The Flask Read online

  Dedication

  For my daughter Molly,

  who taught me everything I needed to know to write this book,

  and who is teaching me still.

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Chapter 58

  Chapter 59

  Chapter 60

  Chapter 61

  Chapter 62

  Chapter 63

  Chapter 64

  Chapter 65

  Chapter 66

  Chapter 67

  Chapter 68

  Chapter 69

  Chapter 70

  Chapter 71

  Chapter 72

  Acknowledgments

  Also by Nicky Singer

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  I find the flask the day the twins are born, so I think of these things as joined, as the twins are joined.

  The flask is in the desk, though it is hidden at first, just as the desk itself is hidden, shrouded inside the word bureau – which is what my gran calls this lump of furniture that arrives in my room. I hate the desk. I hate the bureau. It is a solid, everyday reminder that my aunt Edie is dead.

  Aunt Edie isn’t – wasn’t – my real aunt, she was my great-aunt, so of course she must have been old.

  “Ancient,” says my friend Zoe. “Over sixty.”

  Old and small and wrinkled, with skin as dry as paper.

  No.

  Her bright blue eyes gone milky with age.

  No. No!

  My aunt Edie blazed.

  At the bottom of her garden there was a rockery in which she grew those tiny flowers that keep themselves closed up tight, refusing to unfurl until the sun comes out. They could be closed up for hours, for days, and then suddenly burst into life, showing their dark little hearts and their delicate white petals with the vivid pink tips. That’s what I sometimes thought about Aunt Edie and me. That I was the plant all curled up and she was the blazing sun. That she, and only she, could open up my secret heart.

  A week after her death, I find myself standing by that rockery staring at the bare earth.

  “Looking for the mesembryanthemums?” says Si. Si’s my stepfather and he’s good with long words.

  I say nothing.

  “They’re annuals, those flowers, the ones you used to like. Don’t think she had the chance to plant any this year.”

  I say nothing.

  “What’re you thinking, Jess?”

  Si is good with questions. He’s good with answers. He’s good at talking. He’s been talking in my life since I was two.

  “About the music,” I say.

  I’m thinking about Aunt Edie and the piano in her drawing room. About how her tiny hands used to fly over the keys and the room fill with the sound of her music and her laughter. I’m thinking about the very first time she lifted me on to the stool to sit beside her as she played. I must have been about three years old. There was no music on the stand in front of her, she played, as she always did, from memory, or she just made stuff up. But I didn’t know that then. I thought the music was in her hands. I thought music flowed out of people’s fingers.

  “Come on, Jess, your turn now!”

  And that very first day, she put my hands next to hers. My hands on the keys of the piano, the keys to a new universe. And, of course, I can’t have made a tune, I must have crashed and banged, but that’s not how I remember it. I remember that she could make my fingers flow with music too. I remember my dark little heart opening out.

  After that I couldn’t climb on to that stool fast enough. Every time I went to her house, I would pull her to the piano and she would lift me, laughing. When I sat on that stool nothing else in the world existed. Just me and Edie and the music. Time passed and my legs got longer. I didn’t need to be lifted on to the stool. And still we played. Hidden little me – unfurling.

  “Where shall we go, Jess?” she’d ask “What’s your song today?”

  My song.

  Our song.

  I thought it would last for ever.

  Then she was dead. It was Gran who found her. Gran and Aunt Edie were sisters. They had keys to each other’s houses, had lived next door to each other for the best of forever. In the fence that separates their gardens there is a little gate. During daylight hours, summer and winter, they kept their back doors open, and you never knew, if you called on them, in whose house you’d find them. So they were joined too.

  All sorts of things I’d thought of as separate before the twins were born turn out to be joined.

  The whole family gathers at the crematorium for the funeral. The hearse is late. My cousin Alistair, who is only five, keeps asking when Aunt Edie is going to arrive. Finally, the hearse turns up with the great brass-handled coffin.

  “But where’s Aunt Edie?” persists Alistair.

  The grown-ups hush him, but I know what he means. You’re invited to Aunt Edie’s for tea and there she is with a plate of Marmite sandwiches. You’re invited to her funeral, why wouldn’t she be there too? Aunt Edie at the crematorium with a plate of Marmite sandwiches.

  Besides, as I know (and Alistair obviously knows), you can’t put the sun in a box.

  After the service there is a party at Gran’s which Si calls a wake. I don’t ask about the word wake but Si, with his Best Explaining Voice, tells me anyway. The old English root of the word, which means being awake, he says, changed in late medieval times to wacu. He pronounces this like wacko. It means watching over someone, he tells me. People used to sit up overnight, apparently, with dead bodies, watching.

  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.

  “Hi, hi, hi. Hi!” says Zoe. She wheels about, or tries to, which is when she comes face to face with the desk.

  “What,” she says, “is that?!”

  “It’s a bureau,” I say.

  “A what?”

  “A bureau.”

  “But what’s it doing here?”

  “It belonged to my aunt Edie.”

  “It’s hideous,” she says. “And ancient.”

  Ancient is one of her favourite words. Anything more than two weeks old is ancient as far as Zoe is concerned.

  “It’s George III,” I say. Si again.

  “Hideous, ancient and pre-owned. Who’d want something that already belonged to some George whatever?” she says.

  I’m going to explain that George Whatever didn’t own this piece of furniture, that he just happened to be on the throne of England when it was made, but that would turn me into Si, so I don’t.

&nbs
p; “Hideous, ancient, pre-owned and bashed up,” she continues.

  Bashed up?

  I actually take a look at the desk. It’s not bashed up. And the wood isn’t as dark as I’d thought either, in fact it’s a pale honey colour, and the grain is quite clear so, even though it’s over two hundred and fifty years old you can still imagine the tree from which it was originally cut. There are dents in the surface of course and scratches too, but it doesn’t look bashed up, just as though it has lived a little, lived and survived.

  “It’s not bashed up,” I say.

  “What?”

  “And it’s not hideous. Look at the locks,” I say. “Look at the handles.”

  The locks and the handles are also not as I’d thought. They’re not heavy, not funereal, in fact they’re quite delicate. Around the keyholes are beautiful little curls of brass in the shape of leaves and even the little brass-headed nails that hold the handles in place are carefully banged in to just look like part of the pattern.

  “Hideous, ancient, pre-owned and IN THE WAY,” says Zoe. She pirouettes. “I mean, how is a person to dance in this room any more?”

  Then she sees the mirror turned against the wall.