place when she saw me.
She said, “I went with my mum to the hospital this morning for another load of chemo and I’d rather not go back to school today. Let’s show Violet a good time, she’s been stuck doing nothing for ages.”
We got two tickets for the London Eye. It was like Violet was going to come striding out of her urn, she was so excited. We played this silly game where we had to spot all the sights in alphabetical order, A for the aquarium, B for Buckingham Palace or Big Ben, C for Canary Wharf, D for Dulwich and so on, (X and J are the hardest). After that we went on the wobbly bridge to the Tate. Violet was just crazy about the river so we went out on one of the balconies in the wind and watched the water go by, mud beige and fast and seething. I put Violet on the rail and put my arm round the urn so it didn’t fall, and I had my other arm round Martha’s waist and I whispered to her what must we look like, two kids on a day trip with somebody’s ashes, and she whispered back that we must look happy.
And I thought that in spite of everything, in spite of her mum being so sick and my dad being missing and a big let-down, and Violet being dead, we actually were.
I hadn’t told anyone about Violet’s tape, not even Martha. I didn’t know why at the time, I just didn’t want to. It was mine, I suppose. Mine and Dad’s and Violet’s, at least until I knew what was on there.
I took a long time getting myself ready before I listened to it. I pulled down the blinds in my room and made a cup of tea. I got a pen and paper. I put a chair and a table by the window, with the tape and the pen and paper and Dad’s little tape player all lined up. I searched the kitchen for new batteries. I made another cup of tea and a sandwich, and got an apple and some peanuts and a few other things just in case because I had no idea how long all this was going to take. I spent a while making a joint because I thought I might end up needing one. I kept thinking, “please don’t be taped over, please don’t be nothing.” I locked and unlocked the door and then I locked it again. I think I was putting things off because even though I was desperate to hear what the tape had to say, I was scared of it too. Kind of dreading it, if I’m honest.
I had to rewind it first and I pressed the wrong button and this voice was talking, mid sentence, and it was my dad’s. It made me feel sick and cold and anxious and I turned it straight off. I sat there staring at the machine for a while and then I dug out my headphones. The last thing my mum needed right now? The sound of my dad’s voice somewhere in the house.
Through the headphones I could hear them moving and breathing as well as talking. I heard birds outside the window where they were sitting, and cars. Someone was pouring tea, I heard the clink of a spoon against the inside of a cup.
I closed my eyes – and I’m sitting right there with them, like I’ve travelled in time.
All of us in one room, me and the missing and the dead.
It’s book-lined, this room we share, wooden floors thick with varnish like clear honey, windows (three) looking on to bright empty sky and the roll of the park. We sit in canvas chairs and my dad crosses his legs, right over left, and he frowns while he listens and smokes a lot of cigarettes and occasionally writes something down in a brown notebook. I’m thinking about that notebook blowing open and shut, swelling with the rain at the dump, thanks to Mum. Violet’s chair is opposite Dad’s, their knees centimetres apart and she’s leaning slightly forward in her seat, keeping watch on his attention.
She is the wrong age. I mean I am imagining her much younger than she would have been. I’m using the photos and the painting I’ve seen and doing my best, but I’m definitely way out; her voice is years older than the Violet I see. It cracks and wavers and fails in the middle of sentences. Her hands dart about as she talks, a ring on each finger throwing sparks, the nails short and shiny red. There is so much life in those hands I’ve got tears in my eyes just watching them.
Neither of them notices me, stoned and weeping and grinning like an idiot in the corner. They don’t look over at me once.
“Let’s start with your family,” Dad says. His voice turns my spine to water.
Violet sighs and says it like she’s said it all before. “I was an only child to older parents. They pushed me hard to make something of my life because they never had.”
“Was yours a happy childhood?”
“Oh, heavens no!” and she laughs, but you can tell she’s not finding it exactly funny. “I worked hard and I don’t remember much laughter. They kept me away from other children.”
“Why?”
“To avoid contamination, I imagine. They didn’t want me getting the scent of rebellion.”
“So you were a good girl, an obedient child?”
“What else could I be, darling? I didn’t know I had a choice, until later.”
Violet’s laugh is throaty and deep, like she’s smoked a few thousand cigarettes in her time. But she’s not smoking now, only my dad is; I can hear him exhale.
“And did you blame them?”
“For the strictness and isolation? For having my first real friend at the age of seventeen? Of course I did, at first. But now I understand they only did their best.”
“You really think that?”
“Yes, dear, I do. I’m sure I would have been far worse in their place.”
“And how hard was it, to forgive them?”
“What? It was easy! Children would much prefer to love their parents than hate them, after all.”
Dad says, “God, I do hope so,” and Violet arches her thin, pencilled brows at him. “Why do you say that Peter? Do you long to forgive or be forgiven?”
I watch my dad carefully for his answer and he says, “I’m a terrible father.” Just that.
I want to go over there and tell him I forgive him for the thing he hasn’t even done yet, but it’s not true and anyway I can’t move.
Dad asks what is it she now understands about her parents, what drove them to drive her? She stops to think, staring past my dad and into her past.
“I’ve thought about it many times. It was my mother, most of all. She was a teacher and life was too small for her, too tight all over. She dreamed of being a great actress and at school they’d told her she would never make it, being plain and flat-chested. And she’d believed them, they had crushed her. But she was good, I remember her being good. She lit up the Hobart Amateur Dramatic Society’s efforts, at any rate. I saw them all as a child, rehearsals included. In fact, I thought she was an actress until she followed me to school and started teaching. It was a dreadful disappointment for both of us.”
My dad doesn’t say anything. He looks at her and nods and waits so she carries on. “Father was a bank manager. He was rather formal with us. I’m not sure that he ever relaxed at home. But he loved discipline and routine so he enforced my mother’s strict regimes. He was, I suspect, a little terrified of his passionate, unfulfilled wife and his musical, solitary daughter.”
“You were musical as a child?”
“Oh yes, very,” she says. “I frightened the life out of mother at the theatre one day. I played a piece I’d heard only once, a minute before, in its entirety without a fault. She was checking the piano for a hidden mechanism when I did it again. I think it was a little Mozart minuet, nothing spectacular. I don’t remember it at all.”
“How old were you?”
“Three or four,” Violet says, and I can see the grin on my dad’s face in the silence.
“Three or four,” he says again.
“I