Jenny Valentine - 4 Book Award-winning Collection. Jenny Valentine
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.
1 Where the hell have you been since October 16th 2002?
2 Why didn’t you contact us?
3 Was it something we did?
4 Any regrets?
5 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.
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