Finding Violet Park

by Jenny Valentine

  My dad was a pretty cool guy. In all the photos I’ve seen of him he looked good. There’s no evidence of him wearing high-heeled shoes or jackets that were two sizes too small or ridiculous sideburns, like other people’s dads. He seemed to stand alone for effortless cool in a room full of serious fashion errors.

  Now I wear my dad’s suits and shirts and stuff because they just about fit me. I wouldn’t let Mum throw them out because I was expecting him back any time. And I suppose it makes me quite proud that I’m big enough now, almost as tall as dad was when he went, with exactly the same size feet (nine and a half), but it guts me too because in all the time that it’s taken me to grow up he hasn’t come back.

  Mum hates me wearing Dad’s stuff. The first time I did it she burst into tears. She says I am already enough like he was when she first met him, and she feels sorry for the girl that’s going to fall in love with me because it hasn’t exactly been a picnic from her point of view.

  The thing about my dad though, he didn’t just look cool, he actually was, and no amount of wearing his clothes is going to make me him, or even nearly him, ever. My dad was a journalist. I remember him as the man in the room that people wanted to be next to, the one they were interested in. I’m more like the one in the room that people forget is there.

  Mum and Dad might even have been in love before they got married. I think they were having the time of their lives until Mum got pregnant with Mercy. Everyone was really down on them for doing it without rings on their fingers, so they did the right thing in a church before the bump that became Mercy was big enough to show. Mum says it wasn’t Mercy that screwed things up, because Dad loved being a dad. It was the getting married that really hacked him off because he hated doing what he was told.

  What is it about people that makes them want to get married anyway? I don’t know how anyone could ever be sure enough of something like that. I can’t decide how to get to school. I can’t order food in a caff without spending the rest of the meal worrying I’ve made the wrong choice. I don’t reckon I’ll ever be able to do it. And on the evidence I’ve got, meaning my family (exhibit A: big empty space where a husband and dad used to be) I’m not sure it’s even worth the bother.

  And how come if Mum knew it was a bad idea the moment she’d done it, she didn’t have the sense to know it a week or a day or even ten minutes earlier? I just don’t get it. And when I see what Mum’s left with after so many years, and hear her complaining that she can’t even remember loving Dad or wanting kids or whatever, it makes no sense to me at all.

  It makes me determined to do life with my eyes open, even if it means making no decisions at all.

  FOUR

  On Monday, instead of double geography and French, I went back to the mini cab office for another look at the urn. There were more people around, the shops were open on the high street and there were some last ditch battles for parking. Basically, a much less attractive place when awake, but the mews itself was pretty quiet. There was a lady walking up and down and the way she was walking had this strange rhythm, like four steps forward – stop – up on tiptoes – stop – three steps forward – stop, and when she got to the top of the mews she turned round and started again.

  When I passed her she said, “Sorry to ask, but can you spare a cigarette?” and she made me jump and I said “No” and took my hands out of my pockets to show her I wasn’t hiding any. And I wasn’t, because I might smoke weed now and again, but I would never smoke tobacco for these reasons, among others.

  It doesn’t get you high. What’s the point of being addicted to something that will kill you and doesn’t even make you laugh or feel good or anything?

  It kills you.

  It smells bad.

  Cigarettes cost very little to make but there’s a load of tax on them that goes straight to the government, making them rich. That means the people who are supposed to take care of our health and welfare and help keep the fabric of society together are making a profit out of something really addictive that doesn’t get you high and will kill you. Also I’m not old enough to vote so I’m avoiding tax generally, where I can help it.

  Mercy told me something about the tobacco giants ripping off their farmers and paying them next to nothing. Mercy’s boyfriend smokes American Spirit, which are fair trade and organic, apparently, if you can get your head round the idea of an organic cigarette.

  Not-organic cigarettes contain about 250 poisonous toxins which will also kill you.

  I stood outside Apollo Cars for a while, with the lady pacing behind me, and I tried to think about what I might say when I went in. There were those vertical Venetian blinds in the window, like you see in dentists and too-trendy apartments, the kind that are made out of plasticky cardboard pieces held together with cheap chains made of tiny ball bearings. The blinds were really dirty, but I liked the way they cut up the view inside, as if somebody got a photo of a minicab office out of a magazine and cut it into strips. If I took a step to the right I could see the urn on its shelf, and if I moved back to where I was it disappeared from view and I could see somebody’s profile and the front page of two different newspapers. The urn looked so precious in there compared to everything else, so completely out of place.

  Anyone walking into the mews just then would have seen a lady with a demented walk and a boy hopping from one foot to the other, and would most probably have turned round and walked back out again.

  As soon as I went in I knew I hadn’t really thought this thing through. I was way under prepared. I could hear my blood shushing through my ears like a pulse. For a start, I’d been standing outside for longer than I realised, arousing suspicion. Tony Soprano was halfway down his stairs already. Whether he remembered me from the other night or not, he had every right to think I was a nutter. I was sort of hovering on the spot, smiling like an idiot. And anyway, paying a call on the remains of a dead stranger isn’t the sanest thing I’ve ever tried to do.

  He asked me if I wanted a cab and I said no, and then when he turned his back to me I changed my mind and said yes, and he laughed and asked if I had any money, which I didn’t. Then he told me to leave, which wasn’t the cleverest time to ask him about the dead lady. He walked right up to me then, younger than he looked, sallow with grey bags under his eyes and cigar breath.

  This, as far as I can remember it, is the conversation I had with Tony Soprano.

  Me: Why have you got a dead lady’s ashes?

  TS: What’s it to you?

  Me: Is she yours?

  TS: What? (Looks at colleagues) What a question!

  Me: I mean did you know her? Was she a relative or something?

  TS: No.

  Me: What are you going to do with her?

  TS: Who? None of your business mate.

  Me: Well—

  TS: When they collect they can do whatever they want.

  Me: Who?

  TS: The family, whoever left her, who d’you think?

  Me: Are they going to?

  TS: No idea. You’re not touching it. Get that idea out of your head right now.

  Me: What’s her name?

  TS: (giving me the hard stare for the count of five and sighing) If I tell you, will you sod off?

  Me: Yes

  TS: (picking up the urn and showing me the metal plaque on the side that reads VIOLET PARK 1927 – 2002) Now sod off.

  It was like a light going on in my brain.

  I read once in a comic about readiness potential, the way your brain is always one step ahead of you, even though you think you’re the one in charge. It’s pretty complicated, but I think I understand it and it goes like this.

  First you have to get the difference between action and reaction.

  Action is throwing a ball and reaction is dodging out of the way when you suddenly realise that the ball’s going to hit you.

  Your brain is firing signals all the time, telling you to scratch your nose or smile or put one foot in front of the other when you’re walking.
But some things you do, like blink or drop a hot piece of toast, you couldn’t possibly know you were going to do beforehand because you didn’t see them coming. That’s where your brain proves it knows everything before you do, because it has to send the signal and the signal takes time.

  This is called the readiness potential, the way your brain tells your body what to do before even you know you need to do it.

  And what reminded me of the readiness potential thing was that when I read Violet’s name, I realised I knew it after all, before he showed it to me, even though there was no way I could. I heard it in my head just before I saw it written down, like when you watch a film and the dubbing’s out, so you hear what people say a bit before their mouths move. Right then I was pretty wired about it. I was thinking about that conversation-with-a-dead-pensioner feeling I’d had on the hill and I was sure that the only way I could have known her name was that she’d already told me.

  It flew around in my brain like a pigeon trapped in a building, flitting through the spaces, clattering against the sides. V-I-O-L-E-T. A good strong name; a name that’s a colour and there aren’t many of those around, and also a flower, soft and pretty and old fashioned, the perfect name for a dead old lady.

  It was all I could do to stop myself from grabbing the urn and running off. I felt like her only hope at that moment. She’d been dead long enough to know there was no one coming for her. It still makes me sick to think of her stuck there since I was eleven, the same time as my dad went wherever.

  Tony Soprano put Violet back on the shelf. I’d promised to leave and he was going to hold me to it. To stay calm on the way out I made a list in my head of all the good reasons to make friends with a dead lady in an urn.

  A dead old lady would never be judgemental or lecture me like every other female on the planet.

  If I decided to find out about her she might turn out to be the coolest most talented bravest person I’d ever heard of, and I might sort of get to know her without the hassle of her actually existing.

  I would get to rescue her and I never did that for anyone before, and it sort of makes you need them too in your own way.

  A dead old lady would be easy to like because she couldn’t leave any more than she had already.

  I do know, I am aware, that a boy my age should have thought more about bringing home a living girl than a dead old lady. And I did care about that other stuff, about girls and mates and sex and stuff, I’m not a total freak. It’s just that Violet was becoming my newest friend and she was working her way to the front of my brain all the time, like new friends do.

  If you think about it, a person being dead isn’t any barrier to finding out what they are like. Half the people we learn about in school have been dead for ages. People write whole books about William Blake and Henry the Eighth and Marilyn Monroe, and they’ve never met them and they still sound like they know what they are talking about.

  I met Violet after she died but it didn’t stop me getting to know her. And what I keep trying to prove is that I’m not as insane as I’m sounding.

  FIVE

  Of all the places I would like to be when I’m dead, Apollo Cars is the last. I can’t decide what my first is yet, mainly because I’m too young to, but my top three all time places so far for being quiet and on my own (which sounds like a good description of being dead if you think about it) are as follows.

  1. Primrose Hill – over the top and down again to the quiet side. It doesn’t have a great view like if you’re at the top, but it is peaceful and for some reason hardly anyone goes there, even on days when the park is mobbed. Also, it’s where my dad’s old friend Bob had a tree planted to celebrate when Jed was born.

  2. St Pancras Church – I don’t like cemeteries in a Goth way (although I don’t mind anyone that does) because actually, apart from Violet, I’m not that comfortable with dead people. But I do like St Pancras. Mary Shelley who wrote Frankenstein used to be buried there, next to her mum who died giving birth to her, but then I think they got moved to St Albans, which is another thing you wouldn’t expect to do when you’re dead.

  The church is on a gentle hill and you can’t see the dead from the road or the beauty of the place really, until you’re right inside it. There’s a tree there called the Hardy tree with loads of old gravestones (no bodies) sort of leaned up against it, all random. It’s called the Hardy tree after Thomas Hardy the famous writer who invented that place Wessex and made up sad stories about beautiful milkmaids and other pessimistic country people. He’s not buried there and he wasn’t even famous when he had anything to do with the Hardy tree. He was actually an engineer I think, and he was in charge of clearing the way for the railway line out to the midlands and he had to shrink the cemetery to make room and squish all the dead bodies into a smaller place. He might even have been the one who moved Mary Shelley and her mum. There must have been a bit of a mix up or something, because the headstones of some of the people that got moved just got left up against the tree.

  I wonder how big the tree was then because its pretty old now, and then I wonder how big Jed’s tree on Primrose Hill will be in like two hundred years, and I wonder if anyone will find out about it and call it the Swain tree, because maybe Jed will be famous for something one day.

  3. The City on a Sunday. Dad used to take me. There’s no one there. You can walk around and pretend you’re in one of those science fiction stories like The Day of the Triffids or 48 Hours Later. All the modern buildings reek of money and bad taste, and you can still feel the frantic stuff that goes on all week long, almost like the ghost of it is there on a Sunday, like the place is just exhausted with the pace of it all. And there are these really, really old bits too, all mixed in. You can be standing at some super modern glass box with your back to the oldest pub in London, and round the corner there’s a really narrow little lane called Wardrobe Street where they really did used to make wardrobes in about 17something, and it’s like time travel, street to street, and that’s a brilliant thing.

  I didn’t know what Violet’s places might be, where she liked to spend her time, where she’d want to end up, and that’s a sad thing for nobody to know about a person. Before I die I’m going to leave strict instructions about where I want to spend the rest of time. I hope I won’t be so completely alone in the world that no one would remember to collect me after my funeral. It’s like those stories in the local paper about people who die and nobody notices for weeks and then they start smelling, and suddenly their neighbours remember they haven’t seen them for ages. And whenever I think about anyone living or dying all by themselves I end up thinking about my dad and wondering if he died alone, and if he thought about us when he died or if he is alive and ever thinks about us now.

  I’ve only ever been to two funerals. The first one was my grandad’s – my mum’s dad – and I don’t remember it because I was about two, but Mum says I spent the whole time crawling around and barking like a dog.

  The second one was this girl in my class called Angelique and she died when we were in year six. I think it was the Easter holidays, and she went somewhere like Spain with her mum and dad and died in the shower of carbon monoxide poisoning. They flew her home and the whole class went to her funeral. We all wanted to because she was really popular and a really nice person and everyone was gutted that she wasn’t ever coming back.

  She was in a coffin made of bamboo or wicker or something, like a beautiful Angelique-shaped basket covered in pink blossom, and either side of her they had these silver buckets filled with sand and flowers. You got a candle when you came in and you lit it and put it in a bucket, so there were maybe a hundred candles surrounding her. The light was sort of eerie and full of life.

  When the priest talked about commending Angelique to heaven, the flowers in some of the buckets all seemed to catch fire at the same time and you could hear this gasp go round the church like it was a sign or something, and nobody wanted to put the fires out. When Angelique’s dad went to pick up the
coffin on the way out he leaned against it for support, like he was hugging her, and that really got to me.

  After the funeral, back at Angelique’s house we had this kind of circle time thing where we all said something we liked about Angelique or told a funny story about her. They make you do circle time at school a lot when something bad happens, or sometimes just because they want to, and it can be OK and it can be pretty crap, depending, but that circle time at Angelique’s was just about the most sweet and touching thing ever. Everybody had something they really wanted to say, and Angelique’s mum and dad were crying and laughing at the same time, and you could see they were going to get by on those stories for years to come.

  I doubt Violet’s funeral was much to write home about, seeing as she was the guest of honour and got left in a taxi. I doubt there was a circle time for her.

  If we ever find my dad and he’s dead, I’m going to organise the biggest funeral you’ve ever seen and I’ll personally see to it that the flowers catch fire. We’ll play the best music, and everyone he ever knew and liked will be there and cry their eyes out and say really nice things about him. And afterwards, back at our house, we’ll have the best wake and nobody will want to leave. They’ll look after Mum and make sure she’s OK, and phone her every week, instead of being too embarrassed to say anything or ever call her up because there isn’t a body and they’re a bit busy with work and they were his friends really, not hers.

  When Dad first went missing there was a big, big fuss. Not just Mum running around pulling her hair out (eight and a half months pregnant) and the police showing up all the time, and Mercy yelling and slamming doors and shagging whoever’d have her. For a while everyone was interested and he was all over the press – all the papers and the telly for weeks. There was this same photo of him everywhere, one that none of us can stand to look at now, firstly because it reminds us of everything going wrong, and secondly because he looks so damn happy in it and that must have been an act.