Unchained Melanie (26 page)

‘Will she be allowed to go home?’ Cherry shouted back, as she ran her finger over an eye-shadow tester. It was a deep pinky-gold, Mel noticed: things
had
changed for Cherry – usually she never veered from a safe smoky grey.

‘I don’t know, to be honest. She’s turned into one of those parcel people, you know, when the “system” takes over and she has to be assessed? Brenda won’t be
around to take care of her for more than a few more days, though I think she’s trying to change their flight so she can help sort things out. You hear about old ladies walled up in hospital wards for weeks and weeks, waiting to be placed somewhere by the powers that be. I hope she comes back home.’

Mel would miss the old lady a lot if she didn’t, it occurred to her. Mrs Jenkins had been around all the time she and Roger had lived in that house, all through Rosa’s growing up, through the loss of Daniel. She’d babysat, cat-sat, kept an eye on the house when they’d been away for holidays. She had long been Southernbrook Road’s senior resident. If she went, someone else would move up to that position – probably Gerald from the other side of Mel. It was depressing, somehow, to think that in her turn she too could be the lone Elder Inhabitant. Panicking at the idea, she told herself, as she tried out a deep purple lipstick on the back of her hand, that she could move on and away, but then remembered all the lovely new garden. How would she face Max and tell him she was off to start again, casual and heedless, say in a riverside flat with only a titchy plantless balcony? Perhaps he wouldn’t care, she thought, as she trailed after Cherry to the outside door. After all, she was only a client, nothing special.

‘What are you going to tell your folks?’ Rota-Girl Kate was sitting on Rosa’s floor. Rosa was stretched out on the bed, stroking her expanded stomach with great fondness. She knew that from where Kate sat the bump would look exaggerated, like when you were lying on the grass at the bottom of a hill and the land seemed to be rising above you forever.

‘And why haven’t you told them yet?’ Kate went on. ‘Why are you having it? Don’t you believe in abortion?’

‘Leave off her, Kate. What kind of a question is that?’ Desi snapped at her.

‘No, it’s OK, Desi, they’re all fair questions.’ Rosa thought for a moment. ‘I think I want to have this baby more than I want to do anything else right now,’ she said, stretching her arms above her head and yawning.

‘You mean you’re having it because you can’t be arsed not to?’ Kate’s face was screwed up with overdone incomprehension.

‘That’s not what I said,’ Rosa told her. ‘I’ll be good at this. I can do it. Mum will be cool about it.’ She hesitated a few seconds, then added, ‘I think.’

‘And what about your dad?’ Kate persisted. ‘Will he go spare?’

Rosa laughed softly. ‘Dad? I don’t think he’s got any grounds for complaint, somehow, not with his track record.’ She laughed again. ‘In the space of just a few weeks he’ll become a father and then a grandfather. I wonder what his little-girl wife will make of that.’

Tina Keen was all finished with her case. She wound up the paperwork in the office and Melanie, back at her keyboard that evening, allowed her to go out for a celebratory dinner with the chief constable. He was married, of course – Tina’s men usually were – it was how it was for women past thirty. In his honour Tina was wearing the kind of underwear Sarah would heartily approve of – solving a case was a massively sexy achievement. Mel had often thought she should look things of this sort up on the Internet or in the library, find out for sure if there was some hormonal trigger associated with success at work that applied to
women in the same way that it did, with a testosterone rush, for men. Whichever way it was, for the purposes of the book’s ending, Tina was feeling warm and powerful, accommodating and seductive.

Over the sliced duck and sticky mango sauce the chief constable told Tina that he and his wife had ‘different interests’. He ran his hand up Tina’s silky leg and encountered suspenders, a proper lacy stocking-top and that soft warm strip of exposed flesh at the top of her thigh. She continued to eat her duck steadily while the chief constable kneaded his stubby nicotine-stained fingers into her leg. She really should, she thought as he prodded deep into her flesh, go on a diet.

Melanie stopped typing and looked down into the garden. She’d left plenty of lights on downstairs this time, even though she wasn’t writing anything that would make her jumpy. She would talk to Max about getting lights fixed up outside, artily placed ones so that the shapes of the plants would show up like ghostly statues.

Concentrating on Tina once more, Mel let her finish the duck and help herself to extra potatoes – creamy dauphinois ones, for if Tina was to sign up with Shape Sorters she should be allowed a last generous binge. Then she let her take a long, cool look at the chief constable, weigh up the why and why not of the situation. He was sweating visibly now as his hand stroked and rubbed. If Tina knew Perfect Patty’s husband Dave, she would be strongly reminded of him.

‘Excuse me, just for a moment,’ Tina murmured to the chief constable. Ever polite to ladies, he half-stood, clutching his napkin to the giveaway bulge in his trousers as she took herself and her handbag to the loo. She looked at herself in the mirror. Too much make-up,
too accommodating, too generous in the choice of underwear, too little discernment in her choice of date. Tina’s reflection reminded her of the murder victims she’d just had to deal with. She was now about to have sex with a man she didn’t much fancy, just as they all had – the difference being that she wasn’t going to get paid. Or murdered. She’d be better off on her own, she thought, as she retouched her lipstick. Melanie provided her with a handy fire exit and allowed her out of the restaurant by a side door. A black cab was conveniently passing the end of the road. It stopped for Tina as she raised her hand, and Melanie sent her home to her flat, by herself.

Melanie raided the fridge and found some bacon, eggs and cold roast potatoes. There was also a bottle of cheap fizz that was perfectly chilled and would do well enough for now to celebrate the completion of
Dying For It
. The real celebration would come later, when her agent Dennis had read it and raved about it and the publishers gave it the thumbs up. She fried up the bacon and potatoes together till both were too crisp for most civilized people’s tastes, and then cracked an egg over the top. Just because Tina Keen was about to start a diet, that didn’t mean that her creator had to join in as well. The feast was piled onto a plate and Melanie took it through to the sitting room, along with the bottle and a glass. She settled herself comfortably on the sofa, shoved aside newspapers and magazines from the low table in front of her and put the bottle there at the ready. She dug the TV’s remote control from behind a cushion and flipped through the channels.
Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?
was just about to finish. Melanie turned up the volume and
then sat with the remote control still in her outstretched hand and watched in amazement as, without needing her after all, without her being his Friend to Phone, Max shook hands with Chris Tarrant and left the programme’s studio with a cheque for £64,000.

There was a peculiar noise. A strange beeping woke Melanie. Surfacing from deep sleep into the early morning greyness, she at first half-dreamed there was a sad, trapped bird somewhere in the room, one that had spent the night quietly seeking an escape route but with daybreak had been forced to resort to cheeping for help. Then she sat up fast, her thoughts turning to disaster, to fire and smoke and being trapped alone at the top of a blazing stairwell. But there was no smell of smoke and she quickly realized that it was the phone that was alerting her to its presence. She picked it up as a computer-generated voice ordered her quite crossly to ‘Hang Up Now’. She tried hard to remember the last call she’d made. Surely she hadn’t been out of contact since returning Cherry’s call the morning before? Why had the silly gadget not piped up to tell her off before now? She smiled to herself as she went down the stairs to make a cup of tea – there must have been a highest-level phone company meeting at some time about that. Directors, soberly dressed in proper suits, must have congregated round a boardroom table, solemnly discussing how long a phone could
reasonably be expected to be off the hook before a householder should be jolted into reconnecting. The women would opt for a longer time than the men, she decided, as she stacked last night’s abandoned plates and cutlery in the dishwasher. They would be able to imagine plenty of situations where someone might want to leave the phone off the hook. She thought the men would be more reluctant – some might go for a ten-minute maximum, not because of a need to be contacted, but through a general shakiness about having something electronic in the house that was less than fully functioning.

Mel yawned and stretched, catching sight of her tousled bed-hair in the mirror on the dresser. Even though her new edgy hairstyle was meant to look as if she’d been dragged through a bush, this amount of matting and tangling would only look sexy on someone under twenty. Perhaps her mother had a point. How seductive was it to pad around the house in the early morning in a pair of ancient (but free) Virgin Atlantic in-flight oversized grey pyjamas? But then, unless she invited Neil to share her nights, who was there to be seductive for?

When she turned round again, Max was looking in at her through the back-door window and she could feel all her nerves leap at once. ‘God, Max, you made me jump!’ she said as she unlocked and opened the door.

‘I could see that,’ he said with a grin, coming into the kitchen and kicking off his muddy wellies. ‘I thought you were going to hit the ceiling! Sorry. You look nice,’ he commented, grinning at her in what she took to be mock admiration.

‘Sure I do,’ she replied, thinking she could do without sardonic humour at such an early hour. He
reached across and switched the kettle on again, then helped himself to a mug from the cupboard and a tea bag from the jar. ‘You do, actually, but you’re so sodding defensive I won’t bother saying it again. It’s bloody cold out there. One of those days when I’m sure I’m in the wrong job. I nearly stayed at home to do the VAT and I don’t often consider that to be an attractive option.’

‘I didn’t think I’d see you again,’ she said as she pushed a couple of slices of bread into the toaster, ‘not after your big win.’ She tried hard, but could feel herself failing, to keep out of her voice a note of slight acidity. It was a thing that didn’t matter, really it didn’t, even though he’d asked her, even though she’d allowed herself to feel a bit flattered, almost honoured. If he’d decided he had more reliable, more trustworthy, probably in truth more downright knowledgeable Friends to Phone than she was, well, that was his choice. It had obviously paid off. Being told now that she ‘looked nice’ felt a bit like being a dog thrown a very tiny bone.

‘It was a big enough win, and a hugely welcome one, but hardly enough to retire on! If I’d only known for sure, and I should have done, that chloroplasts were not present in animal cells . . .’ he laughed. ‘Still, it’s enough to take time out for a bit of travelling. I quite fancy a gap year. I don’t see why kids straight out of school should have all the fun.’

‘Are you leaving right now or will you find a minute or two to wrap up my plants?’ Ridiculously, Mel felt close to tears. She occupied herself quickly, taking the butter and marmalade from the fridge, clattering about with cutlery.

‘Of course I’m not leaving right now. I’m here,
aren’t I? Reporting for work? I just wondered . . .’

‘Yes?’

‘Why were you gossiping on the phone yesterday morning? I really needed you and I couldn’t get through. In the end I had to ask my sister which writer Elizabeth Jane Howard used to be married to.’

‘Kingsley Amis,’ Mel answered promptly.

‘I knew you’d know. She wasn’t sure if it was him or William Golding. It cost me a fifty-fifty lifeline. If you’d been available instead of yacking all day I might be looking at a cheque for a million.’

Melanie laughed. He didn’t really sound as if he minded too much. So he
had
tried to contact her. She felt a bit pathetic that such a small thing sent her spirits soaring. Perhaps her mother was halfway right, hormones might be involved. ‘The phone got left off the hook. It was an accident, I was a bit distracted by events, I’ll tell you about it. Though I was rather surprised to see you on the programme, I only caught the part where you were going off with your cheque. You never said the day before that you’d be on.’

‘I didn’t know! It was recorded that morning, all very, very last-minute. They keep a couple of spare contestants ready in the studio in case someone keels over with nerves. But during a break the night before, four of them went and pigged out on dodgy chicken burgers from a van outside the studio and got instantly ill. I was only called in because I lived near. And then, well we had to put four Welsh towns in alphabetical order. Abergavenny, Aberystwyth, Abersoch and one I can’t remember and I did it fastest.’

‘That was clever of you. I’d just rush it and get it wrong.’

‘It’s from looking in plant directories – I’m always searching the index for stuff.’

‘I thought you’d changed your mind – that you’d decided you didn’t need me.’ She hadn’t at all intended to say it. The words had just let themselves out without any help.

‘And you minded?’ Max looked mildly incredulous.

She shrugged. ‘Yeah, well, just a bit. Not a lot, you know.’

‘Yeah, I know. Go and get dressed, Mel, you can help me wrap these plants.’

Mel was in the shower when Neil phoned. He left a message on the machine saying he’d be round that evening to take her out for supper, and that he wasn’t going to leave her a number and give her a chance to think up an excuse not to see him. Bloody control freak, she thought, cutting off her options. Perhaps she could just go out, or hide in bed with the lights off. On second thoughts, going out would be good for her and possibly good fun too.