Jenny Valentine - 4 Book Award-winning Collection. Jenny Valentine
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.
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.”
This was a weak threat because I actually would rather Bob did it, so I nearly called his bluff. But I felt sorry for him, stuck between me and Mum, making weak threats, playing Dad’s part as well as he could even though he didn’t have to and he wasn’t family. So I took the phone out of his hand and dialled home.
No one was in.
It’s much easier to say sorry to an answer-phone than a real, pissed off, on the moral high ground person. I said, “Hello, it’s me, Lucas. Sorry about yesterday. I couldn’t handle it. It’s not your fault. I’ll be home later or tomorrow. Bye.”
Bob wasn’t impressed.
We talked about Mum then. I thought at the time it was funny because I’d come over to talk about Dad, but we hardly did and I didn’t mind so much.
Bob started it. He said, “How much more of this do you think she can take?” and I said, “More of what?” because I really wasn’t ready to get into it.
Bob rolled his eyes and looked out of the window for a minute. Then he said “What did she do wrong?”
I said, “She chucked all Dad’s things on the dump!”
Bob said, “Oh, so did he want it all then?” and I said, “No, but—” and then he interrupted me which was a relief because I wasn’t sure what came after the but.
“And before that? What did she do to offend you last week?”
“What do you mean?” I said, but I knew what he meant.
“It’s not your mum’s fault he left,” Bob said. “You know that, don’t you?”
I said I did, and I was thinking how ironic it was, how unfair that I’d been mad for so long at the person who stuck around instead of the one who abandoned me.
“God knows she needs something better from the men in her life,” Bob said, which was pretty much what I was thinking.
I said, “You’ve always been good to her,” and Bob laughed that dry sad laugh he always uses when we’re talking about him and Mum.
“She never needed me to be good to her. She needed you and Pete.”
It used to make me proud to be lumped in with Dad like that, father and son, Lucas and Pete. All I wanted was to look like Dad and be like Dad and remind people of him. Now it was making me feel worse than useless.
I didn’t want to be like Dad any more.
We were quiet for a while after that. I mentioned Dad’s records. Bob said he’d be honoured to take them, which was a nice thing to say, considering.
On my way out I wanted to say something to make Bob realise that he’d got to me, that what we’d talked about had meant something.
I wanted to say something that would separate me from my dad.
Because, for the record, I know Mum is funny and clever. I know she loves us. She works hard and she takes Jed to cool places and takes us out sometimes too. She lets me and Mercy make our own decisions and asks our opinions like she really wants to hear them and she’s great. And she’s still beautiful, if you ask me, but I doubt any of the crap in the bathroom ever helped.
I don’t know if I said it right or not when I said it to Bob. It’s much easier saying everything you want to say when you’re the only one that’s listening.
I was halfway home when I remembered Violet was still in Bob’s cupboard. She was one of the reasons I’d gone there. I stood there on the pavement not knowing what to do, whether I should go back for her or keep walking. I was rocking from foot to foot and mumbling, and people were staring, but then people do. And then I heard someone calling my name, so I looked up and there was Martha across the street and she motioned for me to come over, so I did.
She said, “Where are you going?” and I said I couldn’t decide and she laughed again, with her head thrown back, her lovely open mouth. I had my hand in her hair and she was smiling and she was like this angel, honestly, that’s how she looked to me.
We went back to Bob’s and I ran in and got the bag and said sorry for stashing it there and then went to run out again. I was in a hurry to get back to Martha, that was all, but Bob said, “Lucas, are you in trouble?” and he was looking from me to the bag.
I shook my head and said, “No, my girlfriend’s outside” and he grinned and made some joke about me storing condoms in his wardrobe.
I was running down the path and I turned so I was facing him and running backwards, and I pulled out the urn and held it up for him to see and I shouted, “No, I’ve been storing our friend Violet Park” and I put my other arm around Martha and we walked away.
I think I did it because the condom joke sort of annoyed me. But I regretted it straight away. Because Bob’s face was a picture. A terrible picture.
I couldn’t get it out of my head for days. What I did pretty much turned him to stone. I’m sure he would’ve run after us if he could move. It was more than me storing someone’s ashes in his flat that made Bob look like that. It was proper shock at the mention of her name; white, drop-jawed horror, like he really had seen a ghost. And I thought at the time that the ghost he’d seen was Violet’s, but it turned out in a way to be my dad’s.