The Flask (11 page)

Si has barely been home since I informed him he was not my parent, and when he does finally appear, he goes straight into the garage and gets out Roger the Wreck’s trolley.

“I have to fix the timing chain,” he announces.

It’s the timing chain that drives the camshaft which, in turn, opens the valves which let the fuel mixture in and the exhaust out. I know this because, for nearly a year, Si’s been talking about the function and importance of a timing chain and how this particular one could break at any time on account of The Rattle.

“Hear that rattle, Jess?”

Actually, no. Mainly because this boneshaker of a car makes so many bangs and clatters and rattles that distinguishing The Rattle from any number of other rattles is beyond me.

“It’s a very distinctive sound,” says Si. “Like a bike chain slipping.”

And the faster the car goes, the louder the rattle.

Apparently.

Anyway, here we are on Good Friday, and Si is all overalled up with his tools laid out beside him.

“I have to fix it today,” says Si.

For a whole year he hasn’t fixed it.

Why now?

And then I have a totally non-scientific, non-rational thought about the timing chain. Maybe that’s why it’s called a timing chain, because the timing is crucial. Si has to fix the chain today otherwise… otherwise…

Otherwise what?

The monsters will get us.

Have you ever played the Pavement Crack Game? Zoe and I used to play it all the time.
If we step on a single crack between paving stones on the way to the park, the monsters will get us
. Aged five, Zoe and I knew every crack between the cul-de-sac and the swings. We never stepped on a single one, and that’s how we kept safe.

I decide the broken timing chain is a crack. If we can mend it today, Si and I, then the monsters won’t come. They won’t get me, and more importantly, they won’t get the twins.

“Do you need some help?” I ask Si.

He stands quite still then and looks me straight in the eye and I hold his gaze. Si can talk for England, but he doesn’t talk now. Which makes me want to say I’m sorry about the parent thing, but I don’t know how to, so I just go to the back of the garage and find a pair of blue overalls. As I roll up the sleeves and the trouser legs, I remember how this man, who is not my father, used to lift me on to his shoulders at the end of a walk too long for my toddler legs. I remember how he was never impatient with me when, with Mum already waiting in the car, I cried for him to take me back into the house so I could check on Spike. And, speaking of monsters, I also remember how he would make sure to close the door of my wardrobe at night because he knew I feared the things which lurked there in the dark. I return to Si looking like the Michelin man. I still don’t say anything to him but he speaks to me.

“Thank you, Jess,” he says. “Thank you very much. I could really use some help today.”

And he smiles one of those smiles like incense.

“First up, the radiator then,” says Si.

He begins by loosening the radiator hoses, talking as he goes, explaining what he’s doing and I’d forgotten this about his maintenance work, how very instructive it is, as though he’s passing on wisdom that will, one day, allow me to construct an entire engine from scrap metal and memory alone.

I help him lift the radiator out.

“Now for the crank pulley bolts,” he says. “Pass me the wrench.”

And I do. Like I’m some junior doctor in an operating theatre.

Which, of course, makes me think of the twins. Although, in fact, I’m never not thinking about the twins.

“Mum told me,” I say, “about the tests. About how they share a liver.”

“Yes,” says Si. “Not great news.”

“So what do the doctors say now then?” I ask. “About the operation?”

“Depends which one you ask,” says Si, as he puts metal to metal and turns. “At the last count there were about twenty-two of them.”

“Twenty-two!”

“Four surgeons, four anaesthetists… Can you pass me that hammer?” I pass him the little copper mallet and he begins a soft tap tap tapping. “Remember, always go gently on a crank pulley,” he says, tap tap tapping. “Although they won’t all be in the operating theatre at once. They have to work in shifts… Ah, here we go.” The crank pulley comes out. “Now for the timing chain cover. Ratchet please, and socket.”

There are about twenty small tubular attachments in the socket tray. “What size?” I ask.

“9/16th should do it, I reckon.”

I pass him the relevant socket and he screws it on to the ratchet head.

“But when are they going to do it?” I ask. “The op?”

“Not for a few months yet,” says Si. His arm is deep inside the car engine. “It’s safer for the babies if they can grow a bit first. Hmm. I think I’m going to have to go at this from underneath.”

I get out the jack for him and wheel it under a jack point.

“Haven’t forgotten everything then, have you?” says Si. And he’s pleased with me, and right now, I like him being pleased with me.

He cranks the car up and then goes to fetch the trolley.

And with the trolley come the twins, of course, one underneath the car and one hopping about for a spanner.

“And what,” I say, “what are their…” Only I can’t finish the sentence.

“Chances?” says Si. “Good. Basically good, I think. But no one’s really prepared to stick their neck out. There are so many different factors to be taken into consideration.”

He slips himself under the car and I go with him, elbowing my way along the oily cardboard so I’m lying right beside him. Almost as close, I think, as Clem is to Richie. But not quite.

“If it was just their livers that were joined, that would be one thing. But it’s also the lower sternum and the ribs and some part of the abdominal cavity and…” He pauses to fit the socket head over the lowest bolt.

“But the heart, they don’t share a heart,” I say. I hadn’t realised I’d been hanging on to this fact. “That’s the main thing, isn’t it?”

“Well, apparently there may be a small joining of the pericardium, after all.” He begins to turn the wrench. “That’s the covering of the heart. And Clem’s VSD doesn’t help and…” He spins the ratchet. “Ow! Ow! Jeez!” A stream of curses follows.

Instead of catching the bolt, he’s caught his knuckles.

He kicks himself out from under the car, still cursing, and I elbow my way out behind him.

His knuckles are bleeding and I don’t like the blood, not because my stepfather is hurting, but because the blood came when he was speaking about Clem and that brings the monsters closer. I mean, why did it have to be Clem, the weaker twin, the one who
dips
– why did it have to be Clem’s name all spilt and spattered with blood?

“Half-inch,” says Si, sucking at his fist. “Should have used a half-inch not a 9/16th. Idiot.”

I need to do something to help. “Shall I get you a plaster?”

“Yes – over there.” He nods at a cabinet at the other end of the garage, beneath the Morris Authorised Dealer sign and a bunch of red onions. “Top drawer, I think.”

I find an old box with a random selection of different-sized plasters and help him patch himself up. Mum would have made him wash his hands first.

“First rule of mechanics – check your socket size. Right. Let’s try again.”

I hand him a half-inch socket and we both resume positions underneath the car. This time the bolts come away easily.

He removes the timing chain cover and then slides out again.

“We’ll do the timing marks from up top,” he says. “They need to be lined up and the crank has to be at TDC,” he says. “Do you remember TDC?”

“Top Dead Centre,” I say.

“That’s my girl!” he says.

His girl.

He works in silence for a while, but his mind, not unlike mine, remains with the twins, because then he says, “There’ll be a rehearsal operation first.”

“What?”

“A rehearsal. When they go through everything. Who’s going to do what on the day. So, unlike us, they don’t end up with the wrong-sized socket.”

“But what if they do end up with something wrong?”

He pauses. “They won’t. That’s the point of the rehearsal.” He smiles, but this time it’s a little tight. “Come on now – chain tensioner.”

He fiddles with something I can’t see and the timing chain comes free. It looks nothing much, it looks like a slightly bigger version of a bicycle chain. Yet it can rattle and break and make the engine fail. The car remains all mixed up with Clem.

“Now all we have to do,” Si says, holding the new chain, “is fit this little beauty and redo everything in reverse order.”

But it doesn’t happen quite that way because, when he’s fitted the new chain and checked the timing marks again and refitted the tensioner, he has to turn the crankshaft two revolutions and when he does that one of the chain teeth jumps and the timing marks are out of alignment.

“Typical!” he says. He looks at his watch. “Maybe we should break,” he says. “Get some lunch.”

“No,” I say, “we have to finish it. Get the job done. Now.”

“Since when did you become chief mechanic?” he says, but he’s smiling as he starts all over again.

I wonder then what will happen with the babies if something goes wrong, because an operation is not like a car, and the doctors won’t just be able to start it all over again, will they?

Eventually Si gets the cover back on and checks and seals the new gasket so it doesn’t leak oil. Then he reassembles the radiator. It’s late, late into the afternoon now.

“Now for the moment of truth,” Si says, and he starts the engine.

The car coughs and spits and rattles, and then roars into life.

“Fantastic,” he says. “Listen.”

I listen.

“Not a peep,” he says, face beaming.

So we won this one, I think, despite the blood on Clem. We’ve kept the monsters at bay.

Si turns the engine off, gets out and pats the car on the bonnet. “My perfect, perfect little moggie.”

I think about perfect.

I think about this Morris Traveller 1000, Si’s little moggie, which still rattles and bangs and splutters, but is – according to its loving owner – perfect.

I think about the flask, which is slightly lopsided, the glass of one of its shoulders slightly thicker than the other. I actually go upstairs and hold it in my hand. The little seed fish (which aren’t swimming today) are actually blemishes, bubbles in the glass which shouldn’t really be there, mistakes in the glassmaking process. These imperfections are also the beautiful part of the flask. They are what shimmer and shine as the flask breathes, lives.

Then I think about my brothers lying together in their cot. They are not perfect, they are not even
normal
according to Paddy.

They’re not any old twins. They’re Siamese.

In the old days, before medicine could make people perfect, conjoined twins stayed the way they were born. Like Chang and Eng. Si showed me pictures of them online. Born in Thailand (or Siam, as it was then) in 1811, Chang and Eng were joined down the chest in just the same way as Richie and Clem. They began life in the circus, just like Paddy said, being exhibited as ‘curiosities’ all over the world. But they broke free, bought a plantation, ran their own businesses, got married to sisters and had twenty-one children between them. They were happy and lived until they were seventy-two.

No one tried to separate Chang and Eng. They were allowed to stay together.

Then I wonder – what’s more perfect? Two little boys joined, or two little boys separated? And I try and imagine a world where everyone is born conjoined and only once every thousand, thousand births, do separate human beings arrive. Then I watch conjoined people bending over the separate cots and gasping. And, all at once, a team of twenty-two doctors (in eleven pairs of two) arrives to sew those little babies together again, so nobody will ever know they were born apart. And when the doctors have done their work and it’s all gone swimmingly, I hear the relatives heave sighs of relief and say, “What perfect little boys.”

While I’m on perfect, I think about Zoe. I haven’t spoken to her since I discovered her name means
life
, since she shouted over her shoulder,
Since when were we joined at the hip
?

And she hasn’t spoken to me either.

This friend I made in kindergarten. This person who bounds into my life two or three times a week and with whom I’ve been as close as Richie is to Clem.

I decide to ring her up, I decide to tell her about her beautiful life-giving name.

“Hello,” I say brightly.

“Hi,” she says, but she sounds suspicious, like I’m just about to go all heavy on her again.

So what I actually say is, “They share more organs than we thought.” It just sort of falls out of me, so maybe I was always going to say this.

“What?” says Zoe.

“The twins. They share ribs and a bit of their lower sternum and their abdominal cavity and a bit of pericardium, which is the heart. Their heart.”

“Oh,” says Zoe.

“And also their liver. They just have the one liver.”

“Urgh,” she says. “That’s gross.”

Gross.

I put the phone down.

She rings back.

“Look,” she says, “I didn’t mean gross like… gross.”

“What did you mean?”

“I meant, you know… Nothing against your brothers or anything. And I don’t have a problem with internal organs, but livers. I mean nobody wants to talk about stuff like that, do they?”

I do. I have to, otherwise it all just sits like a heavy red stone in my brain.

“Since 1950,” I say to my friend Zoe, “seventy-five per cent of separations result in one live twin.” This isn’t one of Si’s statistics. It’s one I found myself. On the net.

“Seventy-five per cent?” queries Zoe, as if she’s trying to work out the maths.

“Yes,” I say. “Or, put it another way, seventy-five per cent of the time, when they separate people who have been,” I pause, “so close… one twin dies.”

“Oh,” she says.

“So who do you think it’ll be?” I ask.

“Jess…” she begins. “
Jess
…”

“Who?” I say.

“Do we have to—”

“Who?” I interrupt. “Which one?”

“Neither – probably neither. Jess – what’s got into you?”

“You have to say: Richie or Clem.”

Zoe or Jess?

“Why are you asking me this stuff?”

I have a vision: me on my mobile, Zoe on hers. No wire between us, but joined nonetheless, joined by some powerful but invisible signal, and if I press the red button on my phone, that signal will just snap off, snap away.

I press the red button.

There should be silence. So how come I hear the rip of a surgeon’s knife?