The Flask

“Bit late for the park,” says Gran.

But I want to go to the park because I want some private time with Zoe. I want to tell her how beautiful my brothers are, after all; I want to take time, sharing all the details of those little birds and the web of their join. I want to look in her eyes, see myself reflected in the mirror of her, the big sister of two baby boys.

“Please,” I say to Gran. “Just for half an hour.”

I also want to tell Zoe about the flask.

“Well,” says Gran. She looks at her watch. “Oh, all right then. Just while I make dinner.”

“Thanks, Gran,” I say, and I actually lean over and give her a kiss.

Zoe doesn’t know we’ve just come from the hospital and I don’t tell her. I want to be lying in the half-moon when I tell her about the babies. I want her to be the first to know, as she was about the join. A special moment, shared. Luckily, as we head down the cul-de-sac, she’s already chatting to me, she’s telling me about her sister’s boyfriend and his new car and how her mother won’t let the boyfriend drive Zoe about, but she doesn’t mind him driving her sister about, which is ridiculous and…

And soon we’re at the park and Paddy and Sam are there too with a football and two jumpers to mark a goal. Paddy isn’t Paddy’s real name, his real name is Maxim, but he doesn’t look like a Maxim so everyone calls him Paddy. He has a big, round, smiling face and he bounces through life like a beach ball. Happy and full of air. Or at least that’s what I think. Zoe thinks he’s massively handsome and has An Outstanding Sense of Humour. It’s Paddy, in fact, that Zoe has her eyes on.

I’m desperate to skirt behind the conker tree so we can get to the playground unseen, but Zoe is heading straight for the boys.

“Zoe…” I start urgently, clutching at her jacket.

But she’s already pulling away, calling. “Hi! Hi! Hi Paddy. Hi Sam.”

So there I am, trailing behind her.

The boys look up.

“Hey,” Sam says. Sam wears slouchy trousers and likes to think he’s cool. “How’s it going?”

“Great,” says Zoe.

We haven’t seen either boy since school broke up for the Easter holidays.

“We were just going to the swings,” I say quickly.

“Well, in a mo,” says Zoe.

Paddy looks at Zoe and then he looks at me. “Did the babies arrive yet?” he asks.

And there’s a moment where I could just say no, I could just say no and then we could walk away, and I could tell Zoe like I planned to as we lay in the half-moon swing.

“Well, did they?”

“Yes,” I say.

“What?” shrieks Zoe.

“They arrived.” I think I say it because I don’t want to deny them any more, these baby birds who are my brothers. I need them to be around me. Solid.

“Why didn’t you tell me?” shrieks Zoe.

Why didn’t you ask?

“Oh, right,” says Sam, whose interests are pretty much confined to sport and his computer.

“And?” asks Paddy.

“And they’re beautiful,” I say. “Boys. Two boys.”

“They’re all right then?” says Zoe. “They’re both all right?”

“They’ve got eight legs,” says Paddy.

“What?” says Sam.

“That’s what my nan said,” Paddy continues. “They could have eight legs.”

“Mumbo jumbo,” I say, and I shoot a look at Zoe. “They have four legs.”

“Four!” exclaims Paddy.

“Yes,” I say. “Two each. Like normal people.”

“Oh – normal!” Paddy laughs.

Zoe’s shrugging. Zoe’s making out that whatever Paddy’s saying, it’s nothing to do with her.

“What you all on about?” Sam asks.

“Jess’s brothers,” says Paddy. “They’re not just any old twins. They’re Siamese.”

Sam is doing knee-ups with the ball. “Siamese?” he says.

“Conjoined.” I hear my voice going up, I hear myself about to shout. “The correct term is conjoined twins. And as for normal, they are normal. Considering the cellular complexity of the average human being, that is.” Shut up, Si. “They’re as normal as me. Or you. If you call that normal.”

Paddy ignores normal. “Point is,” he says, “they’re joined down the chest.”

Sam drops the ball. He drops his jaw. His mouth hangs open. “Man,” he says. “Joined down the chest? Wow. Like, you mean, face to face? Like they’re facing each other all the time? Jeez.”

“If I was stuck on to my brother,” says Paddy, going to retrieve the ball, “if he was the first thing I saw when I woke up and the last thing I saw before I went to sleep, that would kill me.”

“More likely kill your brother, being stuck to you,” I say. Then I round on Zoe. “Come on,” I say. “We’re going.”

But Zoe’s feet seem planted in the ground.

“In the old days,” says Paddy, “they put Siamese twins in the circus. People paid to see them.”

“Conjoined!” I shout.

“You could do that,” Paddy continues. “You could bring your brothers in next term and charge a pound a go to look.”

“They might not even last that long,” I say. Or maybe I don’t say it. Maybe it’s the silent thing shouting in my head. They might not even last that long.

Paddy’s big face is shining with excitement. “I’d pay,” he says. “I’d pay to look. Wouldn’t you, Sam?”

“Yeah,” says Sam.

“You could have a different rate depending on whether it was just a look or a touch,” Paddy continues.

“Shut up,” I say.

“A pound for a look, two pounds for a good look and a fiver for a touch.”

“I said SHUT UP.”

“We could call it JFS – Jess’s Freak Show.”

And now everything that’s been silent and bottled up comes frothing and boiling over at last and I go right up to him because I’m going to hit him in the stupid, shining face. I draw back my fist and I lash out as hard and fast as I can, but he just catches my wrist.

“Hey,” he says. “Hey. What’s up with you? It was only a joke. Can’t you take a joke now?”

“I hate you,” I scream.

But actually it’s Zoe I hate.

I turn and march away from the park. Of course, Zoe follows me.

“Jess,” she says. “Jess, Jess, Jess!” And now it’s her turn to clutch me by the sleeve. “Come on!”

I stop, I wheel about. “Come on what, exactly?”

“I never told him,” she says. “I didn’t.”

“Oh, right; he just made it up, did he? Thought it up out of his own stupid little brain?”

“I didn’t tell him, Jess, I promise, I swear.”

I stare at her. Her eyes are all lit up bright, but not like a mirror. I can’t see myself in them, in her. “Then who did?”

“I don’t know,” Zoe exclaims. “Maybe your mum told his mum and she told Paddy.”

“Oh, yeah, right.”

“Or Em. You didn’t just tell me, did you? You pretended you did, but you didn’t. You told Em too. So maybe it was Em who told Paddy.”

Very clever. And hurtful, because it’s true. I did tell Em actually and I did pretend to Zoe that she was the only one who knew. Why did I do that? Because Zoe can be jealous probably. She can go mental just like she did about the friendship bracelet thing in year 5. But Em’s away on holiday. Em’s not here to defend herself. “Why would Em tell Paddy? She doesn’t even like Paddy. No one likes Paddy.” I pause. “Except you.”

“I still didn’t tell him, Jess. I mean – why would I?”

And I can’t say it. I can’t say, Because I think you’re beginning to like him more than you like me, because that sounds totally pathetic. So I say, “For a laugh. So you could both have a laugh behind my back about my so-not-normal brothers.”

“Jess, you’re way over the top. I didn’t tell him. I didn’t!”

“So why did you let him say all that stuff, all that eight-leg circus-freak stuff?”

“That’s just mumbo jumbo, Jess, you said so yourself. You said people would say stuff like that. How’s that my fault?”

“You could have spoken up – you could have said something. Anything.”

Now she’s silent, biting in her lip.

“But you just stood there,” I ram it home. “You let him say all of it and you just stood there.”

I start walking again now, turning my back on her and walking, walking.

She runs back after me again, but I shake her off.

“I didn’t know I had to say anything. Anyway, you were saying stuff,” Zoe remarks to my back. “And what does it matter? They’re born now. They’re OK.”

It matters because she promised, because I trusted her. And I need to go on trusting her. Because of the flask. “Who says they’re OK?” I say.

“What?”

“The babies – who says they’re OK?”

“You did!” says Zoe. “You said it!”

“I said they were beautiful. I didn’t say they were OK.”

“Well – are they OK?”

I say nothing.

“Well, are they?”

“I’m not telling you,” I say. “I’m not telling you anything ever again.”

I don’t say a single thing over dinner. And if Gran notices she doesn’t mention it. She probably thinks it’s to do with the babies. And she’s right. Everything’s to do with the babies these days.

Except the flask.

I delay going up to bed, partly because I’m no good at sleeping when I’m angry, and partly because I expect to see little bits of sticky tape on the floor. I mean, something that can blow a cork from a bottle can burst through sticky tape, right?

Wrong.

There is no sticky tape on the floor. The desk is still closed, the drawer inside shut. I reach my hand in and feel the cold, rounded form of the flask.

“I’m back,” I say, sliding my fingers up the throat of the bottle, just to check the sticky tape is really still in place.

It is.

So I draw the flask out into the light. It is blue. Really blue – like a summer sky. Like happiness. Whatever I expected, it wasn’t this.

I just stand and stare, trying to work out whether it is the glass or the thing inside that is blue. But I can’t separate the two. Nor can I understand why – despite Zoe and Paddy and the park and the mumbo jumbo – just holding it makes me fizz with joy, as though I am holding a tiny, perfect other universe.

“You’re extraordinary,” I say. “You know that?”

No reply.

But then what would a universe reply? And I remember Si showing me pictures taken by the Hubble Telescope, pillars of dust 57 trillion trillion miles high and some nebula thing called the eye of God because that’s what it looked like, some astonishingly beautiful giant eye. And Si was busy explaining about gas and cusp knots and interstellar collisions, and I was just thinking it was all too much and too beautiful to look at even in a newspaper. And here is something even more extraordinary in the palm of my hand.

I don’t want to put the flask back in the dark drawer, I want to keep it close by me. So I take it to my bed, and lay it on my pillow as I undress. I don’t know how long the blue will last, the blue and the bright happiness inside me. And it’s not just the thing about Zoe (why couldn’t it have been my mum talking to Paddy’s mum?), it’s also the first time, I realise, I’ve felt really happy since we knew about the babies. The babies have shadowed everything for months, the worry of them. Would they be born alive, and if so, would they be able to survive? And now, this glowing blue seems to have the power to push the gloom away. Or maybe it’s just that I’ve seen the babies. Seen them alive with their bright little bird faces.

I get into bed thinking sleep will come with the sweetest of dreams.

But sleep doesn’t come.

Not quickly.

Not at all.

My mind will not be quiet, it refuses to listen to my happy heart. The flask is tucked beneath my pillow, but my thoughts still toss about in the park (of course my mum didn’t talk to Paddy’s mum, why would she?). Eventually, my restless anxiety pokes its way under my brothers’ sheet at the hospital.

Richie and Clem.

I’m glad the babies have names, it makes them seem less vulnerable somehow, as though they really are here to stay, have personalities all of their own, a right to exist. Richie seems a slightly bigger name to me than Clem, just as Richie himself, I realise as I picture them again in my mind, is the bigger twin. Not by much, of course, but if one twin could be said to be clinging on to the other, then it is Clem who is clinging to Richie. Clem who, if there is to be trouble, is the weaker one.

Thirty-four per cent of conjoined twins don’t make it through the first twenty-four hours.

Clem’s a strange name, a strange word. It sounds to me like clam. Clem the closed-up clam, clinging.

I turn over.

And over.

I feel bad characterising Clem like this, as though naming him as weaker makes him weaker still. They are both strong, I tell myself.

Strong enough to get through this dangerous night. Their first on earth.

I put my hand under my pillow, reaching for the flask as if blue was something you could feel or touch.

Then my thoughts return to Zoe: Em would never betray a secret and I haven’t once seen her talking to Paddy. It’s Zoe who’s always talking to Paddy. Though I can’t check, can’t be sure, because Em’s away on holiday for pretty much the whole Easter break. But it must have been Zoe, confiding in Paddy. Making the join of the twins the butt of Paddy’s Outstanding Sense of Humour, which he clearly gets from his nan and her eight legs and… And my thoughts find the twins, sleeping together, breathing together, the little sheet rising and falling around them. And as they breathe, the flask seems to breathe too, inhaling and exhaling beneath my hand. A tiny ribcage. And then things begin to get muddled and I hear a moan of the sort people make when they’re dreaming and they want to wake up and they can’t. And I don’t know if I am really awake, or just dreaming that I am awake, but I do hear the moan get louder, becoming more of a wail, and suddenly I’m sitting bolt upright in bed, my heart pounding.

It makes me gasp how fast my heart is pounding. It’s deeply dark, the middle of the night. So I must have slept after all, slept for a long while. I try to calm myself, to try to remember the blue, the overwhelming happiness. But all I hear is the wail, only it isn’t a wail any more, it’s a howl. Something dark and inhuman is howling from beneath my pillow.

I stumble and fling myself out of that bed. Fear makes many shapes, but this thing has only one shape, the shape of the flask. The same thing that splashed light on my window sill and held a universe of brilliant blue is now pulsing black wolf howls into my night, into my head.

“Stop, stop, stop!” I want to shout, to scream, but the words are stuck in my throat.

There is nothing for it but to reach through the dark, reach under the pillow. I am afraid the flask will be soft under my hand, like a heart, but it is hard and cold, holding its glass shape. I want to smash it. If I smash it the noise will stop, it will have to stop.

I pick up the flask, intending to fling it against the wall, but that’s when the howl goes higher and also softer, not so much wolf as wolf cub, and there is suddenly something so terrible and so sad about the noise that I just pull the flask to my chest and hold it there. Then I rock with it, like you’d rock with a baby who was crying and you had nothing to give but the warmth of your own flesh.

Which is when Gran comes into the room.

“Jess?” she says. “Jess, can’t you sleep either?”

“No,” I cry. “No!”

The spill of light from the hall makes my bedroom bright and ordinary.

“I thought I heard you,” Gran says.

“Heard me?”

“Walking about.”

“Water,” I say. “I need some water.”

“You look half-frozen,” she replies. “I’ll get the water. Come on now, you get back to bed. It’s gone two o’clock.”

Gratefully, I get back into bed. Under the covers, I look at the flask. It is not a heart, not a ribcage, it isn’t pulsing. There is nothing black about it, but nothing blue either. It is calm and hard and glassy, colourless.

As Gran returns with the water, I slip the flask back beneath the pillow.

“He told you they could die on their first night, didn’t he?” Gran says.

“Who?” I say, as though I don’t quite understand her. Though of course I do.

“Si. He told you the babies could die, didn’t he?”

I shrug.

“He’s no business saying things like that.” She sits down hard on the edge of the bed. “No business at all.”

“He only mentioned the statistics…” I begin.

“Statistics,” says Gran, “are bosh.”

And I know this. I’ve heard it all my life.

Statistics are bosh.

Statistics are bosh.

Gran says it like a mantra, her own little song.

This is something else Si has told me about. Something he’s explained. Si explains everything; Gran explains nothing. You just have to guess what Gran means, you have to look around her corners. “Your grandmother,” said Si, “has never trusted statistics since your father died of something people don’t normally die of. Hiatus hernia. A million-to-one chance, that’s what the doctors told her. So now she doesn’t believe in the numbers game.”

I should never have mentioned statistics.

“Anyway,” Gran continues, “you saw your brothers. Saw them with your own eyes. They’re going to be fine. Do you hear me?”

I hear her.

“So you’re not to worry. Right?”

She comes to tuck me in like I’m some baby myself. As she fusses about me, I realise that I will always be her baby in a way that my brothers will not. Si is the twins’ father, but not mine. So Gran has no blood relationship with the twins. Gran and the babies – they aren’t joined at all.

In the last chink of light, before Gran shuts my door, I check the flask. In its whorls, its worlds, there are a couple of bright seed fish swimming.

After that, I sleep.

The following morning, the phone rings at 7.36. Nobody rings our house that early.

I arrive in the kitchen to hear Gran say, “Yes, of course I’ll tell her, Si.”

She puts down the phone. I wait for her to give me the news.

“Morning, Jess,” she says. “Breakfast’s up.” From the oven she takes a steaming plate of bacon and egg and tomatoes and fried bread. The smell of it makes me want to retch.

“What did he say?” I ask. “What’s happened?”

“Your mum’s fine,” says Gran.

“And the babies?”

“They’re fine too.” But there is something too bright and too quick about the way she says it.

I look at her. “What?”

“What what?” she repeats.

“What did Si say? What did he want you to tell me?”

Gran wipes her hands on her apron. “Your stepfather,” she says, “wanted you to know that your mother and your brothers are fine.”

I stare at her and I keep on staring. I want the truth.

“Clem…” Gran says finally, lips pressed tight.

“Yes?”

“He took a little dip in the night… but he’s absolutely fine now.”

A little dip.

I can’t imagine Si using these words. Si would use precise medical terms.

“What kind of ‘dip’?”

“Oh, I don’t know, Jessica. Nobody said it would be plain sailing. The important thing is that he’s OK now.”

“And when exactly?” I ask.

“When what?” says Gran.

“When did Clem take this little dip?”

“Does it matter?”

I think of that great sobbing howl.

“Yes. It does matter.”

“Look, Jess, I know things have been difficult in this house over the last few months. And I know you didn’t sleep very well last night. So I’m going to ignore your tone of voice. But you have to trust me and Si and the doctors. And you have to eat your breakfast.”

I sit down. I try my bacon, toy with my egg. In the right-hand pocket of my trousers I can feel the weight of the flask. Calm this morning, colourless. But opalescent on the day the twins were born, its cork bursting from its throat, and then black and howling the night that Clem took a dip.

“Do you ever think,” I ask Gran, “that things are more…” I want to use the word joined, the word that’s been stuck in my head for weeks, but I choose to say connected. “Do you think things are more connected than they might appear?”

Gran is eating toast. “I’m not sure I understand you, Jess.”

“That there are more things on earth than can be explained by – well, science?”

“Are we talking God?” asks Gran.

“No!” Actually, I think we’re talking Si; I’m talking about whether there is more in the universe than can be explained by my stepfather.

“Ghosts?” she hazards.

Ghosts. That makes a patter in my heart. When did the flask come into my life? After Aunt Edie died. And where did it come from? Aunt Edie’s desk. Ghosts are spirits without bodies. Like the thing in the flask. And they arrive after people die…

“Jessica?”

“No, no!” I don’t want a ghost. A ghost is scary.

Scarier than the howls?

Besides – a ghost doesn’t make any sense. Not the ghost of Aunt Edie. I’d know that ghost, surely. And it – she – would know me. We’d chat, wouldn’t we? Hi Jess, it’s me, Aunt Edie, just came to see how you were getting on with your piano playing. And in any case, ghosts don’t exist, do they? Pug and his Mrs Nerg wouldn’t have anything to do with ghosts. Si wouldn’t have anything to do with ghosts. But is a ghost any more extraordinary than a disembodied something connected to the twins?

My mind is going round in circles. I blame Zoe. If Zoe and I were on speaking terms I wouldn’t be having to share all this with Gran.

“What do you mean then?” Gran asks.

“I was just thinking… last night – I couldn’t sleep, you couldn’t sleep and Clem – he wasn’t well. Maybe we somehow… sensed that?”

“Nice idea,” says Gran. “But a bit far-fetched. It’s just worry, I’m afraid. Keeps people awake all the time.” She gets up to reboil the kettle. “And knowing too much. Sometimes the less you know, the better.”

I say nothing. I don’t like the dig at Si. He told you the babies could die, didn’t he? Sometimes the less you know the better. I’m allowed to have a dig at him, but she isn’t. Why is that?

“You’ve always been a sensitive child, Jessica,” Gran continues. “And sometimes that’s a good thing.” She pauses. “And sometimes it’s a curse.”

“A curse?”

“You imagine things that simply aren’t there.”

“Last night,” I say, suddenly angry, “there was a howl, a terrible, terrible sobbing howl. Didn’t you hear it?”

“Jess love, it was a difficult night. You were tossing and turning. I know – I peeked in on you. I think you must have been dreaming.”

Dreaming?

I never actually saw the flask go black, did I? I never saw it pulse. When I did look at it, when light finally spilt into the room, it was just glassy, colourless, ordinary.

Though it had been blue. Fizz-heart, sky-happy blue. I definitely saw that.

Конец ознакомительного фрагмента.

Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес».

Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию на ЛитРес.

Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.