kept saying it was to be expected, it wasn’t too much of a surprise, that kind of thing, but Martha says it doesn’t matter how much warning you’ve had or how prepared you are for it, death is still sudden and it’s still a shock.
“One minute she was here,” she said, “being my mum, and the next she was nowhere forever. How is it better that I’ve known it was going to happen for ten years?”
She made me think about it, the sudden definite moment when someone dies, and I saw it was what I’d been spared, in a way, by my dad’s ambiguous departure. The lines around him are all blurry, the lines between being alive and being dead, like he’s been slowly fading from one to the other the whole time he’s been gone. My dad being dead now would still be a shock, but nothing like it was for Martha, holding Wendy’s hand in the morning when she was living and in the afternoon when she was not. She said she looked down at her mum’s dead hand in hers and thought “It’s never going to touch me again.” She thought, “It’s not my mum any more, it’s just a hand,” and she had to leave the room and be sick.
The funeral was pretty straightforward considering Wendy’s earlier hopes for the Ganges. It was in a church for one thing, and the vicar kept mentioning God, who I know she wasn’t sure about.
Martha’s dad read a poem about how dying was just letting go and being free or being born even, and it was incredible because it was full of hope and made being dead seem like the coolest and most relaxing thing to do ever. In the poem it wasn’t like being dead was the end of everything, it was just the end of being who you were, with all the hang ups and memories and crazy ideas that weigh you right down when you’re alive.
If you look at it like that, dying isn’t such a bad option for some people.
Afterwards the house was packed out and people were practically queuing up to say how brilliant and amazing and fearless Wendy was. There was a slide show on the staircase wall, pictures of her when she was a child, at graduation, getting married, holding Martha as a baby, looking radiant, looking sick, laughing with all her own hair. People spent a lot of time looking at it, even when the pictures had gone round and they’d seen them more than once. I suppose it was because they still wanted to be around her and this was the closest they were going to get.
Martha didn’t like it in the house with everybody talking about Wendy and getting drunk, so we went for a walk, nowhere special. It was getting properly dark and the colour was leeching out of everything and the streetlights hadn’t come on yet to turn it all orange. There were people laughing in the street and pushing into pubs and running across roads. I kept thinking, Don’t they know her mum’s just died?
We ended up sitting on a wall outside a funeral parlour of all places. Martha was laughing and crying at the same time. She said she couldn’t imagine being with anyone else at a time like this.
“We’re family now, you and me, you know that,” she said, and I didn’t want to feel good about what she said because it was her mum’s funeral, but I did.
Martha cries a lot. She says I might as well get used to it because it’ll be mainly what she does for a while, even when she doesn’t really feel like doing it. She’s right. We both noticed that she cries the most when she’s happy, like when we’re together, just messing about, or when something makes her laugh out loud. Martha says it’s because the instant she realises she’s happy she feels guilty for forgetting to miss her mum.
I said just because she isn’t thinking about her mum doesn’t mean she isn’t missing her. It’s just another part of the brain doing the missing, that’s all.
Before the tape, everything connecting Violet and my dad had felt like guesswork. It seemed ridiculous that the two of them were linked at all really, apart from by their absence. And then suddenly, listening to them talk, it seemed to me that it was exactly that, their absence, that bound them together in a way I could never have imagined in a thousand years.
The thing I knew for sure was this.
Violet asked my dad to help her die.
And then what?
Did my dad say yes or no? Because if he said yes, it changes things.
Because if you agree to help someone die and disappear shortly after, there’s a good chance those two things are connected.
I’ve been trying to remember what my dad was like in the months before Violet died and he left us, when I was ten and strange (apparently) and probably not helping much with all my staring.
Was he thinking the whole time about helping an old lady die?
Or was he just dreaming up ways of escape?
I’ve thought about it a lot and I’m guessing things went something like this.
After Violet asked my dad to kill her, after the tape recorder got switched off, after she maybe repeated the question, my dad said NO.
He might have got up and paced the room a bit, but mostly he would have felt pretty calm in the knowledge that there was no way he was going to help her however much she begged him.
My dad didn’t do much for others, remember, and this was quite a lot to ask.
If you don’t remember birthdays and anniversaries, if you never take your kids to school or the zoo or the London Planetarium, if giving someone a lift to the station is a major inconvenience, then assisted suicide is way out of range.
It’s just one favour too far.
But what if Violet changed his mind?
It’s not impossible.
How would you go about something like that, convincing someone to kill you?
You’d have to be very persuasive.
Pestering and nagging and just going on about it would never have worked. My dad ignored such methods.
Appealing to his better nature would be hard, like finding a needle in a haystack. My dad was no Good Samaritan.
So how would Violet convince him?
Did she prove beyond a doubt that she had no good reason to go on living?
I mean why did she want to do it? She must have told him that.
Maybe she was suffering from something that was going to kill her anyway, like cancer or heart disease or Parkinson’s or boredom.
Maybe she’d had enough of living on her own, with her imaginary son and her records and her failing hands.
Maybe she promised him a hefty inheritance. This theory works because it funds his vanishing act and if he was really planning on going, a cash prize is the best carrot she could have offered.
Another thing I know.
Less than a year after they made that tape, Violet died. I’m not sure how – I’m hoping peacefully in her sleep. And my dad jumped ship pretty soon after.
That
