The Flask Read Free Page B

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