The Flask (17 page)

We are so involved in our conversation that we do not hear the front door latch and we are embracing when there are treads on the stairs. So we hear nothing until the door opens, and standing in the door frame, still in her outside coat, is Gran. She is not towering, she is not angry, in fact, she just looks old and frail and exhausted.

“I’m sorry,” I say immediately. “I’m really sorry, Gran.”

And she doesn’t shout. Not at all. She just presses her lips tight together, as if she’s trying to hold in some emotion, and her eyes squeeze up, and despite the outdoor coat, a big shudder goes through the whole of her body.

And then I go over to her, one hand holding the towel around me, one hand around her neck.

And she kisses the top of my head.

Kisses me.

There’s a long moment of silence and I feel (but cannot see) her looking out over my head and finally noticing Zoe.

“Hello Mrs Walton,” says Zoe.

“Hello Zoe,” says Gran.

“Zoe helped me,” I say. “It was Zoe who got me home, got me warm.”

Gran looks at Zoe and then at me and she nods. “Thank you, Zoe,” says Gran. “Thank you very much.” Then she adds, “Why don’t you put on a dressing gown, Jess, while I make us some tea and toast. Would you like toast, Zoe?”

And it’s the dressing gown that takes me by surprise. Gran is not a dressing gown person. More particularly, she is not in favour of people eating breakfast in their dressing gowns. She calls it
slack
. Gran thinks people who are going to make something of their lives get dressed in the morning.

Gran escorts Zoe out of the room and I slip on my nightie, dressing gown and slippers. In the pocket of the dressing gown, I put the flask.

Then I go downstairs and we all sit around the kitchen table and the mugs of tea steam and I eat four slices of hot buttered toast.

Eventually Zoe says thank you and she needs to be getting home, else her mum will worry (at this Gran flashes a not-quite-so-benign look at me) and then she turns to me.

“Bye Jess,” she says.

“Bye,” I say, “my best friend in the whole universe.”

Zoe smiles.

When she’s gone, I expect Gran to turn around and ask me to explain myself. But she doesn’t. More than this, she allows me to be in my dressing gown all day and all evening.

I think I love my gran.

The next day it’s as if the snow never existed. I look out of the window and I am astonished. The whole world has turned green and the sun is out. The sun is shining brilliantly.

I come downstairs (dressed) to see Gran staring out of the kitchen window.

“It’s an omen,” she says.

And I nod, because neither of us has to say the word
operation
, it just hangs in the air of the house. I imagine the babies being wheeled down the long corridor towards the operating theatre, Mum and Si walking close behind, holding hands, joined. I see the anaesthetists checking charts and flicking syringes and Mum and Si just looking at the babies’ faces as though it could be for the last time.

Which is what you would feel if you didn’t know how brightly the flask is shining this morning.

“How can it all have just gone?” I ask Gran of the snowless world.

“I’ve only seen it once before like this,” says Gran. “When I was a little girl, about the same age as you. Only that time it was just one day. It snowed in the night, really heavy snow, and in the morning we went out sledging with a sled my father made himself, and then, by the afternoon of the same day, there was nothing left at all. It was like a dream.”

Gran opens the back door. “Feel it,” she says. “Feel how warm it is.”

And I go and stand outside and feel the sun on my face and that reminds me of the mesembryanthemums in Aunt Edie’s garden and how their faces opened to the sun, and I feel something open out in me too.

“Shall we go out?” I say to Gran. “Before breakfast?”

There is no
before breakfast
in Gran’s life. Nothing can be achieved before breakfast.

“Yes,” says Gran. “Let’s.”

We put on jackets, but we could almost have gone out in T-shirts, short sleeves anyway. We walk down the close and take great gulps of air.

“It smells of…” I begin.

“… of summer,” Gran finishes.

“What is that smell?”

“I don’t know,” says Gran, sniffing again. “I’d like to say it’s flowers. But it isn’t. It’s just… a kind of warmth.”

“A promise,” I say.

“A promise?”

“That summer will come. That after the winter, summer will come.”

In my pocket, the flask that was so cold is warm to the touch.

“I’m not sure you can smell a promise,” says Gran.

But I think you can.

We pass the garage where Bruno Teisler built the ice mermaid. Not a single crystal of snow remains. Which is strange too, because isn’t it the compacted snow that usually remains? The giant snowballs, the thick trunks of snowmen? They sit solid for days no matter how green the grass around them. The lack of any trace of the mermaid makes me feel slightly (but only slightly) better about knocking her head off.

We’re not aiming for the park, we haven’t discussed where we’re going, but Gran and I arrive at the park.

Some blossom trees are out, not the heavy pink cherry kind, but the lighter paler sort.

“Apple,” says Gran. “It’s apple.”

And I look through the blossom up into the sky, which is a very pale blue with high, wispy clouds.

But it’s not sky or the blossom that’s so extraordinary, it’s the tiny shoots of green on almost every tree and bush and plant in the park. They look to me suddenly like tiny green flames, as if the whole park will soon combust in a great conflagration of green.

“Look at the flower buds,” says Gran.

And I hadn’t noticed those.

Tight buds on the rose bushes, their delicate pinks masked with a kind of papery, brown exterior petal.

“And this is choisya, I think,” says Gran, bending down to examine a dark green bush dense with tiny white buds. “It will smell amazing in a few weeks.”

The whole park is pulsing with the promise of new life.

Then we see the butterfly.

“It’s a Red Admiral,” I say, “isn’t it?”

Gran nods and I concentrate on its bright colours and its delicate, delicate, beating wings.

“How could it survive?” I ask Gran. “How could it survive the snow?”

“I don’t know,” she says. “Maybe it didn’t. Maybe it came out of its chrysalis just this morning.”

I don’t know if this is true, but I want it to be true. I want this beautiful creature to have been born today, liberated today, come into the world today. This day of my brothers’ operation.

Beating wing.

Beating heart.

I watch it flutter from bush to bush, looking for some place of welcome, an open flower, then flutter on, searching wider, trying harder. And then just lift into the sky where I watch it, outlined against the sky.

Then I have the strangest sense that I too am fluttering, growing, promising. That I’m totally myself, Jessica Walton, but that I’m also a leaf unfurling, a rosebud waiting to bloom, a cloud scudding across the sky, a butterfly on the wing. That I belong to myself, but also to the whole world, that I’m part of it, every cell of mine indivisible from every other cell in the universe. It only lasts a moment this feeling, but it pierces me with happiness and with hope.

“Gran?” I say.

“Yes, Jess?”

“Can we go to Aunt Edie’s house?”

“Why?” asks Gran.

“I want to play the piano.”

She takes me to Aunt Edie’s in the afternoon.

“Might as well,” she says. The sun is still shining, but Gran’s mood has darkened. She’s thinking, but not saying, that this is about the most dangerous time for the twins, Phase 4, when the team of surgeons will divide their single liver.

“We can’t discount the possibility of haemorrhage.” That’s what the doctors say. That’s what they fear. In her dark afternoon, Gran is afraid.

I am not afraid.

The flask is green.

Not lurid, electric green as it was when it stood in front of the green buttons of my Wi-Fi router, but the bold, gorgeous green of nature. It came in, a flame at a time, with the tiny shoots of new life on the trees in the park. It pushed itself through the misty white and gold, like young blades of grass. All through the day the green has come, promising pulsing spring. Now there is nothing left of white and gold, the flask is just one whole globe of green.

We don’t go through the little side gate; we park in Gran’s drive and walk around the road way to Aunt Edie’s front door.

“I’ve got the piano men coming next week,” Gran says. “This will be the last time you can play the piano in Edie’s house.”

And previously that would have chilled me, but it doesn’t today because today is full of hope and glory.

I go straight to Aunt Edie’s sitting room and I hope Gran won’t follow me and she doesn’t. Perhaps she knows I need to be alone now.

I set the shining green world of the flask on top of the piano.

“Now,” I say. “It’s now, isn’t it?”

I can hear the notes, of course I can, they began to come when we walked in the park. They pushed into my mind along with the blades of grass.

I lay my hand on the hair from the lion’s mane, and around it a chord builds, quite easily, fluently, as though it could never be or have been any chord but the one that finds itself under my fingers. It makes me think of Aunt Edie and how music flowed out of her hands. Alongside the lion are other notes from ‘For Rob’, but they don’t make you want to cry, they are not a lament. It’s the same music, but not the same music at all, it’s a mirror reflection, stronger, more powerful. I realise then where this song is heading, what the mirror is: all the minor chords of ‘For Rob’, they have parallels in the major keys. If I can stretch my hands and my mind then I will find this jubilant thing, this thing that has been just out of my reach for so long.

“It’s what you showed me in the park?” I say to the flask. “Yes?”

This possibility, this song which says that God’s creation cannot fail. Everything counts: the tiniest trill of the sweetest bird to the loudest most crashing crescendo wave. They all have their part to play in the whole beautiful pattern and rhythm of life. Only I still can’t hear it all, there’s something missing.

“What is it? Tell me! You must know this song. You sang it first.”

The flask glows and glows.

But the ending will not come. It makes me feel like I’m on the edge of a cliff suspended – I could fall, I could fly, fall, fly…

The door opens.

Someone comes in.

It’s not Gran.

It’s no one I know. In fact, it’s three people I don’t know.

Three people in Aunt Edie’s house, I haven’t heard coming because I’ve been all wrapped up in the music.

I fall. Or at least my hands do – off the piano.

There’s a man in a sharp suit with a fat tie and scrubbed-clean face who looks startled, and a young couple, at least I think they’re a couple, because of the way they’re standing, so close they’re almost joined, barely a kiss apart.

“That was nice,” says the woman, nodding at the piano. “Really nice.”

Nice. This song of creation.

Nice.

But she means it kindly, I see that. She’s got warm brown eyes.

The fat tie man taps at his clipboard. “I wasn’t expecting anyone,” he says, “to be in.”

Then I see what the woman is carrying. A sheet of paper with a picture of Aunt Edie’s house on it, and below the picture, details of all Aunt Edie’s rooms, the precise measurements, a layout of the ground floor, a layout of the first floor. And a price.

Aunt Edie’s house is for sale and here is the estate agent and a couple who might come into this house and repaint the walls (well, actually they need repainting), and fill the rooms with their own furniture, and perhaps have a baby here. A baby of their own.

“You’re her granddaughter,” says Fat Tie. “Is that right? Mrs Walton’s granddaughter?”

I say nothing.

“Nice room,” says the man, beginning to explore, to look out of Aunt Edie’s bay window. “Spacious.”

The woman hasn’t moved though. “Don’t let us disturb you,” she says again. “You just go right on playing.”

But, of course, I can’t.

The husband comes up behind his wife and slides his hand around her waist. “Your piano would fit here,” he says. “Wouldn’t it?”

“Yes,” she says.

And then Fat Tie says, “Of course, the conservatory is a huge asset to the house,” and he takes them through the Sun Room and out into the garden.

I want to start the song again, but I can’t. There is only one way back into the house and it’s through this room. Even if Fat Tie takes the couple right to the end of the witch’s hat garden where the compost heap is, and even if they stop off on the way back to inspect the gate through to Gran’s garden or observe how her eucalyptus tree leans over the joint fence, they will not be gone very long. They will be back, disturbing my song again.

I pick the flask up off the piano, hold it in my hands. It’s green and quiet.

“But you don’t mind, do you?”

No reply.

“You could have sung and you didn’t. Yes?”

No reply.

“So when? If not now? When?”

No reply.

I put the flask back on the piano. I will have to wait again. Listen. Be patient.

“A song always chooses its own time. Yes?”

I can hear voices from the garden. I haven’t thought of the people coming to buy Aunt Edie’s house before. I’ve blocked them out, not wanting anyone to tread in the sacred places that were Edie’s. Edie’s and mine.

But if someone has to buy this house, I hope suddenly that it will be this young couple with their near-kiss join and their hopes and their piano. Or her piano anyway.

Soon enough they’re back.

Fat Tie is all for pushing them quickly through the room, but the woman hovers, comes close to the piano, looks at me, looks at the flask.

“That’s a very beautiful object,” she says. “I like the way,” she pauses, “it seems to capture the light.”

“Capture the light?” I repeat.

Can she see it? Can this total stranger see it?

“Yes,” she says. “It’s very unusual, isn’t it?” She smiles. “Like your playing,” she adds. “Did you make up that piece yourself?”

“Sort of,” I say.

She nods. “If we buy this house,” she says, “I will always remember you. You – and your music.”

Then I’m pierced again with a hope and a happiness, which lasts right up until the evening.

When Si rings.