The Truth About Melody Browne by Lisa Jewell Page B

in thick ropes of chestnut, but she wasn’t a particularly nice shape (she had her father’s legs, apparently) and her face wasn’t all symmetrical like Charlotte’s. Charlotte’s face looked like someone had sat down with a protractor and a very sharp pencil and spent ages designing it. Melody’s face was more slapdash. Unconventional, according to her mother. Melody wasn’t sure she liked the idea of unconventional. Anything with an ‘un’ in front of it tended to be a bad thing, as far as she could tell.
    ‘In fact,’ continued Charlotte, ‘I wish no one in your whole entire family had ever been born, going all the way back to your great-great-great-great-grandparents.’
    Melody gulped. She didn’t even know she had any great-great-great-great-grandparents.
    ‘That way,’ continued Charlotte, ‘there wouldn’t be even the tiniest chance of any of your relatives getting together and making you, even by accident.’ She turned the Girls’ World around and began to comb the hair at the back. ‘What shall I do,’ she said, pulling at the yellow hair with her fingertips, ‘a plait or a chignon?’
    ‘A plait,’ said Melody, feeling slightly more confident about the precise definition and pronunciation of the word.
    ‘It’s nothing personal, you know,’ Charlotte said, dividing the hair roughly into three sections. ‘I’m sure, under different circumstances that you are completely OK. It’s just that this is only a small house and you and your father take up way too much room . And also, your dad smells funny.’
    ‘No he doesn’t!’
    ‘Yes, he does. He smells all vinegary, like a Banda machine.’
    ‘Well, that’s because he’s a printer. He can’t help it.’
    ‘No, I know he can’t. I’m not saying it’s his fault. I’m just saying I wish he’d go and take his smell somewhere else. Do you realise,’ Charlotte said, feeling around in a pot full of elastic bands, ‘that before my mother met your smelly father, she was about to get back with my dad?’
    Melody threw her a sceptical look.
    ‘Yes, she cooked him dinner with Champagne and everything. And then your stupid dad turned up on the scene.’
    ‘But what about Mai?’
    ‘What about Mai?’
    ‘Well, isn’t your dad married to her now?’
    ‘Yeah? So what? Mai’s about as important as your stupid dad. If my mum clicked her fingers, my dad would just dump Mai in the middle of the street and come running. Seriously.’ She wound a lime-green hairband tightly around the end of a plait and smiled. ‘There,’ she said, ‘now that is what I would call a perfect plait.’
    Melody stared at the plait. It was very neat indeed. And then she stared at Charlotte’s fingernails. They were ragged and bitten. They looked incongruous against her flawless skin and perfectly parted hair. Something about them made Melody feel sad inside. She reached out and touched Charlotte’s hand, with her fingertips.
    Charlotte looked at her aghast. ‘Jesus Christ, child,’ she said, ‘get your grubby hands off me immediately before I scream the whole house down!’
    Melody snatched her hand back and let it fall onto her lap.
    Melody hated saying goodbye to her father, knowing that he was going to carry on being there, sleeping in his big soft bed with Jacqui, eating Jacqui’s delicious suppers at the lovely shiny table with the big chandelier, watching whatever he liked on the TV that lived in a mahogany cabinet while Charlotte sat on the armchair beside him, wearing her posh pyjamas, swinging her long legs over the arm and eating as much popcorn as she wanted. Ken’s house seemed so bare and wooden compared to Jacqui’s smothered house. And her mother seemed so lifeless compared to the bustling, colourful Jacqui. And where life in Jacqui’s house made perfect sense – Jacqui loved Daddy, Daddy loved Jacqui, Charlotte hated Melody and Jacqui pretended to like Melody – in Ken’s house life was a series of dead ends and cul-de-sacs and