The Woman Next Door(15)
‘What on earth do you mean?’ She has to grasp this information, she knows this, yet cannot.
Tilly mimes throwing up, expressively. Jamie hoots with laughter and Tilly beams at the appreciation. ‘She’s totally rat-arsed,’ she says cheerfully. ‘Now she’s flat out in the guest room, snoring her head off.’
‘Wow, it sounds like some party you’ve got going on here, Mel!’ says Jamie.
Tilly, still glowing in the heat of his attention, shoots him an arch smile. It looks all wrong, like a toddler wearing its mother’s shoes. ‘You’d think, wouldn’t you?’ she says.
No. This has to stop right now.
Melissa opens her mouth to tell Jamie he has to go when a clap of thunder as loud as a gunshot cracks the still air. All three flinch in surprise. Fat raindrops plop onto Jamie’s head and confetti the step around him. He cartoon cowers, arms up to fend off the rain. A hot concrete smell wafts upwards.
‘Mum! Let him come in! What’s wrong with you?’
And then somehow Jamie is crossing the threshold and here he is, inside.
He’s in her house and she has lost control of the situation.
‘Jesus,’ says Melissa. ‘All right! Just go and … wait in there.’ She gestures to the sitting room. ‘I’ll be as quick as I can dealing with this. Just don’t … move.’ What she wants to say is, ‘Don’t touch anything. Don’t steal anything. Piss off.’
Jamie walks quickly past her and flumps down onto the plush sofa. He strokes its arm luxuriously, stretching out his legs, before turning to flash a grin that seems to say, ‘I should have all this too.’
The band of pain tightens around Melissa’s head.
***
As hot water thunders into the bucket in the bathroom upstairs, she sits on the edge of the bath and holds her head in her hands. She squeezes her eyes shut and moans softly, a long sibilant hiss. ‘Shit-shit-shit-shit.’
She and Jamie had been separated before her days in Asquith Mansions but it’s too close for comfort. Was that why he was here? And how did he find her? Holding her breath and scrubbing at the foul pink mess, she thinks about doing this before, many times over, back when she was Melanie Ronson. But then it was cheap scratchy carpets pocked with fag burns that rubbed your knees raw, or lino that was cracked and sticky. Not this oatmeal-coloured pure wool, which Tilly’s bare toes scrunch into every day and which is proving to be astonishingly absorbent to vomit.
However hard she scrubs, she can’t stop the pictures that start flicker-booking through her mind:
– Her mother slumped, weeping, at the yellow Formica table, smelling bad. Melissa, then Melanie, hiding behind the sofa and pick-pick-picking at the swirly green and black wallpaper. She’d seen a programme about Narnia on telly. They don’t have any big wardrobes but she is obsessed with hiding places just in case;
– The purplish grey swelling of her mother’s eyes one morning that made her think of lizards and dinosaurs;
– Lying in bed, pulling the sour-smelling Barbie duvet up to her face when her mother flings open the bedroom door. She is silhouetted against the yellowish landing light. Flecks of spit fly from her mouth as she screams that she could have ‘made something’ of herself and that she should have ‘just dealt with it’ when she had the opportunity.
And finally.
– Coming into the dark living room, a little unsteady after too many Bacardi and Cokes and a little sore from pounding against the bonnet of Gary Mottram’s Vauxhall Viva in the Camelot car park, to find her mother dead in the stripy brown and orange chair that always smelled musty.
She had been fifteen then.
No one would believe that she had been looking after herself for years. That she had found money around the house and bought the chips for dinner, spreading margarine on slices of bread and, once, putting some dandelions in a jar in the centre of the table because she had seen something like it on telly. Mum had taken one look and then burst into tears, so Melanie never did it again.
Melissa sits back on her heels now, staring down at the damp carpet. She hopes she won’t have to replace it.
Rain patters against the sash window where Tilly has hung a blue feathery dreamcatcher that Melissa has never seen before. Getting up with a sigh, she lifts the bucket of dirty water.
She will get rid of him.
It’s going to be okay.
HESTER
I’m looking up at an unfamiliar ceiling.
The inside of my head thrums and pulses in sickening waves. Have I had an accident? Maybe I was hit by a car and I’m in hospital.
I run my tongue over my dry lips, grimacing at the terrible taste in my mouth.
As I turn my head and look to the right, I can see a pale blue wooden bedside table. It looks far too pretty and upmarket to be in a hospital. That’s not all. The wallpaper is textured with roses and looks like raw silk. Gauzy curtains shimmer and flutter at a window where a light breeze drifts in. The light is the pale bluish milk of very early morning.
My brain scrambles to assemble a jigsaw puzzle of jagged information.
Computer club. A party.
Laughing and then feeling peculiar.
Oh no, oh no, oh no …
Memories crash into my mind with the violence of bumper cars. I’m talking too loud to the couple whose faces are frozen with embarrassment. I’m on the landing, feeling queer. And then I’m in Tilly’s room and …