The Truth About Melody Browne Read Free

in the area and Melody had been fortunate enough to have been offered one of their flats when she’d found herself a single mother at the age of fifteen. She and Ed had lived here alone, together, ever since, and the flat had taken on the look of a home that had evolved through times of change and growth. It was a home with layers and piles. They still had the same sofa that they’d been given by a charity for teenage mums when they moved in seventeen years ago, covered with a throw that she’d found in a charity shop when Ed was about ten and now decorated with smart cushions she’d bought from Monsoon in the sale two years ago when she won seventy-five pounds on the lottery.
    Melody had bought pot plants when Ed was tiny. In the nineties everybody had pot plants. Most of them had died but one still remained, strong and determined and really quite ugly, sitting on a chipped saucer ringed with rust marks and ingrained dirt. If Melody were to move to a new flat the plant would go, but it was such a part of the fabric of the home she’d known for seventeen years that she didn’t see it any more.
    The same was true of the piles of paperwork underneath her bed, Ed’s old trainers in the hallway, which hadn’t fit him since he was fifteen, and the ugly framed painting of a Spanish dancer on her bedroom wall that had come with her from her childhood home.
    Melody’s home would not win any prizes for interiors, but it was warm and comfortable, and filled with the smell and feel of her and her son. It was a treasure box of memories; photographs, souvenirs, postcards pinned to a cork board. Melody and her son had grown up together in this flat and she wanted, consciously or not, to make sure that not one iota of that experience ended up in landfill. She wanted it all to hand, every friend’s visit, every school play, every Christmas morning, every last memory, because memory was something that Melody valued more than life itself.
    Melody dressed carefully that night, the night her life both ended and began. Melody rarely dressed carefully, because she had no interest in clothes at all. Half the time she wore her son’s clothes. She didn’t go anywhere, apart from to work as a dinner lady at the school where Ed had been a pupil up until finishing his A levels last month, and she didn’t have enough money to buy anything nice, so she just didn’t bother. But today she’d been to Oxford Street, to the big branch of Primark, and spent thirty-five hard-earned pounds, because tonight she was meeting a man, her first proper date in eight years.
    Melody pulled a necklace from her jewellery box, a pear-shaped pendant in jet and onyx hanging from a thick silver chain, one of the few things she had left of her mother. She looped it over her head and turned to face Ed who was watching her from the corner of her bed. He was wearing a white polo shirt, the collar turned up and a silver chain around his neck. His black hair was cropped and glossy with something out of a tube, his eyes were navy blue and his profile was Roman. He had been the best-looking boy in the sixth form: that wasn’t just her opinion, it was the opinion of half the girls at his school, and Melody knew it because she heard them whispering it when they thought no one who cared could possibly be listening.
    He smiled and gave her the thumbs up. ‘You look hot,’ he said.
    ‘Thank you for lying,’ she said.
    ‘I’m not, honest. You look really good.’
    ‘Well, lying or not, I love you for it.’ She squashed his cheeks between her hands and kissed him loudly on the lips.
    ‘Urgh!’ he said, wiping his mouth with the back of his hands. ‘Lip gloss!’
    ‘I bet you wouldn’t be complaining if it was Tiffany Baxter’s lip gloss.’
    ‘Course I wouldn’t,’ he said. ‘She’s seventeen years old, she’s fit and she’s not my mother.’
    She turned back to the mirror and appraised what she saw. Faded chestnut hair that had grown out of a short crop