Читать книгу The Flask - Nicky Singer - Страница 22

I don’t say a single thing over dinner. And if Gran notices she doesn’t mention it. She probably thinks it’s to do with the babies. And she’s right. Everything’s to do with the babies these days.

Except the flask.

I delay going up to bed, partly because I’m no good at sleeping when I’m angry, and partly because I expect to see little bits of sticky tape on the floor. I mean, something that can blow a cork from a bottle can burst through sticky tape, right?

Wrong.

There is no sticky tape on the floor. The desk is still closed, the drawer inside shut. I reach my hand in and feel the cold, rounded form of the flask.

“I’m back,” I say, sliding my fingers up the throat of the bottle, just to check the sticky tape is really still in place.

It is.

So I draw the flask out into the light. It is blue. Really blue – like a summer sky. Like happiness. Whatever I expected, it wasn’t this.

I just stand and stare, trying to work out whether it is the glass or the thing inside that is blue. But I can’t separate the two. Nor can I understand why – despite Zoe and Paddy and the park and the mumbo jumbo – just holding it makes me fizz with joy, as though I am holding a tiny, perfect other universe.

“You’re extraordinary,” I say. “You know that?”

No reply.

But then what would a universe reply? And I remember Si showing me pictures taken by the Hubble Telescope, pillars of dust 57 trillion trillion miles high and some nebula thing called the eye of God because that’s what it looked like, some astonishingly beautiful giant eye. And Si was busy explaining about gas and cusp knots and interstellar collisions, and I was just thinking it was all too much and too beautiful to look at even in a newspaper. And here is something even more extraordinary in the palm of my hand.

I don’t want to put the flask back in the dark drawer, I want to keep it close by me. So I take it to my bed, and lay it on my pillow as I undress. I don’t know how long the blue will last, the blue and the bright happiness inside me. And it’s not just the thing about Zoe (why couldn’t it have been my mum talking to Paddy’s mum?), it’s also the first time, I realise, I’ve felt really happy since we knew about the babies. The babies have shadowed everything for months, the worry of them. Would they be born alive, and if so, would they be able to survive? And now, this glowing blue seems to have the power to push the gloom away. Or maybe it’s just that I’ve seen the babies. Seen them alive with their bright little bird faces.

I get into bed thinking sleep will come with the sweetest of dreams.