“I will.”
“Time to go,” says Si.
I lie awake a long time that night. Keeping vigil. Watching. I imagine Mum being awake. And Si. And probably the babies too, waiting.
In the morning I skip breakfast.
“You’re growing,” said Gran. “You have to eat.”
But I can’t.
I go to my room and start on the desk. I have decided that I will put in some homework stuff, but also some private things. In one of the cubbyholes I lodge my English dictionary, my French dictionary, my class reader. I pay attention to the height of the books, their colour, shuffling them about until I am sure that I have the correct book (the stubby French dictionary), in the middle. In the inkwell space, I put pens, pencils, glue, sticky tape and my panda rubber with the eyes fallen off.
Then I move on to more precious things. Behind the little arched door, I put ScatCat. He’s a threadbare grey, his fur worn thin from having slept in my arms every night for the first four years of my life. His jet-black eyes are deep and full of memories. I think I’d still be sleeping with him if Spike hadn’t arrived. More about Spike later. To keep Scat company, I add the family of green glass cats made as I watched by a glassmaker one summer holiday. Then I add a bracelet that Zoe made for me (plaited strands of pink and purple thread) and also one made by another good friend – Em – (purple and green) when we were in year 5. I once suggested we make a thread friendship bracelet for the three of us, winding Zoe’s colours and Em’s and mine (purple and blue) all together. Zoe laughed at me. She said friendship bracelets could only be exchanged one-to-one. That’s what Best Friends meant, Zoe said. Didn’t I understand about Best Friends? I close the little arched door.
Next I select my father’s ivory slide rule. Not Si’s slide rule, but one which belonged to my real father. Gran thrust it into my hand one day.
“Here,” she said, quite roughly. “Your father had this when he was about your age. You should have it now.”
“What is it?” I asked.
“A slide rule, of course.”
I must have looked puzzled.
“It was how people did maths,” said Gran. “Before calculators.”
Before calculators sounded a bit like Before the Ark. It made my father seem further away not nearer. Or it did until I held the slide rule. Carefully crafted in wood, overlaid with ivory (“I know we shouldn’t really trade ivory,” said Gran, “but this elephant has been dead a long, long while”), it’s bigger and deeper than a normal ruler with a closely fitting sliding section in the middle slightly broader than a pencil. Along all its edges carved numbers are inked in black.
“It originally belonged to your grandfather. Passed down,” Gran said. She paused. “Useless now, I suppose. It’s useless, isn’t it?”
Gran talks to me quite often about my father, although only when we are alone. Normally it makes me uncomfortable, not because I’m not interested, but because she always seems to require a response from me and I’m never quite sure what that response should be. And the more she looks at me, the more she wants, the less I seem to be able to give. Though I think she believes that, if she talks about him enough, I’ll remember him. It will unlock memories of my own. But I was only nine months old when he died and I remember nothing.
But the slide rule is different. It’s the first thing I’ve ever held in my hands that he held in his.
“It’s not useless,” I say. “I like it. Thank you.”
And all the roughness falls away from her.
I’m thinking all this as I select a drawer for my father’s ivory slide rule. Right or left? I choose the right, slip it in. Then I change my mind.
I just change my mind.
I open the left drawer and transfer the slide rule. But it won’t go, it won’t fit. I push at it, feel the weight of its resistance. I push harder, the drawers are an equal pair, so what fits in one has to fit in the other.
Only it doesn’t.
I pull out the right-hand drawer. It runs the full depth of the desk, plenty long enough for the slide rule. I pull out the left-hand drawer. It is less than half the length of its twin. Yet it isn’t broken. It is as perfectly formed as on the day it was made.
Which is when I put my hand into the dark, secret space that lies behind that drawer.
And find the flask.
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