Unchained Melanie by Judy Astley

Author:Judy Astley
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781446437889
Publisher: Transworld

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Cherry had forgiven Melanie for the loss of badger. And so she should, Mel thought, seeing as she had just bought her a substantial lunch at the River Café to make up for it. They were on their way to an exhibition, a private view held at the unusual time of 2 p.m. to catch, according to Cherry, the school-run-mother trade. ‘They’re the ones who make the decisions about what goes on the walls. And they’ll all turn up because they’re grateful to be asked to a grown-up event in the daytime,’ Cherry told her as they walked up the Fulham Palace Road, looking backwards for an available taxi.

‘I can understand that. When Rosa was little, the only discussions I seemed to have were with other mums who had some small person twined round their legs. You’d be forever saying something like, “Did you see that play on BBC2 last night no darling don’t eat the ice cream from the wrong end.” Completely mad conversations that were only half there and never went anywhere.’

‘Well, I wouldn’t know about that, but I know how to get a woman to buy a painting,’ Cherry said, flinging out her arm to hail a fast-approaching taxi. ‘And you’ll like the artist – she paints domestic interior scenes, a bit like those old Dutch paintings but about this century instead. Great wobbling oversized women, every bit of cellulite on show, staggering beneath mounds of laundry, that sort of thing.’

The gallery was in the middle of a row of chic shops at the Notting Hill end of Kensington and was indeed, as Cherry had predicted, crammed with women clutching drinks and chatting to each other – few seemed to be taking much notice of the paintings. Mel overheard words familiar from the gym locker-room vocabulary range such as ‘scholarship’, ‘au pair’, ‘exorbitant’ and ‘Sardinia’. Collectively, the women all looked remarkably similar – mid-thirties, predominantly pinky-beige in colouring, with chin-length highlighted English-mouse hair and ditsy little tight cardigans in sugared-almond colours worn over black trousers. Mel wondered how many of them had independent careers other than being full-time wives and mothers. She tried not to do them an injustice: any or every one of them might be a skiving novelist just like her, or an off-duty lawyer, a nurse or a night-shift police surgeon.

Whatever these women filled their daily lives with, the contrast between their sleek, well-kept appearance and the subjects of the paintings could hardly have been greater. The artist, as Cherry had told her, had painted big angry canvases crammed with ironic social realism (so Melanie read on the catalogue, and which she didn’t feel qualified to dispute). She particularly liked a six-foot-square scene depicting a kitchen table piled high with family detritus. There were school-books, a computer, newspapers, junk mail, a sleeping cat, half a Lego castle – anything but food – the table looked as if it had never been used for meals. In the corner, cowering against a big fridge, lurked a fat woman spooning baked beans into her mouth, guiltily, covertly, cold from the tin.

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