Still, if my dad can disappear and then show up once, he can do it again.
Agatha Christie went missing for a while when she was pretty famous and then she came back, but nobody knows where she went. Except my friend Ed, the one whose house I was at the night I met Violet, who reckons he knows exactly. Ed says that his great grandfather on his mother’s side was having a secret affair with Agatha Christie in Jamaica or Antigua or somewhere, but it didn’t work out so he went back to his wife in Swindon. He kept this shawl Agatha Christie had given him in his sock drawer and stroked it lovingly every now and then when his wife wasn’t looking. But of course she knew because wives in those days put their husbands’ clean socks away and didn’t say anything about affairs or lovers’ trinkets to avoid the shame.
If my dad was holed up with a thriller writer in the West Indies (or a nurse in Brazil) my mum would kick up a stink. She is way beyond worrying about what the neighbours might say.
I thought it would be simple once we’d got Violet out of the cab office. Sitting with her in Pansy and Norman’s front room, I couldn’t see any other obstacles to getting her sprinkled and leaving her to get on with being dead in a much better place and me to go back to normal. But I kept putting it off, and it was more than six weeks before I realised she wasn’t ready to go yet.
Mercy read a story once about dead people who got to enjoy a very pleasant afterlife for as long as they were remembered on earth, but as soon as they were forgotten even for an instant they disappeared into nothing. She banged on about it and what a fantastic concept it was until I never wanted to hear about it again, but the story came back to me and I thought it was obvious really, that if Violet had clung on for dear life (so to speak) when everyone had forgotten her so completely, she must have clung on for a reason. She seemed so alive to me in that little pot, there must be something she needed doing before she was prepared to become nothing somewhere forever. I just didn’t know what the thing that needed doing was.
I didn’t know a thing about her yet, apart from she was dead.
And then I took Jed to the cinema.
Watching films is very high up on our top ten list of things we best like doing. I could watch films my whole life long, back to back, and never feel like I’d wasted a second.
Jed likes old stuff he’s seen with Norman, like Charlie Chaplin or the Marx Brothers, as well as anything Pixar and most cartoons. I signed him up at this Cinema Club for kids. It was there that we saw Binky’s Magic Piano, which was this pretty old, pretty lame half-cartoon half-live-action thing about a boy genius who could play anything on the piano and did concerts all over the world, except he wasn’t a genius because it was his piano that did all the work. Then one day the piano decided it had had enough and Binky was doing an encore at Carnegie Hall and he couldn’t play anything right, not even Chopsticks, and he had to come clean, and then he woke up and it was all a dream. The End.
Jed really liked it and we were just about to leave the cinema when I happened to look up at the credits rolling old-fashionedly along and it said All pieces performed on the piano by Violet Park with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra at Pinewood studios, England. I sat back down in my seat and my mouth went all dry, and I gawped at the screen because I knew it was her, just like when I knew she wanted my help and I knew her name and I knew she was loving it at Pansy’s.
All the way home I was holding Jed’s hand across roads and listening to what he said about Binky and how he wanted a magic guitar and could we have eggs on toast with beans when we got in, and in my head I was saying, “I’ve found her, I’ve found her, I’ve found her,” and knowing that Violet was going to be dead pleased.
We got in and I handed Jed to Mum like a parcel, which probably annoyed them both, and I went straight to the library to book a computer and look for Violet Park the pianist. I’d tried it with my dad loads of times, but it always turned up his old articles or stuff from when he went missing, never anything about him exactly, so I wasn’t doing it so often these days.
The library on Queens Crescent is an OK place. It’s in a boxy building with flats and a weird cooling tower on top made of yellow bricks. It’s pretty loud in there, considering the rules, and the toys and the books and the furniture all get broken and nicked. Mostly it’s full of people who don’t have anywhere better to go, so nobody who works there gives anyone too hard a time. They speak to you like you’re as good as the next person, whoever you are. If you think about it, having nowhere good to go is just about the crappest feeling there is. I’m lucky because I’ve got my own room and really only one person yells at me at a time. But if I went home and everybody yelled at me and wanted me to be somewhere else, the last thing I would want was strangers in the library yelling at me for being there as well.
Ed’s glamorous mum calls the kids on the crescent “thugs” and she pounds the word against her tongue so it sounds really ugly, THUG, like she wants it to. Anyone under twenty or a bit skint or preferably male (but things are changing) who stays out after dark is a thug to Ed’s mother. I said he should tell her that we learned about thugs in history and they were actually this pretty amazing caste of assassins in India a hundred or so years ago. They strangled people with a long scarf with a rupee sewn into each end. It was their destiny to be thugs and they had no choice and they accepted it as their role in the order of things. They had initiation rites and codes of honour and everything, they didn’t just hang around on street corners wearing crap tracksuits and smoking dope.
I put VIOLET PARK in the search field and got 71,600 items.
And she was there, my Violet, about halfway down page 1 of 832 which went something like this.
A book called Violet Fire by Somebody Park that seemed to be about the colour of a girl’s eyes.
The Violet Voice and a load of other stuff from the African Violet Society, headed up by a lady called Mrs Park.
A site called FLOWERS ARE FOREVER about two little girls in America called Janice and Violet who died in a fire, and a girl in tenth grade called Parker who wrote a poem for them.
Violet Park Sneddon from Manchester who died the year before last on September 8th aged 73.
Fat Girls and Plump Humpers starring Jenny Park, Violet and Tia Lorene, which I would have had a look at if I wasn’t in the library where they have a block on that sort of thing.
Violet Mary Park from Maidstone, April 19th, age 57 (not dead).
Violet Park, Indiana, a garden centre from the company that also owns Consider the Lilies in Wellfleet, Massachusetts.
Violet Park Barker from Blair Gowrie in Scotland (1913-1978).
Violet’s Rubber Stamp Inn at Ventura, California – accessories and lectures.
Orlando Park, a writer, stunt actor and horse trainer based at Violet Farm in New Zealand.
Three Dimensional Dementia, which was about time travel or memory or something. I didn’t get it.
Violet Park, 1927-2002, a pianist on the Tasmanian Significant Women website.
Bingo.
The Tasmanian Significant Women website is proud of Violet Park in a big way.
My mum’s friend Belinda lived in Tasmania when she was a little kid and she says one of the few things she can remember is that her horse-riding teacher had a black moustache and orange lipstick and was a woman. There are no hairy ladies on the website, but there is a black and white picture of Violet, aged 26, like a movie studio shot.
Violet when she was young and alive.
She’s looking down and slightly to the side like