the house was packed out and people were practically queuing up to say how brilliant and amazing and fearless Wendy was. There was a slide show on the staircase wall, pictures of her when she was a child, at graduation, getting married, holding Martha as a baby, looking radiant, looking sick, laughing with all her own hair. People spent a lot of time looking at it, even when the pictures had gone round and they’d seen them more than once. I suppose it was because they still wanted to be around her and this was the closest they were going to get.
Martha didn’t like it in the house with everybody talking about Wendy and getting drunk, so we went for a walk, nowhere special. It was getting properly dark and the colour was leeching out of everything and the streetlights hadn’t come on yet to turn it all orange. There were people laughing in the street and pushing into pubs and running across roads. I kept thinking, Don’t they know her mum’s just died?
We ended up sitting on a wall outside a funeral parlour of all places. Martha was laughing and crying at the same time. She said she couldn’t imagine being with anyone else at a time like this.
“We’re family now, you and me, you know that,” she said, and I didn’t want to feel good about what she said because it was her mum’s funeral, but I did.
Martha cries a lot. She says I might as well get used to it because it’ll be mainly what she does for a while, even when she doesn’t really feel like doing it. She’s right. We both noticed that she cries the most when she’s happy, like when we’re together, just messing about, or when something makes her laugh out loud. Martha says it’s because the instant she realises she’s happy she feels guilty for forgetting to miss her mum.
I said just because she isn’t thinking about her mum doesn’t mean she isn’t missing her. It’s just another part of the brain doing the missing, that’s all.
Before the tape, everything connecting Violet and my dad had felt like guesswork. It seemed ridiculous that the two of them were linked at all really, apart from by their absence. And then suddenly, listening to them talk, it seemed to me that it was exactly that, their absence, that bound them together in a way I could never have imagined in a thousand years.
The thing I knew for sure was this.
Violet asked my dad to help her die.
And then what?
Did my dad say yes or no? Because if he said yes, it changes things.
Because if you agree to help someone die and disappear shortly after, there’s a good chance those two things are connected.
I’ve been trying to remember what my dad was like in the months before Violet died and he left us, when I was ten and strange (apparently) and probably not helping much with all my staring.
Was he thinking the whole time about helping an old lady die?
Or was he just dreaming up ways of escape?
I’ve thought about it a lot and I’m guessing things went something like this.
After Violet asked my dad to kill her, after the tape recorder got switched off, after she maybe repeated the question, my dad said NO.
He might have got up and paced the room a bit, but mostly he would have felt pretty calm in the knowledge that there was no way he was going to help her however much she begged him.
My dad didn’t do much for others, remember, and this was quite a lot to ask.
If you don’t remember birthdays and anniversaries, if you never take your kids to school or the zoo or the London Planetarium, if giving someone a lift to the station is a major inconvenience, then assisted suicide is way out of range.
It’s just one favour too far.
But what if Violet changed his mind?
It’s not impossible.
How would you go about something like that, convincing someone to kill you?
You’d have to be very persuasive.
Pestering and nagging and just going on about it would never have worked. My dad ignored such methods.
Appealing to his better nature would be hard, like finding a needle in a haystack. My dad was no Good Samaritan.
So how would Violet convince him?
Did she prove beyond a doubt that she had no good reason to go on living?
I mean why did she want to do it? She must have told him that.
Maybe she was suffering from something that was going to kill her anyway, like cancer or heart disease or Parkinson’s or boredom.
Maybe she’d had enough of living on her own, with her imaginary son and her records and her failing hands.
Maybe she promised him a hefty inheritance. This theory works because it funds his vanishing act and if he was really planning on going, a cash prize is the best carrot she could have offered.
Another thing I know.
Less than a year after they made that tape, Violet died. I’m not sure how – I’m hoping peacefully in her sleep. And my dad jumped ship pretty soon after.
That can’t be a coincidence, can it?
So maybe he did do it.
Perhaps it was my dad who helped Violet die.
And if he did do it, I’m wondering how.
You’d have to be pretty careful because clearly it can’t look like murder, and it can’t look like assisted suicide even, unless you live in Holland and maybe parts of Scandinavia.
It was probably an overdose, sleeping pills and booze or painkillers.
But then why would Violet need my dad when she could do that herself?
Probably she just wanted him to hold her hand while she went, or make sure she was properly dead before he called anyone so she didn’t get wrenched back from the tunnel with the light at the end.
I bet she was scared and she wanted somebody to talk to, or someone there just in case she changed her mind at the last minute. Because that would be pretty bad, if you changed your mind halfway through killing yourself and there was nothing you could do about it.
I don’t even want to think about that.
Maybe she took the pills and then he smothered her to speed things up a bit. Once you’ve gone through with it, the waiting must be pretty bad.
I’m dying to know if he actually did any killing.
But he probably said no and left her to it.
Somehow, in between looking after Martha, and keeping the whole Pete and Violet thing to myself, and trying to be nicer to Mum, I lost sight of Bob for a week or two.
I might have been avoiding him.
Because I knew I’d have to go and find out what he knew.
And say sorry for what happened.
It was obvious to me as soon as I saw him that Bob knew a lot. He couldn’t look at me. Plus he looked dreadful, like he hadn’t slept since I’d last seen him, which actually turned out to be true. He was all creased up and unsteady on his feet, scratching his arse in a pair of old pyjama bottoms, and I realised he’d been drinking.
Bob hadn’t had a drink in years. Not since his life fell apart and he glued it back together again.
It was a big deal for Bob, not