Read Vince and Joy for Free Online Page B

Melon?’
    ‘Uh-huh. With two ls.’
    ‘No way’
    ‘Yeah. Mellon. Could have been worse. I could have been a girl with enormous tits.’
    ‘I think it’s a beautiful name.’
    ‘Do you?’
    ‘Yes. It’s pretty.’
    ‘Hmm. I never thought of it like that before. I even thought about changing it after Chris and mum got married – changing it to Chris’s surname.’
    ‘Which is?’ ‘Jebb.’
    ‘Oh, no.’ She frowned and shook her head. ‘Mellon’s much nicer.’
    ‘You reckon?’
    ‘Oh, God, yeah. I’ll swap with you, if you like.’
    ‘Why? What’s yours?’
    ‘Downer. Nice, eh?’
    ‘Oh. It’s not so bad. Especially with your first name. They kind of cancel each other out.’
    Joy smiled. ‘I guess so,’ she said. ‘But the therapists had a field day with it.’
    ‘Therapists?
    ‘Yes. Therapists.’ Joy breathed in. She wanted to tell him. She wanted him to know her. Τ suppose it’s only fair for you to know that you’re sitting in a pub with a nutter.’
    ‘Yeah, right.’
    ‘No, seriously. I spent four weeks in hospital earlier this year. I had a nervous breakdown.’ She stopped and smiled tightly, waiting for his reaction, knowing already that he would understand.
    And then she told him everything – all the things she’d vowed never to tell anyone because they were so sordid and so seedy. She told him about the day she’d got back from school and found her father sitting on a chair in the kitchen with his trousers around his ankles and Toni Moran from across the road sitting astride his lap and how Toni Moran had carried on pumping up and down obliviously for a full five strokes after she’d walked in, while her father stared at her in mute horror over her shoulder.
    She told him about how her father had given her £500 in crisp £
10
notes not to tell her mother and how she’d spent it all on clothes from Kensington Market which she’d taken back the following weekend because she’d felt so guilty and how she’d then hidden the £500 in a shoebox in the bottom of her wardrobe and how for weeks afterwards she’d had to watch her mother kowtowing to her father, cooking his dinner, polishing his shoes, rubbing his feet on the sofa at night, in the full knowledge that he was still conducting his affair with Toni Moran. She told him how much she’d wanted to tell her mother but hadn’t dared, too scared of the repercussions which she could only imagine would impact harder on her mother than on her father, and how she’d learned to recognize the smell of Toni Moran on her father when he came home from the golf course or a committee meeting.
    She told him about the awful sense of complicity that her father had tried to foster between the two of them, as if the duplicity was some great adventure they were sharing and how instead of getting easier it had become harder and harder to keep the secret locked away inside.
    It had all come to a head while she was going through the stress of university interviews, dragging a twenty-pound Α1 portfolio around the country in the middle of an unseasonal heatwave, sitting outside offices with a dozen other candidates, knowing that they were all better than her, wondering why the hell she was even bothering.
    She began to get this unsettling, panicky feeling all the time, as if her body was nothing to do with her.She’d forget how to walk, sometimes, how to make her legs move. And other times she’d forget how to breathe properly and her heart would stop, then start racing, then stop again. She spent so much time focusing inside herself, existing inside a strange, tinny little bubble of self-obsession, that she became absent-minded and distracted to an almost comical extent. She left things everywhere she went, forgot entire conversations, and failed to turn up for prearranged appointments. But she didn’t know how close she was to falling apart until one spring afternoon when she turned up for an interview at Chelsea School of Art –