it would last for ever.
Then she was dead. It was Gran who found her. Gran and Aunt Edie were sisters. They had keys to each other’s houses, had lived next door to each other for the best of forever. In the fence that separates their gardens there is a little gate. During daylight hours, summer and winter, they kept their back doors open, and you never knew, if you called on them, in whose house you’d find them. So they were joined too.
All sorts of things I’d thought of as separate before the twins were born turn out to be joined.
The whole family gathers at the crematorium for the funeral. The hearse is late. My cousin Alistair, who is only five, keeps asking when Aunt Edie is going to arrive. Finally, the hearse turns up with the great brass-handled coffin.
“But where’s Aunt Edie?” persists Alistair.
The grown-ups hush him, but I know what he means. You’re invited to Aunt Edie’s for tea and there she is with a plate of Marmite sandwiches. You’re invited to her funeral, why wouldn’t she be there too? Aunt Edie at the crematorium with a plate of Marmite sandwiches.
Besides, as I know (and Alistair obviously knows), you can’t put the sun in a box.
After the service there is a party at Gran’s which Si calls a wake. I don’t ask about the word wake but Si, with his Best Explaining Voice, tells me anyway. The old English root of the word, which means being awake, he says, changed in late medieval times to wacu. He pronounces this like wacko. It means watching over someone, he tells me. People used to sit up overnight, apparently, with dead bodies, watching.
I wacu the wacko people at the wacu. There are some I don’t know and no one else seems to know them either as they are standing in a corner by themselves. Mum is sitting on the window seat, weighed down by the coming birth. I listen to her hiccup, she can barely breathe because of the two babies pressed together inside her. She asks me to take some sandwiches to the newcomers. There’s one plate of Marmite so I take that. The strangers – two men and a woman – don’t notice me at first because they are deep in conversation. They’re talking about Aunt Edie’s money and about who is going to get it as she doesn’t have any children of her own and therefore no grandchildren.
“Sandwich?” I say.
“Oh – and who do we have here?” says the woman, as though I just morphed into a three-year-old.
“Jessica,” I say. No one calls me Jessica unless they’re angry with me. But I don’t like this woman with her hard face and very pink lipstick and I don’t want her to call me Jess, which is what the people I love call me.
“And what’s in the sandwiches, Jessica?”
“Marmite.”
“Oh – not for me, thanks.”
“It was Aunt Edie’s favourite,” I say.
“Why don’t you have one then, Jessica?” the woman says.
I have three. I stand there munching them in front of those strangers even though I’m not in the least hungry. When I’ve finished I say, “Aunt Edie left everything to Gran.”
Si told me that too.
Si doesn’t believe in keeping things from children.
Later Gran says, “I want to give you something, Jess; something of Edie’s.” She pauses. “Edie would have wanted that. What would you like, Jess?”
I do not say the desk.
I certainly do not say the bureau.
I say, “The piano.”
This cannot be a surprise to my grandmother, but her hand flies to her mouth as if, instead of saying the piano, I’d said the moon.
“I don’t know,” says Gran from behind her hand. “I don’t know about that. I mean, I’ll have to talk it over with your mum. And Si.”
Mum says, “You already have a piano, Jess.”
This is true and not true. There is a piano in our house, an old upright, offered – free of charge – to anyone who cared to remove it when the Tinkerbell Nursery closed down when I was about six. I jumped at the chance of a piano – any piano. But the keys of the Tinkerbell piano were hit for too long by too many small fingers with no music in them at all. The felt of the piano’s hammers is worn and the C above middle C always sticks and the top A doesn’t sound at all, no matter what the piano tuner does.
Aunt Edie’s piano has a full set of working notes. Aunt Edie’s piano keeps its pitch even though it’s only tuned once a year. Aunt Edie’s piano holds all the songs we ever made together.
It’s also a concert grand.
Si says, “This is a small house, Jess.”
This is also true and not true. The house is small, but the garage is huge.
Si says, “You can’t keep a piano in a garage, Jessica.”
And you can’t. Not when the garage is full up with bits and pieces for your stepfather’s Morris 1000 Traveller. And the Traveller itself. And the donor cars he keeps for spare parts.
“What about the bureau?” says Gran.
“Bureau?” I say.
“Desk,” says Si. “A desk’s a great idea. A girl your age can’t be doing her homework at the kitchen table for ever.”
“It belonged to my father, Jess,” says Gran. “Your great-grandfather.”
But I never met my great-grandfather. I don’t care about him, and I don’t care about his desk.
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