Unchained Melanie

by Judy Astley

  Tina Keen and Melanie were pretty sure by now who had committed the grim café murder. The victim’s friend, the young reformed junkie, had been allowed (just) to keep her life, but not before enduring a terrifying, torturous night shackled to a barred window in a cellar. The chill, airless room was beneath a hospital where body parts – amputated limbs, defunct livers, infected, useless kidneys and aborted foetuses – waited like a butcher’s special offer on steel trays in irreverent uncared-for heaps, to be bagged up and taken away for incineration. The hooded killer simply sat and watched her, silent, sinister and dangerous. For amusement he played with his knife, testing the blade by slicing a lobe from a diseased lung, then cutting a finger from a hand severed in a meat-processing accident.

  Melanie’s own fingers hovered over her keyboard, just giving one last moment to deciding which way to take it: whether to condemn the secretive young constable (with the sister-fixated past), or the mortuary attendant with his morbid obsession for making holes in people, to a life sentence of wary terror in gaol. It’s not real, she reminded herself; it’s only pretend. Neither of these was a flesh and blood man who was really about to pass many fearful years in a miserable cell. She could flip a coin, let the fates decide which one of the pair was to star in the book’s cataclysmic finale.

  Mel finished the second-to-last chapter satisfied that as she’d scared herself to the point where she was almost afraid to leave her study, her readers would find it quite gruesome enough. She switched off the i-Book and looked down into the garden. It was dark – a smoky-damp late afternoon. Most of the gardens on either side of hers had long pools of light leaking out from downstairs rooms. Hers didn’t – she hadn’t been downstairs since the daylight started to fade, and no lights were on. Below, as she left her study, there was a rattle and clatter that almost made her heart stop, but it was only Jeremy Paxman racing in through his catflap. He was being chased, Mel thought, as the adrenalin subsided, either that or it was later than she’d imagined and he was in urgent need of food.

  Melanie switched on the kitchen light, opened a sachet of Jeremy’s favourite food for him, then took the vodka and tonic bottles out of the fridge and ice from the freezer. She smiled to herself as she pictured Roger with his eyebrows high up like a viaduct arch, commenting, ‘Spirits before six, Melanie?’ as if she was only a single measure away from joining the winos under the bridge. She poured herself a good strong drink (thinking as she did so of Sarah’s useful maxim that if you pour the vodka over ice, you can kid yourself it’s only a small one) and sat facing the black, blank window. A branch from next door’s buddleia was scratching against the glass. The teenage addict she’d just been writing about, the murderer’s chosen final victim, had been watched through an uncurtained window like this one. She too had fed her cat, taken a drink from her fridge, and all the time there’d been a man just the other side of the door, just a pane of glass and some flimsy wood away, excited, elated, craving to do unspeakable things to her.

  Someone could be out there now, she thought, her insides tightening as small beads of fear started collecting together and gathering an unwelcome strength. There were no hiding places in her garden for any Tom to do his peeping from. Max had left it stripped and flattened, not so much as a blade of a weed remaining. But someone could be just beside the fence, sneaking along the black edges where the oblong of light stopped. They could have crept up close and be only inches away beneath the window.

  Her mother’s voice took over from Roger’s drink warning. ‘You should have got curtains,’ it said, ‘nice thick ones.’ Mel had never seen the point of curtains in a kitchen, thinking them fussy and suburban and likely to get soggy and grease-speckled. Kitchens were warm places, needing more heat to be let out than kept in. She wasn’t overlooked by other windows or by passers-by. It occurred to her now for the first time that somebody might take an undraped window for an invitation to peer in and think criminal thoughts.

  ‘Maybe I should write light romantic comedies in future,’ she told Jeremy Paxman, who was finishing off the last lickings round his bowl. The cat merely raised his head for a second and then started lapping noisily at his water.

  The doorbell ringing almost made Melanie, in her hyped-up state, pass out completely. Her heart was pounding so hard as she went to open the front door that she thought it would crack a rib.

  ‘I thought I’d just pop round on my way home, see how you’re doing.’ Roger was on the doorstep, shuffling his feet slightly, trying to look nonchalant. Melanie recognized that look – sideways grin, eyes not quite meeting hers – and it didn’t convince. She remembered it from when he’d first mentioned Leonora, dropping her name too often and too enthusiastically into a conversation about junk e-mails. ‘Just someone at work,’ he’d said, when Mel asked who she was. If he’d been a child he’d have been literally wriggling with the burden of the lie. As it was, he’d shifted and twisted and got up for some more wine when his glass was still almost full.

  ‘OK, come in,’ she said, rather gracelessly. ‘And on your way home from where? You’re a long way off the track from Battersea to Esher.’ Good grief, surely he wasn’t seeing someone else this soon into his new marriage?

  Roger slid his coat off and flung it over the banister rail, just as he used to when he’d lived there. ‘Oh, just went into the town for something. Couldn’t find it, don’t remember what it was.’

  ‘You’re rambling, Roger. Just admit you’ve come to check that I haven’t gutted the house as well as the garden. Drink?’ She led the way to the sitting room, switching on a couple of lamps. As she closed the blue linen curtains she took a quick look outside to the garden. No-one there. Of course there wasn’t.

  ‘Oh, er . . . yes. That would be lovely. Only if you’ve got time though, I don’t want to keep you from anything.’ He was peering around, she noticed, as she went to the kitchen and came back with whisky, ice and a glass for him. She wondered what he was looking for – signs of another man occupying his former territory? A big fierce dog? Paint charts? He settled himself into the motheaten pink chair and pulled nervously at a couple of loose threads. In spite of herself, she couldn’t help watching as he crossed one long leg over the other. She’d always loved the way his muscles went taut. He had, for a man, the most elegant legs, so did Max. Did this, she wondered, make her a ‘leg-woman’, in the same way that men defined themselves by their preferences as ‘tit-men’?

  ‘I’ve just finished work myself,’ she told him, pouring him a Scotch. ‘I’ve got nothing else planned – yet. I might go to see a film later.’

  ‘Oh? Who with?’

  ‘Why do people ask that? Isn’t “which film” more to the point? If you really want to know, I’d be going by myself!’ She laughed at him. ‘Roger, you’re as bad as Cherry – she thinks anyone who goes out on their own is terminally sad. Which in her case means she hardly ever goes anywhere.’

  ‘Well, what’s on? We could go together.’

  She laughed again. ‘What, you and me? Like a date? Are you mad?’

  ‘No, not like a date. Like old friends.’ He shrugged. ‘It was just a thought.’ He hesitated for a moment, then looked at her carefully. ‘We are old friends, aren’t we?’

  Melanie felt taken aback. ‘Old friends’ would not have been her first thought when asked to describe their no-longer-married state. But to call themselves ‘new enemies’, or just ‘acquaintances’, would be to cancel out all the years when they’d been contented enough, raising Rosa, putting their home together, planting the now-annihilated garden. And there’d been the shared, well-supported bad times too – the death of his father, the loss of their baby.

  ‘Yes, OK, Roger, we can be old friends if you like. I don’t particularly want to go out with you, though, not tonight. Sorry. Anyway . . .’ She couldn’t stop herself using the defensive, carpy voice she thought had gone for ever the day the decree absolute had come through, as she added, ‘Don’t you want to rush home to Leonora?’

&
nbsp; Ugh – she almost shuddered, wishing she hadn’t said that. Now he’d think that somewhere in the corner of her soul there was still a little heap of jealous regret. She pictured it as a small, slightly battered sandcastle on a typical cold English beach just as the sun’s going down, everyone has gone and the tide is coming in. At first, when they’d decided the marriage was definitely no longer workable, there’d been a whole massive sandy fortification of the stuff, practically a garrison town’s worth – how could there not be? They’d been together, give or take a dozen or so of Roger’s dalliances, for nearly twenty years. She was happy to be down to that one last tiny bucket-sized heap, with no flag in the top.

  ‘ActuaIly, there was something.’ Roger’s foot started twitching up and down with nerves. ‘I sort of wanted to talk to you.’

  Oh please, she thought, don’t let it be some messy personal stuff concerned with Leonora and her pregnancy.

  ‘Roger . . .’ she began.

  He interrupted quickly. ‘No, Mel, just let me . . .’

  He fumbled in his pocket, pulling out a crumpled piece of paper. ‘Do you remember this?’ He passed it to her and she smoothed it out, her hands moving softly and gently as she recognized the pattern.

  ‘Oh, the wallpaper! Of course I remember. Those lovely Swallows and Amazons boats. I remember . . . I’m sure you do too . . . we talked about how free they were, those storybook children messing about on the water, no grown-ups, no life jackets, no-one fussing around, telling them not to tack downwind. Have you kept this scrap of paper all this time?’

  ‘No. It’s just . . . this is recent – it’s still in production. Can you believe that?’ He gave a short, brittle laugh. ‘There’s a book of sample papers that Leonora got. I ripped this one out.’

  ‘What . . . because . . .’

  ‘She liked this one. She’d turned the corner of the page down. I didn’t want her to have it.’

  ‘I see.’ And she did, perfectly.

  ‘Because it was ours, wasn’t it? You understand, don’t you? This was to do with us. I know it’s just a detail, but those kids in the boats, I remember we saw them as Rosa and Daniel, five years on.’ He pulled some more threads out of the chair cover. ‘We never even collected the paper from the shop.’

  ‘Er . . . I did, actually.’

  ‘You did? Why? What was the point – Daniel had gone.’

  ‘I know, I know. I was just passing the shop, about a month after he’d died, and I went in, on a sort of whim. I was half-crazed at the time, don’t forget, I think we both were. Maybe I thought if I just carried on as if everything was all right, it sort of would be. Of course, when I got home, well, even halfway home – no buggy to push, no feed to rush back for . . . I just put it all in the loft, then went off to collect Rosa from school. It’s still there, all seven rolls of it.’ She laughed, shakily. ‘I mean, if you really did want it, you could . . . No, on second thoughts, sorry.’

  ‘I think . . .’ Roger took a deep, long breath. ‘I think I’m scared it might all happen again. Is that half-crazed too?’

  ‘No, of course not. You know in your heart that it’s not even remotely likely, but, well, I’d be amazed if you didn’t think about it. Don’t you talk about all this with Leonora?’ She somehow hoped he didn’t – Daniel had been their baby, their loss, their grief. One and a half pounds of almost transparent humanity. She could hardly bear the thought of Leonora, too young, too uncomprehending, eyes glittery, saying, ‘Oh poor Roger, how terrible for you,’ but she wouldn’t have a clue, not deep down. She pictured her giving Roger a consoling hug, smiling a reassurance that her body wasn’t faulty, wouldn’t fail to let a baby hang in there for the full term. Then she’d switch channels on the TV, time for Sex in the City.

  ‘Leonora hasn’t even read a single baby book, not even one How To article in her many magazines. I don’t think it occurs to her that there could possibly be anything to go wrong.’

  No imagination, that’s her trouble, Melanie thought, biting her lip to stop the words hurtling out.

  ‘Well, she’s probably right – it almost certainly won’t go wrong,’ she told him. ‘We were just unlucky, that’s all.’

  ‘Yeah. I’m sure you’re right. Look, I’m really sorry to have dragged all this up again. I’d better be going.’ He looked at his watch and stood up. ‘You OK?’

  ‘Yes, I’m fine. I won’t sit here and brood about it, don’t worry. I have my down moments still, but not many and not for long – his birthday, the day that should have been his birthday, Christmas just a bit, you know.’

  ‘Yes, but you’re here by yourself . . .’ He hovered by the doorway, as if guilty that he was abandoning someone that he’d injured. She felt annoyed suddenly, for it wasn’t as if he could stay, even if they both wanted him to. He had somewhere else to be, someone else to be with. As if on cue, the doorbell rang.

  ‘I like being by myself. I don’t like having to keep reassuring people about it, though. I won’t say it again, actually, it’s too much like letting you off the hook,’ she said as she walked past him to open the front door. Roger followed her, picking up his coat from the banisters. He looked puzzled, as if he’d patted her gently and she’d turned on him.

  ‘Hi! Shelf-man here for you!’ Neil, eager and willing as a soft old Labrador, brought chill damp air into the house with him. He also carried a big blue metal tool box and another one that she could see contained some kind of power tool.

  ‘Oh. I see, so you’re not quite as “on your own” as you make out,’ Roger said, smirking as he gave Mel’s cheek a perfunctory peck. ‘I’ll give you a call in the week – I was wondering what Rosa wants to do about Christmas. Bye!’ and he was gone, swallowed up into the night and his new, other life.

  Rosa and Desi lay on his bed watching Friends. They’d eaten a chicken stir-fry into which Desi had sliced too much ginger. ‘It’s good for you,’ he’d told her. ‘Ginger is supposed to stop you feeling sick.’

  ‘Not this much of it, surely,’ she’d said. ‘Couldn’t you have just got me a luscious box of ginger chocolates instead? Really dark, really bitter chocolate?’

  And he had. She hadn’t actually meant it, but Desi was one of those people who took things literally. In a way it was good, there was no devious thinking about him. You got what you paid for, so to speak. She put it down to spending all those years locked up (well, not literally, but it must have felt like it) at the kind of school where the use of imagination wasn’t really encouraged. Sport, religion and a strangely old-fashioned sense of history – that was what he’d been raised on. He’d said he was just going out to the offy to buy a couple of cans of Stella, and he’d come back with a box of chocolate ginger creams. Milk chocolate, but lucky to get that after 8 p.m. on the edge of Plymouth town centre. He didn’t want anything in return. He just did it because he liked her. She almost cried.

  ‘You’d better check the sell-by,’ he warned now as she reached into the box for her fifth sweet.

  ‘Too late now,’ she told him, hugging him close.

  Melanie could have done it herself, quite easily. Well, she could have assembled the shelves – getting them to go up and stay up on the wall might have been another matter. Max would probably have obliged.

  ‘It’s not as simple as it looks,’ Neil told her, in that way men do without bothering to ask first whether you’ve got a degree in Product Engineering. ‘You can’t just bash in the Rawlplugs wherever you feel like it.’ He went hand over hand along the study wall as if feeling for the catch to the secret passage, knocking gently now and then. Melanie suppressed laughter: the scene was like a play in which a walled-up nun or a prisoner on the other side was likely to knock back. She couldn’t think what he was listening for – these were not modern breeze-block and batten walls; as far as she could see the only thing to avoid, drill-wise, was slicing into an electric cable, and it was pretty obvious where they were. Neil looked happy enough, though. Like all men she’d ever known, he’d spread out
over the entire room for this so-called simple job. On her desk was the open tool box, exposing an impressive range of drill-bits, screwdrivers, hacksaw blades and chisels that would stock an entire branch of B & Q. His electric screwdriver was charging itself up by way of her computer’s mains plug and the packaging from the flat-pack box was strewn around the carpet. Tidy worker he was not.

  ‘I’ll get this lot cleared up in a minute,’ he said as the last shelf’s final fixing plate went successfully into the wall. He looked distinctly proud of himself, Melanie thought, as if he was genuinely thrilled to be fulfilling society’s expectations of the standard ideal male of the species. He reminded her of Jeremy Paxman when he brought a bird in through the catflap – all erect head and delighted, challenging eyes.

  ‘It’s looking really good,’ she told him, feeling conscious that she too was assuming an allotted role. She would now have to cook something – that was the next thing in the script. She wondered if it had been subconscious on his part – turn up an hour or so before the average suppertime and do a manly job so that he could be properly rewarded with sustenance. She could take him out somewhere, she thought, but she was quite enjoying observing Man in his more primitive element, and she didn’t want to undermine his mood: if only for the sake of research it was interesting to study him as a stereotype. Besides, for once there was plenty of food in the fridge.

  ‘There!’ Neil stepped back and surveyed his work triumphantly. ‘That OK for you?’ He turned to Mel.

  ‘It’s lovely, Neil, thank you. This has saved me a lot of hassle. Now – would you like some supper, my turn to cook?’

  While Neil reassembled his toolkit and swept up the sawdust and plaster, Mel went down to the kitchen and opened the fridge, trusting it to come up with something instantly edible and miraculously simple to prepare yet impressive to serve. There was pasta (of course), three packs of tomatoes of varying ages, romaine lettuce that was a bit droopy in the leaf but crisp enough further down. A bit like me, really, Mel thought, as she took it out and started chopping at it. She was no longer looking at the window, expecting a crazed axeman to be outside, leering in with teeth bared and eyes manic. It seemed as if having a man on the premises was like a talisman against bad luck. The idea that she should acquire one, surrender her independence just to ward off imagined evil, wasn’t a welcome one. She would, she thought, prefer to get a large, fierce dog.