Jenny Valentine - 4 Book Award-winning Collection. Jenny Valentine
through a crack in the door. Tony Soprano carried the urn very carefully. He put Violet on the mantelpiece next to the photo of my dad and said how sorry he was about Pansy’s sister.
Then Norman in a random piece of brilliance came out with “She’s dead you know” and they probably nodded gravely or something because it was very quiet.
Tony Soprano must have seen a picture of Pansy and her real dead sister Dolly, who’s also on the mantelpiece, because he said “Is this her?” and Pansy said “Yes, she was a real live wire,” and Norman said “You can say that again, she was a goer your big sister.” Tony Soprano sort of coughed, and then said he really should be going. Pansy walked him to the door (about a metre) and they shook hands and said goodbye, and I thought what a decent bloke he was really, taking it all so seriously and being respectful and doing the right thing.
Then I came out of the bedroom because Soprano had gone and Pansy was having a go at Norman for calling her big sister a slag. I wasn’t sure how Violet would feel in this new place in front of rowing strangers.
She was resting on the mantelpiece to the right of and slightly behind the old front-page photo of my dad. They sat there together, the one we thought we knew all about apart from where he was (or wasn’t), and the one we knew absolutely nothing about except she was dead and at my gran’s house. I stared at them from one of Pansy’s over-furnished armchairs and wondered for a minute what we’d done. Was it really any of my business where a set of ashes ended up? Was I off my head the night I set my heart on rescuing her?
I could feel Pansy’s eyes going from me to the urn, waiting for something to happen, maybe a disembodied voice or my eyes to roll back in my head, or a power cut and some ectoplasm. I didn’t want to let her down.
Then …I felt it, faint at first but unmistakeable.
Violet was happy.
It was like a slow creeping glow and there I was, smiling her smile. She was warm (heating constantly full on) and she liked the décor (overcrowded and a lot of crochet) and nobody was smoking or swearing, and could she have a bit of music on? Rachmaninov’s Fourth (which by the way, I’d never heard of, I swear, but Norman had it on vinyl and we cranked it up and Violet knew it like the back of her hand and she went all tingly which was pretty amazing). Maybe sheltered accommodation in Kentish Town wasn’t her first-choice eternal idyll, but it was a step up from Apollo Cars and Violet wanted us to know she was grateful.
I was bombed. My legs were shaking. Pansy thought I was the new Uri Geller. She kept staring at me with her mouth open and her teeth slipping and a new respect in her eyes.
(For the record, I think Uri Geller is a big crazy fake, but Pansy thinks he’s the real deal because Norman’s watch was broken and Uri fixed it through the TV, apparently.)
And I decided that Dad and Violet Park weren’t that different. One was dead and one was missing, but everyone has their secrets don’t they? Take any family and there’ll be unspeakable stuff rattling around behind the scenes, guaranteed. Here’s some of mine.
1 There’s Dad (obviously) who has some other life that we know naff all about, or is dead, which he’s kept pretty secret too.
2 Pansy had a kid (my dad) by an encyclopaedia salesman before she married Norman. She was brave about it then, but now she won’t have it mentioned and she fakes her wedding anniversaries just to make it all legit.
3 Norman couldn’t have kids (mumps) but he doesn’t know that we all know he’s not strictly related to us. Mum told me and Mercy a long time ago, before Dad went, and I remember thinking that it made no difference. Jed doesn’t know yet, at least I don’t think he does. Maybe even Norman’s forgotten that he’s not my dad’s real dad, what with missing him so much and going senile and everything.
4 Mum has had a boyfriend for over six months and she thinks none of us know. It’s not Bob (pity) but she did sleep with Bob a few times, another thing she thinks we never knew about. Mum’s boyfriend is called David and he teaches life drawing at the Community Centre. He’s nice enough but he wears weird jewellery and talks quite a lot of crap.
5 Mercy’s on the pill and she smokes and she does drugs and she shoplifts and she bunks off and she climbs out the bedroom window to visit her dealer jailbird boyfriend when she’s grounded.
6 Jed wets the bed but he made Mum promise not to tell us.
7 Mum told us.
That’s not even all of them but I’m not telling any more because the point is we’ve got loads of secrets and so has everybody. By my reckoning, being missing and being dead, like Dad and Violet, is just a way of keeping another, bigger secret. And secrets are never that hard to unearth. Somebody always slips up, or leaves a trail, or says the wrong thing at the right time. And then everybody finds out the truth, whether they want to or not.
Bob Cutforth was a man with secrets. He used to have a mountain of them and now he doesn’t have any. He says that it’s better this way, but it must have been pretty painful getting found out again and again, like he did, and losing everything, bit by bit. The thing I really like about Bob, my absolute favourite thing about him, is that he is way happier now with nothing than he ever was before. Bob says it’s the best kind of freedom, having nothing to lose.
He says that when he lived in a big house in Camden Square, with a beautiful academic wife and a sexy assistant and a pedigree dog and an impressive wine cellar and a great job and a fat wallet, he never for one minute stopped worrying. Bob worried about being robbed or mugged or murdered. His wife was neurotic and his assistant was insatiable, so he couldn’t please either of them and he worried about that. His dog was on Prozac and threw itself through a plate glass window one morning when he was leaving for the airport because she didn’t like being left.
Bob’s job frightened the life out of him. He went to Rwanda and Afghanistan and Pakistan and the Philippines and Libya and Colombia at times when other people were frightened just to see them on TV. No wonder he was scared. Bob says he was drinking a litre of vodka a day by the end and that the wine cellar was just for show.
I suppose the other big thing about Bob is that he could have gone missing too, easily, and he chose to stay. One minute he was everybody’s hero, like John Simpson or Raggy Omar, and the next he was a degenerate sicko with no morals, no job, a mistress, a coke habit, an expensive divorce and a drink-driving ban. He must have been tempted to run for it, but he stuck it out, all of it, and you’ve got to love him for that.
I can’t help wondering, what was so bad that Dad couldn’t face it? I don’t like where things go when I try to answer that question. I’ve said it before – it’s the not knowing that drives you mad. It’s the imagining things that you wish you couldn’t think up all by yourself.
Of course, Bob is the best person for talking about my dad and he knows lots of brilliant, secret stuff that kids me into thinking I know him better. Bob and my dad go back years. They worked on a local paper together when they were just out of college – The Radnorshire Express. Bob says there was nothing express about it and it was the slowest, dullest place he’s ever lived, and if it wasn’t for my dad he’d of gone off his head with boredom. I imagine it was a bit like Andover, which is the most boring place I’ve ever been. My mum sent me there on an adventure weekend and I still say she should have got them for false advertising.
According to Bob, my dad went missing before.
He was twenty-three or twenty-four. He was going out with a nurse from Brazil called Luzmira (Bob said it means “look at the light”). Bob and my dad were working at the Evening Standard and they spent a lot of time drinking and playing serious poker with some doctors from Charing Cross Hospital. A weird crowd, Bob said, real freaks, they put him off medics for good. Bob said Dad was in over his head and owed them a load of money. Then suddenly Dad stopped coming to work or to poker, and he lost his job. Luzmira and the doctors