do you say that?”
“Man-eater, that one,” Norman said.
I had an image of Violet swallowing my dad whole. So that was where he had gone. “Was she?”
“Other people’s husbands for breakfast, lunch and dinner,” he said.
“Not Dad though,” I said.
Norman shrugged. “Thick as thieves they were, at the end.”
“What end?” I said, but Norman didn’t say anything.
“Did Dad tell you he was leaving?” I said.
Norman looked hard at me and said, “Do you think I wouldn’t remember a thing like that?”
“I don’t know, Grandad,” I said, which was a lie.
“Do you think I’d leave everybody wondering and not knowing, if I knew?” he said, and I shook my head and said, “No” but I could tell just by looking at him that he knew he couldn’t remember.
And I felt for Norman, I really did. It wasn’t the same for us. We didn’t know where Dad was and that was that, simple. But Norman must always be wondering whether he did know. Imagine knowing the thing that you most need to know, and your whole family most needs to know, and not being able to find it, only wondering if you know it or not.
Mum arrived with Pansy and said she couldn’t stay, for some reason. She drove off pretty quick, like she couldn’t wait to be out of there. Pansy was shrunken and frail like a doll. It scared me a bit, the thought of her being in a pot like Violet pretty soon. Me and Norman swooped and fussed around her until she swatted us off. I went to the kitchen to make them both a cup of tea and when I came back they were sitting in silence, holding hands across the gap in their easy chairs.
Pansy’s hands looked like birds’ claws. The bones stood up under her skin and her veins were all knotted and dark blue. Her fingernails needed cutting. She looked like she was made of paper.
She didn’t even notice that Violet was gone. She sat staring at Dad’s photo on the mantelpiece and didn’t see the new gap beside it.
“I never thought I’d die before he came back,” she said to no one in particular, and no one in particular answered because what could we say?
“I’m so disappointed in him, Lucas,” Pansy said to me, tears rolling down her face, perfect dewdrops magnifying her wrinkles.
I hadn’t heard her speak a word against Dad in five years. I’d relied on Pansy for that.
“So am I,” I said.
It made me cold all over, the change in Pansy. It was like someone had broken her. She’d been away less than two weeks and she’d come back beaten.
Pansy started to talk about funerals then. She said she knew she was going soon and she wanted a say in how she went, so that even though Dad would most likely not be there she’d still have stuff to look forward to. I promised her I’d take care of it, even if she wanted a horse-drawn carriage and a four-metre statue of a cherub for a gravestone. But Pansy wants a quiet simple service. She wants to be buried whole (no burning) in the village in Wales where she grew up. Her mum is buried there and her dad’s name is on the headstone too, but his body is busy becoming coal, she says, in the mine where he died. She says she wants a space for Norman there too, next to hers, because she’ll only worry if he’s out of her sight.
Martha says she’d like a Viking burial. This means she wants to be wrapped up in an oil-soaked cloth and pushed out to sea in a long boat. Then she wants a flaming arrow fired at her corpse, which will burst into flames and burn to a cinder before being swallowed by the water.
I hope not to be there.
Martha’s dad is an anthropologist, which means he looks at how people behave in different groups and cultures, and he knows a lot about funerals and says they are different the world over. It seems there’s no end to the many ways you can say goodbye to someone.
In Bali (I think) the body hangs about above ground for a while, going off, and then it gets decked with flowers and torched. When the fire’s gone out the relatives have to scrabble for bones and throw them in the ocean. It’s very hands-on. And somewhere, maybe some part of China, long after the funeral, when everyone has stopped grieving and mourning, the dead person gets dug right back up again and you have a party with the bones to show you’re really OK and over it and everything. It’s a good job they don’t have lead-lined coffins there. Martha says that if you’re buried in a lead-lined coffin no air can get in and you can’t leak out so you turn to soup.
Martha’s mum wants to be scattered in some form or other in the river Ganges in India, but she’ll probably settle for the New Forest. She says, “Unlike us in the west who sweep death under the carpet, the Hindu people have a very healthy attitude to dying because they’ve done it before and they’ll do it again.” I suppose with reincarnation, dying is no big deal, as long as you’ve behaved yourself and you don’t come back as a blue tit or a dung beetle.
Martha’s mum and dad are called Wendy and Oliver. I met them when I went to their house for Sunday lunch. I was nervous to start with because I’ve never been to anyone’s house for Sunday lunch before. I probably talked too much and I can’t have been that interesting when I know so much less about everything than they do, but they were keen to like me. About halfway through pudding I realised I felt pretty much at home.
Martha was right about her mum. She made me laugh so much I nearly squirted beer through my nose. And I would never have known she was wearing a wig. Not in a million years.
I lugged my old tape recorder to Bob’s and we sat and listened to the Good Cop Bad Cop game. It made him laugh and he said Jed was very precocious and enjoying his role as the Oracle, whatever that means; something to do with channelling the words of the Gods, or in this case, Norman.
I could see he was trying to suss out how much I knew and how much to tell me. He was definitely on his guard and a bit cagey. I hadn’t expected Bob to be like that, so I started behaving like that too.
And there was one thing I knew for sure that Bob didn’t.
Violet was currently laid to rest in a plastic bag inside a rucksack three metres from where we were sitting.
For some reason that felt like four aces in a card game.
I asked Bob if he’d ever met Violet and how many times and what was she like.
He said that he and Dad had first met Violet together when they came to interview her for an article about music in film. It was pretty early on when they were starting out and took any work they could get, and Bob came with Dad to take the pictures.
He said they called Violet the Technicolor lady because she had hair the colour of fire and lipstick the colour of blood, and wore bright pinks and greens and purples. Bob said they were hung-over and they kept their shades on for as long as possible because she hurt their eyes.
He said Violet made them Brandy Alexanders
