Finding Violet Park

by Jenny Valentine

  The library on Queens Crescent is an OK place. It’s in a boxy building with flats and a weird cooling tower on top made of yellow bricks. It’s pretty loud in there, considering the rules, and the toys and the books and the furniture all get broken and nicked. Mostly it’s full of people who don’t have anywhere better to go, so nobody who works there gives anyone too hard a time. They speak to you like you’re as good as the next person, whoever you are. If you think about it, having nowhere good to go is just about the crappest feeling there is. I’m lucky because I’ve got my own room and really only one person yells at me at a time. But if I went home and everybody yelled at me and wanted me to be somewhere else, the last thing I would want was strangers in the library yelling at me for being there as well.

  Ed’s glamorous mum calls the kids on the crescent “thugs” and she pounds the word against her tongue so it sounds really ugly, THUG, like she wants it to. Anyone under twenty or a bit skint or preferably male (but things are changing) who stays out after dark is a thug to Ed’s mother. I said he should tell her that we learned about thugs in history and they were actually this pretty amazing caste of assassins in India a hundred or so years ago. They strangled people with a long scarf with a rupee sewn into each end. It was their destiny to be thugs and they had no choice and they accepted it as their role in the order of things. They had initiation rites and codes of honour and everything, they didn’t just hang around on street corners wearing crap tracksuits and smoking dope.

  I put VIOLET PARK in the search field and got 71,600 items.

  And she was there, my Violet, about halfway down page 1 of 832 which went something like this.

  A book called Violet Fire by Somebody Park that seemed to be about the colour of a girl’s eyes.

  The Violet Voice and a load of other stuff from the African Violet Society, headed up by a lady called Mrs Park.

  A site called FLOWERS ARE FOREVER about two little girls in America called Janice and Violet who died in a fire, and a girl in tenth grade called Parker who wrote a poem for them.

  Violet Park Sneddon from Manchester who died the year before last on September 8th aged 73.

  Fat Girls and Plump Humpers starring Jenny Park, Violet and Tia Lorene, which I would have had a look at if I wasn’t in the library where they have a block on that sort of thing.

  Violet Mary Park from Maidstone, April 19th, age 57 (not dead).

  Violet Park, Indiana, a garden centre from the company that also owns Consider the Lilies in Wellfleet, Massachusetts.

  Violet Park Barker from Blair Gowrie in Scotland (1913-1978).

  Violet’s Rubber Stamp Inn at Ventura, California – accessories and lectures.

  Orlando Park, a writer, stunt actor and horse trainer based at Violet Farm in New Zealand.

  Three Dimensional Dementia, which was about time travel or memory or something. I didn’t get it.

  Violet Park, 1927-2002, a pianist on the Tasmanian Significant Women website.

  Bingo.

  The Tasmanian Significant Women website is proud of Violet Park in a big way.

  My mum’s friend Belinda lived in Tasmania when she was a little kid and she says one of the few things she can remember is that her horse-riding teacher had a black moustache and orange lipstick and was a woman. There are no hairy ladies on the website, but there is a black and white picture of Violet, aged 26, like a movie studio shot.

  Violet when she was young and alive.

  She’s looking down and slightly to the side like a lot of those pictures, and she has this fine, slightly hooked nose in profile and long long eyelashes, and her face is all powdered with hard shadows and it looks like cold poreless clay. Her hair is that style that loads of old ladies have now because it was fashionable when they were young, sort of curled in towards her face and touching her collar and parted at the side, like you can tell she had it in curlers for the picture.

  She’s not as pretty as I hoped, but she is striking. Even on the computer printout that’s still on my wall, which is rubbish quality, all grainy and grey, she’s got something you want to keep looking at.

  Violet was a concert pianist from Hobart, Tasmania, and she lived in Australia and Singapore and Los Angeles and London. She got into the movies because she met someone at a party who was making a film about a deranged pianist, and the actress who was playing the pianist couldn’t play a note. Violet’s hands are actually in this movie. It’s called The Final Veil and it’s pretty dated, but her hands fly up and down the keys like little birds.

  She’s in a lot of movies from that time, or rather her piano playing is. I borrowed some from the good video shop in Camden. People say “heppy” in them instead of happy, and pronounce their r’s and t’s and s’s, even in the middle of some emotional crisis. Films with names like Cruel Encounter and The Flower Girl and Where have all the Good Men Gone?

  I took them round to Pansy and Norman’s so Violet could see them. Pansy loved it, she drew the curtains and turned the phone off (not that it rings much) and she sat on the sofa with Norman and said it was a trip down memory lane, just like the Roxy. Then she giggled like a schoolgirl, which I took to mean that her and Norm had done a bit of something in the back row but I didn’t ask. Every time the piano music surged in on things Pansy looked at Violet’s urn on the mantelpiece and nodded her approval. I could see she was getting used to having her around. It was heart warming, really.

  TEN

  There are all kinds of questions that can really get to the bottom of what sort of person you are. I don’t mean those useless questionnaires in the mags Mercy leaves lying around. I mean the questions that people answer one way or the other and you can really tell something about them because of it. Like

  Do you believe in capital punishment?

  If someone offered you £1million would you lie for them about something really important?

  Do you think people are supposed to be monogamous (i.e. with one partner for life, like swans and lobsters)?

  If you found someone’s diary would you read it?

  The tricky thing about these questions is that you know what the right answer is, what you’re supposed to say to convince everyone you’re a good person. But it’s not until you’re in that position that you really know who you are. I’m sure about this because I found Mum’s diary and I didn’t think twice about reading it. I really shocked myself.

  I could have done with finding Violet’s diary – I would much rather discover the innermost secrets of a mysterious dead old lady than someone I see every day, who does my laundry and kisses me goodnight and has no idea that I know what she’s thinking. Because the person in Mum’s notebook isn’t Mum, it’s Nicky, who she is when she’s alone, and she’s not the person I thought she was. Not better or worse, just different, more complicated, less loveable I suppose, more real.

  When I first stuck my nose in it, I didn’t expect to find anything interesting. I thought it would say stuff like pick Jed up for dentist or dinner with David or yoga 7.00 pm, which shows how much I know. This is the first thing I read.

  When I’m not livid with Pete for abandoning me, I’m jealous of him for getting out first. It was only ever going to be possible for one of us to escape.

  So you can see maybe why I read on, or why I should have stopped.

  It turns out that Mum is seeing a therapist called Janie Golden and one of her tasks (it’s all written in a printout stapled to the inside cover) is to write down thoughts and feelings for discussion.

  Ready for another one?

  I met Pete at a party when I was 19 and he was 26. He was so confident and good looking and everyone was buzzing around him because he’d just come back from some brink or other, and I was so honoured that he wanted to talk to me I forgot that I didn’t like him that much. I wouldn’t have guessed in a million years that he would lead me to the life I’ve ended up with.

  I kept telling myself to put the diary back because I didn’t like what I was reading, but at the same
time I couldn’t stop, I really couldn’t.

  Of course, it wasn’t my honour at all, it was his. I could have had anyone I’d wanted in that room, I just didn’t know it. You never do at the time. When I’m 60 I’ll tell everyone I was a beautiful 40-year-old but I don’t feel like one now.

  You always forget your parents ever had a childhood, and they admit they’re wrong so rarely they kind of brainwash you into thinking they’re perfect. But boy has my mum made some mistakes. I get the impression she regrets every single thing she ever did, pretty much. Like she never really knew who she was in the moment and only worked it out afterwards when it was too late.

  For every decision I make there’s the other thing, the alternative route and I find myself hankering after it as soon as it’s gone. Pair of shoes, marriage, same.

  I never really asked myself if my mum and dad were in love. You don’t. I never looked at the root of things because it wasn’t my job. Mum’s made jokes for years about her terrible marriage and I just thought that was her making heartbroken funny. Now I don’t know what to think.

  One of the kids asked me why it was called a nuclear family and I said it was because it explodes with devastating consequences, which I’m sure has been said before. I don’t have an original thought in my body

  Here’s something I never would have known without doing the wrong thing and invading my mum’s privacy. When I was about nine or ten she met a man and fell for him. Nothing happened but she wanted to give everything up for him, so she never saw him again or spoke to him or anything because she couldn’t handle what would happen if she did. I’d like to ask her all kinds of things like, was it worth it? And why don’t you look for him now? And are you sure? In her notebook it says that after less than a week she had completely forgotten what he looked like and could only remember bits, an eye, a stretch of gum and teeth, his hands. I want to tell her that she should have seen him again and kept on seeing him until something got to her, like he picked his nose or was rude to a waitress, so that then he could become real and annoying like we are and Dad was, not faultless and impossible. Then she wouldn’t end up talking about him to a therapist after all these years. But if I say anything about it she’d know where I’d been and she’d probably hate me.

  My mum reckons she gets about an hour to herself, usually around ten at night, but that she instantly forgets what it is she’s been dying to do all day so she looks in the paper at what’s on TV and ends up doing nothing. For me doing nothing is pretty much the aim but at some point that must change because doing nothing makes my mum sad.

  Mum has got quite a lot to say about us in her notebook. She sees straight through Mercy because she’s been there and done that, and she reckons that her job is to ignore Mercy as much as possible until she comes out the other side, when she will be on hand to pick up the pieces. I guess this is about sex and drugs and tongue piercing, and I think she’s probably right. Mum says very sweet things about Jed, like we all do because he’s our lucky mascot or something, unrattled by the skeleton in the cupboard, wrapped up in Lego and squirrels and Babybel cheese. She’s afraid of the moment he sacks her as Number One Important Person in the World and she knows its coming so she’s feeling a bit clingy. She says weird stuff about me, and of course it’s my own fault that it’s doing my head in, because I wasn’t supposed to see it.

  I’m worried about Lucas. He’s turning into his dad, on purpose, before my very eyes, and he’s doing it badly because he never really knew Pete, not the way he would if he was still around. He doesn’t know the half of it and I don’t think I can tell him.

  I have no business knowing this much about my mother.

  ELEVEN

  My mum’s got this thing about teeth. She’s really strict about it. We all have to clean our teeth all the time and floss twice a day. She goes crazy at Mercy about tobacco stains. Some nights when I come in really late, I turn the key in the lock when I’m shutting the door so it’s quiet, and tiptoe up the stairs all considerate, and go past her room with my shoes off, and she calls out, “Clean your teeth, Lucas!” It’s like she’s been waiting up all night just to say it, like she may not be able to control us any more, or even know where we are half the time, but she’s never going to give up on our teeth.

  Our dentist backs on to Apollo Cars, above a dodgy minimarket that used to be a Citroën garage and smells very strongly of roast chicken. You ring on a bell, go up some stairs and you’re there.

  There’s a painting in the surgery. I must have seen it loads of times before, twice a year for more than eight years to be exact. I’ve looked at it and half listened while the dentist chats about something weird, like the emotional properties of flowers or the similarities between a spider’s web and al-Qaeda.

  But it was the last time, tipped back in the chair with my face stretched open and somebody’s surgical gloves in my mouth, that I finally really saw it.

  It’s a portrait of Violet.

  I think I nearly swallowed the dentist’s hand.

  It spooked me, like Violet was stalking me or something. What was she doing there?

  I was thinking, had this always been a picture of Violet or was she haunting a different painting just to get to me? When I left would she disappear and be replaced by an ocean view or a small child with a dog?

  Because that’s what it felt like, not a painting at all, but the real Violet Park looking down on me from the wall.

  We couldn’t take our eyes off each other.

  She was in a wide wooden frame that made the painting look bigger than it was, more the size of a shoebox I suppose. I liked the painting, the way I could really see the creases in her blouse, each strand of her hair, stuff like that. Her hair was red. I didn’t get that from the black and white photo; it could be any colour in that. There was something timid about her – the angle of her head, the sideways glance – and something hard too, like you wouldn’t mess with her, flared nostrils like a horse’s, and a strong chin. The brush marks were thick in the background, like whoever painted it was in a bit of a rush when they got to that bit and sort of went blob blob blob.

  But those eyes were incredible. Green and almost 3-D where the paint had been piled on and scraped about. Even though I knew it was only paint and that the flecks of white on the top of the other colours showed light but weren’t actual light themselves, the eyes were so real, so convincing and alive that I was sort of spellbound.

  It was definitely Violet and she was definitely watching.

  I said, once I’d got my mouth to myself, after rinsing and spitting, “Is that Violet Park?” and I hoped I sounded all casual to balance out the blushing and cold sweating I was doing.

  The dentist said yes and where did I know Violet from? And I said, “from around,” which we both knew wasn’t that convincing considering she’s been dead for five years.

  Then the dentist turned her back to me and wrote something in a notebook and said three things.

  “Violet lived nearby, in the green house on Chalcott Crescent. It’s a self portrait and she left it to us in her will.”

  Then she told me to address an envelope to myself at reception so they could send me a reminder in six months, she said I had great teeth and she ushered me out of the door.

  I was sure now Violet was trying to talk to me.

  I was dumbstruck that she left an actual will.

  I had no idea she could paint so well.

  I wondered if anyone from the dentist went to Violet’s funeral or if they had any idea she’d been stuck in that urn for so long right under their noses.

  Violet’s house is greyish green with wide sash windows. It has a big old wisteria growing up it and iron steps that go down to the basement and a black metal mailbox. It sits on the flat of a crescent in Primrose Hill, right where another street hits it, so you can see it all the way down the road. And if you were standing inside it looking out of the windows, you’d be able to see clear to the park through the gap in the rooftops. It’s
got to be one of the best houses around there, which is saying something, even though it’s a bit rundown and the paint’s peeling off all over the place and the pipes are a bit mossy.

  I’d walked past that house at least a hundred times before I knew it was Violet’s.

  It was so familiar I hardly noticed it, and then all of a sudden it was new and strange and I was dying to get inside. I stood in front of it, on my way back from the dentist. I stood exactly in the middle with my hands on the railings and felt myself being sucked in. I didn’t want to leave. I think I stared at every inch until it became as familiar and alive as someone’s face, paintwork the pale colour of a leaf’s back and shedding like skin, pipes and wires a network of veins, each window reflecting a different light, including me in the ground floor ones, looking in.

  TWELVE

  I’d been thinking about what Mum said in her diary, about me being a half-baked version of my dad. I’d been thinking about it even though I wasn’t supposed to have any idea what she thinks.

  I sat in my room and asked myself the same question over and over.

  Have I been remembering my dad correctly?

  It’s probably no accident that I hardly ever asked Mum about him and always asked Pansy. Maybe Pansy saw him the way I wanted to, half blind, without the cruel light of actual knowledge. After all, how well do mothers know their sons? I was hanging with a dead lady, not sleeping much and helping myself to her innermost thoughts, and Mum didn’t have a clue about any of it. So it follows that Pansy’s grown-up boy who’s been missing for five years would be a near stranger to her.