Unchained Melanie

by Judy Astley

  ‘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.

  The Golf had been found tidily parked in a cul-de-sac near Basingstoke. Nothing had been taken from it, according to Sergeant Ginger, who was keen to assure her that even her packet of Everton mints was still untouched in the door pocket.

  ‘And are the cassettes still there?’ It was hard to believe that anyone willing to nick a car wouldn’t think to pilfer the contents.

  ‘In the glove compartment? There’s about a dozen of them listed here. Were there any more than that, in a bag or something?’

  There weren’t. Her taste for the Beach Boys’ greatest hits, vintage Hancock comedy shows and the complete works of Duran Duran had been scorned. Rosa would have been in full agreement with the car thieves, she thought, wondering as she often did about the Youth of Today. A more fitting, dramatic finale for the faithful Golf would have been for it to end up a gloriously burned-out shell, abandoned at a skewed and dangerous angle (possibly upside down) in a lay-by somewhere way up near Carlisle. It should have had a thrilling adventure as the unwilling but speedy and reliable accomplice to a stunning bank raid. Investigating officers could perhaps have found a few suspicious bloodstains, traces of cordite . . . It was all the fault of the books she wrote, she thought, as she went up the stairs to have a good look in her wardrobe and see if it suddenly and magically contained an outfit that would make her the envy of all those ex-contemporaries from her schooldays. Deciding what to wear was going to be almost as tricky as working out how Tina Keen was going to pinpoint the murderer.

  ‘I didn’t think there’d be this many,’ Sarah whispered to Melanie as they went in through their old school’s main door and followed the sound of high-pitched, exclusively female conversation to the hall. Melanie hesitated by the door, reluctant to launch herself into this chattering and colourful throng. Dress-code-wise, the majority seemed to have gone for the smart, bright, on-the-knee suit. There were no scarves that Mel could see, cleverly knotted or otherwise, but there were a daunting number of scrubbed teeth on show: every woman she looked at seemed to be beaming far too eagerly. A hundred different perfumes almost knocked her out, too successfully quashing any stale lingering scent of school lunches.

  ‘Can you see anyone?’ Sarah murmured.

  ‘Bloody hundreds. Can’t you?’

  Sarah punched her arm, just sharply enough for Mel to be sure there’d be a bruise on its way the next day.

  ‘No, idiot, people we know!’

  Mel couldn’t. And, apart from a gaggle of ladies so ancient and wizened they could have passed for founder pupils, it looked as if most of those present were younger than her and Sarah. Instantly, she felt like a sad (in the Rosa-used sense) middle-aged divorcée with nothing better to do in the evening, and her morale sank even lower on considering that this was the truth.

  ‘We shouldn’t have come.’ She turned in panic to Sarah. ‘It’s a nightmare in there. I feel as if I’m going to be signed up for a netball match any minute.’

  ‘You’ll feel better after a drink.’ Sarah grabbed her wrist and pulled her towards the back of the hall, where the thickness of the crush suggested the welcome presence of a bar.

  ‘Why are we here?’ Mel hissed, as they sipped at unchilled Chilean white that Sarah had obtained by shimmying her slender self through a mass of softly padded bodies.

  ‘You’re here for a giggle and for a bit of research. I’m here to show that maths bitch that you didn’t need to understand bloody quadratic equations in order to have a gorgeous life. We’re here together to prove how successful and wonderful we are, swans among ugly ducks.’

  ‘So that’ll come under “showing off” then, will it? “Swanking”, as my mother would put it?’ Mel felt depressed, surrounded by all these brightly chirping females. She wished she was home, lying on the sofa with Jeremy Paxman and watching Changing Rooms. She could just sneak out – Sarah was being picked up by her husband Nick later, so Mel was going home
alone anyway. Sarah was right, though, occasions like this were good for a writer’s research. She’d do some listening in on other people’s conversations, see if there were any gems to pick up and store for later. Around her she caught the odd phrases: talk of families, careers – years and years of catching up bundled into sentences that had to be few enough to hold their listeners’ attention, but full enough to convey an impression of a top-grade A level in Life. The really insecure simply wouldn’t have turned up. The ones who were still looking for themselves, for love, for fulfilment, wouldn’t have dragged all that tatty baggage along to be picked over like reject jumble tonight.

  It was a perfect event for Sarah, with her massive house by the park, pair of children brilliant in both the sporty and academic areas, and a husband with an account at Tiffany’s, who brought home loving little trinkets so often that if he was married to Mel she’d be convinced he was having an affair. Melanie thought about her home, that, comfortable though it was, could be less shabby round the edges, her devastated garden, the just-successful-enough career that could be more dynamic, her husband who was now someone else’s and her daughter who pecked out her life in text messages. Sarah had disappeared into the throng, presumably in pursuit of Mrs Golightly (maths) with a view to showing her how well her bank statements added up.

  ‘Good grief! Surely it’s not Melanie? Melanie Thomas?’

  Why was it ‘surely not’, Mel wanted to know. She put on a cheerful smile and looked at the man standing in front of her. He was one of very few males in the room, someone’s husband, she assumed, hoping it wasn’t someone she’d been out with long, long ago and impolitely forgotten.

  ‘Sorry – er . . .’ Good grief, she suddenly thought, surely not Neil Nicholson (geography)? His face was less youthfully sharp, his brown hair (no longer curly) had a hint of streakiness that could be the beginnings of grey, but the grin was familiar, a slightly mocking, urbane know-all look that had had several hundred silly schoolgirls wishing he’d share some very private non-geographical tuition time with them.

  ‘Mr Nicholson! Well, I didn’t expect to see you here!’

  He leaned forward and she caught a familiar memory-tweaking scent of Gauloise.

  ‘You always called me Neil out of school,’ he said, teasing her.

  ‘But we’re in school now, aren’t we?’ She cursed herself for sounding so pert – not something particularly becoming in anyone over fifteen. So he still favoured leather, she noted, though now it was a puppy-soft black jacket, DKNY she’d guess, rather than the battered old flying jacket he’d worn in all weathers and which, he’d told her during one of the lifts home, had annoyed the head of the school no end.

  ‘I think we’re each now supposed to be amazed at how little the other has changed,’ Neil said. ‘You first.’

  Mel laughed. ‘After twenty-five years? Would you still want to look like Jim Morrison? And are you going to tell me the puppy fat will disappear in time?’

  Bugger. She wished she hadn’t said that. Now he’d think it had been an astoundingly major event in her life, that scorching summer day close to the end of term when he hadn’t driven her straight home but had put the car roof down and taken her for tea and ginger cake and a bit of a lie-down among the ferns near the Windmill on Wimbledon Common. She hadn’t had sex before. Well – she didn’t (quite) get it then either (which was disappointing) but it had been close enough to rate a seven out of ten in her diary that night. He’d been the one to hold back. It might have been fear for his career or it could have been the off-putting virginal presence of her school uniform, the blue and white button-through check dress with its little-girl Peter Pan collar. She’d lain back on the grass, still and passive and barely daring to breathe while he’d unfastened all the buttons down the front, peeling the fabric apart, then staring at her pale sun-starved body as if she was a box of chocolates and he was wondering where to start. That was when she’d started gabbling about being fat, putting her hands over her tummy and pushing it flat. ‘Typical woman,’ he’d said, gently pulling aside her broderie anglaise bra and kissing her left breast. ‘You always imagine you’re less than perfect.’

  She’d never told anyone, but whenever lurid news of an offending teacher reached the press, she was reminded that these days that lazy and usefully instructive hour on the common could have got Neil fined, finished for ever in his profession and quite possibly enrolled on the sex offenders’ register, even though she’d been close to seventeen.

  The chatter volume was rising as more women arrived in the hall.

  ‘Have you had a look round the place? Has it changed much?’ Neil asked.

  ‘I’ve only been here about ten minutes. In fact I was just wondering why I bothered. I came with Sarah, remember Sarah Michaels?’

  Neil shrugged and shook his head. ‘Most of them are a blur, to tell the truth. Not you, though.’ Mel felt absurdly pleased, conscious that she was rapidly regressing to daft-schoolgirl level.

  ‘Come up to the staffroom – there’s better wine up there, and we can do some catching up. Unless you’re desperate to hear the speeches?’

  Melanie wasn’t. She had a feeling that her feet (crammed into kitten-heeled slivers of scarlet velvet from L.K. Bennett) quite literally wouldn’t stand for the reminiscences of the three surviving retired head teachers. Neil took her hand and whizzed her through the crush, up the stairs by the music room and left into what had been the Staff Corridor.

  ‘We were only allowed to come up here in dire emergencies,’ she told him.

  ‘That was so we staff could have a fag in peace,’ he said, opening a door and leading her into a big untidy room.

  The faded beige walls had brighter, grey-edged patches where posters had been, like skin that’s been too long under a plaster. There were pin-scarred naked noticeboards and scruffy old armchairs were dotted around randomly, with faded seats dented and battered as if weary teachers had gradually moulded their personal shape into each one over too many years. On a big central table (which Mel noticed was as heavily biro-ingrained as classroom desks) a stack of used glasses and several empty bottles showed that the staff returning for the occasion had got themselves well fortified before facing the throng of eager Old Girls in the hall.

  ‘There’s plenty left under here,’ Neil said, delving beneath the table and hauling a bottle of red wine from a cardboard box. ‘This OK for you?’

  It crossed Melanie’s mind that last time they’d met she wasn’t old enough to drink. She hadn’t, then, yet found any alcohol she liked and when he’d once taken her to a pub (at a safe distance from the school’s catchment area) she’d chosen cider and sipped her reluctant way through half a pint, hoping that the taste would grow on her.

  Neil and Mel selected the least unappealing of the chairs and sat down. From the hall below them high female voices could be heard enthusiastically belting out ‘Jerusalem’, the hymn with which each school term had opened and closed.

  ‘So . . .’ they both said at the same time. Mel laughed. ‘No, you first. You don’t have to say much, just your life in half a dozen sentences. Then I’ll do mine and we can see if there’s anything left over. Just one thing, though, how many others of us pupils did you take out and seduce?’

  ‘Now I didn’t seduce you,’ Neil insisted. ‘I wanted to but . . .’

  ‘Actually, why didn’t you?’ Mel was curious.

  ‘Scruples.’ Neil grinned. Mel spluttered into her wine. ‘Scruples? I don’t think so!’

  ‘No, truly. About being caught, being found out, being fired.’

  ‘Oh, those kind of scruples, those of a true gentleman! You haven’t answered the question, Neil, how many dozens of other girls . . .’

  Neil groaned. ‘Don’t even ask – but it was only those first couple of years. I did manage to grow up eventually.’

  ‘Married?’

  ‘Yes – then divorced. And you?’

  ‘Same.’ Mel sipped her wine, marvelling at how few words twenty-
odd years had been condensed into. From beyond the door, a collection of footsteps was making its way along the corridor. There was the sound of voices heading towards them.

  Unable to face what could only be the post-speech dignatories, Mel looked around for an escape route. Neil grabbed the wine bottle, took her hand and quickly led her to the far side of the room, where a door led to what Mel remembered as the school’s sanatorium – an over-grand term for the small airless cell with no windows.

  ‘The old sanny! We used to hate being sent in here,’ Mel whispered as the chatty volume increased in the room they’d just fled from. ‘It was just like prison. We’d put up with any amount of pain rather than be sent here.’

  A door on the far side of the little room would have led to the corridor, if it hadn’t been locked.

  ‘Bugger! What now?’ Mel sat down on the narrow rickety bed that was probably the same one on which she’d squirmed with pain during her first period. It was covered with an ancient blanket and several heaps of what looked like old report books, the ones that had held each girl’s entire school progress record. Neil shoved some of the books aside and sat next to her. ‘We could go back through the staffroom, brazen it out. Or we could wait.’

  ‘If we strolled out of here they’d think . . .’

  ‘Mm, they probably would.’ The two of them were in danger of giving away their presence by a fit of giggling. Mel picked up one of the report books and opened it, in an attempt to stop feeling hysterical. Inside the booklet’s cover a black and white photo of an unknown teenage girl stared out, looking defiant. ‘Janet Silverman, Four B,’ she read. ‘Remember her?’

  ‘No, she was before my time.’

  Mel flicked through Janet’s records. ‘She was good at geography, an A every time.’

  ‘Mm. Shame I can’t take the credit.’ He was close to her, reading over her shoulder. That sharp tang of Gauloise was taking Mel right back.

  ‘You know, you really should have . . .’