Читать книгу Jenny Valentine - 4 Book Award-winning Collection - Jenny Valentine - Страница 32

Somehow, in between looking after Martha, and keeping the whole Pete and Violet thing to myself, and trying to be nicer to Mum, I lost sight of Bob for a week or two.

I might have been avoiding him.

Because I knew I’d have to go and find out what he knew.

And say sorry for what happened.

It was obvious to me as soon as I saw him that Bob knew a lot. He couldn’t look at me. Plus he looked dreadful, like he hadn’t slept since I’d last seen him, which actually turned out to be true. He was all creased up and unsteady on his feet, scratching his arse in a pair of old pyjama bottoms, and I realised he’d been drinking.

Bob hadn’t had a drink in years. Not since his life fell apart and he glued it back together again.

It was a big deal for Bob, not drinking.

“What’s going on?” I said, and I was scared, like a little kid. Bob didn’t say a word. He just turned back into the house and left the front door open.

He veered to the left all the way down the corridor and kept knocking into the wall. I walked behind him thinking, Did I do this?

“’Snot your fault,” Bob breathed into my face at the door. He stank of drink.

“Isn’t it?” I said.

“No!” he grunted, and he sort of shouldered open the door at the same time. There was something in the way of it (coats, piles of coats and blankets on the floor) and we had to squeeze through because it would only open a little way.

The flat was trashed. It looked like Bob had emptied every cupboard and drawer and shelf on to the floor and made a pile of stuff and then rolled around in it.

“Bob, what have you done in here?” I said. “Christ!”

“I was looking for something,” he said with his eyes screwed shut, and then he shrugged his shoulders. “Can’t find it.”

“What were you looking for, somewhere to sit?” I asked, because that’s what I was doing.

“Oh, sit on the floor, sit where you are!” Bob waved his hands around, annoyed, so I did, shoeing aside a typewriter lid, a flyblown banana and some pants. But then I got up again because the floor was wet.

“Why’re you drinking Bob?” I said. “What’s happened in here?”

Then I stopped because I saw something familiar by the window – a box spewing out papers; a washing up liquid box that I’d seen Mum take out of her car and chuck on the dump. I looked around the room then, turning slowly, taking it all in. There were other things, other boxes, mostly unpacked, stacks of notebooks and magazines and stuff.

Dad’s things.

Not everything we dumped, not even close, but quite a lot of it.

Bob was searching my dad’s stuff for something.

“Bob, what the …?”

“I just couldn’t find it,” he said, and he was crying, shaking his head and crying, his face collapsing into his beard. “I made five trips to that godforsaken place, on foot, carrying the stuff back and forth and I couldn’t bloody find it.”

I asked him what it was he couldn’t find, but I couldn’t get any sense out of him. He was just sobbing and shaking his head, standing in the middle of his trashed flat, like things had gone way beyond what it was he could or couldn’t find.

Then Bob poured two massive glasses and thrust one at me.

“Keep drinking,” he said. “Keep drinking,” and I didn’t want to, but Bob drank his straight down and poured another.

Then he stared at me with his eyes all glazed over and he said, “You’re nothing like your dad,” and I asked him what he meant by that.

“Pete was my best friend and I loved him, but he was a bad man,” Bob said, and it just hung there between us, this “bad man” thing, and neither of us liked that he’d said it, even though we both had our reasons for thinking it was true.

“Will you tell me what you were looking for?” I said.

Bob said he didn’t want to tell me anything. He said, “I’ve hated knowing it all this time.”

“Do you know where he is?” I said. That would be my worst, if he’d known all along where my dad was and never told me.

“God no!” Bob said. “Do you think I could have kept that from you?”

“I don’t know, Bob,” I said, and I was starting to get angry. “What are you keeping from me?”

Bob looked through me for a minute. He drained his glass again and poured another. Then he said, “I know something about your dad. Something he did.”

“Something he did?” I said, like a brainless echo. I hate it when people do that.

“Yeah,” Bob said. “We had a fight about it.”

“What did he do?” I said.

“He said he didn’t do it but he lied,” Bob said.

“What was this thing he did?” I said.

“It was Violet.”

I thought I was going to throw up.

“Violet?”

Bob nodded. “Violet Park. The lady in the urn you stashed here without asking.”

I said I was sorry. Bob looked at me and said, “So was it really her in there?”

“Yes,” I said, and then I had to ask. “Was she dead or alive when you had this fight about her?”

“She’d been dead for three days,” Bob said. “Your dad found her.”

The hairs on my arms prickled. My stomach lifted and then dropped again. My dad found her. That kind of put him at the scene of the crime.

“Found her? How?”

Bob shrugged. “At home. Dead at home.”

“Jesus!” I said. “How did Violet die? Was it old age?”

Bob looked as if he was standing on the edge of a canyon about to jump in.

“Overdose,” he said, staring at the floor.

I’m not sure exactly what happens when you get a surge of adrenaline in your body. Your heart bangs inside you, I know that, and it feels like all the blood in your body drains away from other places like your brain and your eyes and your fingers.

“So she killed herself?” I said.

Bob shrugged. Then he shook his head. He wouldn’t look at me.

“The thing is,” he said, his voice thick with tears, “your dad lied to me.”

“Lied how?” I said. “What about?”

“He said he was home looking after you. You had chickenpox. But Nicky was raging because he hadn’t been back, she hadn’t seen him and …”

“I remember having chickenpox,” I said.

I remember Mum putting baking powder on them to stop the itching and I remember still having scabs when I found out I didn’t have a dad any more.

“How do you know?” I said. “How do you know Dad was there? How do you know he wasn’t looking after me?”

“Oh come on, Lucas,” Bob said, and I knew what he meant. My dad never spent more than five minutes watching over me when I was sick. Anyone who knew him would know it was a crap alibi.

There were several things I could have said. But I didn’t.

Bob said, “Violet Park changed her will and left your dad everything.”

“Did he know that?” I said. “Maybe he didn’t.”

“He knew it,” Bob said. “We talked about it. He told me.”

“And what did he say?” I asked.

“When the old girl goes I’ll be rich as sin,” Bob said, and stared at me hard.

I shut my eyes and tried to think.

“Did you accuse him of killing her?” I said, kind of amazed at Bob’s nerve.

“Lucas, I saw Violet the day she died and she was happy.”

“So?” I said. “Maybe she was happy because she’d decided to die that day.”

Bob stared at me. “That’s exactly what your dad said.”

I stared at the reflection of the room in the window. I traced the pattern of the carpet. I didn’t want to look at Bob at all. What if he hadn’t done that, if he’d kept his mouth shut? Would my dad still be here?

“I knew Violet,” he said. “She wouldn’t kill herself. She loved life.”

“I knew Dad,” I said back. “He wouldn’t run away. He loved us.”

Bob didn’t say anything to that.

And when I finally looked at him he was passed out, dead drunk.

I didn’t go anywhere while he was sleeping. I didn’t do much.

I sat in the filth and I thought about stuff.

Of course, I knew from the tape that Violet wanted to die. Bob was working on less than half the picture and I had to tell him. But I wondered at first whether to bother. I was so angry at him for being wrong, for maybe making Dad leave. Not telling him felt like a fitting punishment, but only for a minute.

I knew it wasn’t Bob’s fault really.

I knew my dad wasn’t a good man.

The idea had been hanging around me for a while but I’d been ignoring it.

And I felt evil for thinking it.

But really I had no choice.

It’s what you do when you grow up, apparently, face up to things you’d rather not and accept the fact that nobody is who you thought they were, maybe not even close.

My dad was definitely not who I’d been thinking he was all these years.

It wasn’t because of what Bob or Jed or Norman or Mum had said about him. It wasn’t even about Violet.

It was all coming from me, doubts and bad thoughts.

The voice in my head was my voice, so I couldn’t get away from it.

And the voice was saying I’d known it all along. It was telling me I had all the evidence I needed.

Maybe he killed Violet and maybe he didn’t. I didn’t know anything.

And that’s the point.

The proof I had was the exact same reason I couldn’t be certain of anything I said about him, the reason he escaped all the blame and all the judgement I put my mum through the last few years, the reason I had him up on some stage for the blessed and the untouchable.

He wasn’t here.

And while I hadn’t given up all hope that he was dead in a freak accident or kidnapped by aliens or mistakenly locked in a nuthouse or lying in hospital piecing together what remained of his memory, I was beginning to realise it was far more likely that my dad just ran off because he felt like it. Violet or no Violet, he couldn’t be arsed with us any more. He’d had enough. And he got away with it, too.

So yes, my dad was cool and clever and funny and handsome, and his taste was impeccable and he looks good in photos, but that doesn’t add up to anything.

And I was angry that it took me so long to notice. I thought about how hard it must have been for Mum and Bob to keep quiet while I turned him into a hero, how many times they must have banged their heads against a wall while I went around in his suits and listened to his music and painted him whiter than white.

I only did it because I loved him.

And I thought, Did Violet come back for this, to show me this?

Did she wait in purgatory to point out what my dad was really like?

And what does it say about my dad that his best friend thought him capable of murder?

Not much.

In the end I woke Bob up and started talking.

“I found Violet in a cab office. I didn’t know she had anything to do with Dad when I found her,” I said. “I just wanted to put her somewhere better. It wasn’t a good place for her to be. And then everyone seemed to know who she was – you did and Norman did and Jed did and the dentist did. And she kept popping up everywhere and it was like she was trying to get my attention, trying to tell me something and I didn’t know what it was. And then I found a tape with her name on it so I kept it. It didn’t make it as far as the dump.”

Bob looked up at me then.

“It’s got Violet and Dad on it, talking,” I said. “She asked him, Bob. At the end of the tape she says I am asking you to help me die.”

He put his face in his hands and wept when I said that.

But I didn’t know what to do with it at all.

I didn’t know what to think or how to feel. Was everything better or was everything worse?