“Where’s Violet? What in hell are you talking about, Peter?” Norman said, and he made me jump because I’d forgotten he was there.
“I thought you were asleep,” I said.
Pansy winked at me and whispered, “Sometimes it’s hard to tell the difference.” And then she yelled, “Nothing Norman! Go back to sleep. It was the telly,” which was a bare-faced lie because the telly wasn’t even on. Then we were back to the film script and she said, “Is there a ransom?”
It wasn’t quite what I was expecting. “What?”
“If someone’s holding an old lady hostage in a cab office they must be doing it for a reason.”
“She’s dead, Gran,” I said, and I counted to ten for it to sink in.
“They’ve got a dead lady on a shelf? That’s disgusting!” Pansy had got over excited. I could see the little explosions happening behind her eyes. “How did you meet her if she was dead, Lucas?”
“She’s in an urn. She’s been cremated.”
Pansy didn’t say anything to that. She just unclasped her hands, fingers spread out either side of her face, still trying to catch the answer to her last question. Her eyebrows were raised so high up her face that her forehead looked like a terraced hillside. I knew I had her full attention. Now it just remained for me to reel her in.
“Gran, I’m not promising anything, but I think she’s communicating with me from …”
Pansy mouthed the words at me in a furious display of facial gymnastics, “ …the other side?”
I nodded and went to put the kettle on.
I did this because I know that my grandparents’ response to anything, from the disappearance of their son to the adverts in the middle of Emmerdale, is to make a cup of tea. I don’t think they’ve ever gone more than an hour or two without one in fifty years. They are tea junkies.
And maybe there’s some truth in their tea beliefs. Once she’d had had a sip, Pansy was back to her normal self, no more gawping and tonguing her teeth back and forth. She was all helpful hints and blinding ideas.
I said I wanted to rescue Violet. The rest of the plan was mostly down to Pansy.
It was brilliant and simple.
The first thing to do was phone Apollo Cars.
“If I don’t know the answer to any of his questions I’ll just tell him I don’t remember. Nobody gives an old lady a hard time,” Pansy said, and then she dialled the number and started mewing into the receiver in her old lady voice. This always gets me because you’d think an old lady wouldn’t be able to do a good old lady impression, but Pansy can.
“Hello? Mr Soprano?” she said, and I waved NO at her but it didn’t register. “Have you got my sister there?”
Then she said, “Maybe I’ve got the wrong cab office. She’s been mislaid and she’s in an urn and her name is Violet. Ring any bells?”
I could hear his tinny squashed voice from where I was sitting but I couldn’t hear what he was saying.
“Well, I am sorry you’ve been stuck with her all this time, I’ve been abroad you see,” and she said “abroad” like she imagined the queen would and arched her see-through old eyebrows at me.
I had to leave the room then because Norman had woken up and was misbehaving in the kitchen. Norman and the dog scoff chocolate together behind Pansy’s back, like she’s running a prisoner of war camp and him and Private Jack Russell have got contraband. She says she wouldn’t mind except that they both do it until they’re sick. She says Norman doesn’t remember how much he’s had and the dog just takes advantage.
I took the chocolate off Norman and let the dog out, and when I got back, Pansy was wrapping things up. She was blowing her nose in a fresh pink tissue and sounding all teary, the old faker (“It’s very kind of you, Mr Soprano, to go to so much trouble, only if you’re sure, I can’t thank you enough,” etc, etc.) and then she banged the phone down with a smile. The thing about false teeth is that they don’t match your face. Pansy looks like she’s borrowed someone else’s grin, some famous actor, George Clooney’s perfect Hollywood pearlies stuck in the middle of her collapsing face.
“He’s coming,” she said, “in half an hour, in person, to hand her over.”
“Well, I’d better go then,” I said, getting my coat and trying to manoeuvre past Norman who was in the doorway and wasn’t sure if he was on his way in or on his way out.
“Lucas Swain, you get your arse back in here!” Pansy said.
“He can’t see me, Gran. If he sees me he won’t let you have her.”
“Well, hide in the bedroom then. I’m letting a stranger in here for your benefit. The least you can do is be on hand.”
So I hid in Pansy and Norman’s bedroom for twenty-four minutes and I worried about what might go wrong.
The urn would get dropped and burst open.
The urn would roll around on the backseat of the car and burst open.
Soprano would crash the car and get concussion and forget about the urn entirely.
He’d just lied to get an old lady off the phone and had no intention of coming over.
Pansy had given him the wrong address.
Pansy had forgotten to give him an address at all.
Norman would open the door and say no thank you or you’ve got the wrong house and shut it again.
Norman would think the ashes were my dad and lose it completely.
Norman would think the ashes were Pansy and lose it completely.
Norman would blow Pansy’s story by saying very loudly she never had a sister called Violet.
Pansy would call Violet the name of one of her real sisters (Dolly, Daisy, Daphne, Delia – I don’t know what happened with Pansy. They must have run out of D’s).
Pansy and Norman would fall asleep and not hear the doorbell (quite common).
One or all of these things would force me out of hiding so Soprano would see me before the drop and smell a rat.
After twenty-four minutes the doorbell rang. Pansy heard it and answered it. She’d done herself up a bit with make-up and a cardigan and some pearls. I watched through a crack in the door. Tony Soprano carried the urn very carefully. He put Violet on the mantelpiece next to the photo of my dad and said how sorry he was about Pansy’s sister.
Then Norman in a random piece of brilliance came out with “She’s dead you know” and they probably nodded gravely or something because it was very quiet.
Tony Soprano must have seen a picture of Pansy and her real dead sister Dolly, who’s also on the mantelpiece, because he said “Is this her?” and Pansy said “Yes, she was a real live wire,” and Norman said “You can say that again, she was a goer your big sister.” Tony Soprano sort of coughed, and then said he really should be going. Pansy walked him to the door (about a metre) and they shook hands and said goodbye, and I thought what a decent bloke he was really, taking it all so seriously and being respectful and doing the right thing.
Then I came out of the bedroom because Soprano had gone and Pansy was having a go at Norman for calling her big sister a slag. I wasn’t sure how Violet would feel in this new place in front of rowing strangers.
She was resting on the mantelpiece to the right of and slightly behind the old front-page photo of my dad. They sat there together, the one we thought we knew all about apart from where he was (or wasn’t), and the one we knew absolutely nothing about except she was dead and at my gran’s house. I stared at them from one of Pansy’s over-furnished armchairs and wondered for a minute what we’d done. Was it really any of my business where a set of ashes ended up? Was I off my head the night I set my heart on rescuing her?
I could feel Pansy’s eyes going from me to the urn, waiting for something to happen, maybe a disembodied voice or my eyes to roll back in my head, or a power cut and some ectoplasm. I didn’t want to let her down.
Then …I felt it, faint at first but unmistakeable.
Violet was happy.
It was like a slow creeping glow and there I was, smiling her smile. She was warm (
heating constantly full on) and she liked the décor (overcrowded and a lot of crochet) and nobody was smoking or swearing, and could she have a bit of music on? Rachmaninov’s Fourth (which by the way, I’d never heard of, I swear, but Norman had it on vinyl and we cranked it up and Violet knew it like the back of her hand and she went all tingly which was pretty amazing). Maybe sheltered accommodation in Kentish Town wasn’t her first-choice eternal idyll, but it was a step up from Apollo Cars and Violet wanted us to know she was grateful.
I was bombed. My legs were shaking. Pansy thought I was the new Uri Geller. She kept staring at me with her mouth open and her teeth slipping and a new respect in her eyes.
(For the record, I think Uri Geller is a big crazy fake, but Pansy thinks he’s the real deal because Norman’s watch was broken and Uri fixed it through the TV, apparently.)
And I decided that Dad and Violet Park weren’t that different. One was dead and one was missing, but everyone has their secrets don’t they? Take any family and there’ll be unspeakable stuff rattling around behind the scenes, guaranteed. Here’s some of mine.
There’s Dad (obviously) who has some other life that we know naff all about, or is dead, which he’s kept pretty secret too.
Pansy had a kid (my dad) by an encyclopaedia salesman before she married Norman. She was brave about it then, but now she won’t have it mentioned and she fakes her wedding anniversaries just to make it all legit.
Norman couldn’t have kids (mumps) but he doesn’t know that we all know he’s not strictly related to us. Mum told me and Mercy a long time ago, before Dad went, and I remember thinking that it made no difference. Jed doesn’t know yet, at least I don’t think he does. Maybe even Norman’s forgotten that he’s not my dad’s real dad, what with missing him so much and going senile and everything.
Mum has had a boyfriend for over six months and she thinks none of us know. It’s not Bob (pity) but she did sleep with Bob a few times, another thing she thinks we never knew about. Mum’s boyfriend is called David and he teaches life drawing at the Community Centre. He’s nice enough but he wears weird jewellery and talks quite a lot of crap.
Mercy’s on the pill and she smokes and she does drugs and she shoplifts and she bunks off and she climbs out the bedroom window to visit her dealer jailbird boyfriend when she’s grounded.
Jed wets the bed but he made Mum promise not to tell us.
Mum told us.
That’s not even all of them but I’m not telling any more because the point is we’ve got loads of secrets and so has everybody. By my reckoning, being missing and being dead, like Dad and Violet, is just a way of keeping another, bigger secret. And secrets are never that hard to unearth. Somebody always slips up, or leaves a trail, or says the wrong thing at the right time. And then everybody finds out the truth, whether they want to or not.
EIGHT
Bob Cutforth was a man with secrets. He used to have a mountain of them and now he doesn’t have any. He says that it’s better this way, but it must have been pretty painful getting found out again and again, like he did, and losing everything, bit by bit. The thing I really like about Bob, my absolute favourite thing about him, is that he is way happier now with nothing than he ever was before. Bob says it’s the best kind of freedom, having nothing to lose.
He says that when he lived in a big house in Camden Square, with a beautiful academic wife and a sexy assistant and a pedigree dog and an impressive wine cellar and a great job and a fat wallet, he never for one minute stopped worrying. Bob worried about being robbed or mugged or murdered. His wife was neurotic and his assistant was insatiable, so he couldn’t please either of them and he worried about that. His dog was on Prozac and threw itself through a plate glass window one morning when he was leaving for the airport because she didn’t like being left.
Bob’s job frightened the life out of him. He went to Rwanda and Afghanistan and Pakistan and the Philippines and Libya and Colombia at times when other people were frightened just to see them on TV. No wonder he was scared. Bob says he was drinking a litre of vodka a day by the end and that the wine cellar was just for show.
I suppose the other big thing about Bob is that he could have gone missing too, easily, and he chose to stay. One minute he was everybody’s hero, like John Simpson or Raggy Omar, and the next he was a degenerate sicko with no morals, no job, a mistress, a coke habit, an expensive divorce and a drink-driving ban. He must have been tempted to run for it, but he stuck it out, all of it, and you’ve got to love him for that.
I can’t help wondering, what was so bad that Dad couldn’t face it? I don’t like where things go when I try to answer that question. I’ve said it before – it’s the not knowing that drives you mad. It’s the imagining things that you wish you couldn’t think up all by yourself.
Of course, Bob is the best person for talking about my dad and he knows lots of brilliant, secret stuff that kids me into thinking I know him better. Bob and my dad go back years. They worked on a local paper together when they were just out of college – The Radnorshire Express. Bob says there was nothing express about it and it was the slowest, dullest place he’s ever lived, and if it wasn’t for my dad he’d of gone off his head with boredom. I imagine it was a bit like Andover, which is the most boring place I’ve ever been. My mum sent me there on an adventure weekend and I still say she should have got them for false advertising.
According to Bob, my dad went missing before.
He was twenty-three or twenty-four. He was going out with a nurse from Brazil called Luzmira (Bob said it means “look at the light”). Bob and my dad were working at the Evening Standard and they spent a lot of time drinking and playing serious poker with some doctors from Charing Cross Hospital. A weird crowd, Bob said, real freaks, they put him off medics for good. Bob said Dad was in over his head and owed them a load of money. Then suddenly Dad stopped coming to work or to poker, and he lost his job. Luzmira and the doctors said they hadn’t seen him. His landlady put all his stuff in a cupboard and rented his room out. Bob thought dad was dead. About three months later Dad came back, out of the blue, and he wouldn’t tell anybody where he’d been, not even Bob, and he never did.
Still, if my dad can disappear and then show up once, he can do it again.
Agatha Christie went missing for a while when she was pretty famous and then she came back, but nobody knows where she went. Except my friend Ed, the one whose house I was at the night I met Violet, who reckons he knows exactly. Ed says that his great grandfather on his mother’s side was having a secret affair with Agatha Christie in Jamaica or Antigua or somewhere, but it didn’t work out so he went back to his wife in Swindon. He kept this shawl Agatha Christie had given him in his sock drawer and stroked it lovingly every now and then when his wife wasn’t looking. But of course she knew because wives in those days put their husbands’ clean socks away and didn’t say anything about affairs or lovers’ trinkets to avoid the shame.
If my dad was holed up with a thriller writer in the West Indies (or a nurse in Brazil) my mum would kick up a stink. She is way beyond worrying about what the neighbours might say.
NINE
I thought it would be simple once we’d got Violet out of the cab office. Sitting with her in Pansy and Norman’s front room, I couldn’t see any other obstacles to getting her sprinkled and leaving her to get on with being dead in a much better place and me to go back to normal. But I kept putting it off, and it was more than six weeks before I realised she wasn’t ready to go yet.
Mercy read a story once about dead people who got to enjoy a very pleasant afterlife for as long as they were remembered on earth, but as soon as they were forgotten even for an instant they disappeared into nothing. She banged on about it and what a fantastic concept it was until I never wanted to hear about it again, but the story came back to me and I thought it was obvious really, that if Violet had clung on for dear life (so to speak) when everyone had forgotten her so completely, she must have clung on for a reason. She seeme
d so alive to me in that little pot, there must be something she needed doing before she was prepared to become nothing somewhere forever. I just didn’t know what the thing that needed doing was.
I didn’t know a thing about her yet, apart from she was dead.
And then I took Jed to the cinema.
Watching films is very high up on our top ten list of things we best like doing. I could watch films my whole life long, back to back, and never feel like I’d wasted a second.
Jed likes old stuff he’s seen with Norman, like Charlie Chaplin or the Marx Brothers, as well as anything Pixar and most cartoons. I signed him up at this Cinema Club for kids. It was there that we saw Binky’s Magic Piano, which was this pretty old, pretty lame half-cartoon half-live-action thing about a boy genius who could play anything on the piano and did concerts all over the world, except he wasn’t a genius because it was his piano that did all the work. Then one day the piano decided it had had enough and Binky was doing an encore at Carnegie Hall and he couldn’t play anything right, not even Chopsticks, and he had to come clean, and then he woke up and it was all a dream. The End.
Jed really liked it and we were just about to leave the cinema when I happened to look up at the credits rolling old-fashionedly along and it said All pieces performed on the piano by Violet Park with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra at Pinewood studios, England. I sat back down in my seat and my mouth went all dry, and I gawped at the screen because I knew it was her, just like when I knew she wanted my help and I knew her name and I knew she was loving it at Pansy’s.
All the way home I was holding Jed’s hand across roads and listening to what he said about Binky and how he wanted a magic guitar and could we have eggs on toast with beans when we got in, and in my head I was saying, “I’ve found her, I’ve found her, I’ve found her,” and knowing that Violet was going to be dead pleased.
We got in and I handed Jed to Mum like a parcel, which probably annoyed them both, and I went straight to the library to book a computer and look for Violet Park the pianist. I’d tried it with my dad loads of times, but it always turned up his old articles or stuff from when he went missing, never anything about him exactly, so I wasn’t doing it so often these days.
Finding Violet Park Page 4
