The Truth About Melody Browne by Lisa Jewell Read Free Book Online

open and a packet of salmon kebabs in her hand.
    She gathered her carrier bags hastily, smiled at the woman called Emerald, and headed for the tube.
    ‘So,’ said Stacey, ‘how’d it go with your number fourteen man?’
    Melody poured herself another glass of pink Cava and grimaced. ‘Hmmmm,’ she said.
    ‘Oh dear.’
    ‘No. It was fine. I mean, he was fine. But the night was, well, a bit bizarre.’
    She told Stacey about being hypnotised and fainting on stage and she thought about telling her about the strange feelings she’d been having but couldn’t quite stomach the conversation that would follow. Stacey was scathing about anything that she perceived to be in any way ‘alternative’ or ‘spiritual’. She didn’t believe in ghosts or tarot or past lives and she certainly didn’t believe in hypnotism. Stacey believed only in the tangible and the visible. Anything else made her scowl disdainfully and say things like, ‘Bollocks’ or ‘Pile of old crap’. Stacey would have no time for the onset of inexplicable flashbacks. She’d say, ‘Get over yourself, it’s just your mind playing tricks on you.’
    Stacey glanced at her questioningly. ‘You all right?’
    Melody lit a cigarette and shrugged. ‘Of course I am.’
    ‘Right,’ said Stacey. ‘You seem a bit off, that’s all. You sure you’re not coming down with something?’
    Melody nodded and inhaled. It was her first cigarette of the day, the first since yesterday afternoon, and, like her coffee that morning, it tasted strange. She glanced at the packet absent-mindedly, checking the brand, checking she hadn’t picked up the wrong ones. But they were hers, definitely, her Marlboro Lights. Her cigarette tasted musty and dusty, though, not like tobacco, but like dirt , the way cigarettes had tasted when she was just pregnant with Ed.
    She stared at the cigarette distastefully and then stubbed it out.
    ‘What’s going on?’ said Stacey, eyeing the mashed up cigarette in the bowl.
    ‘Don’t know,’ said Melody. ‘It just tasted wrong.’
    ‘Ha!’ Stacey laughed, and banged her hand down on the tabletop. ‘That Julius bloke – he’s hypnotised you out of liking nicotine!’
    ‘Oh God,’ said Melody, staring at the ashtray. ‘Do you think?’
    ‘Well, I’ve never seen you do that before. Never in my life! Ooh, I wonder if he could hypnotise me out of liking chocolate?’
    ‘Yeah, and maybe into liking sex!’
    Stacey laughed and her husband, Pete, grunted from the barbecue where he was turning burgers. ‘I’d pay for that,’ he said.
    The air was still damp from the earlier shower, but was drying out quickly in a long stretch of sunshine. Their toddler, Clover, sat at a small plastic table arranging miniature teacups and saucers with fat hands while Mutley, their Norfolk terrier, snuffled at a stuffed toy on the decking by her feet. It was, as ever, a picture of domestic bliss.
    Melody and Stacey had started their adult lives at exactly the same point: fifteen, pregnant, homeless and single, but within a year of their babies being born exactly a week apart, Stacey’s life had headed in a completely different direction, because when she was seventeen, she’d met Pete. Placid, strong and dependable Pete had stuck around and married her even with another man’s baby, and now as they neared middle age, she had a neat little house in Hackney, two teenagers, an unexpected baby girl and an eternal air of contentment. Stacey and Melody were similar in so many ways, and for a while it looked like their lives might have panned out the same way. But from the very moment that they both discovered they were pregnant at the age of fifteen, Stacey’s life had begun.
    And Melody’s had hit rock bottom.

Chapter 7
1988
     
    Rock bottom wasn’t a day or a week or a month. Rock bottom was a moment. And for Melody it looked like this:
    A room, ten by ten, with ripped net curtains and a rusty Baby Belling.
    A single, unmade bed and a chair