is throwing a ball and reaction is dodging out of the way when you suddenly realise that the ball’s going to hit you.
Your brain is firing signals all the time, telling you to scratch your nose or smile or put one foot in front of the other when you’re walking. But some things you do, like blink or drop a hot piece of toast, you couldn’t possibly know you were going to do beforehand because you didn’t see them coming. That’s where your brain proves it knows everything before you do, because it has to send the signal and the signal takes time.
This is called the readiness potential, the way your brain tells your body what to do before even you know you need to do it.
And what reminded me of the readiness potential thing was that when I read Violet’s name, I realised I knew it after all, before he showed it to me, even though there was no way I could. I heard it in my head just before I saw it written down, like when you watch a film and the dubbing’s out, so you hear what people say a bit before their mouths move. Right then I was pretty wired about it. I was thinking about that conversation-with-a-dead-pensioner feeling I’d had on the hill and I was sure that the only way I could have known her name was that she’d already told me.
It flew around in my brain like a pigeon trapped in a building, flitting through the spaces, clattering against the sides. V-I-O-L-E-T. A good strong name; a name that’s a colour and there aren’t many of those around, and also a flower, soft and pretty and old fashioned, the perfect name for a dead old lady.
It was all I could do to stop myself from grabbing the urn and running off. I felt like her only hope at that moment. She’d been dead long enough to know there was no one coming for her. It still makes me sick to think of her stuck there since I was eleven, the same time as my dad went wherever.
Tony Soprano put Violet back on the shelf. I’d promised to leave and he was going to hold me to it. To stay calm on the way out I made a list in my head of all the good reasons to make friends with a dead lady in an urn.
1 A dead old lady would never be judgemental or lecture me like every other female on the planet.
2 If I decided to find out about her she might turn out to be the coolest most talented bravest person I’d ever heard of, and I might sort of get to know her without the hassle of her actually existing.
3 I would get to rescue her and I never did that for anyone before, and it sort of makes you need them too in your own way.
4 A dead old lady would be easy to like because she couldn’t leave any more than she had already.
I do know, I am aware, that a boy my age should have thought more about bringing home a living girl than a dead old lady. And I did care about that other stuff, about girls and mates and sex and stuff, I’m not a total freak. It’s just that Violet was becoming my newest friend and she was working her way to the front of my brain all the time, like new friends do.
If you think about it, a person being dead isn’t any barrier to finding out what they are like. Half the people we learn about in school have been dead for ages. People write whole books about William Blake and Henry the Eighth and Marilyn Monroe, and they’ve never met them and they still sound like they know what they are talking about.
I met Violet after she died but it didn’t stop me getting to know her. And what I keep trying to prove is that I’m not as insane as I’m sounding.
Of all the places I would like to be when I’m dead, Apollo Cars is the last. I can’t decide what my first is yet, mainly because I’m too young to, but my top three all time places so far for being quiet and on my own (which sounds like a good description of being dead if you think about it) are as follows.
1. Primrose Hill – over the top and down again to the quiet side. It doesn’t have a great view like if you’re at the top, but it is peaceful and for some reason hardly anyone goes there, even on days when the park is mobbed. Also, it’s where my dad’s old friend Bob had a tree planted to celebrate when Jed was born.
2. St Pancras Church – I don’t like cemeteries in a Goth way (although I don’t mind anyone that does) because actually, apart from Violet, I’m not that comfortable with dead people. But I do like St Pancras. Mary Shelley who wrote Frankenstein used to be buried there, next to her mum who died giving birth to her, but then I think they got moved to St Albans, which is another thing you wouldn’t expect to do when you’re dead.
The church is on a gentle hill and you can’t see the dead from the road or the beauty of the place really, until you’re right inside it. There’s a tree there called the Hardy tree with loads of old gravestones (no bodies) sort of leaned up against it, all random. It’s called the Hardy tree after Thomas Hardy the famous writer who invented that place Wessex and made up sad stories about beautiful milkmaids and other pessimistic country people. He’s not buried there and he wasn’t even famous when he had anything to do with the Hardy tree. He was actually an engineer I think, and he was in charge of clearing the way for the railway line out to the midlands and he had to shrink the cemetery to make room and squish all the dead bodies into a smaller place. He might even have been the one who moved Mary Shelley and her mum. There must have been a bit of a mix up or something, because the headstones of some of the people that got moved just got left up against the tree.
I wonder how big the tree was then because its pretty old now, and then I wonder how big Jed’s tree on Primrose Hill will be in like two hundred years, and I wonder if anyone will find out about it and call it the Swain tree, because maybe Jed will be famous for something one day.
3. The City on a Sunday. Dad used to take me. There’s no one there. You can walk around and pretend you’re in one of those science fiction stories like The Day of the Triffids or 48 Hours Later. All the modern buildings reek of money and bad taste, and you can still feel the frantic stuff that goes on all week long, almost like the ghost of it is there on a Sunday, like the place is just exhausted with the pace of it all. And there are these really, really old bits too, all mixed in. You can be standing at some super modern glass box with your back to the oldest pub in London, and round the corner there’s a really narrow little lane called Wardrobe Street where they really did used to make wardrobes in about 17something, and it’s like time travel, street to street, and that’s a brilliant thing.
I didn’t know what Violet’s places might be, where she liked to spend her time, where she’d want to end up, and that’s a sad thing for nobody to know about a person. Before I die I’m going to leave strict instructions about where I want to spend the rest of time. I hope I won’t be so completely alone in the world that no one would remember to collect me after my funeral. It’s like those stories in the local paper about people who die and nobody notices for weeks and then they start smelling, 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
