Unchained Melanie (7 page)

‘Now that you’ve got time on your hands . . .’

It was something Melanie wasn’t supposed to have. It was too much along the lines of Pleasing Herself. Perhaps it had been a mistake to drop in on her mother on the way back from the gym. It gave a bad impression of careless leisure to be frittered away at sinful will. Mel and Gwen sat at the small round table by the window in Gwen’s kitchen. In front of them was a two-cup cafetière, a small floral plate (intertwined morning glory), with chocolate chip biscuits arranged in a circle, overlapping as exactly as if a practised card sharp had dealt them out, and a glass bowl containing the kind of sugar that reminded Melanie of miniature grave-chippings.

Gwen Thomas sipped at her coffee and gave Mel a beady glance over the fluted edge of the cup.

‘I wasn’t exactly rushed off my feet looking after Rosa, you know, Mum,’ Melanie told her. ‘I mean she is nearly nineteen, and has been telling me she has a life of her own for the past three years at least. Most days we just crossed paths once or twice on the way to the fridge.’

Gwen laughed. ‘You’ll be surprised. You think there’s no difference but when the washing machine’s half-load button is permanently on, and when it’s taking three days to fill the dishwasher – then you’ll know you’re really on your own.’

Melanie took a deep breath, forcing herself not to protest. There was no point. ‘OK, so what is it you want me to do with all this time?’

Gwen took a deep breath. ‘It’s your father.’ She
looked down at the table and her fingers picked at bits of sugar that weren’t really there.

Mel felt cold suddenly, sensing disaster, illness, death.

‘Dad? Is there something wrong? Where is he, by the way, has he gone to the garden centre again?’

‘Garden centre! I wish it was the garden centre.’ She looked at Mel, glittery-eyed but defiant. ‘He’s at the pub. Takes the dog every day and goes to the pub. He’s there hours. Comes home reeling.’

Melanie tried to imagine her father blind drunk. It wasn’t easy, even for a woman who made a very good living from exercising her imagination.

Carefully, she put together a picture of the man she knew so well. It was like painting by numbers, with the finished view so familiar you barely had to refer to the chart. There was the cricket-club blazer, faded navy corduroy trousers (baggy and faded at the knee), soft brown and cream check Viyella shirt, Marks and Spencer V-neck brick-coloured wool-mix jumper (only three-ply, he hated anything heavyweight), thoroughly polished slip-on shoes. Having carefully assembled this portrait, she set her father down on the road out near the parade of shops by the crossroads and tried to send him tottering along the pavement, one hand in his pocket, the other outstretched to ward off obstructions he might not see in time.

‘Aren’t you going to say something?’ Gwen prompted, while Melanie was still sorting out her mental pictures.

‘Er . . . are you sure?’ she said eventually. ‘I mean lots of people like a bit of an appetizer before lunch and, well, he’s retired, there’s no reason why he shouldn’t. He can even sleep it off in the afternoon if he feels like it.’

‘
I’m
retired!’ Mel’s mother got up abruptly and started bustling the coffee things together, practically hurling them onto the draining board. ‘
I
don’t go getting plastered in the middle of the morning. There are things to do!’

There weren’t things to do though, really, Melanie thought. Her parents always seemed to be filling in their days, as she assumed all the other non-employed elderly did. They devised time-consuming routines to occupy the hours. Gwen hand-washed her dusters every week, even though there were rooms in the house where the air was barely stirred enough to gather dust. She ironed underwear that could (possibly should) be simply fluffed and folded straight from the dryer and put away. Her father swept fallen leaves from the garden every single morning, from the first autumnal flurry right through to the first buds of spring. Once, Melanie had commented to Vanessa that it was as if the virtuous pursuit of good order would keep them alive longer. Vanessa had been sniffy about that, saying they’d never been the sort to take to the idle life and weren’t likely to start now. If one of them declared they fancied simply lying on the sofa for an afternoon reading a novel, the other would probably decide their spouse was sliding into terminal decadence. Active body, active mind was the thinking of the generation that might have vanquished Hitler, but now feared senility invading by stealth.

Melanie’s mother whisked away their coffee cups, donned her rubber gloves and briskly swished the crockery around in the suds-filled bowl in the sink. Gwen had never got the hang of modern detergents. Melanie had marvelled over many years at the great alp-like crests of soap suds that resulted from the
prolonged squirting of the Fairy bottle. ‘It’s hard water,’ Gwen had argued, when Mel had tried to tell her that you needed the merest gentle splash of liquid these days to get the same results as twenty years before. Change of any sort alarmed and unsettled her. Just now Melanie could feel her confusion about her husband’s behaviour. Howard was doing something different, something that was just for himself. He hadn’t consulted his wife, hadn’t invited her to join him for these morning drink sessions. It was almost as if he had been her tame pet, but had started reverting to the wild and behaving in a way that didn’t respond to the old well-tried training techniques.

‘Have you talked to Vanessa about Dad?’ Mel asked. She could imagine her sister’s reaction and had to stop herself smiling: Vanessa was of the ‘Stop it at once!’ school of behavioural therapy, applied with no expectation of argument to her pair of seemingly angelic (but to Mel’s mind rather suspiciously quiet) children. She’d quite easily use the same strategy on her father, as if he was a naughty child who would keep climbing over the gate and making for the dangers of the main road.

‘Vanessa’s got her own family to deal with. I’m only mentioning it to you because you
haven’t
. Well, not any more.’ Gwen sighed, as if the goings-on of the world were suddenly an exhausting mystery to her. She peeled off the pink Marigolds, folded them neatly and placed them next to the yellow plastic scourer in the china sink-tidy, taking refuge in small, familiar kitchen rituals.

Mel bit her lip and tried to feel that she hadn’t been mildly insulted. Something was her fault. Losing Roger was her fault. But it was only her mother (oh, and of
course Vanessa) who made her feel he’d been ‘lost’. It was too dramatic a word for their reasonably contented separation. ‘Losing’ was for something that left you with real, heart-clutching emptiness. Like her son, that tiny, barely formed baby with skin the colour of fury, so thin that between the tubes and dressings she was sure she could see right through him. Time to go, she decided, getting quickly out of her seat, time to get back to Tina Keen and the mutilated teenage hooker stuffed under the café stairs.

‘I’ll have a think about Dad,’ Mel said as she briefly kissed her mother’s powdery cheek. ‘I’ll ask him if I can come to the pub with him one day and see what he’s up to. Perhaps he’d just like a bit of time to himself.’

‘To himself? Whatever for?’ Gwen said as she opened the front door to see her daughter off the premises. ‘You get plenty of time to yourself when you’re widowed. It’s not something you go looking for, Melanie, you’ll find that out for yourself one day.’

It was cold in the aircraft’s Club Class section, which cancelled out any extra comfort that the legroom and not-bad food gave. Roger could swear there was a freezing draught whistling in from the window beside him. Leonora slept peacefully, stretched out beneath her airline blanket as if she was in the best kind of bed. In fact, he thought, as he checked his watch for the hundredth time, for the price of this upgrade he could have bought a bloody excellent top-of-the-range mattress.

The cold Atlantic blast was aiming at his left calf and making him shiver. Roger wasn’t a happy flier at the best of times, always expecting the big tin tube to
give in to gravity and plummet to earth. He could see drops of something (not rain, could it be rain?) trickling down the wall beside him. This couldn’t be right, surely the plane should be completely sealed? He wondered about calling the stewardess, but was terrified that these small wet drops really were a cause for concern. He could imagine the stewardess’s panic-stricken shriek, all the passengers waking, the shouting, the confusion, the praying – the end. Definitely if he made a fuss they’d crash. If he ignored this, the plane would fly on. Whether he said something or not, though, there shouldn’t be little gaps where the outside could let itself in. Suppose something gave way under the pressure. Wouldn’t they all be sucked out? He tightened his seat belt, then felt under Leonora’s blanket to make sure hers was secure. The stewardess, catching sight of his hidden hand snaking across her body, gave him an uncertain little smile. Let her think what she liked: he was too old to explain himself away.

Leonora smiled in her sleep, content, confident, sure of her happy future. Roger, meanwhile, twitched his feet up and down, rotated his ankles, went on to worry about deep vein thrombosis and about whether he really should have eaten the chicken risotto that now lay so heavily in his stomach. Most of all, though, he worried about whether the plane’s oxygen supply was enough for the fragile growing baby, because, as he (and Mel) knew too well, there were things that could go catastrophically wrong and, as Leonora’s pregnancy advanced, it seemed more and more to Roger as if with this extra chance of producing a little life, fate was being teased and tempted. With wicked disloyalty, he wished Melanie was next to him right now. Not as a
replacement for Leonora, but just to talk to about all the worry-things. She’d know whether it was all right about the leaky plane, that was for sure. If she took one quick look and said, ‘Condensation,’ that’s exactly what it would be. If she said, ‘Hmm, not sure,’ he’d worry on. You knew where you were with Mel. He hoped, he really hoped, as he looked at Leonora’s smooth young trusting face, that he’d manage to know where he was without her.

The trouble with working late was that sleep wasn’t as easy to come by as when you packed up earlier and gave yourself several hours to loosen the brain. On nights like this, when Mel’s head was still buzzing at 2 a.m. with the work she’d just finished, she could quite see the point of proper office hours. She realized, as she lay in bed staring at the shadows on the ceiling, that she shouldn’t have gone to bed straight after the cheese and pickle sandwich. If it was true, as her mother had always said, that cheese last thing at night gave you nightmares, she wouldn’t mind at least getting to sleep so that she could put the theory to the test.

It should have been the quietest part of the night, too. Instead she could hear the distant whoopings of a group of revellers who must have managed to persuade some unlucky pub landlord to host a lock-in. There was the special night-time traffic as well: she could hear the rhythmic whine and clunk of the bin wagon collecting rubbish from the back of the shops and restaurants on the main road a couple of streets away. And along with them was the metallic clanging of heavy-load trolleys delivering to the fast-food restaurant at the end of that same block.

The whooping gang were getting nearer. Melanie tensed as she heard glass breaking, somewhere at the far end of the road near the lane that led to the river. There’d be graffiti by morning too, she guessed: some indecipherable teenage tag scrawled on a house-side, applied with far more speed than artistry.

Mel turned the pillow over to cool her head, lay on her side and tried to settle. Thoughts about Tina Keen still raced around her brain. There could, she thought, be a way of using these early-hours rubbish collections to find her way to the killer. Mel herself wasn’t yet sure who’d done it. She preferred to use the Ruth Rendell method of plot formation: if she knew from the start who the culprit was, a reader could work it out too. It made the job more interesting, but definitely tiring. Sometimes she envied writers who had every chapter mapped out, complete with character sketches and plot summaries. It would be like having a good map to follow in a country you’d never visited. The way she worked, she just had to rely on instinct and a reasonable sense of direction.

The whooping gang were quite close now. She put her hands over her ears and tried to shut them out. She could smell the lavender water she’d sprinkled on her pillow, and wondered if its soporific qualities had possibly been exaggerated. But then she’d defy any herbal tincture to lull away the new sound of a car screaming at full throttle down the lane. It sounded mildly familiar, even being over-revved. A Golf, she identified, at last feeling mildly dreamy.

A Golf? Her Golf had been parked in front of the house, in its usual place just under the chestnut tree. Wearily, knowing exactly what she’d find, Mel climbed out of bed and went to the window. ‘Oh, great,’ she
murmured as she dialled 999. ‘Bloody frigging great.’

‘We don’t usually come out for cars.’ The large gingery sergeant, who looked as if retirement wasn’t that far off, accepted a third biscuit and stretched his legs out under the kitchen table. Melanie assumed she was to feel privileged.

‘So why did you?’ she asked.

‘Well obviously it’s because you’re on your own, love. We have to check you’re not unduly distressed, or that there’s not something else you haven’t felt able to mention.’ Ginger sounded like a patient teacher, going over something for the fiftieth time with a bunch of trying pupils.

‘Like what? There isn’t anything else, it’s just the car that was stolen.’ Melanie, having waited well over an hour for the honour of this police presence, was more than ready for sleep now but felt she should make the most of the visit’s research possibilities. She knew plenty (definitely a lot more than the average citizen would want to know) about police procedures and protocol, but the real-life character traits had to be grasped as and when.

Sergeant Ginger gave her a bless-your-sweet-innocence smile and explained, ‘Well, your car might have been taken by an abusing partner. You could be covered in bruises and not finding it easy to divulge the real problem.’