Under Shifting Glass

by Nicky Singer

  “Do you remember?”

  Yes. Forever. I often pushed Spike on the swing. Spike liked the rhythm; it soothed him.

  “For three whole 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—pimento cheese sandwiches, which were Spike’s favorite. But Gran, she never gave Spike food. Not one sandwich in three years.

  The place where I join with Aunt Edie burns.

  22

  Gran 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 pile where they back onto 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 farther 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 joking. “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 more than 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 on Gran’s side, a bolt on the side of the new neighbors. 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.”

  23

  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 fireplace to the rear. Only there aren’t any sofas anymore. 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 TV. 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 my house, can’t you?”

  And I should be glad, I should be grateful. The piano won’t be sold, won’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 still 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 around, sell a few more bits and pieces at 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 stack of music books—Bach, Beethoven, Chopin, Mozart.

  “Bit beyond you at the moment, probably,” Gran says. “But practice makes perfect. You’ll be needing to come over to my house a lot.”

  24

  Gran hands me the stack and goes off to sort the vases. I hear her clattering about in the kitchen.

  Music.

  Aunt Edie and I never read 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 the 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 learned 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 Shinichi 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, the master said, 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.

  25

  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 with messiness. 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, commit
ting 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 to 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 to look at all of Aunt Edie’s notes arranged in front of me like some locked-up treasure chest to which I do not have the key.

  What level 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 recognize 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 baseline, 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 until 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, gray and purple, the color of storm clouds and bruises. Gently, I unwind the sticky tape from the throat of the glass, not to hear the song better—I could hear it if I were on 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?”

  26

  It’s the flask.

  But it isn’t swirling with storm clouds and bruises; it’s just its quiet, colorless 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 out of 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 keep 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 toward 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 forever, though some other part of me feels that, for all its trembling, that beating is the strongest thing in the world.

  27

  Finally, Gran puts down the bottle. “The things my sister kept,” she says.

  At once the butterfly breath flies and curls itself 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 says 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 bucket, 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.

  28

  It’s about four o’clock before we set off for home.

  I have another text from Zoe. She reminds me that tomorrow is the day we’re going—with Paddy—to the Buddhist Center for our vacation 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 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 holding a grudge.

  “Si called,” 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 driveway 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 dolly, a wooden platform on casters that he made himself.

  He looks like a daddy longlegs, too thin and sprawly for the platform. He’s tall, Si, and bony, and has springy, sandy-colored hair. I’m not particularly tall for my age, but I’m also a bit bony and have that same sandy-colored hair. We also both have grayish eyes.

  Don’t you and your dad look alike! Lots of people have said that to me. I don’t tell them Si’s my stepfather; it just causes complications. In fact there have been many times when I’ve pretended that Si is my father. It makes things easier, like at school, when they ask you to write stuff about your family. What does your father do for a living? My father’s a mechanic. Actually Si is not a mechanic, but he might as well be, the amount of time he spends on this car.

  He has been working on his “little moggie” pretty much the whole time he’s been in my life. Him and the oily cardboard and the spare parts and the wrenches and the tinkering. Tinkering. That’s what Mom calls it, though she says it lovingly.

  “You’d think he could leave it alone for one day,” says Gran. “With everything that’s going on.”

  “Hello, Angela,” says Si, as she gets out of the car. Then he swivels around to face me. “Hi, Jess. How’s tricks?”

  The dolly on which he swivels is my fault. If I had been the stepchild he wanted, it would have been Si lying—dollyless—under the car tinkering and me lying beside him. Me being interested in exhausts, radiators, crankshafts, and timing chains, and me wriggling out to fetch whatever bolt or socket wrench he had forgotten, so he could keep lying there, hour after hour. And it’s not that I haven’t tried to be interested, I have. I just never quite got the point of Roger the Wreck. Yes, that’s what he calls it—Roger the Wreck. Because when he bought it, it wasn’t really a car at all, more a sort of heap of junk. But over the years he’s lovingly put it all back together again. He’s screwed and bolted and joined and greased it into some sort of whole, bursting with the pride of it.