Prologue Prologue
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.

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! Melody!” It was her. That woman. Her mother.

“She opened her eyes! Did you see? Just for a second!” Another voice. The man with the bald head. Her father.

Melody breathed in. Her throat and her nose felt like they had been doused in acid; the smoky air burned like fire as it passed down into her lungs. It stuck for a while, halfway to her gullet, like a lit match. She held it there and waited a heartbeat for her body to expel it. But for that tiny moment, lying on the pavement in front of her house, the moon shining down onto her, her thoughts muffled and her parents at her side, she felt suspended somewhere both dark and light, painful and comfortable, a place where her life finally made some sense. She smiled again and then she coughed.

They were smiling at her, her mother and father, smiling with sooty faces and frazzled hair. Her mother put her hand to her hair and stroked it. “Oh thank God!” she cried breathlessly. “Thank God!”

Melody blinked at her and tried to talk, but she had no voice. The fire had taken it. She turned to look at her father. There were tear tracks running through the dirt on his face. He held her hand inside his.

“Don’t try to talk,” he said. His voice was raw and gravelly, but full of tenderness. “We’re here. We’re here.”

In her peripheral vision, Melody could see the strobe of blue lights playing out in the splintered windows of the house. She allowed her mother to pull her into a sitting position and she gazed around her at an altogether unexpected vision. A house, her house, roaring and alive with flames. Crowds of people, huddled together in dressing gowns and pajamas, watching the fire as though it were a Guy Fawkes Night offering. Two big red engines drawing up in the middle of the street, men in yellow helmets unfurling thick hosepipes and rushing toward them, and the moon still hanging there, fat and bright and oblivious.

She got to her feet and felt her knees trembling precariously beneath her.

“She was unconscious for a while,” she heard her mother saying to somebody. “Out cold for about five minutes.”

Somebody took her elbow and moved her gently toward the bright light of an ambulance. She was wrapped in a blanket and fed oxygen through a strange-smelling plastic mask. Her eyes were riveted by the mayhem around her. Slowly reality seeped through the layers of smoke and chaos and something hit her like a thunderbolt.

“My painting!”

“It’s OK,” said her mother. “It’s here. Clive saved it.”

“Where? Where is it?”

“There.” She pointed at the curb.

The painting was propped up against the pavement. Melody stared at it, at the Spanish girl with the huge blue eyes and the polka-dot dress. It moved her in some strange, unknowable way. It soothed her and reassured her like it had always done, ever since she was a small girl.

“Can you look after it?” she croaked. “Make sure it doesn’t get stolen?”

Her parents glanced at each other, clearly reassured by her preoccupation with a shoddy junk-shop painting.

“We’ll have to take her into hospital,” said a man. “Get her checked over. Just to be on the safe side.”

Her mother nodded.

“I’ll stay here,” said her father. “Keep an eye on things.”

All three of them turned then, as one, to acknowledge the shocking sight of their home disintegrating in front of their very eyes, to ash and rubble.

“That’s my house,” said Melody.

Her parents nodded.

“And you’re my mum and dad.”

They nodded again and pulled her toward them into an embrace.

Melody felt safe there, inside her parents’ arms. She remembered a few moments ago, lying in her bed, a pair of strong arms pulling her, carrying her through the roasting house, toward the fresh air. And that was all she could remember. Her father saving her life. The moon staring down at her. The Spanish girl in the painting telling her that everything was going to be all right.

She lay down on the crisp white sheets of the emergency bed and watched as the doors were pulled shut. The noise, the lights, the crackle of destruction all faded away and the ambulance took her to hospital.