1 A dead old lady would never be judgemental or lecture me like every other female on the planet.
2 If I decided to find out about her she might turn out to be the coolest most talented bravest person I’d ever heard of, and I might sort of get to know her without the hassle of her actually existing.
3 I would get to rescue her and I never did that for anyone before, and it sort of makes you need them too in your own way.
4 A dead old lady would be easy to like because she couldn’t leave any more than she had already.
I do know, I am aware, that a boy my age should have thought more about bringing home a living girl than a dead old lady. And I did care about that other stuff, about girls and mates and sex and stuff, I’m not a total freak. It’s just that Violet was becoming my newest friend and she was working her way to the front of my brain all the time, like new friends do.
If you think about it, a person being dead isn’t any barrier to finding out what they are like. Half the people we learn about in school have been dead for ages. People write whole books about William Blake and Henry the Eighth and Marilyn Monroe, and they’ve never met them and they still sound like they know what they are talking about.
I met Violet after she died but it didn’t stop me getting to know her. And what I keep trying to prove is that I’m not as insane as I’m sounding.
Of all the places I would like to be when I’m dead, Apollo Cars is the last. I can’t decide what my first is yet, mainly because I’m too young to, but my top three all time places so far for being quiet and on my own (which sounds like a good description of being dead if you think about it) are as follows.
1. Primrose Hill – over the top and down again to the quiet side. It doesn’t have a great view like if you’re at the top, but it is peaceful and for some reason hardly anyone goes there, even on days when the park is mobbed. Also, it’s where my dad’s old friend Bob had a tree planted to celebrate when Jed was born.
2. St Pancras Church – I don’t like cemeteries in a Goth way (although I don’t mind anyone that does) because actually, apart from Violet, I’m not that comfortable with dead people. But I do like St Pancras. Mary Shelley who wrote Frankenstein used to be buried there, next to her mum who died giving birth to her, but then I think they got moved to St Albans, which is another thing you wouldn’t expect to do when you’re dead.
The church is on a gentle hill and you can’t see the dead from the road or the beauty of the place really, until you’re right inside it. There’s a tree there called the Hardy tree with loads of old gravestones (no bodies) sort of leaned up against it, all random. It’s called the Hardy tree after Thomas Hardy the famous writer who invented that place Wessex and made up sad stories about beautiful milkmaids and other pessimistic country people. He’s not buried there and he wasn’t even famous when he had anything to do with the Hardy tree. He was actually an engineer I think, and he was in charge of clearing the way for the railway line out to the midlands and he had to shrink the cemetery to make room and squish all the dead bodies into a smaller place. He might even have been the one who moved Mary Shelley and her mum. There must have been a bit of a mix up or something, because the headstones of some of the people that got moved just got left up against the tree.
I wonder how big the tree was then because its pretty old now, and then I wonder how big Jed’s tree on Primrose Hill will be in like two hundred years, and I wonder if anyone will find out about it and call it the Swain tree, because maybe Jed will be famous for something one day.
3. The City on a Sunday. Dad used to take me. There’s no one there. You can walk around and pretend you’re in one of those science fiction stories like The Day of the Triffids or 48 Hours Later. All the modern buildings reek of money and bad taste, and you can still feel the frantic stuff that goes on all week long, almost like the ghost of it is there on a Sunday, like the place is just exhausted with the pace of it all. And there are these really, really old bits too, all mixed in. You can be standing at some super modern glass box with your back to the oldest pub in London, and round the corner there’s a really narrow little lane called Wardrobe Street where they really did used to make wardrobes in about 17something, and it’s like time travel, street to street, and that’s a brilliant thing.
I didn’t know what Violet’s places might be, where she liked to spend her time, where she’d want to end up, and that’s a sad thing for nobody to know about a person. Before I die I’m going to leave strict instructions about where I want to spend the rest of time. I hope I won’t be so completely alone in the world that no one would remember to collect me after my funeral. It’s like those stories in the local paper about people who die and nobody notices for weeks and then they start smelling, and suddenly their neighbours remember they haven’t seen them for ages. And whenever I think about anyone living or dying all by themselves I end up thinking about my dad and wondering if he died alone, and if he thought about us when he died or if he is alive and ever thinks about us now.
I’ve only ever been to two funerals. The first one was my grandad’s – my mum’s dad – and I don’t remember it because I was about two, but Mum says I spent the whole time crawling around and barking like a dog.
The second one was this girl in my class called Angelique and she died when we were in year six. I think it was the Easter holidays, and she went somewhere like Spain with her mum and dad and died in the shower of carbon monoxide poisoning. They flew her home and the whole class went to her funeral. We all wanted to because she was really popular and a really nice person and everyone was gutted that she wasn’t ever coming back.
She was in a coffin made of bamboo or wicker or something, like a beautiful Angelique-shaped basket covered in pink blossom, and either side of her they had these silver buckets filled with sand and flowers. You got a candle when you came in and you lit it and put it in a bucket, so there were maybe a hundred candles surrounding her. The light was sort of eerie and full of life.
When the priest talked about commending Angelique to heaven, the flowers in some of the buckets all seemed to catch fire at the same time and you could hear this gasp go round the church like it was a sign or something, and nobody wanted to put the fires out. When Angelique’s dad went to pick up the coffin on the way out he leaned against it for support, like he was hugging her, and that really got to me.
After the funeral, back at Angelique’s house we had this kind of circle time thing where we all said something we liked about Angelique or told a funny story about her. They make you do circle time at school a lot when something bad happens, or sometimes just because they want to, and it can be OK and it can be pretty crap, depending, but that circle time at Angelique’s was just about the most sweet and touching thing ever. Everybody had something they really wanted to say, and Angelique’s mum and dad were crying and laughing at the same time, and you could see they were going to get by on those stories for years to come.
I doubt Violet’s funeral was much to write home about, seeing as she was the guest of honour and got left in a taxi. I doubt there was a circle time for her.
If we ever find my dad and he’s dead, I’m going to organise the biggest funeral you’ve ever seen and I’ll personally see to it that the flowers catch fire. We’ll play the best music, and everyone he ever knew and liked will be there and cry their eyes out and say really nice things about him. And afterwards, back at our house, we’ll have the best wake and nobody will want to leave. They’ll look after Mum and make sure she’s OK, and phone her every week, instead of being too embarrassed to say anything or ever call her up because there isn’t a body and they’re a bit busy with work and they were his friends really, not hers.
When Dad first went missing there was a big, big fuss. Not just Mum