The Flask

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 it feels like a lifetime. Even the room doesn’t look the way it did before. It’s bigger, brighter, there is sunlight splashing through the window.

“The babies,” I shout. “They’re alive!” I jump on the bed and throw myself into a wild version of a tribal dance Zoe once taught me. Then I catch sight of myself in the mirror and stop. Immediately.

I also see, in the mirror, the flask. It has fallen over, it’s lying on its side on the desk.

No. No!

I scoot off the bed.

Please don’t be cracked, please don’t be broken.

The flask has only just entered my life and yet, I realise suddenly, I feel very powerfully about it. Connected, even. I find myself lurching forwards, grabbing for it. But it isn’t my beautiful, breathing flask, it is just a bottle. Something you might dig up in any old back garden. It isn’t broken, but it might just as well be, because the colours are gone and so are the patterns. No, that’s not true, there are whorls on the surface of the glass still, but they aren’t moving any more, and the bubbles, my little seed fish, they aren’t swimming. And there is nothing – nothing – inside.

I feel a kind of fury, as though somebody has given me something very precious and then just snatched it away again. I realise I already had plans for that flask. I was going to remove the cork and…

The cork – where is the cork?

It isn’t in the bottle. I scan the desk. It isn’t on the desk. But how can it be anywhere but in the bottle or on the desk? Did I imagine a cork? No, I saw it: a hard, discoloured thing, lodged in the throat of the flask. I look into the empty bottle, as if the cork might just miraculously appear. But it doesn’t. The smell of the bottle is of cold and dust. There can’t have been anything in that bottle.

And yet there was.

There was something crouched inside that glass, waiting.

No, not crouched, that makes it sound like an animal. And the thing didn’t have that sort of form, it was just something moving, stirring. Then I see it, the cork. Look! There on the floor. It’s not close to the flask, not just fallen out and lying on the desk, but a full metre away. Maybe more. To carry the cork that far something big, something powerful, must have come out of the flask, burst from it.

So where is that thing now?

It’s on the window sill.

What I thought was a patch of sunlight isn’t sunlight at all. It’s bright like sunlight, but it doesn’t fall right, doesn’t cast the right shadows. Light coming through a windowpane starts at the sun and travels for millions of miles in dead straight lines. You learn that in year 6. Light from the sun is not curved, or lit from inside, or suddenly iridescent as a soap bubble or milky as a pearl. It doesn’t expand and pulse and move. It doesn’t breathe. Whatever is on the window sill, it isn’t light from the sun.

I go towards it. It would be a lie to say I’m not frightened. I am frightened, terrified even, but I’m also drawn. I can’t help myself. I remember my old maths teacher, Mr Brand, breaking off from equations one day and going to stand at the window where there was a slanted sunbeam. He cupped his hands in the beam and looked at the light he held – and didn’t hold.

“You can’t have it,” he said. “You can’t ever have it.”

And all of the class laughed at him. Except me. I knew what he meant because I’ve tried to capture sunbeams too.