Jenny Valentine - Finding Violet Park

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.

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.