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The Flask
Nicky Singer
An unforgettable standalone novel from Nicky Singer, author of the sensational, award-winning FEATHER BOY.Twelve-year-old Jess is grieving for her beloved Aunt Edie, and anxiously awaiting the birth of her twin brothers, when she finds a mysterious glass flask hidden in a desk. The flask is beautiful to Jess, and soon she starts to believe that it contains a magical life-force. When her half-brothers are born critically ill, Jess becomes convinced that their survival depends on what’s happening to the flask…Through Jess's stunning narration, Nicky Singer explores the meaning of life, and the interconnected nature of all things - in a way which is entirely accessible to young readers.




Dedication (#ulink_f48389b6-6218-5e24-aee7-88a351b410bc)
For my daughter Molly,
who taught me everything I needed to know to write this book,
and who is teaching me still.
Contents
Cover (#ud3276923-8f5f-5717-8f62-3bcd5d0f7f6e)
Title Page (#u633dc34e-f592-540f-a2f4-bca5897c6489)
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 (#litres_trial_promo)


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.
“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.
“And what’s this?” she says. “Are you having a bad face day?”
She hangs the mirror the correct way round and checks to see if she has any spots, which of course she doesn’t. Even when she gets to be a proper teenager I doubt if she’ll have spots. Things like that don’t happen to Zoe.
“I’m sorry about the dancing, Zo,” I say. “But I really like this bureau. In fact,” I add, experimenting, “I think I love it.”
“Huh?” says Zoe, who’s still searching for spots.
Sometimes I think Zoe is a mirror. I look into her to find out who I really am.


As soon as Zoe leaves (flamboyant twirl and a shout of Bye-eee as she flies down the stairs), I take my chair and sit at the desk.
I never saw Aunt Edie at this desk, as I saw her so often at the piano. But she must have sat here, I realise. Sat writing letters, private things, not things you do when you have guests in the house. I pull out the runners (and Si is right about this, it isn’t difficult at all) and lay down the lid.
Inside it is like a little castle. In the middle, there is a small arched doorway, the door itself hinged between two tiny carved wooden pillars. On either side of the door are stepped shelves and cubbyholes of different sizes, to store envelopes or paper, I suppose. There are also four drawers, two wide shallow ones next to the pillars, and at either edge of the desk two narrower, longer ones. The desktop itself slides away if you pull a little leather tab. Underneath is a cavernous little underdrawer.
“That’s where they would have kept the inkwells,” says Si in passing.
I can see dark stains which could have been ink. People writing at this desk long before Aunt Edie. I imagine a quill pen scratching out a love letter. And suddenly those faraway people who sat at this desk, family or strangers, they don’t seem so faraway at all. They seem joined to me by the desk and all the things that have been written and thought here. And then I think about Edie herself, and how maybe she loved this desk. Sun-bright Edie, maybe coming here to be quiet, to be still, to unfurl her own dark heart.
Then I know I want to claim this desk after all.


But I still don’t put anything in the desk. Not until the morning my mother is to deliver the babies. This is going to be a long day, a difficult day. “We’ll need to keep busy,” Gran says; “you and me.”
Gran has agreed to stay in the house with me so that Si can be in the operating theatre with Mum.
“It’s an elective caesarean, Jess,” says Si. “The operation itself is quite safe.”
They have to go in the night before, as Mum is first on the list. Si stands in the hall holding Mum’s suitcase.
“Don’t worry, Jess,” Mum says, and stretches out her arms for me. But I can’t get close, because of the babies. “I’ll bring them home safe,” she whispers into my hair. “I will.”
“Time to go,” says Si.
I lie awake a long time that night. Keeping vigil. Watching. I imagine Mum being awake. And Si. And probably the babies too, waiting.
In the morning I skip breakfast.
“You’re growing,” said Gran. “You have to eat.”
But I can’t.
I go to my room and start on the desk. I have decided that I will put in some homework stuff, but also some private things. In one of the cubbyholes I lodge my English dictionary, my French dictionary, my class reader. I pay attention to the height of the books, their colour, shuffling them about until I am sure that I have the correct book (the stubby French dictionary), in the middle. In the inkwell space, I put pens, pencils, glue, sticky tape and my panda rubber with the eyes fallen off.
Then I move on to more precious things. Behind the little arched door, I put ScatCat. He’s a threadbare grey, his fur worn thin from having slept in my arms every night for the first four years of my life. His jet-black eyes are deep and full of memories. I think I’d still be sleeping with him if Spike hadn’t arrived. More about Spike later. To keep Scat company, I add the family of green glass cats made as I watched by a glassmaker one summer holiday. Then I add a bracelet that Zoe made for me (plaited strands of pink and purple thread) and also one made by another good friend – Em – (purple and green) when we were in year 5. I once suggested we make a thread friendship bracelet for the three of us, winding Zoe’s colours and Em’s and mine (purple and blue) all together. Zoe laughed at me. She said friendship bracelets could only be exchanged one-to-one. That’s what Best Friends meant, Zoe said. Didn’t I understand about Best Friends? I close the little arched door.
Next I select my father’s ivory slide rule. Not Si’s slide rule, but one which belonged to my real father. Gran thrust it into my hand one day.
“Here,” she said, quite roughly. “Your father had this when he was about your age. You should have it now.”
“What is it?” I asked.
“A slide rule, of course.”
I must have looked puzzled.
“It was how people did maths,” said Gran. “Before calculators.”
Before calculators sounded a bit like Before the Ark. It made my father seem further away not nearer. Or it did until I held the slide rule. Carefully crafted in wood, overlaid with ivory (“I know we shouldn’t really trade ivory,” said Gran, “but this elephant has been dead a long, long while”), it’s bigger and deeper than a normal ruler with a closely fitting sliding section in the middle slightly broader than a pencil. Along all its edges carved numbers are inked in black.
“It originally belonged to your grandfather. Passed down,” Gran said. She paused. “Useless now, I suppose. It’s useless, isn’t it?”
Gran talks to me quite often about my father, although only when we are alone. Normally it makes me uncomfortable, not because I’m not interested, but because she always seems to require a response from me and I’m never quite sure what that response should be. And the more she looks at me, the more she wants, the less I seem to be able to give. Though I think she believes that, if she talks about him enough, I’ll remember him. It will unlock memories of my own. But I was only nine months old when he died and I remember nothing.
But the slide rule is different. It’s the first thing I’ve ever held in my hands that he held in his.
“It’s not useless,” I say. “I like it. Thank you.”
And all the roughness falls away from her.
I’m thinking all this as I select a drawer for my father’s ivory slide rule. Right or left? I choose the right, slip it in. Then I change my mind.
I just change my mind.
I open the left drawer and transfer the slide rule. But it won’t go, it won’t fit. I push at it, feel the weight of its resistance. I push harder, the drawers are an equal pair, so what fits in one has to fit in the other.
Only it doesn’t.
I pull out the right-hand drawer. It runs the full depth of the desk, plenty long enough for the slide rule. I pull out the left-hand drawer. It is less than half the length of its twin. Yet it isn’t broken. It is as perfectly formed as on the day it was made.
Which is when I put my hand into the dark, secret space that lies behind that drawer.
And find the flask.


My heart gives a little thump. I’ve no idea, this first time, what I’m touching, except that it is cold and rounded and about the size of my hand. As I draw it out into the light, I feel how neatly its hard, shallow curves fit into my palm.
I call it a flask, but perhaps it is really a bottle, a flattish, rounded glass bottle with a cork in. It is very plain, very ordinary and yet it is like nothing I’ve ever seen before. The glass is clear – and not clear. There are bubbles in it, like seeds, or tiny silver fish, swimming. And the surface has strange whorls on it, like fingerprints or the shapes of contour lines on a map where there are mountains. I think I should be able to see inside, but I can’t quite, because the glass seems to shift and change depending on how the light falls on it: now milky as a pearl; now flashing a million iridescent colours.
I sit and gaze at it for a long while, turning it over and over in my hands, watching its restless colours and patterns. It is a beautiful thing. I wonder how it came into being, who made it? It can’t have been made by machine, it is too special, too individual. I remember the glassmaker who made my green cats and I imagine a similar man in a leather apron blowing life down a long tube into this glass, putting his own breath into it, lung to lung, pleased when the little vessel expanded. And then, as I keep on looking, the contours don’t look like contours any more but ribs, and the bowl of glass a tiny ribcage.
I have these thoughts because of the babies. Everything in the last nine months has been about the babies. They get into and under everything. They aren’t even born and they can make you frightened, they can make Mum cry, they can make me see things that aren’t there under shifting glass. Because, all of a sudden, I think I can see something beneath the surface of the glass after all.
Something and nothing.
I do make things up. Si says, “You are certainly not a scientist, Jessica. Scientists look at the evidence and then they come to a view.” But it’s not just Si, it’s Gran and even Mum. They say I make things up. I see things that aren’t there. And hear them sometimes too. Like now, beneath the glass, through the glass.
Some movement, a blink, a sigh. A song. Some sadness.
The sensation of life, of a ribcage, breathing.
“Jessica!” That’s a shout, a real-world shout. Gran is shouting. “Jessica, Jess!”
I jolt out of myself. “What?”
“The phone, Jess.”
Gran is standing at the bottom of the stairs, the phone in her hand.
It has come. The message. She knows. She knows about the babies.
I abandon everything, fly down the stairs, rip the phone from her.
“Yes?”
It is Si.
“Jess,” he says. “Jess.”
“Yes!”
“They’re alive. They’re alive, Jess.” His voice doesn’t sound like his normal voice, it sounds floating. I conjure his face. His eyes are full of stars.
I know I’m supposed to say something , but I don’t know what.
“Isn’t it wonderful?” says Gran.
“And they both have a heart,” says Si. “Two hearts, Jess. One heart each.”
Then I find something to say.
“Omphalopagus,” I say.


Omphalopagus is the technical term for babies joined at the lower chest. These type of babies never share a heart, so I don’t know why Si is so surprised. After all, it was Si who did the research, hours and hours of it on the net. Si who taught me the word, made me pronounce it back to him. Omphalo – umbilicus. Pagus – fastened, fixed. Fixed at the navel. The twins umbilically joined to each other and to Mum and right back through history to the Greeks who coined the word in the first place.
Me and the joins.
Si and the statistics.
Si’s endless statistics. Seventy per cent of conjoined twins are girls. Thirty-nine per cent are stillborn. Thirty-four per cent don’t make it through the first day of life.
Si’s eyes, shining.
“Can you give me back to Gran now, Jess,” says Si.
As I hand over the phone, I remember the night of Mum’s nineteen-week scan. I’d come down for a raid on the cereal cupboard. Si and Mum were talking in the sitting room, hushed, serious talk.
“They’re gifts of God,” I heard Mum say.
I stood at the door of the kitchen waiting for Si to put Mum right about that. I waited for him to tell Mum what he’d told me earlier that afternoon that, despite a great deal of mystical mumbo jumbo talked about conjoined twins down the ages, they are actually just biological lapses, slips of nature. Embryos that begin to divide into identical twins, but never complete the process, or split embryos that somehow fuse back together again. A small error, a malfunction, nothing to be surprised about, considering the cellular complexity of a human being.
I wait for him to say this. But he doesn’t.
“They’re miracles,” Mum says. “Our miracles. And I don’t care what anyone says. They’re here to stay.”
And Si doesn’t go on to mention the thirty-nine per cent of conjoined twins who don’t make it through the birth canal, or the thirty-four per cent who die on day one.
He just takes her in his arms and lets her bury her head in his chest. I see them joined there. Head to chest.


I’ve only been gone from my bedroom a matter of minutes, but it feels like a lifetime. Even the room doesn’t look the way it did before. It’s bigger, brighter, there is sunlight splashing through the window.
“The babies,” I shout. “They’re alive!” I jump on the bed and throw myself into a wild version of a tribal dance Zoe once taught me. Then I catch sight of myself in the mirror and stop. Immediately.
I also see, in the mirror, the flask. It has fallen over, it’s lying on its side on the desk.
No. No!
I scoot off the bed.
Please don’t be cracked, please don’t be broken.
The flask has only just entered my life and yet, I realise suddenly, I feel very powerfully about it. Connected, even. I find myself lurching forwards, grabbing for it. But it isn’t my beautiful, breathing flask, it is just a bottle. Something you might dig up in any old back garden. It isn’t broken, but it might just as well be, because the colours are gone and so are the patterns. No, that’s not true, there are whorls on the surface of the glass still, but they aren’t moving any more, and the bubbles, my little seed fish, they aren’t swimming. And there is nothing – nothing – inside.
I feel a kind of fury, as though somebody has given me something very precious and then just snatched it away again. I realise I already had plans for that flask. I was going to remove the cork and…
The cork – where is the cork?
It isn’t in the bottle. I scan the desk. It isn’t on the desk. But how can it be anywhere but in the bottle or on the desk? Did I imagine a cork? No, I saw it: a hard, discoloured thing, lodged in the throat of the flask. I look into the empty bottle, as if the cork might just miraculously appear. But it doesn’t. The smell of the bottle is of cold and dust. There can’t have been anything in that bottle.
And yet there was.
There was something crouched inside that glass, waiting.
No, not crouched, that makes it sound like an animal. And the thing didn’t have that sort of form, it was just something moving, stirring. Then I see it, the cork. Look! There on the floor. It’s not close to the flask, not just fallen out and lying on the desk, but a full metre away. Maybe more. To carry the cork that far something big, something powerful, must have come out of the flask, burst from it.
So where is that thing now?


It’s on the window sill.
What I thought was a patch of sunlight isn’t sunlight at all. It’s bright like sunlight, but it doesn’t fall right, doesn’t cast the right shadows. Light coming through a windowpane starts at the sun and travels for millions of miles in dead straight lines. You learn that in year 6. Light from the sun is not curved, or lit from inside, or suddenly iridescent as a soap bubble or milky as a pearl. It doesn’t expand and pulse and move. It doesn’t breathe. Whatever is on the window sill, it isn’t light from the sun.
I go towards it. It would be a lie to say I’m not frightened. I am frightened, terrified even, but I’m also drawn. I can’t help myself. I remember my old maths teacher, Mr Brand, breaking off from equations one day and going to stand at the window where there was a slanted sunbeam. He cupped his hands in the beam and looked at the light he held – and didn’t hold.
“You can’t have it,” he said. “You can’t ever have it.”
And all of the class laughed at him. Except me. I knew what he meant because I’ve tried to capture sunbeams too.
And now I want the thing on the window sill, because it is strange and beautiful and I don’t want to lose it again. I don’t want to feel what I felt when I saw that the flask was empty, which is sick and hollow, my stomach clutching just like in the moment when Mum told me Aunt Edie was dead.
So I move very slowly and quietly, as though the thing is an animal after all and might take fright. And it does seem to be vibrating – or trembling, I can’t tell which – as though it is aware of me, watching me, though something without eyes cannot watch.
“It’s all right,” I find myself saying. “It’s all right. I won’t hurt you.”
I won’t hurt it! What about it hurting me?
My room’s not big, as I’ve said, but it takes an age to cross. I am just a hand-stretch away from the pearly, pulsing light when there is a sudden whoosh, like a wind got up from nowhere, and I feel a rush and panic, but I don’t know if it is my rush and panic or that of the thing which seems to whip and curl past my head and pour itself back into the flask.
Back into the flask!
Quick as a flash, I put my thumb over the opening and I hold it down tight as I scrabble in the desk for my sticky tape. I pull at the tape, bite some off, jam it over the open throat of the flask and then wind it again and again around the neck, so the thing cannot escape.
I have it captured.
Captured!
Then I feel like one of those boys you read about in books that pull the wings off flies: violent, cruel. But here’s the question: if you had something in your bedroom that flew and breathed and didn’t obey the laws of science, would you want it at liberty?
There you are then.


When my heart calms down, I feel I owe the flask (or the thing inside it) an explanation. I think I should tell the truth, about the fear as well as the excitement. But I don’t know who or what I’m dealing with, so I also feel I shouldn’t give too much away. I should be cautious. Si’s always saying that: a man of science proceeds with care. Or If you’re going to mix chemicals, Jess, put your goggles on.
I’m not sure what sort of goggles I need to deal with the thing in the flask, but I think the least I can try is an apology.
“I’m sorry about the sticky tape,” I say.
I’m not really expecting a reply and I don’t get one, but the movement inside the flask does seem to become a little less frantic, so I have the feeling the thing is listening.
“I guess you must have been in that flask a long time,” I say next.
Where does that remark come from? From the cold and the dust I smelt in the bottle? Or from some story-book knowledge of things in bottles, genies in lamps? What am I imagining, that the thing is some trapped spirit cursed to remain in the flask for a thousand years until – until what? Until Jessica Walton arrives with her father’s ill-fitting slide rule? They say (correction: Si says) if you put a sane person in a lunatic asylum for any length of time they become as mad as the inmates. Me? I’m talking to a thing in a flask.
I’m calling it you.
The word you implies that the thing I’m talking to is alive. I mean you don’t say you to a box of tissues, do you? Or to a hairbrush or a necklace or a mobile phone. So I am making a definite assumption about the thing being alive. Mr Pugh, our biology teacher, says that only things that carry out all seven of the life processes can be said to be alive. Pug calls this Mrs Nerg.
M – for movement
R – for reproduction
S – for sensitivity
N – for nutrition
E – for excretion
R – for respiration
G – for growth
I look at the thing in the flask. Movement – no doubt about that. Reproduction. I’m not sure I want to think about that right now. Sensitivity. Definitely. It’s sensitive to me, I’m sensitive to it. Nutrition. Does the thing eat? Unlikely. It doesn’t have a mouth. But then plants eat and they don’t have mouths. Excretion. Not important. If you don’t eat you don’t need to excrete. Respiration. Yes, it breathes, doesn’t it? And it has to get energy from somewhere or it couldn’t move and it certainly moves. Growth. Yes again; I think I can imagine it growing.
To be alive, Pug says, you have to be able to carry out all seven of the processes. Not two, or five or one. All seven.
I think Pug may have missed out on some of his training. This thing is definitely alive.
“Who are you?” I say. “What are you?”
The thing does not respond.
I retreat a bit. “I think you’ll be safer in the flask for a while,” I say.
I mean, of course, that I’ll feel safer if the thing is in the flask. I’ve heard adults do this. They tell you something they want by making it sound useful to you, like, You’ll be much warmer in your coat, won’t you?
“Because,” I add, “I have to go to the hospital in a minute. Gran’s taking me to the hospital.”
No reply.
“To see the babies.”
No reply.
“So I’m just going to pop you (you) back in the desk for a bit.”
No reply.
“OK?”
“You see, I noticed how you rushed back in the flask yourself, so it must be your home, I guess. Am I right?”
No reply.
“My name’s Jess, by the way.”
Some little silver seed fish, swimming.
“How do you do that? How do you make the fish swim?”
No reply.
“It’s beautiful.”
No reply.
“So just wait, OK?”
No reply.
“Promise?”
Very gently, I place the flask back into the dark space behind the left-hand drawer in the desk.
“See you later,” I say, as I leave the room.


Our local hospital is too small to deal with cases like the twins’, so we have to go to the city. It’s a long drive.
“Your mum will be very tired, you know that, don’t you?” Gran says.
She makes it sound like we shouldn’t be going, but I know why we’re going. In case the twins belong in the thirty-four per cent who die on day one.
The Special Care Baby Unit is in the tower-block part of the hospital, on the fifteenth floor. We come out of the lift to face a message to tell us we are In the Zone and to make sure we scrub ourselves with the Hygienic Hand Rub. The doors to the unit are locked and we have to ring to gain admission.
Si hears us as we check in at the nurses’ station and comes out to greet us.
“Angela,” he says to Gran and then, “Jess.” And he puts his hand out to touch me, which he doesn’t usually. I look at his eyes. They aren’t sparkling, but they are smiling. “Come on in.”
There are four incubators in the room and five nurses. Two of the nurses are wearing flimsy pink disposable aprons and throwing things into bins. There’s an air of serious hush, broken only by the steady blip of ventilators. Beside each cot is a screen with wavy lines of electronic blue, green and yellow. I don’t know what they measure, but they’re the sort of machines you see in films that go into a single flat line when people die. Mum is not sitting or standing, but lying on a bed. They must have wheeled her in on that bed, and braked her up next to the twins. She doesn’t look up immediately when we come into the room; all her focus, all her attention is on my brothers.
Brothers.
All through the pregnancy, Mum’s been calling them my brothers. When the twins are born, when your brothers are born… But, I realise, standing in the hospital Special Care Unit, that they are not my brothers. Not full brothers, anyway. We share a mother, but not a father, so they are my half-brothers. But half-brothers sounds as if they’re only half here or as if they don’t quite belong. And that’s scary. Or maybe it’s actually me that doesn’t quite belong any more, as though a chunk of what I thought of as family has somehow slid away. And that’s even scarier.
So, I’m going to call them brothers – my brothers.
Mum looks up, shifts herself up on her pillows a little when she sees me, although I can see it hurts her.
“Jess… come here, love.”
I come and she puts her arms right around me, even though it’s difficult with leaning from the bed.
“Look.” She nods towards the incubator. “Here they are, here they are at last.”
They lie facing each other, little white knitted hats on their heads, hands entwined. Yes, they’re holding hands. Fast asleep and tucked in under a single white blanket they look innocent. Normal.
“Aren’t they beautiful?” says Mum.
“Yes,” I say. And it’s true, though there is something frail about them, two little birds who can’t fly and are lucky to have fallen together in such a nest.
“You were a beautiful baby too, Jess.”
She is making it ordinary, but it isn’t ordinary. Somewhere beneath that blanket, my brothers are joined together and I want to see that join. At least I do now, although for months the idea of the join has been making me feel queasy.
There, I’ve said it.
The truth is, when Mum first told me she was pregnant I felt all rushing and hot. Not about the join, which we didn’t know about then, or even about them being twins. No, I felt rushing and hot about her being pregnant at all. I can’t really explain it except to say I didn’t want people looking at my mother, I didn’t want them watching her swelling up with Si’s baby. It seemed to be making something very private go very public. And I didn’t like myself for the way I felt, so when it turned out to be twins, and conjoined twins at that, I hid myself in the join. I made this the secret. I didn’t want people to know about the join (I told Zoe, I told Em), because of all the mumbo jumbo talked about such twins down the centuries. I didn’t tell them that I wasn’t so sure about the babies myself, that the idea of the join actually made me feel sick to my stomach. I kept very quiet about that.
Am I a bad person?
A nurse is hovering and sees the babies stir.
“Do you want to hold them, Mum?” the nurse says as if my mother is her mother.
“Yes,” says Mum.
Si helps Mum into a comfortable sitting position while the nurse unhitches one side of the incubator and adjusts some tubes. Then he stands protectively as the nurse puts a broad arm under both babies and draws them out. Si never takes his eyes off the babies and there is something fierce in his gaze and something soft too, that I’ve never seen before.
“There now,” says the nurse as she gives the babies to Mum. They are in Mum’s arms, but they are still facing each other, of course. The nurse has been careful to keep the blanket round the babies as she lifts them and she’s careful now to tuck it in.
One of the babies makes a little yelping noise and Mum puts a finger to the baby’s lips and he appears to suck.
“They’re doing very well,” says Mum, and then she loosens the blanket.
The babies are naked, naked except for two outsized nappies which seem to go from their knees to their waists – where the join begins. Mum leaves the blanket open quite deliberately. Gran turns her head away, but I look. I look long and hard as Mum means me to do.
The babies’ skin is a kind of brick colour, as if their blood is very close to the surface, and it is also dry and wrinkled, as if they are very old rather than very young. Aunt Edie again. But the skin where they join is smooth and actually rather beautiful, like the webs between your fingers. It makes me feel like crying.
Very gently, Mum strokes the place where her children join, and then she draws the blanket back around them.
I realise then I don’t know what the babies are called.
“Richie,” says Mum, “after Si’s father. And Clem, after mine.”


It seems to be enough for Mum. She lies back and closes her eyes and the nurse comes and takes the babies away again. I think Si would like to lift them himself, but he doesn’t dare. Maybe he feels they are too fragile, that he’d hurt them.
Mum seems to have gone into an almost immediate sleep, and just for a moment, I feel we might all be just some dream of hers – me and Si and Gran and the babies all rather unlikely conjurings of her exhausted brain. And then, as I watch her chest rise and fall, I think about the flask and that seems like an even deeper dream. I had been going to tell Mum about the flask, how I found it in the desk and how it was full of something unearthly, something beautiful and scary at the same time and how I captured it, because I feel fierce and soft towards it, just like Si does towards the twins, but that I also feel bad because, as Mr Brand says, you can’t catch things that are supposed to be wild and free and…
“I think we ought to go now,” says Gran.
“Mum…” I say.
“Ssh,” says Si. “She needs to rest.”


By the time we get back home it is almost dark.
“Who’s that?” Gran asks as we turn into our drive.
It’s Zoe, of course, knocking at our front door. She turns as she hears the car pull up. I wind down my window.
“Want to come to the park?” she asks.
Zoe and I often go to the park at dusk. It’s one of our little rituals. We swing on the swings after all the little kids have gone home. We swing and talk. Or Zoe dances. She dances around the swan on its large metal spring. She dances along the wooden logs which are held up by chains, she backflips off the slide. When she’s tired, which isn’t often, we lie together on our backs in the half-moon swing and look at the sky. Or I look at the sky anyway. She looks upwards, but what she sees I don’t know, because people can look in the same place but not see the same things, can’t they?
“Bit late for the park,” says Gran.
But I want to go to the park because I want some private time with Zoe. I want to tell her how beautiful my brothers are, after all; I want to take time, sharing all the details of those little birds and the web of their join. I want to look in her eyes, see myself reflected in the mirror of her, the big sister of two baby boys.
“Please,” I say to Gran. “Just for half an hour.”
I also want to tell Zoe about the flask.
“Well,” says Gran. She looks at her watch. “Oh, all right then. Just while I make dinner.”
“Thanks, Gran,” I say, and I actually lean over and give her a kiss.
Zoe doesn’t know we’ve just come from the hospital and I don’t tell her. I want to be lying in the half-moon when I tell her about the babies. I want her to be the first to know, as she was about the join. A special moment, shared. Luckily, as we head down the cul-de-sac, she’s already chatting to me, she’s telling me about her sister’s boyfriend and his new car and how her mother won’t let the boyfriend drive Zoe about, but she doesn’t mind him driving her sister about, which is ridiculous and…
And soon we’re at the park and Paddy and Sam are there too with a football and two jumpers to mark a goal. Paddy isn’t Paddy’s real name, his real name is Maxim, but he doesn’t look like a Maxim so everyone calls him Paddy. He has a big, round, smiling face and he bounces through life like a beach ball. Happy and full of air. Or at least that’s what I think. Zoe thinks he’s massively handsome and has An Outstanding Sense of Humour. It’s Paddy, in fact, that Zoe has her eyes on.
I’m desperate to skirt behind the conker tree so we can get to the playground unseen, but Zoe is heading straight for the boys.
“Zoe…” I start urgently, clutching at her jacket.
But she’s already pulling away, calling. “Hi! Hi! Hi Paddy. Hi Sam.”
So there I am, trailing behind her.
The boys look up.
“Hey,” Sam says. Sam wears slouchy trousers and likes to think he’s cool. “How’s it going?”
“Great,” says Zoe.
We haven’t seen either boy since school broke up for the Easter holidays.
“We were just going to the swings,” I say quickly.
“Well, in a mo,” says Zoe.
Paddy looks at Zoe and then he looks at me. “Did the babies arrive yet?” he asks.
And there’s a moment where I could just say no, I could just say no and then we could walk away, and I could tell Zoe like I planned to as we lay in the half-moon swing.
“Well, did they?”
“Yes,” I say.
“What?” shrieks Zoe.
“They arrived.” I think I say it because I don’t want to deny them any more, these baby birds who are my brothers. I need them to be around me. Solid.
“Why didn’t you tell me?” shrieks Zoe.
Why didn’t you ask?
“Oh, right,” says Sam, whose interests are pretty much confined to sport and his computer.
“And?” asks Paddy.
“And they’re beautiful,” I say. “Boys. Two boys.”
“They’re all right then?” says Zoe. “They’re both all right?”
“They’ve got eight legs,” says Paddy.
“What?” says Sam.
“That’s what my nan said,” Paddy continues. “They could have eight legs.”
“Mumbo jumbo,” I say, and I shoot a look at Zoe. “They have four legs.”
“Four!” exclaims Paddy.
“Yes,” I say. “Two each. Like normal people.”
“Oh – normal!” Paddy laughs.
Zoe’s shrugging. Zoe’s making out that whatever Paddy’s saying, it’s nothing to do with her.
“What you all on about?” Sam asks.
“Jess’s brothers,” says Paddy. “They’re not just any old twins. They’re Siamese.”
Sam is doing knee-ups with the ball. “Siamese?” he says.
“Conjoined.” I hear my voice going up, I hear myself about to shout. “The correct term is conjoined twins. And as for normal, they are normal. Considering the cellular complexity of the average human being, that is.” Shut up, Si. “They’re as normal as me. Or you. If you call that normal.”
Paddy ignores normal. “Point is,” he says, “they’re joined down the chest.”
Sam drops the ball. He drops his jaw. His mouth hangs open. “Man,” he says. “Joined down the chest? Wow. Like, you mean, face to face? Like they’re facing each other all the time? Jeez.”
“If I was stuck on to my brother,” says Paddy, going to retrieve the ball, “if he was the first thing I saw when I woke up and the last thing I saw before I went to sleep, that would kill me.”
“More likely kill your brother, being stuck to you,” I say. Then I round on Zoe. “Come on,” I say. “We’re going.”
But Zoe’s feet seem planted in the ground.
“In the old days,” says Paddy, “they put Siamese twins in the circus. People paid to see them.”
“Conjoined!” I shout.
“You could do that,” Paddy continues. “You could bring your brothers in next term and charge a pound a go to look.”
“They might not even last that long,” I say. Or maybe I don’t say it. Maybe it’s the silent thing shouting in my head. They might not even last that long.
Paddy’s big face is shining with excitement. “I’d pay,” he says. “I’d pay to look. Wouldn’t you, Sam?”
“Yeah,” says Sam.
“You could have a different rate depending on whether it was just a look or a touch,” Paddy continues.
“Shut up,” I say.
“A pound for a look, two pounds for a good look and a fiver for a touch.”
“I said SHUT UP.”
“We could call it JFS – Jess’s Freak Show.”
And now everything that’s been silent and bottled up comes frothing and boiling over at last and I go right up to him because I’m going to hit him in the stupid, shining face. I draw back my fist and I lash out as hard and fast as I can, but he just catches my wrist.
“Hey,” he says. “Hey. What’s up with you? It was only a joke. Can’t you take a joke now?”
“I hate you,” I scream.
But actually it’s Zoe I hate.


I turn and march away from the park. Of course, Zoe follows me.
“Jess,” she says. “Jess, Jess, Jess!” And now it’s her turn to clutch me by the sleeve. “Come on!”
I stop, I wheel about. “Come on what, exactly?”
“I never told him,” she says. “I didn’t.”
“Oh, right; he just made it up, did he? Thought it up out of his own stupid little brain?”
“I didn’t tell him, Jess, I promise, I swear.”
I stare at her. Her eyes are all lit up bright, but not like a mirror. I can’t see myself in them, in her. “Then who did?”
“I don’t know,” Zoe exclaims. “Maybe your mum told his mum and she told Paddy.”
“Oh, yeah, right.”
“Or Em. You didn’t just tell me, did you? You pretended you did, but you didn’t. You told Em too. So maybe it was Em who told Paddy.”
Very clever. And hurtful, because it’s true. I did tell Em actually and I did pretend to Zoe that she was the only one who knew. Why did I do that? Because Zoe can be jealous probably. She can go mental just like she did about the friendship bracelet thing in year 5. But Em’s away on holiday. Em’s not here to defend herself. “Why would Em tell Paddy? She doesn’t even like Paddy. No one likes Paddy.” I pause. “Except you.”
“I still didn’t tell him, Jess. I mean – why would I?”
And I can’t say it. I can’t say, Because I think you’re beginning to like him more than you like me, because that sounds totally pathetic. So I say, “For a laugh. So you could both have a laugh behind my back about my so-not-normal brothers.”
“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.
Which is when Gran comes into the room.
“Jess?” she says. “Jess, can’t you sleep either?”
“No,” I cry. “No!”
The spill of light from the hall makes my bedroom bright and ordinary.
“I thought I heard you,” Gran says.
“Heard me?”
“Walking about.”
“Water,” I say. “I need some water.”
“You look half-frozen,” she replies. “I’ll get the water. Come on now, you get back to bed. It’s gone two o’clock.”
Gratefully, I get back into bed. Under the covers, I look at the flask. It is not a heart, not a ribcage, it isn’t pulsing. There is nothing black about it, but nothing blue either. It is calm and hard and glassy, colourless.
As Gran returns with the water, I slip the flask back beneath the pillow.
“He told you they could die on their first night, didn’t he?” Gran says.
“Who?” I say, as though I don’t quite understand her. Though of course I do.
“Si. He told you the babies could die, didn’t he?”
I shrug.
“He’s no business saying things like that.” She sits down hard on the edge of the bed. “No business at all.”
“He only mentioned the statistics…” I begin.
“Statistics,” says Gran, “are bosh.”
And I know this. I’ve heard it all my life.
Statistics are bosh.
Statistics are bosh.
Gran says it like a mantra, her own little song.
This is something else Si has told me about. Something he’s explained. Si explains everything; Gran explains nothing. You just have to guess what Gran means, you have to look around her corners. “Your grandmother,” said Si, “has never trusted statistics since your father died of something people don’t normally die of. Hiatus hernia. A million-to-one chance, that’s what the doctors told her. So now she doesn’t believe in the numbers game.”
I should never have mentioned statistics.
“Anyway,” Gran continues, “you saw your brothers. Saw them with your own eyes. They’re going to be fine. Do you hear me?”
I hear her.
“So you’re not to worry. Right?”
She comes to tuck me in like I’m some baby myself. As she fusses about me, I realise that I will always be her baby in a way that my brothers will not. Si is the twins’ father, but not mine. So Gran has no blood relationship with the twins. Gran and the babies – they aren’t joined at all.
In the last chink of light, before Gran shuts my door, I check the flask. In its whorls, its worlds, there are a couple of bright seed fish swimming.
After that, I sleep.


The following morning, the phone rings at 7.36. Nobody rings our house that early.
I arrive in the kitchen to hear Gran say, “Yes, of course I’ll tell her, Si.”
She puts down the phone. I wait for her to give me the news.
“Morning, Jess,” she says. “Breakfast’s up.” From the oven she takes a steaming plate of bacon and egg and tomatoes and fried bread. The smell of it makes me want to retch.
“What did he say?” I ask. “What’s happened?”
“Your mum’s fine,” says Gran.
“And the babies?”
“They’re fine too.” But there is something too bright and too quick about the way she says it.
I look at her. “What?”
“What what?” she repeats.
“What did Si say? What did he want you to tell me?”
Gran wipes her hands on her apron. “Your stepfather,” she says, “wanted you to know that your mother and your brothers are fine.”
I stare at her and I keep on staring. I want the truth.
“Clem…” Gran says finally, lips pressed tight.
“Yes?”
“He took a little dip in the night… but he’s absolutely fine now.”
A little dip.
I can’t imagine Si using these words. Si would use precise medical terms.
“What kind of ‘dip’?”
“Oh, I don’t know, Jessica. Nobody said it would be plain sailing. The important thing is that he’s OK now.”
“And when exactly?” I ask.
“When what?” says Gran.
“When did Clem take this little dip?”
“Does it matter?”
I think of that great sobbing howl.
“Yes. It does matter.”
“Look, Jess, I know things have been difficult in this house over the last few months. And I know you didn’t sleep very well last night. So I’m going to ignore your tone of voice. But you have to trust me and Si and the doctors. And you have to eat your breakfast.”
I sit down. I try my bacon, toy with my egg. In the right-hand pocket of my trousers I can feel the weight of the flask. Calm this morning, colourless. But opalescent on the day the twins were born, its cork bursting from its throat, and then black and howling the night that Clem took a dip.
“Do you ever think,” I ask Gran, “that things are more…” I want to use the word joined, the word that’s been stuck in my head for weeks, but I choose to say connected. “Do you think things are more connected than they might appear?”
Gran is eating toast. “I’m not sure I understand you, Jess.”
“That there are more things on earth than can be explained by – well, science?”
“Are we talking God?” asks Gran.
“No!” Actually, I think we’re talking Si; I’m talking about whether there is more in the universe than can be explained by my stepfather.
“Ghosts?” she hazards.
Ghosts. That makes a patter in my heart. When did the flask come into my life? After Aunt Edie died. And where did it come from? Aunt Edie’s desk. Ghosts are spirits without bodies. Like the thing in the flask. And they arrive after people die…
“Jessica?”
“No, no!” I don’t want a ghost. A ghost is scary.
Scarier than the howls?
Besides – a ghost doesn’t make any sense. Not the ghost of Aunt Edie. I’d know that ghost, surely. And it – she – would know me. We’d chat, wouldn’t we? Hi Jess, it’s me, Aunt Edie, just came to see how you were getting on with your piano playing. And in any case, ghosts don’t exist, do they? Pug and his Mrs Nerg wouldn’t have anything to do with ghosts. Si wouldn’t have anything to do with ghosts. But is a ghost any more extraordinary than a disembodied something connected to the twins?
My mind is going round in circles. I blame Zoe. If Zoe and I were on speaking terms I wouldn’t be having to share all this with Gran.
“What do you mean then?” Gran asks.
“I was just thinking… last night – I couldn’t sleep, you couldn’t sleep and Clem – he wasn’t well. Maybe we somehow… sensed that?”
“Nice idea,” says Gran. “But a bit far-fetched. It’s just worry, I’m afraid. Keeps people awake all the time.” She gets up to reboil the kettle. “And knowing too much. Sometimes the less you know, the better.”
I say nothing. I don’t like the dig at Si. He told you the babies could die, didn’t he? Sometimes the less you know the better. I’m allowed to have a dig at him, but she isn’t. Why is that?
“You’ve always been a sensitive child, Jessica,” Gran continues. “And sometimes that’s a good thing.” She pauses. “And sometimes it’s a curse.”
“A curse?”
“You imagine things that simply aren’t there.”
“Last night,” I say, suddenly angry, “there was a howl, a terrible, terrible sobbing howl. Didn’t you hear it?”
“Jess love, it was a difficult night. You were tossing and turning. I know – I peeked in on you. I think you must have been dreaming.”
Dreaming?
I never actually saw the flask go black, did I? I never saw it pulse. When I did look at it, when light finally spilt into the room, it was just glassy, colourless, ordinary.
Though it had been blue. Fizz-heart, sky-happy blue. I definitely saw that.

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