Dad’s things.
Not everything we dumped, not even close, but quite a lot of it.
Bob was searching my dad’s stuff for something.
“Bob, what the …?”
“I just couldn’t find it,” he said, and he was crying, shaking his head and crying, his face collapsing into his beard. “I made five trips to that godforsaken place, on foot, carrying the stuff back and forth and I couldn’t bloody find it.”
I asked him what it was he couldn’t find, but I couldn’t get any sense out of him. He was just sobbing and shaking his head, standing in the middle of his trashed flat, like things had gone way beyond what it was he could or couldn’t find.
Then Bob poured two massive glasses and thrust one at me.
“Keep drinking,” he said. “Keep drinking,” and I didn’t want to, but Bob drank his straight down and poured another.
Then he stared at me with his eyes all glazed over and he said, “You’re nothing like your dad,” and I asked him what he meant by that.
“Pete was my best friend and I loved him, but he was a bad man,” Bob said, and it just hung there between us, this “bad man” thing, and neither of us liked that he’d said it, even though we both had our reasons for thinking it was true.
“Will you tell me what you were looking for?” I said.
Bob said he didn’t want to tell me anything. He said, “I’ve hated knowing it all this time.”
“Do you know where he is?” I said. That would be my worst, if he’d known all along where my dad was and never told me.
“God no!” Bob said. “Do you think I could have kept that from you?”
“I don’t know, Bob,” I said, and I was starting to get angry. “What are you keeping from me?”
Bob looked through me for a minute. He drained his glass again and poured another. Then he said, “I know something about your dad. Something he did.”
“Something he did?” I said, like a brainless echo. I hate it when people do that.
“Yeah,” Bob said. “We had a fight about it.”
“What did he do?” I said.
“He said he didn’t do it but he lied,” Bob said.
“What was this thing he did?” I said.
“It was Violet.”
I thought I was going to throw up.
“Violet?”
Bob nodded. “Violet Park. The lady in the urn you stashed here without asking.”
I said I was sorry. Bob looked at me and said, “So was it really her in there?”
“Yes,” I said, and then I had to ask. “Was she dead or alive when you had this fight about her?”
“She’d been dead for three days,” Bob said. “Your dad found her.”
The hairs on my arms prickled. My stomach lifted and then dropped again. My dad found her. That kind of put him at the scene of the crime.
“Found her? How?”
Bob shrugged. “At home. Dead at home.”
“Jesus!” I said. “How did Violet die? Was it old age?”
Bob looked as if he was standing on the edge of a canyon about to jump in.
“Overdose,” he said, staring at the floor.
I’m not sure exactly what happens when you get a surge of adrenaline in your body. Your heart bangs inside you, I know that, and it feels like all the blood in your body drains away from other places like your brain and your eyes and your fingers.
“So she killed herself?” I said.
Bob shrugged. Then he shook his head. He wouldn’t look at me.
“The thing is,” he said, his voice thick with tears, “your dad lied to me.”
“Lied how?” I said. “What about?”
“He said he was home looking after you. You had chickenpox. But Nicky was raging because he hadn’t been back, she hadn’t seen him and …”
“I remember having chickenpox,” I said.
I remember Mum putting baking powder on them to stop the itching and I remember still having scabs when I found out I didn’t have a dad any more.
“How do you know?” I said. “How do you know Dad was there? How do you know he wasn’t looking after me?”
“Oh come on, Lucas,” Bob said, and I knew what he meant. My dad never spent more than five minutes watching over me when I was sick. Anyone who knew him would know it was a crap alibi.
There were several things I could have said. But I didn’t.
Bob said, “Violet Park changed her will and left your dad everything.”
“Did he know that?” I said. “Maybe he didn’t.”
“He knew it,” Bob said. “We talked about it. He told me.”
“And what did he say?” I asked.
“When the old girl goes I’ll be rich as sin,” Bob said, and stared at me hard.
I shut my eyes and tried to think.
“Did you accuse him of killing her?” I said, kind of amazed at Bob’s nerve.
“Lucas, I saw Violet the day she died and she was happy.”
“So?” I said. “Maybe she was happy because she’d decided to die that day.”
Bob stared at me. “That’s exactly what your dad said.”
I stared at the reflection of the room in the window. I traced the pattern of the carpet. I didn’t want to look at Bob at all. What if he hadn’t done that, if he’d kept his mouth shut? Would my dad still be here?
“I knew Violet,” he said. “She wouldn’t kill herself. She loved life.”
“I knew Dad,” I said back. “He wouldn’t run away. He loved us.”
Bob didn’t say anything to that.
And when I finally looked at him he was passed out, dead drunk.
I didn’t go anywhere while he was sleeping. I didn’t do much.
I sat in the filth and I thought about stuff.
Of course, I knew from the tape that Violet wanted to die. Bob was working on less than half the picture and I had to tell him. But I wondered at first whether to bother. I was so angry at him for being wrong, for maybe making Dad leave. Not telling him felt like a fitting punishment, but only for a minute.
I knew it wasn’t Bob’s fault really.
I knew my dad wasn’t a good man.
The idea had been hanging around me for a while but I’d been ignoring it.
And I felt evil for thinking it.
But really I had no choice.
It’s what you do when you grow up, apparently, face up to things you’d rather not and accept the fact that nobody is who you thought they were, maybe not even close.
My dad was definitely not who I’d been thinking he was all these years.
It wasn’t because of what Bob or Jed or Norman or Mum had said about him. It wasn’t even about Violet.
It was all coming from me, doubts and bad thoughts.
The voice in my head was my voice, so I couldn’t get away from it.
And the voice was saying I’d known it all along. It was telling me I had all the evidence I needed.
Maybe he killed Violet and maybe he didn’t. I didn’t know anything.
And that’s the point.
The proof I had was the exact same reason I couldn’t be certain of anything I said about him, the reason he escaped all the blame and all the judgement I put my mum through the last few years, the reason I had him up on some stage for the blessed and the untouchable.
He wasn’t here.
And while I hadn’t given up all hope that he was dead in a freak accident or kidnapped by aliens or mistakenly locked in a nuthouse or lying in hospital piecing together what remained of his memory, I was beginning to realise it was far more likely that my dad just ran off because he felt like it. Violet or no Violet, he couldn’t be arsed with us any more. He’d had enough. And he got away with it, too.
So yes, my dad was cool and clever and funny and handsome, and his taste was impeccable and he looks good in photos, but that doesn’t add up to anything.
And I was angry that it took me so long to notice. I thought about how hard it must
have been for Mum and Bob to keep quiet while I turned him into a hero, how many times they must have banged their heads against a wall while I went around in his suits and listened to his music and painted him whiter than white.
I only did it because I loved him.
And I thought, Did Violet come back for this, to show me this?
Did she wait in purgatory to point out what my dad was really like?
And what does it say about my dad that his best friend thought him capable of murder?
Not much.
In the end I woke Bob up and started talking.
“I found Violet in a cab office. I didn’t know she had anything to do with Dad when I found her,” I said. “I just wanted to put her somewhere better. It wasn’t a good place for her to be. And then everyone seemed to know who she was – you did and Norman did and Jed did and the dentist did. And she kept popping up everywhere and it was like she was trying to get my attention, trying to tell me something and I didn’t know what it was. And then I found a tape with her name on it so I kept it. It didn’t make it as far as the dump.”
Bob looked up at me then.
“It’s got Violet and Dad on it, talking,” I said. “She asked him, Bob. At the end of the tape she says I am asking you to help me die.”
He put his face in his hands and wept when I said that.
But I didn’t know what to do with it at all.
I didn’t know what to think or how to feel. Was everything better or was everything worse?
TWENTY-SEVEN
If I’d been a proper old-fashioned detective, or if I still had my Usborne How To Be A Private Eye kit, I would have dusted Violet’s urn for fingerprints. There were eight sets of prints on there because eight people handled her after she was dead.
Me,
Martha,
Pansy (probably moved it for dusting),
Norman (maybe working out if it was Pansy),
Mr Soprano from the cab office,
Jawad Saddaoui, the structural engineer from Morocco whose cab Violet got left in,
Mr Francis Macauley at the crematorium in Golders Green,
Pete Swain, missing journalist, angel of mercy and my dad.
At least he had the decency to organise her funeral. If you could call it organise, because him and Bob were the only people there.
Bob said they followed the body to Golders Green and then afterwards they got trashed in a pub around the corner.
My dad picked up her ashes the day after he fought with Bob. It’s on record at the crematorium that they were collected. I checked.
So it was my dad that left her ashes in the back of a cab and vanished, abandoning her as well as his wife, his parents, his daughter and two sons (one unborn) and his best friend.
I’ve decided you can look at it in two ways.
Violet asked my dad to help her die and broke his heart. He said no but she persuaded him that it was what she wanted and without him she would have to do it alone. He helped her because he cared about her and the strain of it pushed him to breaking point. Then his best friend accused him of murder and he realised nobody would believe him and he could end up in jail for helping her. So he cracked and had to get out, away from everything, away from us. You read about people doing it for less.
In other words, he was a good person who did something brave and selfless and couldn’t handle the consequences.
Helping Violet die was his ticket out of here – help an old lady, get a new life. My dad didn’t do it for Violet, he didn’t give a damn about her really. He did it for what she promised him in return (enough money to get a new identity) and his conscience didn’t bat an eyelid.
This makes him a self-serving, cold-hearted borderline sociopath.
I can’t decide between them or any of the grey areas in between and in the end I suppose it doesn’t matter either way.
He did what he did. She got what she wanted. He left.
Those are the things that count.
TWENTY-EIGHT
Violet was waiting when I got home from Bob’s. It was maybe four in the morning and I let myself in and didn’t make too much noise on the stairs and even my breathing sounded too loud and I locked my bedroom door behind me and got her out from under the bed. Her urn was so beautiful. The grain in the wood was intricate and clear, the polish was smooth and flawless in my hands. Did my dad think the same thing when he chose it? Or did he pick the cheapest thing in the brochure and never noticed how it shone?
I sat with her on the floor while the birds woke up and the sky turned a watery grey and people got in their cars and tried to start them.
Violet had spent five years in that urn for a reason. I’d started off wondering why she picked me to help her, what she wanted. I’d thought about her funeral, her will, about finding her the right resting place. I’d thought she wanted to me to solve something for her. I didn’t know she was doing something for me. I hadn’t expected for a minute that she was going to lead me to my dad.
I was sorry that she’d decided to have enough of living.
I hugged her in her exquisite, cold, wooden container and I wished that I’d been able to know her when she was still alive.
We flung her ashes in the Thames. I remembered what she said on the tape, that when she was homesick she imagined the water flowing all the way back home, and I thought she could go home that way if she wanted, or really anywhere if she didn’t. The wind threw most of her back in our faces, me and Martha and Bob. We got a cab to Westminster Bridge, behind a car full of builders. All their hard hats were on the back shelf and they looked like eggs nestled there, jostling together over the speed bumps.
On the way home I felt sad and tired and empty, like she’d only just died. The urn was so different without her in it.
I hope she ended up where she wanted. I hope she found what she came back for.
I hope I was some help, walking into that cab office out of my mind.
And I suppose that’s why I had to tell somebody, why I had to write things down.
I wanted to add to what she’d left behind – a handful of movies, a portrait, a contact sheet and a tape.
Violet changed my life and I wanted to stop hers from turning to nothing.
TWENTY-NINE
Bob said something to me the other day.
He said that if Dad did it for the money, I could take comfort in the fact that she didn’t leave him everything after all.
I said, “What do you mean?” or “How do you know?” or something, and I was thinking about the portrait she left the dentist, because that was in her will.
And Bob said that he read an obituary about a month after she died, a long and fawning one written by a music librarian at York University. The obituary said that Violet was survived by her only son who inherited her entire estate, including houses in Australia, New Zealand, London and the US.
“She didn’t have a son,” I said.
“Yes she did,” Bob said. “And I remember his name because it was unusual. It was Orlando.”
I felt sick with rage and excitement, because Violet invented Orlando Park. I knew that from the tape, and so did my dad.
Suddenly, after loving him and looking after the hole he’d left and trying to grow up without him, I knew where Dad was.
And I knew he wasn’t dead, the bastard.
He was rich as sin, however rich that is, living off Violet’s money in the sun.
I went to my room and I punched a hole in the wall, but I didn’t cry.
I felt weirdly happy. Angry happy.
And I did something that I didn’t tell anyone about; not Bob, not Martha, definitely not my mum. I can’t work out if it’s the start of something or the end of it and I’m trying to stop my brain from going there. I did it and I’ll wait and see what happens before I tell anybody.
I sent a parcel to Orlando Park at Violet Farm, Turungakuma, South Island, New Zealand. I found him on the Internet. He’d been there the first time, the time I
’d checked for Violet. I’d looked straight through him.
I sent him Violet’s empty urn, the one he’d collected from the crematorium and left in the back of a cab.
And I stuck a little note on it, round the other side from Violet’s name.
It said
PETE SWAIN
1958-2002
RIP
Who knows if I’ll hear anything back? It seems unlikely.
Thanks to Violet, that matters a hell of a lot less than it used to.
Acknowledgments
Thank you thank you thank you to
Veronique Baxter
Stella Paskins
Gillie Russell
Jane Griffiths
Belinda Hollyer
Pat and Chris Cutforth
and the marvellous Lauren P.
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one
At my father’s funeral, after everything, I lit a great big fire in his honour, built from stacked apple crates and broken furniture and pieces of a fallen-down tree. It towered over the scrubby piece of land I call the bonfire garden, and blazed, too far gone to fight, against the fading afternoon. On the lawn below me, my family gulped for air like landed fish. They clawed at their own faces like Edvard Munch’s Screamers, like meth-heads. His mourners poured from the house, designer-clad and howling, lit up like spectres by the flames.
My stepfather, Lowell Baxter, ageing pin-up boy, one- time TV star and current no-hoper, stood swaying, dazed and hollow-eyed, a man woken up in the wrong place after a long sleep. Hannah, my mother, crumpled on to the wet grass like a just-born foal in all her credit-card finery, her gorgeous face collapsing in a slow puncture. She clutched at her own clothes, sobbing violently, but she didn’t bother getting to her feet. I doubt she could remember how, she was so weighted down with debt.
Finding Violet Park Page 11
