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TWENTY-TWO

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I hadn’t told anyone about Violet’s tape, not even Martha. I didn’t know why at the time, I just didn’t want to. It was mine, I suppose. Mine and Dad’s and Violet’s, at least until I knew what was on there.

I took a long time getting myself ready before I listened to it. I pulled down the blinds in my room and made a cup of tea. I got a pen and paper. I put a chair and a table by the window, with the tape and the pen and paper and Dad’s little tape player all lined up. I searched the kitchen for new batteries. I made another cup of tea and a sandwich, and got an apple and some peanuts and a few other things just in case because I had no idea how long all this was going to take. I spent a while making a joint because I thought I might end up needing one. I kept thinking, “please don’t be taped over, please don’t be nothing.” I locked and unlocked the door and then I locked it again. I think I was putting things off because even though I was desperate to hear what the tape had to say, I was scared of it too. Kind of dreading it, if I’m honest.

I had to rewind it first and I pressed the wrong button and this voice was talking, mid sentence, and it was my dad’s. It made me feel sick and cold and anxious and I turned it straight off. I sat there staring at the machine for a while and then I dug out my headphones. The last thing my mum needed right now? The sound of my dad’s voice somewhere in the house.

Through the headphones I could hear them moving and breathing as well as talking. I heard birds outside the window where they were sitting, and cars. Someone was pouring tea, I heard the clink of a spoon against the inside of a cup.

I closed my eyes – and I’m sitting right there with them, like I’ve travelled in time.

All of us in one room, me and the missing and the dead.

It’s book-lined, this room we share, wooden floors thick with varnish like clear honey, windows (three) looking on to bright empty sky and the roll of the park. We sit in canvas chairs and my dad crosses his legs, right over left, and he frowns while he listens and smokes a lot of cigarettes and occasionally writes something down in a brown notebook. I’m thinking about that notebook blowing open and shut, swelling with the rain at the dump, thanks to Mum. Violet’s chair is opposite Dad’s, their knees centimetres apart and she’s leaning slightly forward in her seat, keeping watch on his attention.

She is the wrong age. I mean I am imagining her much younger than she would have been. I’m using the photos and the painting I’ve seen and doing my best, but I’m definitely way out; her voice is years older than the Violet I see. It cracks and wavers and fails in the middle of sentences. Her hands dart about as she talks, a ring on each finger throwing sparks, the nails short and shiny red. There is so much life in those hands I’ve got tears in my eyes just watching them.

Neither of them notices me, stoned and weeping and grinning like an idiot in the corner. They don’t look over at me once.

“Let’s start with your family,” Dad says. His voice turns my spine to water.

Violet sighs and says it like she’s said it all before. “I was an only child to older parents. They pushed me hard to make something of my life because they never had.”

“Was yours a happy childhood?”

“Oh, heavens no!” and she laughs, but you can tell she’s not finding it exactly funny. “I worked hard and I don’t remember much laughter. They kept me away from other children.”

“Why?”

“To avoid contamination, I imagine. They didn’t want me getting the scent of rebellion.”

“So you were a good girl, an obedient child?”

“What else could I be, darling? I didn’t know I had a choice, until later.”

Violet’s laugh is throaty and deep, like she’s smoked a few thousand cigarettes in her time. But she’s not smoking now, only my dad is; I can hear him exhale.

“And did you blame them?”

“For the strictness and isolation? For having my first real friend at the age of seventeen? Of course I did, at first. But now I understand they only did their best.”

“You really think that?”

“Yes, dear, I do. I’m sure I would have been far worse in their place.”

“And how hard was it, to forgive them?”

“What? It was easy! Children would much prefer to love their parents than hate them, after all.”

Dad says, “God, I do hope so,” and Violet arches her thin, pencilled brows at him. “Why do you say that Peter? Do you long to forgive or be forgiven?”

I watch my dad carefully for his answer and he says, “I’m a terrible father.” Just that.

I want to go over there and tell him I forgive him for the thing he hasn’t even done yet, but it’s not true and anyway I can’t move.

Dad asks what is it she now understands about her parents, what drove them to drive her? She stops to think, staring past my dad and into her past.

“I’ve thought about it many times. It was my mother, most of all. She was a teacher and life was too small for her, too tight all over. She dreamed of being a great actress and at school they’d told her she would never make it, being plain and flat-chested. And she’d believed them, they had crushed her. But she was good, I remember her being good. She lit up the Hobart Amateur Dramatic Society’s efforts, at any rate. I saw them all as a child, rehearsals included. In fact, I thought she was an actress until she followed me to school and started teaching. It was a dreadful disappointment for both of us.”

My dad doesn’t say anything. He looks at her and nods and waits so she carries on. “Father was a bank manager. He was rather formal with us. I’m not sure that he ever relaxed at home. But he loved discipline and routine so he enforced my mother’s strict regimes. He was, I suspect, a little terrified of his passionate, unfulfilled wife and his musical, solitary daughter.”

“You were musical as a child?”

“Oh yes, very,” she says. “I frightened the life out of mother at the theatre one day. I played a piece I’d heard only once, a minute before, in its entirety without a fault. She was checking the piano for a hidden mechanism when I did it again. I think it was a little Mozart minuet, nothing spectacular. I don’t remember it at all.”

“How old were you?”

“Three or four,” Violet says, and I can see the grin on my dad’s face in the silence.

“Three or four,” he says again.

“I think they wished it had never happened,” she says. “It’s very draining having a child like that on your hands, an unusual child, so I’m told.”

And then my dad says something so unexpected I don’t know where to look. He says, “My son Lucas is a strange child.”

I’m sitting there in the room looking at my shoes. Dad’s shoes on my feet, and he’s saying this about me.

“Oh, good,” Violet says, “let’s talk about someone else, I’m terribly bored of me. Tell me about this strange child of yours, this Lucas. How old is he?”

“Ten.”

That makes the tape within a year of dad leaving. I’m trying to remember what I was like when I was ten. Was I strange?

“Do you like him?” she says. “Do you get along?”

“I don’t know. I don’t think he likes me all that much.”

I’m thinking, Yes I do, you idiot, yes I did.

“And why is he strange?” says Violet, and I can’t believe she’s asking about me, they’re talking about me while I’m sitting in the corner listening. I would be honoured, except for what they’re actually saying.

“He’s on his own a lot. He stares. I think he suspects me of something.”

“Suspects you of what?”

“Later, maybe. Another time,” my dad says, and the funny thing is he’s looking at me when he says it, like he knows I’m listening in.

“Do you have children?” he asks her, and she frowns and shakes her head while she sips her tea the way people sip tea when it’s way too hot, just for something to do.

“No,” she says. “I never wanted them. I’m not the mothering kind, too selfish. I would have been stuck at home playing the piano to nobody. That was never my intention. I always knew I would never have any.”

“What made you so sure? How old were you when you knew?”

“I didn’t want to turn into my mother – all that talent stifled. She was a miserable, bitter woman who spent her life in the reluctant service of others. She would have considered my having a family the utmost betrayal.”

“So because your mother was unhappy you decided being a mother wasn’t for you?”

“Precisely. Although imaginary children are no trouble at all.”

“Imaginary children?”

“Yes. In the fifties I invented a rather glamorous son called Orlando, who was a racing driver or a horse trainer or a stunt actor, depending on what party I was attending.”

“You told other people about him?”

“Of course! That’s why I invented him. He was irresistible. They couldn’t get enough of him. What else was I going to talk about at all those parties? The key of B flat? The dressing rooms and catering at Pinewood? Orlando livened things up a bit.”

My dad laughs his brilliant, all-consuming laugh, the one I can’t believe I’ve nearly forgotten. Saying something funny to my dad and hearing him laugh always made me feel proud and smart and warm inside.

“I can’t believe you,” he says, and he is still laughing, wiping his eyes. “You invented a child to have something to talk about at parties? Who was the father?”

“Oh, I wouldn’t talk about him,” Violet says with a smile. “I may have hinted that he was awfully famous. It raised the stakes you see, upped the scandal. Fatherless children were very big news in those days, not like now, where nobody raises an eyebrow.”

I did, I want to say. I raised an eyebrow when I became one.

My dad says, “Tell me about growing up in Tasmania” and Violet says, “I thought it was paradise, the sea and the mountains and the heat. I thought I must be one of the lucky ones, to be born there. And then I found out it didn’t belong to us, we stole it from its people. Can you imagine how that felt?”

My dad says, “Did you feel responsible?” and Violet says “Well, someone in my family had to.” And then she pauses and says, “I felt like a blood stain on a white sheet. I felt terribly conspicuous, terribly to blame.”

“How did you find out?” asks my dad, and she says, “I read it in a book. I was no more than eight or nine. I was sitting by myself on a cushion in the corner of Hobart Library. Very shiny floors in Hobart Library, very high ceilings.”

“What was the book called?”

“Do you know, I can’t remember? It was lying on the floor under a shelf and I felt sorry for it so I picked it up and started reading.”

“You felt sorry for the book?” My dad is smiling.

“I am a very emotional person,” Violet says, and she shifts a little in her seat, rustle rustle. “Think how I felt for the aboriginal people.”

Violet’s voice has only the slightest hint of an accent. She speaks a very proper English, quite blunt and sharp and clipped with only a shadow of down under. I am thinking about her voice, and my dad must be thinking about it at the same time because he says, “Is that why you have removed all trace of your homeland from your life, from your voice?”

“Oh, I became less angry the further away from the place I was,” she says. “And I mellowed with age. Now I’m proud to be a Tasmanian woman. I just wish I had a few more native warrior women for company. I mean, what did I do? Play the piano at the movies.”

“And your voice?” my dad says. “You sound utterly British.”

“I had to take speech lessons to get anywhere in my business. You poms all thought I was a sheep shearer,” and for that sentence she puts on her richest, overbaked Tasmanian drawl and they laugh briefly together, two different octaves on a grand.

He asks her when she left Tasmania and she says, “I was seventeen. That was a time to arrive in London, my goodness. I came to study at the Royal Academy. Coming here was like somebody turning the lights out. There was no heat, no glare from the sun, no colour. It was too strange, too depressing. I stood on Westminster Bridge and imagined the water in the Thames flowing all the way back to Australia, flowing all the way back home.”

“Were you homesick?”

“Yes, very. But I learned to live with that because I didn’t want to go back. I never have.”

“Do you regret that? Would you like to go there again?”

“Darling, the next place I’m going is in the ground.”

“Oh, Violet, you’ve got a while yet.”

“Not if I have a say in it.”

Me and my dad both look straight up at Violet when she says this, our heads snap up at exactly the same time. It’s not so much what she says, a simple, throwaway comment that could mean nothing. It’s the way she says it. The silence between them stretches out as I watch him watching her say that.

“What’s this interview for anyway, darling?” she asks, changing the subject, and my dad says it’s not for the book, it’s just a profile, maybe for a Sunday paper, nothing much but he likes to be thorough.

Violet says, “And there was I thinking you just wanted to spend time with me,” and they smile at each other in the quiet on the tape.

“Will you write my obituary? I’d like you to do it.”

“If I’m still around,” Dad says, and I think, You will be, give or take a year, and then you’ll fall in a big black hole. I’m wondering if her obituary might’ve been the last thing he did before he went, if he ever did it.

Then Violet coughs and shifts in her chair which creaks, and says, “And now I’m tired of listening to myself talk. It’s your turn. I will ask you five questions about your personal life, for my own profile. And keep the tape running because it’s only fair.”

Jenny Valentine - 4 Book Award-winning Collection

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