Unchained Melanie (25 page)

‘This is what happens when you refuse to live with anybody,’ Gwen went on, crashing cupboard doors around in search of tea bags. ‘You’ll end up going out in any old thing, all hours of the day and night. You look like a tramp, quite frankly, Melanie – I’m your mother, it’s my duty to tell you straight out. Don’t you possess a mirror?’

‘I haven’t got dressed yet,’ Mel said, feeling too dejected to explain further.

‘You mean you sleep in old jeans, sheepskin boots and a filthy sweatshirt? And your hair . . .’ Gwen looked out of the window and sniffed. ‘I see you’ve been getting on with the garden, such as it is. They’ll all die you know, plants like that aren’t for cold countries like this.’

It was almost comforting to be harried. It reminded Melanie that whatever else was tearing the world to pieces, some things would never change.

‘Anyway, I’ve come to talk about Rosa and what she’d like for Christmas. I don’t know what teenage girls like . . .’

‘Teenage boys, mostly . . .’ Mel murmured.

‘What? Look, please don’t be flippant, Melanie, I haven’t got time for it. She’s the last one I need to buy for – I’ve more or less got Christmas out of the way. I’m too old to fight my way round shopping centres in December so I want it all done and dusted by the weekend.’

Gwen picked up the boiling kettle and poured water into a pair of mugs. ‘No proper teapot . . .’ she murmured, as she always did. Mel flopped into one of the wicker chairs as her mother fussed around. It seemed
easier to let her get on with it rather than to battle for occupation of her own kitchen.

‘Don’t you have anyone doing your cleaning at the moment?’ Gwen said eventually, as she placed a mug of weak milky tea in front of Melanie. ‘This place looks like a bomb’s hit it.’ She surveyed the array of dirty wine glasses by the sink, left from the night before, Patty’s abandoned chocolate cake that looked as if someone had dug impatient, clumsy fingers into its middle, and the sink full of plates. She sniffed the air, canny as a gundog. ‘And it smells in here. Cigarettes.’

Melanie almost laughed; it was like being a teenager, caught having a sly cigarette out of the bedroom window.

‘I had a few people in last night, that’s all. We were celebrating the new garden.’

‘Drinking. That’s what people mean when they say celebrating. Drinking.’ Gwen put a lifetime’s worth of disapproval into the word. For her, drink was something people ‘took to’, something that drove them to ruin and disgrace. Howard had been heading that way, she was sure. It was why they were going to spend a month in Spain - to break the habit. He wouldn’t like Sangria or the robust Spanish wines, and by the time she got him home again he’d have lost the taste for that tawdry pub. It wasn’t the only habit that she intended to be broken, either, for where was he going to get his hands on filthy magazines in a good Catholic country where girls in photographs kept their clothes on and their legs together?

She glared at the bin bag which waited by the back door to be taken down to the dustbin. It bulged with obvious bottle shapes. A beer can had pierced a hole and poked out, pointing a broken ring pull at her.

‘Someone’ll cut themselves, taking that out,’ she said, indicating the sharp metal. ‘You could sever a vein.’

‘I know, I know.’ Melanie reached across and shoved the can further into the depths of the bag.

‘And nobody would know. You could be lying here all alone, bleeding to death. Now if you and Roger . . .’

Mel put her hands over her ears. Huge tears pushed their way out of her eyes and rolled down her cheeks. They felt as big as marbles. She was aware of them individually as they fell, and a weirdly disconnected part of her brain marvelled at how each one formed in her eyes, welled up to overflowing and gradually tipped itself out over the edge, like a reluctant but determined suicide going over a high balcony.

‘Gracious, Melanie, what on earth’s the matter? Was it something I said?’ Gwen sat down next to Mel and put her hand on hers, rather gingerly.

Melanie looked down at the skin on her mother’s hand. It was thin, dry, speckled. If you touched it, it would crackle. The folds and lines were rather beautiful, she thought in an odd, detached way, like a dried-out river valley pictured from space.

‘It’ll be hormones.’ Gwen nodded wisely at her. ‘You’re not getting any younger, are you?’

‘It’s not hormones. I’m fine,’ Mel protested.

‘It’s the time of year then,’ Gwen decreed, risking some gentle patting. ‘People on their own do feel it worst around Christmas.’

Melanie smiled at her mother. There was no point arguing this particular toss, Gwen would never believe her.

‘Mrs Jenkins has been burgled,’ she told her, as she reached across for kitchen towel to blow her nose on.
Was it less than ten hours before that she’d used this paper roll to staunch Max’s blood? Where was he? He’d said he’d be back, that there were still things to finish, like wrapping fleece around the plants to protect them from frost. She really wished he was with her now, even if he was down at the far end of the garden doing something loud and messy involving cement and a hammer.

‘And whoever did it,’ she went on, ‘has hit her and knocked her out. She’s been taken to the hospital.’

‘Oh, so that’s why you’ve got her dog – I thought you’d taken up walking in the park. That poor woman, she’ll never feel safe in her own home again.’

Mel wiped the tears away. They seemed to have stopped as suddenly as they’d started, as if there’d been just that amount of spare salt water, no more.

‘Look, why don’t you come home with me?’ Gwen suggested at last. ‘Daddy would love to see you and we could have a nice fish pie for lunch. I’ve got one in the freezer. It only needs mike-ing.’ She looked at Melanie intently. ‘You know, you could come and stay properly if you like, back in your old room. It’s not as if . . . Well, till Rosa gets back from university. You don’t want to be on your own.’

Melanie got up and started clattering with the dishes in the sink, shoving them carelessly and fast into the dishwasher. She was touched by the invitation, but didn’t want her mother to see how very much she couldn’t bear the thought of returning to her childhood home, even for one night, to sleep as someone’s child again in her old bedroom. She also caught sight of her mother looking nervous, taking sharp glances at the freezer. Mel could almost read her mind, could sense her wondering whether having her daughter to stay
would involve moving the frozen fish pies aside to make room for a bag of dead squirrels.

‘It’s a very kind thought,’ she said eventually. ‘But I’ve got to stay here and talk to Brenda – Mrs Jenkins’s daughter – tell her what’s happened. She’ll be back soon. It’ll be a shock for her but she’ll want to know the details from me, not from some police officer who doesn’t really know. And then there’s the dog, and the cat . . .’

Gwen stood up quickly and tucked her scarf round her neck. ‘All right, Mel, I expect that’s the best plan really, but remember, if you ever want . . .’

‘Thanks, Mum, I will. And I’ll let you know what happens with Mrs Jenkins.’

‘Oh yes, do, I like her. We had a very nice lunch together that day you went out. She might enjoy a visit at the hospital.’ The thought seemed to cheer Gwen quite considerably. Mel was glad – her mother was now distracted from her daughter’s stubborn solitariness and was mentally running through the choices: whether to take grapes or tangerines,
The Lady
or
People’s Friend
on her visit to the hospital.

‘And Melanie.’ Gwen, by the open front door, turned and spoke almost in a whisper to Mel, as if half the street was all ears. ‘Go and do something about yourself. Have a bath, wear something pretty, put some lipstick on. It makes all the difference.’

‘I will, Mum, I promise. Thanks.’

Brenda and Hal and their pair of teenagers squeezed their ample bodies out of the taxi and argued loudly on the pavement over who should carry which bags into the house. Lee-Ann’s mouth was turned down at the corners in a sulk that almost prompted Melanie to
warn her that her face would stay like that if the wind changed. That was, it crossed her mind with renewed depression, exactly the kind of thing her mother had said to her when she was little. Gwen had never said it to Vanessa, not that she could recall, because Vanessa’s face had been permanently set in a smile. ‘Born to please, that one,’ her mother had said, ‘born to please.’ The phrase, almost sung, would be followed up with something along the lines of ‘Now why can’t you be more like that, Melanie?’

She hadn’t caught Vanessa, behind her back, putting her tongue out at Melanie, digging her nails into her leg, making her squeal as they sat beside each other at the table. Gwen hadn’t caught her with a pair of nail scissors, either, cutting small sly holes in Melanie’s dolls’ dresses, holes small enough to be missed on first looking, so that by the time Mel discovered them Vanessa would be nowhere near either dresses or scissors and suspicion would fall on Melanie herself.

‘You were just jealous of her,’ Roger had said when she’d described a classic example of sibling rivalry.

‘I probably was,’ Mel agreed. ‘The first child is an only child for a while. It’s hard to give up that complete attention you get. Especially when you’re only fifteen months old.’

When her time came to have children, Melanie had dreaded a repeat of her own childhood battles and been careful not to produce two of them too close together. The four-year gap had seemed ideal. But then Daniel hadn’t survived, and a lot of things were not ideal after that.

Melanie drove Brenda and Lee-Ann to the hospital. Hal offered to go too, but in a manner that suggested he would, if pushed, come up with a lot of excuses not to
be there. Mel could read in his reluctant expression that, though he was eager not to cause pain, he knew for sure that hospital beds were female terrain, that he would be in the way there, that this was Brenda’s mother, not his, and that he had his own masculine way of being useful. ‘I’ll stay here, fix the door and put up a chain. Barty can walk the dog,’ he volunteered.

In the car, Brenda clutched a box of tissues and her daughter’s hand. ‘Hal hates hospitals,’ she said. ‘They make him feel queasy.’

‘I don’t think anyone’s that keen on them,’ Melanie reassured her.

‘I hate them too. Why’d I have to come?’ Lee-Ann whined.

‘She’ll wanna see you,’ Brenda said bluntly.

‘Won’t she wanna see Barty too?’

‘He can come tomorrow. Too many people might make her tired,’ Brenda told her, taking a shaky deep breath and becoming tearful. ‘If she’s still . . . still with us. Poor Mom! We should never have gone and left her.’

It wasn’t the moment, Mel thought as she pulled into the hospital car park, to point out that as they’d left her on her own for the last fifteen years or so, they could hardly have foreseen that another week would make such a difference. She remembered, as she went with them along the hospital’s corridor, the mental picture she’d had of Mrs Jenkins sipping coffee at a sunny table outside the Café de Flore. Would she really have liked Paris? Or would she have worried about the dog, worried that her arthritis would play up, hated the food, mistrusted the language?

‘She’s in
here
?’ Brenda stopped at the door of the long ward and looked at the double line of beds. She
seemed to be horror-struck, gazing around as if she was taking in a scene from a years-old film. The hospital, although impressively rebuilt and ultra-modern at the front, kept a couple of Victorian wings with traditional long wards far away at the back. It was as if they were being kept specially, just till the present generation of old people died out, so that they wouldn’t be flummoxed by small mixed wards and high-tech surroundings. Ancient ladies in pastel dressing gowns shuffled around, some laboriously wheeling drips or catheter equipment alongside them. Visitors huddled beside beds administering home-cooked food, spooning it into pale, frail, paper-thin relatives. There was a sad smell of mild decay, of leaked urine overlaid with the aroma of recent lunch.

‘Why doesn’t she have her own room?’ Lee-Ann asked, bewildered by the antiquated scene.

Melanie smiled. In contrast to Lee-Ann, she found the place reassuring. She would have to explain to the girl that sharing a huge, old-fashioned, shabby ward with twenty-three strangers meant that you were probably going to be all right. In this country the occupation of a precious single room on the National Health Service tended to mean only one thing: it was the ante-room to death.

It was a bit late in the day for serious Christmas shopping by the time Melanie went off to meet Cherry. Twilight was already starting to gather as she emerged from the tube at Knightsbridge. She wouldn’t get much of it done, but it didn’t matter – it was just important somehow to launch herself into central London’s careless, brightly lit bustle and join in the annual crazed buying fest. Having spent so long protesting to all and
sundry that she relished being on her own, she could hardly wait to lose herself in a crowd and chat with a good friend.

Cherry was waiting outside the Sloane Street entrance to Harvey Nichols. The new radiance that had lit her face the night before, when she’d told Mel and Sarah about Helena, was still there. Even her chestnut hair seemed to shine more richly. Something new in her had been brought to life. It was about time, Melanie thought; Cherry had kept her personal capacity for love locked up and dormant for far too many years. Somehow it didn’t surprise her that Cherry had fallen for a woman. After Nathan, she’d seeded and cultivated a distrust of male-female relationships that was rooted so deep it would take another lifetime to shift it.

‘So, how’s your poor neighbour? Any news since this morning?’ Cherry asked, as they made their way into the cosmetics department. The counters were at least six deep in eager purchasers. Had this been such a good idea, Melanie wondered, feeling the beginnings of claustrophobia, wouldn’t it have been more sensible to buy everything she needed over the Internet?

‘She’s confused, sore and wanting to go home,’ Mel yelled to Cherry, over the battle between a woman demanding a Susheimo foundation in Dizzy Peach and an assistant assuring her there was no such shade.