Unchained Melanie (8 page)

‘Yes, but, well I appreciate all that but truly, as you can see, I’m fine. The car was just taken. I was just trying to get to sleep at the time.’

‘Even so.’ Ginger Plod sipped at his well-cooled tea. ‘Crime is always a shock. Do you have anyone you could get to come and stay with you? What about a
neighbour? Boyfriend? Best pal?’ He looked as if he rather hoped she’d fall sobbing to the floor. He had a kind, round, placid face. She hoped he wasn’t disappointed by his job – he looked as if when he’d joined the force he’d given ‘Helping People’ as his main reason for doing so on the application form. His shoes were wonderfully polished, as if compensating for the laxity of discipline in the modern cop.

She smiled at him, hoping to express thanks for his concern along with reassurance that she didn’t need it. The cat came rattling through the catflap and although it was tempting to say she was going to cuddle up in bed soon with Jeremy Paxman, she no longer had the energy for explaining the joke.

‘I’ll be fine, really. And please, I don’t need Victim Support or counselling – I know it’s always offered, but it would be wasted on me. It’s not as if I’ve suffered . . .’

The policeman gave her a disbelieving look. ‘Everyone’s suffered, one way or another,’ he declared as he stood up. ‘The trick is to admit it.’ He put on his cap and headed for the door. ‘There’s such a thing as being too independent, you know,’ were his parting words. Mel thought how very like her mother he sounded, promised she’d bear it in mind, then went rather crossly back to bed, falling into a deep sleep just as she was wondering where the hell her insurance details were.

Being eighty-one (or thereabouts) didn’t stop Mrs Jenkins being an early riser. She liked to be up and ready to greet the postman, always opening the door to take in her mail as if her letter box had been sealed up or she was protecting the poor man’s fingers from her poodle’s savage teeth. Often she was disappointed – too frequently he cycled on past without even junk mail to deliver, not so much as a pizza menu or an invitation to take out a bank loan. She liked to be waiting on the step, though, just in case there was something from Brenda in Canada. And when there was, as today, when an autumn breeze wafted in through her open door and chilled her vein-knobbled legs beneath her old plaid dressing gown, she needed to know immediately what the news was from her daughter, so she stepped over the low wall and knocked hard on Melanie’s door.

‘It’s seven o’clock!’ Melanie yawned, wrapping her robe tightly round her against the cool, damp air. This counted as more of an interrupted night than an early morning and was to be grudged, even to a needy neighbour. After the previous week, when the car had been
stolen, she’d gone into a kind of jet lag without the fun of travel. It was becoming a routine, working late and then staying up for a good relaxing while, well into the early hours, flicking through cable-TV films to find the ones she’d missed first time round. She’d also started to make her way through the red wine that Roger had told her was definitely not for drinking
yet
(so when? Suppose they died first?) and ate bizarre sandwiches from whatever was left in the fridge. The night before had been salami, artichoke hearts from a jar whose sell-by date she now wished she’d checked, topped off with tomato and a couple of slices of mozzarella. Cheese, she’d found, did not give her bad dreams. Only the thought that Roger might resume his habit of loading her with his life’s minor hiccups caused her to half-wake in the night. She could have solved this by switching off the phone, but there was Rosa in Plymouth to consider and the rest of the family too – the moment she was out of contact there would be sure to be some dreadful emergency. She could just imagine Vanessa, tight-lipped outside a hospital ward, hissing accusingly, ‘We did try to phone you . . .’ as if instead of innocently sleeping she’d been out on the town, having careless rampant sex with a coked-up young stockbroker newly trawled from Stabbers nightclub out in EC-something. This morbid worst-case dreamscape was completed by her mother, pale and sorrowing in the background, clutching a poignant black bin bag containing her freshly dead husband’s clothes, his watch, four back teeth (on a plate that had click-clacked and never really fitted), signet ring and the loose change that always weighed down his left trouser pocket.

‘I’ve had a letter, dear.’ Mrs Jenkins tottered past
Melanie and made her way straight to the kitchen, where she sat down at the table and ripped open the envelope. She held out the pages to Melanie and looked across at the kettle.

‘Cup of tea?’ Mel asked, obediently.

‘Thank you dear, and if you’ve got any bread I wouldn’t mind a slice of toast to go with it. Whatever it is in tea, it needs something to mop it up or it’s funny on the insides.’

‘OK, toast it is then.’ Melanie cut a couple of slices of her favourite rough-hewn wholemeal and hoped it wasn’t too challenging for Mrs Jenkins’s tender ‘insides’.

Mrs Jenkins’s daughter Brenda had strangely old-fashioned handwriting. It was spiky and slanted keenly to the left, like wind-battered trees struggling to survive in coastal areas. Mel could imagine Brenda at school in the 1960s, being told off in Handwriting Practice for the exaggerated backward slope, the almost apologetically undersized script, for not rounding her o’s and e’s properly. Possibly the girl had been left-handed – whatever she was, she was fluent enough in her middle years. Page after page of turquoise hieroglyphics challenged Mrs Jenkins’s failing sight. It seemed bizarre to Melanie that Brenda kept so fervently in touch with her mother, chronicling her Toronto life so thoroughly but being ignorant of the fact that her mother could now read only from the Large Print section of the local library. Perhaps it was just as well this was the case, otherwise Mrs Jenkins would be perusing the cheap-flights sections at the back of the Sunday papers and wondering why she was never invited to cross the Atlantic on an out-of-season special offer. Brenda’s letters were always
crammed with news of recently acquired material goods – particularly hearty outdoor equipment which made Mel feel she was reading through the L. L. Bean catalogue. This time there was husband Hal’s new hunting rifle, a couple of Arctic-quality sleeping bags, the winter cover for the pool, son Barty’s drop-head car – second-hand, but with scarlet leather seats. How much could a few hundred dollars for her mother’s air fare hurt?

‘They’re so far away,’ Mrs Jenkins sighed now, gazing out of the window past Melanie as if Toronto might just come into view on a passing cloud. Melanie stopped reading and poured her aged neighbour another cup of tea. It was all she could do, really. Mrs Jenkins didn’t want to hear her making suggestions about visits, raising hopes and possibilities that just weren’t going to happen.

‘You must miss Brenda a lot,’ Mel said, cursing herself for the inadequate platitude.

‘Well yes I do, but you want them to get on in life,’ Mrs Jenkins said. ‘You don’t want to stand in their way.’

I would, Mel thought fiercely, I’d stand in Brenda’s bloody way with a return ticket and the grandchildren all lined up before it’s too late and they’re all rushing over here for the funeral. Depressed, she returned to the letter and continued, ‘“
And the big news, I saved it for last! Hal’s got a business trip to Europe so I’m coming with him for a visit. School will be out by then so Barty and Lee-Ann will come too
. . .” They’re coming over!’ Mel couldn’t keep her astonishment out of her voice. ‘They’re coming to see you!’

‘They’d better hurry up then, I’m eighty-one, you know.’

Max from Green Piece was not what anyone could call a speedy worker. On his initial inspection visit, he had been accompanied by a business partner who hadn’t appeared since, and Max seemed to have taken on all the work himself and occasionally went missing. Beyond Melanie’s back gate was a skip that was only very, very slowly being filled with the rejected contents of her flower beds. If he didn’t get a move on, the whole lot would have rotted down and be ready for digging back in as compost. Max had given her a quote for the entire job so he wasn’t, thank goodness, being paid by the hour, but she couldn’t help suspecting that he was spreading his services out, working on at least two other jobs at the same time – for clients who were clearly more important, or more profitable, than she was.

‘It’s always the same,’ Sarah told her over coffee at Costa’s in Richmond. ‘It’s what they do with lone women clients – plumbers always tell you they need a vital part and don’t come back for a fortnight, leaving you with a defunct boiler and a dripping tap. Remember Cherry’s kitchen?’

Melanie did. When Cherry was renovating her flat, post-inheritance, she’d existed for two months with a kitchen that was no more than a sink and a plank. Bare lethal wires poked from the walls and ceiling, the flooring was rough broken concrete and there was a lurking smell of drains. She had become a world-class expert on takeout pizzas: ‘I could go on
Record Breakers
, if it was still going,’ she’d complained. ‘I could tell you what it was and where it came from and its fancy menu-name blindfold.’

‘She got quite plump at the time,’ Sarah reminisced,
not without a note of sly pleasure.

‘Mmm,’ Mel agreed, giving her own left thigh a testing squeeze. It felt too soft. One week without the car meant no trips to the gym. She could have cycled, her conscience told her, or taken a bus (lined up at the bus stop with Ben and his schoolmates – would he speak to her if she did? Or just skulk and glower, praying fervently that she wouldn’t single him out?) But that would have taken half the morning, time when she could be writing . . . or having coffee with Sarah.

‘So you’re coming tomorrow night? To this reunion?’ Sarah reminded her.

‘Yeah, OK. What do we wear?’ Mel giggled ‘Old school hat? Do you remember those straw boaters? They made good frisbees.’

‘They did. I remember boys at the bus stop nicking them off our heads and whizzing them into the road under cars.’

‘And all the goody-goody girls kept theirs on with elastic under their chins.’

‘Do you think they’ll all be there? All the smug ones, the ones who never rolled their waistbands over so their skirts were up to their knickers?’

‘Sure to be. They’re just the sort who’d be bound to turn up. It’ll be a sea of Jaeger and Country Casuals and clever ways with scarves.’

Sarah downed the last of her coffee. ‘It’s really the old members of staff I want to see.’

‘Most of them are probably dead. Or at least as old as dinosaurs.’

‘Not all of them. I wonder if that cow who taught us maths is still alive, the one who said one day that I was so hopeless I’d never get a job in a bank.’ Sarah giggled. ‘I got detention for asking her if that was a promise.
And what about . . .’ she hesitated. Mel watched a frown of concentration collecting across her face. She knew what Sarah was thinking. She’d already thought it herself: what about Mr Nicholson (geography), passion fodder for just about every girl who’d read past page forty-six (and studied the accompanying photos carefully) in the school’s biology textbook.

Sarah snapped her fingers, making Mel jump. ‘Mr Nicholson – geography. Mr Knickers-off. He looked a bit like a cross between Jim Morrison and that bloke off
Magpie
, all long curls and leather. We all fancied him. I think some girls even got lucky, so rumour had it.’

Mel sipped her coffee and avoided Sarah’s eyes. ‘I don’t suppose he’ll be there, but if he is at least he won’t be a dinosaur. He wasn’t much older than us, not really. If you think, we were what, sixteen, when he arrived? It must have been our O-level year. He can’t have been more than twenty-three.’

‘You’re right, that’s barely any difference. Poor bastard, newly qualified, far too good-looking and thrown in to face being adored by seven hundred adolescent girls. He liked you, Mel, I remember that. Did you and he ever . . .’

‘He gave me a lift home sometimes – it was only because he was going that way, no special reason.’

She’d lied a bit, because if she’d told the truth Sarah would ooh and aah and demand to know a) full details and b) why she’d kept it a secret from her very best friend for so long. She wasn’t sure herself – at the time it was because it was so delicious (and Neil had said essential) to keep it a secret, and since then . . . well, it had simply never come up. Till now.

Sarah sighed. ‘I remember he had a nice car, a red MG – we could hope for no greater sophistication back
then. Such a tragic waste – him, not the car. He could have given us all far more of an education than just teaching us about contour maps and the exports of Argentina. Do you think perhaps he was gay?’

‘Couldn’t tell you.’ (Almost true,
wouldn’t
was closer.) ‘He won’t be there though, I bet. He could be anywhere by now. He could be working at Roedean and still being adored.’

Sarah laughed. ‘No, he’ll be bald, paunchy and depressed about the State of Education Today. And he’ll have a saggy wife who’s not a bit like all that luscious teen crumpet that we were.’

‘What a terrible fate. Poor sod,’ Melanie sighed.

‘Yeah. Poor sod.’

The nice ginger sergeant was on the answerphone when Mel got home. ‘Your vehicle has been located in an undamaged condition,’ he said in that mechanical, stilted way, like police being interviewed on TV. Mel felt rather disappointed: she’d seen a cute little Audi in the car showroom round the corner and had been planning to call in and chat to the sales staff. She’d never bought an absolutely brand new car, one that smelled only of fresh, clean, unsullied upholstery. Every car she’d ever driven had carried beneath the over-lavish air freshener a history of the fast food and cigarettes and sweat and particles of life from the previous owner. Roger had been one of those people who (like her mother – again) considered the depreciation during a car’s first year was so enormous that it made far better sense to go for something which was – in his words – ‘slightly used’. An unfortunate, sordid little term, she thought now, reminding her of the time they’d spent the night in a bed and breakfast in Lyme
Regis, and she’d been more than suspicious that the sheets hadn’t been changed since the previous occupant. He was probably right though, boringly, sensibly right, she conceded, as she looked up the number of the police station in her Psion: a new car was surely a piece of wanton extravagance. Nice, though. It would have been fun to look through a brochure, to be offered options like leather seats (in pink? purple?), a sunroof, alloy wheels (whatever difference they made) and an unfathomable choice of in-car entertainment systems.