Finding Violet Park

by Jenny Valentine

  “Norman,” I said, “so it could be made up senile stuff or it could be true. I’ve no way of telling.”

  “It’s true,” he said, after a bit of a gap. “Yeah, your dad knew Violet Park quite well.”

  I lay down in the long grass with the phone still against my ear and I looked at the sky (mottled cloud, one bird, one plane) and I concentrated on breathing.

  Bob said, “What else did Norman tell you?”

  “Not much,” I said. “He clouded over.”

  Bob said, “Do you want to come round?” and I nodded because I forgot he couldn’t see me.

  “I have to walk the dog first,” I said.

  I watched the two of them for a while, my grandad and my little brother. I stayed in the long grass and watched them from a distance.

  I’ve said before that they liked hanging out together, but it wasn’t until now that I realised what a double act they’d always been. I’d got a glimpse of their world for the first time, awash with secrets. And though I’ve said before that I suspected Norman knew more than he let on, I never thought I was right.

  They’d looked guilty, the two of them, standing right outside Violet’s house. There’s no other word for the way they’d looked.

  And now I understand why they stick together. I’ve thought about it a lot.

  When he is around Jed, Norman still gets to be the commanding old man that he would have been if all those little strokes hadn’t been chipping away at him year after year.

  And Jed has a lifeline to his stranger of a dad after all.

  I had no idea how hard it would be to filter information from a man with dementia through the mind of a five-year-old boy. Norman and Jed’s combined version of anything is so garbled it’s a mangled wreck of the real event. It’s like putting a brick through a sieve, twice.

  Jed probably knew I was going to corner him and ask him a load of questions he didn’t want to answer. He managed to avoid me for a few hours by being at a friend’s house, then very busy reading with Mum, then engrossed in a video he’s seen maybe thirteen times and that I’ve definitely heard him say was boring and for babies.

  It was a change because mostly at home he hangs out with me a lot, so I almost missed him.

  Finally though, he gave in, and I got to interrogate him.

  I said we were playing Good Cop Bad Cop. He’s seen The Bill before on telly so he knew what to expect. He gave me his police hat and he was in plastic handcuffs. I taped it.

  Me: This is officer Lucas Swain, Monday 3rd of October, 18:04 hours, questioning the suspect, Jeddathon the Howler, otherwise known as Black Jed. The tape is running. Black Jed, tell me what you know about Norman Swain alias Mad Norm?

  Jed: He’s my grandad.

  Me: Two master criminals in the family. What has Mad Norm taught you about the business?

  Jed: (whispering) Don’t call him mad, Lucas.

  Me: (whispering) Sorry.

  Me: So, what’s he taught you?

  Jed: About what?

  Me: Let’s start with his son, Pete Swain, the invisible man.

  Jed: Dad wasn’t Grandad’s real son. Did you know that?

  Me: He told you that? I didn’t think Norman knew. I thought he’d forgotten.

  Jed: Sometimes he remembers.

  Me: And he told you. Does he mind?

  Jed: No. He says he was a good dad …He played with dad a lot.

  Me: He plays with you a lot too, even though he’s not our real grandad.

  Jed: Yes he is. Shut up, Lucas.

  Me: Do you want to see your lawyer?

  Jed: Are you still buying me sweets after?

  Me: Yes. Does Norman know where Dad is now?

  Jed: Don’t think so.

  Me: Have you ever asked him?

  Jed: No. I could.

  Me: Worth a try, isn’t it.

  Jed: I don’t know.

  Me: What’s he told you about Dad?

  Jed: Loads.

  Me: Like what? Give me five things.

  Jed: His middle name was Anthony. Grandad met him when Dad was six, same as me nearly, and they went to a fair and Grandad won him a goldfish that died. His favourite food was hot chestnuts. He taught him how to fish and ride a bike and he’s going to teach me too. Is that five?

  Me: No, that’s four. One more.

  Jed: He had loads of friends who were girls but I’m not supposed to get why until I’m older.

  Me: Did he tell you any secrets about Dad that you aren’t supposed to tell anyone?

  Jed: What, like him telling Grandad he was leaving before he was leaving?

  Me: Did he? Jesus!

  Jed: No. I don’t know. Maybe.

  Me: Jesus Christ Jed!

  Jed: Is that swearing?

  Me: What?

  Jed: Is crap swearing?

  Me: Not really.

  Jed: Mum says it is. And wankster.

  Me: What’s a wankster?

  Jed: Mum calls people that when she’s driving.

  Me: OK. Jed, can we get back to Dad? This is really important.

  Jed: Grandad says Dad was a wankster.

  Me: Does he? Why?

  Jed: Sometimes he thinks I’m Dad. He calls me Peter. Sometimes he remembers that Dad isn’t here any more. Sometimes he thinks you’re Dad.

  Me: Yeah, I know.

  Jed: He thought you were Dad in the park the other day and he called you a wankster. Can you undo these? I need the loo.

  Me: Why did Grandad call me that?

  Jed: I told you, cos he thought you were Dad.

  Me: No I know, I mean why did he call Dad it?

  Jed: I asked him that. He said pick a reason. Is this what Dad did for work?

  Me: What?

  Jed: Follow people round all day and ask lots of questions?

  Me: I don’t know, maybe.

  Jed: It’s boring. Go and ask Mercy some.

  Me: Mercy’s out.

  Jed: Go and ask Grandad.

  Me: I’m going to.

  Jed: He likes tape recorders.

  (Interview suspended 18:12.)

  SIXTEEN

  It occurs to me that all most people do when they grow up is fix on something impossible and then hunger after it.

  I do it about Dad, and Violet.

  Mum does it about what she might amount to if she lived her life again.

  Bob does it about Mum, according to Mercy.

  Ed does it about winding his mum up and getting laid.

  Mercy does it about Kurt Cobain and breast implants and mind-altering narcotics.

  Pansy does it about her encyclopaedia salesman and her son and about some pre-senile version of Norman.

  Norman does it about his past, which he can’t quite hold on to.

  Violet’s doing it past her sell by date about something I haven’t worked out yet.

  The only person who doesn’t do it is Jed.

  He lives in the present tense only. I don’t think he’s any good at all at things like the past or the future. Even today and tomorrow and yesterday trip him up. Jed says yesterday when he means six months ago and tomorrow when he means not now. Also, when you’re going somewhere with Jed, he instantly forgets that you’re headed from A to B. He just spends ages looking at snails and collecting gravel and stopping to read signs along the way.

  Jed is clueless about time and that means Jed is never sad or angry about anything for more than about five minutes. He just can’t hold on to stuff for long enough. Five minutes might as well be a year to him.

  And the thing about everyone else in my family is we are so busy being miserable and down all the time about impossible stuff that being miserable and down has started to become normal and strangely comforting.

  I mean, how much would we actually really like it if Dad showed up tomorrow and became part of the family again?

  Wouldn’t it get everyone’s backs up a little bit?

  It would be like having a stranger in the house, like a new lodger.

&
nbsp; It would be really weird.

  At some point, the impossible object of desire must turn into the last thing on earth you want to happen, without anybody noticing.

  The day Pansy came home from the hospital I waited with Norman for Mum to drop her off. He sat at the kitchen table folding and refolding a piece of paper, and I did a bit of washing up and taking out the rubbish (mostly chocolate wrappers). I sensed that if I wanted to ask Norman anything and I wanted a straight answer, now was the time. I think he was looking forward to being off guard and probably just wanted to doze in his chair and potter about with the dog like before, safe in the knowledge that she at least knew who he was.

  I coughed first to break the silence.

  “Did you meet Violet Park, Grandad?”

  He looked at me for a second as if he hadn’t realised I was there and I thought, no, it’s too late, he’s gone back to forgetting. Then he said “No. It was your dad that knew her, for all the good it did him.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “Man-eater, that one,” Norman said.

  I had an image of Violet swallowing my dad whole. So that was where he had gone. “Was she?”

  “Other people’s husbands for breakfast, lunch and dinner,” he said.

  “Not Dad though,” I said.

  Norman shrugged. “Thick as thieves they were, at the end.”

  “What end?” I said, but Norman didn’t say anything.

  “Did Dad tell you he was leaving?” I said.

  Norman looked hard at me and said, “Do you think I wouldn’t remember a thing like that?”

  “I don’t know, Grandad,” I said, which was a lie.

  “Do you think I’d leave everybody wondering and not knowing, if I knew?” he said, and I shook my head and said, “No” but I could tell just by looking at him that he knew he couldn’t remember.

  And I felt for Norman, I really did. It wasn’t the same for us. We didn’t know where Dad was and that was that, simple. But Norman must always be wondering whether he did know. Imagine knowing the thing that you most need to know, and your whole family most needs to know, and not being able to find it, only wondering if you know it or not.

  Mum arrived with Pansy and said she couldn’t stay, for some reason. She drove off pretty quick, like she couldn’t wait to be out of there. Pansy was shrunken and frail like a doll. It scared me a bit, the thought of her being in a pot like Violet pretty soon. Me and Norman swooped and fussed around her until she swatted us off. I went to the kitchen to make them both a cup of tea and when I came back they were sitting in silence, holding hands across the gap in their easy chairs.

  Pansy’s hands looked like birds’ claws. The bones stood up under her skin and her veins were all knotted and dark blue. Her fingernails needed cutting. She looked like she was made of paper.

  She didn’t even notice that Violet was gone. She sat staring at Dad’s photo on the mantelpiece and didn’t see the new gap beside it.

  “I never thought I’d die before he came back,” she said to no one in particular, and no one in particular answered because what could we say?

  “I’m so disappointed in him, Lucas,” Pansy said to me, tears rolling down her face, perfect dewdrops magnifying her wrinkles.

  I hadn’t heard her speak a word against Dad in five years. I’d relied on Pansy for that.

  “So am I,” I said.

  It made me cold all over, the change in Pansy. It was like someone had broken her. She’d been away less than two weeks and she’d come back beaten.

  Pansy started to talk about funerals then. She said she knew she was going soon and she wanted a say in how she went, so that even though Dad would most likely not be there she’d still have stuff to look forward to. I promised her I’d take care of it, even if she wanted a horse-drawn carriage and a four-metre statue of a cherub for a gravestone. But Pansy wants a quiet simple service. She wants to be buried whole (no burning) in the village in Wales where she grew up. Her mum is buried there and her dad’s name is on the headstone too, but his body is busy becoming coal, she says, in the mine where he died. She says she wants a space for Norman there too, next to hers, because she’ll only worry if he’s out of her sight.

  Martha says she’d like a Viking burial. This means she wants to be wrapped up in an oil-soaked cloth and pushed out to sea in a long boat. Then she wants a flaming arrow fired at her corpse, which will burst into flames and burn to a cinder before being swallowed by the water.

  I hope not to be there.

  Martha’s dad is an anthropologist, which means he looks at how people behave in different groups and cultures, and he knows a lot about funerals and says they are different the world over. It seems there’s no end to the many ways you can say goodbye to someone.

  In Bali (I think) the body hangs about above ground for a while, going off, and then it gets decked with flowers and torched. When the fire’s gone out the relatives have to scrabble for bones and throw them in the ocean. It’s very hands-on. And somewhere, maybe some part of China, long after the funeral, when everyone has stopped grieving and mourning, the dead person gets dug right back up again and you have a party with the bones to show you’re really OK and over it and everything. It’s a good job they don’t have lead-lined coffins there. Martha says that if you’re buried in a lead-lined coffin no air can get in and you can’t leak out so you turn to soup.

  Martha’s mum wants to be scattered in some form or other in the river Ganges in India, but she’ll probably settle for the New Forest. She says, “Unlike us in the west who sweep death under the carpet, the Hindu people have a very healthy attitude to dying because they’ve done it before and they’ll do it again.” I suppose with reincarnation, dying is no big deal, as long as you’ve behaved yourself and you don’t come back as a blue tit or a dung beetle.

  Martha’s mum and dad are called Wendy and Oliver. I met them when I went to their house for Sunday lunch. I was nervous to start with because I’ve never been to anyone’s house for Sunday lunch before. I probably talked too much and I can’t have been that interesting when I know so much less about everything than they do, but they were keen to like me. About halfway through pudding I realised I felt pretty much at home.

  Martha was right about her mum. She made me laugh so much I nearly squirted beer through my nose. And I would never have known she was wearing a wig. Not in a million years.

  SEVENTEEN

  I lugged my old tape recorder to Bob’s and we sat and listened to the Good Cop Bad Cop game. It made him laugh and he said Jed was very precocious and enjoying his role as the Oracle, whatever that means; something to do with channelling the words of the Gods, or in this case, Norman.

  I could see he was trying to suss out how much I knew and how much to tell me. He was definitely on his guard and a bit cagey. I hadn’t expected Bob to be like that, so I started behaving like that too.

  And there was one thing I knew for sure that Bob didn’t.

  Violet was currently laid to rest in a plastic bag inside a rucksack three metres from where we were sitting.

  For some reason that felt like four aces in a card game.

  I asked Bob if he’d ever met Violet and how many times and what was she like.

  He said that he and Dad had first met Violet together when they came to interview her for an article about music in film. It was pretty early on when they were starting out and took any work they could get, and Bob came with Dad to take the pictures.

  He said they called Violet the Technicolor lady because she had hair the colour of fire and lipstick the colour of blood, and wore bright pinks and greens and purples. Bob said they were hung-over and they kept their shades on for as long as possible because she hurt their eyes.

  He said Violet made them Brandy Alexanders at eleven in the morning and told them unrepeatable stories about the rich and famous.

  They were too drunk to get much done on the article.

  So they had to come back.

  And th
e second time they were much more businesslike and only had two or three cocktails and wrote everything down and got out the camera. And then when they were at the front door, leaving, she looked at Dad – definitely at Dad according to Bob – and said, “Which one of you two gents would care to take me out to dinner this Friday?”

  And Dad laughed and said, “Me.”

  I asked Bob if he could dig out any photos he had from that job and he looked at me blankly and then mumbled something about not being sure he still had them, but he made a show of looking anyway. Then he started opening drawers and shuffling around in boxes while we were talking, which made it easier to ask questions because he wasn’t staring straight at me the whole time.

  So I said, “Did dad actually go out with Violet, on a date, like boyfriend and girlfriend?” and Bob said, “It would have been nicer if he had.”

  I said, “What does that mean?” and Bob told me that dad kept Violet on the brink of it for years, always giving her enough hope so she’d give him money or buy him a suit or take him out for dinner or something, never saying no and never delivering either.

  Bob said, “Your dad could say ‘I love you’ to a woman without even blinking, whether he meant it or not. Mostly not. He said it was the way to get whatever you wanted out of chicks at no extra cost.”

  And Bob said judging by Dad’s success rate with the opposite sex, his theory worked.

  My dad the stud. I was kind of impressed and appalled all at once.

  “Well how come he married Mum then,” I said, “if he had Violet to pay for stuff and all these girls on tap?”

  “Your mum was a cut above,” Bob said. “She was beautiful and funny and bright and she had no interest whatsoever in your father.” And he threw me a photo of Mum then, taken maybe twenty years ago. It was funny seeing her like that, herself and not herself, the same person but not the one I knew. I had to admit she was a fox.

  “She didn’t even like him,” I said.

  “Not at first, but he worked hard on it. He loved your mum, you know.”

  “Yeah? Right.”

  Bob didn’t say anything to that.

  I said, “So Dad married Mum and then he didn’t see Violet again and then he disappeared and she died and that’s it?”