Unchained Melanie

by Judy Astley

  ‘Would you consider being one of my Phone A Friends? We’re allowed up to five. I thought you might take on the dodgy literature questions? Book-wise I only really know about sci-fi.’ He finally got the words out.

  She laughed, part relief and part amazement. ‘What, me? That’s a dire responsibility!’

  ‘Is it? I mean, don’t if you’d rather not. But I won’t hold it against you if you get a question you can’t handle. I mean, that’ll make two of us, won’t it, by definition.’

  ‘Well yes, I guess it would. But if you win a million you won’t want to come back and finish my garden, will you? Or anyone else’s. So if I get asked who the madwoman in the wedding dress was in Great Expectations, I could just decide to plump for “Miss Faversham” instead of Miss Havisham.’

  ‘I trust you,’ he said. ‘You’re a book person, who better?’

  ‘Could be a big mistake!’

  On the day that Neil Nicholson was to come to her house in the evening and cook, Melanie went early to the gym. On the way she picked up Ben from the bus stop. He was huddled into a fat puffa jacket, staring at the pavement as she pulled up beside him.

  ‘Getting colder,’ she commented to him, wondering why it had evolved as a British habit to make pointless observations about the weather.

  ‘Too right. Not that the school cares. We got a lecture yesterday about wearing “the right sort of coat”.’

  ‘Well that one’s OK, isn’t it?’

  ‘Not according to them.’ Ben laughed. ‘You wouldn’t believe the verbal circles our head went round in, trying to avoid saying that we’re not allowed to look as if we go to the comprehensive!’

  ‘What are you supposed to wear, then? A big tweed coat? A Barbour?’

  ‘Well, a few of us thought we might go round the charity shops and see if we could find those big camel-type things like Del Boy wears in the programme.’

  ‘You’d need a cigar to match. And a flat cap.’

  Ben laughed again. ‘Great. That would wind them up.’

  Nothing seemed to change over the years, school-wise, Mel thought after she’d dropped Ben off. When she’d been at school there’d been a craze for short PVC macs, the sort she still selected occasionally for tarts patrolling wet night streets in her books. They’d been noisy, slippery garments. She remembered one late after-school afternoon when she’d had a play rehearsal – Antony and Cleopatra, a bit part as Charmian, a handmaiden. Neil Nicholson had been leaving the school late, too, and had stopped at the bus stop in his slinky MG, telling her to get in, quick. She assumed the urgency was to do with the pouring rain getting into his adored car. As Rosa would put it: naive or what? He’d had music on loud, a cassette belting out Whitesnake. The car, the music were exciting stuff, in a highly fancied young teacher. When he’d dropped her off outside her house, that had been the first time he’d kissed her – nothing to object to (well, not back in those days), just a brief electrifying brush of his lips against the corner of hers. His hand had rested on her leg, pale against the black shiny fabric. And she’d felt selected, special. Her seventeen-year-old ego never questioned whether there were others picked out like this. He’d been, for Mel and her hormonally-pent-up peers, the very stuff of solo sexual fantasy – the perfect aid to sleep. She hadn’t thought at the time to question the state of his ego, the confidence he must have had that his chosen girls wouldn’t fail to keep the secret. How carefully had he chosen them, she wondered?

  At the gym there were further signs of winter. On the notice board as she went in was a huge poster depicting fat snowflakes and an even fatter Santa Claus, advertising the Christmas party. Christmas was a sneaky thing, Melanie had decided over the past few years – tricking its way in from September onwards, while families were still adjusting to Back to Skool. The earliest signs were workmen taking apart corners of department stores, lugging in bare plastic-leaved Christmas trees and boxes of baubles that were left around in innocent piles, still closed, for a few days, waiting for their moment. Before you knew it entire shop floors were transformed into grottos, awash with glitter and tat and the tinny background of carols. Melanie stared at the poster and wondered whether Roger should be still on her present list. What would the Gift Guides suggest as perfect for the ex-husband? Perhaps someone made an alimony-payment reminder, a silver beeper that went off when a cheque was due.

  ‘Can I sell you a couple of tickets for the party? You and your husband?’ chirpy blonde Tanya on the reception desk asked Mel.

  ‘I don’t think so, thanks all the same,’ Mel told her, imagining a bar full of overexcited twenty-somethings drunk on Bacardi Breezers and the probability of sexual conquest. It was at just that kind of party (amazing what happened backstage at staid insurance underwriters) that Leonora had shown Roger her own Christmas stockings, beneath a boardroom table.

  ‘Oh, shame!’ Tanya’s bright lipsticked smile faded for a second, then revived quickly. ‘Or are you going away? Somewhere nice?’

  ‘No, no I’m not going anywhere. Just to my sister’s on the dreaded big day.’ The smile hovered uncertainly as Tanya sympathized, ‘Oh a nice quiet time for you then,’ which somehow managed to sound as if there’d been a death. Mel hurried away to stash her bag in the locker room and found Sarah drying her hair.

  ‘Hi! So tonight’s the big night! Looking forward to it?’ Sarah yelled over the sound of the hairdryer. Heads swivelled to look, women towelled less vigorously, sensing gossip.

  ‘Ssh! It’s no big deal! Only supper. In fact . . .’

  ‘What? Tell me!’ Sarah switched off the hairdryer and replaced it in its holder on the counter top. ‘Do you want knicker advice? All I can say is don’t wear those big beige pants. In fact, throw them away.’ She shuddered. ‘How Neil can still want to see you again after he’s seen those . . .’

  ‘Hey, he won’t be seeing my underwear – I’ve done that phase. I’m on to “Just Being Friends”. A new maturity.’

  ‘Can’t be done, sweetie. They don’t know the rules to that game. Now look, you need to be ready for . . .’ Sarah lowered her voice and glanced around quickly, pulling Mel into an unoccupied corner of the changing room.

  ‘Ready for?’

  ‘Anything. Just in case. You might change your mind. I mean, look around here, take a peek. What do you notice?’

  ‘Women? Some dressed, some not? Cool gymwear? Expensive shoes?’

  ‘Look at the not-dressed. With subtlety, obviously – you don’t want to be misinterpreted,’ Sarah whispered. ‘They’ve all gone into winter plumage. Frightful. Just because they’re not sunning themselves on some beach doesn’t mean they don’t need to keep up with the bikini wax. I mean, some of the sights . . . I hope you’ve booked a trim, darling. You don’t want to be falling out of your lace thong.’

  Melanie giggled. ‘I’ve always thought there’s not much that can’t be achieved with a Bic disposable. Not that it matters, I mean, no-one’s going to be . . .’

  There was a shocked intake of breath from Sarah. ‘Are you mad? You’ll have a stubbly undercarriage! How unattractive is that? And suppose you got run over by a bus?’

  ‘You sound just like my mother! Except in her case she only went as far as insisting on clean underwear, not a brutally executed Brazilian wax complete with token Dali-esque wisp. And if I got run over, surely I’d want a bona fide orthopaedic bod to look at me, not one who fancied a spot of voyeuristic gynaecology on the side.’

  ‘I give in. You’re a lost cause – almost. Toenails, then. Just because it’s now tights weather . . .’

  Mel obediently kicked off a shoe, pulled off a sock and showed Sarah a neatly painted set of cerise nails.

  ‘Phew, well, that’s one good thing, I suppose. But remember what I said. When you’re on the market you’ve got to make the best of yourself At All Times. Listen to your Aunty Sarah, she knows.’

  ‘She doesn’t know everything,’ Mel reminded her, as she refastened her trainer. ‘She doesn’t seem to understa
nd I’m not on the market.’

  Sarah put an arm round her shoulders and leaned close to her. ‘Then what are you doing in here?’ she asked.

  ‘Keeping myself in good nick. For me. Just me,’ Mel told her.

  ‘Yeah, I know,’ she said, patting Mel as if indulgently pitying her. ‘Of course you are, sweetie.’

  Neil was taking quite a chance, Melanie considered, as she parked her car close to the delicatessen. He didn’t know how well or how badly equipped her kitchen was. She might, for all he knew, be the sort of woman who lived entirely on Count on Us Meals for One from Marks and Spencer and didn’t possess a single sharp knife, a bottle of olive oil or a decent chopping board. On the other hand, perhaps she was the one taking a chance. The height of Neil’s culinary repertoire could well involve defrosting a couple of portions of supermarket chicken Kiev and spreading oven chips across a baking tray. It was a strange thing to do, really, to offer to cook in someone else’s kitchen when you didn’t know them that well. Somewhere along the way there must have been an assumption that was based on the two of them being of the same . . . well, it could only be called class, really. If you were cooking for someone at your own home, you could impose your own tried and trusted favourites on them and trust your guest at least to be polite about it. If you went to a restaurant, you could express preferences via a menu. This way, it was an odd and slightly uncomfortable merging of tastes.

  Mel was beginning to feel as if this non-relationship had been pushed several cogs forward while she was looking the other way. What she could do, at least, was make sure she’d got something that would redress the balance a bit. She’d find some really good bread, fat, fresh olives, a dense, rich pâté – perhaps put together a pudding, even though she wasn’t that keen on them herself. And then there was all that wine that Roger hadn’t yet collected. The thought of making further inroads into that, with someone Roger would consider an ill-intentioned interloper, quite cheered her.

  ‘Hello, Melanie – we don’t often see you in here.’ Perfect Patty was by the organic yogurt section, clutching her big wicker shopping basket in front of her.

  ‘No. I’m more of a dash-round-Waitrose woman usually. When you’re living by yourself you don’t need so much stuff. When I think of the hours I wasted shopping in the past . . .’

  ‘Of course, I was forgetting you’ve got an empty nest. Sorry,’ Patty half-whispered, as if Mel was suffering from a tragic disease. It was disconcerting, making her ramble on. ‘Anyway, I’ve got someone coming tonight and I wanted a few extra bits and pieces.’

  ‘Oh?’ Patty made the short word last for at least the length of three syllables. ‘I mean, oh that’s nice. We don’t want you to get lonely.’

  Mel smiled broadly, attempting to dispel any misplaced mystery. ‘Don’t worry, I won’t. It’s just an old friend, left over from my school reunion a few weeks back,’ she explained.

  There was another ‘Oh,’ from Patty, this one on a down-note of disappointment. ‘Oh well, never mind, I’m sure one day . . .’ then she rallied quickly. ‘Talking of exes, which we weren’t, well, not really, that old boyfriend of your Rosa is doing brilliantly at Oxford, I hear.’

  ‘Do you? Who from? And isn’t it a bit early to tell?’ Mel could hear herself failing in the attempt not to sound waspish. Alex had hurt her daughter badly, he’d zapped away too much of her sparkle – he wasn’t to be allowed to get away with being a genius.

  ‘I saw his mother. His brother’s in Ben’s year. Tipped for a first, by all accounts.’

  ‘Oh well, good luck to him,’ Mel said, crossing her fingers behind her back.

  ‘Oh, and talking of boys – which at least we are this time – Ben’s been spending a lot of time at your house. I hope he isn’t getting in the way.’

  Mel reached behind Patty’s perfectly layered chestnut head for a carton of extra-thick double cream. She’d think of something to combine with it later, something fattening, chocolatey, out-of-season strawberries . . . ‘He’s not at all in the way, really. Don’t worry about that. I like to see him.’

  ‘Hmm. Yes, well,’ Patty shifted awkwardly from foot to foot, ‘it’s just that, well, to be honest, I think he should be doing his homework at home. I can’t really see why he needs to keep coming round to you. Our computer’s always available for him. I mean, it’s been almost every evening this last week or so.’

  Mel looked at her, very nearly coming out with a true and speedy denial. Ben had only been round twice in the past ten days. What she had caught sight of, though, and obviously Patty hadn’t, was Ben sloping past her own gate and up Mrs Jenkins’s path. Lee-Ann from Canada was a pretty and very friendly girl.

  ‘I’ll remind him he’s got a home to go to,’ Mel promised. ‘Best I can do.’

  ‘Thanks, Mel, I knew you’d understand. Upsets during the exam years can be so disruptive, can’t they?’

  Mel made her way quickly round the store, crammed a random selection of goodies into her trolley and lined up at the checkout behind a boy somewhere around Rosa’s age. He had the same dark red hair colour as Rosa, and similar straight wide shoulders. She’d never thought of her home as an ‘empty nest’ before. Patty’s throwaway comment had rattled her. It gave her unwelcome thoughts of baby birds that didn’t quite make it – the eggs that didn’t hatch, the scrawny weakest babies that died unfed or were pushed out of the nest to land on hard pavements, where curious children poked at the sad damp feathers.

  Another lad joined the one in front of her: ‘Jim! Long time! What did you get?’ She listened in shamelessly, waiting to hear if it was a degree result or A levels they were talking about. It was hard to pinpoint their ages.

  ‘Oh, I got ninety hours community service,’ she heard. ‘Mick wasn’t so lucky, he got six months.’

  ‘That’ll be the knife.’ The pair of young men did some wise nodding.

  ‘GBH to the filth. They gotta send you down for that. Set an example.’

  Melanie felt instantly cheered: that small, solemn and somehow highly moral exchange had quite made her day.

  Rosa was backing a virtual oil tanker out of Poole Harbour. What it was doing there in the first place, she really had no idea. It would have been interesting to attach some kind of story to it, imagine it was on its way back to the Gulf to pick up a million gallons of crude oil. As far as she was aware there wasn’t a refinery in the Poole area, though she could be wrong – if there was they should have been told, then they’d know what the tanker was there for, that it hadn’t just parked itself at random. She’d been to Poole: when she was small her parents used to make the most of the sunniest days, keep her off school and drive down to Studland Bay to glory in doing nothing at all on a proper English beach. They’d have lunch at a hotel, one that was sniffy about children being in the grown-up dining room. Roger and Mel would ignore rules like that, keep her with them, let her show off her grown-up table manners that owed more to her being repulsed by her schoolfriends’ sloppy lunch habits than to her parents’ guidance. She’d always been a neat eater and could easily manage a Big Mac without a single bit of onion tumbling from the bun.

  The thought of food made her feel nauseous, as did the idea that one day she could, if she pursued this particular module through to the end of the course, really find herself steering a massive tanker, on water, not just on a simulator. She was sharing the controls with people who really would ferry vast container ships across all the world’s oceans one day. She was being taught by a man who actually had. The simulator gave little idea of the sea’s movement. The students were handling the ship, but not the element it rode on, and it felt a bit like cheating. Anyone can drive a ship on a screen, she thought, as she crashed its bow into the harbour wall. It was like a cartoon: she could back the vessel out now (and she did) and the wall would mend itself. It was no more real than Tom reflating after being flattened by Jerry on a motorbike.

  ‘What shall I wear, Max? Bearing in mind that this isn’t a date, not a rea
l one. But I don’t want to look . . . slovenly.’

  Mel didn’t know why she was asking Max for advice – from what she’d seen, he was hardly a model of sartorial elegance. It was nearly six-thirty and they were having a beer in the kitchen. Jeremy Paxman was stretched out across Max’s lap, purring and proudly full of the big winter-fat mouse he’d caught that afternoon.

  ‘God, don’t ask me!’ Max put his hands up, pleading defeat. ‘You look OK as you are. I take it you don’t want to be too . . . how shall I put it? Encouraging?’

  Mel laughed. ‘That’s it in one. This is all a big mistake. We should have gone out – a pub supper or something on neutral ground. It’s turned into something ridiculously intimate. At least, from my point of view. I don’t usually have people I hardly know rummaging through my drawers – kitchen ones, I mean. Or any other sort!’ She felt herself going ludicrously pink, over-explaining. Possibly she and Max should stick to discussing whether a Butia capitata would prefer a west- or south-facing position.

  Max shrugged. ‘Tell him you’ve changed your mind. When he rings the doorbell, be ready with a coat and rush him out to your car. Tell him the cooker blew up but you know the perfect alternative just across town. Easy.’ He leaned forward and chinked her glass gently with his own. ‘Don’t forget, you’ve only yourself to think of right now. So do just that.’

  And it would have been that easy. Mel put on her most comfortable jeans and a longish black cashmere/silk-mix jumper. She chose a pair of unobtrusive, pebble-like silver earrings and made sure she hadn’t overdone the make-up. Her jacket was ready by the door, her keys were on the table for Max’s suggested swift getaway. When the doorbell rang she almost fell over in her haste to put his plan into action.

  ‘Hi!’ She heard herself being over-breezy as she flung the door back – and almost ran into Ben on the doorstep.