I have no business knowing this much about my mother.
My mum’s got this thing about teeth. She’s really strict about it. We all have to clean our teeth all the time and floss twice a day. She goes crazy at Mercy about tobacco stains. Some nights when I come in really late, I turn the key in the lock when I’m shutting the door so it’s quiet, and tiptoe up the stairs all considerate, and go past her room with my shoes off, and she calls out, “Clean your teeth, Lucas!” It’s like she’s been waiting up all night just to say it, like she may not be able to control us any more, or even know where we are half the time, but she’s never going to give up on our teeth.
Our dentist backs on to Apollo Cars, above a dodgy minimarket that used to be a Citroën garage and smells very strongly of roast chicken. You ring on a bell, go up some stairs and you’re there.
There’s a painting in the surgery. I must have seen it loads of times before, twice a year for more than eight years to be exact. I’ve looked at it and half listened while the dentist chats about something weird, like the emotional properties of flowers or the similarities between a spider’s web and al-Qaeda.
But it was the last time, tipped back in the chair with my face stretched open and somebody’s surgical gloves in my mouth, that I finally really saw it.
It’s a portrait of Violet.
I think I nearly swallowed the dentist’s hand.
It spooked me, like Violet was stalking me or something. What was she doing there?
I was thinking, had this always been a picture of Violet or was she haunting a different painting just to get to me? When I left would she disappear and be replaced by an ocean view or a small child with a dog?
Because that’s what it felt like, not a painting at all, but the real Violet Park looking down on me from the wall.
We couldn’t take our eyes off each other.
She was in a wide wooden frame that made the painting look bigger than it was, more the size of a shoebox I suppose. I liked the painting, the way I could really see the creases in her blouse, each strand of her hair, stuff like that. Her hair was red. I didn’t get that from the black and white photo; it could be any colour in that. There was something timid about her – the angle of her head, the sideways glance – and something hard too, like you wouldn’t mess with her, flared nostrils like a horse’s, and a strong chin. The brush marks were thick in the background, like whoever painted it was in a bit of a rush when they got to that bit and sort of went blob blob blob.
But those eyes were incredible. Green and almost 3-D where the paint had been piled on and scraped about. Even though I knew it was only paint and that the flecks of white on the top of the other colours showed light but weren’t actual light themselves, the eyes were so real, so convincing and alive that I was sort of spellbound.
It was definitely Violet and she was definitely watching.
I said, once I’d got my mouth to myself, after rinsing and spitting, “Is that Violet Park?” and I hoped I sounded all casual to balance out the blushing and cold sweating I was doing.
The dentist said yes and where did I know Violet from? And I said, “from around,” which we both knew wasn’t that convincing considering she’s been dead for five years.
Then the dentist turned her back to me and wrote something in a notebook and said three things.
“Violet lived nearby, in the green house on Chalcott Crescent. It’s a self portrait and she left it to us in her will.”
Then she told me to address an envelope to myself at reception so they could send me a reminder in six months, she said I had great teeth and she ushered me out of the door.
I was sure now Violet was trying to talk to me.
I was dumbstruck that she left an actual will.
I had no idea she could paint so well.
I wondered if anyone from the dentist went to Violet’s funeral or if they had any idea she’d been stuck in that urn for so long right under their noses.
Violet’s house is greyish green with wide sash windows. It has a big old wisteria growing up it and iron steps that go down to the basement and a black metal mailbox. It sits on the flat of a crescent in Primrose Hill, right where another street hits it, so you can see it all the way down the road. And if you were standing inside it looking out of the windows, you’d be able to see clear to the park through the gap in the rooftops. It’s got to be one of the best houses around there, which is saying something, even though it’s a bit rundown and the paint’s peeling off all over the place and the pipes are a bit mossy.
I’d walked past that house at least a hundred times before I knew it was Violet’s.
It was so familiar I hardly noticed it, and then all of a sudden it was new and strange and I was dying to get inside. I stood in front of it, on my way back from the dentist. I stood exactly in the middle with my hands on the railings and felt myself being sucked in. I didn’t want to leave. I think I stared at every inch until it became as familiar and alive as someone’s face, paintwork the pale colour of a leaf’s back and shedding like skin, pipes and wires a network of veins, each window reflecting a different light, including me in the ground floor ones, looking in.
I’d been thinking about what Mum said in her diary, about me being a half-baked version of my dad. I’d been thinking about it even though I wasn’t supposed to have any idea what she thinks.
I sat in my room and asked myself the same question over and over.
Have I been remembering my dad correctly?
It’s probably no accident that I hardly ever asked Mum about him and always asked Pansy. Maybe Pansy saw him the way I wanted to, half blind, without the cruel light of actual knowledge. After all, how well do mothers know their sons? I was hanging with a dead lady, not sleeping much and helping myself to her innermost thoughts, and Mum didn’t have a clue about any of it. So it follows that Pansy’s grown-up boy who’s been missing for five years would be a near stranger to her.
And come to think of it, how well does anyone know their own mum and dad? I’m only just beginning to learn. You start off thinking they own the world, and everything is downhill from there. Parents do too many things to wake you up to the idea that they are less than perfect.
Speak like they think teenagers speak (always wrong, excruciatingly wrong).
Get drunk too quickly or too much.
Be rude to people they don’t know.
Flirt with your teacher and your friends.
Forget their age.
Use their age against you.
Get piercings.
Wear leather trousers (both sexes).
Drive badly (without admitting it).
Cook badly (ditto).
Go to seed.
Sing in the shower/car/public.
Don’t say sorry when they’re wrong.
Shout at you or each other.
Hit you or each other.