Tell dirty jokes in front of your friends.
Give you grief in front of your friends.
Try to be your mate when it suits them.
Even with great parents, the list is endless. They can’t ever win.
I was eleven when Dad left.
And now it had occurred to me that instead of missing him and dreaming about him and seeing him in crowds and turning him into some kind of mythical über-dad, I might have been arguing with him, buying records with him, getting underage drunk with him, stealing from him, calling him a hypocrite, realising he had bad breath. Real things, mixed up things, not perfect scenes of craving that go on entirely in my head.
Dad didn’t have to go through all the stuff that Mum did with us. For instance, my hyper-critical phase, when every single thing mum did was so humiliating and even hearing her breathe or chew or open her mouth to speak put me in a bad mood.
My dad got away with that because I thought he was perfect and he wasn’t here.
And in the time he’s been gone I’ve learned stuff about my mum, layer by layer, bad and good. It makes sense that the way I see Dad would have changed in that time too.
So I started to believe that Mum was right about me and that we might need to talk about it. And I had no idea how to go about something like that.
It was about this point that Pansy fell off a ladder. Actually it might have been a chair, but whatever it was, she fell off it and cracked her head on the kitchen worktop on the way down. She woke up about twenty minutes later with a broken hip and concussion, and Norman curled up and crying in the corner because he thought she was dead and he’d forgotten the number for 999. She’d been trying to close a window.
At least she wasn’t going to have that problem in the London Free Hospital. That place is sealed like a fish tank and it stinks like one too. Pansy’s ward was on the eighth or ninth floor and it was full of old people pining for a smell of the outdoors. I went to visit her straight after school and I took Jed with me because Mum had rushed there in a hurry and there was no one to pick him up. We walked in through the sliding doors, under a blast of hot air, and the smell hit us, lino and cabbage and old lady perfume, and Jed said, “Is this a restaurant or a shop?” And I said, “Both, for sick people.”
Jed’s not good with lifts. He always stops like a rabbit in headlights when he’s supposed to get in one because he thinks the doors are going to close on him and, because he stops and takes that little bit longer to get in, they usually do.
We took the stairs.
Pansy was halfway down Edwin Sprockett ward, lying flat in bed wearing a violent peach bed jacket.The bed was all kind of padded around her legs and she looked like one of those dolls with big knitted skirts that people her age put over loo rolls. She didn’t have her teeth in and the bottom half of her face was all caved in. The teeth were in a cup on her bedside locker, all magnified through the plastic so they looked warped and massive, and Jed had his eye on them. There were a lot of teeth in a lot of beakers in that place.
Mum looked pleased to see us. She was having trouble communicating with Pansy, you could tell. I said if she wanted go home and get Jed his tea I didn’t mind staying on for a bit longer. Mum winked at me and gave Pansy this quick angry kiss on the cheek and left with Jed. She couldn’t wait to get out of there, it was obvious.
I suppose relations can be a bit strained when you’ve both been abandoned by the same man. Mum and Pansy remind each other of what they’ve lost just by being in the same room. But it occurred to me then, sitting with Pansy and watching her watch Mum go, that it wasn’t Pansy’s idea they weren’t friends any more – it was Mum’s. Pansy didn’t mind the being reminded, not at all; it was pretty much what she was after. But Mum couldn’t handle it. Mum wanted to forget.
And I thought about who Dad was to each of them. Pansy’s perfect, clever, handsome son and Mum’s difficult, arrogant, absent husband. They might have been grieving for two different men.
How many versions of Dad are we all missing, me and Mercy and Bob and Norman and Mum and Pansy? A different one for each of us and not one of them is real.
Except maybe Jed, and that’s because to him Dad equals one blank space.
Pansy hated it at the hospital. She said an airless room full of ill people was like dying in Tupperware. She said it was impossible to get any personal privacy and nobody wanted to be old and in their nightie in a goldfish bowl. She said she never thought it would be possible to miss sheltered housing, but you live and learn.
She told me that after the fall she’d floated up away from her body and seen herself from above, all sprawled out on the kitchen floor. But her near-death experience didn’t impress her much. She said, “When I turned round to find that tunnel to the afterlife I read about in Readers Digest, there was bugger all there.”
Mainly Pansy was worried about Norman and how he was coping without her. I said him and Jack were most probably scoffing sweets and swapping war stories right at that moment, but it didn’t come out as funny as I’d hoped. She said I should take Violet’s ashes home with me while Norman was on his own because he’d only keep seeing them and thinking someone had died and getting upset. I tried to cheer her up by telling her about Violet’s website and her portrait, and how I found out at the dentist that she’d been practically living round the corner and everything. But Pansy wasn’t really listening, and then the nurse showed up and said it was time for Pansy’s bed bath and that was my cue to leave.
Because Pansy had asked me to, I went straight round to see Norman and he opened the door looking baffled and a bit tearful. The home help was over, all cheerful banter and loud whistling, and I think Norman thought he might be married to her. He was struggling to hide his disappointment. When he followed me into the front room and saw the urn he started weeping all over again, but I couldn’t get it out of him who he thought had died.
“It’s Violet, Granddad,” I said over the noise of the hoover.
Norman looked horrified and said “Violet? When did she die?” but I didn’t have time to explain.
I let Violet have one last look around then I checked her lid was on tight and shoved her in my rucksack. And because I couldn’t deal with taking her home and explaining to anyone why I had what I had in my bag, I went to Bob’s.
Question: how do you show up at someone’s house with a dead lady in your bag?
Answer: you don’t tell them.
While Bob was in the kitchen I shoved my bag in the bottom of his wardrobe. Violet was hating me right now for bringing her here. I could feel it seeping through the fabric of my rucksack. This place was like the opposite of Pansy and Norm’s. There were no brass ornaments, no royal wedding plates on the wall and no doilies on the furniture. Bob doesn’t go in much for decorating, or cleaning even. There was a communal hallway that smelt of cabbage soup. There was a bare light bulb in the bathroom, candles and joss sticks, and no TV.
Violet was most definitely unimpressed.
Bob made some green tea which he told me the Zen Buddhists drink to focus their minds before meditating. I knocked it back because I thought a clear head could only help at this point. It tasted like grass. He asked me how things were at home and I grunted a bit and Bob said, “Your mum is worried about you” and I said, “Yeah, she thinks I’m turning into Dad” and he said, “Are you?” and I said, “How do I know?” which he agreed was a fair point.
Then I said something about Mum having more than enough problems of her own without inventing stuff about me, and Bob called my bluff in a way because he said, “Oh, so you’re an expert on your mother’s state of mind, are you?” and I told him that I was