Unchained Melanie

by Judy Astley

  Melanie sat back in her chair and gazed out of the window. It was dusk, but she could just make out the Thames shimmering between the houses beyond her back garden. The tide was high and parked cars down by the bridge would soon be sitting like small metal islands in the water, the tide creeping up their wheels, under the doors and then soaking the floors. Later, the river would slink away again, leaving the road fresh and wet, the cars’ tyres glistening clean stark black. Their oblivious drivers would return, would drive away, wonder about the strange noise from the exhaust, gradually realize that the floor was wetly tacky and that there was a smell that hadn’t been there before. That was what she had to get into this chapter, she thought, as she started typing again. When Tina and her DCI went down through the back of the coffee shop after a long and bad-tempered fruitless watching session, the terrible realization that the next murder victim was already lying dead and cruelly mutilated in the cubbyhole beneath the stairs would have to seep into their senses like the stench of rotting river water.

  It was close to midnight when Melanie finished working for the day. The heating had gone off hours ago and her fingers were starting to set into cold curves over the keyboard. She hadn’t eaten since lunchtime and her stomach was telling her it was painfully empty. Down in the kitchen she opened the fridge and found a big slab of Cheddar, which she grated over a couple of thick slices of bread. She shoved the lot under the grill and poured herself a generous and well-earned glass of red wine. Outside some kind of animal life skittered about and a cat yowled a raucous warning to an invading creature in the garden. Mel sat rigid at the table, not looking at the uncurtained window and waiting for her heart to stop pounding. That was the problem with writing about the most terrifyingly gruesome things that could happen, you never stopped imagining the worst. What was important, she told herself as she switched the grill off and topped up her wine glass, was to switch her mind off along with the computer. Tina Keen and the macabre, murderous world she inhabited were only pretend. Really.

  Four

  Melanie had left the radio tuned to Radio Four and when she returned home and switched it on she could trust it not to be blaring out Chris Tarrant at full volume. She also knew that if there’d been bread in the cupboard before she went out to the gym in the morning, she’d be able to have toast when she got back. These small truisms occurred to her as she got into the car and chucked her bag onto the back seat. Superficially trivial facts like these represented significant milestones – with Rosa occupying the house no such things could ever be counted on. No item of food was safe, no last half-inch of milk, no final scrapings from the marmalade jar or sticky crystals from the bottom of the sugar bowl. Before, when Mel had gone out in the morning, she’d had to gamble with herself whether it was worth calling in to the corner store to do a quick restock in case she felt acute exercise-induced near-starvation after her workout and swim. There’d be that nagging thought in the back of her head that in the cupboard the loaf was down to barely more than a drying heel – just enough for a desperate snack – but only for one. Rosa, who, when Melanie left would have been fast asleep and dead to all but her dreams, would be up before her mother got back, scavenging the kitchen for something sweet and filling. Toast, with honey, jam or marmalade, was what she craved on waking. And back into the fridge would go an empty, scraped-out jar, back in the cupboard would go the bread wrapper containing only crumbs. Empty banana skins would be replaced to blacken and seep their sweetly rotting aroma on top of the fruit bowl.

  ‘At least she puts things away,’ Sarah had commented, watching Melanie one day as she discovered a pair of completely empty ketchup bottles in her store cupboard. ‘Mine just leave everything scattered around like a burglary gone wrong.’

  ‘I wouldn’t call it “away”,’ Mel had replied. ‘Throwing the empties in the bin would count as “putting away”. I blame all that emphasis on recycling and conservation at school – she finds it just about impossible to consign anything to the trash.’

  Today Melanie had left the kitchen as tidy as a show house. And when she got home it would, so long as robbers hadn’t come ransacking, be just the same. She smiled broadly to herself and, as the car slowed to join the queue at the traffic lights, she realized an entire grumpy bus queue was staring at her and judging her to be mad. One member of the queue was Ben, the school-bound son of her neighbour, Perfect Patty. As the car drew level, the boy glowered at her, slouching his shoulders into habitual teen sullen mode, but then suddenly he smiled back at her in recognition. Astonished at this transformation from hunched hostility, Mel waved, lowered the window and called to him, ‘Ben! I’m going past your school, would you like a lift?’

  The boy flung his scuffed bag into the car and folded his long self in after it. He brought with him the scents of a recently smoked cigarette, hair gel, and a lemony tang of deodorant. He was only a couple of years younger than Rosa, approaching A levels next year, Mel guessed, but, as his school still demanded the wearing of a uniform right through to the bitter end, he looked a lot less grown-up than Rosa had at that age. No wonder he usually seems so surly, Melanie thought with sympathy, it must be tough being seventeen and having to face the mean suburban streets each day in a red and black striped blazer.

  ‘You going to the gym? That one behind St Dominic’s?’ he asked, glancing at her Nike bag on the back seat.

  ‘I am. But I don’t go as often as I should.’ She laughed and prodded her thighs, encased like overstuffed sausages in workout leggings. ‘In my job there’s too much opportunity for sitting around and letting the legs spread.’

  Oh God, why had she said that? She could feel herself going ludicrously pink. Perhaps (vain wish) he’d passed that age when just about anything was remotely double entendre-ish? Unlikely, especially a boy at a single-sex school without the scornful but essentially more mature presence of girls. Or perhaps the comment had passed him by. A woman of her age, well, probably he wasn’t even listening. Teenage boys were a bit of a mystery to her. The only one she ever had any dealings with was her nephew William, but he was only fourteen and not communicative unless a conversation contained the word ‘PlayStation’.

  ‘So wassit like down the gym? D’you do weights and stuff?’ Kind boy, she thought – he couldn’t possibly care less what she inflicted on her flabby body in the gym. Patty and David had obviously passed on to him their good-manners genes.

  ‘Well, I usually start off with the bike for twenty minutes, then do a circuit of various machines, some stretches on the mat and then if the pool’s not too crowded I have a swim.’

  ‘Is there a sauna?’

  ‘There’s two, one in each changing room.’

  ‘In each?’ Ben looked puzzled.

  ‘Men and women. Separate.’

  ‘Oh. Right. Yeah well I suppose they would be.’ She’d reached the roundabout where commuters were doing their daily resentful battle with school-run parents, and couldn’t take her eyes off the teeming road to glance at his face, couldn’t guess whether he was laughing (at her?) or (his turn) blushing.

  ‘Well, this isn’t Sweden,’ she teased.

  ‘Nah, shame.’ He was laughing.

  The traffic thinned as they left the main London-bound road. Assorted boys in the same red and black as Ben sloped along reluctantly towards their school day. Some hung about in groups in shop doorways, swigging from drinks cans like the winos on the Green. Younger ones play-punched each other and chucked their bags around. Next to her, Ben watched them. ‘Pathetic,’ he murmured at the scene in general.

  ‘Where do you want me to drop you? Somewhere safely past the school gates?’ How uncool it was, or not, to be seen in the company of a middle-aged woman (who looked decidedly early-morning and sans make-up) she had no idea.

  ‘No, the gates are fine. I don’t have a problem being seen with you . . . unless you do of course . . .’ He was openly mocking her now.

  ‘I’ll get over it,’ she told him, stopping the car.

&
nbsp; As he got out he hesitated. ‘Thanks for the lift and . . . er, I know it’s a bit of a cheek but do you often go to the gym? I mean, winter’s coming. It gets wet and cold at the bus stop . . .’

  ‘OK, OK, if I’m going I’ll look out for you. But I don’t always go at the same time,’ she warned.

  ‘Cool, good enough.’ He treated her to a final smile as he turned and sauntered through the gates, and Mel was left with a Cheshire cat-like display of the most perfect teeth modern orthodontic treatment could provide.

  Sarah’s car was parked as close as she could get to the gym’s doors. Mel parked the Golf between a pair of the massive tank-like vehicles favoured by the women of the area – yuppie trucks, Rosa called them. It must have been raining when Sarah arrived, either that or she had slid out of the car all geared up and ready for the cross-trainer in her little pink Nike shorts and cropped-off vest and didn’t want the outside world to catch sight of her exposed tummy. Sarah’s gym outfits, particularly the lime snake-print leggings, it occurred to Mel, would sit neatly on her Tina Keen detective. Sarah and Tina had similar clothes taste and both were skinny, wiry women, though Tina was a few inches shorter and a good bit faster-moving. If the two had to escape from a burning building, Tina would be swifter off the mark, out of the nearest window, pausing only to pocket her cigarettes and shimmying down a drain-pipe as if SAS-trained. Sarah would be sizing up all possible exits for the one that would do the least damage to her nails.

  Mel took her time in the changing room, shoving her reluctant feet into her state-of-the-art trainers that were far too high-tech for the paltry amount of exercise she took in them. She almost felt sorry for them, for the lack of decent challenge she offered, their soles barely scuffed from sauntering round on the gym’s carpets as she took her time ambling between the weights machines, stopping for chats here and there. The most she asked of these shoes was that they didn’t slip on the pedals of the stationary bike as she watched Lorraine Kelly organizing viewer makeovers on GMTV.

  ‘Oh, you’re here! Have you been in yet?’ Sarah, her face flushed as seaside-rock pink as her outfit, bounded in and flopped down on the bench next to Melanie.

  ‘No. I just got here. I gave Perfect Patty’s boy a lift to school.’

  ‘Huh!’ Sarah snorted. ‘His school’s only next door, it’s hardly out of your way.’ She poked a sharp finger into Mel’s leg. ‘You’re slacking. We need you toned and honed for the meat market. And book a sunbed, manicure and facial too. If I’m going to relaunch you as a desirable product I want to have something good to sell.’

  ‘You don’t give up do you, Sarah?’ Mel stood up and went to the mirror, tying her hair back into a scrunchie. ‘I’m really truly not looking for another man. I’m living completely on my own now for the first time since I was – well, ever, really and it’s great. Let me just enjoy it, OK?’

  ‘OK.’ Sarah sighed and looked sulky. ‘But – if you won’t go out with boys will you come out with the girls? Our dear old school’s having a final reunion. They’re closing it for good, knocking the place down and building something – social housing I think – so will you come to that? Thursday week?’

  ‘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 t
hat 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.