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

covered in clothes.
    Her hands, resting helplessly in her lap, holding a scrunched-up piece of tissue paper.
    The sound of the front door slamming downstairs and Tiff’s scooter buzzing angrily away into the dark night air.
    Sudden silence and a sudden desperate realisation.
    She was alone, in a damp bedsit; and she was pregnant.
    Her boyfriend had just dumped her.
    And she wasn’t even sure it was his baby.
    At her feet was a bottle of gin. On the bed next to her was a packet of paracetamols. She glanced from the gin, to the tablets and then back to her upturned hands. She tried to imagine a baby in those hands, a baby who might look like Tiff, or might look like a man whose name she didn’t know because there hadn’t been time to find out. She tried to imagine those hands rubbing cream onto a baby’s bottom, putting a safety pin into the corners of a terry nappy, clipping a parasol to the bars of a pram. She tried and she couldn’t.
    After a while she picked up a teacup and filled it to the brim with gin. Then she poured ten paracetamols into the palm of her hand and tipped them into her mouth. She washed the tablets down with the gin, poured herself another and swallowed that down in three vile gulps.
    Down the hall she could hear the bath water nearing the top. She tiptoed across the landing, clutching her towel. And it was there, halfway across the landing, her stomach full of gin and pills, the bathroom in front of her spewing steam through the open door, on her way to kill her baby, that she felt it; the cold, grimy, sharp surface of rock bottom.
    Afterwards she sat on her bed, her knees drawn into her chest, damp tendrils of hair curling around her bare shoulders, and she wept soft, hot tears into the fur of a battered teddy bear.

Chapter 8
Now
     
    The sun was shining and Bloomsbury was full of happy students from University College and office workers sunbathing on the grass. The summer air felt sweet against her clammy skin. Usually after work on these warm summer days Melody craved lager or chilled white wine, but today she had a sudden urge for a glass of lemonade.
    She stopped at a café on Sicilian Avenue, took a table on the pavement and ordered one. It arrived in a tall condensation-coated glass with a yellow bendy straw and a crescent of lemon floating on the top. She stared at it for a while before bringing it to her lips and as she stared another picture appeared in her head. A Formica-topped table, a salmon-pink banquette, a rain-splattered crash helmet, a glass of lemonade and a huge glass globe of ice cream; three mounds of vanilla, a squirt of strawberry sauce, hundreds and thousands, a fan-shaped wafer, a long spoon and a man’s voice saying: ‘ Regrets are worse than any mistake you could ever make. Far, far worse .’ And then a smaller voice, a girl’s voice: ‘ Will I still be here? In Broadstairs? ’
    ‘ Oh, I doubt that very much. Nobody should stay in Broadstairs for ever .’
    And then the vignette disappeared and a name flashed through her thoughts.
    Ken.
    That’s who that man was. The man with the crash helmet and the long fingers and the wise words about regret.
    Ken.
    But before she could grab hold of the memory and make any sense of it, it was gone and she was once more at a pavement table in Bloomsbury staring at a glass of lemonade. She pulled her bag onto her knee and opened it with shaking hands, taking out her cigarettes and lighter, but before she’d even lit it up, she knew she didn’t want it. She dropped the box back into her bag and sighed.
    What was happening to her? She appeared to be going mad. All the signs suggested an encroaching state of insanity. Inexplicable flashbacks. Voices in her head. Paranoia. And a sudden dramatic aversion to coffee and cigarettes.
    But no, there was something more to it than simple madness. Broadstairs . It meant something to her. It had always meant something to her. All her adult life, whenever she heard the name Broadstairs she