Nicky Singer - The Flask

“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.