The Flask (5 page)

I turn and march away from the park. Of course, Zoe follows me.

“Jess,” she says. “Jess, Jess, Jess!” And now it’s her turn to clutch me by the sleeve. “Come on!”

I stop, I wheel about. “Come on
what
, exactly?”

“I never told him,” she says. “I didn’t.”

“Oh, right; he just made it up, did he? Thought it up out of his own stupid little brain?”

“I didn’t tell him, Jess, I promise, I swear.”

I stare at her. Her eyes are all lit up bright, but not like a mirror. I can’t see myself in them, in her. “Then who did?”

“I don’t know,” Zoe exclaims. “Maybe your mum told his mum and she told Paddy.”

“Oh, yeah, right.”

“Or Em. You didn’t just tell me, did you? You pretended you did, but you didn’t. You told Em too. So maybe it was Em who told Paddy.”

Very clever. And hurtful, because it’s true. I did tell Em actually and I did pretend to Zoe that she was the only one who knew. Why did I do that? Because Zoe can be jealous probably. She can go mental just like she did about the friendship bracelet thing in year 5. But Em’s away on holiday. Em’s not here to defend herself. “Why would Em tell Paddy? She doesn’t even like Paddy. No one likes Paddy.” I pause. “Except you.”

“I still didn’t tell him, Jess. I mean – why would I?”

And I can’t say it. I can’t say,
Because I think you’re beginning to like him more than you like me
, because that sounds totally pathetic. So I say, “For a laugh. So you could both have a laugh behind my back about my so-not-normal brothers.”

“Jess, you’re way over the top. I didn’t tell him. I didn’t!”

“So why did you let him say all that stuff, all that eight-leg circus-freak stuff?”

“That’s just mumbo jumbo, Jess, you said so yourself. You said people would say stuff like that. How’s that my fault?”

“You could have spoken up – you could have said something. Anything.”

Now she’s silent, biting in her lip.

“But you just stood there,” I ram it home. “You let him say all of it and you just stood there.”

I start walking again now, turning my back on her and walking, walking.

She runs back after me again, but I shake her off.

“I didn’t know I had to say anything. Anyway, you were saying stuff,” Zoe remarks to my back. “And what does it matter? They’re born now. They’re OK.”

It matters because she promised, because I trusted her. And I need to go on trusting her. Because of the flask. “Who says they’re OK?” I say.

“What?”

“The babies – who says they’re OK?”

“You did!” says Zoe. “You said it!”

“I said they were beautiful. I didn’t say they were OK.”

“Well – are they OK?”

I say nothing.

“Well, are they?”

“I’m not telling you,” I say. “I’m not telling you anything ever again.”

I don’t say a single thing over dinner. And if Gran notices she doesn’t mention it. She probably thinks it’s to do with the babies. And she’s right. Everything’s to do with the babies these days.

Except the flask.

I delay going up to bed, partly because I’m no good at sleeping when I’m angry, and partly because I expect to see little bits of sticky tape on the floor. I mean, something that can blow a cork from a bottle can burst through sticky tape, right?

Wrong.

There is no sticky tape on the floor. The desk is still closed, the drawer inside shut. I reach my hand in and feel the cold, rounded form of the flask.

“I’m back,” I say, sliding my fingers up the throat of the bottle, just to check the sticky tape is really still in place.

It is.

So I draw the flask out into the light. It is blue. Really blue – like a summer sky. Like happiness. Whatever I expected, it wasn’t this.

I just stand and stare, trying to work out whether it is the glass or the thing inside that is blue. But I can’t separate the two. Nor can I understand why – despite Zoe and Paddy and the park and the mumbo jumbo – just holding it makes me fizz with joy, as though I am holding a tiny, perfect other universe.

“You’re extraordinary,” I say. “You know that?”

No reply.

But then what would a universe reply? And I remember Si showing me pictures taken by the Hubble Telescope, pillars of dust 57 trillion trillion miles high and some nebula thing called
the eye of God
because that’s what it looked like, some astonishingly beautiful giant eye. And Si was busy explaining about gas and cusp knots and interstellar collisions, and I was just thinking it was all too much and too beautiful to look at even in a newspaper. And here is something even more extraordinary in the palm of my hand.

I don’t want to put the flask back in the dark drawer, I want to keep it close by me. So I take it to my bed, and lay it on my pillow as I undress. I don’t know how long the blue will last, the blue and the bright happiness inside me. And it’s not just the thing about Zoe (why couldn’t it have been my mum talking to Paddy’s mum?), it’s also the first time, I realise, I’ve felt really happy since we knew about the babies. The babies have shadowed everything for months, the worry of them. Would they be born alive, and if so, would they be able to survive? And now, this glowing blue seems to have the power to push the gloom away. Or maybe it’s just that I’ve seen the babies. Seen them alive with their bright little bird faces.

I get into bed thinking sleep will come with the sweetest of dreams.

But sleep doesn’t come.

Not quickly.

Not at all.

My mind will not be quiet, it refuses to listen to my happy heart. The flask is tucked beneath my pillow, but my thoughts still toss about in the park (of course my mum didn’t talk to Paddy’s mum, why would she?). Eventually, my restless anxiety pokes its way under my brothers’ sheet at the hospital.

Richie and Clem.

I’m glad the babies have names, it makes them seem less vulnerable somehow, as though they really are here to stay, have personalities all of their own, a right to exist. Richie seems a slightly bigger name to me than Clem, just as Richie himself, I realise as I picture them again in my mind, is the bigger twin. Not by much, of course, but if one twin could be said to be clinging on to the other, then it is Clem who is clinging to Richie. Clem who, if there is to be trouble, is the weaker one.

Thirty-four per cent of conjoined twins don’t make it through the first twenty-four hours
.

Clem’s a strange name, a strange word. It sounds to me like
clam
. Clem the closed-up clam, clinging.

I turn over.

And over.

I feel bad characterising Clem like this, as though naming him as weaker makes him weaker still. They are both strong, I tell myself.

Strong enough to get through this dangerous night. Their first on earth.

I put my hand under my pillow, reaching for the flask as if blue was something you could feel or touch.

Then my thoughts return to Zoe: Em would never betray a secret and I haven’t once seen her talking to Paddy. It’s Zoe who’s always talking to Paddy. Though I can’t check, can’t be sure, because Em’s away on holiday for pretty much the whole Easter break. But it must have been Zoe, confiding in Paddy. Making the join of the twins the butt of Paddy’s Outstanding Sense of Humour, which he clearly gets from his nan and her eight legs and… And my thoughts find the twins, sleeping together, breathing together, the little sheet rising and falling around them. And as they breathe, the flask seems to breathe too, inhaling and exhaling beneath my hand. A tiny ribcage. And then things begin to get muddled and I hear a moan of the sort people make when they’re dreaming and they want to wake up and they can’t. And I don’t know if I am really awake, or just dreaming that I am awake, but I do hear the moan get louder, becoming more of a wail, and suddenly I’m sitting bolt upright in bed, my heart pounding.

It makes me gasp how fast my heart is pounding. It’s deeply dark, the middle of the night. So I must have slept after all, slept for a long while. I try to calm myself, to try to remember the blue, the overwhelming happiness. But all I hear is the wail, only it isn’t a wail any more, it’s a howl. Something dark and inhuman is howling from beneath my pillow.

I stumble and fling myself out of that bed. Fear makes many shapes, but this thing has only one shape, the shape of the flask. The same thing that splashed light on my window sill and held a universe of brilliant blue is now pulsing black wolf howls into my night, into my head.

“Stop, stop, stop!” I want to shout, to scream, but the words are stuck in my throat.

There is nothing for it but to reach through the dark, reach under the pillow. I am afraid the flask will be soft under my hand, like a heart, but it is hard and cold, holding its glass shape. I want to smash it. If I smash it the noise will stop, it will have to stop.

I pick up the flask, intending to fling it against the wall, but that’s when the howl goes higher and also softer, not so much wolf as wolf cub, and there is suddenly something so terrible and so sad about the noise that I just pull the flask to my chest and hold it there. Then I rock with it, like you’d rock with a baby who was crying and you had nothing to give but the warmth of your own flesh.

Which is when Gran comes into the room.

“Jess?” she says. “Jess, can’t you sleep either?”

“No,” I cry. “No!”

The spill of light from the hall makes my bedroom bright and ordinary.

“I thought I heard you,” Gran says.

“Heard me?”

“Walking about.”

“Water,” I say. “I need some water.”

“You look half-frozen,” she replies. “I’ll get the water. Come on now, you get back to bed. It’s gone two o’clock.”

Gratefully, I get back into bed. Under the covers, I look at the flask. It is not a heart, not a ribcage, it isn’t pulsing. There is nothing black about it, but nothing blue either. It is calm and hard and glassy, colourless.

As Gran returns with the water, I slip the flask back beneath the pillow.

“He told you they could die on their first night, didn’t he?” Gran says.

“Who?” I say, as though I don’t quite understand her. Though of course I do.

“Si. He told you the babies could die, didn’t he?”

I shrug.

“He’s no business saying things like that.” She sits down hard on the edge of the bed. “No business at all.”

“He only mentioned the statistics…” I begin.

“Statistics,” says Gran, “are bosh.”

And I know this. I’ve heard it all my life.

Statistics are bosh.

Statistics are bosh
.

Gran says it like a mantra, her own little song.

This is something else Si has told me about. Something he’s explained. Si explains everything; Gran explains nothing. You just have to guess what Gran means, you have to look around her corners. “Your grandmother,” said Si, “has never trusted statistics since your father died of something people don’t normally die of. Hiatus hernia. A million-to-one chance, that’s what the doctors told her. So now she doesn’t believe in the numbers game.”

I should never have mentioned statistics.

“Anyway,” Gran continues, “you saw your brothers. Saw them with your own eyes. They’re going to be fine. Do you hear me?”

I hear her.

“So you’re not to worry. Right?”

She comes to tuck me in like I’m some baby myself. As she fusses about me, I realise that I will always be her baby in a way that my brothers will not. Si is the twins’ father, but not mine. So Gran has no blood relationship with the twins. Gran and the babies – they aren’t joined at all.

In the last chink of light, before Gran shuts my door, I check the flask. In its whorls, its worlds, there are a couple of bright seed fish swimming.

After that, I sleep.