The Flask (2 page)

It is as if the desk has landed from space. My room is small and it has small and mainly modern things in it. A single bed with a white wooden headboard and a white duvet stitched with yellow daisies, a chrome-and-glass computer station, a mirror in a silver frame, a slim chest of drawers. And a small(ish) space, where they put the desk.

Two men puff and heave it up the stairs. They are narrow stairs. They bang it into the doorjamb getting it into the room and then they plonk it down in the space and push it hard against the wall.

“Don’t make them like they used to,” says the sweatier of the two men. “Thank the Lord.”

The desk – the bureau – is made of dark wood. It has four drawers with heavy brass locks and heavy brass handles, which make me think of Aunt Edie’s coffin. The desk bit is a flap. You pull out two runners, either side of the top drawer, and fold the desk down to rest on them. One of the runners, the one on the left, is wobbly, and if you’re not careful, it just falls out on the floor. Or your foot.

Si comes for an inspection. “I could probably fix that runner,” he says. “Or you could just be careful. It’s not difficult. Look.”

I look.

“Marvellous,” Si says, testing the flap. “You can do your homework and then – Bob’s your uncle – fold it all away.”

“I hate it,” I say.

“It’s a desk,” says Si. “Nobody hates a desk.”

The desk squats in my room. I don’t touch it, I don’t put anything in it, I don’t even look at it more than I can help, but it certainly looks at me; it scowls and glowers and mocks me.

Here I am
, it says.
Just what you wanted, right? A bureau
.

I turn my back on that bureau. But it still stares at me – stares and stares out of the mirror.

I turn the mirror to face the wall.

Some weeks later, I hear Mum puffing upstairs. She puffs more than the removal men, because of carrying the weight of the babies all curled together inside her. And also the weight of the worry they are causing.

“Jess,” she says, stopping by my door.

“Yes?”

“Jess – I wish you could have had the piano too.”

And that makes me want to cry, the way things do when you think nobody understands but actually they do.

The next day my friend Zoe comes round.

Zoe is a dancer. She doesn’t have the body of a dancer; she’s not slim and poised. In fact she’s quite big, big-boned, and increasingly, curvy. But when she dances you think it is what she was born to do. I love watching Zoe dance. When Zoe dances she’s like me with the piano – nothing else exists, she loses herself in it.

Otherwise, we’re not really very alike at all. She’s loud and I’m quiet. She’s funny and I’m not. And she likes boys. Mum says that it’s because, even though we’re in the same year at school, she’s the best part of twelve months older than me and it makes a difference. Mum says it’s also to do with the fact that she’s the youngest child in their family.

Soon I will not be the youngest child in our family.

I will no longer be an only child.

Si says, “Girls grow up too fast these days.”

And I don’t ask him what he means by this or whether he’d prefer Zoe (I’ve a feeling he doesn’t like Zoe that much) to go back to wearing a Babygro, because this will only start A Discussion.

I have other friends of course – Em, Alice – but it’s Zoe I see most often, not least because she lives at the bottom of our cul-de-sac, so she just waltzes up and knocks on our door.

Like today.

Then she pounds up the stairs and bursts into my room. Sometimes I think I’ll ask her if it’s possible for her to come into a room so quietly no one would notice her, which is something I’m quite good at. But I’m not sure she’d understand the task, which is another reason why I like her.

“Hi, hi, hi. Hi!” says Zoe. She wheels about, or tries to, which is when she comes face to face with the desk.

“What,” she says, “is that?!”

“It’s a bureau,” I say.

“A what?”

“A bureau.”

“But what’s it doing here?”

“It belonged to my aunt Edie.”

“It’s hideous,” she says. “And ancient.”

Ancient
is one of her favourite words. Anything more than two weeks old is ancient as far as Zoe is concerned.

“It’s George III,” I say. Si again.

“Hideous, ancient and
pre-owned
. Who’d want something that already belonged to some George whatever?” she says.

I’m going to explain that George Whatever didn’t own this piece of furniture, that he just happened to be on the throne of England when it was made, but that would turn me into Si, so I don’t.

“Hideous, ancient, pre-owned and bashed up,” she continues.

Bashed up?

I actually take a look at the desk. It’s not bashed up. And the wood isn’t as dark as I’d thought either, in fact it’s a pale honey colour, and the grain is quite clear so, even though it’s over two hundred and fifty years old you can still imagine the tree from which it was originally cut. There are dents in the surface of course and scratches too, but it doesn’t look bashed up, just as though it has lived a little, lived and survived.

“It’s not bashed up,” I say.

“What?”

“And it’s not hideous. Look at the locks,” I say. “Look at the handles.”

The locks and the handles are also not as I’d thought. They’re not heavy, not funereal, in fact they’re quite delicate. Around the keyholes are beautiful little curls of brass in the shape of leaves and even the little brass-headed nails that hold the handles in place are carefully banged in to just look like part of the pattern.

“Hideous, ancient, pre-owned and IN THE WAY,” says Zoe. She pirouettes. “I mean, how is a person to dance in this room any more?”

Then she sees the mirror turned against the wall.

“And what’s this?” she says. “Are you having a bad face day?”

She hangs the mirror the correct way round and checks to see if she has any spots, which of course she doesn’t. Even when she gets to be a proper teenager I doubt if she’ll have spots. Things like that don’t happen to Zoe.

“I’m sorry about the dancing, Zo,” I say. “But I really like this bureau. In fact,” I add, experimenting, “I think I love it.”

“Huh?” says Zoe, who’s still searching for spots.

Sometimes I think Zoe is a mirror. I look into her to find out who I really am.

As soon as Zoe leaves (flamboyant twirl and a shout of
Bye-eee
as she flies down the stairs), I take my chair and sit at the desk.

I never saw Aunt Edie at this desk, as I saw her so often at the piano. But she must have sat here, I realise. Sat writing letters, private things, not things you do when you have guests in the house. I pull out the runners (and Si is right about this, it isn’t difficult at all) and lay down the lid.

Inside it is like a little castle. In the middle, there is a small arched doorway, the door itself hinged between two tiny carved wooden pillars. On either side of the door are stepped shelves and cubbyholes of different sizes, to store envelopes or paper, I suppose. There are also four drawers, two wide shallow ones next to the pillars, and at either edge of the desk two narrower, longer ones. The desktop itself slides away if you pull a little leather tab. Underneath is a cavernous little underdrawer.

“That’s where they would have kept the inkwells,” says Si in passing.

I can see dark stains which could have been ink. People writing at this desk long before Aunt Edie. I imagine a quill pen scratching out a love letter. And suddenly those faraway people who sat at this desk, family or strangers, they don’t seem so faraway at all. They seem joined to me by the desk and all the things that have been written and thought here. And then I think about Edie herself, and how maybe she loved this desk. Sun-bright Edie, maybe coming here to be quiet, to be still, to unfurl her own dark heart.

Then I know I want to claim this desk after all.

But I still don’t put anything in the desk. Not until the morning my mother is to deliver the babies. This is going to be a long day, a difficult day. “We’ll need to keep busy,” Gran says; “you and me.”

Gran has agreed to stay in the house with me so that Si can be in the operating theatre with Mum.

“It’s an elective caesarean, Jess,” says Si. “The operation itself is quite safe.”

They have to go in the night before, as Mum is first on the list. Si stands in the hall holding Mum’s suitcase.

“Don’t worry, Jess,” Mum says, and stretches out her arms for me. But I can’t get close, because of the babies. “I’ll bring them home safe,” she whispers into my hair. “I will.”

“Time to go,” says Si.

I lie awake a long time that night. Keeping vigil. Watching. I imagine Mum being awake. And Si. And probably the babies too, waiting.

In the morning I skip breakfast.

“You’re growing,” said Gran. “You have to eat.”

But I can’t.

I go to my room and start on the desk. I have decided that I will put in some homework stuff, but also some private things. In one of the cubbyholes I lodge my English dictionary, my French dictionary, my class reader. I pay attention to the height of the books, their colour, shuffling them about until I am sure that I have the correct book (the stubby French dictionary), in the middle. In the inkwell space, I put pens, pencils, glue, sticky tape and my panda rubber with the eyes fallen off.

Then I move on to more precious things. Behind the little arched door, I put ScatCat. He’s a threadbare grey, his fur worn thin from having slept in my arms every night for the first four years of my life. His jet-black eyes are deep and full of memories. I think I’d still be sleeping with him if Spike hadn’t arrived. More about Spike later. To keep Scat company, I add the family of green glass cats made as I watched by a glassmaker one summer holiday. Then I add a bracelet that Zoe made for me (plaited strands of pink and purple thread) and also one made by another good friend – Em – (purple and green) when we were in year 5. I once suggested we make a thread friendship bracelet for the three of us, winding Zoe’s colours and Em’s and mine (purple and blue) all together. Zoe laughed at me. She said friendship bracelets could only be exchanged one-to-one. That’s what Best Friends meant, Zoe said. Didn’t I understand about Best Friends? I close the little arched door.

Next I select my father’s ivory slide rule. Not Si’s slide rule, but one which belonged to my real father. Gran thrust it into my hand one day.

“Here,” she said, quite roughly. “Your father had this when he was about your age. You should have it now.”

“What is it?” I asked.

“A slide rule, of course.”

I must have looked puzzled.

“It was how people did maths,” said Gran. “Before calculators.”

Before calculators
sounded a bit like
Before the Ark
. It made my father seem further away not nearer. Or it did until I held the slide rule. Carefully crafted in wood, overlaid with ivory (“I know we shouldn’t really trade ivory,” said Gran, “but this elephant has been dead a long, long while”), it’s bigger and deeper than a normal ruler with a closely fitting sliding section in the middle slightly broader than a pencil. Along all its edges carved numbers are inked in black.

“It originally belonged to your grandfather. Passed down,” Gran said. She paused. “Useless now, I suppose. It’s useless, isn’t it?”

Gran talks to me quite often about my father, although only when we are alone. Normally it makes me uncomfortable, not because I’m not interested, but because she always seems to require a response from me and I’m never quite sure what that response should be. And the more she looks at me, the more she wants, the less I seem to be able to give. Though I think she believes that, if she talks about him enough, I’ll remember him. It will unlock memories of my own. But I was only nine months old when he died and I remember nothing.

But the slide rule is different. It’s the first thing I’ve ever held in my hands that he held in his.

“It’s not useless,” I say. “I like it. Thank you.”

And all the roughness falls away from her.

I’m thinking all this as I select a drawer for my father’s ivory slide rule. Right or left? I choose the right, slip it in. Then I change my mind.

I just change my mind.

I open the left drawer and transfer the slide rule. But it won’t go, it won’t fit. I push at it, feel the weight of its resistance. I push harder, the drawers are an equal pair, so what fits in one has to fit in the other.

Only it doesn’t.

I pull out the right-hand drawer. It runs the full depth of the desk, plenty long enough for the slide rule. I pull out the left-hand drawer. It is less than half the length of its twin. Yet it isn’t broken. It is as perfectly formed as on the day it was made.

Which is when I put my hand into the dark, secret space that lies behind that drawer.

And find the flask.