Jenny Valentine - Finding Violet Park

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.

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.