The Flask (15 page)

The wet of the snow has penetrated my gloves and my fingers are freezing. I didn’t notice this before, but I’m noticing it now, just as I’m noticing how the white-blue sky has gone slightly rose-coloured and grey. Maybe it’s dawn already. Only three hours for the snow babies to last. I listen for the birds, but I don’t hear any. Maybe the birds are hiding. Maybe the hush has got them too. There aren’t even any cars. There’s just me and my breathing again and a sudden desire to be home, to be tucked up in bed.

I feel exhausted.

I say goodbye to the babies, tuck the flask back into my pocket and follow my own prints out of the park, messing them up slightly by the entrance to the bowling green, as if I could disguise my going there.

As I enter the cul-de-sac, I see that my neighbour, the other night sculptor, has mounded his snow into a huge snow mermaid, a beautiful woman who seems to be compacted together, carved out of ice. I stop to admire her. The boy (or man) is no longer there, but he’s signed his name on the sculpture, as if it was a work of art: Bruno Teisler, it says. And I wonder briefly about this Bruno Teisler who lives in my close, who I’ve never seen before and then I pass on by, stopping only to glance up at Zoe’s window, before arriving at my own house.

The light is on in our porch. The door is not closed quietly on the latch. It’s wide open. And in that lighted doorway, coat and gloves on, is Gran.

“Where on earth have you been? Just what do you think you’re doing? Don’t you think I’ve enough to be worrying about without this, you selfish, selfish child.”

These are just some of the things Gran says, or rather she shouts. She is shouting so loudly I think the whole street, the whole world will hear her. There will never be hush again.

“And you’re shivering. Look at you! LOOK AT YOU! And wet. You’re wet. Jess, you’ll be ill. You’ll be really ill. You know that?”

I don’t know anything. I just feel tired and silent.

“Well, what have you got to say for yourself?”

Then she scoops me up and hugs me tighter than I’ve ever been hugged before, and just for once, I don’t mind being all crushed up against her.

She brings me in and strips me down and makes me drink hot cocoa (I am shivering even with my hands around the warm mug). And she never stops talking and I still don’t say anything.

“How could you?” she repeats, over and over. “How could you? You know about your father, don’t you?”

And of course I know, but it doesn’t stop her telling me again anyway.

“He went out,” Gran says. “Went out in the snow when he was six. Not at night, of course. Not at night. Even he wasn’t that stupid. No, in the day. He was supposed to be in the garden, playing. Children do play in the snow. For hours. And I was getting on with something in the house, like you do, and suddenly it was six o’clock. So I called for him. Called and called, only he didn’t answer. So I went out. And that’s when I found him. Lying flat out in the snow. Flat on his back. I thought he was dead. But he was just asleep. Asleep. How could anyone – ANYONE – just fall asleep in the snow? I’ll never understand that as long as I live. Never.”

There are tears in her eyes.

“And that’s why he always had such a weak chest. He was a sickly boy after that. And I always wonder, when he died so young, I always wondered: if I’d looked out that afternoon, if I’d seen him, if I’d stopped him…”

I’ve heard this story many times and it always ends here, with the blame. But now, for the first time, I wonder too. I wonder why my father lay down in the snow to sleep. It can’t have been because he was tired. There are many more comfortable places to sleep than the snow. So perhaps, like me, he was trying things out, experimenting, playing a Pavement Crack Game all of his own. If I lie down in this snow and no one finds me then…

The monsters won’t get me.

I so much wish I could know that game and the boy who played it. The boy who grew up to be my father. Perhaps he would have things to teach me about monsters. And then, suddenly, I experience the loss of my father as a physical thing, an emptiness somewhere deep inside me. And I want to fill that hole with the sound of his voice; I want to hear my father talking, I could listen to him for a lifetime.

But there’s only Gran talking.

When Gran finally finishes, she fusses me into bed.

“And don’t think you’re going out anywhere tomorrow!” is her parting shot. As she closes the door, I reach into my pocket.

The flask is still white, though not quite as sparkling, not on the surface anyhow. But inside, among the floating paper strips of moonlight there’s something new, a thread of yellow. Or gold, pale gold, like a hair from the mane of a lion, or the brightness of a smile. It throws a filament of light to the white swirling surface, where a single seed fish swims.

“Thank you,” I whisper. “Oh, thank you, thank you, thank you.”

I lie down and sleep. I dream that I am lying in the snow next to my father and we keep each other warm.

I wake to find the flask still in my hand. I can’t have let it go all night. The glass has taken heat from my body and it’s warm too, its surface not frosted any more but transparent. I can clearly see the strips of moonlight, the threads of gold, and yes, the seed fish, the seed fish is still swimming.

The snow babies must have made it through the night!

So the real babies will make it through the op.

Clem will live!

Richie will live!

Zoe will smile on the world and on me!

I pull my alarm clock close. It’s ten o’clock already. The babies will have been in the operating theatre for two hours. I charge downstairs in my dressing gown and arrive in the kitchen just as the phone rings. I get to it before Gran.

It’s Si.

“They’re OK?” I cry. “Aren’t they? Richie’s OK and Clem’s OK and it’s all going fine, even though there hasn’t been a rehearsal op. Right?”

“Not exactly,” says Si.

“What?”

“The op. It’s been delayed.”

A sudden chill. “Why?”

“The snow. Half the team haven’t managed to get in. One of the doctors is marooned somewhere way out of town. Dug his car out, but the roads are impassable.”

“But they’re going to do it later?” I say. “As soon as everyone’s there?”

“No,” says Si. “They’re going to delay it. They have to have everyone and they have to start on time. Can’t start late and work through the night. It’s a long, long process, Jess.”

“But what about Clem?” I burst out.

“He’s stabilised, much to everyone’s astonishment. Didn’t I say that? That’s the good news, Jess.”

Of course he has, because of the building, because of not destroying but… but…

“When’s it going to be – the op – when’s it going to be?”

“Tomorrow,” says Si. “We hope.”

“The snow babies!” I cry.

“What?” says Si.

“The snow babies have to last another twenty-four hours!”

“What are you talking about?” says Si.

I’m talking about marching straight to the park and standing over the snow babies with Si’s large socket spanner. If anyone comes within a foot of them…

But what if they just melt? What if the God that let Clem’s candle gutter in the church just parts the cloud and the sun comes out? What then? I rush to the window. No sign of a thaw. On our garden table the snow is still piled four inches deep at least. And it’s cold, bitingly cold. Even Gran, who likes to tell you that she was a War Baby, and War Babies know about hardship, is standing next to the cooker with a gas ring lit to provide the warmth that the central heating seems to be struggling to achieve.

I go straight upstairs and get dressed so fast I forget the flask. I don’t put on my shoes because I’m going to be wearing wellington boots, and I’m down in the porch in less than two minutes.

But so is Gran.

“And what exactly do you think you’re doing?”

“I’m going out.” I just have to be there, with the snow babies. That’s all there is to it. I will defend them to the death.

To the life.

“Have you gone mad?”

Yes. I think so.

“Did you listen to anything I said last night?”

Yes. All of it.

“You will be ill. You are ill.”

“I am not ill.”

“You will be ill, if you don’t stay in today. You need to rest.”

“I don’t need to rest. I can’t rest.”

“Besides,” says Gran, “you haven’t had breakfast.”

I don’t take on the breakfast issue. I just say, “No one stays in when it snows, Gran. Everyone goes out. They play.”

“You played last night,” says Gran grimly. And then she takes the large brass key that fits the bottom lock on our front door, the anti-burglar Chubb lock, and slots it in. She turns her wrist with something like triumph.

She is locking me in.

She is locking me in my own house.

“You can’t do that,” I say.

“Can’t I?” she replies, and she drops the key in the pocket of her apron.

There’s only one thing for it, I’ll have to make a run for it. I haven’t time for a jacket, I haven’t time for wellington boots, or a scarf, or a hat, or gloves. I just run, in my socks, down the hall and through the kitchen and unbolt and unlock the back door (which does not have a Chubb fitting) and I tear out into the garden (where I nearly stop immediately as my feet land in the freezing wet snow), and around the side of the house and into the street.

“No,” shouts Gran.

But she isn’t even close to being behind me.