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 said they hadn’t seen him. His landlady put all his stuff in a cupboard and rented his room out. Bob thought dad was dead. About three months later Dad came back, out of the blue, and he wouldn’t tell anybody where he’d been, not even Bob, and he never did.
Still, if my dad can disappear and then show up once, he can do it again.
Agatha Christie went missing for a while when she was pretty famous and then she came back, but nobody knows where she went. Except my friend Ed, the one whose house I was at the night I met Violet, who reckons he knows exactly. Ed says that his great grandfather on his mother’s side was having a secret affair with Agatha Christie in Jamaica or Antigua or somewhere, but it didn’t work out so he went back to his wife in Swindon. He kept this shawl Agatha Christie had given him in his sock drawer and stroked it lovingly every now and then when his wife wasn’t looking. But of course she knew because wives in those days put their husbands’ clean socks away and didn’t say anything about affairs or lovers’ trinkets to avoid the shame.
If my dad was holed up with a thriller writer in the West Indies (or a nurse in Brazil) my mum would kick up a stink. She is way beyond worrying about what the neighbours might say.
I thought it would be simple once we’d got Violet out of the cab office. Sitting with her in Pansy and Norman’s front room, I couldn’t see any other obstacles to getting her sprinkled and leaving her to get on with being dead in a much better place and me to go back to normal. But I kept putting it off, and it was more than six weeks before I realised she wasn’t ready to go yet.
Mercy read a story once about dead people who got to enjoy a very pleasant afterlife for as long as they were remembered on earth, but as soon as they were forgotten even for an instant they disappeared into nothing. She banged on about it and what a fantastic concept it was until I never wanted to hear about it again, but the story came back to me and I thought it was obvious really, that if Violet had clung on for dear life (so to speak) when everyone had forgotten her so completely, she must have clung on for a reason. She seemed so alive to me in that little pot, there must be something she needed doing before she was prepared to become nothing somewhere forever. I just didn’t know what the thing that needed doing was.
I didn’t know a thing about her yet, apart from she was dead.
And then I took Jed to the cinema.
Watching films is very high up on our top ten list of things we best like doing. I could watch films my whole life long, back to back, and never feel like I’d wasted a second.
