The Flask (21 page)

It’s a school day when the twins finally come home.

“Can I come and see them?” says Zoe. “Can I, can I, can I?”

Of course, I say yes, although Zoe, being Zoe, would have bounded in anyway.

The space in the hall that used to be the perfect place for the Tinkerbell upright piano, is now perfect for a double buggy. All the equipment in our house is double, including the Moses baskets on their double rocker in the playroom.

“When they get bigger,” says Mum, greeting me, greeting Zoe, “they’ll have a basket each, although they’ll rock together. You see how one push moves both baskets? But for now…”

For now, the babies are small enough still to be side by side, lying together on some floaty blue mattress surrounded by floaty white blankets. They look like they dropped straight from heaven and are still clutching little bits of sky and cloud.

Zoe looks in the basket. Both boys are fast asleep, their lips wobbling with dreams. “Oh,” she exclaims. “Oh, look at them. They’re so cute, so gorgeous, so… scrunchy.”

“Scrunchy?”

“Yumptious. Yummy. I could eat them up.”

“You could?” I peer in the basket. I try to see my brothers as Zoe sees them, and for the first time, they don’t fill me with fear. There they are in their basket, quite ordinary.

“Yes,” I say, “they’re adorable.”

“Couple of pests,” says Mum. “That’s what they are. You don’t have to get up in the night for them.” But she’s smiling like she just invented the universe.

“Can I come and see them often?” says Zoe.

“Of course,” says Mum.

“I’ll help them build bricks.”

Mum laughs. “Not for a bit.”

“And I’ll dance for them too. And in a few years, when you and Si and Jess want to go out, I could babysit them.”

“We’ll see,” says Mum.

I like the fact that Zoe has my brothers in her future, it helps me believe they are really here to stay. I’m glad she sees me in her future too, the two of us together. Friends. The idea that I was all for hating her, refusing to speak to her, chopping her out of my life – that all seems very strange to me now. But then perhaps you can’t really love a person unless you can hate them too, that it’s the flip side of the same coin. I mean, nobody hates an acquaintance, do they? You have to feel powerfully about someone to be able to hate them.

“When are they going to wake up?” says Zoe.

“Not for a bit,” says Mum. “They’ve only just gone down.”

“Oh,” says Zoe, all disappointment.

“You’ll have to come back another time.”

“Can I?” says Zoe. “Can I come back tomorrow and the day after that and the day after that?”

“You’ll get bored,” says Mum.

“No, I won’t.”

She will, of course, but Mum just smiles and I smile too.

When Zoe leaves, Mum and I sit quietly in the playroom with the sleeping babies. The late-afternoon sun pours through the French doors. After a while Mum says, “What are you thinking, Jess?”

As it happens, I’m thinking two things simultaneously. I’m thinking how Em will come and visit the babies and Alice too, and maybe even Paddy. And then the visiting will stop, and we’ll know they really are here to stay. Clem. Richie. Nothing to remark upon. I’m also thinking about love and hate. How I hated Si when he said he was my parent and he wasn’t, and how I loved him when he mended the timing chain so the babies wouldn’t die, and so maybe it is right that you can’t love someone without being able to hate them too. I try to explain the hate thing to Mum.

“Only with you,” I tell Mum, “it doesn’t work, because I’ve never hated you.”

Mum laughs that very gentle, beautiful laugh she has.

“Plenty of time yet,” she says. “You probably just need to get a little older.”

“But I don’t want to hate you!”

“And I don’t want you to hate me. The point is only that you have the option; you can. You can feel safe to.” She pauses. “Sometimes, when a child loses a parent, rowing with the only parent they have left feels dangerous.”

“So you mean if I had a row with you, I’d be being brave?”

“Yes. Exactly.”

“I’ll think about it,” I say.

“But then you’re brave anyway,” says Mum. “Brave and very special. But I think I’ve said that before.”

“Not about brave,” I say.

Mum smiles. “Speaking of which, it all looks fine with Zoe now?”

“Yes. Closer than we were before, I think.”

“That’s how it goes,” says Mum. “It’s only when you’re on the point of losing something – someone – that you really know what you’ve got.”

“That’s not what you said last time.”

“Oh?”

“You said we might be growing out of each other.”

“I offered it as a possibility, that’s all. That it’s OK to move on sometimes.”

“And also OK to stay together. To make it work.”

“Yes, of course.”

“You know what, Mum?”

“What?”

“Sometimes I think, Zoe and me, we might grow old together, be on our Zimmer frames together. Live next door to each other maybe, like Gran and Aunt Edie.”

“So long as you don’t bicker like they did.”

“Well, maybe we will.”

“Yes,” says Mum. “Maybe you will.”

The front door opens. Si is home, but I haven’t finished with this conversation yet.

“What’s a soul, Mum?” I ask, not quite out of the blue.

“Mmm?” says Mum. She’s listening to Si, the noise he makes in the hall with his keys and a drawer. “Sole fish, sole shoe, soul as in not-body?”

“Soul as in not-body.”

“Well, your spirit, I guess. Your essential spirit.” Mum looks in her sons’ basket. “The colour with which your life burns.”

Iridescent pearl and fizz-heart summer sky blue and moonlit white and lion-mane gold and new-shoot green and fluttering pink and even howling black.

“Is that what you meant?” asks Mum.

I don’t have a chance to reply before Si comes in.

He’s obviously overheard us talking because (as he looks in at the twins and gives Mum a peck on the cheek) he says, “Not what the Romans would have said. Anima – that’s the word they had for the soul. Not so much colour as wind or breath. Did you know that?”

“No,” says Mum.

“I did,” I say. Strong as a storm wind, tiny as a baby’s breath.

“Oh,” says Si. “That school of yours must be doing a better job than I thought.”

Si goes upstairs to change out of his suit. I keep looking at the babies, expecting them to wake.

“Babies always sleep longer than you think,” says Mum. “Sleep, feed, excrete, sleep. That’s pretty much it for babies.”

“But I want them to be awake,” I say. “I want to play a song for them.”

“Well, play away. They’ll hear it in their dreams. Your aunt Edie always said that – people respond to music even when they’re asleep.”

“I never heard Aunt Edie say that.”

“You weren’t the only person Edie spoke to, you know, Jess.” Mum gets up. “Suppose I better start thinking about making some food for the rest of us.”

As she heads for the kitchen, I draw the rocking Moses baskets closer to the piano. I want to be able to see the babies’ faces as I play.

“This is ‘Spring Garden’,” I announce. “One of Aunt Edie’s favourite pieces. This is the grass growing. Can you hear the grass, Richie? And this bit’s the cherry trees, bursting into bloom. Can you hear the blossom? And the birds, singing in the tree? Can you hear the birds, Clem? Are you dreaming birds?”

I lean over the baskets. Clem is not dreaming anything, Richie is still fast asleep, but his brother is awake. Clem is wide awake.

“Oh, Clem, do you like it? Do you?”

No reply.

Bit like the flask.

“I’ll teach you. I’ll teach you everything I know. Everything Aunt Edie taught me. Would you like that?”

No reply.

But he’s listening, he’s listening to the music and also to the sound of my voice.

“You’ll be good,” I say. “You’ll be a brilliant player, you know that?”

No reply. He’s staring at the ceiling.

“Better than me, I reckon, because of your beautiful soul. You owe that to Rob you know, Edie’s Rob. You got to be really lucky there, Clem.”

A little munching sound of his lips.

“You’re scrunchy, Clem. You really are. Why don’t you chat back?”

Clem scrunches and munches.

“I love you,” I hear myself say before I realise that Mum is standing in the doorway.

“Has he woken up?” she asks.

How does Mum know that?

“I think he’s going to be a better player than me,” I say. “Clem. Better at the piano. Better at songs.”

“Oh, I don’t know about that,” says Mum.

But I do. I know it like Mum knows that Clem has woken up even though she wasn’t in the room and he never made a sound. I imagine all the family standing around Clem when he’s nine or ten, or thirteen or fourteen. I imagine them saying,
Where did all this boy’s music come from
?

And Si saying, “It can’t have been from my family.”

And Mum saying, “Nor mine for that matter.”

And me saying, “It came from Aunt Edie.”

And both of them laughing and saying that although Edie was my aunt, she wasn’t Clem’s aunt; she’s only a relation through my father, so it can’t be that.

Which is where they’re going to be wrong.

“Maybe it was you,” Mum might add. “Maybe it’s you that has helped Clem get where he is?”

And that will be wrong too, but not wholly wrong.

Aunt Edie’s house is sold.

“To the couple you met,” says Gran. “The ones that looked around the house the day of the twins’ op.”

“I’m glad,” I say. “I liked them.”

“Yes,” says Gran. “So did I. She’s pregnant apparently, so there’ll be a baby in the house soon.”

“And she plays the piano,” I say.

“Oh, how do you know that?”

“She talked about it, or her husband did.”

If we buy this house I will always remember you and your music
.

“Do you want to go around one more time?” asks Gran. “Say goodbye to the house and all that?”

“No,” I say, perhaps too fast. “Thank you.” Without Edie, without the piano, the house is, well, it’s like the flask. Empty.

“Fair enough,” says Gran.

“There is one thing I would like though,” I say. “As I’m here.”

“What’s that, Jess?”

“A sprig of eucalyptus.”

Gran doesn’t ask why I want a sprig from her eucalyptus tree, she just goes to the kitchen drawer and gets out her secateurs.

“Come on then.”

We go to the gate between the houses, which is bolted shut, and stand by the eucalyptus tree.

“Do you want to do it yourself?”

“Yes, please.”

“Remember to cut it at an angle, and just above a leaf stem. It’s better for the plant that way.”

I cut a small piece, only five or six leaves long.

“That’s not much,” says Gran.

“It’s enough,” I say.

“I think I’ll take some too,” says Gran, and she cuts herself a number of small silvery branches and then adds some orange trumpet daffodils from the border.

She offers me daffs too, but I say no.

“Sure?”

“Sure.”

“Suit yourself.”

She arranges her flowers and then soaks some kitchen roll in water to wrap around my single eucalyptus stem.

“That should keep it moist till you get back home.”

“Thanks, Gran.”

“Do you know what eucalyptus means, Jess?”

“I didn’t know it meant anything.”

“Most plants are supposed to have some sort of properties. Eucalyptus is usually associated with protection. And healing.”

When I get my little piece of healing home, Mum says, “Do you need a vase for that, Jess?”

But I’ve already got one.

Because this is what I have decided to make of my marvellous empty flask. I fill the flask from the tap in the bathroom, and when the water gets up to the neck, there’s a sudden rush of bubbles so, just for a moment, it looks like there are little seed fish. Swimming.

I don’t know how or why, but the bubbles keep on coming long after I put in the eucalyptus stem, some of them rise to the surface of the water and burst, but others, millions of others, cling to the inside of the glass like stars in a tiny galaxy. I stand the flask on my bedroom window sill, put it in the exact spot where the breath used to sit and wait. Late-spring sunshine slants in dead straight lines through the windowpane, but the mountainous whorls and the impurities of the glass – and the bubbles – tease and refract that light so my little flask shines and shimmers, just as I hoped it would.

And of course my stem of eucalyptus will die, because everything that lives dies, I have learnt that. When that happens, I’ll go out into the garden or into the wood behind the park and I’ll find something new: a leaf, a blade of grass, a bluebell, a nettle perhaps. In high summer, I might ask Mum for a rose. A pink rose in bud with brown papery petals outside. Because everyday things are made anew, I’ve learnt that too. The vase will hold all of these treasures and every time one falls away, another will rise.

So there will be a rhythm to the flowers and a rhythm to my remembering. And when Clem’s old enough, maybe I’ll tell him about Rob and the flask and how there are always things in the universe bigger than your understanding.

But then again, when I look in his fizz-heart blue eyes, I think he may know that already.