The Flask

But it still arrives.

That’s when I learn you don’t always get what you want in life, you get what you’re given.

Which is how it is for the twins.

It is as if the desk has landed from space. My room is small and it has small and mainly modern things in it. A single bed with a white wooden headboard and a white duvet stitched with yellow daisies, a chrome-and-glass computer station, a mirror in a silver frame, a slim chest of drawers. And a small(ish) space, where they put the desk.

Two men puff and heave it up the stairs. They are narrow stairs. They bang it into the doorjamb getting it into the room and then they plonk it down in the space and push it hard against the wall.

“Don’t make them like they used to,” says the sweatier of the two men. “Thank the Lord.”

The desk – the bureau – is made of dark wood. It has four drawers with heavy brass locks and heavy brass handles, which make me think of Aunt Edie’s coffin. The desk bit is a flap. You pull out two runners, either side of the top drawer, and fold the desk down to rest on them. One of the runners, the one on the left, is wobbly, and if you’re not careful, it just falls out on the floor. Or your foot.

Si comes for an inspection. “I could probably fix that runner,” he says. “Or you could just be careful. It’s not difficult. Look.”

I look.

“Marvellous,” Si says, testing the flap. “You can do your homework and then – Bob’s your uncle – fold it all away.”

“I hate it,” I say.

“It’s a desk,” says Si. “Nobody hates a desk.”

The desk squats in my room. I don’t touch it, I don’t put anything in it, I don’t even look at it more than I can help, but it certainly looks at me; it scowls and glowers and mocks me.

Here I am, it says. Just what you wanted, right? A bureau.

I turn my back on that bureau. But it still stares at me – stares and stares out of the mirror.

I turn the mirror to face the wall.

Some weeks later, I hear Mum puffing upstairs. She puffs more than the removal men, because of carrying the weight of the babies all curled together inside her. And also the weight of the worry they are causing.

“Jess,” she says, stopping by my door.

“Yes?”

“Jess – I wish you could have had the piano too.”

And that makes me want to cry, the way things do when you think nobody understands but actually they do.

The next day my friend Zoe comes round.

Zoe is a dancer. She doesn’t have the body of a dancer; she’s not slim and poised. In fact she’s quite big, big-boned, and increasingly, curvy. But when she dances you think it is what she was born to do. I love watching Zoe dance. When Zoe dances she’s like me with the piano – nothing else exists, she loses herself in it.

Otherwise, we’re not really very alike at all. She’s loud and I’m quiet. She’s funny and I’m not. And she likes boys. Mum says that it’s because, even though we’re in the same year at school, she’s the best part of twelve months older than me and it makes a difference. Mum says it’s also to do with the fact that she’s the youngest child in their family.

Soon I will not be the youngest child in our family.

I will no longer be an only child.

Si says, “Girls grow up too fast these days.”

And I don’t ask him what he means by this or whether he’d prefer Zoe (I’ve a feeling he doesn’t like Zoe that much) to go back to wearing a Babygro, because this will only start A Discussion.

I have other friends of course – Em, Alice – but it’s Zoe I see most often, not least because she lives at the bottom of our cul-de-sac, so she just waltzes up and knocks on our door.

Like today.

Then she pounds up the stairs and bursts into my room. Sometimes I think I’ll ask her if it’s possible for her to come into a room so quietly no one would notice her, which is something I’m quite good at. But I’m not sure she’d understand the task, which is another reason why I like her.

“Hi, hi, hi. Hi!” says Zoe. She wheels about, or tries to, which is when she comes face to face with the desk.

“What,” she says, “is that?!”

“It’s a bureau,” I say.

“A what?”

“A bureau.”

“But what’s it doing here?”

“It belonged to my aunt Edie.”

“It’s hideous,” she says. “And ancient.”

Ancient is one of her favourite words. Anything more than two weeks old is ancient as far as Zoe is concerned.

“It’s George III,” I say. Si again.

“Hideous, ancient and pre-owned. Who’d want something that already belonged to some George whatever?” she says.

I’m going to explain that George Whatever didn’t own this piece of furniture, that he just happened to be on the throne of England when it was made, but that would turn me into Si, so I don’t.

“Hideous, ancient, pre-owned and bashed up,” she continues.

Bashed up?

I actually take a look at the desk. It’s not bashed up. And the wood isn’t as dark as I’d thought either, in fact it’s a pale honey colour, and the grain is quite clear so, even though it’s over two hundred and fifty years old you can still imagine the tree from which it was originally cut. There are dents in the surface of course and scratches too, but it doesn’t look bashed up, just as though it has lived a little, lived and survived.

“It’s not bashed up,” I say.

“What?”

“And it’s not hideous. Look at the locks,” I say. “Look at the handles.”

The locks and the handles are also not as I’d thought. They’re not heavy, not funereal, in fact they’re quite delicate. Around the keyholes are beautiful little curls of brass in the shape of leaves and even the little brass-headed nails that hold the handles in place are carefully banged in to just look like part of the pattern.