by Nicky Singer
“Can I come and see them often?” says Zoe.
“Of course,” says Mom.
“I’ll help them play with blocks.”
Mom laughs. “Not for a bit.”
“And I’ll dance for them, too. And in a few years, when you and Si and Jess want to go out, I could babysit them.”
“We’ll see,” says Mom.
I like the fact that Zoe has my brothers in her future; it helps me believe they really are here to stay. I’m glad she sees me in her future, too, the two of us together. Friends. The idea that I was all for hating her, refusing to speak to her, chopping her out of my life—that all seems very strange to me now. But then perhaps you can’t really love a person unless you can hate them, too, as the flip side of the same coin. I mean, nobody hates an acquaintance, do they? You have to feel powerfully about someone to be able to hate them.
“When are they going to wake up?” says Zoe.
“Not for a bit,” says Mom. “They’ve only just gone down.”
“Oh,” says Zoe, full of disappointment.
“You’ll have to come back another time.”
“Can I?” says Zoe. “Can I come back tomorrow and the day after that and the day after that?”
“You’ll get bored,” says Mom.
“No, I won’t.”
She will, of course, but Mom just smiles, and I smile, too.
When Zoe leaves, Mom and I sit quietly in the playroom with the sleeping babies. The late-afternoon sun pours through the French doors. After a while Mom says, “What are you thinking, Jess?”
As it happens, I’m thinking two things simultaneously. I’m thinking how Em will come and visit the babies, and Alice, too, and maybe even Paddy. And then the visiting will stop, and we’ll know they really are here to stay. Clem. Richie. Nothing remarkable.
I’m also thinking about love and hate. How I hated Si when he said he was my parent and he wasn’t, and how I loved him when he fixed the timing chain so the babies wouldn’t die, and so maybe it is right that you can’t love someone without being able to hate them, too. I try to explain the hate thing to Mom.
“Only with you,” I tell Mom, “it doesn’t work, because I’ve never hated you.”
Mom laughs that very gentle, beautiful laugh of hers.
“Plenty of time yet,” she says. “You probably just need to get a little older.”
“But I don’t want to hate you!”
“And I don’t want you to hate me. The point is only that you have the option; you can. You can feel safe to.” She pauses. “Sometimes when a child loses a parent, arguing with the only parent they have left feels dangerous.”
“So you mean if I had a fight with you, I’d be acting brave?”
“Yes. Exactly.”
“I’ll think about it,” I say.
“But then you’re brave anyway,” says Mom. “Brave and very special. But I think I’ve said that before.”
“Not about brave,” I say.
Mom smiles. “Speaking of which, it all looks fine with Zoe now.”
“Yes. Closer than we were before, I think.”
“That’s how it goes,” says Mom. “It’s only when you’re on the point of losing something—someone—that you really know what you’ve got.”
“That’s not what you said last time.”
“Oh?”
“You said we might be growing out of each other.”
“I offered it as a possibility, that’s all. That it’s okay to move on sometimes.”
“And also okay to stay together. To make it work.”
“Yes, of course.”
“You know what, Mom?”
“What?”
“Sometimes I think, Zoe and me, we might grow old together, use our walkers together. Live next door to each other, maybe, like Gran and Aunt Edie.”
“So long as you don’t bicker like they did.”
“Well, maybe we will.”
“Yes,” says Mom. “Maybe you will.”
The front door opens. Si is home, but I haven’t finished with this conversation yet.
“What’s a soul, Mom?” I ask, not quite out of the blue.
“Mmm?” says Mom. She’s listening to Si, the noise he makes in the hall with his keys and the drawer. “Sole fish, sole shoe, soul as in not-body?”
“Soul as in not-body.”
“Well, your spirit, I guess. Your essential spirit.” Mom looks in her sons’ basket. “The color with which your life burns.”
Iridescent pearl and fizz-heart summer-sky blue and moonlit white and lion-mane gold and new-shoot green and fluttering pink and even howling black.
“Is that what you meant?” asks Mom.
I don’t have a chance to reply before Si comes in.
He’s obviously overheard us talking because (as he looks in at the twins and gives Mom a peck on the cheek) he says, “Not what the Romans would have said. Anima—that’s the word they had for the soul. Not so much color as wind or breath. Did you know that?”
“No,” says Mom.
“I did,” I say. Strong as a storm wind, tiny as a baby’s breath.
“Oh,” says Si. “That school of yours must be doing a better job than I thought.”
71
Si goes upstairs to change out of his suit. I keep looking at the babies, expecting them to wake up.
“Babies always sleep longer than you think,” says Mom. “Sleep, eat, poop, sleep. That’s pretty much it for babies.”
“But I want them to be awake,” I say. “I want to play a song for them.”
“Well, play away. They’ll hear it in their dreams. Your Aunt Edie always said that—people respond to music even when they’re asleep.”
“I never heard Aunt Edie say that.”
“You weren’t the only person Edie spoke to, you know, Jess.” Mom gets up. “Guess I’d better start thinking about making some food for the rest of us.”
As she heads for the kitchen, I draw the rocking Moses baskets closer to the piano. I want to be able to see the babies’ faces as I play.
“This is ‘Spring Garden,’” I announce. “One of Aunt Edie’s favorite pieces. This is the grass growing. Can you hear the grass, Richie? And this part’s the cherry trees, bursting into bloom. Can you hear the blossoms? And the birds, singing in the tree? Can you hear the birds, Clem? Are you dreaming of birds?”
I lean over the baskets. Clem is not dreaming anything. Richie is still fast asleep, but his brother is awake. Clem is wide awake.
“Oh, Clem, do you like it? Do you?”
No reply.
Kind of like the flask.
“I’ll teach you. I’ll teach you everything I know. Everything Aunt Edie taught me. Would you like that?”
No reply.
But he’s listening, he’s listening to the music and also to the sound of my voice.
“You’ll be good,” I say. “You’ll be a brilliant player, you know that?”
No reply. He’s staring at the ceiling.
“Better than me, I reckon, because of your beautiful soul. You owe that to Rob, you know, Edie’s Rob. You were really lucky there, Clem.”
A little munching sound of his lips.
“You’re scrunchy, Clem. You really are. Why don’t you talk back?”
Clem scrunches and munches.
“I love you,” I hear myself say before I realize that Mom is standing in the doorway.
“Has he woken up?” she asks.
How does Mom know that?
“I think he’s going to be a better player than me,” I say. “Clem. Better at the piano. Better at songs.”
“Oh, I don’t know about that,” says Mom.
But I do. I know it like Mom knows that Clem has woken up even though she wasn’t in the room and he never made a sound. I imagine all the family standing around Clem when he’s nine or ten, or thirteen or fourteen. I imagine them saying, Where did all this boy’s music come from?
And Si saying, “It can’t h
ave been from my family.”
And Mom saying, “Nor mine, for that matter.”
And me saying, “It came from Aunt Edie.”
And both of them laughing and saying that although Edie was my aunt, she wasn’t Clem’s aunt; she’s only related through my father, so it can’t be that.
Which is where they’re going to be wrong.
“Maybe it was you,” Mom might add. “Maybe it’s you who helped Clem get where he is.”
And that will be wrong, too—but not entirely.
72
Aunt Edie’s house is sold.
“To the couple you met,” says Gran. “The ones who looked around the house the day of the twins’ operation.”
“I’m glad,” I say. “I liked them.”
“Yes,” says Gran. “So did I. She’s pregnant, apparently, so there’ll be a baby in the house soon.”
“And she plays the piano,” I say.
“Oh, how do you know that?”
“She talked about it, or her husband did.”
If we buy this house I will always remember you—and your music.
“Do you want to go over there one more time?” asks Gran. “Say good-bye to the house and all that?”
“No,” I say, maybe too fast. “Thank you.” Without Edie, without the piano, the house is, well, it’s like the flask. Empty.
“Fair enough,” says Gran.
“There is one thing I would like, though,” I say. “Since I’m here.”
“What’s that, Jess?”
“A sprig of eucalyptus.”
Gran doesn’t ask why I want a sprig from her eucalyptus tree; she just goes to the kitchen drawer and gets out her pruning shears.
“Come on, then.”
We go to the gate between the houses, which is bolted shut, and stand by the eucalyptus tree.
“Do you want to do it yourself?” Gran asks.
“Yes, please.”
“Remember to cut it at an angle, and just above a leaf stem. It’s better for the plant that way.”
I cut a small piece, only five or six leaves long.
“That’s not much,” says Gran.
“It’s enough,” I say.
“I think I’ll take some, too,” says Gran, and she cuts herself a number of small silvery branches and adds some orange trumpet daffodils from the border.
She offers me daffodils, too, but I say no.
“Sure?”
“Sure.”
“Suit yourself.”
She arranges her flowers and then soaks some paper towels in water to wrap around my single eucalyptus stem.
“That should keep it moist till you get back home.”
“Thanks, Gran.”
“Do you know what eucalyptus means, Jess?”
“I didn’t know it meant anything.”
“Most plants are supposed to have some sort of properties. Eucalyptus is usually associated with protection. And healing.”
When I get my little piece of healing home, Mom says, “Do you need a vase for that, Jess?”
But I’ve already got one.
Because this is what I have decided to make of my marvelous empty flask. I fill the flask from the tap in the bathroom, and when the water gets up to the neck, there’s a sudden rush of bubbles, so, just for a moment, it looks like there are little seed fish. Swimming.
I don’t know how or why, but the bubbles keep on coming long after I put in the eucalyptus stem. Some of them rise to the surface of the water and burst, but others, millions of others, cling to the inside of the glass like stars in a tiny galaxy. I stand the flask on my bedroom windowsill, put it in the exact spot where the breath used to sit, and wait. Late-spring sunshine slants in perfectly straight lines through the windowpane, but the mountainous whorls and the impurities of the glass—and the bubbles—tease and refract that light so my little flask shines and shimmers, just like I hoped it would.
And of course my stem of eucalyptus will die, because everything that lives dies. I have learned that. When that happens, I’ll go out into the garden or into the woods behind the park and I’ll find something new: a leaf, a blade of grass, a bluebell, a nettle, maybe. In summer, I might ask Mom for a rose. A pink rosebud with brown papery petals on the outside. Because every day things are made anew; I’ve learned that, too. The vase will hold all of these treasures, and every time one falls away, another will rise.
So there will be a rhythm to the flowers and a rhythm to my remembering. And when Clem’s old enough, maybe I’ll tell him about Rob and the flask and how there are always things in the universe bigger than your understanding.
But then again, when I look in his fizz-heart blue eyes, I think he may know that already.
Acknowledgments
Very grateful thanks to Dr. John Young, a Morris Minor enthusiast who allowed me access to his little moggie called—um, Roger the Wreck. Any resemblance between his Roger the Wreck and mine is purely coincidental. Gratitude, too, to Ron and Innes, my local garagemen, who have not just kept my old banger running for the best part of twenty years but who will also, if you slip them the odd doughnut, tell you about crankshafts and timing chains. Any errors are obviously mine.
My thanks to the Brighton Buddhist Centre and to Padmavajri (Lotus Diamond Thunderbolt) in particular, for her time and her generosity.
And then there’s Peter Tabern. Peter was the first person to notice that Jess was a girl. It’s a long story, which he read on several different occasions in several different incarnations, each time holding up a lantern so I could see what I’d actually written. Thank you very much, Peter. Every writer needs a Peter Tabern, but they don’t all get as lucky as me.
There’s also Charles Boyle. He didn’t allow me to thank him for what he did on my last book (Knight Crew), because he published it and he’s ludicrously modest. But he’s not in charge of this book, so here are the thanks, belated but very sincere. Tough luck, Charles; you can’t win them all.
Last but not least is Rachel Denwood. She decided she wanted to be my new editor before she’d seen a word of The Flask. It’s this sort of faith that keeps a writer going.
Nicky Singer
has written six books for adults and six books for children. Her first children’s novel, Feather Boy, won the Blue Peter Book of the Year Award in the U.K. and was also adapted for television, winning a BAFTA for Best Children’s Drama. She lives with her family in Brighton, England. Learn more about Nicky at www.nickysinger.com.
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