The Truth About Melody Browne

She felt like a creature born to reside on the bottom of the ocean floor, dark and flat and half-blind, slowly rising through the icy water to the glittering light above.

Parents, melody realized, were the linchpin of normality, even when they were far from normal themselves. Parents, even distracted, slightly ambivalent parents, acted as a kind of strainer through which life got poured. They were there, in essence, to catch the lumpy bits. Without a parent, life felt oblique and directionless. Without a parent, the world was too close for comfort

It was as though someone had opened her up

How do you know all this stuff?” “Mum. Mum knows everything about everything. If Mum doesn’t know about it, it hasn’t happened.

But Melody didn’t want to say anything. The thought of saying something made Melody feel like she was about to push her hand into an electric socket or a live flame. So she kept her mouth closed. It felt good. It felt smooth and gentle and strong. Words were messy. Thoughts, she now realized, were far superior. Thoughts could be arranged into boxes, filed away. Words were too public, too immediate. Words were for idiots.

By the time they reached Tooting, it was raining heavily and they huddled together beneath a small Hello Kitty umbrella pulled out from the bowels of Emily’s roomy shoulder bag.

That was her role, as a mother, to paint the world in the cleanest lines, the brightest colors, to protect him from the vagaries and uncertainties of life.

as far as kids are concerned, anyone over twenty is an old git, we all sort of merge together into one mass of sadness.

There was something silly and schoolyardish about the idea of hypnotizing somebody, the sort of thing that someone would only learn to do in order to get better-looking people to pay them attention.

It was a treasure box of memories; photographs, souvenirs, postcards pinned to a cork board. Melody and her son had grown up together in this flat and she wanted, consciously or not, to make sure that not one iota of that experience ended up in a landfill. She wanted it all to hand, every friend’s visit, every school play, every Christmas morning, every last memory, because memory was something that Melody valued more than life itself.

the past was just a dusty fragment of what her life had turned out to be,

She closed her eyes again and smiled. Around her she could hear the rapturous applause of creaking timber, blistering paint, popping windows, a fire engine’s alarm wailing dramatically somewhere in the distance.

Melody Browne opened her eyes and saw the moon, a perfect white circle, like a bullet hole shot through the sky. It was fully lit and beamed down upon her, as if she were the star of the show.

The thought of saying something made Melody feel like she was about to push her hand into an electric socket or a live flame. So she kept her mouth closed. It felt good. It felt smooth and gentle and strong. Words were messy. Thoughts, she now realized, were far superior. Thoughts could be arranged into boxes, filed away. Words were too public, too immediate. Words were for idiots.

lightness come upon her, a sense that there was a centre to everything after all.