Chapter 26
MELODY
Melody drives slowly out of Waterford, not in any rush to get home. She tries hard not to feel rejected, not to be filled with self-pity. She feels completely unwanted, which seems fair as she was the one to push everyone away, but a bitter pill to swallow.
She crawls along and cars overtake her as she tries to figure out some way to be able to turn the car around and undo everything.
Leaving the supermarket where she stopped for some snacks for the drive home, she sees a familiar camper van parked on its own away in the corner of the carpark near the stock entrance.
There’s nobody in the front seats. She knocks on the door and hears the scuffle of movement inside.
Derek opens the door and his face opens in surprise. He has always looked old. Now he’s an older version of his old self. He looks like he hasn’t slept for days and pats down his dishevelled hair.
‘Derek,’ she says, her voice filled with genuine pity.
His eyes fill with tears. ‘Come in, come in.’
It’s stuffy inside, smells like the inside of a sock, very much like he has lived inside it without opening the windows.
The booth table at the back of the camper van is hugged by a couch and is covered with jigsaw puzzle pieces where the border has been completed and he has moved to the centre. The radio is playing something by George Gershwin.
‘I was about to make dinner, will you join me?’
Melody’s about to decline but he seems so alone and she’s got nothing better to do so she accepts.
She sits at the table eyeing up the jigsaw puzzle wondering if it’s the same one that tormented her mother and ended their relationship.
It’s covering the entire table. Either an act of defiance or Derek has learned nothing, though it doesn’t matter now.
‘Thank you for the record player. It was very kind of you.’
‘Did you visit your mother?’
‘I did.’
‘What did she say?’
‘Not a whole lot. She was busy with the garden. She sent me packing pretty quickly.’
‘You too?’ He places two fillets of fish on a pan filled with butter and garlic and the smell immediately fills the air and Melody’s mouth waters.
‘I don’t know what happened,’ he says, masterfully cooking the fish.
‘One minute she was angry with me about the jigsaw puzzle, and then the next she was throwing the pieces around the room and telling me I had to leave. I thought she was having some kind of episode. I thought that with a bit of distance, she would change her mind or feel better but she seems to be holding firm.’
‘Have you been staying here since then?’
‘She gave me the camper van on Monday. I was staying with Karl and Gemma.’ His son and his wife. ‘But they’ve had a new baby so it wasn’t right to stay.’
‘Congratulations, I hadn’t heard. I’m sorry, Derek.’
‘So am I.’
‘I don’t want you two to be apart.’
He looks at her, a glance over his glasses to see if she’s serious. She has probably never communicated any positive thoughts on their relationship to him before. She never particularly felt it until they broke up. She liked knowing that her mother was happy, that she wasn’t alone.
‘I’ve been listening to your podcast,’ he says, to her surprise. ‘And I think there’s something in what you’re talking about with the love locks on the Grace Plunkett Bridge.’
‘You do?’ she practically splutters. Derek is one of the most practical, pragmatic people she knows. ‘You don’t believe in things like that.’
‘I do now, Melody. It’s like a spell has been cast over your mother.
I don’t recognise her. I hear what she’s saying, and I value her words and her feelings, but it was like the flick of a switch.
I know of two other sets of people who also separated, friends of ours who we met when we were travelling.
One couple we met in France, and the other in Split, Croatia, when we were camping.
They were looking for places to visit in Ireland and we told them to go to Kilmainham Gaol.
They both put love locks on the bridge. They’ve both split up too.
Both in their sixties, grandparents! They listened to your podcast because they know about you from us of course, and they reached out to me on Facebook to let me know.
There’s a lot of us counting on you, Melody, to look into this.
You must continue your research. You have all of us behind you. ’ He raises his fist in the air.
He finishes the fish by splashing butter over the top, chops dill and sprinkles it on top.
Melody expects him to clear the puzzle pieces before he serves her.
She daren’t touch them because experience tells her that moving his pieces has dire consequences.
But he places the plate before Melody on top of the jigsaw puzzle pieces as if they’re not even there.
‘I’m not sure what I can do, Derek. What do you want me to do?’
He sits down opposite her. ‘Be careful of the fine bones. Can you locate the locks?’
‘The bridge guy says they went to metal recycling.’
His shoulders drop, then lift again. ‘Have they been recycled?’
‘I assume so. I don’t know.’
‘You haven’t had confirmation?’
‘No.’ And her gut instinct is constantly telling her that Al hasn’t destroyed them. He just doesn’t seem that type of guy. Apart from being broken by his ex and best friend, he loves love, even more than bridges. She’d imagine he’d rather save love than a bridge.
‘Well you must find out! The love locks are the link to this. We must get them back and reconnect them to the bridge. Maybe it’s a message from Grace Plunkett herself. A message from the grave. Perhaps she’s trying to tell us something. And this is one way to get our attention, isn’t it?’
Derek’s coming over all Doc in Back to the Future. There’s a franticness to him. A wild man who’s spent too much time alone in a camper van.
‘What do you think she’s trying to tell us?’ Melody asks, concerned about his mental health.
As if reading her thoughts, he says, ‘I would try anything to get your mother back.’
She considers making a joke about moving the puzzle pieces off the table, but then realises that’s maybe a lesson for her mother to learn too. Why should Derek tidy them away for Belinda? Why should Belinda have to live with a kitchen table she can’t use?
Maybe that’s what Grace is trying to tell them all.
Stop being so selfish and learn about sacrifice.
Joe sacrificed himself for his country, she sacrificed herself and all future love, for him, for this one short beautiful marriage that became known all around the world.
Their love helped spread the news of a greater cause. Love did that. Not fighting.
‘I’m sorry to let you down, Derek, but I can’t do any of that now. I quit the podcast. This is delicious by the way,’ she says quickly, hoping she can hide that revelation behind a compliment.
He looks at her over his glasses which are on the tip of his nose and takes a moment before replying. ‘You used to play tennis when you were young, why did you give that up?’
She hadn’t thought about that for a long time. She laughs and tries to remember. ‘Because I was entered into a round robin that I didn’t want to get into.’
‘Why did you stop playing the guitar?’
Okay, she gets it now, they’re getting into the fact she’s a quitter. He always had a thing about this, while Belinda saw it as her trying new things, or at least that’s how her mother justified the constant ending of things Melody was good at.
‘Because there was a girl in the class who was much better than me and I knew I’d never be as good as her.’ She laughs. ‘And before you read into it too much, which you’re already doing, I left the podcast because Prunella stole my story. She put the subject of my story on her TV show.’
He frowns. ‘Isn’t it both your story?’
‘It’s both our podcast but the story was my idea, I mean, it was …
’ she trails off, realising how irrational it sounds.
‘And yes, New Day promoted our podcast but she was twisting it to make it look like …’ she trails off again.
She sighs and sits back. ‘Yeah. I really quit because we’re a month away from signing a new contract and I saw a way out. But I’ve never had that with music.’
‘Neither has your dad,’ he says gently.
He picks up their empty plates and carries them to the sink. He pulls out a drawer and retrieves a glossy magazine and places it down on the table, on top of the jigsaw pieces.
Melody looks up at him in surprise.
‘This just came out today. One of the perks of living beside the shop, the girls in there bring them out to me to read, think they feel sorry for me. Have you read this?’
She shakes her head.
Her dad, Freddie Yates, is on the front cover of a glossy magazine.
An at-home interview and photoshoot with his daughter Cressida, a nineteen-year-old model of sorts who appeared in the last season of Love Island.
He looks craggy and ancient beside her smooth youthful complexion.
She looks as many young women do now, luscious glossy lips, a smooth shiny forehead, plumped cheeks; like the perfect sex doll.
Freddie Yates’s hair is coiffed and dyed black, he still has lots of it, his old drug-rotten teeth have been replaced with new impressive veneers.
He was always skinny and wore tight clothing but he looks a little more human now out of his tight trousers.
They have both been primped and preened by a crew off shot but as cynical as Melody tries to be there’s no denying that it’s a sweet photograph.
The headline reads, ‘It took me five children to become a good dad, but I am now – Cressida and Freddie Yates at home in their Cotswolds farm’.