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One good side-effect of Violet turning me on to old people was I got to know my gran a lot better. Her name is Pansy – another perfect name for an old lady, another flower name. I’d never really had much time for her before, what with her being old and having false teeth she got too small for, and skin like a bit of screwed up grey tissue that you find in your coat pocket, and pretty extreme opinions on just about everything. She and my grandad live round the corner in sheltered housing. Pansy says there’s nothing more patronising or that fills her with more dread than a primary colour window surround. She says it’s a sign that whoever lives there is no longer taken seriously. It’s worth remembering that they gave up their big house to move here so that we could live in it. Pansy would rather we didn’t forget it.

Pansy is a live wire and she’ll talk about anything and has theories about stuff she’s hardly heard of, like jungle music and PlayStation and Internet dating. She swears all the time but she never actually says the word, just mouths it, with her face especially screwed up, her gums and false teeth colliding slightly, the insides of her mouth sticking together and then pulling apart so swearing becomes this strange spongy clacking sound. It’s quite effective.

Pansy is passionate about football and has been for years. But somehow, at the same time, she’s managed to learn absolutely nothing about the rules. She once said that footballers should get extra points for hitting the post or the cross bar because it’s much harder than scoring a proper goal. She’s a Tottenham fan because she grew up in Enfield and her dad played in the brass band at White Hart Lane. If you ask me, there’s never enough reason to be a Spurs fan because I’m into Arsenal and so was my dad. Pansy says Dad only supported Arsenal to hack her off when he was a kid. Grandad, who can take football or leave it, rolls his eyes and says, “They used to fight like cat and dog when Grandstand was on.” She loves to slag off Arsenal, and mostly that’s fine because we’re at the top of the league and they’re going down.

Pansy was the first person I told about Violet. I needed to tell someone that a dead lady was talking to me and I had several good reasons for letting her in on it. For a start, it was Violet who made me more interested in the person inside Pansy’s old body. Also, I figured Violet would appreciate having another old lady around after all those cab drivers. And I knew Pansy’d be into it because she was always reading about the occult and she liked mediums and stuff and she even went to see one once to see if she could find out if Dad had “passed over” so I knew she’d never dismiss the idea of communicating with the dead.

Of course, that’s the other thing that me and my gran have in common, apart from Violet and the London Derby – my dad, her son. “Our missing link” she calls him. Mum says however bad it feels to us that Dad just went off without a word of warning, we should times it by ten for Pansy because she’s his mum and mums just don’t expect their kids to go before they do. So Pansy loves it when I come round, firstly because she says I’m her favourite (based purely on the fact that I look like her son and wear his clothes) and secondly because she can talk about Dad till she’s run out of air and I won’t lose interest.

I don’t think Grandad is much help with all that. His name is Norman and he fought in the war in North Africa, driving munitions trucks through the desert and smoking woodbines and wetting his pants. Norman is a really really nice bloke and he’s always been a good grandad, but these days he doesn’t know his arse from his elbow. What’s happened is he’s had these tiny strokes, and every time he has one (and you wouldn’t notice if he was having one right in front of you, they’re that small,) some of his memory gets wiped. Some days he’s better than others, but it drives Pansy mad because she says she never knows where she is with him. One minute he’s getting all romantic on her, the next he thinks she’s the home help come to give things a once-round with the hoover.

Pansy has a dog called Jack (Russell) and sometimes I have no idea if she’s talking about the dog or Grandad.

“He’s been under my feet all day and his breath smells terrible.” (Dog)

“He’s not been for three days. I think he needs a good walk.” (Norman)

On a good day Norman will remember that I’m Lucas, and on a stroke day he’ll think I’m my dad. Me and Pansy just agreed to let it slide on stroke days because it makes him happy. Pansy says she wishes she could have a stroke so she could forget her only child had seen fit to abandon his family and head for the hills. Then she dabs her crumpled eyes with a crumpled tissue and says, “Fffck it, let’s have another slice of Battenberg.”

The times I do sit down and have a chat with Norman he’s overjoyed because he doesn’t get a word in edgeways most of the time and he’s actually got quite a lot to say. When you first meet him and Pansy, she’s the one who grabs you because she’s so vibrant and sharp and energetic and into everything, but after a while you realise that Norman is the tortoise to her hare and that if you just give him a minute he can be very interesting and knowledgeable about a lot of things.

The person who really likes being with Norman is Jed. Jed’s too young to realise that Norman forgets things. He thinks he’s just doing it to be funny and he gets a big kick out of it. Jed thinks Norman is the funniest man alive. They hang out together in the kitchen eating biscuits and making Meccano planes and they laugh themselves sick over old Laurel and Hardy films. They’re also allowed to take the dog out together, which is about the only time for both of them that they get to go anywhere without a responsible adult. Jed says being with Grandad is just like being with one of his friends from school except better because Grandad knows a lot more and is really good at sharing.

A while ago, I got this idea in my head that Norman knew something really vital about where Dad is except he couldn’t tell us because he’d forgotten. I was convinced that everything he said, however ordinary, was actually a hidden clue and if I broke the code I’d save my dad. Sometimes when he’s talking to me I still cross my fingers that it will just slip out, an address or a phone number, or a last message, but things are never that simple.

When I told Pansy about Violet, I did it just like I would if I’d met anyone normal, or at least alive. Violet was still on the shelf at Apollo Cars when I did it.

I think I said, “Gran, I met someone you’d really like the other night” and Pansy said something sharp like, “Well don’t go getting her pregnant” and I nearly spat my biscuit out at the thought and said, “No, no, she’s an old girl like you!”

“How old?” said Pansy. “Where did you meet an old lady? What do you want an old girlfriend for?”

I said, “She’s in her seventies like you and she’s not my girlfriend and I met her in a cab office last Friday night on my way home.”

Pansy pursed her lips tight and sucked air in like she was smoking an invisible cigarette which didn’t taste good and she said, “Mercy said you pinched her money, you bloody cheapskate.”

“Yeah, well, I didn’t,” I said, and then she sort of waved her hand around to say let’s not talk about that and said, “What’s a seventy-year-old woman doing in a cab office on a Friday night?” which was the question I’d been waiting for.

“She was on a shelf,” I said a bit too quickly, and Pansy glared at me.

“Have you been smoking that wacky baccy again, Lucas?”

I glared back. “Gran, you know that’s not really relevant.”

“Don’t use those long words with me,” Pansy said. “I told your dad about that stuff and look where he is now.”

I kept looking at her and I said, “Dad could be anywhere, we don’t know, but Violet is trapped on a shelf in a mini cab office and she needs our help.”

It felt like one of those things people say in films, and it was coming out of my mouth.

“Where’s Violet? What in hell are you talking about, Peter?” Norman said, and he made me jump because I’d forgotten he was there.

“I thought you were asleep,” I said.

Pansy winked at me and whispered, “Sometimes it’s hard to tell the difference.” And then she yelled, “Nothing Norman! Go back to sleep. It was the telly,” which was a bare-faced lie because the telly wasn’t even on. Then we were back to the film script and she said, “Is there a ransom?”

It wasn’t quite what I was expecting. “What?”

“If someone’s holding an old lady hostage in a cab office they must be doing it for a reason.”

“She’s dead, Gran,” I said, and I counted to ten for it to sink in.

“They’ve got a dead lady on a shelf? That’s disgusting!” Pansy had got over excited. I could see the little explosions happening behind her eyes. “How did you meet her if she was dead, Lucas?”

“She’s in an urn. She’s been cremated.”

Pansy didn’t say anything to that. She just unclasped her hands, fingers spread out either side of her face, still trying to catch the answer to her last question. Her eyebrows were raised so high up her face that her forehead looked like a terraced hillside. I knew I had her full attention. Now it just remained for me to reel her in.

“Gran, I’m not promising anything, but I think she’s communicating with me from …”

Pansy mouthed the words at me in a furious display of facial gymnastics, “ …the other side?”

I nodded and went to put the kettle on.

I did this because I know that my grandparents’ response to anything, from the disappearance of their son to the adverts in the middle of Emmerdale, is to make a cup of tea. I don’t think they’ve ever gone more than an hour or two without one in fifty years. They are tea junkies.

And maybe there’s some truth in their tea beliefs. Once she’d had had a sip, Pansy was back to her normal self, no more gawping and tonguing her teeth back and forth. She was all helpful hints and blinding ideas.

I said I wanted to rescue Violet. The rest of the plan was mostly down to Pansy.

It was brilliant and simple.

The first thing to do was phone Apollo Cars.

“If 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 Dad (obviously) who has some other life that we know naff all about, or is dead, which he’s kept pretty secret too.

2 Pansy had a kid (my dad) by an encyclopaedia salesman before she married Norman. She was brave about it then, but now she won’t have it mentioned and she fakes her wedding anniversaries just to make it all legit.

3 Norman couldn’t have kids (mumps) but he doesn’t know that we all know he’s not strictly related to us. Mum told me and Mercy a long time ago, before Dad went, and I remember thinking that it made no difference. Jed doesn’t know yet, at least I don’t think he does. Maybe even Norman’s forgotten that he’s not my dad’s real dad, what with missing him so much and going senile and everything.

4 Mum has had a boyfriend for over six months and she thinks none of us know. It’s not Bob (pity) but she did sleep with Bob a few times, another thing she thinks we never knew about. Mum’s boyfriend is called David and he teaches life drawing at the Community Centre. He’s nice enough but he wears weird jewellery and talks quite a lot of crap.

5 Mercy’s on the pill and she smokes and she does drugs and she shoplifts and she bunks off and she climbs out the bedroom window to visit her dealer jailbird boyfriend when she’s grounded.

6 Jed wets the bed but he made Mum promise not to tell us.

7 Mum told us.

That’s not even all of them but I’m not telling any more because the point is we’ve got loads of secrets and so has everybody. By my reckoning, being missing and being dead, like Dad and Violet, is just a way of keeping another, bigger secret. And secrets are never that hard to unearth. Somebody always slips up, or leaves a trail, or says the wrong thing at the right time. And then everybody finds out the truth, whether they want to or not.