I remember the exact moment Mum realised he had actually disappeared and wasn’t just somewhere sleeping things off for longer than usual, or stuck in the office on a deadline without calling, which often happened. I can see her now, rubbing her massive belly with this weird sort of half smile that she wore practically the whole time she was pregnant with Jed, answering the phone and then turning suddenly to dust. I was sitting at the kitchen table, waiting for Dad to come home so there would be another boy in the house, and I was watching her. She was really beautiful when she picked up the phone – in my memory she sort of glows and the lighting is soft and everything – and by the time she put it down, maybe two and a half minutes later, she was grey and old and looked like she was going to throw up.
(She did, all night and the next day and they had to take her into hospital because she wasn’t keeping anything down and she hadn’t slept and everyone was worried about the baby.)
The phone call was from a friend of Dad’s at The Times called Nigel Moon, who said the police had found our car in a field somewhere in Hampshire, and was his passport at home or was there a chance he had it with him, and he thought she should know. He got to her about five minutes before the police because while she was throwing up in the downstairs loo there was a knock on the door and it was them. (Dad’s passport was in a drawer upstairs, next to Mum’s.)
And after the big, big fuss there was nothing. In a few weeks people began to get bored or forget, and they drifted away and left us to our own private chaos. Mum had Jed and they both cried a lot in her room, Mercy stopped speaking for maybe three months, and I walked around lost and got into a lot of fights.
There’s a definite stigma attached to you when someone in your family goes missing like that. A big question mark, a skeleton in your cupboard, a dirty shadow. In the beginning when everyone was all keen and interested, actually they didn’t care at all, they were just looking for something nasty, for dad’s guilty secrets, for the cracks in our family that must have opened into massive caverns and swallowed him whole.
Was he having an affair? Was he mixed up in anything illegal? Was he murdered? Did we do it? Did he kill himself? Why? Was he having an affair? And round and round like a dog chasing its own tail until we put the telly in the cupboard and took the batteries out of the radio and stopped looking at newspapers or answering the door or going out.
Every so often now something comes out about dad in the paper, mostly on a weekend, in the magazine or buried in the review section or whatever. I think the name Pete Swain must be on a kind of reserve list of the missing because he resurfaces every now and again with Lord Lucan and Richie Manic and Shergar, part of a rota for writers with nothing to do. In a way, going missing like that does make a good story, whoever you are. Mum says journalists like nothing better than a question with no answers because they can never be wrong and that makes them look good. She says they’re all vultures circling an old corpse, and that because they mostly abandoned us when they lost the scent she refuses to talk to any of them, even if some of them were still at school when he went missing and have nothing to feel bad about.
Only one of Dad’s friends stayed friends with us after he went. Mercy says the only reason he did it was because he’d always fancied Mum and he wanted to get into her pants, but I reckon loads of good things get done for that reason and it doesn’t make them any less good. He’s the one who planted a tree on Primrose Hill because he thought that even though Jed was born at such a terrible time we shouldn’t forget to celebrate. Mum made him Jed’s godfather after that.
His name is Bob Cutforth and him and Dad started out together on some local paper or other. For a while he was one of the big correspondents for the BBC and he went all over the world and into danger zones and interviewed tyrants and dodged bullets. But then he turned out to be a really sick alcoholic and lost his job and his house and his wife, and now he lives in a bedsit in Kilburn and gets benefits and writes in his notebooks all day. Still, he’s never forgotten Jed’s birthday even once.
SIX
If I was working in one of those swanky Soho ad agencies and I was doing consumer profiling, like where you divide people into groups according to what trousers they wear and if they’re ever likely to buy fish fingers from the freezer compartment, this is how I’d profile my mum.
AGE: 35-45
SEX: female
HEIGHT: 1.7 metres
WEIGHT: 50-60 kilograms depending
ANNUAL INCOME: under £15,000
PROFESSION: classroom assistant. Sometimes she says she’d like to spend a whole week just talking to grown ups and not wiping anybody’s nose, but the job fits in with Jed’s school day and she likes it mostly.
STATUS: married (estranged probably)
ON THE STEREO: old stuff. Some of it I like. Some of it is diabolical.
LEISURE ACTIVITIES: walking on the heath, swimming at the Lido (summer only), reading, knitting, learning to sew, yoga, aggressive cleaning.
If I was working at an ad agency I don’t think I’d go crazy about someone like my mum. I might half-heartedly throw a few bath oils or cleaning products or hair dye her way, but she wouldn’t have much to spend so I wouldn’t waste too much effort.
This would be my big mistake.
My mum is buying stuff all the time.
If there’s a bogus new miracle product on the TV, me and Mercy place bets on how long before Mum buys it. Our bathroom cupboard is spilling over with twenty-four-hour moisturisers, anti-wrinkle creams, cellulite busters and hair thickeners.
Mum says she used to be a beautiful woman, but having three kids and an absent husband has ruined her looks. She says that it’s harder than you’d think to have looks and then lose them, and Mercy says she should try just being ugly all her life and that’s no picnic. Mum says Mercy has low self-esteem. If you ask me, low self-esteem is what most girls live on, instead of food.
The main thing about my mum is that she’s sad. Life isn’t turning out for her the way it was supposed to. She blames Dad for a lot of it, of course, his old friends and us, and also she blames herself.
I know this for a fact, not because she ever told me but because she told Bob Cutforth. A lot. Whenever he came over for dinner they would get wasted together and I would listen outside the kitchen door because when people are wasted they talk about stuff they can’t talk about when they are sober. Once I heard Mum say to Bob that she’d spent the last year they were together hoping Dad would disappear off the face of the earth because she couldn’t stand how things were between them. She said she’d wanted to be free from the job of loving him because he made it such hard work. In her fantasy of being on her own she blossomed (Mum’s word) and did all the things she’d always blamed Dad for stopping her doing. But in reality, when he disappeared she was less than she’d been before, not more.
Remembering that conversation is like being there listening to it for the first time. The line of my spine feels caught, like I need to stretch it, my stomach is a hole, I’m listening to my own breathing and the big wall clock in the hall, and I’m staring at the streaks and blisters in the paint on the kitchen door and thinking I might kick it down and punch my mum in the face for wishing my dad away.
They’re quiet for a bit and then Bob says to her, “You didn’t make him go, Nicky. What did you do? You loved him and you loved his kids. You’ve done nothing wrong.”
Mum started crying then, just softly, and I went upstairs to my room and thought about what it was like to be her, and if her and Bob would end up getting married.
Another time, when I was sitting right there with them at the table, she said to Bob, “I wasn’t as good a wife as you all thought I was you know,” and then she went on about how much she hated being stuck at home with the kids and how she resented Dad’s great job and how she made him pay all the time and was insanely jealous and always thought he was playing around and how she was basically never happy at what turned out to be the happiest time of her life. Bob
said she shouldn’t talk about that stuff in front of me, and she said, “Lucas is nearly thirteen and his dad’s left us, so he’s the man of the house now.” Then she ruffled my hair and told me to go to bed, like I was eight, which hacked me off because I was a man when it suited her and a kid when it didn’t.
She’s better now than she was then.
But the thing about my mum that still bothers me is that people mostly feel sorry for her and she lets them. Mum reckons life dealt her a bad hand, which is a good way of saying that her absent husband, her three kids and the fact that she’s not twenty-one any more are not her fault. I want to ask her if women in places like Sudan or Palestine or Kosovo worry as much about face cream and stretch marks and living without a man around, but I haven’t yet, and who knows, maybe they do.
And sometimes Mum gets angry with the wrong people – meaning those who are still here as opposed to he who has left. Some days I know as soon as I look at her that I’m not going to get a civil word out of Mum at all. Even just the sound of our voices makes her roll her eyes and tut and act like we’re squatters in her actual brain, and not people with as much right to be and speak as she has. On a bad day like that you can tell she’s programmed herself just to say NO to everything, practically before she’s heard it, which means she loses out when we’re saying do you want anything from the shop, or offering to put the dinner on.
What I think on days like that is this.
Maybe life didn’t turn out the way Mum planned, but it’s not our fault. Unless the thing we did wrong was being born, and if you start from there you can never do anything right, no matter how hard you try.
SEVEN
One good side-effect of Violet turning me on to old people was I got to know my gran a lot better. Her name is Pansy – another perfect name for an old lady, another flower name. I’d never really had much time for her before, what with her being old and having false teeth she got too small for, and skin like a bit of screwed up grey tissue that you find in your coat pocket, and pretty extreme opinions on just about everything. She and my grandad live round the corner in sheltered housing. Pansy says there’s nothing more patronising or that fills her with more dread than a primary colour window surround. She says it’s a sign that whoever lives there is no longer taken seriously. It’s worth remembering that they gave up their big house to move here so that we could live in it. Pansy would rather we didn’t forget it.
Pansy is a live wire and she’ll talk about anything and has theories about stuff she’s hardly heard of, like jungle music and PlayStation and Internet dating. She swears all the time but she never actually says the word, just mouths it, with her face especially screwed up, her gums and false teeth colliding slightly, the insides of her mouth sticking together and then pulling apart so swearing becomes this strange spongy clacking sound. It’s quite effective.
Pansy is passionate about football and has been for years. But somehow, at the same time, she’s managed to learn absolutely nothing about the rules. She once said that footballers should get extra points for hitting the post or the cross bar because it’s much harder than scoring a proper goal. She’s a Tottenham fan because she grew up in Enfield and her dad played in the brass band at White Hart Lane. If you ask me, there’s never enough reason to be a Spurs fan because I’m into Arsenal and so was my dad. Pansy says Dad only supported Arsenal to hack her off when he was a kid. Grandad, who can take football or leave it, rolls his eyes and says, “They used to fight like cat and dog when Grandstand was on.” She loves to slag off Arsenal, and mostly that’s fine because we’re at the top of the league and they’re going down.
Pansy was the first person I told about Violet. I needed to tell someone that a dead lady was talking to me and I had several good reasons for letting her in on it. For a start, it was Violet who made me more interested in the person inside Pansy’s old body. Also, I figured Violet would appreciate having another old lady around after all those cab drivers. And I knew Pansy’d be into it because she was always reading about the occult and she liked mediums and stuff and she even went to see one once to see if she could find out if Dad had “passed over” so I knew she’d never dismiss the idea of communicating with the dead.
Of course, that’s the other thing that me and my gran have in common, apart from Violet and the London Derby – my dad, her son. “Our missing link” she calls him. Mum says however bad it feels to us that Dad just went off without a word of warning, we should times it by ten for Pansy because she’s his mum and mums just don’t expect their kids to go before they do. So Pansy loves it when I come round, firstly because she says I’m her favourite (based purely on the fact that I look like her son and wear his clothes) and secondly because she can talk about Dad till she’s run out of air and I won’t lose interest.
I don’t think Grandad is much help with all that. His name is Norman and he fought in the war in North Africa, driving munitions trucks through the desert and smoking woodbines and wetting his pants. Norman is a really really nice bloke and he’s always been a good grandad, but these days he doesn’t know his arse from his elbow. What’s happened is he’s had these tiny strokes, and every time he has one (and you wouldn’t notice if he was having one right in front of you, they’re that small,) some of his memory gets wiped. Some days he’s better than others, but it drives Pansy mad because she says she never knows where she is with him. One minute he’s getting all romantic on her, the next he thinks she’s the home help come to give things a once-round with the hoover.
Pansy has a dog called Jack (Russell) and sometimes I have no idea if she’s talking about the dog or Grandad.
“He’s been under my feet all day and his breath smells terrible.” (Dog)
“He’s not been for three days. I think he needs a good walk.” (Norman)
On a good day Norman will remember that I’m Lucas, and on a stroke day he’ll think I’m my dad. Me and Pansy just agreed to let it slide on stroke days because it makes him happy. Pansy says she wishes she could have a stroke so she could forget her only child had seen fit to abandon his family and head for the hills. Then she dabs her crumpled eyes with a crumpled tissue and says, “Fffck it, let’s have another slice of Battenberg.”
The times I do sit down and have a chat with Norman he’s overjoyed because he doesn’t get a word in edgeways most of the time and he’s actually got quite a lot to say. When you first meet him and Pansy, she’s the one who grabs you because she’s so vibrant and sharp and energetic and into everything, but after a while you realise that Norman is the tortoise to her hare and that if you just give him a minute he can be very interesting and knowledgeable about a lot of things.
The person who really likes being with Norman is Jed. Jed’s too young to realise that Norman forgets things. He thinks he’s just doing it to be funny and he gets a big kick out of it. Jed thinks Norman is the funniest man alive. They hang out together in the kitchen eating biscuits and making Meccano planes and they laugh themselves sick over old Laurel and Hardy films. They’re also allowed to take the dog out together, which is about the only time for both of them that they get to go anywhere without a responsible adult. Jed says being with Grandad is just like being with one of his friends from school except better because Grandad knows a lot more and is really good at sharing.
A while ago, I got this idea in my head that Norman knew something really vital about where Dad is except he couldn’t tell us because he’d forgotten. I was convinced that everything he said, however ordinary, was actually a hidden clue and if I broke the code I’d save my dad. Sometimes when he’s talking to me I still cross my fingers that it will just slip out, an address or a phone number, or a last message, but things are never that simple.
When I told Pansy about Violet, I did it just like I would if I’d met anyone normal, or at least alive. Violet was still on the shelf at Apollo Cars when I did it.
I think I said, “Gran, I met someone you’d really like the other night” and Pansy said something s
harp like, “Well don’t go getting her pregnant” and I nearly spat my biscuit out at the thought and said, “No, no, she’s an old girl like you!”
“How old?” said Pansy. “Where did you meet an old lady? What do you want an old girlfriend for?”
I said, “She’s in her seventies like you and she’s not my girlfriend and I met her in a cab office last Friday night on my way home.”
Pansy pursed her lips tight and sucked air in like she was smoking an invisible cigarette which didn’t taste good and she said, “Mercy said you pinched her money, you bloody cheapskate.”
“Yeah, well, I didn’t,” I said, and then she sort of waved her hand around to say let’s not talk about that and said, “What’s a seventy-year-old woman doing in a cab office on a Friday night?” which was the question I’d been waiting for.
“She was on a shelf,” I said a bit too quickly, and Pansy glared at me.
“Have you been smoking that wacky baccy again, Lucas?”
I glared back. “Gran, you know that’s not really relevant.”
“Don’t use those long words with me,” Pansy said. “I told your dad about that stuff and look where he is now.”
I kept looking at her and I said, “Dad could be anywhere, we don’t know, but Violet is trapped on a shelf in a mini cab office and she needs our help.”
It felt like one of those things people say in films, and it was coming out of my mouth.
Finding Violet Park Page 3
