The Flask (19 page)

Zoe hugs me tight. “Good luck,” she whispers.

But I don’t think luck will have anything to do with it.

The journey to the hospital passes in a blur. A blur of colours. I cannot take my eyes from the flask; it swirls and changes continually. The closer we get to the hospital the more definite the new colours become. Peach, apricot, a flutter of pink. As we enter the hospital car park there isn’t a single thread of green left. Not one. I don’t know what it means, but the new colours are strong and warm and in that my courage holds.

We arrive, ascend the fifteen floors, and ring to gain admission. A nurse greets us, avoids eye contact, and leads us to a different ward in the Special Care Unit. I see Richie at once. There are a million wires going in and out of him, and ranged about him, overhanging him, are machines which hum and beep and flash. The bandages, which cover most of his tiny chest, disappear beneath his huge nappy. His fragility shocks me, if Richie is like this then Clem…

Clem.

Where is Clem?

Clem is not lying beside his brother in the cot.

He’s not lying in an adjacent cot.

Clem is not there at all.

Without Clem beside him, Richie does not look whole, he looks like a ghost of himself.

“Poor little thing,” says Gran in a whisper. “Oh, you poor little thing.”

“Where’s Clem?” I ask the nurse in a voice far too loud for this hushed and beeping place. “Where’s my other brother?”

We cannot be too late. We cannot.

“This way,” says the nurse, and we follow her through the ward to a side room.

Mum is sitting in a chair and Si is sitting on the edge of the bed beside her. Mum has Clem all bundled up in white in her arms. He’s not hooked up to any machines and there’s not a single tube or wire going in or out of him. This should be good news, but from Mum’s face, I know it isn’t. Mum isn’t crying, but it looks as if she has been. It looks as if she has been crying all night.

The only part of Clem that isn’t swaddled is his head. I’m close enough now to see his skin. It’s not the right colour – it’s a pale and slightly sweaty grey. Gran asks some question without moving her lips and Si shakes his head. But I already know why they’ve taken the tubes out of Clem and put him in Mum’s arms.

They’ve put him there to die.

The hush in the room is suffocating, heavier than snow. The only thing holding Clem to the earth is his mother’s love. Mum is holding that grey body as I imagine Aunt Edie once held Rob. Holding him so close you would have to kill her before she let go of him. And Si is so close to Mum he’s part of it too, Mum is holding Clem and Si is holding Mum. They’re all wrapped up there together in defiance of the whole world.

I take out the flask.

I don’t know what I expect to happen, I haven’t got that far. But this is what happens: nothing.

Nothing at all.

I wait and I wait and I wait and there’s still nothing. No matter how I turn or hold or offer or clutch the flask.

I feel hopeless, sick, foolish.

Please, I say, I beg.
Please
.

No reply.

No reply at all.

It’s as if death has taken our breath away and filled the room with stillness and silence and we’re all just waiting and waiting for the terrible thing we know must come.

For minutes and minutes, there’s nothing in this room but death, unless it’s grief. That’s one thing you can hear, grief, crying for itself like it did in ‘For Rob’. I can hear all the notes and twists of it, sobbing and sobbing for the little boy who was never to grow up, whose life ended almost before it was begun. Edie’s Rob. My Clem.

It’s as if, somewhere very close, Aunt Edie is still playing the tune, her tune, ‘For Rob’, and weeping.

“No,” I cry out. “No!”

Or maybe I don’t cry out, because nobody hushes me, nobody does or says a thing. We’re all in the same space and not in the same space. All locked together and apart. So I don’t know, when the tune begins to change, whether it’s me that’s singing, or someone – something – else. Knowing what’s inside and what’s outside my head – I’ve never been very good at that.

But the ‘For Rob’ tune is changing; the minor chords, they’re shifting slightly, just as they did in Aunt Edie’s front room. It’s coming, I think, it’s coming, the creation song, only it isn’t notes, it’s more like a breath, or one of those very gentle summer breezes which carry sounds from somewhere so faraway you think you must be imagining it.

The breeze blows across Clem’s forehead. There isn’t much hair sticking out from under his white bonnet, but what there is quivers, one or two sandy strands of hair suddenly lifting, and despite the harsh hospital strip light above, sparking gold.

Hair of the lion.

My heart lifts, but Clem doesn’t react at all.

Clem is still a closed-up little clam.

The breeze increases in intensity, blowing not just on Clem, but up my arms, raising goosebumps. Behind Mum the curtains begin to buffet and the sounds, such as they are, come closer. Get louder. More major, less sad. Gran said you can’t smell a promise, so I don’t suppose you can hear hopes and dreams. But that’s what I think I’m hearing: hopes, dreams, and the sudden whisper of a woman.

Rob, Rob, I’m here
.

She isn’t here; my aunt isn’t here. I’m not that stupid. But the hopes and dreams are. The hopes and dreams of anyone who brings new life to earth.

Which are my mother’s dreams too as she hangs on, refuses to let go. Not now. Not ever.

Love can do that, I guess.

The song changes again, deepens and broadens, but it’s nothing that I could ever play, nothing I could ever sing. No wonder I couldn’t put my hands on it in Aunt Edie’s house. It’s way, way beyond anything I’ve ever heard before. Huge and strange and beautiful. I don’t really know how to describe it, except to say this is how I think the earth would sound if you could hear dawn breaking or the roots of a giant redwood tree searching the soil for water, or the petals of a mesembryanthemum unfurling to welcome the sun.

Wake. Wake, my darling boy
.

The words come on the breeze, tiny as a baby’s snuffle, big as a storm wind. I cannot tell now which is stronger, the wind or the song, but the curtain behind Mum is flapping furiously. She moves her arm around Clem, perhaps to protect him, and that lets his head move, so he seems suddenly to be facing right into the wind. And all at once, he doesn’t look so grey any more; there’s a more natural glow to his skin, there’s a peachy colour, a flutter of pink.

Of course – how could I not have known? Guessed?

I have to touch him, just to make sure. I have to feel what I can see, I have to touch the life that’s coming back into his cheeks. So I reach and touch and all the noise subsides. The wind and the song both end the moment he opens his eyes.

He looks straight up at me.

And, of course, he’s just a baby and babies can’t focus, so actually he’s not looking at me at all, he’s looking through me, past me, to whatever lies beyond.

Then his little blanket lifts, as though he’s taken a huge gulp of air and his ribcage has to rise as he breathes.

And breathes.

And breathes.

We all stare at Clem’s chest, at its rise and fall. Rise and fall. And no one says a thing.

Except my stepfather.

Si, the Man of Science, says, “Oh my God.”

Afterwards, we talk about what happened in that room.

Mum says, “It was a miracle. I told you those babies were miracles, didn’t I? Right from the beginning, I knew. God’s graciousness, His gifts to us.”

Gran says, “I heard angels. Did anyone else hear that? It was like a choir, celestial music; I can’t really describe it, voices faraway and yet terribly near, and so beautiful, it just made me want to cry.”

And Si says, at first, “There was a strange sound in the room, not singing, I didn’t hear singing, more like wind in trees, at the coast, where there’s also the sea. And that curtain flapping madly as though there was some storm outside when there wasn’t.”

“A miracle,” repeats Mum.

Si looks at her. “We have to be careful,” he says. “We’re not out of the woods yet.”

Mum looks at him. “Did you ever wonder why the babies chose to be born at Easter? At the time of spring and rebirth and Jesus?”

Si says, “Perhaps it was a mass hallucination.”

“Stop,” says Mum; “just stop.”

And actually, he does. He stops.

It’s not till I return home that anyone thinks to ask me what I saw or felt.

“What happened?” says Zoe. “What happened, what happened, what happened?”

“I heard the universe,” I say, “whispering.”

Zoe says, “No surprise there then.”

It’s wonderful to be able to tell her everything, every little detail. When I finish, she says, “You know that letter you wrote? The one you left on the doormat, about how your heart’s all a mess?”

“Yes?”

“Well, it isn’t. And you know what?”

“What?”

“Being your friend. It’s just…” Zoe pauses, “… amazing.”

Of course, the flask is empty. Though not empty in the sense of lonely or miserable, it’s just empty in the sense of not being full. It remains iridescent, cool to the touch, beautiful. Not at all everyday – the flask could never be that.

I wonder what I should do with this marvellous empty flask?

I don’t know, so it sits on my window sill like a piece of unfinished business. Also unfinished is the business of Aunt Edie’s letter – and Gran. I want to talk to Gran about Rob, I want to know everything there is to know about the little boy who gave his life’s breath to my brother.

“So why don’t you just ask her?” says Zoe.

So simple. So Zoe.

I remember the look on Gran’s face when she came into Aunt Edie’s sitting room when I was playing ‘For Rob’. That look, I now realise, was pain.

“I don’t think I could,” I say.

“Why?”

“I think it would hurt her.”

“Why?” says Zoe again. “I mean, it didn’t happen to her.”

“I can’t explain. I just feel, I feel I ought to… protect Gran.”

“Your gran’s an
adult
,” Zoe says. She puts a big stress on
adult
as though if you were an adult you’d be beyond hurt. It’s the first time I’ve ever really thought about adults hurting.

We leave it alone then, Zoe and I, but the letter doesn’t leave me alone. It bangs about in my head. It’s like it was with the twins: even when I’m not thinking about it I am thinking about it. About him. Rob. Aunt Edie’s Rob. I mean, I didn’t even know she was married.

I carry the letter around like I used to carry the flask. In my pocket. It bangs about in there.

Bang, bang, bang.

It’s there when I come down for breakfast, or go to the park, or sleep. It’s there when Gran drives me home from yet another visit to the hospital.

We’re not out of the woods yet
. That’s what Si said, and it’s true, though the doctors are surprised, in fact the doctors are amazed at the progress the twins are making. Especially Clem.

The drive back is rainswept, the windscreen wipers going so hard the outside world seems a blur and the inside world, the one that includes just Gran and me, appears very small and close. There’s a box of tissues on the dashboard of the car, but when I want to blow my nose, I reach inside my pocket (the one that has the letter in) and pull out an old tissue. With the tissue comes the letter, I have it half in my hand and half not, so it spins a little and falls into my lap, the right way up. You can see the writing.

“What’s that?” says Gran.

“A letter.” Did I deliberately pull the letter into my lap? There doesn’t seem anything up my nose that needs blowing.

“I can see it’s a letter,” says Gran.

“From Aunt Edie,” I say. “To her son.”

Gran nearly swerves into a Belisha beacon.

“What did you say?” asks Gran.

But I know she’s heard. “I found it,” I say. “In the bureau.”

We are passing a lay-by; Gran brakes sharply and in we go. She yanks up the handbrake and turns off the car engine. Rain cascades down the front windscreen.

“Give it to me.”

She takes the letter. I have it by heart, so I don’t need to see the words to hear every one of them in my mind as Gran reads.

When she finishes, Gran doesn’t say a word, just takes a tissue out of the box on the dashboard.

“I never even knew Aunt Edie was married,” I begin.

Gran does blow her nose. “She wasn’t. That was part of the problem.”

“Problem?”

“Well, not
problem
. Look, it all happened a very long time ago and I’m sorry you found that letter. Such things are often best forgotten.”

“I don’t imagine Aunt Edie ever forgot,” I say quietly.

“No,” she says at length. “A mother doesn’t forget a dead child.”

It occurs to me she isn’t thinking about Rob now, but about her own dead child, my father.

“What happened to him?” I ask. “To Rob?”

“He was stillborn. That’s all. It happens. We never really got a proper explanation.”

I can’t help this random thought: if Si was telling this story, he’d know the details, he’d have done the statistics.

“We were pregnant together, Edie and me. A time of joy, despite everything.” There’s something softer in Gran’s voice now, and further away, as though she’s no longer sitting in a car in a lay-by in the pouring rain. “Edie just shone.”

“She always shone,” I say.

But Gran isn’t listening to me.

“The man concerned, he was a musician, of course, an American jazz man on a tour of England, and he just swanned right on back to the States. But Edie didn’t care – in fact, to be fair, I’m not even sure she told him. Edie only cared about the baby. Thought it might be her last chance.” Gran pauses. “The babies were due within a week of each other. Rob on the 19th and your father on the 25th. Though your father was late, of course… Anyway, they would have been cousins, your father and Edie’s Rob.”

I imagine Gran holding newborn Dad in her arms and Edie holding an empty blanket. It makes my throat go tight.

“It must have been horrible,” I say. “For Aunt Edie.”

“And a blessing,” says Gran sharply. “In a way. Those weren’t the days for having a child out of wedlock. And who knows how she would have coped financially. She was in cloud cuckoo land really.”

I don’t know about anything in or out of wedlock, or finances, or cloud cuckoo land, but I do know how I felt when Clem was grey and still. “Horrible,” I whisper.

Gran clicks her teeth. “Well, you’re right, of course. It was horrible for her. Especially seeing me and your father. And I never really understood that until…” She trails off.

“Until Dad died,” I say.

“Yes,” says Gran. “And even though your dad was hardly a baby, he was a grown man with a child of his own, but… well, I felt it then. The hole that a child leaves.”

“She wrote that song, didn’t she, in memory of him? ‘For Rob’.”

“Yes, she played it day after day, month after month. Drove us all mad with it. Drove me mad with it. I thought she needed to move on.”

“It’s strange,” I say, and this, I realise, is partly what’s been bothering me. “I always think of her as such a happy person.”

“Well, she was, or was again – particularly after you were born.”

“Me?”

“Yes, you.” And she starts the engine again. “You changed everything.”

There seems something more to say, but Gran doesn’t say it. She just drives hard and fast and in silence until she comes to the crossroads where it’s right for her house and straight on for ours. She turns right.

“There’s another letter,” she says, “that you have to read, Jess.”