by Nicky Singer
Besides, I need to think about Spike. Spike is small and blond and he never brushes his hair, so it’s always wild and knotted. He comes with me everywhere, or at least he used to. He arrived when I grew out of ScatCat, sometimes smiling and full of jokes, sometimes irritating and demanding. He’d hide when I wanted to speak to him or shout out right at the moment I tried to ride my bike without stabilisers. He’d knock my juice over. But at night he was always calm, and came to bed with me, laid his head on the pillow beside mine. Only he never slept. He spent the whole night watching over me.
I’m here, Jess, right here.
Wacu. To be awake.
I’ll never leave you.
To watch over.
I love you, Jess.
As Gran pulls up in her front drive, I realise I haven’t been in her house since the day of the funeral. And I haven’t been in the house next door – Aunt Edie’s house – since Aunt Edie was there to open the door to me.
In Gran’s porch is a blue-and-white china umbrella stand that used to be in Aunt Edie’s porch. It makes my stomach lurch.
I love you, Jess.
“You’ll never guess what I found,” says Gran, leading me straight past the umbrella stand that is in all the wrong place and into the dining room. “Look.”
On the dining room table is a stack of Aunt Edie’s photo albums, the sort that have real old-fashioned photos in, ones on glossy paper, not the flimsy pixilated ones you print off the computer.
She points at a picture of me aged about four pushing an empty swing. Beneath the photo, there is a scrap of paper on which is written, in Aunt Edie’s loopy handwriting: Jess and Spike.
“Do you remember?”
Yes. For ever. I often pushed Spike on the swing. Spike liked the rhythm, it soothed him.
“For a whole three years, you wouldn’t go anywhere without him,” says Gran. “Jessica Walton and her imaginary friend, Spike.” She laughs. “And the sandwiches you got Edie to make for him! Every time you had a plate, he had to have one too.”
Then I remember something else. Aunt Edie made plates and plates of sandwiches for Spike – Marmite sandwiches, which were Spike’s favourite. But Gran, she never gave Spike food. Not one sandwich in three years.
The place where I join with Aunt Edie burns.
Gran’s and Aunt Edie’s gardens are both shaped like witches’ hats, wide close to the house and then narrowing to not much more than a compost heap where they back on to the park. The boundary between the two begins as a fence, making it quite clear which piece of land belongs to whom, but seventy feet further on there is just an increasingly tangled hedge where plants and boundary seem to twine together without end or beginning.
That makes me think of the twins and the web of their join and how they are both clearly separate and yet, beneath it all, they must tangle too.
The gate, which has a latch but no lock, is about a third of the way along, by Gran’s eucalyptus tree. I know it is a eucalyptus because Aunt Edie would sometimes crush a leaf in her hand as we passed.
“Smell this, Jess.”
The smell was pungent, fragrant, oily.
“That’s my tree,” Gran might say, in a tone that wasn’t quite a joke. “And I’ll thank you two to respect it.”
“It’s only a leaf,” Aunt Edie would retort “Just one leaf.”
They did bicker sometimes, Gran and Aunt Edie. Two increasingly old ladies: one who’d lost her husband early, one who’d never married. Sisters whose lives had joined along this boundary for over ten years.
Another pair of siblings joined.
I really hadn’t thought about that before, but I think about it now, as Gran presses down on the latch and the gate swings open as it has so many times before.
Aunt Edie’s house is to be sold. The gate will have to be locked, a bolt Gran’s side, a bolt the side of the new neighbours. Gran will never go through that gate again. I will never go through it again. It makes me want to unlatch the gate and run back and forth a thousand times.
It also makes me want to ask Gran how she is, how she’s feeling. Gran who has no husband and no son and now no sister. All her joins, her connections, broken. But I don’t know how to open that conversation.
Gran shuts the gate behind her and puts a bony arm around my shoulder. And then, as if she can read my mind she says, “I feel so lucky to have you, Jess.”
Gran opens the door of the glass lean-to (which Aunt Edie called the Sun Room) and we go in. The house smells damp and forgotten, as if it has been unlived in for years, not just for a couple of months.
I go straight into the drawing room which is where the piano is. The room runs the length of the house, and the piano is in the bay window to the front and the sofas around the fire to the rear. Only there aren’t any sofas any more. All the large items of furniture have gone, leaving a rolled-up carpet, a few piles of books and Aunt Edie’s ancient…
Ancient… there’s Zoe again, nagging in my ear.
… ancient television. The piano, alone at the far end of the room, looks abandoned, cheerless. Its lid is down. Down! Aunt Edie’s piano lid was never down.
“Who’s going to have it?” I blurt out. “Who’s getting Aunt Edie’s piano? Where’s it going?”
“It’s not going anywhere,” says Gran quickly. “Well, only next door.”
“You’re going to have it?” I must sound astonished.
“It’s not that surprising,” says Gran.
“But you don’t play!”
“Ah, but you do. So instead of going to Aunt Edie’s to play, you can come to mine, can’t you?”
And I should be glad, I should be grateful. The piano isn’t to be sold, isn’t to go into some stranger’s house. It will be just next door, I can play it any time I want. Any time I visit. But I just feel like someone threw a blanket over my head, hot and suffocated.
“Of course I’ll have to make some space in my drawing room,” says Gran. “Move things about, send a few more bits and bobs to auction. But it’ll be worth it, Jess, to have you coming to play.”
I can’t meet her eyes, so I turn my back, go over to the piano, lift the lid and try a chord. Still in perfect tune.
“Are you pleased?” Gran asks.
“I love this piano,” I say. This at least is true.
“Oh, and one more thing. Look.” Gran scrabbles beside the pile of books. “I found this.”
It’s a pile of music – Bach, Beethoven, Chopin, Mozart.
“Bit beyond you for the moment, probably,” Gran says. “But practice makes perfect. You’ll be needing to come round to my house a lot.”
Gran hands me the music and goes off to sort the vases. I hear her clattering about in the kitchen.
Music.
Aunt Edie and I never used music. Notes have always filled me with fear. There, I’ve said it. Right from the beginning, they swam in front of my eyes. I never knew what lines they sat on, or why. I didn’t understand the spaces or clefs or the time signatures.
“She doesn’t seem to be making much progress,” my mother reported.
Nor was I making much progress with reading. I was – I am – dyslexic, but nobody knew it then. Except perhaps Aunt Edie. Despite the fact she’d never even heard the word dyslexic, she just knew.
“Her music’s all here,” said Aunt Edie, tapping her ears. “Where it should be. And also here.” She tapped her heart.
It was Aunt Edie who suggested I give up learning with a conventional teacher and start learning the Suzuki way. She even managed to convince Si on the subject. The founder of the Suzuki method, Aunt Edie told him, observed how effortlessly Japanese children learnt their mother tongue. No one taught them their letters, they just listened to words and repeated them, like every other child in the world. A child could learn music the same way, said Shin’ichi Suzuki, by using his or her ears, by listening and then repeating. “If a child hears fine music from the day of his birth and learns to play it himself,” said the master,
“he develops sensitivity, discipline and endurance. He gets a beautiful heart.”
So finding a slew of music books belonging to Aunt Edie feels like a betrayal. Which is stupid, because of course I know Aunt Edie could read music, even I can read some now, but I just don’t want these books right now. I throw them on the floor. Concertos and sonatas and sonatinas skid about on the carpetless boards.
Then I sit down to play.
I play something very simple, a song we used to call ‘Spring Garden’. “This is the grass growing,” Aunt Edie would say. “And this, this is a cherry tree bursting into bloom. And these are the birds. Can you hear the birds, Jess?”
I didn’t cry when they told me Aunt Edie was dead. I didn’t cry at the funeral or at the wake. But when I hear those birds singing again, I sob my heart out.
After a while I stop playing and blow my nose. Then I think I should pick up the music books because Gran has never been very good at mess. There is the Beethoven, the Bach, the Mozart, the Chopin and a single sheet of paper. At first I think it’s blank, because it’s upside down, face to the floor. I am just about to slip it back inside Chopin’s Preludes when I see that it is music too. A handwritten song, or a composition anyway, tiny little blue ink notes jumping about on neatly ruled (if fading) blue ink staves. The piece doesn’t have a title, but in the top left-hand corner there is a dedication. In Aunt Edie’s distinctive, loopy handwriting it says: For Rob.
This is even more of a shock to me than the books of music. Aunt Edie – writing a song down, committing it to paper? Aunt Edie who could remember every note of a piece, but who also liked to change things, experiment, improvise according to her mood – or mine.
And worse than this: Rob.
Who is Rob that Aunt Edie should dedicate a song to him? Something flashes hot across my heart.
Jealousy.
Aunt Edie and I made many songs together, but she never dedicated one for me. Never wrote it, fixed it down, put my name in blue at the top. For Jess.
I put the music on the piano stand, sit myself down, stare at the notes. I need to hear this piece, need to know what Aunt Edie has written to this Rob I’ve never heard of. I’m a good player, I really am, but I have to count the lines and spaces, try to find where the first ink dot lands. It makes me cross looking at all Aunt Edie’s notes arranged in front of me like some locked-up treasure chest to which I do not have the key.
What grade are you on? That’s what they always ask at school. And: Did you get a merit or a distinction or just a pass? Zoe’s always doing dance exams, always getting distinctions. And even Em and Alice, who both do singing, get the odd merit or two. With Suzuki you don’t do exams. And anyway – who cares? Who cares! I’ve never wanted a piece of paper with some official stamp to say how good or bad I am. I’ve just wanted to be able to listen and then play the way Aunt Edie played. But today is different. Today I want to be able to sight-read, to recognise every note on the stave, be able to lift my hands to the keys and make immediate sense of the fading dots. What if they fade right away before my eyes, what if I never find out what Aunt Edie wrote to Rob? For Rob.
I try again. I find the first note, I check to see if there are any sharps or flats. I look for the rhythm. Minims or quavers? Notes with dots or notes without? Gradually I assemble a chord, and then another, and something in the base line too, a sad rocking sound. Then I think I hear something, catch something, like a melody coming by on the air, a haunting, hunted sound. And it’s suddenly as if I can hear much more than I can play, a whole tune singing itself out loud. I stop playing and start listening and there it is, just as Aunt Edie always said it would be, a song in my ears, in my heart.
And also in my pocket.
The flask is singing. A song even sadder and stranger than the wolf lament of the previous night – and bigger too. Much bigger – a huge song. Something that makes me feel that this is how God would have sung if, when he called the world into being, when he made the stars and the seas and the land and the lions, when he crafted each spark of sky, each drop of water, each blade of grass and every single hair in the lion’s mane, he also knew that, one day, the stars would burn out, the seas dry up and the land and the lions die.
I draw out the flask, oh so slowly, because it feels unholy to disturb this song.
You know how it is sometimes when you see someone crying and you know you can’t comfort them? That even if you put your arm around them, it won’t make any difference, they just have to cry till they’re finished with it? That’s how the song is making me feel.
I stand the flask on the piano. Its heart is swirling, grey and purple, the colour of storm clouds and bruises. Gently, I unwind the sticky tape from the throat of glass, not to hear the song better – I could hear it if I was the other side of the world – but just because I think the song, the flask, needs to be free.
Then of course my hands begin to find the notes. I can just lay my hands on the piano and feel the music flow out of my fingers. I can play the sadness, play the stars and the seas and the land and the lions.
“How do you know that tune?” Gran is suddenly in the doorway, statue still, face like she’s seen a ghost.
My hands falter, they fall from the notes. The spell breaks.
“Where did you get that music?”
“Found it,” I say. “With the other music. Aunt Edie’s music.”
“I haven’t heard that since…” Her voice dies away.
“Since what?” I ask. “Since when?”
She unlocks, comes across the room, her footsteps hollow on the bare floorboards. “Never you mind,” she says.
“But it’s such beautiful music.”
“Beautiful!” she exclaims. She stops in front of the stand and stares at the faded notes.
“And sad,” I say, “really sad. Who’s Rob, Gran?”
Gran says nothing.
“It says For Rob,” I repeat.
“Does it.” And Gran takes the sheet of music and she folds it, no, she crushes up that paper and puts it in her pocket. “And what,” she adds suddenly and just to change the subject, “is that?”
It’s the flask.
But it isn’t swirling with storm clouds and bruises; it’s just its quiet, colourless self.
“It’s a bottle,” I say.
“Where did you get it from?” Gran asks.
“Just found it.”
“You seem to be finding a lot of things, Jess.”
“It was in the desk. Aunt Edie’s desk.”
“I thought I cleared that bureau,” says Gran, and then I see her hand lift and the bottle becomes my precious flask and I know I don’t want her to touch it. I like my gran, I really do, but I just don’t want her to touch Aunt Edie’s flask.
My flask.
“No,” I cry.
But just before Gran’s fingers reach the glass, there’s that whoosh again, that wind got up from nowhere, and into the air comes whatever it is that lies in the flask. The living, breathing thing, whirling and trembling. I hear it, so Gran must hear it too. Only she doesn’t, so her fingers kept reaching, they close around the neck of the bottle.
And the whooshing breath, that big-as-a-storm-wind, tiny-as-a-baby’s-snuffle breath, it comes eddying and circling towards me, and I stretch out my hands and suddenly it’s between my palms. I can feel it beating there, like a trapped butterfly.
And for two seconds, or maybe two hundred years, I hold myself like a sheet of glass, terrified that, with a single movement, I could crush that breath for ever, though some other part of me feels that, for all its trembling, that beating is the strongest thing in the world.
Finally, Gran puts down the bottle. “The things my sister kept,” she says.
At once the butterfly breath flies and curls itself straight back inside the flask.
I look at Gran’s face. She has seen nothing, heard nothing. How is it possible for people to see and hear nothing?
“Well, enough time-wasting,” Gran say
s and smiles, as though we were both having the most ordinary of days. “Come on, we’ve got jobs to do.”
I slip the flask back inside my pocket and Gran sets me to work. I dry the vases she’s washed; sort the good tools from the broken ones in Aunt Edie’s shed; help her lift things like the old coal scuttle that are too heavy for her alone. And actually it feels good to be doing some helpful, simple things. Although maybe the joy is to do with the flask because I’m no longer afraid that, without a cork, without sticky tape, the butterfly breath will fly away.
Because it chose me, didn’t it?
It sheltered under my hand.
It’s about four o’clock before we set off home.
I have another text from Zoe. She reminds me that tomorrow is the day we’re going – with Paddy – to the Buddhist Centre for our holiday project on Places of Worship. Will I just text her back to say I haven’t forgotten?
We are going with Paddy because Zoe was in charge of the arrangements and she deliberately arranged the visit on a day she knew that Em and Alice were both going to be away and Paddy wasn’t. Zoe told me this was just an oversight, but I didn’t believe it then and I don’t believe it now.
I don’t text her back. This is what my mother, who is a very gentle person, calls bearing a grudge.
“Si phoned,” says Gran in the car. “He’s coming back tonight. Check I’m feeding you properly.”
As Gran plans to sleep in her own house that night, I wonder why it is that she’s driving me home, why Si hasn’t come to collect me. I think Gran wonders this too when we pull into our drive to find the garage doors open and Si on his back underneath the Morris Traveller 1000.
“Oh, for goodness’ sake,” Gran says as she pulls up.
Hearing us arrive, Si slides out from underneath the car. He is lying on a little trolley, a wooden platform on casters which he made himself.
He looks like a daddy-long-legs, too thin and sprawly for the platform. He’s tall, Si, and bony, and has springy, sandy-coloured hair. I’m not particularly tall for my age, but I’m also a bit bony and have that same sandy-coloured hair. We also both have greyish eyes.
