Читать книгу Jenny Valentine - 4 Book Award-winning Collection - Jenny Valentine - Страница 22

It occurs to me that all most people do when they grow up is fix on something impossible and then hunger after it.

I do it about Dad, and Violet.

Mum does it about what she might amount to if she lived her life again.

Bob does it about Mum, according to Mercy.

Ed does it about winding his mum up and getting laid.

Mercy does it about Kurt Cobain and breast implants and mind-altering narcotics.

Pansy does it about her encyclopaedia salesman and her son and about some pre-senile version of Norman.

Norman does it about his past, which he can’t quite hold on to.

Violet’s doing it past her sell by date about something I haven’t worked out yet.

The only person who doesn’t do it is Jed.

He lives in the present tense only. I don’t think he’s any good at all at things like the past or the future. Even today and tomorrow and yesterday trip him up. Jed says yesterday when he means six months ago and tomorrow when he means not now. Also, when you’re going somewhere with Jed, he instantly forgets that you’re headed from A to B. He just spends ages looking at snails and collecting gravel and stopping to read signs along the way.

Jed is clueless about time and that means Jed is never sad or angry about anything for more than about five minutes. He just can’t hold on to stuff for long enough. Five minutes might as well be a year to him.

And the thing about everyone else in my family is we are so busy being miserable and down all the time about impossible stuff that being miserable and down has started to become normal and strangely comforting.

I mean, how much would we actually really like it if Dad showed up tomorrow and became part of the family again?

Wouldn’t it get everyone’s backs up a little bit?

It would be like having a stranger in the house, like a new lodger.

It would be really weird.

At some point, the impossible object of desire must turn into the last thing on earth you want to happen, without anybody noticing.

The day Pansy came home from the hospital I waited with Norman for Mum to drop her off. He sat at the kitchen table folding and refolding a piece of paper, and I did a bit of washing up and taking out the rubbish (mostly chocolate wrappers). I sensed that if I wanted to ask Norman anything and I wanted a straight answer, now was the time. I think he was looking forward to being off guard and probably just wanted to doze in his chair and potter about with the dog like before, safe in the knowledge that she at least knew who he was.

I coughed first to break the silence.

“Did you meet Violet Park, Grandad?”

He looked at me for a second as if he hadn’t realised I was there and I thought, no, it’s too late, he’s gone back to forgetting. Then he said “No. It was your dad that knew her, for all the good it did him.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Man-eater, that one,” Norman said.

I had an image of Violet swallowing my dad whole. So that was where he had gone. “Was she?”

“Other people’s husbands for breakfast, lunch and dinner,” he said.

“Not Dad though,” I said.

Norman shrugged. “Thick as thieves they were, at the end.”

“What end?” I said, but Norman didn’t say anything.

“Did Dad tell you he was leaving?” I said.

Norman looked hard at me and said, “Do you think I wouldn’t remember a thing like that?”

“I don’t know, Grandad,” I said, which was a lie.

“Do you think I’d leave everybody wondering and not knowing, if I knew?” he said, and I shook my head and said, “No” but I could tell just by looking at him that he knew he couldn’t remember.

And I felt for Norman, I really did. It wasn’t the same for us. We didn’t know where Dad was and that was that, simple. But Norman must always be wondering whether he did know. Imagine knowing the thing that you most need to know, and your whole family most needs to know, and not being able to find it, only wondering if you know it or not.

Mum arrived with Pansy and said she couldn’t stay, for some reason. She drove off pretty quick, like she couldn’t wait to be out of there. Pansy was shrunken and frail like a doll. It scared me a bit, the thought of her being in a pot like Violet pretty soon. Me and Norman swooped and fussed around her until she swatted us off. I went to the kitchen to make them both a cup of tea and when I came back they were sitting in silence, holding hands across the gap in their easy chairs.

Pansy’s hands looked like birds’ claws. The bones stood up under her skin and her veins were all knotted and dark blue. Her fingernails needed cutting. She looked like she was made of paper.

She didn’t even notice that Violet was gone. She sat staring at Dad’s photo on the mantelpiece and didn’t see the new gap beside it.

“I never thought I’d die before he came back,” she said to no one in particular, and no one in particular answered because what could we say?

“I’m so disappointed in him, Lucas,” Pansy said to me, tears rolling down her face, perfect dewdrops magnifying her wrinkles.

I hadn’t heard her speak a word against Dad in five years. I’d relied on Pansy for that.

“So am I,” I said.

It made me cold all over, the change in Pansy. It was like someone had broken her. She’d been away less than two weeks and she’d come back beaten.

Pansy started to talk about funerals then. She said she knew she was going soon and she wanted a say in how she went, so that even though Dad would most likely not be there she’d still have stuff to look forward to. I promised her I’d take care of it, even if she wanted a horse-drawn carriage and a four-metre statue of a cherub for a gravestone. But Pansy wants a quiet simple service. She wants to be buried whole (no burning) in the village in Wales where she grew up. Her mum is buried there and her dad’s name is on the headstone too, but his body is busy becoming coal, she says, in the mine where he died. She says she wants a space for Norman there too, next to hers, because she’ll only worry if he’s out of her sight.

Martha says she’d like a Viking burial. This means she wants to be wrapped up in an oil-soaked cloth and pushed out to sea in a long boat. Then she wants a flaming arrow fired at her corpse, which will burst into flames and burn to a cinder before being swallowed by the water.

I hope not to be there.

Martha’s dad is an anthropologist, which means he looks at how people behave in different groups and cultures, and he knows a lot about funerals and says they are different the world over. It seems there’s no end to the many ways you can say goodbye to someone.

In Bali (I think) the body hangs about above ground for a while, going off, and then it gets decked with flowers and torched. When the fire’s gone out the relatives have to scrabble for bones and throw them in the ocean. It’s very hands-on. And somewhere, maybe some part of China, long after the funeral, when everyone has stopped grieving and mourning, the dead person gets dug right back up again and you have a party with the bones to show you’re really OK and over it and everything. It’s a good job they don’t have lead-lined coffins there. Martha says that if you’re buried in a lead-lined coffin no air can get in and you can’t leak out so you turn to soup.

Martha’s mum wants to be scattered in some form or other in the river Ganges in India, but she’ll probably settle for the New Forest. She says, “Unlike us in the west who sweep death under the carpet, the Hindu people have a very healthy attitude to dying because they’ve done it before and they’ll do it again.” I suppose with reincarnation, dying is no big deal, as long as you’ve behaved yourself and you don’t come back as a blue tit or a dung beetle.

Martha’s mum and dad are called Wendy and Oliver. I met them when I went to their house for Sunday lunch. I was nervous to start with because I’ve never been to anyone’s house for Sunday lunch before. I probably talked too much and I can’t have been that interesting when I know so much less about everything than they do, but they were keen to like me. About halfway through pudding I realised I felt pretty much at home.

Martha was right about her mum. She made me laugh so much I nearly squirted beer through my nose. And I would never have known she was wearing a wig. Not in a million years.