Jenny Valentine - 4 Book Award-winning Collection. Jenny Valentine
and always thought he was playing around and how she was basically never happy at what turned out to be the happiest time of her life. Bob said she shouldn’t talk about that stuff in front of me, and she said, “Lucas is nearly thirteen and his dad’s left us, so he’s the man of the house now.” Then she ruffled my hair and told me to go to bed, like I was eight, which hacked me off because I was a man when it suited her and a kid when it didn’t.
She’s better now than she was then.
But the thing about my mum that still bothers me is that people mostly feel sorry for her and she lets them. Mum reckons life dealt her a bad hand, which is a good way of saying that her absent husband, her three kids and the fact that she’s not twenty-one any more are not her fault. I want to ask her if women in places like Sudan or Palestine or Kosovo worry as much about face cream and stretch marks and living without a man around, but I haven’t yet, and who knows, maybe they do.
And sometimes Mum gets angry with the wrong people – meaning those who are still here as opposed to he who has left. Some days I know as soon as I look at her that I’m not going to get a civil word out of Mum at all. Even just the sound of our voices makes her roll her eyes and tut and act like we’re squatters in her actual brain, and not people with as much right to be and speak as she has. On a bad day like that you can tell she’s programmed herself just to say NO to everything, practically before she’s heard it, which means she loses out when we’re saying do you want anything from the shop, or offering to put the dinner on.
What I think on days like that is this.
Maybe life didn’t turn out the way Mum planned, but it’s not our fault. Unless the thing we did wrong was being born, and if you start from there you can never do anything right, no matter how hard you try.
One good side-effect of Violet turning me on to old people was I got to know my gran a lot better. Her name is Pansy – another perfect name for an old lady, another flower name. I’d never really had much time for her before, what with her being old and having false teeth she got too small for, and skin like a bit of screwed up grey tissue that you find in your coat pocket, and pretty extreme opinions on just about everything. She and my grandad live round the corner in sheltered housing. Pansy says there’s nothing more patronising or that fills her with more dread than a primary colour window surround. She says it’s a sign that whoever lives there is no longer taken seriously. It’s worth remembering that they gave up their big house to move here so that we could live in it. Pansy would rather we didn’t forget it.
Pansy is a live wire and she’ll talk about anything and has theories about stuff she’s hardly heard of, like jungle music and PlayStation and Internet dating. She swears all the time but she never actually says the word, just mouths it, with her face especially screwed up, her gums and false teeth colliding slightly, the insides of her mouth sticking together and then pulling apart so swearing becomes this strange spongy clacking sound. It’s quite effective.
Pansy is passionate about football and has been for years. But somehow, at the same time, she’s managed to learn absolutely nothing about the rules. She once said that footballers should get extra points for hitting the post or the cross bar because it’s much harder than scoring a proper goal. She’s a Tottenham fan because she grew up in Enfield and her dad played in the brass band at White Hart Lane. If you ask me, there’s never enough reason to be a Spurs fan because I’m into Arsenal and so was my dad. Pansy says Dad only supported Arsenal to hack her off when he was a kid. Grandad, who can take football or leave it, rolls his eyes and says, “They used to fight like cat and dog when Grandstand was on.” She loves to slag off Arsenal, and mostly that’s fine because we’re at the top of the league and they’re going down.
Pansy was the first person I told about Violet. I needed to tell someone that a dead lady was talking to me and I had several good reasons for letting her in on it. For a start, it was Violet who made me more interested in the person inside Pansy’s old body. Also, I figured Violet would appreciate having another old lady around after all those cab drivers. And I knew Pansy’d be into it because she was always reading about the occult and she liked mediums and stuff and she even went to see one once to see if she could find out if Dad had “passed over” so I knew she’d never dismiss the idea of communicating with the dead.
Of course, that’s the other thing that me and my gran have in common, apart from Violet and the London Derby – my dad, her son. “Our missing link” she calls him. Mum says however bad it feels to us that Dad just went off without a word of warning, we should times it by ten for Pansy because she’s his mum and mums just don’t expect their kids to go before they do. So Pansy loves it when I come round, firstly because she says I’m her favourite (based purely on the fact that I look like her son and wear his clothes) and secondly because she can talk about Dad till she’s run out of air and I won’t lose interest.
I don’t think Grandad is much help with all that. His name is Norman and he fought in the war in North Africa, driving munitions trucks through the desert and smoking woodbines and wetting his pants. Norman is a really really nice bloke and he’s always been a good grandad, but these days he doesn’t know his arse from his elbow. What’s happened is he’s had these tiny strokes, and every time he has one (and you wouldn’t notice if he was having one right in front of you, they’re that small,) some of his memory gets wiped. Some days he’s better than others, but it drives Pansy mad because she says she never knows where she is with him. One minute he’s getting all romantic on her, the next he thinks she’s the home help come to give things a once-round with the hoover.
Pansy has a dog called Jack (Russell) and sometimes I have no idea if she’s talking about the dog or Grandad.
“He’s been under my feet all day and his breath smells terrible.” (Dog)
“He’s not been for three days. I think he needs a good walk.” (Norman)
On a good day Norman will remember that I’m Lucas, and on a stroke day he’ll think I’m my dad. Me and Pansy just agreed to let it slide on stroke days because it makes him happy. Pansy says she wishes she could have a stroke so she could forget her only child had seen fit to abandon his family and head for the hills. Then she dabs her crumpled eyes with a crumpled tissue and says, “Fffck it, let’s have another slice of Battenberg.”
The times I do sit down and have a chat with Norman he’s overjoyed because he doesn’t get a word in edgeways most of the time and he’s actually got quite a lot to say. When you first meet him and Pansy, she’s the one who grabs you because she’s so vibrant and sharp and energetic and into everything, but after a while you realise that Norman is the tortoise to her hare and that if you just give him a minute he can be very interesting and knowledgeable about a lot of things.
The person who really likes being with Norman is Jed. Jed’s too young to realise that Norman forgets things. He thinks he’s just doing it to be funny and he gets a big kick out of it. Jed thinks Norman is the funniest man alive. They hang out together in the kitchen eating biscuits and making Meccano planes and they laugh themselves sick over old Laurel and Hardy films. They’re also allowed to take the dog out together, which is about the only time for both of them that they get to go anywhere without a responsible adult. Jed says being with Grandad is just like being with one of his friends from school except better because Grandad knows a lot more and is really good at sharing.
A while ago, I got this idea in my head that Norman knew something really vital about where Dad is except he couldn’t tell us because he’d forgotten. I was convinced that everything he said, however ordinary, was actually a hidden clue and if I broke the code I’d save my dad. Sometimes when he’s talking to me I still cross my fingers that it will just slip out, an address or a phone number, or a last message, but things are never that simple.
When I told Pansy about Violet, I did it just like I would if I’d met anyone normal, or at least alive. Violet was still on the shelf at Apollo Cars when I did it.
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