Jenny Valentine - 4 Book Award-winning Collection

Table of Contents

Cover

Title Page

Finding Violet Park

Broken Soup

The Ant Colony

The Double Life of Cassiel Roadnight

About the Author

Copyright

About the Publisher

For Alex and his Tardis Heart

Cover Page

Dedication

ONE

TWO

THREE

FOUR

FIVE

SIX

SEVEN

EIGHT

NINE

TEN

ELEVEN

TWELVE

THIRTEEN

FOURTEEN

FIFTEEN

SIXTEEN

SEVENTEEN

EIGHTEEN

NINETEEN

TWENTY

TWENTY-ONE

TWENTY-TWO

TWENTY-THREE

TWENTY-FOUR

TWENTY-FIVE

TWENTY-SIX

TWENTY-SEVEN

TWENTY-EIGHT

TWENTY-NINE

Acknowledgments

The mini cab office was up a cobbled mews with little flat houses either side. That’s where I first met Violet Park, what was left of her. There was a healing centre next door – a pretty smart name for a place with a battered brown door and no proper door handle and stuck on wooden numbers in the shape of clowns. The 3 of number 13 was a w stuck on sideways and I thought it was kind of sad and I liked it at the same time.

I never normally take cabs but it was five o’clock in the morning and I was too tired to walk anywhere and I’d just found a tenner in my coat pocket. I went in for a lift home and strolled right into the weirdest encounter of my life.

It turns out the ten pounds wasn’t mine at all. My sister Mercy had borrowed my coat the night before – without asking – even though boys’ clothes don’t suit her and it was at least two sizes too big. She was livid with me about the money. I said maybe she should consider it rent and wouldn’t the world be a better place if people stopped taking things that didn’t belong to them?

It’s funny when you start thinking about pivotal moments like this in your life, chance happenings that end up meaning everything. Sometimes, when I’m deciding which route to take to, say, the cinema in Camden, I get this feeling like maybe if I choose the wrong route, bad stuff will happen to me in a place I never had to go if only I’d chosen wisely. This sort of thinking can make decisions really really difficult because I’m always wondering what happens to all the choices we decide not to make. Like Mum says, as soon as she married Dad she realised she’d done the wrong thing and as she was walking back down the aisle, she could practically see her single self through the arch of the church door, out in the sunlight, dancing around without a care in the world, and she could have spat. I like to picture Mum, dressed like a meringue with big sticky hair, hanging on to Dad’s arm and thinking about gobbing on the church carpet. It always makes me smile.

Whatever, Mercy decided to borrow my coat and she forgot to decide to remove the money and I decided to spend the whole night with my friend Ed in his posh Mum’s house (Miss Denmark 1979 with elocution lessons) and then I made the choice to take a cab.

It was dark in the Mews, blue-black with a sheen of orange from the street lamps on the high street, almost dawn and sort of timeless. My shoes made such a ringing noise on the cobbles I started to imagine I was back in time, in some Victorian red light district. When I stepped into the minicab office it was modern and pretty ugly. One of the three strip lights on the ceiling was blinking on and off, but the other two were working perfectly and their over-brightness hurt my eyes and made everyone look sort of grey and pouchy and ill. There were no other punters, just bored sleepy drivers, waiting for the next fare, chain smoking or reading three-day-old papers. There was a framed map of Cyprus on one wall and one of those gas fires that they reckon are portable with a great big bottle you have to fit in the back. We had one like that in the hostel when we went on a school journey to the Brecon Beacons last year. Those things are not portable.

The controller was in this little booth up a few stairs with a window looking down on the rest of them and you could tell he was the boss of the place as well. He had a cigar in his mouth and he was talking and the smoke was going in his eyes so he had to squint, and the cigar was bouncing up and down as he talked and you could see he thought he was Tony Soprano or someone.

Everybody looked straight at me when I walked in because I was the something happening in their boring night shift and suddenly I felt very light headed and my insides were going hot and cold, hot and cold. I’m pretty tall for my age but them all staring up at me from their chairs made me feel like some kind of weird giant. The only person not staring at me was Tony Soprano so I kind of focused on him and I smiled so they’d all see I was friendly and hadn’t come in for trouble. He was chomping on that cigar, working it around with his teeth and puffing away on it so hard his little booth was filling up with cigar smoke. I thought that if I stood there long enough he might disappear from view like an accidental magic trick. The smoke forced its way through the cracks and joins of his mezzanine control tower and it was making me queasy so I searched around, still smiling, for something else to look at.