Jenny Valentine - Finding Violet Park

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.

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.