I don’t know the answer to any of his questions I’ll just tell him I don’t remember. Nobody gives an old lady a hard time,” Pansy said, and then she dialled the number and started mewing into the receiver in her old lady voice. This always gets me because you’d think an old lady wouldn’t be able to do a good old lady impression, but Pansy can.
“Hello? Mr Soprano?” she said, and I waved NO at her but it didn’t register. “Have you got my sister there?”
Then she said, “Maybe I’ve got the wrong cab office. She’s been mislaid and she’s in an urn and her name is Violet. Ring any bells?”
I could hear his tinny squashed voice from where I was sitting but I couldn’t hear what he was saying.
“Well, I am sorry you’ve been stuck with her all this time, I’ve been abroad you see,” and she said “abroad” like she imagined the queen would and arched her see-through old eyebrows at me.
I had to leave the room then because Norman had woken up and was misbehaving in the kitchen. Norman and the dog scoff chocolate together behind Pansy’s back, like she’s running a prisoner of war camp and him and Private Jack Russell have got contraband. She says she wouldn’t mind except that they both do it until they’re sick. She says Norman doesn’t remember how much he’s had and the dog just takes advantage.
I took the chocolate off Norman and let the dog out, and when I got back, Pansy was wrapping things up. She was blowing her nose in a fresh pink tissue and sounding all teary, the old faker (“It’s very kind of you, Mr Soprano, to go to so much trouble, only if you’re sure, I can’t thank you enough,” etc, etc.) and then she banged the phone down with a smile. The thing about false teeth is that they don’t match your face. Pansy looks like she’s borrowed someone else’s grin, some famous actor, George Clooney’s perfect Hollywood pearlies stuck in the middle of her collapsing face.
“He’s coming,” she said, “in half an hour, in person, to hand her over.”
“Well, I’d better go then,” I said, getting my coat and trying to manoeuvre past Norman who was in the doorway and wasn’t sure if he was on his way in or on his way out.
“Lucas Swain, you get your arse back in here!” Pansy said.
“He can’t see me, Gran. If he sees me he won’t let you have her.”
“Well, hide in the bedroom then. I’m letting a stranger in here for your benefit. The least you can do is be on hand.”
So I hid in Pansy and Norman’s bedroom for twenty-four minutes and I worried about what might go wrong.
The urn would get dropped and burst open.
The urn would roll around on the backseat of the car and burst open.
Soprano would crash the car and get concussion and forget about the urn entirely.
He’d just lied to get an old lady off the phone and had no intention of coming over.
Pansy had given him the wrong address.
Pansy had forgotten to give him an address at all.
Norman would open the door and say no thank you or you’ve got the wrong house and shut it again.
Norman would think the ashes were my dad and lose it completely.
Norman would think the ashes were Pansy and lose it completely.
Norman would blow Pansy’s story by saying very loudly she never had a sister called Violet.
Pansy would call Violet the name of one of her real sisters (Dolly, Daisy, Daphne, Delia – I don’t know what happened with Pansy. They must have run out of D’s).
Pansy and Norman would fall asleep and not hear the doorbell (quite common).
One or all of these things would force me out of hiding so Soprano would see me before the drop and smell a rat.
After twenty-four minutes the doorbell rang. Pansy heard it and answered it. She’d done herself up a bit with make-up and a cardigan and some pearls. I watched through a crack in the door. Tony Soprano carried the urn very carefully. He put Violet on the mantelpiece next to the photo of my dad and said how sorry he was about Pansy’s sister.
Then Norman in a random piece of brilliance came out with “She’s dead you know” and they probably nodded gravely or something because it was very quiet.
Tony Soprano must have seen a picture of Pansy and her real dead sister Dolly, who’s also on the mantelpiece, because he said “Is this her?” and Pansy said “Yes, she was a real live wire,” and Norman said “You can say that again, she was a goer your big sister.” Tony Soprano sort of coughed, and then said he really should be going. Pansy walked him to the door (about a metre) and they shook hands and said goodbye, and I thought what a decent bloke he was really, taking it all so seriously and being respectful and doing the right thing.
Then I came out of the bedroom because Soprano had gone and Pansy was having a go at Norman for calling her big sister a slag. I wasn’t sure how Violet would feel in this new place in front of rowing strangers.
She was resting on the mantelpiece to the right of and slightly behind the old front-page photo of my dad. They sat there together, the one we thought we knew all about apart from where he was (or wasn’t), and the one we knew absolutely nothing about except she was dead and at my gran’s house. I stared at them from one of Pansy’s over-furnished armchairs and wondered for a minute what we’d done. Was it really any of my business where a set of ashes ended up? Was I off my head the night I set my heart on rescuing her?
I could feel Pansy’s eyes going from me to the urn, waiting for something to happen, maybe a disembodied voice or my eyes to roll back in my head, or a power cut and some ectoplasm. I didn’t want to let her down.
Then …I felt it, faint at first but unmistakeable.
Violet was happy.
It was like a slow creeping glow and there I was, smiling her smile. She was warm (heating constantly full on) and she liked the décor (overcrowded and a lot of crochet) and nobody was smoking or swearing, and could she have a bit of music on? Rachmaninov’s Fourth (which by the way, I’d never heard of, I swear, but Norman had it on vinyl and we cranked it up and Violet knew it like the back of her hand and she went all tingly which was pretty amazing). Maybe sheltered accommodation in Kentish Town wasn’t her first-choice eternal idyll, but it was a step up from Apollo Cars and Violet wanted us to know she was grateful.
I was bombed. My legs were shaking. Pansy thought I was the new Uri Geller. She kept staring at me with her mouth open and her teeth slipping and a new respect in her eyes.
(For the record, I think Uri Geller is a big crazy fake, but Pansy thinks he’s the real deal because Norman’s watch was broken and Uri fixed it through the TV, apparently.)
And I decided that Dad and Violet Park weren’t that different. One was dead and one was missing, but everyone has their secrets don’t they? Take any family and there’ll be unspeakable stuff rattling around behind the scenes, guaranteed. Here’s some of mine.
1 There’s
