SIXTEEN

      It occurs to me that all most people do when they grow up is fix on something impossible and then hunger after it.

      I do it about Dad, and Violet.

      Mum does it about what she might amount to if she lived her life again.

      Bob does it about Mum, according to Mercy.

      Ed does it about winding his mum up and getting laid.

      Mercy does it about Kurt Cobain and breast implants and mind-altering narcotics.

      Pansy does it about her encyclopaedia salesman and her son and about some pre-senile version of Norman.

      Norman does it about his past, which he can’t quite hold on to.

      Violet’s doing it past her sell by date about something I haven’t worked out yet.

      The only person who doesn’t do it is Jed.

      He lives in the present tense only. I don’t think he’s any good at all at things like the past or the future. Even today and tomorrow and yesterday trip him up. Jed says yesterday when he means six months ago and tomorrow when he means not now. Also, when you’re going somewhere with Jed, he instantly forgets that you’re headed from A to B. He just spends ages looking at snails and collecting gravel and stopping to read signs along the way.

      Jed is clueless about time and that means Jed is never sad or angry about anything for more than about five minutes. He just can’t hold on to stuff for long enough. Five minutes might as well be a year to him.

      And the thing about everyone else in my family is we are so busy being miserable and down all the time about impossible stuff that being miserable and down has started to become normal and strangely comforting.

      I mean, how much would we actually really like it if Dad showed up tomorrow and became part of the family again?

      Wouldn’t it get everyone’s backs up a little bit?

      It would be like having a stranger in the house, like a new lodger.

      It would be really weird.

      At some point, the impossible object of desire must turn into the last thing on earth you want to happen, without anybody noticing.

      The day Pansy came home from the hospital I waited with Norman for Mum to drop her off. He sat at the kitchen table folding and refolding a piece of paper, and I did a bit of washing up and taking out the rubbish (mostly chocolate wrappers). I sensed that if I wanted to ask Norman anything and I wanted a straight answer, now was the time. I think he was looking forward to being off guard and probably just wanted to doze in his chair and potter about with the dog like before, safe in the knowledge that she at least knew who he was.

      I coughed first to break the silence.

      “Did you meet Violet Park, Grandad?”

      He looked at me for a second as if he hadn’t realised I was there and I thought, no, it’s too late, he’s gone back to forgetting. Then he said “No. It was your dad that knew her, for all the good it did him.”

      “Why do you say that?”

      “Man-eater, that one,” Norman said.

      I had an image of Violet swallowing my dad whole. So that was where he had gone. “Was she?”

      “Other people’s husbands for breakfast, lunch and dinner,” he said.

      “Not Dad though,” I said.

      Norman shrugged. “Thick as thieves they were, at the end.”

      “What end?” I said, but Norman didn’t say anything.

      “Did Dad tell you he was leaving?” I said.

      Norman looked hard at me and said, “Do you think I wouldn’t remember a thing like that?”

      “I don’t know, Grandad,” I said, which was a lie.

      “Do you think I’d leave everybody wondering and not knowing, if I knew?” he said, and I shook my head and said, “No” but I could tell just by looking at him that he knew he couldn’t remember.

      And I felt for Norman, I really did. It wasn’t the same for us. We didn’t know where Dad was and that was that, simple. But Norman must always be wondering whether he did know. Imagine knowing the thing that you most need to know, and your whole family most needs to know, and not being able to find it, only wondering if you know it or not.

      Mum arrived with Pansy and said she couldn’t stay, for some reason. She drove off pretty quick, like she couldn’t wait to be out of there. Pansy was shrunken and frail like a doll. It scared me a bit, the thought of her being in a pot like Violet pretty soon. Me and Norman swooped and fussed around her until she swatted us off. I went to the kitchen to make them both a cup of tea and when I came back they were sitting in silence, holding hands across the gap in their easy chairs.

      Pansy’s hands looked like birds’ claws. The bones stood up under her skin and her veins were all knotted and dark blue. Her fingernails needed cutting. She looked like she was made of paper.

      She didn’t even notice that Violet was gone. She sat staring at Dad’s photo on the mantelpiece and didn’t see the new gap beside it.

      “I never thought I’d die before he came back,” she said to no one in particular, and no one in particular answered because what could we say?

      “I’m so disappointed in him, Lucas,” Pansy said to me, tears rolling down her face, perfect dewdrops magnifying her wrinkles.

      I hadn’t heard her speak a word against Dad in five years. I’d relied on Pansy for that.

      “So am I,” I said.

      It made me cold all over, the change in Pansy. It was like someone had broken her. She’d been away less than two weeks and she’d come back beaten.

      Pansy started to talk about funerals then. She said she knew she was going soon and she wanted a say in how she went, so that