The Flask

by Nicky Singer

  Don’t you and your dad look alike! Lots of people have said that to me. I don’t tell them Si’s my stepfather, it just causes complications. In fact there have been many times when I’ve pretended that Si is my father. It makes things easier, like at school, when they ask you to write stuff about your family. What does your father do for a living? My father’s a mechanic. Actually Si is not a mechanic, but he might as well be, the amount of time he spends on this car.

  He has been working on his ‘little moggie’ pretty much the whole time he’s been in my life. Him and the oily cardboard and the spare parts and the spanners and the tinkering. Tinkering. That’s what Mum calls it, though she says it lovingly.

  “You’d think he could leave it alone for one day,” says Gran. “With everything that’s going on.”

  “Hello Angela,” says Si, as she gets out of the car. Then he swivels round to face me. “Hi Jess. How’s tricks?”

  The trolley on which he swivels is my fault. If I had been the stepchild he wanted, it would have been Si lying – trolleyless – under the car tinkering and me lying beside him. Me being interested in exhausts, radiators, crankshafts, timing chains and me wriggling out to fetch whatever bolt or socket spanner he had forgotten, so he could keep lying there, hour after hour. And it’s not that I haven’t tried to be interested, I have. I just never quite got the point of Roger the Wreck. Yes, that’s what he calls it – Roger the Wreck. Because when he bought it, it wasn’t really a car at all, more a sort of heap of junk. But over the years he’s lovingly put it all back together again. He’s screwed and bolted and joined and greased it into some sort of whole, bursting with the pride of it.

  “Fit like a glove, don’t they, Jess? The new doors.”

  But actually there’s still a gale-force draught around those doors and the word new would not pass a lie detector. There is nothing new about this car. All its components, the wood frame, the chrome trims, the headlamps, they all come from the other cars, the ‘donor’ cars, which squat in our garage. Other heaps of junk which he raids to make Roger run. Roger who occasionally roars into life sounding, Mum says, like a war-time Spitfire.

  I was nine when Si made himself the little trolley on caster wheels, nine when he finally admitted to himself that, as a mechanic’s assistant, I was a failure. That, if he forgot the socket spanner (the heavy one from the Britool box marked war issue) he would have to crawl out from under the car and get it himself. The trolley made things easier – he could just scoot in and out – but, whenever I see it, I can’t help feeling his sense of disappointment.

  “How are the babies?” asks Gran pointedly, as though a real man would not be tinkering under a car when his newborn babies are lying tangled up in a hospital cot.

  “Heart ultrasound, EKG. CT scans. Blood work. Even skin tests – mouths and noses checked for bacteria and fungi and…” He suddenly pauses. “They’re fighting,” he says. “They’re giving it everything they’ve got.”

  And his eyes go fierce and starry again, not like the Si I know, and do you know what? That red hotness flashes across my chest a second time in one day. And I imagine how it would be if the twins come home and lie under the Morris Traveller 1000 and pass their father (their father) the war-issue socket spanner. And because there are two of them, one could always be under the car and the other hopping about for the spanner, so they’d never have to leave him and he wouldn’t be disappointed ever again. And, of course, I know I’m being ridiculous. I’m being totally unfair on these two babies, who might not even make it to being grown-up enough to get under a car, and in any case, just because they’re boys it doesn’t mean they’ll be any more interested than me in oil and grease and dungarees but, but… would he have really wanted them if I’d been good enough? If there’d never been a trolley?

  And then it hits me. I’ve separated them, haven’t I? I’ve put a knife down their join and I’ve put one twin under the car and the other hopping about for spanners. And of course there’s been talk in our house about separation. But it’s so risky, so delicate, that even Si hasn’t talked so very loudly about it. And here I am, just dividing them willy-nilly, sticking the knife in. Statistic: since 1950, seventy per cent of separations result in one live twin.

  One.

  Just one.

  “I don’t suppose you’ve thought about dinner?” Gran says.

  “Takeaway?” hazards Si.

  Gran rolls her eyes, as though this is the most ludicrous thing she’s ever heard, and then marches into the house to rustle something up.

  Which leaves me just standing there.

  Si looks up. “All right, Jess?” he says and then, with an expert kick of his left heel, he disappears under the car.

  Si would have preferred takeaway, I would have preferred takeaway, but we get rice and frozen vegetables and leftover (Zoe would say pre-owned) chicken. Instead of discussing the babies, we talk, or rather Gran talks, about adventures with vases and coal scuttles and garden sheds. I say nothing and Si doesn’t say much either.

  “Hope it hasn’t been too dull for you,” Si says, as Gran’s car finally pulls out of the drive.

  “Gran told me about Clem’s little dip,” I jump in straightaway with this, because part of me fears that Si will disappear under the car again. Or back to the hospital. Or just disappear plain and simple.

  “Hmm?” says Si.

  “Dip – in the night.”

  “Oh. The murmur. Clem has a VSD, a ventricle septal defect – what they used to call a ‘hole in the heart’. So there was a bit of a dip in his breathing last night. Monitor went off. But lots of kids have holes like these apparently – and they can often spontaneously resolve. So we’re not worrying too much about that at the moment.”

  “What time did the monitor go off?”

  “I don’t know, somewhere round two o’clock, I think. Why?”

  You look frozen, Jess. Come on now, back to bed, it’s gone two o’clock.

  “Are there explanations for everything, Si?” I ask then.

  “You mean real ones, scientific ones?”

  When I was about five, someone apparently asked me, in Mum’s hearing, what ‘Si’ was short for. And I didn’t reply Simon, I replied science. That became a family joke for a while, though I never found it very funny.

  “Yes,” I say, even though it’s not really what I mean at all.

  “There are explanations for everything we’ve been clever enough to work out so far,” Si says. “But there’s still a whole lot of stuff we don’t really understand still. Which is why people still believe in God.”

  God again.

  “Or gods,” he goes on.

  I prepare myself for his Best Explaining Voice, though I only have myself to blame.

  “Take Helios,” Si says. “The Greek sun god who was supposed to drag his four-horsed chariot across the sky each morning and with it the rising sun. Each night, the ancients believed he, rather conveniently, travelled back to the east in a golden cup ready to ride across the sky the following day. That story lasted pretty much until we discovered that actually it’s the earth’s rotation that causes night and day. After which, Helios was out of a job.”

  This is quite interesting, and it’s also not nearly as involved as Si’s usual explanations, so I think he must be tired. In fact, when I actually look at him, he seems exhausted. So I hurry up, and I tell him about waking up at the exact moment that Clem’s heart was murmuring.

  “Gran said it was just worry…” I start.

  “Reasonable enough,” says Si. “Though you’d also have to consider simple coincidence.”

  I consider it. If the flask is in some way connected to the twins, then how can it also be connected to this Rob person, or at least to the song Aunt Edie wrote for him? So maybe the howling and the waking up was just coincidence. But then again, coincidences don’t normally crush your heart up.

  “Coincidence is a perfectly rational explanation,” says Si. “Not everything happens for a reaso
n, you know.”

  My face must not be liking this answer because he goes on. “Trouble is, human beings seem to be wired to believe just the opposite. We find it difficult to accept that things can be random. That stuff just happens.”

  Stuff, I suppose, like Aunt Edie writing a really important song to someone I’ve never heard of. Just some random piece of nothing. And I’m just about to ask Si who this nothing, random Rob is, when I realise there is no way Si will know because Si and Edie – they’re not even part of the same family.

  So instead I say, “I don’t think everything does come down to science.”

  “What?” says Si.

  “I mean,” I say, keeping calm enough to choose my example with care, “I mean, when you’re in a car, just driving along and suddenly you just feel there’s someone looking at you and you turn around, and there in the next car, there is, there’s someone staring at you. That’s not science, is it?”

  “Sixth sense,” says Si. “That’s what that is.” He smiles. “Which is just another way of saying, we can’t explain it yet. Bit like Helios. Maybe in a hundred or two hundred years’ time – then we’ll have an explanation for car staring as well.”

  It’s his smile, his smug smile, that makes me take the flask out and put it on the kitchen table.

  “What would you say,” I ask and it all comes out in a rush, “if I told you that, when Clem’s heart was murmuring, this old bottle started pulsing, started howling, like some wolf, crying and howling and pushing black black stuff into my bedroom and it wasn’t a dream, it really wasn’t. And what if I told you that the flask can sing as well, that it can sing something bigger than God, bigger than planets and—”

  “Jess, Jess, steady.” He puts his big bony arm around my shoulder. Then he says he’s sorry.

  “Sorry?”

  “We’ve all been taken up, haven’t we, with the twins.”

  “It’s not that!”

  And I’m probably furious because I shouldn’t be talking to him about this sort of stuff. I should be talking to Zoe, my beautiful dancing, mirror-image friend Zoe. Only I’ve pushed her away, haven’t I? I’m all busy hating her and pushing her away when I’ve never needed her more than I do now. So it’s all my fault that I’m alone with Si and a flask that doesn’t make any sense.

  Si picks up the bottle.

  I wait for the whoosh, the breath and the butterfly beating under my hands. But nothing happens. The bottle, the flask, is still.

  He turns it around in his hands.

  “It’s a beautiful thing,” he says. “Eighteenth century. Whisky flask, if I’m not mistaken. They’re called pumpkin seed flasks, I think, because of their shape.”

  He is giving it a name, he’s describing it, making it just some stupid historical object.

  “You don’t understand!” I shout.

  “I’m a parent,” says Si. “That’s my job.”

  “You’re not my parent,” I shout.

  I have never said this to Si before.

  Ever.

  Si moves a little closer. “Jess,” he says. “Jess, it’s all right.”

  But it isn’t.

  The following morning, Paddy’s mother arrives in our drive at 10.30 a.m. Paddy’s sitting in the front seat of the car and Zoe’s in the back.

  “Our big day at the Buddhist Centre with Onion Bhaji,” announces Paddy.

  “Not onion bhaji,” said Mrs Paddy. “Lalitavajri.” Mrs Paddy has a name of her own – Sarah, I think – but everyone calls her Mrs Paddy because she just looks like a bigger, smilier version of Paddy himself. That big, round cheerful beach ball face.

  I look at Paddy. He’s grinning. I don’t think he remembers anything that happened in the park. I don’t think he remembers that I would have liked to beat him to death. Zoe does remember. There’s something flickering and anxious about her.

  “In you get,” says Mrs Paddy.

  I get in. I’m carrying my clipboard and my Places of Worship questionnaire.

  “Hi Jess,” says Zoe.

  I look out of the window.

  “As it’s Easter,” Mum said before she went into hospital, “I don’t know why you can’t visit a Christian place of worship.”

  “It’s to broaden our minds,” I told her.

  “Going in a Christian church would probably broaden most of your lot’s minds,” Si remarked.

  The truth, which I didn’t tell them, is that we could have chosen a church or a temple or a mosque, for that matter. We probably would have chosen a church if Em or Alice had been part of our group. But, thanks to Zoe and the issue of the holiday dates, they got paired with Jack and we got Paddy.

  “I vote for Buddhism,” Paddy said. “Father Neville knows a big fat zero about Buddhism, so I reckon we’ll be on safe ground whatever we write.”

  “How’re things with the babies, Jess?” Mrs Paddy asks, as we head out of the close.

  “Fine,” I say.

  “And your mum?”

  “Fine.”

  “Well, give her my very best, won’t you?”

  I say I will and then Mrs Paddy leaves the subject. Sometimes you have to be grateful for adults.

  Zoe then asks Paddy if he’s seen some new film and it turns out he has, and she stops being anxious and flickering and starts one of those conversations that go: “Oh, my gosh, wasn’t it amazing when…”, “Yeah, but did you see – wow, I mean…” And they’re completely involved in the excitement of it all and I’m still staring out of the window. Which is, of course, entirely my own fault.

  “You haven’t seen the film yet then, Jess?” says Mrs Paddy, picking up on my silence.

  And I know the yet is just to let me off the hook, to make it clear that I’m not really some excluded saddo, it’s just that I haven’t seen the film yet.

  “No,” I say. “Not yet.”

  “Bit too much going on at your house probably,” says Mrs Paddy kindly.

  Bit too much going on in my mind.

  About a million years later we arrive at the Buddhist Centre.

  “Do you know what this building used to be?” Mrs Paddy asks, as we draw up.

  “No,” I say. Paddy and Zoe are still on the film.

  “An old shoe factory,” says Mrs Paddy.

  We tip out on to the street.

  “I’ll be back for you in an hour,” says Mrs Paddy.

  The double doors to the centre open on to a small porch with hooks for coats and racks for shoes. Beyond this the ground floor is divided into an open-plan office, a library, a tiny kitchen and a reception area with comfy chairs and cushions and rugs which looks like someone’s sitting room. We all hesitate long enough in the porch for someone to ask us our business and suggest we remove our shoes.

  “We’ve come to see,” Paddy pauses, “Lalitavajri.”

  “Ah, that’s me.” A small, smiling woman with oceans of curly orange hair rises from one of the comfy chairs. “You must be Maxim.”

  Paddy nods. “And this is Zoe, and Jess.”

  “Welcome,” says Lalitavajri. “You’re all very welcome.” Her orange curls bob as she talks. “Shall we go to the Shrine Room then?”

  We follow her up three flights of stairs, passing a number of small rooms and shut doors, so the Shrine Room is a surprise. It runs the full length of the building, a spacious airy room with a huge skylight beyond which frothy white clouds scud across the sky. At the far end of the room, where the altar would be in a church, there’s a golden screen painted with the image of the Buddha, and arranged simply on the floor in front of him, are some candles and vases of flowers. The flowers don’t look shop bought, they look like they’ve been cut from people’s gardens. There are a couple of branches, heavy with pink cherry blossom, some hyacinths in a jam jar and a vase with some tall bell-shaped flowers I don’t know the name of. There are also three bendy stems of eucalyptus.

  Yes, eucalyptus.

  Si would probably say it’s just a coincidence that some of the fragrant, oil
y leaves that Aunt Edie pressed for me to smell, are here in this room where I’ve only come because Zoe wanted to do the project with Paddy and Paddy thinks our RE teacher is a goon, but it doesn’t feel that way to me. It feels that this room is welcoming me. And then I think a bit more about coincidences. Was it a coincidence that instead of getting Aunt Edie’s piano I got the bureau and inside the bureau was the flask? And was it a coincidence that I found that flask? Or was that to do with my real father, whose slide rule wouldn’t fit? And was it a coincidence that Gran gave me that slide rule in the first place? How far can you trace back these so-called coincidences? All the things that might have happened but didn’t because you made this choice, not that one. All the coincidences that have led me into this room with the eucalyptus. And then I wish I’d brought the flask with me, instead of leaving it behind in my bedroom, thinking that this project was just some homework thing and not part of my real life. Maybe the flask would have had something to say about the eucalyptus.

  “Now,” says Lalitavajri, “how do you want to do this?”

  “We’ve got a questionnaire,” says Paddy, waving it as though it’s a map of the known universe.

  Lalitavajri sits down on a mat beside a golden gong and invites us to sit beside her.

  “Fire away,” she says.

  “What drew you personally to Buddhism?” reads Paddy solemnly.

  “Ah, that’s easy,” says Lalitavajri. “A world where kindness and generosity have the highest value.”

  And straightaway I feel bad, because here I am sitting cross-legged in this beautiful Shrine Room and a large part of me is still bearing a grudge against Zoe. And Paddy for that matter. And Si who calls himself my father, but is actually only the babies’ father. And the babies themselves for being so dangerously muddled up together. And, actually, against myself. I’m bearing a grudge against myself for being so stupid and never letting go, and…

  “And what for you is the most important belief in Buddhism?” asks Zoe.