V for Violet (22 page)

‘You find it?’ asks Raymond with the cigarette between his lips ready to be lit.

‘No,’ I say. ‘But I’ve found something else.’ I uncurl my fingers and there’s a silver chain pooled in my palm. I pick it up and it unravels and stretches out. As it dangles from my fingers, the silver J swings in front of my eyes like a hypnotist’s charm.

I’ve never heard silence like it. Even though the car engine must still be thrumming and even though the windscreen wipers must be squeaking across the glass, the silence in the car presses down on me like a ten-ton rock. And then I say the stupidest thing I’ve ever said in my life. ‘What are you doing with Jackie’s necklace in your taxi?’

Even as the words leave my mouth, terror is filling me up from my toes to the roots of my hair.

Raymond sniffs and wipes the back of his hand across his nose. ‘Oh, Violet,’ he says. ‘You’ve really gone and done it now, haven’t you?’

I flick my eyes sideways. We’re still in the middle of nowhere. We haven’t hit the outskirts of London yet. I can’t jump, we’re going too fast.

‘You’re not going anywhere, Violet,’ he says, as though he’s read my thoughts. ‘Well, not yet anyway.’

It feels like there are hands around my throat already, pressing down hard, squeezing the voice out of me. I can’t breathe and then I’m breathing too fast and all I can think of are the haunted walls of the pump house in Battersea Park and the screams of four girls as they are lost to the world.

I want to die right now. And I don’t want to die at all.

Raymond bangs the steering wheel with the flats of his hands. ‘One thing you need to know, Violet. I love your sister. I love Norma. I’d never do anything to hurt her.’

For some reason, those words frighten me more than anything else.

‘You can’t kill me,’ I say. ‘They’ll all know it’s you. Norma knows you’ve come to pick me up.’

‘Think you’re so clever, don’t you,’ he spits. ‘You always were a stuck-up little bitch. Always thought you were better than the rest of us, with your books and your fancy words. But you’re not that clever, are you?’ He turns to glare at me and his lips are wet with spit. ‘Don’t have to say I actually picked you up, do I? Got to the pier and you weren’t there. I waited around, but you didn’t show up. No choice but to drive home, did I? Who’s going to know any better?’

‘Why, Raymond?’ I ask, my voice a tiny, scared creature. ‘Why have you done these things?’

‘I like it,’ he says, giving me the worst answer of all. ‘Gives me a kick.’ He turns and grins at me. ‘You know what it feels like on the rides at the funfair, Violet? How exciting? How the Big Dipper makes your stomach roll? How you feel on top of the world? Well, imagine that, only a thousand times better. And those girls, Violet. They were so stupid, you know. They deserved everything they got. They should’ve known better than to get in a car with a strange bloke. But just because I drive a taxi, they think it’s safe, you see. And your little friend Jackie … she was the worst. So trusting … so trusting.’

‘Please, Raymond. Please don’t hurt me. Just take me home and I promise I won’t say anything about the necklace.’ I’m crying now. I can’t help it. I’m V for Violet, not V for Victim. This can’t be happening. I just want to wake up. I don’t want my picture to be on the mantelpiece because I’m dead. Then, before I can stop it, there’s hot liquid spreading across the crotch of my jeans, and I remember a playground long ago and a little girl scared out of her wits. But this time Jackie’s not here to help me.

‘Have you pissed yourself? You dirty little cow.’

And then I’m screaming and screaming and screaming and Raymond’s yelling at me to stop. He’s punching me in the face to shut me up. And I’m grabbing at his arm and trying to bite him. He elbows me in the mouth and there’s a sickening crunch and bright white pain and the metal taste of blood. And then I don’t care about me any more, I just want him to die. So I fling myself at the steering wheel and he yells and claws at my face and the car is swerving wildly, but I won’t let go. Then my stomach leaps into my mouth as an explosion of metal and glass slams into me. I try to scream again as the car skids and judders, but my voice has been ripped from my throat. I imagine I’m flying high in a clear blue French sky and then spiralling down, down, down, and the last thing I see before darkness closes around me is a thousand glittering fragments of broken glass.

‘Violet. Violet. Help me. Please help me.’

I slowly open my eyes. Who’s calling my name? I twist my head to one side. It hurts. It hurts so much. There’s stuff on my face. I try to brush it off. Pieces of glass scratch my cheek. I try to focus. I’m still in the car, but the window’s all smashed and the sky is in the wrong place. I try to move again but a pain shoots through my leg and all I can see for a minute are thousands of dazzling stars. My legs are where my head should be and I realise the car is upside down. I try turning to look the other way.

And then I see him. He’s right next to me, all scrunched up under the steering wheel. His shoulder is touching mine. I try to scream but there’s no sound left inside me.

‘Violet,’ he says again. ‘Help. Please.’

And then I see the blood. Thick and red and oozing from his chest, around a jagged slice of metal. I dare to look at his face. His eyes are half closed and sticky with more blood that’s pouring from a black gash on his forehead. ‘Please,’ he says. ‘Please.’

I don’t even have to think about it. I lean towards him and whisper in his ear. ‘Hey, Raymond. Violet here. You know, V for Violet. V for Victory. V for fucking Vengeance.’ Then I pull as hard as I can on the jagged slice of metal until it slides from his chest. I watch as the blood pumps thick and fast from the wound and I wait until his screams stop dead.

Then, with my last bit of strength, I crawl through the smashed window and collapse onto the road with the silver J still clutched in my hand.

I like to sleep. I like to sleep a lot. The nurses say it’s good for me. It’ll help me to recover. Luckily, I don’t have nightmares or even dreams. There’s always just a soft nothingness to sink into. I reckon it’s all the painkillers they’ve been feeding me. When I’m not sleeping, I’m reading. There’s a stack of books on the bedside cabinet that Miss Read brought for me.

Not that there’s much time for reading. What with all the visitors. Inspector Gordon was one of the first, once the doctor had said I was well enough to talk.

‘We wouldn’t have caught him without you, Violet,’ he said. ‘Nobody can believe how brave you were. It’s a shame he died at the crash scene. There’s plenty of people who would have loved to see him hanged.’

I don’t think he knows what I did. But even if he does, I don’t think he cares.

Mum comes in every day, of course. She brings grapes and magazines and bustles around the bed, straightening the covers. She never says much. I don’t think she knows what to say. But every time she leaves she says, sleep tight, watch the bedbugs don’t bite and tells me that she loves me. I think she’s trying to make up for lost time.

Beau’s been to see me too. I didn’t want to see him at first. I couldn’t forgive him for Jackie. For not telling me that he knew her. But he pestered the nurses so much, that just for their sake I let him visit. He won me back straight away when he plonked a great bunch of violets down on the bed.

‘I miss you so much,’ he said. ‘And I’m so sorry for everything.’

He reckons I only made the car crash so I could get a set of scars that are better than his and he won’t stop teasing me about how wrong I was about Joseph. ‘You’d better work on your detective skills next time you fancy solving a crime,’ he said. It hurts when I laugh. But it would hurt even more if I couldn’t.

And then there’s Joseph. It took a while for him to come. But now he can’t keep away. He talks and he talks and the least I can do is listen.

‘Hey, Violet,’ he said. He sat in the chair next to my bed and plucked at the edges of my blanket. ‘I’m so proud of you. You’re a plucky little thing. Much braver than I ever was.’

I wanted to say sorry to him, but I didn’t know where to begin. Luckily he had enough words for both of us.

‘I understand, you know,’ he said. ‘Why you thought it was me. I know you put the police on to me. But I want you to know I don’t blame you. You always knew there was something I was hiding, didn’t you? You just added it up wrong.’ He shrugged, like it didn’t matter to him any more.

‘We’re strangers really, aren’t we? You and me. A brother, more than twice your age, who you never knew – can’t blame you for being wary. They told you I was a hero, didn’t they? And you had to live all your life with them mourning me. But then I came back and it was all a lie. I was a lie. Why wouldn’t you hate me?’ He stopped and took a deep breath.

‘And I am a lie, Violet. But I don’t want to be any more.’

I reached out and took his hand then.

‘I thought you’d found me out when you called me a monster,’ he said. ‘Everyone thinks we’re monsters. I’m used to that. Even when the police took me in for questioning, I still thought that you’d reported me for being ‘one of them’. But then they started to ask me about the girls, about Jackie, and about some letters from a French girl called Arabella. I knew then that you’d really got it wrong. You’d really cocked up. The Arabella that I knew never wrote to me. She was only glad to see the back of me.’ He cleared his throat, like he was trying to get rid of another piece of sadness.

‘You asked me once if I was married. If there was someone special. I told you there was someone, that it was complicated. And I would have told you the truth then, if you’d given me more time. If you hadn’t been so ready to judge me. I needed to tell someone, and I thought you might understand, being from this new generation, where you all seem to think so differently. But then you stole my letters. You sneaked around behind my back, and I was angry. I couldn’t trust you after that.’

He squeezed my hand. Only a tiny movement, but I knew it meant that he’d forgiven me.

‘I want to tell you the truth now,’ he said, ‘because I’d rather you thought I was a monster than a murderer.’

He took his hand away then. But only so he could rub his face. He looked so tired.

‘I always knew I was different, Violet. Right from when I was a little boy. I didn’t know what or why or how. I just knew. I couldn’t put a name to it or anything. But as I got older – well, there were one or two occasions – it seemed like other people had no problem in putting a name to it. I didn’t want to be different. I didn’t want the shame of it. I thought the army would knock it out of me. At least I hoped it would.

‘But then, oddly, after my plane was shot down, that was when it all got better. That was when everything started to make sense. That was when I met him, you see. It didn’t happen straight away. It wasn’t love at first sight or anything. He was just Eric’s surly son. I didn’t even see much of him to begin with. Not while I was recovering from my injuries. But then, once I was better, I began to work on the farm. And we kept finding ourselves alone together out in a field somewhere; fixing fences, mending walls, clearing the ground. One day I smashed my thumb with a hammer and he made me hold it out to him so he could see what damage I’d done. He was so gentle. And then suddenly we were kissing and it was like I’d been on a long, long journey and I’d finally come home.’

He stopped talking and glanced at me to check the expression on my face. I nodded at him to continue.

‘His name is Alain. He’s the son of Eric Armand, the farmer who had taken me in. So you can imagine how careful we had to be. And we were. For years and years and years. He was why I never came back, Violet. At first I couldn’t, for fear of prison, and then … and then, it just seemed kinder to leave you all thinking I was a dead hero. Better that, than for you all to find out what I really was.’ He got up from the chair and started to pace around my bed.

‘But then, we were discovered. One tiny slip. One careless night. We’d fallen asleep in the barn, wrapped in each other’s arms, and it was Eric who found us. It was a terrible time. None of them understood. Not Eric, not Alain’s brother Leon or his wife Arabella. They were sickened by us. Eric kicked me off the farm. I had nowhere to go. I blamed Alain. He blamed me. Our life together in France was over.’ He stopped pacing and sat down carefully on the edge of the bed.

‘That’s when I came back to England. Got some lodgings in Fulham. Alain planned to join me. But being back here, being back where I came from, made me confront myself again after all those years. I couldn’t accept who I was. I couldn’t live with the stigma of being a homosexual. I couldn’t live with the thought that I was doing something wrong, when it felt like the most right thing in the world. When Alain got here, he tried to help. But we had to meet in secret. Sometimes at a pub in the evenings, or when we wanted to be closer we would meet in Battersea Park, by the old pump house. Sometimes we would leave notes for each other, pushed into the cracks of the walls. It was exciting at first, like falling in love all over again. But it got harder and harder. And the constant fear of discovery did something to me. It messed with my head. It made me want to end it all. I wanted to kill myself. Why couldn’t I live my life like everyone else? Why did we have to sneak around? Why did falling in love for me mean I was branded a criminal or a degenerate, with the fear of prison or drugs; doctors trying to make me into something I’m not?

‘I told Alain I didn’t want to see him any more. And that’s when I came home. To try once again to be “normal”.

‘I thought I could forget him, but true love can never be forgotten. Remember that, Violet. I’ve been looking for him, you know. He’s here, in London somewhere. That’s why I went back to the pump house. To see if he’d left me a message in the walls. That’s why I was in Soho. That pub, The Golden Lion, it’s the one place we used to be able to meet in peace. It’s one place where people don’t judge us.

‘I haven’t found him yet. But I’m going to keep on looking. Life’s too short, isn’t it? I could have been killed in the war like all those thousands of other young men. But I cheated death.

All those girls that have died. They’ve been cheated out of a life. So I should make the most of mine, shouldn’t I? I should live it how I want to. And be who I want to be.’

I look at my brother sitting on the end of my bed and I think about his picture on the mantelpiece and how much I hated him, when I didn’t even know him. The brother that I’m looking at now, I don’t hate. I don’t love him yet, but I think it will come. And although he’s not a hero in the usual sense of the word, I’ve got one of my feelings that because he is who he is, he’s going to end up being
my
hero.