Bob shook his head. He said, “They didn’t see each other for years and then Violet got back in touch, apparently, and asked your dad to help her write her life story.”
“Help her?” I said.
“Yep, it’s called ghost writing.”
“He took that a bit literally didn’t he?” I said, and we both forced a laugh.
“Well, he didn’t get very far with it before Violet died,” Bob said, and then he picked up this old contact sheet and stood staring at it.
I said had he found the photos, and he passed it to me; tiny black and white shots, twenty-four of them in three rows of eight. Tiny Violets and tiny Dads, posing and grinning and wearing shades. Dad was wearing a shirt that I still have in my cupboard at home. He had dark brown messy hair like I do. He looked young and happy. I was surprised how much he looked like me. And that’s when I realised.
Maybe Violet thought I was my dad.
Was that why I noticed her in the cab office, and why she was waving her dead arms at me to get my attention?
Did she think I was Pete?
I didn’t want her to think that. I wanted her to think I was me.
EIGHTEEN
I wasn’t in the mood for Mercy when I got in.
She stopped me in the hallway, all businesslike and aggressive, pulling rank.
She said she wanted to have a serious talk with me about Mum.
Mercy’s serious talks usually mean she’s finally woken up to something the rest of us have been aware of for months. They usually take place in her room, last about two minutes and are a load of crap.
I followed her upstairs in a hunched shoulder, stomping on the stairs kind of way and she shut her door behind me.
“We’ve got to do something about Mum,” she said.
“Like what?” I said, pretending not to be bothered.
“She’s depressed, Lucas, have you not noticed?”
I haven’t said much about Mercy before now. Nothing good, anyway. The truth is, that’s kind of how we are in real life. We hardly see each other, maybe at breakfast on school days (except she barely eats and always disappears upstairs to put make-up on) or on the stairs or at night if she’s come home and I’m still up. We don’t have time for more than four words each and most of them are sarcastic.
So anyway, my stranger of a sister was standing between me and the way out with her hands on her hips and obviously brewing for a fight.
She said it again, but with more outrage. “Haven’t you noticed Mum’s depressed?”
I wanted to say all kinds of things. I wanted to say that of course I’d bloody noticed, and it could be to do with her husband abandoning her with two teenagers and a baby and having no time off and no social life and always wishing she’d made different choices and never had any kids. I could have said I knew Mum’s problems intimately through stealing and reading her diary, but I didn’t say any of that.
I said, “No.”
I’m not sure why. Maybe I wanted a fight too.
Mercy threw her arms up in the air and yelled at me. “You are so selfish and out of your face! Is it up to me to look after everybody in this stupid family?”
I said I hadn’t noticed she was looking after anybody apart from herself, which was true, but badly timed. I thought she was going to punch me.
“When are you going to wake up, Lucas?”
“About eleven,” I said. I was enjoying myself. I was perverse.
“She’s got that awful boyfriend, she’s putting on weight, she’s drinking too much and she cries in the bathroom when she thinks we’re watching TV,” Mercy said. “I’m not letting you out of this room until we work something out.”
“Why don’t you offer to baby-sit for Jed or go and visit Pansy once in a while or take Norm and the dog for a walk or do the shopping?” I said to her in a way that pointed out these were all things I was actually doing.
“It’s more than that,” she said.
“Well, let’s see,” I said, and I was pretty angry about everything by then or I wouldn’t have said it. “We could go back in time and tell her not to shag Dad, who she didn’t even like, or not to get pregnant with you so he had to marry her, in fact not to bother having any of us, and what else?”
Mercy was trying to get a word in, but I was all keyed up and I wasn’t stopping.
“Oh! We could go and find Dad for her, wherever the hell he is, and then she could divorce him and marry that other prick, that art teacher, and pretend to get on with her life! That good enough?”
Then I pushed past Mercy and opened the door, and Mum was standing right there in the corridor, listening.
For a moment I thought she was going to do that thing of pretending nothing had happened, which would have been a relief, but she said, “I am getting on with my life, aren’t I? Who says I’m not?”
I said, “Mercy does” and Mercy said, “Lucas does” at the same time, which left us both looking stupid and to blame.
“Well, what do you suggest?” she said, walking in and sitting on Mercy’s bed. She was seething. It was like she wanted to embarrass us.
She said, “Come on! If you talk about people when they aren’t there, you have to have the guts to do it their faces.”
I looked over at Mercy who wasn’t looking at anyone and clearly wasn’t going to go first, and I said, “You should go out more,” which was feeble.
Mum smiled a really unfriendly smile.
Then I said, “You could go back to college and get a degree. You’re clever,” which sounded patronising but wasn’t meant to.
Mum nodded.
“You could go on holiday on your own.”
“Great,” said Mum, meaning the opposite.
“We could move,” Mercy said.
“You should get the marriage annulled and marry whatsisname,” I said.
“The prick?” Mum said.
“You could decorate,” Mercy said. “You could have a clear-out and take Dad’s stuff to the dump. You could rent the house out. Or sell it.”
Mum put out her hand to stop us. She was laughing at us in a way that made me really sad.
“Guys, do you think I haven’t thought of all those things, given that going back in time is still impossible?” She glared at me when she said that.
We shrugged, at the same time, like idiots.
“And do you know why I haven’t done them?”
I said no, but Mercy kept her mouth shut and they were both looking at me. Suddenly I could see what was coming.
“Lucas,” Mum said, dead calm. “Do you know why I haven’t moved house or remarried or gone on holiday? Why I haven’t thrown out so much as a pair of shoes or a postcard that belonged to your dad?”
I wanted to be somewhere else then. I didn’t know what to say to her. Had they talked about this before when I wasn’t around? Mercy was breathing easier, off the hook, and everything was down to me.
“Take a look at yourself,” Mum raged quietly. “Take the plank out of your own eye before you conspire in bedrooms about the speck in mine and lecture me about getting on with my bloody life. Do you think I’ve dared?”
She probably wanted me to answer, but I shrugged.
“You’re a fanatic, Lucas,” she said. “You’re a walking shrine to your father.”
I didn’t say anything. Mercy was staring at me. I wondered if this was working out the way she’d planned.
I took Bob’s old photo of Mum out of my pocket and put it in her hand. I’d wanted her to see it and remember how young and happy and gorgeous she was when she willingly made the choice to marry Dad and have us.
She looked at it, and then she kissed me on the cheek and said, “Tomorrow, you and me are having a clear out and taking his stuff to the dump. No arguments.”
I felt bad that she’d overheard us rowing about her like that. I was ashamed. I wanted to go back about five minutes and have her overhear me saying only good things, because people never get to hear that stuff said about th
em by accident. It’s always a slagging off people stumble upon, and being slagged off by your own kids has got to hurt.
And for a while it stung, what Mum had called me, the fanatic thing, the walking shrine. But the thing is, I couldn’t blame her for saying it. She was right.
And what if I’d said then that I was beginning to see Dad for what he was? It wouldn’t have made her happy. I reckon it would have broken her heart.
I was the last one looking out for him, that’s the thing. Without me he’d have none of us left.
Somebody had to do it.
When a family falls apart it puts itself back together around the thing that’s missing. When Dad went, the thing that bound us was the lack of Dad, the missing him and thinking about him and looking for his face in crowds.
In a weird way, the hole he left was the glue.
It was what made us close, what made us different and in it together, I suppose.
People had to get over it in shifts. We couldn’t all do it together because if we did things might have come unstuck.
Somebody had to be the last person to give up.
It could have been any of us.
But it was me.
NINETEEN
If I hadn’t had the row with Mercy and my mum,
If Mum hadn’t decided to confront me about it being mainly my fault nobody was getting on with their life since Dad left, apparently,
If I hadn’t been roped, harshly, into helping get rid of all trace of him in the house,
If I hadn’t been hunched in the attic, inhaling grey dust and getting splinters and being forced to hand box after precious box of my dad’s books and files and papers down the ladder to my steely-mouthed, hard-hearted mother, I would never have found the box marked VIOLET PARK.
I am not kidding.
I tried to stand up, really fast, without thinking, and hit my head on a beam.
I nearly put my foot through the ceiling.
Mum was going, “What? What?” but there was no way I was telling her.
I yelled down the stairs something about getting a splinter and I must have sworn because she went, “Lucas! Jed’s ears are burning” so I said, “Sorry for being a wankster” and Jed tee-heed and Mum laughed with a snort.
I shook the box and something slid from end to end and clattered like plastic, but Mum didn’t hear it because she was pig-laughing.
The box was an old shoebox and it was done up with Sellotape. My hands were shaking and I was trying to pick at it with my too-short fingernails and the Sellotape was old and worn and almost-nothing thin and really stuck down and I was sweating and the dust and the sweat were running down my forehead and into my eyes and I was swearing, really quietly, in whispers, to myself.
The Sellotape took some of the box away with it when it came off.
I lifted the lid and there was a tape in there. That was it. One tiny tape in a box, marked 1.
I put it in my pocket.
I shoved the box into a corner under a horrible dusty old rug.
Then I passed Mum a load more precious junk that was and wasn’t ours to get rid of.
Once we had all Dad’s stuff piled up, for a while we just sat there staring at it. Jed was going through a box of photos, just flicking really, hardly looking, but sort of wanting to be involved. Mercy had gone out because she said she would put money on there being tears and yelling and she wanted nothing to do with it. I said I thought tears and yelling were her best subjects and she gave me the finger before she slammed the front door.
It was exhausting just looking at it.
It wasn’t just paper in the boxes from the attic. It was clothes and records and cuff links and jewellery and brushes and sunglasses and a guitar and an ashtray I’d made out of clay when I was about seven.
I looked at it and I thought, It’s all that’s left of him.
Then I thought of him in some other place, with new records and clothes and photos and kids who made ashtrays, and I thought that he was still the same poor excuse for a man, however much shopping he’d done, the bastard.
I suppose you could call it me steeling myself.
I said we should give the records to Bob, and Mum looked doubtful and said would he even want them, and I said there was no way a collection like that was going to the dump, so she said OK, but it had to happen today.
Mum said not to take too long. She just wanted to load up the car and get rid, but I needed to check and make a mental note of everything that was going. Every time I made a case for keeping something she got a bit more short-tempered.
I found a camera.
I found a black fountain pen with a gold nib and a mother-of-pearl handle.
I found the tiny tape recorder I needed to play the tiny Violet Park tape.
I was allowed to keep some more of his clothes (two suits, five shirts, some boots and a fisherman’s jumper).
I found his watch in a jacket pocket. I picked it up and rubbed the face of it with my thumb, and I was stunned to see it because Dad pretty much never took it off, and whenever I thought about where he might be, I always pictured him wearing it. It made me go cold. He wouldn’t go anywhere on purpose without that watch. I suddenly thought, Dad’s dead. He didn’t leave us, and we’re rubbishing his good name and chucking his stuff out. I wound the watch up and put it on and pulled my sleeve down over it. I didn’t even tell Mum because I didn’t want to see her face thinking the same.
I said, “Pansy will never forgive us for this.”
She didn’t even look up.
I know now that Mum didn’t mean it, the whole heart of stone, let’s get this over with act. I think she had to choose between hard as nails and mush-like jelly. Mush-like jelly doesn’t do when you’re clearing out your disappeared beloved’s junk with your wreck of a son. So, hard as nails it was.
And maybe I should have thanked her for it, but I kept thinking there was a third option she’d not considered – the give-up option, the spare us both by putting it all back and forgetting about it option. The carry-on-hoping option.
I tried to bring it up a few times. I said, “Are you sure about this?” and “We don’t have to” but Mum just glared like I was confirming her worst fears about me and carried on chucking stuff in bin liners.
I was angry with her when we got to the dump. I was so angry.
I couldn’t believe she was going through with it, to be honest. She stood outside with her head through the driver’s side window begging me to help her, and I stared straight ahead and didn’t look at her because I was scared I might spit in her face. There was a pigeon straight ahead, hopping and dipping about in all the junk, and I watched it and thought it was going to be picking through my dad’s private possessions in a minute, and I called her a cold bitter selfish loser bitch and I wouldn’t get out of the car. I made her cry.
In the end, the blokes in the office came out and gave her a hand. They must have felt sorry for her. They thought I was a complete idiot, guaranteed.
What did I care? I felt like somebody had died.
TWENTY
It was at least a week before I bothered to listen to the tape.
I didn’t give a damn about Violet Park.
I got out of the car at the dump when Mum got back in and I made sure she got a good look at the watch while I did it. Then she drove off and I sat down with Dad’s stuff and just watched it. Bits of paper were already starting to lift out of boxes and flutter about and become not his any more. I worried that if I didn’t watch they would just become trash like all the stuff around them and I wasn’t ready for that to happen. I thought about how Dad’s things stood out to me, how precious they were against the other stuff my brain was telling me was junk. And then I thought about all the junk and how that was precious to somebody else, and soon the whole dump became this mountain range of neglected and forgotten treasure that I had to watch like a hawk.
Somebody had to.
After a while, the men who thought I was an idiot came
out of the office and said they were closing up. It was three-thirty. I know that because I looked at my dad’s watch. His sunglasses were right next to me, shoved down the side of a box of books. I put them on before I left.
I went to Martha’s.
I’m sure the last thing you need when you’ve been going out with someone for three weeks is them showing up on your doorstep like their life’s ended, but I didn’t think about that at the time.
She opened the door and I just started crying. I couldn’t help it. Martha didn’t say anything. She put her arms out and I sort of walked into them, and she took me upstairs to her tiny bedroom and she didn’t ask me one question, just sat with me and held my hand and got me a drink of water and waited until I’d stopped blubbing like a fool.
Then she said that stuff was just stuff and that when her mum died she could throw out every single thing that had ever belonged to her and it still wouldn’t change the bits of Wendy that she was going to hold on to forever, like the time she taught her how to ride a bike, or bought her first bra, or read to her every night even when she was too old for it.
I said I didn’t remember my dad ever reading to me and it was mum who taught me how to ride a bike and I didn’t wear bras.
Martha said maybe I was clinging on to all dad’s stuff because I didn’t have enough good memories of him to fill the spaces.
It was a good point.
TWENTY-ONE
I stayed at Martha’s that night. We stayed up late and I slept on the sofa. I woke up thinking about the dump, and Dad’s watch, and Mum. Martha brought me tea and toast on a tray.
I went to Bob’s instead of school. He’d already seen Mum. She’d driven straight there yesterday, from the dump. Bob didn’t look too happy to see me at the door.
“For Christ’s sake, give your mum a break would you?” he said when he let me in. He asked me if I’d called her and I shrugged and said, “Not yet.”
“You’re out of order, you know that,” Bob said, and he passed me the phone. I must have winced or something because then he got this steely, don’t play me, look in his eyes and he said, “Phone her now or I’ll do it for you.”
Finding Violet Park Page 8
