The Flask (6 page)

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.

And I saw

the cork on the floor

and

the light that didn’t travel in straight lines

and

the opalescence

and

the breathing and the flying

and

the little seed fish swimming

and…

“And that’s before we get to your overactive imagination,” Gran says. “Don’t forget – you are the girl who invented Spike.”

We don’t go to the hospital. Mum says the twins have to have tests.

“Plenty of clearing to do at my house,” says Gran.

She means Aunt Edie’s house.

“That’ll take our minds off things.”

Her mind, maybe.

In the car over, I don’t answer my phone when it rings. Gran doesn’t like me answering the phone when we’re in the middle of a conversation (although as it happens we’re not in the middle of a conversation) because she says it’s rude. But that’s not the reason why I don’t take my calls. I don’t take them because they are all from Zoe. By the time we arrive I have four missed calls and a text:
soz. SOZ cll me
. xx.

Besides, I need to think about Spike. Spike is small and blond and he never brushes his hair, so it’s always wild and knotted. He comes with me everywhere, or at least he used to. He arrived when I grew out of ScatCat, sometimes smiling and full of jokes, sometimes irritating and demanding. He’d hide when I wanted to speak to him or shout out right at the moment I tried to ride my bike without stabilisers. He’d knock my juice over. But at night he was always calm, and came to bed with me, laid his head on the pillow beside mine. Only he never slept. He spent the whole night watching over me.

I’m here, Jess, right here
.

Wacu. To be awake.

I’ll never leave you
.

To watch over.

I love you, Jess.

As Gran pulls up in her front drive, I realise I haven’t been in her house since the day of the funeral. And I haven’t been in the house next door – Aunt Edie’s house – since Aunt Edie was there to open the door to me.

In Gran’s porch is a blue-and-white china umbrella stand that used to be in Aunt Edie’s porch. It makes my stomach lurch.

I love you, Jess
.

“You’ll never guess what I found,” says Gran, leading me straight past the umbrella stand that is in all the wrong place and into the dining room. “Look.”

On the dining room table is a stack of Aunt Edie’s photo albums, the sort that have real old-fashioned photos in, ones on glossy paper, not the flimsy pixilated ones you print off the computer.

She points at a picture of me aged about four pushing an empty swing. Beneath the photo, there is a scrap of paper on which is written, in Aunt Edie’s loopy handwriting:
Jess and Spike
.

“Do you remember?”

Yes. For ever. I often pushed Spike on the swing. Spike liked the rhythm, it soothed him.

“For a whole three years, you wouldn’t go anywhere without him,” says Gran. “Jessica Walton and her imaginary friend, Spike.” She laughs. “And the sandwiches you got Edie to make for him! Every time you had a plate, he had to have one too.”

Then I remember something else. Aunt Edie made plates and plates of sandwiches for Spike – Marmite sandwiches, which were Spike’s favourite. But Gran, she never gave Spike food. Not one sandwich in three years.

The place where I join with Aunt Edie burns.

Gran’s and Aunt Edie’s gardens are both shaped like witches’ hats, wide close to the house and then narrowing to not much more than a compost heap where they back on to the park. The boundary between the two begins as a fence, making it quite clear which piece of land belongs to whom, but seventy feet further on there is just an increasingly tangled hedge where plants and boundary seem to twine together without end or beginning.

That makes me think of the twins and the web of their join and how they are both clearly separate and yet, beneath it all, they must tangle too.

The gate, which has a latch but no lock, is about a third of the way along, by Gran’s eucalyptus tree. I know it is a eucalyptus because Aunt Edie would sometimes crush a leaf in her hand as we passed.

“Smell this, Jess.”

The smell was pungent, fragrant, oily.

“That’s my tree,” Gran might say, in a tone that wasn’t quite a joke. “And I’ll thank you two to respect it.”

“It’s only a leaf,” Aunt Edie would retort “Just one leaf.”

They did bicker sometimes, Gran and Aunt Edie. Two increasingly old ladies: one who’d lost her husband early, one who’d never married. Sisters whose lives had joined along this boundary for over ten years.

Another pair of siblings joined.

I really hadn’t thought about that before, but I think about it now, as Gran presses down on the latch and the gate swings open as it has so many times before.

Aunt Edie’s house is to be sold. The gate will have to be locked, a bolt Gran’s side, a bolt the side of the new neighbours. Gran will never go through that gate again. I will never go through it again. It makes me want to unlatch the gate and run back and forth a thousand times.

It also makes me want to ask Gran how she is, how she’s feeling. Gran who has no husband and no son and now no sister. All her joins, her connections, broken. But I don’t know how to open that conversation.

Gran shuts the gate behind her and puts a bony arm around my shoulder. And then, as if she can read my mind she says, “I feel so lucky to have you, Jess.”

Gran opens the door of the glass lean-to (which Aunt Edie called the Sun Room) and we go in. The house smells damp and forgotten, as if it has been unlived in for years, not just for a couple of months.

I go straight into the drawing room which is where the piano is. The room runs the length of the house, and the piano is in the bay window to the front and the sofas around the fire to the rear. Only there aren’t any sofas any more. All the large items of furniture have gone, leaving a rolled-up carpet, a few piles of books and Aunt Edie’s ancient…

Ancient
… there’s Zoe again, nagging in my ear.

… ancient television. The piano, alone at the far end of the room, looks abandoned, cheerless. Its lid is down. Down! Aunt Edie’s piano lid was never down.

“Who’s going to have it?” I blurt out. “Who’s getting Aunt Edie’s piano? Where’s it going?”

“It’s not going anywhere,” says Gran quickly. “Well, only next door.”

“You’re going to have it?” I must sound astonished.

“It’s not that surprising,” says Gran.

“But you don’t play!”

“Ah, but you do. So instead of going to Aunt Edie’s to play, you can come to mine, can’t you?”

And I should be glad, I should be grateful. The piano isn’t to be sold, isn’t to go into some stranger’s house. It will be just next door, I can play it any time I want. Any time I visit. But I just feel like someone threw a blanket over my head, hot and suffocated.

“Of course I’ll have to make some space in my drawing room,” says Gran. “Move things about, send a few more bits and bobs to auction. But it’ll be worth it, Jess, to have you coming to play.”

I can’t meet her eyes, so I turn my back, go over to the piano, lift the lid and try a chord. Still in perfect tune.

“Are you pleased?” Gran asks.

“I love this piano,” I say. This at least is true.

“Oh, and one more thing. Look.” Gran scrabbles beside the pile of books. “I found this.”

It’s a pile of music – Bach, Beethoven, Chopin, Mozart.

“Bit beyond you for the moment, probably,” Gran says. “But practice makes perfect. You’ll be needing to come round to my house a lot.”