The Flask. Nicky Singer
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Название: The Flask
Автор: Nicky Singer
Издательство: HarperCollins
Жанр: Книги для детей: прочее
isbn: 9780007455102
isbn:
Which is when Gran comes into the room.
“Jess?” she says. “Jess, can’t you sleep either?”
“No,” I cry. “No!”
The spill of light from the hall makes my bedroom bright and ordinary.
“I thought I heard you,” Gran says.
“Heard me?”
“Walking about.”
“Water,” I say. “I need some water.”
“You look half-frozen,” she replies. “I’ll get the water. Come on now, you get back to bed. It’s gone two o’clock.”
Gratefully, I get back into bed. Under the covers, I look at the flask. It is not a heart, not a ribcage, it isn’t pulsing. There is nothing black about it, but nothing blue either. It is calm and hard and glassy, colourless.
As Gran returns with the water, I slip the flask back beneath the pillow.
“He told you they could die on their first night, didn’t he?” Gran says.
“Who?” I say, as though I don’t quite understand her. Though of course I do.
“Si. He told you the babies could die, didn’t he?”
I shrug.
“He’s no business saying things like that.” She sits down hard on the edge of the bed. “No business at all.”
“He only mentioned the statistics…” I begin.
“Statistics,” says Gran, “are bosh.”
And I know this. I’ve heard it all my life.
Statistics are bosh.
Statistics are bosh.
Gran says it like a mantra, her own little song.
This is something else Si has told me about. Something he’s explained. Si explains everything; Gran explains nothing. You just have to guess what Gran means, you have to look around her corners. “Your grandmother,” said Si, “has never trusted statistics since your father died of something people don’t normally die of. Hiatus hernia. A million-to-one chance, that’s what the doctors told her. So now she doesn’t believe in the numbers game.”
I should never have mentioned statistics.
“Anyway,” Gran continues, “you saw your brothers. Saw them with your own eyes. They’re going to be fine. Do you hear me?”
I hear her.
“So you’re not to worry. Right?”
She comes to tuck me in like I’m some baby myself. As she fusses about me, I realise that I will always be her baby in a way that my brothers will not. Si is the twins’ father, but not mine. So Gran has no blood relationship with the twins. Gran and the babies – they aren’t joined at all.
In the last chink of light, before Gran shuts my door, I check the flask. In its whorls, its worlds, there are a couple of bright seed fish swimming.
After that, I sleep.
The following morning, the phone rings at 7.36. Nobody rings our house that early.
I arrive in the kitchen to hear Gran say, “Yes, of course I’ll tell her, Si.”
She puts down the phone. I wait for her to give me the news.
“Morning, Jess,” she says. “Breakfast’s up.” From the oven she takes a steaming plate of bacon and egg and tomatoes and fried bread. The smell of it makes me want to retch.
“What did he say?” I ask. “What’s happened?”
“Your mum’s fine,” says Gran.
“And the babies?”
“They’re fine too.” But there is something too bright and too quick about the way she says it.
I look at her. “What?”
“What what?” she repeats.
“What did Si say? What did he want you to tell me?”
Gran wipes her hands on her apron. “Your stepfather,” she says, “wanted you to know that your mother and your brothers are fine.”
I stare at her and I keep on staring. I want the truth.
“Clem…” Gran says finally, lips pressed tight.
“Yes?”
“He took a little dip in the night… but he’s absolutely fine now.”
A little dip.
I can’t imagine Si using these words. Si would use precise medical terms.
“What kind of ‘dip’?”
“Oh, I don’t know, Jessica. Nobody said it would be plain sailing. The important thing is that he’s OK now.”
“And when exactly?” I ask.
“When what?” says Gran.
“When did Clem take this little dip?”
“Does it matter?”
I think of that great sobbing howl.
“Yes. It does matter.”
“Look, Jess, I know things have been difficult in this house over the last few months. And I know you didn’t sleep very well last night. So I’m going to ignore your tone of voice. But you have to trust me and Si and the doctors. And you have to eat your breakfast.”
I sit down. I try my bacon, toy with my egg. In the right-hand pocket of my trousers I can feel the weight of the flask. Calm this morning, colourless. But opalescent on the day the twins were born, its cork bursting from its throat, and then black and howling the night that Clem took a dip.
“Do you ever think,” I ask Gran, “that things are more…” I want to use the word joined, the word that’s been stuck in my head for weeks, but I choose to say connected. “Do you think things are more connected than they might appear?”
Gran is eating toast. “I’m not sure I understand you, Jess.”
“That there are more things on earth than can be explained by – well, science?”
“Are we talking God?” asks Gran.
“No!” СКАЧАТЬ