The Flask (12 page)

The following day we go to the hospital.

“We’re going to bring your mum home,” says Si.

“And the babies?”

“No, not the babies. Not yet. And only Mum for the afternoon. Apparently I can’t be trusted to bring in the right change of clothes.”

In my pocket I have the flask. It has been quiet and almost colourless every day since I tried to paste the name
Liminal
on to it. But I’m aware of the breath, its quiet ins and outs. Sometimes I think I even hear it when I’m sleeping. Which is impossible.

Only, recently, I’ve begun to believe that nothing is impossible.

Si turns the radio on and we don’t talk much and eventually we arrive at the hospital and ascend fifteen floors in the lift.

In the Special Care Unit, Mum is not on a bed any more, she’s sitting in a chair beside the babies. I’ve been doing a lot of worrying about the babies, but not about Mum. She looks drained and thin.

“Here you are,” she says, and she gets up to greet me. “Missed you.” She gives me a hug and I think I can feel her bones.

“Here’s your big sister, boys,” she says to the babies.

I look into the Perspex cot and I expect to see that the twins have grown, because babies do grow fast, everyone says so.
My, how they’ve grown
! But my brothers still look tiny, their heads still not filling their tiny knitted hats. I pay particular attention to Clem – is he really smaller than his brother? I don’t know, maybe not, but his little hand is on Richie’s shoulder, so it still looks like he’s holding on.

Both babies are asleep, facing each other, their little mouths occasionally munching at precisely the same moment, as if they were having exactly the same eating dream. And then I wonder about their dreams. Do they share dreams, or do they have separate ones?

“Happy dreams,” I whisper down at them. “Have happy dreams.” And they munch and their eyelids flicker too, and I suddenly feel overwhelmed with love for them.

It seems no time at all before a nurse comes to wheel them away for yet more tests.

“They’ll have done so many tests before they come out of here,” jokes Si, “they’ll be able to go straight to university.”

The nurse laughs, but Mum doesn’t. She just watches the babies leave as if somebody was wheeling away her life.

“Come on now,” says Si. “Let’s make the most of the time.”

He takes Mum’s suitcase and her hand and helps her into the lift.

When we get down to ground level, and the doors swish open on to the outside world, Mum seems to stumble a little, blink in the daylight.

“Are you all right?” says Si. “Are you sure you want to make the journey? I mean, for such a short time?”

“Sure,” says Mum. She nods at me. “Got to see my other baby, haven’t I?”

Si helps her into the car and we begin the journey home.

“It’s amazing,” says Mum.

“What?” asks Si.

“The world,” says Mum, as if she’s been gone from it for a hundred years. “It’s so bright. And big.” She pauses. “And busy.” Then she turns around and looks at me. “And you, Jess, even you’ve changed.”

“Have I?”

“Yes – you’ve grown up a bit, I think.”

And I don’t know if she means
grown up – mature,
or
grown up – taller
or even just
grown up compared with the tiny, tiny twins
and I don’t have time to think about this because Si butts in with: “Jess helped me with Roger the Wreck yesterday. We did the timing chain.”

“The timing chain!” Mum exclaims. “So you’ve finally done it? Turned Roger the Wreck into, well, just Roger?”

“Well,” says Si, slightly taken aback. “There’s always more one can do on a moggie.”

Mum laughs and touches him very lightly on the back of the neck.

And, just for a moment, everything feels all right.

Si asks Mum what she wants to do with her few hours at home.

“I want to eat fresh vegetables,” says Mum, “and go to church.”

There are very few vegetables served in the hospital, apparently, and those that are, are frozen. Mum wants to eat fresh courgettes and fresh onions and fresh tomatoes and fresh mushrooms.

“And green beans,” says Mum. “I could kill for some green beans.”

So Si says he will drop her at the church and go on a vegetable hunt.

“Will you come with me, Jess?” Mum asks.

Mum doesn’t go to church so much for the the services, but for the candles. When we’re away on holiday, she goes into every church we pass. She lights candles in memory of my father and I light them too.

“Yes,” I say. “Of course.”

Si drops us at St Nicholas’ which is a small flint church with a square tower.

“Do you know what day it is?” she asks as we enter.

“Saturday,” I say.

“Holy Saturday,” she says. “The day between Good Friday and Easter Sunday. The day of Christ’s entombment.”

“A bardo then,” I say.

“Huh?” says Mum, but she’s not really listening.

We’re whispering, even though there is no one in this quiet place but us. The last time I was in this church was at Christmas when it blazed with light and golden angels and dark holly and statues of the Holy Family stood in real straw. Now the church is stripped, there are no flowers, the altar is bare, the cross covered in a black cloth.

Mum takes a seat at the back of the church, as though she hasn’t quite got the energy to go to the front yet, and I sit beside her. She takes a kneeler and sinks down, head in her hands. I don’t know what she’s praying about, but I can imagine.

I don’t take a kneeler. I just sit on the hard wooden pew and look at the dense gloom in the church. I wish it was Easter Sunday, I wish someone would just roll back the rock like they did in front of Jesus’ tomb and everything be light and bright again for ever.

But maybe nothing’s for ever.

Zoe.

She’s not for ever, she’s moving on, moving away from me. And if she isn’t going all of her own accord, then I’m pushing her, aren’t I? I’m just putting the knife in and slamming down the phone to show her I don’t care, which just shows how much I do care. Can’t she see that? Then I get cross with myself for sitting in a church and thinking about Zoe when my brothers are probably dying. How can Zoe be as important as the twins? I mean, our relationship, Zoe’s and mine, it’s hardly life or death, is it?

But that’s how it sometimes feels to me.

In fact, more than this. It feels that my join with Zoe, which, OK, didn’t start at birth, but was certainly there by the time we were both four, that join, sometimes gets all muddled up in my head with the web that joins my brothers. As though what happens between me and Zoe will impact on what happens to Richie and Clem.

Yeah, right.

Mum picks herself up from her prayer, and hangs the kneeler back up.

“The Anglo-Saxons believed,” she says, “that life is just the flight of a sparrow through a great lighted hall, that we come from the dark and we will return to the dark.”

I don’t know what this means and I don’t ask her, because she looks so sad and I know that she’s been to her place when kneeling, just as I’ve been to mine, and it’s probably a private place.

We go together then towards the front of the church where there’s a candle rack, four rows of little black metal dishes with black metal candle spikes in the middle, and a locked box for donations. There are normally one or two pale, thin candles burning here, but today there are none and Mum hesitates, as though maybe we shouldn’t be lighting candles here on Holy Saturday, maybe we should wait until the Easter light comes in on Sunday.

But she won’t be here on Easter Sunday. And there are candles waiting beneath the rack and she takes three and posts money into the box.

Three candles. She has never taken three candles before.

“First,” she says, “for your father.”

I hold the candle and she strikes the match.

“For Jeremy,” she says, as the wick catches.

“For Dad,” I say and I push the thin wax end on to the spike. You mustn’t push too hard, the candles are so thin that if you do, they can split and fall.

There’s a moment’s silence between us and then she says that she wants to light candles for the babies. And part of me wants to stop her. I want to say:
We can’t light a candle for Dad who’s dead and for the babies who…

Mum interrupts my thought. “I’ll do one for Richie. Will you do Clem’s?”

Which brings the monsters.

Because sometimes, when you light one candle from another, one of the flames gutters, it dies.

“Yes,” I say, “I’ll do it.”

The Pavement Crack Game.

Mum holds Richie’s candle. I hold Clem’s. If either of the flames gutter…

I light mine first, from Dad’s, and I do it very, very carefully and the flame leaps up. It burns strong and bright, and I let go the breath I’ve been holding and push the candle end very gently on to the spike.

Clem lives.

Then Mum takes Richie’s candle and lights it from Clem’s and it doesn’t take immediately, so she pushes down a little harder and there’s a sudden fizz and when she takes the candle away, Richie’s candle is lit and Clem’s extinguished.

Clem’s candle is dead.

Clem again. Why Clem? The monsters laugh, just like they did in the garage when Clem got all spattered with Si’s blood.

I hear myself gasp, but Mum just says, “Oh, bother. Let’s try that again.”

She places Richie’s candle on the rack and relights Clem’s from Dad’s. It burns brightly, innocently.

“There,” she says. “God bless and look after them all.”

But I don’t think He will.

All of a sudden, I don’t think He Gives a Monkeys.

When we get back home, Mum organises fresh clothes for herself and Si makes some sort of ragout with the vegetables. By the time we sit down to eat it’s about 3 p.m.

I sit at the table, but even though it’s late, I’m not hungry – and it’s not the fact that it’s a plate of vegetables. I quite like vegetables. It’s about what happened in the church, it’s about playing the Pavement Crack Game and losing.

“I’m not hungry,” I say.

“Eat,” says Si.

So I do. It feels like a kind of giving-in. Afterwards, while Mum and I wash up, Si goes off in the car to get more petrol for the return journey to the hospital.

Mum has been home less than three hours and soon she will be gone again, who knows for how long.

“Mum…” I say.

“Yes, Jess?”

“Do you know anyone in Aunt Edie’s life called Rob?”

“Rob?” says Mum. “Rob who?”

So I tell her about Aunt Edie’s music ‘For Rob’.

“Must have been someone really important,” I say.

“How do you know that?”

“Because of the music. Because of what she wrote.”

Mum pauses. “No, sorry, doesn’t mean anything to me. Why don’t you ask Gran?”

And I say I will, but I won’t, of course, because whatever Gran knows, she’s not telling.

There’s a silence and then Mum says, “Do you want to know why I really came home today, Jess?”

“Vegetables?” I offer.

Mum laughs. “Of course not. And not for the church or the clothes either. I came home to see you.”

“I know. You said.”

“Did I?” She looks at me quizzically.

“At the hospital.”

“Yes. I suppose I did. But no one but you would have noticed, Jess. You’re a really special person, you know that?”

I shrug.

“And sensitive. And sometimes…”

I wait.

“Sometimes I’m a bit like that too. I can tell what people are saying when they’re not saying things.”

This would be a muddle in anyone else’s mouth, but I know exactly what Mum means.

“What am I not saying?” I ask.

Mum puts her head on one side. “You tell me.”

So many things. Where to begin? The flask, the worry about the babies, the Pavement Crack Game, the monsters coming closer. Zoe.

Zoe.

Zoe.

“Zoe,” I say.

“Go on,” says Mum.

Then I think maybe Si hasn’t gone to get petrol (why couldn’t he get petrol on the journey back?). I think he’s gone to give Mum and me Some Space.

“I don’t think Zoe likes me any more.”

“Oh? And why do you say that?”

I don’t tell her it might be because I shouted at her about livers and slammed the phone down on her, deliberately cutting the cord between us. I say, “I think she’d rather be with Paddy.”

Mum takes my hand and I let her. “People can like more than one person at a time, you know,” she says. “Like just because I have two more children now, doesn’t mean I love you any less, Jess. Not at all.”

Ha. I bet she’s glad she’s had an opportunity to work that into the conversation. Still – I like hearing it. It gives me the same sort of feeling I had when I was tiny and had a fever and she put a cool hand on my forehead.

“Human beings,” she continues, “they – we – have an infinite capacity for love.”

“But Zoe,” I begin again, “she used to come here all the time. Come around. Bound straight in. Barely knocked. You’d have thought she lived here. And now,” I pause lamely, “she doesn’t.”

Mum takes a breath and I prepare myself for Something Adult.

“Jess,” she says, “you and Zoe may just be growing apart. You’ve known her since you were in kindergarten. When people get older, they find different parts of themselves. What used to be a good fit, might not be such a good fit as you grow up, develop your interests. Find out who you really are.” She pauses. “And that’s OK, Jess.”

“It’s not OK,” I say solidly.

“I don’t mean it doesn’t hurt, it can leave a hole…”

A hole?

“But in that space,” continues Mum, “new things can come, new friends.”

But I don’t want any new friends. I just want Zoe, my mirror image, my better, bolder other half. And suddenly Zoe seems to me like Richie, she seems zesty big. And I’m the smaller, weaker twin; I’m Clem, clinging to her for dear life.

“Why do they have to cut them apart?” I exclaim then. “Why can’t they just let the twins stay together for ever and ever?”

Mum raises an eyebrow. “Maybe they’ll have a better life apart.”

“They won’t,” I cry.

Mum still has my hands in hers. Very gently she begins to stroke my fingers. “Maybe together…” she says, “maybe together…” she repeats, “they might just… suffocate each other.”