it was my dad who helped Violet die.
And if he did do it, I’m wondering how.
You’d have to be pretty careful because clearly it can’t look like murder, and it can’t look like assisted suicide even, unless you live in Holland and maybe parts of Scandinavia.
It was probably an overdose, sleeping pills and booze or painkillers.
But then why would Violet need my dad when she could do that herself?
Probably she just wanted him to hold her hand while she went, or make sure she was properly dead before he called anyone so she didn’t get wrenched back from the tunnel with the light at the end.
I bet she was scared and she wanted somebody to talk to, or someone there just in case she changed her mind at the last minute. Because that would be pretty bad, if you changed your mind halfway through killing yourself and there was nothing you could do about it.
I don’t even want to think about that.
Maybe she took the pills and then he smothered her to speed things up a bit. Once you’ve gone through with it, the waiting must be pretty bad.
I’m dying to know if he actually did any killing.
But he probably said no and left her to it.
Somehow, in between looking after Martha, and keeping the whole Pete and Violet thing to myself, and trying to be nicer to Mum, I lost sight of Bob for a week or two.
I might have been avoiding him.
Because I knew I’d have to go and find out what he knew.
And say sorry for what happened.
It was obvious to me as soon as I saw him that Bob knew a lot. He couldn’t look at me. Plus he looked dreadful, like he hadn’t slept since I’d last seen him, which actually turned out to be true. He was all creased up and unsteady on his feet, scratching his arse in a pair of old pyjama bottoms, and I realised he’d been drinking.
Bob hadn’t had a drink in years. Not since his life fell apart and he glued it back together again.
It was a big deal for Bob, not drinking.
“What’s going on?” I said, and I was scared, like a little kid. Bob didn’t say a word. He just turned back into the house and left the front door open.
He veered to the left all the way down the corridor and kept knocking into the wall. I walked behind him thinking, Did I do this?
“’Snot your fault,” Bob breathed into my face at the door. He stank of drink.
“Isn’t it?” I said.
“No!” he grunted, and he sort of shouldered open the door at the same time. There was something in the way of it (coats, piles of coats and blankets on the floor) and we had to squeeze through because it would only open a little way.
The flat was trashed. It looked like Bob had emptied every cupboard and drawer and shelf on to the floor and made a pile of stuff and then rolled around in it.
“Bob, what have you done in here?” I said. “Christ!”
“I was looking for something,” he said with his eyes screwed shut, and then he shrugged his shoulders. “Can’t find it.”
“What were you looking for, somewhere to sit?” I asked, because that’s what I was doing.
“Oh, sit on the floor, sit where you are!” Bob waved his hands around, annoyed, so I did, shoeing aside a typewriter lid, a flyblown banana and some pants. But then I got up again because the floor was wet.
“Why’re you drinking Bob?” I said. “What’s happened in here?”
Then I stopped because I saw something familiar by the window – a box spewing out papers; a washing up liquid box that I’d seen Mum take out of her car and chuck on the dump. I looked around the room then, turning slowly, taking it all in. There were other things, other boxes, mostly unpacked, stacks of notebooks and magazines and stuff.
Dad’s things.
Not everything we dumped, not even close, but quite a lot of it.
Bob was searching my dad’s stuff for something.
“Bob, what the …?”
“I just couldn’t find it,” he said, and he was crying, shaking his head and crying, his face collapsing into his beard. “I made five trips to that godforsaken place, on foot, carrying the stuff back and forth and I couldn’t bloody find it.”
I asked him what it was he couldn’t find, but I couldn’t get any sense out of him. He was just sobbing and shaking his head, standing in the middle of his trashed flat, like things had gone way beyond what it was he could or couldn’t find.
Then Bob poured two massive glasses and thrust one at me.
“Keep drinking,” he said. “Keep drinking,” and I didn’t want to, but Bob drank his straight down and poured another.
Then he stared at me with his eyes all glazed over and he said, “You’re nothing like your dad,” and I asked him what he meant by that.
“Pete was my best friend and I loved him, but he was a bad man,” Bob said, and it just hung there between us, this “bad man” thing, and neither of us liked that he’d said it, even though we both had our reasons for thinking it was true.
“Will you tell me what you were looking for?” I said.
Bob said he didn’t want to tell me anything. He said, “I’ve hated knowing it all this time.”
“Do you know where he is?” I said. That would be my worst, if he’d known all along where my dad was and never told me.
“God no!” Bob said. “Do you think I could have kept that from you?”
“I don’t know, Bob,” I said, and I was starting to get angry. “What are you keeping from me?”
Bob looked through me for a minute. He drained his glass again and poured another. Then he said, “I know something about your dad. Something he did.”
“Something he did?” I said, like a brainless echo. I hate it when people do that.
“Yeah,” Bob said. “We had a fight about it.”
“What did he do?” I said.
“He said he didn’t do it but he lied,” Bob said.
“What was this thing he did?” I said.
“It was Violet.”
I
