Martha says she’d like a Viking burial. This means she wants to be wrapped up in an oil-soaked cloth and pushed out to sea in a long boat. Then she wants a flaming arrow fired at her corpse, which will burst into flames and burn to a cinder before being swallowed by the water.
I hope not to be there.
Martha’s dad is an anthropologist, which means he looks at how people behave in different groups and cultures, and he knows a lot about funerals and says they are different the world over. It seems there’s no end to the many ways you can say goodbye to someone.
In Bali (I think) the body hangs about above ground for a while, going off, and then it gets decked with flowers and torched. When the fire’s gone out the relatives have to scrabble for bones and throw them in the ocean. It’s very hands-on. And somewhere, maybe some part of China, long after the funeral, when everyone has stopped grieving and mourning, the dead person gets dug right back up again and you have a party with the bones to show you’re really OK and over it and everything. It’s a good job they don’t have lead-lined coffins there. Martha says that if you’re buried in a lead-lined coffin no air can get in and you can’t leak out so you turn to soup.
Martha’s mum wants to be scattered in some form or other in the river Ganges in India, but she’ll probably settle for the New Forest. She says, “Unlike us in the west who sweep death under the carpet, the Hindu people have a very healthy attitude to dying because they’ve done it before and they’ll do it again.” I suppose with reincarnation, dying is no big deal, as long as you’ve behaved yourself and you don’t come back as a blue tit or a dung beetle.
Martha’s mum and dad are called Wendy and Oliver. I met them when I went to their house for Sunday lunch. I was nervous to start with because I’ve never been to anyone’s house for Sunday lunch before. I probably talked too much and I can’t have been that interesting when I know so much less about everything than they do, but they were keen to like me. About halfway through pudding I realised I felt pretty much at home.
Martha was right about her mum. She made me laugh so much I nearly squirted beer through my nose. And I would never have known she was wearing a wig. Not in a million years.
I lugged my old tape recorder to Bob’s and we sat and listened to the Good Cop Bad Cop game. It made him laugh and he said Jed was very precocious and enjoying his role as the Oracle, whatever that means; something to do with channelling the words of the Gods, or in this case, Norman.
I could see he was trying to suss out how much I knew and how much to tell me. He was definitely on his guard and a bit cagey. I hadn’t expected Bob to be like that, so I started behaving like that too.
And there was one thing I knew for sure that Bob didn’t.
Violet was currently laid to rest in a plastic bag inside a rucksack three metres from where we were sitting.
For some reason that felt like four aces in a card game.
I asked Bob if he’d ever met Violet and how many times and what was she like.
He said that he and Dad had first met Violet together when they came to interview her for an article about music in film. It was pretty early on when they were starting out and took any work they could get, and Bob came with Dad to take the pictures.
He said they called Violet the Technicolor lady because she had hair the colour of fire and lipstick the colour of blood, and wore bright pinks and greens and purples. Bob said they were hung-over and they kept their shades on for as long as possible because she hurt their eyes.
He said Violet made them Brandy Alexanders at eleven in the morning and told them unrepeatable stories about the rich and famous.
They were too drunk to get much done on the article.
So they had to come back.
And the second time they were much more businesslike and only had two or three cocktails and wrote everything down and got out the camera. And then when they were at the front door, leaving, she looked at Dad – definitely at Dad according to Bob – and said, “Which one of you two gents would care to take me out to dinner this Friday?”
And Dad laughed and said, “Me.”
I asked Bob if he could dig out any photos he had from that job and he looked at me blankly and then mumbled something about not being sure he still had them, but he made a show of looking anyway. Then he started opening drawers and shuffling around in boxes while we were talking, which made it easier to ask questions because he wasn’t staring straight at me the whole time.
So I said, “Did dad actually go out with Violet, on a date, like boyfriend and girlfriend?” and Bob said, “It would have been nicer if he had.”
I said, “What does that mean?” and Bob told me that dad kept Violet on the brink of it for years, always giving her enough hope so she’d give him money or buy him a suit or take him out for dinner or something, never saying no and never delivering either.
Bob said, “Your dad could say ‘I love you’ to a woman without even blinking, whether he meant it or not. Mostly not. He said it was the way to get whatever you wanted out of chicks at no extra cost.”
And Bob said judging by Dad’s success rate with the opposite sex, his theory worked.
My dad the stud. I was kind of impressed and appalled all at once.
“Well how come he married Mum then,” I said, “if he had Violet to pay for stuff and all these girls on tap?”
“Your mum was a cut above,” Bob said. “She was beautiful and funny and bright and she had no interest whatsoever in your father.” And he threw me a photo of Mum then, taken maybe twenty years ago. It was funny seeing her like that, herself and not herself, the same person but not the one I knew. I had to admit she was a fox.
“She didn’t even like him,” I said.
“Not at first, but he worked hard on it. He loved your mum, you know.”
“Yeah? Right.”
Bob didn’t say anything to that.
I said, “So Dad married Mum and then he didn’t see Violet again and then he disappeared and she died and that’s it?”
Bob shook his head. He said, “They didn’t see each other for years and then Violet got back in touch, apparently, and asked your dad to help her write her life story.”
“Help her?” I said.
“Yep, it’s called ghost writing.”
“He took that a bit literally didn’t he?” I said, and we both forced a laugh.
“Well, he didn’t get very far with it before Violet died,” Bob said, and then he picked up this old contact sheet and stood staring at it.
I said had he found the photos, and he passed it to me; tiny black and white shots, twenty-four of them in three rows of eight. Tiny Violets and tiny Dads, posing and grinning and wearing shades. Dad was wearing a shirt that I still have in my cupboard at home. He had dark brown messy hair like I do. He looked young and happy. I was surprised how much he looked like me. And that’s when I realised.
Maybe Violet thought I was my dad.
Was that why I noticed her in the cab office, and why she was waving her dead arms at me to get my attention?
Did