Copyright

Harper Collins Children’s Books is a division of HarperCollins Publishers Ltd 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

Copyright © Jenny Valentine 2007

First published in hardback in Great Britain by Harper Collins Children’s Books 2007

Jenny Valentine asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of the work.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

Source ISBN: 9780007291243

Ebook Edition © JUNE 2012 ISBN: 9780007394043

Version: 2015-04-01

HarperCollinsPublishers has made every reasonable effort to ensure that any picture content and written content in this ebook has been included or removed in accordance with the contractual and technological constraints in operation at the time of publication.

For Alex and his Tardis Heart

Contents

Cover Page

Title Page

Copyright

ONE

TWO

THREE

FOUR

FIVE

SIX

SEVEN

EIGHT

NINE

TEN

ELEVEN

TWELVE

THIRTEEN

FOURTEEN

FIFTEEN

SIXTEEN

SEVENTEEN

EIGHTEEN

NINETEEN

TWENTY

TWENTY-ONE

TWENTY-TWO

TWENTY-THREE

TWENTY-FOUR

TWENTY-FIVE

TWENTY-SIX

TWENTY-SEVEN

TWENTY-EIGHT

TWENTY-NINE

Keep Reading

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Books by Jenny Valentine

About the Publisher

ONE

The mini cab office was up a cobbled mews with little flat houses either side. That’s where I first met Violet Park, what was left of her. There was a healing centre next door – a pretty smart name for a place with a battered brown door and no proper door handle and stuck on wooden numbers in the shape of clowns. The 3 of number 13 was a w stuck on sideways and I thought it was kind of sad and I liked it at the same time.

I never normally take cabs but it was five o’clock in the morning and I was too tired to walk anywhere and I’d just found a tenner in my coat pocket. I went in for a lift home and strolled right into the weirdest encounter of my life.

It turns out the ten pounds wasn’t mine at all. My sister Mercy had borrowed my coat the night before – without asking – even though boys’ clothes don’t suit her and it was at least two sizes too big. She was livid with me about the money. I said maybe she should consider it rent and wouldn’t the world be a better place if people stopped taking things that didn’t belong to them?

It’s funny when you start thinking about pivotal moments like this in your life, chance happenings that end up meaning everything. Sometimes, when I’m deciding which route to take to, say, the cinema in Camden, I get this feeling like maybe if I choose the wrong route, bad stuff will happen to me in a place I never had to go if only I’d chosen wisely. This sort of thinking can make decisions really really difficult because I’m always wondering what happens to all the choices we decide not to make. Like Mum says, as soon as she married Dad she realised she’d done the wrong thing and as she was walking back down the aisle, she could practically see her single self through the arch of the church door, out in the sunlight, dancing around without a care in the world, and she could have spat. I like to picture Mum, dressed like a meringue with big sticky hair, hanging on to Dad’s arm and thinking about gobbing on the church carpet. It always makes me smile.

Whatever, Mercy decided to borrow my coat and she forgot to decide to remove the money and I decided to spend the whole night with my friend Ed in his posh Mum’s house (Miss Denmark 1979 with elocution lessons) and then I made the choice to take a cab.

It was dark in the Mews, blue-black with a sheen of orange from the street lamps on the high street, almost dawn and sort of timeless. My shoes made such a ringing noise on the cobbles I started to imagine I was back in time, in some Victorian red light district. When I stepped into the minicab office it was modern and pretty ugly. One of the three strip lights on the ceiling was blinking on and off, but the other two were working perfectly and their over-brightness hurt my eyes and made everyone look sort of grey and pouchy and ill. There were no other punters, just bored sleepy drivers, waiting for the next fare, chain smoking or reading three-day-old papers. There was a framed map of Cyprus on one wall and one of those gas fires that they reckon are portable with a great big bottle you have to fit in the back. We had one like that in the hostel when we went on a school journey to the Brecon Beacons last year. Those things are not portable.

The controller was in this little booth up a few stairs with a window looking down on the rest of them and you could tell he was the boss of the place as well. He had a cigar in his mouth and he was talking and the smoke was going in his eyes so he had to squint, and the cigar was bouncing up and down as he talked and you could see he thought he was Tony Soprano or someone.

Everybody looked straight at me when I walked in because I was the something happening in their boring night shift and suddenly I felt very light headed and my insides were going hot and cold, hot and cold. I’m pretty tall for my age but them all staring up at me from their chairs made me feel like some kind of weird giant. The only person not staring at me was Tony Soprano so I kind of focused on him and I smiled so they’d all see I was friendly and hadn’t come in for trouble. He was chomping on that cigar, working it around with his teeth and puffing away on it so hard his little booth was filling up with cigar smoke. I thought that if I stood there long enough he might disappear from view like an accidental magic trick. The smoke forced its way through the cracks and joins of his mezzanine control tower and it was making me queasy so I searched around, still smiling, for something else to look at.

That’s when I first saw Violet. I say “Violet” but that’s stretching it because I didn’t even know her name then and what I actually saw was an urn with her inside it.

The urn was the only thing in that place worth looking at. Maybe it was because I’d been up all night, maybe I needed to latch on to something in there to stop myself from passing out, I don’t know, I found an urn. Halfway up a wood panelled wall, log cabin style, there was a shelf with some magazines on and a cup and saucer, the sort you find in church halls and hospitals. Next to them was this urn that at the time I didn’t realise was an urn, just some kind of trophy or full of biscuits or something. It was wooden, grainy and with a rich gloss that caught the light and threw it back at me. I was staring at it, trying to figure out what it was exactly. I didn’t notice that anyone was talking to me until I got the smell of cigar really strongly and realised that the fat controller had opened his door because banging on his window hadn’t got my attention.

“You haven’t come for her have you?” he asked and I didn’t get it but everyone else did because they all started laughing at once.

Then I laughed too because them all laughing was funny and I said “Who?”

The cigar bobbed down towards his chin with each syllable and he nodded towards the shelf. “The old lady in the box.”

I didn’t stop laughing, but really I can’t remember if I thought it was funny or not. I shook my head and because I didn’t know what else to say I said, “No, I need a cab to Queens Crescent please,” and a driver called Ali got up and I followed him out to his car. I walked behind him down the mews and out into the wider space of the high street.

I asked Ali what he knew about the dead woman on the shelf. He said she’d been around since before he started working there, which was eighteen months ago. Somebody had left her in a cab and never collected her and if I wanted to know the whole story I should speak to the boss whose name I instantly forgot because he was always Tony Soprano to me.

The sun was coming up and the buildings with the light behind them looked like their own shadows, and I thought, how could anyone end up on a shelf in a cab office for all eternity? I’d heard of Purgatory, the place you get to wait in when Heaven and Hell aren’t that sure they want you, but I’d never thought it meant being stuck in a box in Apollo Cars forever. I couldn’t get the question out of my head, felt it burrowing down to some dark place in my skull, waiting for later.

Thinking about it now, it’s all down to decision making again, you see. My better self didn’t get in the cab straight away that morning. My better self strode right back in and rescued Violet from the cigar smoke and the two-way radio and the instant coffee and the conversation of men who should have known better than to talk like that in front of an old lady. And after liberating her from the confines of the cab office, my better self released her from her wooden pot and sprinkled her liberally over the crest and all the four corners of Primrose Hill while the sun came up.

But my real self, the disappointing one, he got in the car with Ali and gave him directions to my house and left her there alone.

My name is Lucas Swain and I was almost sixteen when this began, the night I stayed too late at Ed’s house and met Violet in her urn. Some things about me in case you’re interested. I have a mum called Nick and a dad called Pete (somewhere) and a big sister called Mercy, the clothes borrower, who I’ve mentioned. She’s about at the peak of a sarcastic phase that’s lasted maybe six years already. I also have a little brother called Jed.

Here’s something about Jed. On the days I take him to school he always thinks up a funny thing to tell me. We are always at the same place when he tells me this funny thing, the last stretch once we’ve turned the corner into Princess Road. You can tell when Jed’s thought of something early because he can’t wait to get there, and on the days he’s struggling to come up with it he drags his feet and we end up being late, which neither of us minds. The punch line is my brother’s way of saying goodbye.

The other cool thing about Jed is that he’s never met our dad and he’s not bothered. Dad went missing just before Jed was born so they’ve never set eyes on each other. Jed doesn’t know him at all.

There’s a lot of that with Dad, the not knowing. Mum slags him off for abandoning us, and I half listen and nod because it makes her feel better. But I worry that she’s not being fair because if he got hit by a bus or trapped in a burning building or dropped out of a plane, how was he supposed to let us know?

I saw a film once about an alien who landed on earth in a human body in a mental hospital. He had all this amazing stuff to teach everyone and he kept telling the doctors who he was and where he was from and what he had to offer in the way of secrets of the universe and stuff, but they just thought he was mad and pumped him full of drugs and he stayed there until he died. Maybe something like that happened to my dad. He wants more than anything to call us and it’s been five years, and wherever he’s locked up he’s not allowed to phone and he’s just waiting for us to find him. This sort of thought, and other variations, occur to me at least once every day.

Like I said, it’s the not knowing that’s hard.

TWO

Ali dropped me off in his cab and even though everyone was about to get up at home I went straight to bed. Mum walked past my room a couple of times in her pyjamas, giving me her special “You stayed out too late” look, but I pretended not to notice.

I lay there for ages but I couldn’t sleep. Jed had Saturday morning telly on too loud. Mum was joining in with something really lame on the radio. Mercy had found my coat on the stairs and was slamming doors and ranting about the money I spent getting home, but it wasn’t them keeping me awake. All that’s quite normal for a Saturday and I usually sleep right through. Every time I closed my eyes, the urn was there on its crappy shelf, glaring at me, which was unsettling and made me open my eyes again. It was the strangest feeling, being reproached by an urn.

I got out of bed and put my clothes back on and went for a walk on the heath. It was a beautiful day, all vast blue sky and autumn colours and a clean breeze that made me forget I’d had no sleep, but I couldn’t relax into it. That part of the heath is covered with enormous crows. They’ve got massive feet and they walk around staring at their massive feet like they can’t believe how big they are. They all look like actors with their hands behind their backs, rehearsing the bit in that play when the king says “Now is the winter of our discontent …”

I watched them for a while and then I walked up to the top of kite hill and ate an apple. You can see the whole of London from up there pretty much: St Paul’s, the Telecom tower, the buildings at Canary Wharf and the docks. There were a few runners on the athletics track just below me and plenty of dog walkers and little kids, but not many old ladies and that set me wondering what all the old people who live in London got up to with their time.

What did the old lady in the cab office do before she did nothing all day in that urn?

Did she get up really, really early in the morning like most old people? Mum says that’s their work ethic, the same reason old men wear suits and ties instead of tracksuit bottoms, and old ladies queue up outside the post office half an hour before it even opens and have really clean curtains and stuff. But doesn’t getting up that early just mean there are more hours to fill with being old?

Before then I’d never thought what it was actually like to be a pensioner. I’d just weaved in and out of them on the pavement, and smirked with my friends at their funny hair and high-waisted trousers, and the way they make paying for something at a checkout last for ages just to have someone to talk to. One minute the thought never crossed my mind, the next I was really and truly concerned about what it was like to be old and stuck in London, where everyone moved faster than you and even the simplest thing could end up taking all day.

It was her. I know it was. It was my old lady, the dead one in the urn.

I remember sitting there on the hill with kites whipping through the air behind me and the thought occurring to me that she and I might actually be having some kind of conversation. A dead old lady was trying to educate me about the over-sixties from her place on the shelf. It was a good feeling, a hairs-on-the-back-of-your-neck feeling, like when you hear a wicked bit of music, or when you’re high and someone you’re really into is sitting next to you. I suspected I was making it up but that hardly mattered. I make a lot of things up that are important to me, like being irresistible to girls, or being moody and mysterious like my dad, or what my dad might be up to at any moment, even this one.

THREE

I walked home the long way so I could watch what was going on. The street we live on is a good place, I think. It’s a market street, fruit and veg every day, and then other things on Thursdays and Saturdays, like fresh fish and feather dusters and crap clothes and other stuff Mercy reckons is all nicked. One time, one of the blokes from the market fell in the road and nearly got hit by his own van, and Mercy went, “Oh look, he’s fallen off the back of a lorry,” and I laughed so hard.

The market end of the street is what my mum and her friends call the “dodgy” end. I don’t know when my mum became such a snob about the dodgy and not dodgy ends of life. We’re only here because Dad’s mum and dad took pity on us when he disappeared and let us move in, and then they went into sheltered housing round the corner. Before that we lived in a dump and she wasn’t snobby about stuff then.

The other interesting thing about our street is that it’s called a crescent, but as far as I can make out it’s actually dead straight.

We live in a whole house, which is rare nowadays in this part of London. More and more people are fitting into smaller and smaller spaces, like in New York. Mum talks a lot about selling up and moving out of London where she could get loads more for her money. Grown-ups spend a lot of time talking about the price of houses and how much they could add to the price of a house if they painted the kitchen terracotta and fitted a power shower. It’s like they’re never happy with the way things are and they think they’ll be happier if the bathroom looks different. I don’t know why Mum bothers with all that when she’s not going anywhere.

Here’s how I know.

For a start, Mum would go mad in the country in about five minutes. Even when we went to Bath for the day to see all the Roman stuff, she kept commenting on how small minded and provincial people were and how nobody in the countryside has any “spatial awareness”.

Also Jed would miss his friends, and Mercy would throw a total tantrum and leave home to live in sin in a damp bedsit with her boyfriend, and I wouldn’t go either without a fight.

You probably can’t even get that much more for your money elsewhere; that’s just something estate agents tell you because they want to get their hands on the family home.

Plus when Dad comes back we have to be here or he’ll never find us.

That’s what happens when someone disappears. They trap you in time. You can’t change anything, not drastically, because it’s the same as giving up hope. I’ve changed loads since he left, I’ve grown maybe about a metre and I shave almost every two days, and my hair is way longer too. He might not even recognise me if he did knock on the door and I answered it, but I can’t help that and I’m definitely against changing anything else just in case.

My dad was a pretty cool guy. In all the photos I’ve seen of him he looked good. There’s no evidence of him wearing high-heeled shoes or jackets that were two sizes too small or ridiculous sideburns, like other people’s dads. He seemed to stand alone for effortless cool in a room full of serious fashion errors.

Now I wear my dad’s suits and shirts and stuff because they just about fit me. I wouldn’t let Mum throw them out because I was expecting him back any time. And I suppose it makes me quite proud that I’m big enough now, almost as tall as dad was when he went, with exactly the same size feet (nine and a half), but it guts me too because in all the time that it’s taken me to grow up he hasn’t come back.

Mum hates me wearing Dad’s stuff. The first time I did it she burst into tears. She says I am already enough like he was when she first met him, and she feels sorry for the girl that’s going to fall in love with me because it hasn’t exactly been a picnic from her point of view.

The thing about my dad though, he didn’t just look cool, he actually was, and no amount of wearing his clothes is going to make me him, or even nearly him, ever. My dad was a journalist. I remember him as the man in the room that people wanted to be next to, the one they were interested in. I’m more like the one in the room that people forget is there.

Mum and Dad might even have been in love before they got married. I think they were having the time of their lives until Mum got pregnant with Mercy. Everyone was really down on them for doing it without rings on their fingers, so they did the right thing in a church before the bump that became Mercy was big enough to show. Mum says it wasn’t Mercy that screwed things up, because Dad loved being a dad. It was the getting married that really hacked him off because he hated doing what he was told.

What is it about people that makes them want to get married anyway? I don’t know how anyone could ever be sure enough of something like that. I can’t decide how to get to school. I can’t order food in a caff without spending the rest of the meal worrying I’ve made the wrong choice. I don’t reckon I’ll ever be able to do it. And on the evidence I’ve got, meaning my family (exhibit A: big empty space where a husband and dad used to be) I’m not sure it’s even worth the bother.

And how come if Mum knew it was a bad idea the moment she’d done it, she didn’t have the sense to know it a week or a day or even ten minutes earlier? I just don’t get it. And when I see what Mum’s left with after so many years, and hear her complaining that she can’t even remember loving Dad or wanting kids or whatever, it makes no sense to me at all.

It makes me determined to do life with my eyes open, even if it means making no decisions at all.

FOUR

On Monday, instead of double geography and French, I went back to the mini cab office for another look at the urn. There were more people around, the shops were open on the high street and there were some last ditch battles for parking. Basically, a much less attractive place when awake, but the mews itself was pretty quiet. There was a lady walking up and down and the way she was walking had this strange rhythm, like four steps forward – stop – up on tiptoes – stop – three steps forward – stop, and when she got to the top of the mews she turned round and started again.

When I passed her she said, “Sorry to ask, but can you spare a cigarette?” and she made me jump and I said “No” and took my hands out of my pockets to show her I wasn’t hiding any. And I wasn’t, because I might smoke weed now and again, but I would never smoke tobacco for these reasons, among others.

1 It doesn’t get you high. What’s the point of being addicted to something that will kill you and doesn’t even make you laugh or feel good or anything?

2 It kills you.

3 It smells bad.

4 Cigarettes cost very little to make but there’s a load of tax on them that goes straight to the government, making them rich. That means the people who are supposed to take care of our health and welfare and help keep the fabric of society together are making a profit out of something really addictive that doesn’t get you high and will kill you. Also I’m not old enough to vote so I’m avoiding tax generally, where I can help it.

5 Mercy told me something about the tobacco giants ripping off their farmers and paying them next to nothing. Mercy’s boyfriend smokes American Spirit, which are fair trade and organic, apparently, if you can get your head round the idea of an organic cigarette.

6 Not-organic cigarettes contain about 250 poisonous toxins which will also kill you.

I stood outside Apollo Cars for a while, with the lady pacing behind me, and I tried to think about what I might say when I went in. There were those vertical Venetian blinds in the window, like you see in dentists and too-trendy apartments, the kind that are made out of plasticky cardboard pieces held together with cheap chains made of tiny ball bearings. The blinds were really dirty, but I liked the way they cut up the view inside, as if somebody got a photo of a minicab office out of a magazine and cut it into strips. If I took a step to the right I could see the urn on its shelf, and if I moved back to where I was it disappeared from view and I could see somebody’s profile and the front page of two different newspapers. The urn looked so precious in there compared to everything else, so completely out of place.

Anyone walking into the mews just then would have seen a lady with a demented walk and a boy hopping from one foot to the other, and would most probably have turned round and walked back out again.

As soon as I went in I knew I hadn’t really thought this thing through. I was way under prepared. I could hear my blood shushing through my ears like a pulse. For a start, I’d been standing outside for longer than I realised, arousing suspicion. Tony Soprano was halfway down his stairs already. Whether he remembered me from the other night or not, he had every right to think I was a nutter. I was sort of hovering on the spot, smiling like an idiot. And anyway, paying a call on the remains of a dead stranger isn’t the sanest thing I’ve ever tried to do.

He asked me if I wanted a cab and I said no, and then when he turned his back to me I changed my mind and said yes, and he laughed and asked if I had any money, which I didn’t. Then he told me to leave, which wasn’t the cleverest time to ask him about the dead lady. He walked right up to me then, younger than he looked, sallow with grey bags under his eyes and cigar breath.

This, as far as I can remember it, is the conversation I had with Tony Soprano.

Me: Why have you got a dead lady’s ashes?

TS: What’s it to you?

Me: Is she yours?

TS: What? (Looks at colleagues) What a question!

Me: I mean did you know her? Was she a relative or something?

TS: No.

Me: What are you going to do with her?

TS: Who? None of your business mate.

Me: Well—

TS: When they collect they can do whatever they want.

Me: Who?

TS: The family, whoever left her, who d’you think?

Me: Are they going to?

TS: No idea. You’re not touching it. Get that idea out of your head right now.

Me: What’s her name?

TS: (giving me the hard stare for the count of five and sighing) If I tell you, will you sod off?

Me: Yes

TS: (picking up the urn and showing me the metal plaque on the side that reads VIOLET PARK 1927 – 2002) Now sod off.

It was like a light going on in my brain.

I read once in a comic about readiness potential, the way your brain is always one step ahead of you, even though you think you’re the one in charge. It’s pretty complicated, but I think I understand it and it goes like this.

First you have to get the difference between action and reaction.

Action is throwing a ball and reaction is dodging out of the way when you suddenly realise that the ball’s going to hit you.

Your brain is firing signals all the time, telling you to scratch your nose or smile or put one foot in front of the other when you’re walking. But some things you do, like blink or drop a hot piece of toast, you couldn’t possibly know you were going to do beforehand because you didn’t see them coming. That’s where your brain proves it knows everything before you do, because it has to send the signal and the signal takes time.

This is called the readiness potential, the way your brain tells your body what to do before even you know you need to do it.

And what reminded me of the readiness potential thing was that when I read Violet’s name, I realised I knew it after all, before he showed it to me, even though there was no way I could. I heard it in my head just before I saw it written down, like when you watch a film and the dubbing’s out, so you hear what people say a bit before their mouths move. Right then I was pretty wired about it. I was thinking about that conversation-with-a-dead-pensioner feeling I’d had on the hill and I was sure that the only way I could have known her name was that she’d already told me.

It flew around in my brain like a pigeon trapped in a building, flitting through the spaces, clattering against the sides. V-I-O-L-E-T. A good strong name; a name that’s a colour and there aren’t many of those around, and also a flower, soft and pretty and old fashioned, the perfect name for a dead old lady.

It was all I could do to stop myself from grabbing the urn and running off. I felt like her only hope at that moment. She’d been dead long enough to know there was no one coming for her. It still makes me sick to think of her stuck there since I was eleven, the same time as my dad went wherever.

Tony Soprano put Violet back on the shelf. I’d promised to leave and he was going to hold me to it. To stay calm on the way out I made a list in my head of all the good reasons to make friends with a dead lady in an urn.

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.

FIVE

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 running around pulling her hair out (eight and a half months pregnant) and the police showing up all the time, and Mercy yelling and slamming doors and shagging whoever’d have her. For a while everyone was interested and he was all over the press – all the papers and the telly for weeks. There was this same photo of him everywhere, one that none of us can stand to look at now, firstly because it reminds us of everything going wrong, and secondly because he looks so damn happy in it and that must have been an act.

I remember the exact moment Mum realised he had actually disappeared and wasn’t just somewhere sleeping things off for longer than usual, or stuck in the office on a deadline without calling, which often happened. I can see her now, rubbing her massive belly with this weird sort of half smile that she wore practically the whole time she was pregnant with Jed, answering the phone and then turning suddenly to dust. I was sitting at the kitchen table, waiting for Dad to come home so there would be another boy in the house, and I was watching her. She was really beautiful when she picked up the phone – in my memory she sort of glows and the lighting is soft and everything – and by the time she put it down, maybe two and a half minutes later, she was grey and old and looked like she was going to throw up.

(She did, all night and the next day and they had to take her into hospital because she wasn’t keeping anything down and she hadn’t slept and everyone was worried about the baby.)

The phone call was from a friend of Dad’s at The Times called Nigel Moon, who said the police had found our car in a field somewhere in Hampshire, and was his passport at home or was there a chance he had it with him, and he thought she should know. He got to her about five minutes before the police because while she was throwing up in the downstairs loo there was a knock on the door and it was them. (Dad’s passport was in a drawer upstairs, next to Mum’s.)

And after the big, big fuss there was nothing. In a few weeks people began to get bored or forget, and they drifted away and left us to our own private chaos. Mum had Jed and they both cried a lot in her room, Mercy stopped speaking for maybe three months, and I walked around lost and got into a lot of fights.

There’s a definite stigma attached to you when someone in your family goes missing like that. A big question mark, a skeleton in your cupboard, a dirty shadow. In the beginning when everyone was all keen and interested, actually they didn’t care at all, they were just looking for something nasty, for dad’s guilty secrets, for the cracks in our family that must have opened into massive caverns and swallowed him whole.

Was he having an affair? Was he mixed up in anything illegal? Was he murdered? Did we do it? Did he kill himself? Why? Was he having an affair? And round and round like a dog chasing its own tail until we put the telly in the cupboard and took the batteries out of the radio and stopped looking at newspapers or answering the door or going out.

Every so often now something comes out about dad in the paper, mostly on a weekend, in the magazine or buried in the review section or whatever. I think the name Pete Swain must be on a kind of reserve list of the missing because he resurfaces every now and again with Lord Lucan and Richie Manic and Shergar, part of a rota for writers with nothing to do. In a way, going missing like that does make a good story, whoever you are. Mum says journalists like nothing better than a question with no answers because they can never be wrong and that makes them look good. She says they’re all vultures circling an old corpse, and that because they mostly abandoned us when they lost the scent she refuses to talk to any of them, even if some of them were still at school when he went missing and have nothing to feel bad about.

Only one of Dad’s friends stayed friends with us after he went. Mercy says the only reason he did it was because he’d always fancied Mum and he wanted to get into her pants, but I reckon loads of good things get done for that reason and it doesn’t make them any less good. He’s the one who planted a tree on Primrose Hill because he thought that even though Jed was born at such a terrible time we shouldn’t forget to celebrate. Mum made him Jed’s godfather after that.

His name is Bob Cutforth and him and Dad started out together on some local paper or other. For a while he was one of the big correspondents for the BBC and he went all over the world and into danger zones and interviewed tyrants and dodged bullets. But then he turned out to be a really sick alcoholic and lost his job and his house and his wife, and now he lives in a bedsit in Kilburn and gets benefits and writes in his notebooks all day. Still, he’s never forgotten Jed’s birthday even once.

SIX

If I was working in one of those swanky Soho ad agencies and I was doing consumer profiling, like where you divide people into groups according to what trousers they wear and if they’re ever likely to buy fish fingers from the freezer compartment, this is how I’d profile my mum.

 AGE: 35-45

 SEX: female

 HEIGHT: 1.7 metres

 WEIGHT: 50-60 kilograms depending

 ANNUAL INCOME: under £15,000

 PROFESSION: classroom assistant. Sometimes she says she’d like to spend a whole week just talking to grown ups and not wiping anybody’s nose, but the job fits in with Jed’s school day and she likes it mostly.

 STATUS: married (estranged probably)

 ON THE STEREO: old stuff. Some of it I like. Some of it is diabolical.

 LEISURE ACTIVITIES: walking on the heath, swimming at the Lido (summer only), reading, knitting, learning to sew, yoga, aggressive cleaning.

If I was working at an ad agency I don’t think I’d go crazy about someone like my mum. I might half-heartedly throw a few bath oils or cleaning products or hair dye her way, but she wouldn’t have much to spend so I wouldn’t waste too much effort.

This would be my big mistake.

My mum is buying stuff all the time.

If there’s a bogus new miracle product on the TV, me and Mercy place bets on how long before Mum buys it. Our bathroom cupboard is spilling over with twenty-four-hour moisturisers, anti-wrinkle creams, cellulite busters and hair thickeners.

Mum says she used to be a beautiful woman, but having three kids and an absent husband has ruined her looks. She says that it’s harder than you’d think to have looks and then lose them, and Mercy says she should try just being ugly all her life and that’s no picnic. Mum says Mercy has low self-esteem. If you ask me, low self-esteem is what most girls live on, instead of food.

The main thing about my mum is that she’s sad. Life isn’t turning out for her the way it was supposed to. She blames Dad for a lot of it, of course, his old friends and us, and also she blames herself.

I know this for a fact, not because she ever told me but because she told Bob Cutforth. A lot. Whenever he came over for dinner they would get wasted together and I would listen outside the kitchen door because when people are wasted they talk about stuff they can’t talk about when they are sober. Once I heard Mum say to Bob that she’d spent the last year they were together hoping Dad would disappear off the face of the earth because she couldn’t stand how things were between them. She said she’d wanted to be free from the job of loving him because he made it such hard work. In her fantasy of being on her own she blossomed (Mum’s word) and did all the things she’d always blamed Dad for stopping her doing. But in reality, when he disappeared she was less than she’d been before, not more.

Remembering that conversation is like being there listening to it for the first time. The line of my spine feels caught, like I need to stretch it, my stomach is a hole, I’m listening to my own breathing and the big wall clock in the hall, and I’m staring at the streaks and blisters in the paint on the kitchen door and thinking I might kick it down and punch my mum in the face for wishing my dad away.

They’re quiet for a bit and then Bob says to her, “You didn’t make him go, Nicky. What did you do? You loved him and you loved his kids. You’ve done nothing wrong.”

Mum started crying then, just softly, and I went upstairs to my room and thought about what it was like to be her, and if her and Bob would end up getting married.

Another time, when I was sitting right there with them at the table, she said to Bob, “I wasn’t as good a wife as you all thought I was you know,” and then she went on about how much she hated being stuck at home with the kids and how she resented Dad’s great job and how she made him pay all the time and was insanely jealous and always thought he was playing around and how she was basically never happy at what turned out to be the happiest time of her life. Bob said she shouldn’t talk about that stuff in front of me, and she said, “Lucas is nearly thirteen and his dad’s left us, so he’s the man of the house now.” Then she ruffled my hair and told me to go to bed, like I was eight, which hacked me off because I was a man when it suited her and a kid when it didn’t.

She’s better now than she was then.

But the thing about my mum that still bothers me is that people mostly feel sorry for her and she lets them. Mum reckons life dealt her a bad hand, which is a good way of saying that her absent husband, her three kids and the fact that she’s not twenty-one any more are not her fault. I want to ask her if women in places like Sudan or Palestine or Kosovo worry as much about face cream and stretch marks and living without a man around, but I haven’t yet, and who knows, maybe they do.

And sometimes Mum gets angry with the wrong people – meaning those who are still here as opposed to he who has left. Some days I know as soon as I look at her that I’m not going to get a civil word out of Mum at all. Even just the sound of our voices makes her roll her eyes and tut and act like we’re squatters in her actual brain, and not people with as much right to be and speak as she has. On a bad day like that you can tell she’s programmed herself just to say NO to everything, practically before she’s heard it, which means she loses out when we’re saying do you want anything from the shop, or offering to put the dinner on.

What I think on days like that is this.

Maybe life didn’t turn out the way Mum planned, but it’s not our fault. Unless the thing we did wrong was being born, and if you start from there you can never do anything right, no matter how hard you try.

SEVEN

One good side-effect of Violet turning me on to old people was I got to know my gran a lot better. Her name is Pansy – another perfect name for an old lady, another flower name. I’d never really had much time for her before, what with her being old and having false teeth she got too small for, and skin like a bit of screwed up grey tissue that you find in your coat pocket, and pretty extreme opinions on just about everything. She and my grandad live round the corner in sheltered housing. Pansy says there’s nothing more patronising or that fills her with more dread than a primary colour window surround. She says it’s a sign that whoever lives there is no longer taken seriously. It’s worth remembering that they gave up their big house to move here so that we could live in it. Pansy would rather we didn’t forget it.

Pansy is a live wire and she’ll talk about anything and has theories about stuff she’s hardly heard of, like jungle music and PlayStation and Internet dating. She swears all the time but she never actually says the word, just mouths it, with her face especially screwed up, her gums and false teeth colliding slightly, the insides of her mouth sticking together and then pulling apart so swearing becomes this strange spongy clacking sound. It’s quite effective.

Pansy is passionate about football and has been for years. But somehow, at the same time, she’s managed to learn absolutely nothing about the rules. She once said that footballers should get extra points for hitting the post or the cross bar because it’s much harder than scoring a proper goal. She’s a Tottenham fan because she grew up in Enfield and her dad played in the brass band at White Hart Lane. If you ask me, there’s never enough reason to be a Spurs fan because I’m into Arsenal and so was my dad. Pansy says Dad only supported Arsenal to hack her off when he was a kid. Grandad, who can take football or leave it, rolls his eyes and says, “They used to fight like cat and dog when Grandstand was on.” She loves to slag off Arsenal, and mostly that’s fine because we’re at the top of the league and they’re going down.

Pansy was the first person I told about Violet. I needed to tell someone that a dead lady was talking to me and I had several good reasons for letting her in on it. For a start, it was Violet who made me more interested in the person inside Pansy’s old body. Also, I figured Violet would appreciate having another old lady around after all those cab drivers. And I knew Pansy’d be into it because she was always reading about the occult and she liked mediums and stuff and she even went to see one once to see if she could find out if Dad had “passed over” so I knew she’d never dismiss the idea of communicating with the dead.

Of course, that’s the other thing that me and my gran have in common, apart from Violet and the London Derby – my dad, her son. “Our missing link” she calls him. Mum says however bad it feels to us that Dad just went off without a word of warning, we should times it by ten for Pansy because she’s his mum and mums just don’t expect their kids to go before they do. So Pansy loves it when I come round, firstly because she says I’m her favourite (based purely on the fact that I look like her son and wear his clothes) and secondly because she can talk about Dad till she’s run out of air and I won’t lose interest.

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