The Truth About Melody Browne by Lisa Jewell

needs you. One who loves you.’
    ‘Yes, but she’s not a baby, is she? She’s four years old. I know her. I know her hair. I know her voice. I know that she likes Viscount biscuits and colouring-in and that she prefers your mother to my mother. I know she’s got hazel eyes and legs like yours. I know her. That’s what I’ve lost. Not a baby. Not a child. Potential . I’ve lost potential. All the things I will never, ever know . And it kills me, John, kills me every time I close my eyes.’
    There was a long pause then, and Melody held her breath.
    ‘Melody may not be your only baby, Jane, but you’re her only mother. You need to find a way out of this, because you owe it to her. You owe her a mother.’
    ‘But that’s exactly it. That’s exactly, precisely it! If I can’t be Romany’s mother, then I don’t want to be anybody’s mother at all, do you understand? Nobody’s mother at all.’
    Melody exhaled silently, and very slowly, very quietly, tidied away her crayons and went to bed.

Chapter 10
Now
     
    The summer term finished on Thursday and Melody felt a sense of enormous relief as she left through the school gates that afternoon. Her head was overflowing with memories and ideas. The memories didn’t come in a neat, chronological stream, however. They came in fits and bursts, unconnected to each other, as if someone had taken a pair of scissors to her life, thrown the pieces in the air and let them float slowly back down to earth, scrap by scrap.
    The following day, hoping to put some order to the fragments, Melody packed herself a small bag, dressed herself in jeans and trainers and got on a train to Broadstairs. She stood on the platform at Victoria Station and glanced up and down nervously, almost as if she were expecting someone to appear. A Tannoy message announced the imminent arrival of her train and with the announcement came another memory. Cold, bare hands in her lap. Bobbly, navy tights and a denim skirt. A woman’s voice saying, ‘ You’ll have to freeze then.’ A wave of sadness.
    Melody shivered, suddenly cold in spite of the diesel-tinged summer heat.
    She took a window seat on the near-empty train that arrived a moment later. She was hoping that she might see something from here that would give her some sense of direction but the view through the window seemed ordinary and insignificant. It wasn’t until she found herself in Broadstairs town that her subconsciousness began to stir again.
    Broadstairs was a pretty town, full of slender maritime town houses, squat clapboard cottages and stucco Regency villas. The streets were tiny and cobbled, and lined with touristy gift shops with striped awnings. It was the first day of the summer holidays and the town was packed with fresh-faced families. Melody didn’t recognise anything, but she did feel herself being pulled along in a particular direction, as if being led by the hand by an excitable child.
    On the high street she stopped for a moment to peer through the window of a coffee shop. It was old-fashioned, with an ornate Victorian façade and gingham curtains strung across the window. She felt a burst of surprise as she stood there, as though she’d just seen something wonderful and surprising. She stood for a while, mesmerised slightly by the way she was feeling and waiting for something to come to her, something colourful and full of explanations. But it didn’t, and she moved along and waited to see where else she would be taken.
    She began to feel a sense of disappointment as she wandered around over the next half an hour or so. She was having no flashbacks and no sense of remembering. She was beginning to think that she was wasting her time, until two things happened within a short time of each other. First of all she saw a house, a tall white house with thin windows and a curved balcony like a sad smile. Her memory opened up and gave her this:
    Rain, soft against her skin like feathers.
    Three seagulls circling overhead, so