The Flask

Dedication

For my daughter Molly,

who taught me everything I needed to know to write this book,

and who is teaching me still.

Contents

I find the flask the day the twins are born, so I think of these things as joined, as the twins are joined.

The flask is in the desk, though it is hidden at first, just as the desk itself is hidden, shrouded inside the word
bureau
– which is what my gran calls this lump of furniture that arrives in my room. I hate the desk. I hate the bureau. It is a solid, everyday reminder that my aunt Edie is dead.

Aunt Edie isn’t – wasn’t – my real aunt, she was my great-aunt, so of course she must have been old.

“Ancient,” says my friend Zoe. “Over sixty.”

Old and small and wrinkled, with skin as dry as paper.

No.

Her bright blue eyes gone milky with age.

No. No!

My aunt Edie blazed.

At the bottom of her garden there was a rockery in which she grew those tiny flowers that keep themselves closed up tight, refusing to unfurl until the sun comes out. They could be closed up for hours, for days, and then suddenly burst into life, showing their dark little hearts and their delicate white petals with the vivid pink tips. That’s what I sometimes thought about Aunt Edie and me. That I was the plant all curled up and she was the blazing sun. That she, and only she, could open up my secret heart.

A week after her death, I find myself standing by that rockery staring at the bare earth.

“Looking for the mesembryanthemums?” says Si. Si’s my stepfather and he’s good with long words.

I say nothing.

“They’re annuals, those flowers, the ones you used to like. Don’t think she had the chance to plant any this year.”

I say nothing.

“What’re you thinking, Jess?”

Si is good with questions. He’s good with answers. He’s good at talking. He’s been talking in my life since I was two.

“About the music,” I say.

I’m thinking about Aunt Edie and the piano in her drawing room. About how her tiny hands used to fly over the keys and the room fill with the sound of her music and her laughter. I’m thinking about the very first time she lifted me on to the stool to sit beside her as she played. I must have been about three years old. There was no music on the stand in front of her, she played, as she always did, from memory, or she just made stuff up. But I didn’t know that then. I thought the music was in her hands. I thought music flowed out of people’s fingers.

“Come on, Jess, your turn now!”

And that very first day, she put my hands next to hers. My hands on the keys of the piano, the keys to a new universe. And, of course, I can’t have made a tune, I must have crashed and banged, but that’s not how I remember it. I remember that she could make my fingers flow with music too. I remember my dark little heart opening out.

After that I couldn’t climb on to that stool fast enough. Every time I went to her house, I would pull her to the piano and she would lift me, laughing. When I sat on that stool nothing else in the world existed. Just me and Edie and the music. Time passed and my legs got longer. I didn’t need to be lifted on to the stool. And still we played. Hidden little me – unfurling.

“Where shall we go, Jess?” she’d ask “What’s your song today?”

My song.

Our song.

I thought it would last for ever.

Then she was dead. It was Gran who found her. Gran and Aunt Edie were sisters. They had keys to each other’s houses, had lived next door to each other for the best of forever. In the fence that separates their gardens there is a little gate. During daylight hours, summer and winter, they kept their back doors open, and you never knew, if you called on them, in whose house you’d find them. So they were joined too.

All sorts of things I’d thought of as separate before the twins were born turn out to be joined.

The whole family gathers at the crematorium for the funeral. The hearse is late. My cousin Alistair, who is only five, keeps asking when Aunt Edie is going to arrive. Finally, the hearse turns up with the great brass-handled coffin.

“But where’s Aunt Edie?” persists Alistair.

The grown-ups hush him, but I know what he means. You’re invited to Aunt Edie’s for tea and there she is with a plate of Marmite sandwiches. You’re invited to her funeral, why wouldn’t she be there too? Aunt Edie at the crematorium with a plate of Marmite sandwiches.

Besides, as I know (and Alistair obviously knows), you can’t put the sun in a box.

After the service there is a party at Gran’s which Si calls a
wake
. I don’t ask about the word
wake
but Si, with his Best Explaining Voice, tells me anyway. The old English root of the word, which means
being awake
, he says, changed in late medieval times to
wacu
. He pronounces this like
wacko
. It means
watching over someone
, he tells me. People used to sit up overnight, apparently, with dead bodies, watching.

I wacu the wacko people at the wacu. There are some I don’t know and no one else seems to know them either as they are standing in a corner by themselves. Mum is sitting on the window seat, weighed down by the coming birth. I listen to her hiccup, she can barely breathe because of the two babies pressed together inside her. She asks me to take some sandwiches to the newcomers. There’s one plate of Marmite so I take that. The strangers – two men and a woman – don’t notice me at first because they are deep in conversation. They’re talking about Aunt Edie’s money and about who is going to get it as she doesn’t have any children of her own and therefore no grandchildren.

“Sandwich?” I say.

“Oh – and who do we have here?” says the woman, as though I just morphed into a three-year-old.

“Jessica,” I say. No one calls me Jessica unless they’re angry with me. But I don’t like this woman with her hard face and very pink lipstick and I don’t want her to call me Jess, which is what the people I love call me.

“And what’s in the sandwiches, Jessica?”

“Marmite.”

“Oh – not for me, thanks.”

“It was Aunt Edie’s favourite,” I say.

“Why don’t you have one then, Jessica?” the woman says.

I have three. I stand there munching them in front of those strangers even though I’m not in the least hungry. When I’ve finished I say, “Aunt Edie left everything to Gran.”

Si told me that too.

Si doesn’t believe in keeping things from children.

Later Gran says, “I want to give you something, Jess; something of Edie’s.” She pauses. “Edie would have wanted that. What would you like, Jess?”

I do not say
the
desk
.

I certainly do not say
the bureau
.

I say, “The piano.”

This cannot be a surprise to my grandmother, but her hand flies to her mouth as if, instead of saying
the piano
, I’d said
the moon
.

“I don’t know,” says Gran from behind her hand. “I don’t know about that. I mean, I’ll have to talk it over with your mum. And Si.”

Mum says, “You already have a piano, Jess.”

This is true and not true. There is a piano in our house, an old upright, offered – free of charge – to anyone who cared to remove it when the Tinkerbell Nursery closed down when I was about six. I jumped at the chance of a piano – any piano. But the keys of the Tinkerbell piano were hit for too long by too many small fingers with no music in them at all. The felt of the piano’s hammers is worn and the C above middle C always sticks and the top A doesn’t sound at all, no matter what the piano tuner does.

Aunt Edie’s piano has a full set of working notes. Aunt Edie’s piano keeps its pitch even though it’s only tuned once a year. Aunt Edie’s piano holds all the songs we ever made together.

It’s also a concert grand.

Si says, “This is a small house, Jess.”

This is also true and not true. The house is small, but the garage is huge.

Si says, “You can’t keep a piano in a garage, Jessica.”

And you can’t. Not when the garage is full up with bits and pieces for your stepfather’s Morris 1000 Traveller. And the Traveller itself. And the
donor
cars he keeps for spare parts.

“What about the bureau?” says Gran.

“Bureau?” I say.

“Desk,” says Si. “A desk’s a great idea. A girl your age can’t be doing her homework at the kitchen table for ever.”

“It belonged to my father, Jess,” says Gran. “Your great-grandfather.”

But I never met my great-grandfather. I don’t care about him, and I don’t care about his desk.

But it still arrives.

That’s when I learn you don’t always get what you want in life, you get what you’re given.

Which is how it is for the twins.