Nicky Singer - The Flask

I wacu the wacko people at the wacu. There are some I don’t know and no one else seems to know them either as they are standing in a corner by themselves. Mum is sitting on the window seat, weighed down by the coming birth. I listen to her hiccup, she can barely breathe because of the two babies pressed together inside her. She asks me to take some sandwiches to the newcomers. There’s one plate of Marmite so I take that. The strangers – two men and a woman – don’t notice me at first because they are deep in conversation. They’re talking about Aunt Edie’s money and about who is going to get it as she doesn’t have any children of her own and therefore no grandchildren.

“Sandwich?” I say.

“Oh – and who do we have here?” says the woman, as though I just morphed into a three-year-old.

“Jessica,” I say. No one calls me Jessica unless they’re angry with me. But I don’t like this woman with her hard face and very pink lipstick and I don’t want her to call me Jess, which is what the people I love call me.

“And what’s in the sandwiches, Jessica?”

“Marmite.”

“Oh – not for me, thanks.”

“It was Aunt Edie’s favourite,” I say.

“Why don’t you have one then, Jessica?” the woman says.

I have three. I stand there munching them in front of those strangers even though I’m not in the least hungry. When I’ve finished I say, “Aunt Edie left everything to Gran.”

Si told me that too.

Si doesn’t believe in keeping things from children.

Later Gran says, “I want to give you something, Jess; something of Edie’s.” She pauses. “Edie would have wanted that. What would you like, Jess?”

I do not say the desk.

I certainly do not say the bureau.

I say, “The piano.”

This cannot be a surprise to my grandmother, but her hand flies to her mouth as if, instead of saying the piano, I’d said the moon.

“I don’t know,” says Gran from behind her hand. “I don’t know about that. I mean, I’ll have to talk it over with your mum. And Si.”

Mum says, “You already have a piano, Jess.”

This is true and not true. There is a piano in our house, an old upright, offered – free of charge – to anyone who cared to remove it when the Tinkerbell Nursery closed down when I was about six. I jumped at the chance of a piano – any piano. But the keys of the Tinkerbell piano were hit for too long by too many small fingers with no music in them at all. The felt of the piano’s hammers is worn and the C above middle C always sticks and the top A doesn’t sound at all, no matter what the piano tuner does.

Aunt Edie’s piano has a full set of working notes. Aunt Edie’s piano keeps its pitch even though it’s only tuned once a year. Aunt Edie’s piano holds all the songs we ever made together.

It’s also a concert grand.

Si says, “This is a small house, Jess.”

This is also true and not true. The house is small, but the garage is huge.

Si says, “You can’t keep a piano in a garage, Jessica.”

And you can’t. Not when the garage is full up with bits and pieces for your stepfather’s Morris 1000 Traveller. And the Traveller itself. And the donor cars he keeps for spare parts.

“What about the bureau?” says Gran.

“Bureau?” I say.

“Desk,” says Si. “A desk’s a great idea. A girl your age can’t be doing her homework at the kitchen table for ever.”

“It belonged to my father, Jess,” says Gran. “Your great-grandfather.”

But I never met my great-grandfather. I don’t care about him, and I don’t care about his desk.

But it still arrives.

That’s when I learn you don’t always get what you want in life, you get what you’re given.

Which is how it is for the twins.

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.