The Flask

“Promise?”

Very gently, I place the flask back into the dark space behind the left-hand drawer in the desk.

“See you later,” I say, as I leave the room.

Our local hospital is too small to deal with cases like the twins’, so we have to go to the city. It’s a long drive.

“Your mum will be very tired, you know that, don’t you?” Gran says.

She makes it sound like we shouldn’t be going, but I know why we’re going. In case the twins belong in the thirty-four per cent who die on day one.

The Special Care Baby Unit is in the tower-block part of the hospital, on the fifteenth floor. We come out of the lift to face a message to tell us we are In the Zone and to make sure we scrub ourselves with the Hygienic Hand Rub. The doors to the unit are locked and we have to ring to gain admission.

Si hears us as we check in at the nurses’ station and comes out to greet us.

“Angela,” he says to Gran and then, “Jess.” And he puts his hand out to touch me, which he doesn’t usually. I look at his eyes. They aren’t sparkling, but they are smiling. “Come on in.”

There are four incubators in the room and five nurses. Two of the nurses are wearing flimsy pink disposable aprons and throwing things into bins. There’s an air of serious hush, broken only by the steady blip of ventilators. Beside each cot is a screen with wavy lines of electronic blue, green and yellow. I don’t know what they measure, but they’re the sort of machines you see in films that go into a single flat line when people die. Mum is not sitting or standing, but lying on a bed. They must have wheeled her in on that bed, and braked her up next to the twins. She doesn’t look up immediately when we come into the room; all her focus, all her attention is on my brothers.

Brothers.

All through the pregnancy, Mum’s been calling them my brothers. When the twins are born, when your brothers are born… But, I realise, standing in the hospital Special Care Unit, that they are not my brothers. Not full brothers, anyway. We share a mother, but not a father, so they are my half-brothers. But half-brothers sounds as if they’re only half here or as if they don’t quite belong. And that’s scary. Or maybe it’s actually me that doesn’t quite belong any more, as though a chunk of what I thought of as family has somehow slid away. And that’s even scarier.

So, I’m going to call them brothers – my brothers.

Mum looks up, shifts herself up on her pillows a little when she sees me, although I can see it hurts her.

“Jess… come here, love.”

I come and she puts her arms right around me, even though it’s difficult with leaning from the bed.

“Look.” She nods towards the incubator. “Here they are, here they are at last.”

They lie facing each other, little white knitted hats on their heads, hands entwined. Yes, they’re holding hands. Fast asleep and tucked in under a single white blanket they look innocent. Normal.

“Aren’t they beautiful?” says Mum.

“Yes,” I say. And it’s true, though there is something frail about them, two little birds who can’t fly and are lucky to have fallen together in such a nest.

“You were a beautiful baby too, Jess.”

She is making it ordinary, but it isn’t ordinary. Somewhere beneath that blanket, my brothers are joined together and I want to see that join. At least I do now, although for months the idea of the join has been making me feel queasy.

There, I’ve said it.

The truth is, when Mum first told me she was pregnant I felt all rushing and hot. Not about the join, which we didn’t know about then, or even about them being twins. No, I felt rushing and hot about her being pregnant at all. I can’t really explain it except to say I didn’t want people looking at my mother, I didn’t want them watching her swelling up with Si’s baby. It seemed to be making something very private go very public. And I didn’t like myself for the way I felt, so when it turned out to be twins, and conjoined twins at that, I hid myself in the join. I made this the secret. I didn’t want people to know about the join (I told Zoe, I told Em), because of all the mumbo jumbo talked about such twins down the centuries. I didn’t tell them that I wasn’t so sure about the babies myself, that the idea of the join actually made me feel sick to my stomach. I kept very quiet about that.

Am I a bad person?

A nurse is hovering and sees the babies stir.

“Do you want to hold them, Mum?” the nurse says as if my mother is her mother.

“Yes,” says Mum.

Si helps Mum into a comfortable sitting position while the nurse unhitches one side of the incubator and adjusts some tubes. Then he stands protectively as the nurse puts a broad arm under both babies and draws them out. Si never takes his eyes off the babies and there is something fierce in his gaze and something soft too, that I’ve never seen before.

“There now,” says the nurse as she gives the babies to Mum. They are in Mum’s arms, but they are still facing each other, of course. The nurse has been careful to keep the blanket round the babies as she lifts them and she’s careful now to tuck it in.

One of the babies makes a little yelping noise and Mum puts a finger to the baby’s lips and he appears to suck.

“They’re doing very well,” says Mum, and then she loosens the blanket.

The babies are naked, naked except for two outsized nappies which seem to go from their knees to their waists – where the join begins. Mum leaves the blanket open quite deliberately. Gran turns her head away, but I look. I look long and hard as Mum means me to do.

The babies’ skin is a kind of brick colour, as if their blood is very close to the surface, and it is also dry and wrinkled, as if they are very old rather than very young. Aunt Edie again. But the skin where they join is smooth and actually rather beautiful, like the webs between your fingers. It makes me feel like crying.

Very gently, Mum strokes the place where her children join, and then she draws the blanket back around them.

I realise then I don’t know what the babies are called.

“Richie,” says Mum, “after Si’s father. And Clem, after mine.”

It seems to be enough for Mum. She lies back and closes her eyes and the nurse comes and takes the babies away again. I think Si would like to lift them himself, but he doesn’t dare. Maybe he feels they are too fragile, that he’d hurt them.

Mum seems to have gone into an almost immediate sleep, and just for a moment, I feel we might all be just some dream of hers – me and Si and Gran and the babies all rather unlikely conjurings of her exhausted brain. And then, as I watch her chest rise and fall, I think about the flask and that seems like an even deeper dream. I had been going to tell Mum about the flask, how I found it in the desk and how it was full of something unearthly, something beautiful and scary at the same time and how I captured it, because I feel fierce and soft towards it, just like Si does towards the twins, but that I also feel bad because, as Mr Brand says, you can’t catch things that are supposed to be wild and free and…

“I think we ought to go now,” says Gran.

“Mum…” I say.

“Ssh,” says Si. “She needs to rest.”

By the time we get back home it is almost dark.

“Who’s that?” Gran asks as we turn into our drive.

It’s Zoe, of course, knocking at our front door. She turns as she hears the car pull up. I wind down my window.

“Want to come to the park?” she asks.

Zoe and I often go to the park at dusk. It’s one of our little rituals. We swing on the swings after all the little kids have gone home. We swing and talk. Or Zoe dances. She dances around the swan on its large metal spring. She dances along the wooden logs which are held up by chains, she backflips off the slide. When she’s tired, which isn’t often, we lie together on our backs in the half-moon swing and look at the sky. Or I look at the sky anyway. She looks upwards, but what she sees I don’t know, because people can look in the same place but not see the same things, can’t they?

“Bit late for the park,” says Gran.

But I want to go to the park because I want some private time with Zoe. I want to tell her how beautiful my brothers are, after all; I want to take time, sharing all the details of those little birds and the web of their join. I want to look in her eyes, see myself reflected in the mirror of her, the big sister of two baby boys.

“Please,” I say to Gran. “Just for half an hour.”