by Nicky Singer
“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 f
or 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 th
at 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.
