a man just the other side of the door, just a pane of glass and some flimsy wood away, excited, elated, craving to do unspeakable things to her.

Someone could be out there now, she thought, her insides tightening as small beads of fear started collecting together and gathering an unwelcome strength. There were no hiding places in her garden for any Tom to do his peeping from. Max had left it stripped and flattened, not so much as a blade of a weed remaining. But someone could be just beside the fence, sneaking along the black edges where the oblong of light stopped. They could have crept up close and be only inches away beneath the window.

Her mother’s voice took over from Roger’s drink warning. ‘You should have got curtains,’ it said, ‘nice thick ones.’ Mel had never seen the point of curtains in a kitchen, thinking them fussy and suburban and likely to get soggy and grease-speckled. Kitchens were warm places, needing more heat to be let out than kept in. She wasn’t overlooked by other windows or by passers-by. It occurred to her now for the first time that somebody might take an undraped window for an invitation to peer in and think criminal thoughts.

‘Maybe I should write light romantic comedies in future,’ she told Jeremy Paxman, who was finishing off the last lickings round his bowl. The cat merely raised his head for a second and then started lapping noisily at his water.

The doorbell ringing almost made Melanie, in her hyped-up state, pass out completely. Her heart was pounding so hard as she went to open the front door
that she thought it would crack a rib.

‘I thought I’d just pop round on my way home, see how you’re doing.’ Roger was on the doorstep, shuffling his feet slightly, trying to look nonchalant. Melanie recognized that look – sideways grin, eyes not quite meeting hers – and it didn’t convince. She remembered it from when he’d first mentioned Leonora, dropping her name too often and too enthusiastically into a conversation about junk e-mails. ‘Just someone at work,’ he’d said, when Mel asked who she was. If he’d been a child he’d have been literally wriggling with the burden of the lie. As it was, he’d shifted and twisted and got up for some more wine when his glass was still almost full.

‘OK, come in,’ she said, rather gracelessly. ‘And on your way home from where? You’re a long way off the track from Battersea to Esher.’ Good grief, surely he wasn’t seeing someone else this soon into his new marriage?

Roger slid his coat off and flung it over the banister rail, just as he used to when he’d lived there. ‘Oh, just went into the town for something. Couldn’t find it, don’t remember what it was.’

‘You’re rambling, Roger. Just admit you’ve come to check that I haven’t gutted the house as well as the garden. Drink?’ She led the way to the sitting room, switching on a couple of lamps. As she closed the blue linen curtains she took a quick look outside to the garden. No-one there. Of course there wasn’t.

‘Oh, er . . . yes. That would be lovely. Only if you’ve got time though, I don’t want to keep you from anything.’ He was peering around, she noticed, as she went to the kitchen and came back with whisky, ice and a glass for him. She wondered what he was
looking for – signs of another man occupying his former territory? A big fierce dog? Paint charts? He settled himself into the motheaten pink chair and pulled nervously at a couple of loose threads. In spite of herself, she couldn’t help watching as he crossed one long leg over the other. She’d always loved the way his muscles went taut. He had, for a man, the most elegant legs, so did Max. Did this, she wondered, make her a ‘leg-woman’, in the same way that men defined themselves by their preferences as ‘tit-men’?

‘I’ve just finished work myself,’ she told him, pouring him a Scotch. ‘I’ve got nothing else planned – yet. I might go to see a film later.’

‘Oh? Who with?’

‘Why do people ask that? Isn’t “which film” more to the point? If you really want to know, I’d be going by myself!’ She laughed at him. ‘Roger, you’re as bad as Cherry – she thinks anyone who goes out on their own is terminally sad. Which in her case means she hardly ever goes anywhere.’

‘Well, what’s on? We could go together.’

She laughed again. ‘What, you and me? Like a date? Are you mad?’

‘No, not like a date. Like old friends.’ He shrugged. ‘It was just a thought.’ He hesitated for a moment, then looked at her carefully. ‘We are old friends, aren’t we?’

Melanie felt taken aback. ‘Old friends’ would not have been her first thought when asked to describe their no-longer-married state. But to call themselves ‘new enemies’, or just ‘acquaintances’, would be to cancel out all the years when they’d been contented enough, raising Rosa, putting their home together, planting the now-annihilated garden. And there’d
been the shared, well-supported bad times too – the death of his father, the loss of their baby.

‘Yes, OK, Roger, we can be old friends if you like. I don’t particularly want to go out with you, though, not tonight. Sorry. Anyway . . .’ She couldn’t stop herself using the defensive, carpy voice she thought had gone for ever the day the decree absolute had come through, as she added, ‘Don’t you want to rush home to Leonora?’

Ugh – she almost shuddered, wishing she hadn’t said that. Now he’d think that somewhere in the corner of her soul there was still a little heap of jealous regret. She pictured it as a small, slightly battered sandcastle on a typical cold English beach just as the sun’s going down, everyone has gone and the tide is coming in. At first, when they’d decided the marriage was definitely no longer workable, there’d been a whole massive sandy fortification of the stuff, practically a garrison town’s worth – how could there not be? They’d been together, give or take a dozen or so of Roger’s dalliances, for nearly twenty years. She was happy to be down to that one last tiny bucket-sized heap, with no flag in the top.