Chapter 4
Melody
Melody traverses the city on an electric scooter.
Helmet and personalised fluorescent-pink high-vis jacket on, she zooms past stationary traffic, feeling like the only moving, free thing in the congested town.
From her apartment in Dublin’s city centre in Spencer Dock, over Samuel Beckett Bridge, across to the south side of the city to Pembroke Street, one of Dublin’s Georgian streets, she reaches the location where she records the Night and Day podcast.
Melody, renowned dance DJ and host of the weekend radio dance slot Night Owl, is ‘Night’; Prunella Maguire, her co-star, is ‘Day’.
As one of Ireland’s most loved daytime TV presenters, Prunella has amassed huge followers on social media who lap her up, cloning themselves to become lookalike versions.
With a jewellery line, a well-being retreat company, clothing lines and more, she is also a mother to twin girls and wife to business mogul Jasper Maguire.
She is filtered perfection, even in person.
Her outfits are stylish, selected from an Instagram-perfect white wardrobe with plush white carpets. She is impeccable.
Melody and Prunella really are night and day.
Melody folds her scooter and carries it down the iron staircase to the Trance Production studio in the basement.
She removes her helmet, fluffs her hair and is greeted by the scent of coffee.
Melody finds Prunella at a table, drinking something green and lumpy, her face full of TV make-up from New Day, the daytime magazine-style TV show she presents.
‘Morning,’ Melody says, despite the afternoon hour. Melody works late nights so many of her afternoons are her mornings.
‘Good morning,’ Prunella replies, with a smile, taking in Melody’s outfit.
Melody’s style is festival-chic, whether she’s at a festival or not.
Which requires wearing pretty dresses with scuffed trainers or boots, or like today her low baggy jeans, an ‘Eat Vegetables’ T-shirt, with dainty gold jewellery.
Her mastered festival fashion, glam and laid-back at the same time, is popular with people who are intrigued by her eclectic combinations.
She’s like a toddler who’s allowed to dress herself from the fancy dress costume box.
‘Good show today?’
‘You mean, you didn’t watch?’ Prunella asks, innocent big blue eyes, skin like porcelain. Heavily powdered porcelain.
‘I did watch, but I was mixing music; did you know that “Tainted Love” can be mashed up with “Smells Like Teen Spirit”?’ She’d spent the morning getting lost in playing her ‘lab’, mixing songs together that have no business going together, feeling like she’s solved a puzzle when a transition works, when she discovers songs from different genres and eras that have synchronised tempos and compatible harmonies.
It’s like finding treasure. It’s like every best couple she knows – the more opposite in personality they seem to be, the longer they stay together.
She always ends a session at home feeling revitalised for the day.
‘The food looked interesting. I don’t know how you eat all that stuff live on TV, was the chicken even cooked?’
Melody wants to hear that the studio sinks aren’t real, that the chicken is sometimes raw, but Prunella sticks to the script. ‘It was tasty,’ she says optimistically, as if appealing to a certain invisible demographic in the room.
‘You think parsley juice is tasty,’ Melody says, sitting down and flicking through the newspapers for inspiration for their podcast chat.
‘And then after that you talked about how gonorrhoea is on the rise,’ Melody cackles.
‘I don’t know how you get away with talking about that stuff in the middle of the day.
If I was to talk about it live at a festival, where it would actually count, we’d be cancelled.
So, give me one interesting fact about the clap. ’
‘Melody must be here,’ Ed, the producer, says, stepping out of the studio, and catching her last sentence. ‘Save the juicy stuff for the podcast.’
Once they’ve moved into the studio Prunella kicks off her runners and folds her legs under her on the couch.
She hugs a fluffy pillow. She looks like every ten-year-old’s perfect sleepover date, every woman’s best friend, every man’s secret crush.
But there’s something choreographed about her pose.
Melody eyes her shoes, perhaps she’s trying to get them on camera.
Pod fans can view the conversation as well as listen.
Is there a new sponsorship deal that Melody doesn’t know about?
Melody’s eyes travel to her feet which are sparkling under the studio lights, but it’s not her toes that are different, it’s the tattoo which is snaking up her foot.
‘Do you like it?’ Prunella asks, wriggling her toes. ‘We’re selling temporary tattoos on the website. Just added. I can give you some if you like.’
‘Cool,’ Melody says, pulling her mic close and glancing at her notes. ‘But I have twelve real ones on my body.’
Prunella smiles, hearing the dig. ‘I was never allowed to have tattoos when I was modelling. The designers frowned on them.’
‘I think things have changed since your modelling days,’ Melody teases.
Each episode of Night and Day goes like this: romance-obsessed Prunella shares real-life love stories that she has unearthed, and meet-cute stories.
This is legitimate. Prunella is obsessed with asking people how they met, with romance, with love stories, and it’s not just for the recording, Melody has been present when Prunella has asked absolute strangers how they met.
But this is Night and Day, so Melody is here to offer the anti-love story.
It’s based on her theory that love sucks, that full-time commitment is a life-sucking chore.
This is also legitimate. Prunella thinks Melody is anti-love because her parents weren’t great role models.
Her mother, a hardcore groupie in her youth, made a baby with a rock and roll legend who didn’t stick around, and went on to produce many half-siblings around the world that Melody has no relationship with.
Prunella’s facts are right but Melody disagrees with her theory.
She just believes that fulfilment can be found in more meaningful ways.
Today she will discuss ‘sell the ring, do the thing’ where men and women sell their engagement or wedding ring and do something with the money.
It can be something life-changing or something small but, no matter what it is, it’s enormously better than being married.
And that’s how they roll week after week.
They’re both so genuinely different sometimes they could kill the forty-five-minute podcast debating over just one item.
So they do the preamble and patter about what they’ve been up to that week, Melody choosing to talk about an unofficial self-assigned hairy-bum contest in a night club during a set where a group of men out on a stag night lined up to see who had the hairiest arse, and Prunella about how she’d answered the door to a take-away delivery wearing an LED face mask, and then it’s Melody’s turn for her item.
‘I just can’t imagine selling the ring after breaking up,’ Prunella says. Her wedding finger is filled with a selection of sparkles. Melody could retire off the sale of Prunella’s rings. ‘Does anybody really do that?’
‘I’ve just told you three stories of what people did.’
‘I know but, anyone we know?’
‘I know one person.’ And in an effort to prove to Prunella that she’s wrong, Melody barely thinks before saying, ‘My ex-boyfriend.’
Prunella gasps. Melody rarely, in fact never, discusses her personal life.
‘You had a boyfriend?’ Prunella asks, shocked.
‘Ha. Ha,’ Melody says drily. ‘Yes, I know it’s hard to believe but I did.’
‘He sold a ring that you gave him?’
‘He sold a ring that he wanted to give me. It was an engagement ring.’ Even though Melody introduced the topic, she’s not liking where it’s now going. She never discusses her private life.
Prunella can’t believe it. She’s fanning herself and gasping. ‘You were engaged? But you hate love. I have so many questions I don’t know where to start.’
‘I don’t hate love, that’s ridiculous, and I wasn’t engaged, well almost, kind of, but that’s not the story.’ Melody pivots quickly to a more comfortable topic. ‘I’ll tell you what he bought. He invested in a food truck. With me.’
Melody is lucky to have been able to make a living from DJing, live and on broadcast radio, but she does have one other form of income thanks to Sam – sweet, adorable, ex-boyfriend Sam – who’d helped make a shared dream of theirs become a reality.
They are the proud owners of a Food Truck, ‘Stuffed’, specialising in stuffed jacket potatoes and a half-dozen choice of fillings.
Sam, a qualified chef, and now married with a baby, had invested in the food truck with her, and she’d be damned if she let it fail. She owed him.
And suddenly this feels like a great idea to discuss.
It’s a bit of free advertisement. The summer is over, the festivals have come to an end.
The busy Christmas season is over. It’s early January and bookings are on her mind.
A small festival here and there to keep them going, nothing huge, Sam has a baby to feed and this food truck was her idea.
She has to keep it going and this is the best way. She can’t let him down.
‘You actually work in the truck?’
‘Sometimes, yes. If you book the prestige package you can get me as the DJ for your event and the food truck too,’ she explains.
‘Sam’s the chef, he’s the food genius and we always have excellent music in the truck, with a dance area outside.
I have been known to spin a few tunes in the truck while he sizzles the spuds. ’
Prunella laughs. ‘You guys sound like the perfect team,’ she says, eyes glistening. She literally lights up like a bulb when she’s prodding people for relationship information. She’s in love with the idea of love. ‘Why didn’t you get married?’
There’s a pause. Then Melody says, trying to keep the edge out of her voice, ‘Not everyone has to bow to societal and cultural conformity, Prunella. Sometimes people can have individual thoughts, as deviant as being single may seem. But I will fly the flag for outliers all around the world.’ She can’t quite muster a laugh.
Melody had brought the topic up but she hadn’t meant for it to get personal. She’s a DJ, a music journalist, dabbling in a new lifestyle podcast. She feels like a fish out of water and she may have just made a costly mistake airing a private matter just to win a point.
Prunella smiles, seeing a different, surprisingly defensive side to the usually chill Melody and she doesn’t let it pass.
‘You weren’t lying, your ex really sold the ring and did the thing.
But I don’t know if that tracks with the other stories you told.
He didn’t do it to get away from you to start a new life.
It sounds to me as if he sold the ring to stay close to you.
It’s sweet,’ Prunella continues as Melody’s cheeks blaze from the heat. ‘You’re still a team.’