Unchained Melanie (22 page)

‘ActuaIly, there was something.’ Roger’s foot started twitching up and down with nerves. ‘I sort of wanted to talk to you.’

Oh please, she thought, don’t let it be some messy personal stuff concerned with Leonora and her pregnancy.

‘Roger . . .’ she began.

He interrupted quickly. ‘No, Mel, just let me . . .’

He fumbled in his pocket, pulling out a crumpled piece of paper. ‘Do you remember this?’ He passed it to her and she smoothed it out, her hands moving softly
and gently as she recognized the pattern.

‘Oh, the wallpaper! Of course I remember. Those lovely
Swallows and Amazons
boats. I remember . . . I’m sure you do too . . . we talked about how free they were, those storybook children messing about on the water, no grown-ups, no life jackets, no-one fussing around, telling them not to tack downwind. Have you kept this scrap of paper all this time?’

‘No. It’s just . . . this is recent – it’s still in production. Can you believe that?’ He gave a short, brittle laugh. ‘There’s a book of sample papers that Leonora got. I ripped this one out.’

‘What . . . because . . .’

‘She liked this one. She’d turned the corner of the page down. I didn’t want her to have it.’

‘I see.’ And she did, perfectly.

‘Because it was ours, wasn’t it? You understand, don’t you? This was to do with us. I know it’s just a detail, but those kids in the boats, I remember we saw them as Rosa and Daniel, five years on.’ He pulled some more threads out of the chair cover. ‘We never even collected the paper from the shop.’

‘Er . . . I did, actually.’

‘You did? Why? What was the point – Daniel had gone.’

‘I know, I know. I was just passing the shop, about a month after he’d died, and I went in, on a sort of whim. I was half-crazed at the time, don’t forget, I think we both were. Maybe I thought if I just carried on as if everything was all right, it sort of
would
be. Of course, when I got home, well, even halfway home – no buggy to push, no feed to rush back for . . . I just put it all in the loft, then went off to collect Rosa from school. It’s still there, all seven rolls of it.’ She laughed, shakily. ‘I
mean, if you really did want it, you could . . . No, on second thoughts, sorry.’

‘I think . . .’ Roger took a deep, long breath. ‘I think I’m scared it might all happen again. Is that half-crazed too?’

‘No, of course not. You know in your heart that it’s not even remotely likely, but, well, I’d be amazed if you
didn’t
think about it. Don’t you talk about all this with Leonora?’ She somehow hoped he didn’t – Daniel had been
their
baby, their loss, their grief. One and a half pounds of almost transparent humanity. She could hardly bear the thought of Leonora, too young, too uncomprehending, eyes glittery, saying, ‘Oh poor Roger, how terrible for you,’ but she wouldn’t have a clue, not deep down. She pictured her giving Roger a consoling hug, smiling a reassurance that
her
body wasn’t faulty, wouldn’t fail to let a baby hang in there for the full term. Then she’d switch channels on the TV, time for
Sex in the City
.

‘Leonora hasn’t even read a single baby book, not even one How To article in her many magazines. I don’t think it occurs to her that there could possibly be anything to go wrong.’

No imagination, that’s her trouble, Melanie thought, biting her lip to stop the words hurtling out.

‘Well, she’s probably right – it almost certainly
won’t
go wrong,’ she told him. ‘We were just unlucky, that’s all.’

‘Yeah. I’m sure you’re right. Look, I’m really sorry to have dragged all this up again. I’d better be going.’ He looked at his watch and stood up. ‘You OK?’

‘Yes, I’m fine. I won’t sit here and brood about it, don’t worry. I have my down moments still, but not many and not for long – his birthday, the day that
should
have been his birthday, Christmas just a bit, you know.’

‘Yes, but you’re here by yourself . . .’ He hovered by the doorway, as if guilty that he was abandoning someone that he’d injured. She felt annoyed suddenly, for it wasn’t as if he could stay, even if they both wanted him to. He had somewhere else to be, someone else to be with. As if on cue, the doorbell rang.

‘I like being by myself. I don’t like having to keep reassuring people about it, though. I won’t say it again, actually, it’s too much like letting you off the hook,’ she said as she walked past him to open the front door. Roger followed her, picking up his coat from the banisters. He looked puzzled, as if he’d patted her gently and she’d turned on him.

‘Hi! Shelf-man here for you!’ Neil, eager and willing as a soft old Labrador, brought chill damp air into the house with him. He also carried a big blue metal tool box and another one that she could see contained some kind of power tool.

‘Oh. I see, so you’re not quite as “on your own” as you make out,’ Roger said, smirking as he gave Mel’s cheek a perfunctory peck. ‘I’ll give you a call in the week – I was wondering what Rosa wants to do about Christmas. Bye!’ and he was gone, swallowed up into the night and his new, other life.

Rosa and Desi lay on his bed watching
Friends
. They’d eaten a chicken stir-fry into which Desi had sliced too much ginger. ‘It’s good for you,’ he’d told her. ‘Ginger is supposed to stop you feeling sick.’

‘Not
this
much of it, surely,’ she’d said. ‘Couldn’t you have just got me a luscious box of ginger chocolates instead? Really dark, really bitter chocolate?’

And he had. She hadn’t actually meant it, but Desi was one of those people who took things literally. In a way it was good, there was no devious thinking about him. You got what you paid for, so to speak. She put it down to spending all those years locked up (well, not literally, but it must have felt like it) at the kind of school where the use of imagination wasn’t really encouraged. Sport, religion and a strangely old-fashioned sense of history – that was what he’d been raised on. He’d said he was just going out to the offy to buy a couple of cans of Stella, and he’d come back with a box of chocolate ginger creams. Milk chocolate, but lucky to get that after 8 p.m. on the edge of Plymouth town centre. He didn’t want anything in return. He just did it because he liked her. She almost cried.

‘You’d better check the sell-by,’ he warned now as she reached into the box for her fifth sweet.

‘Too late now,’ she told him, hugging him close.

Melanie could have done it herself, quite easily. Well, she could have assembled the shelves – getting them to go up and stay up on the wall might have been another matter. Max would probably have obliged.

‘It’s not as simple as it looks,’ Neil told her, in that way men do without bothering to ask first whether you’ve got a degree in Product Engineering. ‘You can’t just bash in the Rawlplugs wherever you feel like it.’ He went hand over hand along the study wall as if feeling for the catch to the secret passage, knocking gently now and then. Melanie suppressed laughter: the scene was like a play in which a walled-up nun or a prisoner on the other side was likely to knock back. She couldn’t think what he was listening for – these were not modern breeze-block and batten walls; as far as she
could see the only thing to avoid, drill-wise, was slicing into an electric cable, and it was pretty obvious where they were. Neil looked happy enough, though. Like all men she’d ever known, he’d spread out over the entire room for this so-called simple job. On her desk was the open tool box, exposing an impressive range of drill-bits, screwdrivers, hacksaw blades and chisels that would stock an entire branch of B & Q. His electric screwdriver was charging itself up by way of her computer’s mains plug and the packaging from the flat-pack box was strewn around the carpet. Tidy worker he was not.

‘I’ll get this lot cleared up in a minute,’ he said as the last shelf’s final fixing plate went successfully into the wall. He looked distinctly proud of himself, Melanie thought, as if he was genuinely thrilled to be fulfilling society’s expectations of the standard ideal male of the species. He reminded her of Jeremy Paxman when he brought a bird in through the catflap – all erect head and delighted, challenging eyes.

‘It’s looking really good,’ she told him, feeling conscious that she too was assuming an allotted role. She would now have to cook something – that was the next thing in the script. She wondered if it had been subconscious on his part – turn up an hour or so before the average suppertime and do a manly job so that he could be properly rewarded with sustenance. She could take him out somewhere, she thought, but she was quite enjoying observing Man in his more primitive element, and she didn’t want to undermine his mood: if only for the sake of research it was interesting to study him as a stereotype. Besides, for once there was plenty of food in the fridge.

‘There!’ Neil stepped back and surveyed his work
triumphantly. ‘That OK for you?’ He turned to Mel.

‘It’s lovely, Neil, thank you. This has saved me a lot of hassle. Now – would you like some supper, my turn to cook?’

While Neil reassembled his toolkit and swept up the sawdust and plaster, Mel went down to the kitchen and opened the fridge, trusting it to come up with something instantly edible and miraculously simple to prepare yet impressive to serve. There was pasta (of course), three packs of tomatoes of varying ages, romaine lettuce that was a bit droopy in the leaf but crisp enough further down. A bit like me, really, Mel thought, as she took it out and started chopping at it. She was no longer looking at the window, expecting a crazed axeman to be outside, leering in with teeth bared and eyes manic. It seemed as if having a man on the premises was like a talisman against bad luck. The idea that she should acquire one, surrender her independence just to ward off imagined evil, wasn’t a welcome one. She would, she thought, prefer to get a large, fierce dog.

It was a simple meal – pasta with pesto and cherry tomatoes – thanks to Nigel Slater’s
Real Fast Food
cookbook. Now there, she thought, as she gouged out slivers of Parmesan with her potato peeler, was a man who understood the good things about lone living and eating. Nigel unashamedly praised the virtues of a real chip sandwich – thick white bread, twice-cooked chips, the sort you could really go mad for when you were by yourself. He knew a hundred ways with a single piece of chicken and the best things to put in a for-one omelette. It was all the kind of food that the lone greedy-guts most loved, yet when people were set up into couples and families it was the sort
of food they pretended to scorn eating.

Neil wolfed down two platefuls of spaghetti, both the chocolate and brandy mousses Mel had been saving to have in bed after a long evening’s work, and helped her to finish another bottle of Roger’s best claret.

‘Delicious. Thanks, Mel, you know the way to a man’s vital organs,’ he said, patting his tummy in a manner that seemed strangely elderly and reminded Mel of her father.

‘No problem,’ she said as she shoved plates into the dishwasher, ‘it’s just a small thank-you for doing the shelves.’

‘Give me a kiss then, say thanks properly.’ He had her all wrapped up against him and his mouth on hers before she could say, ‘Ah, so that’s the catch.’

She didn’t much mind kissing him, in fact it was quite tasty and exciting, but it did occur to her that if the going rate for a couple of shelves was a snog, it was possibly just as well she hadn’t asked him to construct a double-size built-in wardrobe.

‘So how’s it going with Neil?’ Sarah was one of those annoyingly fit women who could run and talk at the same time. Even at full pelt her voice sounded perfectly normal, as if she was doing nothing more energetic than ambling round Space NK in search of a new lipstick. The gym was busy, humming with full-throttle exercise machines, booming with vigorous gee-up music that seemed to make the pace zap faster, and everyone in the building had skin glistening with the sheen of worthy exertion. Melanie, on the next machine to Sarah, was puffing at a slow trot and wondering why she hadn’t simply volunteered to take her parents’ terrier and Mrs Jenkins’s poodle for a ramble in the park instead. She could have had a lovely childlike kick through heaps of fallen leaves, checked the horse chestnut trees for early signs of next spring’s sticky buds and tried to guess which of the early morning mushrooms were the prized magic ones. At least there she wouldn’t have to pretend she was in peak physical condition, and could commune peacefully with nature and her own thoughts.

‘And what makes you think there’s any “it” going
with Neil?’ she asked Sarah when she had gathered enough spare breath.

‘I called him.’ Sarah’s voice was loud to overcome the music. ‘I asked if he’d seen you and he said he’d been round doing a spot of DIY for you. And we all know what
that
means.’ Her eyes met Mel’s in the mirror and she gave her a grin full of nudge-nudge insinuation.

Mel laughed. ‘It means I’ve got a couple of nice new shelves where I can stash a few more books.’

‘Oh come on, Melanie, don’t be so po-faced, I can’t believe it was just shelves he was putting up, so to speak.’

A passing staff member, one of the instructors, overheard Sarah. He slowed down, eyed up Mel in a questioning way and gave her a smirk and a leer. He was a well-muscled twenty-something, stocky with cropped black hair and bum-hugging shorts. Gossip in the gym claimed he’d been a pro rugby player until a run-in with an overenthusiastic opponent damaged his knee. He winked lasciviously at Mel via the mirror and she simpered back, just to be obliging.

‘Did you see that? Bloody nerve!’ she commented to Sarah as the man crossed the room to sort out another woman’s confusion with the triceps-extension machine.

‘I did and he’s gorgeous. Your problem, Mel, is that you don’t know when to be grateful.’

‘Grateful? God, am I supposed to be? Thanks.’

‘Yeah, grateful. Who knows? He might really fancy you. You should go over and give him your phone number; I would in your position. Young fresh blood, you never know . . .’

‘Get real, Sarah, you make me sound like a vampire!
All that would happen is that we’d see how fast he could run!’