Page 1 of Love Unlocked

1

MELODY

‘No.’

In the distance, a train rattles rhythmically along the tracks, sounding like a beating heart. At first, Melody thinks it’s her own heart. She feels it coming long before it arrives, from deep down, vibrating through the ground, up through her body where she’s tucked up in bed, wide awake and alert.

Her apartment building hugs the tracks. The rumble of trains, the squeal of brakes and the sudden sound of the train horn has never disturbed her. She likes how the speeding carriages create a speckled light as they race by, like a silent disco on her living room wall. She’s comforted by the train’s rhythm, the ebb and flow of the slow build, the crash of its arrival, the diminishing sound as it disappears down the line. She likes its persistence and consistence, that if she was to stand on the railings of her balcony and stretch herself to her limit, fingers positioned elegantly as a ballerina, she could almost touch it. She’s comforted by the fleeting presence of hundreds of humans right outside her window. She likes the way it makes her feel that she’s not alone.

Because Melody doesn’t like to be alone.

Her cortisone levels are high. Soon the trains will end, the last one will leave central Dublin at 11.30 p.m. and there will no longer be people outside, no sounds to distract her from the terrifying silence that consumes her apartment. Hopefully her delicate heart will settle.

Usually Sam is beside her.

He had tried to propose to her during dinner tonight. She’d sensed it in the way he was acting, in the way the waiting staff in the restaurant treated them. There was an air of expectancy, something they were all excited about, something that was making Sam act off. Melody had started to sweat. She felt as though a rubber band was wrapped around her throat. Her skin felt too tight, like she needed to unzip her membrane and climb out.

Together five years, she knew that she didn’t want to marry him, she didn’t want to marry anyone. She’d been battling these thoughts ever since they’d become professional wedding-goers to their friends’ weddings. With each wedding, unique and special in their own right, she’d wondered what type she would like. None of them had been for her. Her growing discomfort was so immense it had made her feel something different at each occasion; nervous, snappy, wild, weird. She’d drunk too much, she’d not drunk at all, she’d gone home early, she’d been the last one to leave, they’d argued about nothing, they’d argued about everything. She didn’t know, quite frankly, what kind of wedding guest she was going to be on any given wedding, never mind what kind of bride, until she’d realised and decided, that there would never be a wedding at all. Melody did not want to get married at all. To anyone. Since deciding that she had been filled with a beautiful peace.

But she’d not yet shared that piece of information with her boyfriend of five years.

She couldn’t allow the proposal to play out. She couldn’t tell him no in front of everyone. She couldn’t humiliate him, hurt him. But she also couldn’t lie.

Sam is a beautiful person, he has a heart of gold. Everyone should have a Sam, just not her. She’d stopped his hand from snaking through the tableware, her hand firmly on his.

‘Please don’t ask me what you’re about to ask me. I can’t.’

She’d watched his heart break. She’d watched pain and humiliation manifest in real time and she’d caused it. It was like watching a horrific accident occur, it seemed to happen in slow motion. She saw his dreams crushed, a woman he loved transform into a monster, a friend he knew transform into a stranger. She’ll never stop seeing it. The cogs turning in his head, the message being sent to his heart, his body reacting. The slump, the immediate severing of their deep connection. The slice right through the invisible something that keeps people together.

She hated herself saying it, more than he hated her right then, and when he’d go home and spend hours, days, nights, weeks and possibly years reliving the moment, his hatred for her growing like mould on dead fruit, she knew she’d hate herself even more than that.

And now, the evening over, Sam gone, really gone, Melody, who hates to be alone at night, lies in bed alone, replaying the slow-motion heartbreak in her head.

She listens out for approaching trains for company, hoping for a connection with near empty carriages. The trains are like a heartbeat, chugging on and on.

2

AL

‘Yes.’

Al and his girlfriend Tara pull up outside her family’s home in rural Cork. It’s so heavily decorated with Christmas lights you could see it on the headland from a mile away, perhaps from space.

‘Whoa,’ Al says, blinking against the full force of the lights.

‘I know. Daddy loves Christmas.’

‘He loves electricity.’

‘Are you nervous?’ she asks.

‘Not at all.’

It’s his first Christmas with her family. A couple for three years, they’d previously gone their own ways for the holiday but this year they’re together. Driving from Dublin to Cork on Christmas Eve, playing Christmas songs in the car, Al’s heart is full. It’s like the opening sequence to one of those corny Christmas movies that Tara loves and that Al scoffs at but secretly enjoys.

‘We’ll get the bags later,’ he says calmly, ‘let’s go inside and say hi first.’

The door opens as soon as they step onto the porch and they’re welcomed with the loudest, ‘SURPRISE!’