Читать книгу The Flask - Nicky Singer - Страница 6

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.