Chapter 24
Melody
Belinda’s home is a cottage in the Waterford countryside.
There’s more garden than there is house, a wrap-around allotment that’s a delight to hares, foxes, butterflies and bees.
Bird boxes, a few hens for her daily organic eggs.
The camper van is gone from the driveway, it was almost bigger than the house; a gaping hole where Derek used to be.
It makes Melody feel sad, which confuses her because she still saw Derek as an interloper: a stranger who arrived into her peaceful feminine home and made her feel uncomfortable.
Melody had never lived with a man before, so Derek’s arrival in their home when she was a teenager unnerved her.
Not because he was creepy, no he was anything but, he was a kind man, thoughtful enough to stay out of her way though he made it clear he wasn’t going to be pushed out of his new house or changed.
It was his maleness that she needed to get used to: the sounds and smells that were so distinctly male.
Women are quiet. They do things quietly.
They bend and fold, shape themselves around people, they are hospitable and adaptable.
They mostly think of others first, themselves second – or at least are supposed to be genetically designed that way.
They are aware of their sounds, the effect they have, the energy they leave, the first impression and the lasting effect.
They consider. They mop their footprints up behind them as they go.
Men are reared to leave their marks. They plant their flags and they pound their chests.
They do what they need to do for themselves first. Needs must. Derek was a noisy nose-blower.
The act was so loud it would wake Melody in the morning.
His sneezes were aggressive and he expelled more air through his mouth than his nostrils, resulting in yells.
In the morning the radio was loud, echoing, the cupboards banging, the cups and saucers clinking, placed down without thought for others who could hear.
Even how he turned the pages of his newspaper was aggressive.
The sudden rustle and snap ruffled her. And at fifteen years of age she was already irritable, everything pretty much annoyed her and felt unfair.
Before Derek moved in, she had been used to having the house to herself when her mum was out or at work but suddenly retired Derek was there.
Even if he stayed out of her way she could hear him.
The guttural throat-clearing, the heavy steps, the whistling.
And the smells. She hated sharing a bathroom.
His Derek man stuff, though neatly ordered in the corner away from hers, knowing to give even her personal items space.
Dark brown bottles, razors and tubes. Tampons and sanitary towels were confined to the deep dark cupboards, not because he wanted this but because fifteen-year-old Melody did.
She would go whole days without saying hi, or only saying hi.
Avoiding his eye so that they wouldn’t converse.
Ignoring him became a full-time job. Pretending he wasn’t there became all-consuming.
Belinda and Derek both gave Melody room and space to adjust to the change but everything felt gross and different, the house had changed and it didn’t feel like it was her home anymore.
It wasn’t the people, it was the smells and sounds that pushed her out.
She left at sixteen years old, failing to finish school, and moved to London to live with her dad.
The one thing she did like about Derek was his record player.
Melody had never seen one before and it took over the storage unit in the living room, his record player, its speakers and his vinyl collection.
Because Melody didn’t have her own collection she listened to Derek’s music.
Belinda was a rock fan, punk rock, hard rock, folk rock on calmer days, but Derek’s was so very different.
He loved synth pop. Watching the record spin was as much a part of the experience as listening to it and Melody loved when he was out so that she could play his music and sit watching it hypnotically spin.
She never scratched his records, she was always respectful to his collection.
She would dust them down, wipe them, she even organised his collection alphabetically.
It truly was the introduction to her deeper music-loving experience. Some noises, she could take.
She pushes open the red gate and Bitsy, Belinda’s Jack Russell, appears at the top of the couch at the window, going berserk.
Belinda comes round the side of the house, in a floral dress, with a polo neck beneath, and a gardening apron, mucky gloves on her hands.
‘Love!’ she says, lighting up.
‘Surprise,’ Melody says, relieved that her presence has been received well. ‘I just popped by because we have the food truck in the whiskey festival.’ She hadn’t told her she was visiting because she worried Belinda would have told her not to.
She hugs her mother but it’s not as tight as she’d like because of the muddy apron and gloves.
Her mother is keeping distance – like an air hug.
Melody could have done with more, a squeeze and a hold, someone to hold her in place, to stop the springs and screws from falling out of her completely because she’s still shaken from her encounter with Sam.
She follows her busy mother around the side of the house, who points out things she’s doing and needs to do this month for the garden, readying it for the spring planting.
She’s distracted by her monumental tasks that must be done before she loses light.
‘Do you have time for a break?’ Melody asks. ‘I’ll make you tea.’
‘Okay,’ Belinda says reluctantly, eyes racing across the garden with a list of things to do in her mind. ‘Yes, that would be nice. I’ll have camomile, please. I’ll just finish up here.’
Melody enters the kitchen. She heats the teapot, locates the teacups. Belinda is old-school and likes teacups and saucers, and, like the interiors of the house, and her mother’s wardrobe, the patterns are gloriously mismatched.
Belinda’s hair was always fire-engine red, dyed, and now she has left it to go naturally grey, apart from two bright red streaks in the front which she leaves down as the grey is pinned back.
Melody sits at the green wooden table, and green wooden chairs, with mismatched cushions on each seat, and watches her mother hunched over her beds, in the bright day.
The kitchen feels different. Silent. No mucus-clearing coughs, no rustling newspaper, no radio with a political debate or anything from Porgy and Bess.
A ticking clock in the hall is the only sound.
The house is lighter, emptier, echoey. All of Derek’s clutter is gone.
A pain rises in her chest, an ache of loss.
How hurt he must feel, at seventy-five years old, to be turfed out on his own.
She raps on the window and Belinda begrudgingly drops her tools and slowly gets to her feet. She stretches her aching joints and comes inside to wash her hands.
‘The cottage looks so different,’ Melody remarks.
‘Doesn’t it look better?’ She sits at the table. ‘I can hear myself think again. It was taking him so long to come and collect his things I had a brainwave and put everything in the camper van and told him to take that, so he drove away with everything, which was handy.’
It seems so cruel, she can’t understand how her mum could be like this, as though a spell has been cast over her. ‘What happened?’
Belinda sighs. ‘I don’t really want to get into it but it began over his jigsaw puzzle.
You know the way he takes over the entire table with his horrendous puzzles.
This was a particularly difficult one that was taking him months.
Months, Melody,’ she says, rolling her eyes and getting agitated at just the thought of it.
‘He was finding one puzzle piece a day if he was lucky. It was a dark Dutch painting, I can’t remember what it’s called.
Miserable. Unless it was a pear, or an orange, all the pieces looked the same.
He was never going to finish it. It was taking up so much space, I couldn’t invite anyone over and he wouldn’t let me move it. And I just flipped.’
It sounded very much like the dishwasher argument. About the dishwasher but not at all about the dishwasher.
‘How are you now?’
‘I’m great thank you, love, as you can see, busy, busy.’
‘So … no regrets?’
‘None.’ Belinda’s eyes flash with defiance and Melody leaves it alone. ‘I see you survived your nights alone?’
‘I took a gig on the first night. And then the second night …’ a silly smile arrives on Melody’s face quite unexpectedly. ‘I met a guy, a really gorgeous guy, and I stayed with him.’
‘That’s nice, love,’ she says pleasantly, the smile not reaching her eyes. She sips her tea.
She’d expected her mother to want to hear the juicy gossip.
‘Do you not want to know about him?’
‘Should I?’
‘What do you mean? If you care, I’ll tell you, but if you’re not bothered, I won’t.’
‘I suppose I’m hesitant, Melody, because you’re never really that bothered.
I don’t want to get invested in the poor man and then he’s never seen nor heard of again.
But that’s okay because that’s how you want it.
’ She leaves a silence. ‘I actually understand you now.’ She looks around the kitchen again and then closes her eyes, hands hugging the teacup. ‘Being alone is bliss.’
‘How are you at night?’
‘Absolutely perfectly fine.’ She’s almost chirping, but there’s something daring in her voice and her eyes.
‘But you were in love with Derek. It seems so sudden.’