The Flask

by Nicky Singer

  “You want Clem? Clem wants you?”

  No reply.

  “Then I’ll take you. I’ll take you to the hospital. After the op – yes?”

  After the op. What if there is no after the op?

  What if, because there’s no time for the rehearsal op, they choose the wrong socket spanner and Clem doesn’t make it, he dies on the operating table?

  This is a night for bravery, but suddenly I don’t feel at all brave, I feel the monsters begin to crowd around again.

  So I hedge my bets. I can’t stop myself, I play the Pavement Crack Game one final time.

  To date, the monsters and I are running even. Si and I won (just) with the timing chain. The monsters won in the church. This will be the decider.

  “Winner takes all,” I say. “Yes?”

  No reply.

  Not from the flask.

  Not from the monsters.

  “If the snow babies still exist when the op starts tomorrow morning, then everything will be all right.”

  The op is scheduled for 8 a.m. I don’t know what the time is now (the bowling green clock says 3.30, but it’s been saying that ever since I arrived). Whatever time it is, the snow babies only have to last perhaps four or five hours, and it’s cold and there’s no one in the park, and anyway they’re hidden and even the early sledgers won’t come here because the bowling green area is so flat and… Surely I can win this one? Dead cert – yes?

  “If the snow babies exist when the op starts,” I repeat, “Richie will live. Clem will live. Both of them. They’ll both survive.” Then, like chucking salt over your shoulder for good luck, I add, “As will my friendship with Zoe.”

  Out in the moonlight, where the white sky touches the white earth, dreams feel real.

  The wet of the snow has penetrated my gloves and my fingers are freezing. I didn’t notice this before, but I’m noticing it now, just as I’m noticing how the white-blue sky has gone slightly rose-coloured and grey. Maybe it’s dawn already. Only three hours for the snow babies to last. I listen for the birds, but I don’t hear any. Maybe the birds are hiding. Maybe the hush has got them too. There aren’t even any cars. There’s just me and my breathing again and a sudden desire to be home, to be tucked up in bed.

  I feel exhausted.

  I say goodbye to the babies, tuck the flask back into my pocket and follow my own prints out of the park, messing them up slightly by the entrance to the bowling green, as if I could disguise my going there.

  As I enter the cul-de-sac, I see that my neighbour, the other night sculptor, has mounded his snow into a huge snow mermaid, a beautiful woman who seems to be compacted together, carved out of ice. I stop to admire her. The boy (or man) is no longer there, but he’s signed his name on the sculpture, as if it was a work of art: Bruno Teisler, it says. And I wonder briefly about this Bruno Teisler who lives in my close, who I’ve never seen before and then I pass on by, stopping only to glance up at Zoe’s window, before arriving at my own house.

  The light is on in our porch. The door is not closed quietly on the latch. It’s wide open. And in that lighted doorway, coat and gloves on, is Gran.

  “Where on earth have you been? Just what do you think you’re doing? Don’t you think I’ve enough to be worrying about without this, you selfish, selfish child.”

  These are just some of the things Gran says, or rather she shouts. She is shouting so loudly I think the whole street, the whole world will hear her. There will never be hush again.

  “And you’re shivering. Look at you! LOOK AT YOU! And wet. You’re wet. Jess, you’ll be ill. You’ll be really ill. You know that?”

  I don’t know anything. I just feel tired and silent.

  “Well, what have you got to say for yourself?”

  Then she scoops me up and hugs me tighter than I’ve ever been hugged before, and just for once, I don’t mind being all crushed up against her.

  She brings me in and strips me down and makes me drink hot cocoa (I am shivering even with my hands around the warm mug). And she never stops talking and I still don’t say anything.

  “How could you?” she repeats, over and over. “How could you? You know about your father, don’t you?”

  And of course I know, but it doesn’t stop her telling me again anyway.

  “He went out,” Gran says. “Went out in the snow when he was six. Not at night, of course. Not at night. Even he wasn’t that stupid. No, in the day. He was supposed to be in the garden, playing. Children do play in the snow. For hours. And I was getting on with something in the house, like you do, and suddenly it was six o’clock. So I called for him. Called and called, only he didn’t answer. So I went out. And that’s when I found him. Lying flat out in the snow. Flat on his back. I thought he was dead. But he was just asleep. Asleep. How could anyone – ANYONE – just fall asleep in the snow? I’ll never understand that as long as I live. Never.”

  There are tears in her eyes.

  “And that’s why he always had such a weak chest. He was a sickly boy after that. And I always wonder, when he died so young, I always wondered: if I’d looked out that afternoon, if I’d seen him, if I’d stopped him…”

  I’ve heard this story many times and it always ends here, with the blame. But now, for the first time, I wonder too. I wonder why my father lay down in the snow to sleep. It can’t have been because he was tired. There are many more comfortable places to sleep than the snow. So perhaps, like me, he was trying things out, experimenting, playing a Pavement Crack Game all of his own. If I lie down in this snow and no one finds me then…

  The monsters won’t get me.

  I so much wish I could know that game and the boy who played it. The boy who grew up to be my father. Perhaps he would have things to teach me about monsters. And then, suddenly, I experience the loss of my father as a physical thing, an emptiness somewhere deep inside me. And I want to fill that hole with the sound of his voice; I want to hear my father talking, I could listen to him for a lifetime.

  But there’s only Gran talking.

  When Gran finally finishes, she fusses me into bed.

  “And don’t think you’re going out anywhere tomorrow!” is her parting shot. As she closes the door, I reach into my pocket.

  The flask is still white, though not quite as sparkling, not on the surface anyhow. But inside, among the floating paper strips of moonlight there’s something new, a thread of yellow. Or gold, pale gold, like a hair from the mane of a lion, or the brightness of a smile. It throws a filament of light to the white swirling surface, where a single seed fish swims.

  “Thank you,” I whisper. “Oh, thank you, thank you, thank you.”

  I lie down and sleep. I dream that I am lying in the snow next to my father and we keep each other warm.

  I wake to find the flask still in my hand. I can’t have let it go all night. The glass has taken heat from my body and it’s warm too, its surface not frosted any more but transparent. I can clearly see the strips of moonlight, the threads of gold, and yes, the seed fish, the seed fish is still swimming.

  The snow babies must have made it through the night!

  So the real babies will make it through the op.

  Clem will live!

  Richie will live!

  Zoe will smile on the world and on me!

  I pull my alarm clock close. It’s ten o’clock already. The babies will have been in the operating theatre for two hours. I charge downstairs in my dressing gown and arrive in the kitchen just as the phone rings. I get to it before Gran.

  It’s Si.

  “They’re OK?” I cry. “Aren’t they? Richie’s OK and Clem’s OK and it’s all going fine, even though there hasn’t been a rehearsal op. Right?”

  “Not exactly,” says Si.

  “What?”

  “The op. It’s been delayed.”

  A sudden chill. “Why?”

  “The snow. Half the team haven’t managed to get in. One of the doctors is marooned somewhere way out of town. Dug his
car out, but the roads are impassable.”

  “But they’re going to do it later?” I say. “As soon as everyone’s there?”

  “No,” says Si. “They’re going to delay it. They have to have everyone and they have to start on time. Can’t start late and work through the night. It’s a long, long process, Jess.”

  “But what about Clem?” I burst out.

  “He’s stabilised, much to everyone’s astonishment. Didn’t I say that? That’s the good news, Jess.”

  Of course he has, because of the building, because of not destroying but… but…

  “When’s it going to be – the op – when’s it going to be?”

  “Tomorrow,” says Si. “We hope.”

  “The snow babies!” I cry.

  “What?” says Si.

  “The snow babies have to last another twenty-four hours!”

  “What are you talking about?” says Si.

  I’m talking about marching straight to the park and standing over the snow babies with Si’s large socket spanner. If anyone comes within a foot of them…

  But what if they just melt? What if the God that let Clem’s candle gutter in the church just parts the cloud and the sun comes out? What then? I rush to the window. No sign of a thaw. On our garden table the snow is still piled four inches deep at least. And it’s cold, bitingly cold. Even Gran, who likes to tell you that she was a War Baby, and War Babies know about hardship, is standing next to the cooker with a gas ring lit to provide the warmth that the central heating seems to be struggling to achieve.

  I go straight upstairs and get dressed so fast I forget the flask. I don’t put on my shoes because I’m going to be wearing wellington boots, and I’m down in the porch in less than two minutes.

  But so is Gran.

  “And what exactly do you think you’re doing?”

  “I’m going out.” I just have to be there, with the snow babies. That’s all there is to it. I will defend them to the death.

  To the life.

  “Have you gone mad?”

  Yes. I think so.

  “Did you listen to anything I said last night?”

  Yes. All of it.

  “You will be ill. You are ill.”

  “I am not ill.”

  “You will be ill, if you don’t stay in today. You need to rest.”

  “I don’t need to rest. I can’t rest.”

  “Besides,” says Gran, “you haven’t had breakfast.”

  I don’t take on the breakfast issue. I just say, “No one stays in when it snows, Gran. Everyone goes out. They play.”

  “You played last night,” says Gran grimly. And then she takes the large brass key that fits the bottom lock on our front door, the anti-burglar Chubb lock, and slots it in. She turns her wrist with something like triumph.

  She is locking me in.

  She is locking me in my own house.

  “You can’t do that,” I say.

  “Can’t I?” she replies, and she drops the key in the pocket of her apron.

  There’s only one thing for it, I’ll have to make a run for it. I haven’t time for a jacket, I haven’t time for wellington boots, or a scarf, or a hat, or gloves. I just run, in my socks, down the hall and through the kitchen and unbolt and unlock the back door (which does not have a Chubb fitting) and I tear out into the garden (where I nearly stop immediately as my feet land in the freezing wet snow), and around the side of the house and into the street.

  “No,” shouts Gran.

  But she isn’t even close to being behind me.

  Running isn’t exactly an option, what with the thick wet of the snow and the surprisingly hard and uneven pavement below, but I’m still moving fast. As fast as I can. At the bottom of the cul-de-sac I pass the ice mermaid. Her proud, beautiful head and carved ice eyes watch me pass. She is intact, so the snow babies will be too.

  I’m glad of my jeans and my shirt and thick fleece hoodie, but my feet are already in pain and so are my hands. The wind is managing to find the gap around my throat and send icy blasts down the front of my chest, but I just stumble on, not caring. At least the speed is helping, the stumble-running is warming my core, that space around my heart.

  I pass the electricity junction box at the edge of the park. It’s still humming, though you can hardly hear it for the shouts and yells and laughter coming from the park. The park is full of brightly coloured people shrieking as they toboggan down slopes on sledges and tin trays and flattened cardboard boxes. There are mothers and fathers and tiny children all muffled up and dogs barking. One little grey dog has a series of tiny snowballs attached to all four paws which he’s trying, in vain, to bite off. I think I recognise some people from school at the top of the hill by the conker tree, though everyone is twice their normal size in ski jackets and snow boots. Closer to me, in the play park, a child is eating snow from a swing and being reprimanded.

  It’s all so very ordinary.

  Most people are busy with what they are doing, but some turn as I pass and one child even points, maybe because I’m stumble-running still, maybe because I don’t look dressed for the snow.

  I’m soon at the bowling green. I can no longer feel my feet. I think they have joined some other body. Or maybe they’ve become part of the frozen earth; they certainly don’t seem to be mine any more. My head takes no responsibility for them. Or for my hands.

  The gate of the bowling green is wide open. No Dogs. No Ball Games.

  It doesn’t say anything about the Pavement Crack Game.

  There are four dogs in the area and a huge snowball fight in progress, right at the centre of which is beach-ball-grinning Paddy. Sam is with him, and Alice. And also Em. Em is back.

  Do I care?

  No. I don’t care about Em or Alice. I don’t even care about Zoe who now I see is crouching, face to the ground, gathering snow. Whether Zoe’s smiling, whether she’s read the letter – it all seems totally unimportant. The only thing that matters now is the babies. Protecting them.

  You can’t see the bench from the gate, so I know nothing until I turn in and pass the shivering palm tree.

  There they are, snow Richie, snow Clem, just as I left them.

  No, not just as I left them, they are slightly more slumped, slightly closer together, their little heads have gone crystalline.

  I will sit with them all day if I have to.

  All night. All day again. As long as it takes.

  “Jess, is that you? Jess. Jess!” Em is coming over. “Yay – Jess!”

  “Hey, what’s with the footwear, Jess?” Paddy is coming too.

  “Bombs away,” shouts Zoe. Now she’s looking up, standing up, and she is smiling, widely, broadly. Grinning like a lunatic. She lobs a snowball at Paddy, which catches him right on the side of his head.

  “Oi!” he yells. He’s less than an arm’s length away from me, and to retaliate, I think he’s just going to bend down and scoop snow from beneath his feet. But he doesn’t. He’s in a rush so he just leans forwards and grabs Clem’s already neatly balled head.

  “No!” I scream.

  But he’s already done it. He’s taken Clem’s head and he’s lobbing it at Zoe. It flies through the air, but his aim is wide and he misses her.

  Zoe does her tribal victory dance. She’s stamping and yelling and whistling and GRINNING.

  “No! No! NO!” I cry.

  “What’s up with you?” says Paddy.

  I could hit him, push him, kill him, put the whole force of my body between him and what remains of the babies. But I do nothing. I just stand there completely unable to move, staring at headless Clem and also the join. The join – the babies are still joined. Maybe that’s enough, could that be enough? It’s my game, my Pavement Crack Game, it wouldn’t be changing the rules to say, it’s the join that matters, if the join survives, then…

  “Bombs away,” shouts Zoe again. And it’s coming at me this time, a huge white ball of snow flying through the air alongside Zoe’s ecstatic GRIN. I
observe myself stepping aside; I do it instinctively, so as not to be hit.

  So the biggest snowball in the world makes a perfect parabola over the bowling green and lands smack between the babies, right on the join.

  Splitting them asunder.

  I don’t know why or how I move after that. There is no part of my body I can feel, my bones are solid ice, yet I’m moving.

  I brought it on myself, didn’t I? The death of Clem, of Zoe and me, of everything I’ve ever wanted. If I was looking for a message – what could be clearer? Headless Clem. Smashed-up join. If I believe in pictures and symbols and things without words, what more is there to say?

  “Jess?” Someone is behind me. It isn’t Em or Alice or Paddy. They’re all still screeching in the park. “Jess. Jess!” It’s Zoe. Screeching Zoe.

  Her voice just one of many because no one’s laughing any more. All the mothers and all the fathers and all the children are screeching, they’re screaming, wailing, crying, their noise like fingers down a blackboard in my ears, because there can never be any happiness.

  Not now.

  Not ever.

  “Jess!”

  “Leave me alone.”

  But she doesn’t.

  Haven’t we played this scene before? Jessica Walton fleeing the park pursued by her friend Zoe? And it doesn’t end well, it ends with Jess screaming: I’ll never tell you anything ever again. Only this time Zoe’s still coming.

  “It’s over. It’s all over. Can you see that? I’ve lost, you’ve lost, the babies have lost—”

  “Lost what?”

  “Everything.”

  The snow mermaid is still outside Bruno Teisler’s garage. It remains proud, beautiful and intact. I punch that mermaid’s head off.

  “Jess?” It’s difficult to hear Zoe’s voice above the screeching, but I do hear it. It’s full of horror. And fear. “What’s got into you?”

  “Go away, Zoe. Forget it. Forget everything I wrote in that letter. It’s over. Finished.”

  Zoe does not go away. “What letter?” she says.