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.
I remember the exact moment Mum realised he had actually disappeared and wasn’t just somewhere sleeping things off for longer than usual, or stuck in the office on a deadline without calling, which often happened. I can see her now, rubbing her massive belly with this weird sort of half smile that she wore practically the whole time she was pregnant with Jed, answering the phone and then turning suddenly to dust. I was sitting at the kitchen table, waiting for Dad to come home so there would be another boy in the house, and I was watching her. She was really beautiful when she picked up the phone – in my memory she sort of glows and the lighting is soft and everything – and by the time she put it down, maybe two and a half minutes later, she was grey and old and looked like she was going to throw up.
(She did, all night and the next day and they had to take her into hospital because she wasn’t keeping anything down and she hadn’t slept and everyone was worried about the baby.)
The phone call was from a friend of Dad’s at The Times called Nigel Moon, who said the police had found our car in a field somewhere in Hampshire, and was his passport at home or was there a chance he had it with him, and he thought she should know. He got to her about five minutes before the police because while she was throwing up in the downstairs loo there was a knock on the door and it was them. (Dad’s passport was in a drawer upstairs, next to Mum’s.)
And after the big, big fuss there was nothing. In a few weeks people began to get bored or forget, and they drifted away and left us to our own private chaos. Mum had Jed and they both cried a lot in her room, Mercy stopped speaking for maybe three months, and I walked around lost and got into a lot of fights.
There’s a definite stigma attached to you when someone in your family goes missing like that. A big question mark, a skeleton in your cupboard, a dirty shadow. In the beginning when everyone was all keen and interested, actually they didn’t care at all, they were just looking for something nasty, for dad’s guilty secrets, for the cracks in our family that must have opened into massive caverns and swallowed him whole.
Was he having an affair? Was he mixed up in anything illegal? Was he murdered? Did we do it? Did he kill himself? Why? Was he having an affair? And round and round like a dog chasing its own tail until we put the telly in the cupboard and took the batteries out of the radio and stopped looking at newspapers or answering the door or going out.
Every so often now something comes out about dad in the paper, mostly on a weekend, in the magazine or buried in the review section or whatever. I think the name Pete Swain must be on a kind of reserve list of the missing because he resurfaces every now and again with Lord Lucan and Richie Manic and Shergar, part of a rota for writers with nothing to do. In a way, going missing like that does make a good story, whoever you are. Mum says journalists like nothing better than a question with no answers because they can never be wrong and that makes them look good. She says they’re all vultures circling an old corpse, and that because they mostly abandoned us when they lost the scent she refuses to talk to any of them, even if some of them were still at school when he went missing and have nothing to feel bad about.
Only one of Dad’s friends stayed friends with us after he went. Mercy says the only reason he did it was because he’d always fancied Mum and he wanted to get into her pants, but I reckon loads of good things get done for that reason and it doesn’t make them any less good. He’s the one who planted a tree on Primrose Hill because he thought that even though Jed was born at such a terrible time we shouldn’t forget to celebrate. Mum made him Jed’s godfather after that.
His name is Bob Cutforth and him and Dad started out together on some local paper or other. For a while he was one of the big correspondents for the BBC and he went all over the world and into danger zones and interviewed tyrants and dodged bullets. But then he turned out to be a really sick alcoholic and lost his job and his house and his wife, and now he lives in a bedsit in Kilburn and gets benefits and writes in his notebooks all day. Still, he’s never forgotten Jed’s birthday even once.
If I was working in one of those swanky Soho ad agencies and I was doing consumer profiling, like where you divide people into groups according
