The Flask. Nicky Singer

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      My heart gives a little thump. I’ve no idea, this first time, what I’m touching, except that it is cold and rounded and about the size of my hand. As I draw it out into the light, I feel how neatly its hard, shallow curves fit into my palm.

      I call it a flask, but perhaps it is really a bottle, a flattish, rounded glass bottle with a cork in. It is very plain, very ordinary and yet it is like nothing I’ve ever seen before. The glass is clear – and not clear. There are bubbles in it, like seeds, or tiny silver fish, swimming. And the surface has strange whorls on it, like fingerprints or the shapes of contour lines on a map where there are mountains. I think I should be able to see inside, but I can’t quite, because the glass seems to shift and change depending on how the light falls on it: now milky as a pearl; now flashing a million iridescent colours.

      I sit and gaze at it for a long while, turning it over and over in my hands, watching its restless colours and patterns. It is a beautiful thing. I wonder how it came into being, who made it? It can’t have been made by machine, it is too special, too individual. I remember the glassmaker who made my green cats and I imagine a similar man in a leather apron blowing life down a long tube into this glass, putting his own breath into it, lung to lung, pleased when the little vessel expanded. And then, as I keep on looking, the contours don’t look like contours any more but ribs, and the bowl of glass a tiny ribcage.

      I have these thoughts because of the babies. Everything in the last nine months has been about the babies. They get into and under everything. They aren’t even born and they can make you frightened, they can make Mum cry, they can make me see things that aren’t there under shifting glass. Because, all of a sudden, I think I can see something beneath the surface of the glass after all.

      Something and nothing.

      I do make things up. Si says, “You are certainly not a scientist, Jessica. Scientists look at the evidence and then they come to a view.” But it’s not just Si, it’s Gran and even Mum. They say I make things up. I see things that aren’t there. And hear them sometimes too. Like now, beneath the glass, through the glass.

      Some movement, a blink, a sigh. A song. Some sadness.

      The sensation of life, of a ribcage, breathing.

      “Jessica!” That’s a shout, a real-world shout. Gran is shouting. “Jessica, Jess!”

      I jolt out of myself. “What?”

      “The phone, Jess.”

      Gran is standing at the bottom of the stairs, the phone in her hand.

      It has come. The message. She knows. She knows about the babies.

      I abandon everything, fly down the stairs, rip the phone from her.

      “Yes?”

      It is Si.

      “Jess,” he says. “Jess.”

      “Yes!”

      “They’re alive. They’re alive, Jess.” His voice doesn’t sound like his normal voice, it sounds floating. I conjure his face. His eyes are full of stars.

      I know I’m supposed to say something , but I don’t know what.

      “Isn’t it wonderful?” says Gran.

      “And they both have a heart,” says Si. “Two hearts, Jess. One heart each.”

      Then I find something to say.

      “Omphalopagus,” I say.

      Omphalopagus is the technical term for babies joined at the lower chest. These type of babies never share a heart, so I don’t know why Si is so surprised. After all, it was Si who did the research, hours and hours of it on the net. Si who taught me the word, made me pronounce it back to him. Omphalo – umbilicus. Pagus – fastened, fixed. Fixed at the navel. The twins umbilically joined to each other and to Mum and right back through history to the Greeks who coined the word in the first place.

      Me and the joins.

      Si and the statistics.

      Si’s endless statistics. Seventy per cent of conjoined twins are girls. Thirty-nine per cent are stillborn. Thirty-four per cent don’t make it through the first day of life.

      Si’s eyes, shining.

      “Can you give me back to Gran now, Jess,” says Si.

      As I hand over the phone, I remember the night of Mum’s nineteen-week scan. I’d come down for a raid on the cereal cupboard. Si and Mum were talking in the sitting room, hushed, serious talk.

      “They’re gifts of God,” I heard Mum say.

      I stood at the door of the kitchen waiting for Si to put Mum right about that. I waited for him to tell Mum what he’d told me earlier that afternoon that, despite a great deal of mystical mumbo jumbo talked about conjoined twins down the ages, they are actually just biological lapses, slips of nature. Embryos that begin to divide into identical twins, but never complete the process, or split embryos that somehow fuse back together again. A small error, a malfunction, nothing to be surprised about, considering the cellular complexity of a human being.

      I wait for him to say this. But he doesn’t.

      “They’re miracles,” Mum says. “Our miracles. And I don’t care what anyone says. They’re here to stay.”

      And Si doesn’t go on to mention the thirty-nine per cent of conjoined twins who don’t make it through the birth canal, or the thirty-four per cent who die on day one.

      He just takes her in his arms and lets her bury her head in his chest. I see them joined there. Head to chest.

      I’ve only been gone from my bedroom a matter of minutes, but СКАЧАТЬ