Finding Violet Park

by Jenny Valentine

  “I had to take speech lessons to get anywhere in my business. You poms all thought I was a sheep shearer,” and for that sentence she puts on her richest, overbaked Tasmanian drawl and they laugh briefly together, two different octaves on a grand.

  He asks her when she left Tasmania and she says, “I was seventeen. That was a time to arrive in London, my goodness. I came to study at the Royal Academy. Coming here was like somebody turning the lights out. There was no heat, no glare from the sun, no colour. It was too strange, too depressing. I stood on Westminster Bridge and imagined the water in the Thames flowing all the way back to Australia, flowing all the way back home.”

  “Were you homesick?”

  “Yes, very. But I learned to live with that because I didn’t want to go back. I never have.”

  “Do you regret that? Would you like to go there again?”

  “Darling, the next place I’m going is in the ground.”

  “Oh, Violet, you’ve got a while yet.”

  “Not if I have a say in it.”

  Me and my dad both look straight up at Violet when she says this, our heads snap up at exactly the same time. It’s not so much what she says, a simple, throwaway comment that could mean nothing. It’s the way she says it. The silence between them stretches out as I watch him watching her say that.

  “What’s this interview for anyway, darling?” she asks, changing the subject, and my dad says it’s not for the book, it’s just a profile, maybe for a Sunday paper, nothing much but he likes to be thorough.

  Violet says, “And there was I thinking you just wanted to spend time with me,” and they smile at each other in the quiet on the tape.

  “Will you write my obituary? I’d like you to do it.”

  “If I’m still around,” Dad says, and I think, You will be, give or take a year, and then you’ll fall in a big black hole. I’m wondering if her obituary might’ve been the last thing he did before he went, if he ever did it.

  Then Violet coughs and shifts in her chair which creaks, and says, “And now I’m tired of listening to myself talk. It’s your turn. I will ask you five questions about your personal life, for my own profile. And keep the tape running because it’s only fair.”

  TWENTY-THREE

  If you could interview anyone and ask them five questions that they had to answer truthfully, who would they be and what would you ask them? This is one of those never ending questions, like if you could meet three figures from history who would they be? (Mahatma Gandhi, Kurt Vonnegut, Bill Hicks) or what four things would you take to a desert island? (a yacht, a water distilling kit, an iPod with everlasting batteries and Martha, but that’s cheating). Whenever you answer them you instantly change your mind and think of something better that you wish you’d said instead. Or I do, anyway.

  I’m not sure that I would choose my dad. If I could interview anyone in the world, anyone at all, I’d have a duty, surely, to get the truth out of someone like George Bush because my thing about my dad is only my problem, but righteous, misguided, thick as shit world leaders are everybody’s problem.

  But providing my dad was still alive and I got to interview him, I would ask him this.

  Where the hell have you been since October 16th 2002?

  Why didn’t you contact us?

  Was it something we did?

  Any regrets?

  What happens now?

  Violet asked my dad five questions. I know them and his answers pretty much off by heart because I’ve listened to them over and over again, trying to learn the things he said and trying to hear the things he’s not quite saying, if you know what I mean.

  It was less than a year before he left, from what I can make out, and you can tell from his answers he was already thinking about it.

  When and where were you happiest?

  On a houseboat in Chelsea Wharf, about 1985. I was with Bob at a party. We were drunk, I’d just come out of rehab and got a job for The Times and I was about to meet the girl I was going to marry, all in one day.

  What is your greatest regret?

  Not meeting the people I love’s expectations. I come home and they’re disappointed. It’s not a good feeling. That and the failure of diplomacy in international affairs.

  And not knowing my real father. Take your pick.

  (How does my dad feel about Jed I wonder, seeing as it’s his doing somebody else never met their real dad? I can’t believe how people turn their lives in circles and repeat the mistakes that screwed them over in the first place. You’d think some people were cleverer than that.)

  Who have been the most influential people in your life?

  Nicky because she loves me even though I am bad at loving her back.

  Bob because he’s always been there and without him I’d have half the memories, even though he’s messed his own life up royally and worships my wife, the idiot.

  A guy called Mitchell Malone, a speed freak hospital porter who nearly killed me over a poker debt. He could have done, I had no chance. He would have dumped my body in the river and nobody would have known, but he changed his mind and let me go. I never knew why. He was influential, wouldn’t you say?

  What’s wrong with the world, Peter?

  God, I don’t know. Where do you start? People give up. We’re defeatist and we stop striving or fighting or enjoying things. It doesn’t matter what you’re talking about – war, work, marriage, democracy, it all fails because everybody gives up trying after a while, we can’t help ourselves.

  And don’t ask me to solve it because I’m the worst. I’d escape tomorrow if I could, from every single thing I’ve always wanted.

  (Straight from the horse’s mouth. Give it a while, Pete, and you will.)

  If a good friend asked you to, would you help them to die?

  God, I don’t know. I believe in the right to die if that’s what you’re asking. I mean, if people are sick or have no quality of life and they’re of sound mind and they want to go then who am I to stop them? But I don’t know if I could help them do it. I’m a coward. My friends know that about me. They’d pick someone braver. They wouldn’t ask me.

  I am asking you, Peter.

  That’s where the tape stops. It shuts off loud like someone’s fist just landed on it, my dad’s, because Violet just asked him to kill her. On tape.

  It’s what I did too, punched the thing half off the table because I couldn’t believe what I was hearing.

  The quiet of my own room took a minute to get used to. I opened my eyes and pulled off the headphones and I was on my own again, so many years later, still listening for their voices, trying to hear what was no longer there, what he might have said to her once the tape was stopped and he’d lit another cigarette, hands shaking, while she calmly poured more tea.

  I mean, what was he supposed to say to that?

  You must be joking.

  Of course, you’re not serious.

  Very funny, Violet.

  No way on God’s earth.

  How dare you?

  Try suicide (falling under a train, jumping off Archway Bridge, gunshot to the head, etc, etc).

  Or maybe he said, Yes, OK, I will.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  Martha’s mum died. Wendy died.

  People kept saying it was to be expected, it wasn’t too much of a surprise, that kind of thing, but Martha says it doesn’t matter how much warning you’ve had or how prepared you are for it, death is still sudden and it’s still a shock.

  “One minute she was here,” she said, “being my mum, and the next she was nowhere forever. How is it better that I’ve known it was going to happen for ten years?”

  She made me think about it, the sudden definite moment when someone dies, and I saw it was what I’d been spared, in a way, by my dad’s ambiguous departure. The lines around him are all blurry, the lines between being alive and being dead, like he’s been slowly fading from one to the other the whole time he’s been gone. My dad being dead now would still be a shock, but
nothing like it was for Martha, holding Wendy’s hand in the morning when she was living and in the afternoon when she was not. She said she looked down at her mum’s dead hand in hers and thought “It’s never going to touch me again.” She thought, “It’s not my mum any more, it’s just a hand,” and she had to leave the room and be sick.

  The funeral was pretty straightforward considering Wendy’s earlier hopes for the Ganges. It was in a church for one thing, and the vicar kept mentioning God, who I know she wasn’t sure about.

  Martha’s dad read a poem about how dying was just letting go and being free or being born even, and it was incredible because it was full of hope and made being dead seem like the coolest and most relaxing thing to do ever. In the poem it wasn’t like being dead was the end of everything, it was just the end of being who you were, with all the hang ups and memories and crazy ideas that weigh you right down when you’re alive.

  If you look at it like that, dying isn’t such a bad option for some people.

  Afterwards the house was packed out and people were practically queuing up to say how brilliant and amazing and fearless Wendy was. There was a slide show on the staircase wall, pictures of her when she was a child, at graduation, getting married, holding Martha as a baby, looking radiant, looking sick, laughing with all her own hair. People spent a lot of time looking at it, even when the pictures had gone round and they’d seen them more than once. I suppose it was because they still wanted to be around her and this was the closest they were going to get.

  Martha didn’t like it in the house with everybody talking about Wendy and getting drunk, so we went for a walk, nowhere special. It was getting properly dark and the colour was leeching out of everything and the streetlights hadn’t come on yet to turn it all orange. There were people laughing in the street and pushing into pubs and running across roads. I kept thinking, Don’t they know her mum’s just died?

  We ended up sitting on a wall outside a funeral parlour of all places. Martha was laughing and crying at the same time. She said she couldn’t imagine being with anyone else at a time like this.

  “We’re family now, you and me, you know that,” she said, and I didn’t want to feel good about what she said because it was her mum’s funeral, but I did.

  Martha cries a lot. She says I might as well get used to it because it’ll be mainly what she does for a while, even when she doesn’t really feel like doing it. She’s right. We both noticed that she cries the most when she’s happy, like when we’re together, just messing about, or when something makes her laugh out loud. Martha says it’s because the instant she realises she’s happy she feels guilty for forgetting to miss her mum.

  I said just because she isn’t thinking about her mum doesn’t mean she isn’t missing her. It’s just another part of the brain doing the missing, that’s all.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  Before the tape, everything connecting Violet and my dad had felt like guesswork. It seemed ridiculous that the two of them were linked at all really, apart from by their absence. And then suddenly, listening to them talk, it seemed to me that it was exactly that, their absence, that bound them together in a way I could never have imagined in a thousand years.

  The thing I knew for sure was this.

  Violet asked my dad to help her die.

  And then what?

  Did my dad say yes or no? Because if he said yes, it changes things.

  Because if you agree to help someone die and disappear shortly after, there’s a good chance those two things are connected.

  I’ve been trying to remember what my dad was like in the months before Violet died and he left us, when I was ten and strange (apparently) and probably not helping much with all my staring.

  Was he thinking the whole time about helping an old lady die?

  Or was he just dreaming up ways of escape?

  I’ve thought about it a lot and I’m guessing things went something like this.

  After Violet asked my dad to kill her, after the tape recorder got switched off, after she maybe repeated the question, my dad said NO.

  He might have got up and paced the room a bit, but mostly he would have felt pretty calm in the knowledge that there was no way he was going to help her however much she begged him.

  My dad didn’t do much for others, remember, and this was quite a lot to ask.

  If you don’t remember birthdays and anniversaries, if you never take your kids to school or the zoo or the London Planetarium, if giving someone a lift to the station is a major inconvenience, then assisted suicide is way out of range.

  It’s just one favour too far.

  But what if Violet changed his mind?

  It’s not impossible.

  How would you go about something like that, convincing someone to kill you?

  You’d have to be very persuasive.

  Pestering and nagging and just going on about it would never have worked. My dad ignored such methods.

  Appealing to his better nature would be hard, like finding a needle in a haystack. My dad was no Good Samaritan.

  So how would Violet convince him?

  Did she prove beyond a doubt that she had no good reason to go on living?

  I mean why did she want to do it? She must have told him that.

  Maybe she was suffering from something that was going to kill her anyway, like cancer or heart disease or Parkinson’s or boredom.

  Maybe she’d had enough of living on her own, with her imaginary son and her records and her failing hands.

  Maybe she promised him a hefty inheritance. This theory works because it funds his vanishing act and if he was really planning on going, a cash prize is the best carrot she could have offered.

  Another thing I know.

  Less than a year after they made that tape, Violet died. I’m not sure how – I’m hoping peacefully in her sleep. And my dad jumped ship pretty soon after.

  That can’t be a coincidence, can it?

  So maybe he did do it.

  Perhaps it was my dad who helped Violet die.

  And if he did do it, I’m wondering how.

  You’d have to be pretty careful because clearly it can’t look like murder, and it can’t look like assisted suicide even, unless you live in Holland and maybe parts of Scandinavia.

  It was probably an overdose, sleeping pills and booze or painkillers.

  But then why would Violet need my dad when she could do that herself?

  Probably she just wanted him to hold her hand while she went, or make sure she was properly dead before he called anyone so she didn’t get wrenched back from the tunnel with the light at the end.

  I bet she was scared and she wanted somebody to talk to, or someone there just in case she changed her mind at the last minute. Because that would be pretty bad, if you changed your mind halfway through killing yourself and there was nothing you could do about it.

  I don’t even want to think about that.

  Maybe she took the pills and then he smothered her to speed things up a bit. Once you’ve gone through with it, the waiting must be pretty bad.

  I’m dying to know if he actually did any killing.

  But he probably said no and left her to it.

  TWENTY-SIX

  Somehow, in between looking after Martha, and keeping the whole Pete and Violet thing to myself, and trying to be nicer to Mum, I lost sight of Bob for a week or two.

  I might have been avoiding him.

  Because I knew I’d have to go and find out what he knew.

  And say sorry for what happened.

  It was obvious to me as soon as I saw him that Bob knew a lot. He couldn’t look at me. Plus he looked dreadful, like he hadn’t slept since I’d last seen him, which actually turned out to be true. He was all creased up and unsteady on his feet, scratching his arse in a pair of old pyjama bottoms, and I realised he’d been drinking.

  Bob hadn’t had a drink in years. Not since his life fell apart and he glued it back together again.

  It
was a big deal for Bob, not drinking.

  “What’s going on?” I said, and I was scared, like a little kid. Bob didn’t say a word. He just turned back into the house and left the front door open.

  He veered to the left all the way down the corridor and kept knocking into the wall. I walked behind him thinking, Did I do this?

  “’Snot your fault,” Bob breathed into my face at the door. He stank of drink.

  “Isn’t it?” I said.

  “No!” he grunted, and he sort of shouldered open the door at the same time. There was something in the way of it (coats, piles of coats and blankets on the floor) and we had to squeeze through because it would only open a little way.

  The flat was trashed. It looked like Bob had emptied every cupboard and drawer and shelf on to the floor and made a pile of stuff and then rolled around in it.

  “Bob, what have you done in here?” I said. “Christ!”

  “I was looking for something,” he said with his eyes screwed shut, and then he shrugged his shoulders. “Can’t find it.”

  “What were you looking for, somewhere to sit?” I asked, because that’s what I was doing.

  “Oh, sit on the floor, sit where you are!” Bob waved his hands around, annoyed, so I did, shoeing aside a typewriter lid, a flyblown banana and some pants. But then I got up again because the floor was wet.

  “Why’re you drinking Bob?” I said. “What’s happened in here?”

  Then I stopped because I saw something familiar by the window – a box spewing out papers; a washing up liquid box that I’d seen Mum take out of her car and chuck on the dump. I looked around the room then, turning slowly, taking it all in. There were other things, other boxes, mostly unpacked, stacks of notebooks and magazines and stuff.