Finding Violet Park

by Jenny Valentine

  And come to think of it, how well does anyone know their own mum and dad? I’m only just beginning to learn. You start off thinking they own the world, and everything is downhill from there. Parents do too many things to wake you up to the idea that they are less than perfect.

  Speak like they think teenagers speak (always wrong, excruciatingly wrong).

  Get drunk too quickly or too much.

  Be rude to people they don’t know.

  Flirt with your teacher and your friends.

  Forget their age.

  Use their age against you.

  Get piercings.

  Wear leather trousers (both sexes).

  Drive badly (without admitting it).

  Cook badly (ditto).

  Go to seed.

  Sing in the shower/car/public.

  Don’t say sorry when they’re wrong.

  Shout at you or each other.

  Hit you or each other.

  Steal from you or each other.

  Lie to you or each other.

  Tell dirty jokes in front of your friends.

  Give you grief in front of your friends.

  Try to be your mate when it suits them.

  Even with great parents, the list is endless. They can’t ever win.

  I was eleven when Dad left.

  And now it had occurred to me that instead of missing him and dreaming about him and seeing him in crowds and turning him into some kind of mythical über-dad, I might have been arguing with him, buying records with him, getting underage drunk with him, stealing from him, calling him a hypocrite, realising he had bad breath. Real things, mixed up things, not perfect scenes of craving that go on entirely in my head.

  Dad didn’t have to go through all the stuff that Mum did with us. For instance, my hyper-critical phase, when every single thing mum did was so humiliating and even hearing her breathe or chew or open her mouth to speak put me in a bad mood.

  My dad got away with that because I thought he was perfect and he wasn’t here.

  And in the time he’s been gone I’ve learned stuff about my mum, layer by layer, bad and good. It makes sense that the way I see Dad would have changed in that time too.

  So I started to believe that Mum was right about me and that we might need to talk about it. And I had no idea how to go about something like that.

  THIRTEEN

  It was about this point that Pansy fell off a ladder. Actually it might have been a chair, but whatever it was, she fell off it and cracked her head on the kitchen worktop on the way down. She woke up about twenty minutes later with a broken hip and concussion, and Norman curled up and crying in the corner because he thought she was dead and he’d forgotten the number for 999. She’d been trying to close a window.

  At least she wasn’t going to have that problem in the London Free Hospital. That place is sealed like a fish tank and it stinks like one too. Pansy’s ward was on the eighth or ninth floor and it was full of old people pining for a smell of the outdoors. I went to visit her straight after school and I took Jed with me because Mum had rushed there in a hurry and there was no one to pick him up. We walked in through the sliding doors, under a blast of hot air, and the smell hit us, lino and cabbage and old lady perfume, and Jed said, “Is this a restaurant or a shop?” And I said, “Both, for sick people.”

  Jed’s not good with lifts. He always stops like a rabbit in headlights when he’s supposed to get in one because he thinks the doors are going to close on him and, because he stops and takes that little bit longer to get in, they usually do.

  We took the stairs.

  Pansy was halfway down Edwin Sprockett ward, lying flat in bed wearing a violent peach bed jacket.The bed was all kind of padded around her legs and she looked like one of those dolls with big knitted skirts that people her age put over loo rolls. She didn’t have her teeth in and the bottom half of her face was all caved in. The teeth were in a cup on her bedside locker, all magnified through the plastic so they looked warped and massive, and Jed had his eye on them. There were a lot of teeth in a lot of beakers in that place.

  Mum looked pleased to see us. She was having trouble communicating with Pansy, you could tell. I said if she wanted go home and get Jed his tea I didn’t mind staying on for a bit longer. Mum winked at me and gave Pansy this quick angry kiss on the cheek and left with Jed. She couldn’t wait to get out of there, it was obvious.

  I suppose relations can be a bit strained when you’ve both been abandoned by the same man. Mum and Pansy remind each other of what they’ve lost just by being in the same room. But it occurred to me then, sitting with Pansy and watching her watch Mum go, that it wasn’t Pansy’s idea they weren’t friends any more – it was Mum’s. Pansy didn’t mind the being reminded, not at all; it was pretty much what she was after. But Mum couldn’t handle it. Mum wanted to forget.

  And I thought about who Dad was to each of them. Pansy’s perfect, clever, handsome son and Mum’s difficult, arrogant, absent husband. They might have been grieving for two different men.

  How many versions of Dad are we all missing, me and Mercy and Bob and Norman and Mum and Pansy? A different one for each of us and not one of them is real.

  Except maybe Jed, and that’s because to him Dad equals one blank space.

  Pansy hated it at the hospital. She said an airless room full of ill people was like dying in Tupperware. She said it was impossible to get any personal privacy and nobody wanted to be old and in their nightie in a goldfish bowl. She said she never thought it would be possible to miss sheltered housing, but you live and learn.

  She told me that after the fall she’d floated up away from her body and seen herself from above, all sprawled out on the kitchen floor. But her near-death experience didn’t impress her much. She said, “When I turned round to find that tunnel to the afterlife I read about in Readers Digest, there was bugger all there.”

  Mainly Pansy was worried about Norman and how he was coping without her. I said him and Jack were most probably scoffing sweets and swapping war stories right at that moment, but it didn’t come out as funny as I’d hoped. She said I should take Violet’s ashes home with me while Norman was on his own because he’d only keep seeing them and thinking someone had died and getting upset. I tried to cheer her up by telling her about Violet’s website and her portrait, and how I found out at the dentist that she’d been practically living round the corner and everything. But Pansy wasn’t really listening, and then the nurse showed up and said it was time for Pansy’s bed bath and that was my cue to leave.

  Because Pansy had asked me to, I went straight round to see Norman and he opened the door looking baffled and a bit tearful. The home help was over, all cheerful banter and loud whistling, and I think Norman thought he might be married to her. He was struggling to hide his disappointment. When he followed me into the front room and saw the urn he started weeping all over again, but I couldn’t get it out of him who he thought had died.

  “It’s Violet, Granddad,” I said over the noise of the hoover.

  Norman looked horrified and said “Violet? When did she die?” but I didn’t have time to explain.

  I let Violet have one last look around then I checked her lid was on tight and shoved her in my rucksack. And because I couldn’t deal with taking her home and explaining to anyone why I had what I had in my bag, I went to Bob’s.

  Question: how do you show up at someone’s house with a dead lady in your bag?

  Answer: you don’t tell them.

  While Bob was in the kitchen I shoved my bag in the bottom of his wardrobe. Violet was hating me right now for bringing her here. I could feel it seeping through the fabric of my rucksack. This place was like the opposite of Pansy and Norm’s. There were no brass ornaments, no royal wedding plates on the wall and no doilies on the furniture. Bob doesn’t go in much for decorating, or cleaning even. There was a communal hallway that smelt of cabbage soup. There was a bare light bulb in the bathroom, candles and joss sticks, and no TV.


  Violet was most definitely unimpressed.

  Bob made some green tea which he told me the Zen Buddhists drink to focus their minds before meditating. I knocked it back because I thought a clear head could only help at this point. It tasted like grass. He asked me how things were at home and I grunted a bit and Bob said, “Your mum is worried about you” and I said, “Yeah, she thinks I’m turning into Dad” and he said, “Are you?” and I said, “How do I know?” which he agreed was a fair point.

  Then I said something about Mum having more than enough problems of her own without inventing stuff about me, and Bob called my bluff in a way because he said, “Oh, so you’re an expert on your mother’s state of mind, are you?” and I told him that I was because I’d found Mum’s diary and couldn’t stop reading it even though I wasn’t happy knowing what it made me know.

  It was a relief actually, telling somebody.

  Bob said I should put a stop to it because it was a violation. He said, “It’s unforgivable.” He said there were ways to talk about stuff I’d read without admitting I’d read them.

  I told him about when she’d written I wish I loved Bob because I thought it might interest him, but he just frowned and looked at the carpet.

  Before I left he asked me how Pansy was. He said Mum had called and told him what happened. I told him about Pansy’s brush with the afterlife and how it failed to meet her expectations. We agreed that was Pansy all over. Even Heaven wasn’t up to standard.

  FOURTEEN

  My friend Ed, with the fancy mum and the house in Primrose Hill, said I’ve always been weird and now I’m getting weirder. He said he’s always liked that I dress like an old man and talk to myself (apparently) and don’t mind all that much what people say about me. But then he said I have to start minding, because the people who are talking about me are girls, pretty ones, and he wants to go out with one of them. Ed wanted me to go for a drink at some bar with these pretty girls, not dressed like an old man, not talking to myself, not being anxious or wanting to be alone, i.e. not being me at all but some perfect friend that Ed wants to pretend I am.

  I was dreading it.

  But I went because Ed is my friend and I don’t actually have many, and even though we’re different I like him.

  I can’t quite remember how I met Ed. He was around in my field of vision for a while before we actually spoke. We were both on our own a lot when he started school and so we ended up being on our own together. Ed started halfway through a term in year nine. He’d been to one exclusive, expensive school after another and got thrown out of every single one. According to Ed, you don’t have to do that much to get asked to leave. His mum is tearing her very blow-dried hair out about him getting such a low-brow education, but Ed says this school is the first one he’s ever liked, so they’ll have to agree to differ. And of course, Ed doesn’t stick out any more like when he first arrived. He fits right in. Everybody likes Ed.

  So we went for that drink, even though it was the last thing I wanted to do. It was a nice Camden evening, the sky was making up for how small it was by going pink and purple and gold all over the Stables Market. I never have a problem in pubs, maybe because of how tall I am, but we went somewhere new and Ed headed straight for the garden, just in case. I had a Guinness, disgusting and delicious at the same time. Ed was drinking trendy beer out of a bottle and biting his nails.

  He said, “They’re late, they’re not coming,” almost as soon as we sat down.

  I’m not sure which one of us was more nervous.

  Ed had already told me what he thought I needed to know, which was that the girls were called Natalie (blonde) and Martha (brown) and they were both seventeen. The blonde one Natalie was on the gym team and had her belly button pierced and was Ed’s, so I was not to try to impress her in any way. I could have Martha apparently, who Ed hadn’t bothered to learn anything about.

  I was just saying it was ironic that Ed was all edgy and nervous (for once) instead of me, and then the girls showed up and it just floored me because while Natalie was very pretty in a nice enough way and I didn’t at all fancy her, Martha was so beautiful I wanted to cry.

  That first night with Martha I did a lot of staring. I didn’t take my eyes off her the whole time and she says she was grateful. She says generally people don’t notice her.

  I don’t know how this is possible.

  When Martha called two days and two and a half hours after we first met, I picked up the phone and she said, “Hello, it’s Martha. Martha Hooper. Natalie’s friend, we met on Friday,” like that, on and on, as if I knew a load of other Marthas or would never remember her. It killed me.

  I don’t remember much about that evening, but I remember everything about Martha.

  Martha is nine months older than me.

  Martha has not got brown hair. Martha’s hair is a thousand different colours, each hair different from the next – black, almost black, chocolate, chestnut, mahogany, amber, blonde.

  Martha’s eyes are not green. They are olive and tree bark and ivy and jade.

  Martha’s skin is pale and soft, palest on the inside of her wrists, softest on her thighs, freckled on her nose and cheeks and shoulders.

  Martha is an only child and her mum and dad are still in love and Martha’s mum has got cancer.

  Martha says her mum has had cancer of one kind or another for over ten years, since Martha was seven.

  She says they have a joke in her house about the number of times her mum wore a wig to her birthday parties when she was growing up.

  Martha says her mum is the funniest woman alive and that she can make you laugh at anything, even dying at forty-four. Her mum says the only way to deal with cancer is to mock it and make it feel small, otherwise it takes over everything you do or say or think and then it’s winning.

  Martha says it usually always wins eventually.

  The second time I saw Martha she took me to St Johns Gardens, a very quiet bit of Regents Park by the rose garden that I didn’t know existed. Hardly anyone goes there. It was sunny and quiet and we sat on a blue bench and Martha kissed me. I put my head on her lap and looked up through the trees at the sky and she stroked my hair.

  She asked me one question, a vague one. “Tell me something about yourself that nobody else knows.”

  This wasn’t hard. I had a lot to choose from. I told her that. I said I didn’t do much talking really and she said, “You can talk to me.”

  So I did. About Dad. About Mum and Bob and Jed and Mercy and Pansy and Norman.

  And about Violet.

  “Violet Park?” she said “The pianist? My dad’s got one of her records. I watched The Final Veil over and over again when I was a kid just to see her hands.”

  “Like little birds,” we said at the same time.

  I wanted to marry her there and then.

  FIFTEEN

  I went with Norman past Violet’s house while Pansy was still in the hospital. I didn’t plan to. Me and Jed and Norman were taking Jack for a walk on the hill and we just went that way, that was all.

  I was walking behind them down the road because I had Jack on the lead and he’d stopped to sniff interesting invisible thing number thirty-seven, and when they passed her house I thought I heard Norman say to Jed, “Violet’s place eyes left” and I said, “What?”

  They stopped and I said again, loud and a bit aggressive, “What did you say?” and Norman looked back at me and Jed looked at his feet.

  And then Norman said quite clearly, “This is Violet’s house, the lady whose ashes you found. The pianist.”

  Everything went quiet and I was suddenly very far away and looking at Norman through a telescope.

  I said, “How do you know that?” (because really, what were the odds on Norman knowing anything about it?) and he said, “I know that because your dad used to visit her here.”

  Norman’s got this way of talking where he hardly moves his mouth and his voice is very deep and very quiet. He has a big old dappled moustac
he that bobs around so his hardly-moving mouth and his very quiet words sometimes don’t make themselves heard. I rewound to double check and I listened again and heard, “Your dad used to visit her here.”

  I was torn between believing him and just bursting out laughing.

  How could Violet Park and my dad have anything to do with each other at all?

  As far as I knew, the only places those two were even remotely connected were Pansy’s mantelpiece and my own brain.

  But there was something about the way Norman looked at me as if he hadn’t been inside himself looking out for a long time, like he knew exactly what he was saying for once and he was willing me to notice.

  So I said, “Why did Pete visit Violet?”

  It was Jed that answered. Jed, my bloody five-and-a-half-year-old brother, who suddenly might know things I didn’t about the dad he’d never met. He said, “He was making a book about her.” He was still holding Norman’s hand and looking up at him while he said it.

  And then there was a pause while we both looked at Norman, and then Norman said, “Who? Who was writing a book?”

  “Why didn’t you tell me this before, Grandad?” I said.

  Norman shrugged his shoulders and started walking again, and he said, “Before what? What are you talking about, Lucas?”

  And that was it.

  When we got to the park I left them playing with the dog for five minutes and called Bob on my mobile. I didn’t bother with small talk, I just said: “Do you know anything about Violet Park?”

  Bob was dead quiet for a minute and then he said, “A bit. Why?”

  “Did my dad know her?” I said.

  Bob half laughed and half sighed down the phone. I could tell from his breathing he was keeping something in. “Who told you that?”