Under Shifting Glass (6 page)

Scarier than the howls?

Besides—a ghost doesn't make any sense. Not the ghost of Aunt Edie. I'd know that ghost, surely. And it—she—would know me. We'd chat, wouldn't we?
Hi, Jess, it's me, Aunt Edie, just came to see how you were getting on with your piano playing
. And in any case, ghosts don't exist, do they? Pug and his Mrs. Nerg wouldn't have anything to do with ghosts. Si wouldn't have anything to do with ghosts. But is a ghost any more extraordinary than a disembodied something connected to the twins?

My mind is going round in circles. I blame Zoe. If Zoe and I were on speaking terms I wouldn't be having to share all this with Gran.

“What do you mean, then?” Gran asks.

“I was just thinking . . . last night—I couldn't sleep, you couldn't sleep, and Clem—he wasn't well. Maybe we somehow . . . sensed that?”

“Nice idea,” says Gran. “But a bit far-fetched. It's just worry, I'm afraid. Keeps people awake all the time.” She gets up to reboil the kettle. “And knowing too much. Sometimes the less you know, the better.”

I say nothing. I don't like the dig at Si.
He told you the babies could die, didn't he? Sometimes the less you know the better
. I'm allowed to have a dig at him, but she isn't. Why is that?

“You've always been a sensitive child, Jessica,” Gran continues. “Sometimes that's a good thing.” She pauses. “And sometimes it's a curse.”

“A curse?”

“You imagine things that simply aren't there.”

“Last night,” I say, suddenly angry, “there was a howl, a terrible, terrible sobbing howl. Didn't you hear it?”

“Jess, love, it was a difficult night. You were tossing and turning. I know—I peeked in on you. I think you must have been dreaming.”

Dreaming?

I never actually
saw
the flask go black, did I? I never saw it pulse. When I did look at it, when light finally spilled into the room, it was just glassy, colorless, ordinary.

Though it had been blue. Fizz-heart, sky-happy blue. I definitely saw that.

And I saw

the cork on the floor

and

the light that didn't travel in straight lines

and

the opalescence

and

the breathing and the flying

and

the little seed fish swimming

and . . .

“And that's before we get to your overactive imagination,” Gran says. “Don't forget—you are the girl who invented Spike.”

We don't go to the hospital. Mom says the twins have to have tests.

“Plenty of cleaning to do at my house,” says Gran.

She means Aunt Edie's house.

“That'll take our minds off things.”

Her mind, maybe.

In the car on the way over, I don't answer my phone when it rings. Gran doesn't like me answering the phone when we're in the middle of a conversation (though, as it happens, we're not in the middle of a conversation) because she says it's rude. But that's not the reason I don't take my calls. I don't take them because they are all from Zoe. By the time we arrive I have four missed calls and a text:
sry. SRY cll me. xx
.

Besides, I need to think about Spike. Spike is small and blond and he never brushes his hair, so it's always wild and knotted. He comes with me everywhere, or at least he used to. He arrived when I grew out of ScatCat, sometimes smiling and full of jokes, sometimes irritating and demanding. He'd hide when I wanted to speak to him or shout right at the moment I tried to ride my bike without training wheels. He'd knock my juice over. But at night he was always calm, and came to bed with me, lay his head on the pillow beside mine. Only he never slept. He spent the whole night watching over me.

I'm here, Jess, right here
.

Wacu. To be awake.

I'll never leave you
.

To watch over.

I love you, Jess
.

As Gran pulls up in her driveway, I realize I haven't been in her house since the day of the funeral. And I haven't been in the house next door—Aunt Edie's house—since Aunt Edie was there to open the door to me.

On Gran's porch is a blue-and-white china umbrella stand that used to be on Aunt Edie's porch. It makes my stomach lurch.

I love you, Jess
.

“You'll never guess what I found,” says Gran, leading me straight past the umbrella stand that is in the wrong place and into the dining room. “Look.”

On the dining room table is a stack of Aunt Edie's photo albums, the sort that have real old-fashioned photos in them, ones on glossy paper, not the flimsy pixelated ones you print off the computer.

She points at a picture of me at about four, pushing an empty swing. Beneath the photo, there is a scrap of paper on which is written, in Aunt Edie's loopy handwriting,
Jess and Spike
.

“Do you remember?”

Yes. Forever. I often pushed Spike on the swing. Spike liked the rhythm; it soothed him.

“For three whole years, you wouldn't go anywhere without him,” says Gran. “Jessica Walton and her imaginary friend, Spike.” She laughs. “And the sandwiches you got Edie to make for him! Every time you had a plate, he had to have one, too.”

Then I remember something else. Aunt Edie made plates and plates of sandwiches for Spike—pimento cheese sandwiches, which were Spike's favorite. But Gran, she never gave Spike food. Not one sandwich in three years.

The place where I join with Aunt Edie burns.

Gran and Aunt Edie's gardens are both shaped like witches' hats, wide close to the house and then narrowing to not much more than a compost pile where they back onto the park. The boundary between the two begins as a fence, making it quite clear which piece of land belongs to whom, but seventy feet farther on there is just an increasingly tangled hedge where plants and boundary seem to twine together without end or beginning.

That makes me think of the twins and the web of their join and how they are both clearly separate and yet, beneath it all, they must tangle, too.

The gate, which has a latch but no lock, is about a third of the way along, by Gran's eucalyptus tree. I know it is a
eucalyptus because Aunt Edie would sometimes crush a leaf in her hand as we passed.

“Smell this, Jess.”

The smell was pungent, fragrant, oily.

“That's
my
tree,” Gran might say, in a tone that wasn't quite joking. “And I'll thank you two to respect it.”

“It's only a leaf,” Aunt Edie would retort. “Just one leaf.”

They did bicker sometimes, Gran and Aunt Edie. Two increasingly old ladies: one who'd lost her husband early, one who'd never married. Sisters whose lives had joined along this boundary for more than ten years.

Another pair of siblings joined.

I really hadn't thought about that before, but I think about it now, as Gran presses down on the latch and the gate swings open as it has so many times before.

Aunt Edie's house is to be sold. The gate will have to be locked, a bolt on Gran's side, a bolt on the side of the new neighbors. Gran will never go through that gate again. I will never go through it again. It makes me want to unlatch the gate and run back and forth a thousand times.

It also makes me want to ask Gran how she is, how she's feeling. Gran who has no husband and no son and now no
sister. All her joins, her connections, broken. But I don't know how to open that conversation.

Gran shuts the gate behind her and puts a bony arm around my shoulder. And then, as if she can read my mind, she says, “I feel so lucky to have you, Jess.”

Gran opens the door of the glass lean-to (which Aunt Edie called the Sun Room) and we go in. The house smells damp and forgotten, as if it has been unlived in for years, not just for a couple of months.

I go straight into the drawing room, which is where the piano is. The room runs the length of the house, and the piano is in the bay window to the front and the sofas around the fireplace to the rear. Only there aren't any sofas anymore. All the large items of furniture have gone, leaving a rolled-up carpet, a few piles of books, and Aunt Edie's ancient . . .

Ancient
 . . . there's Zoe again, nagging in my ear.

. . . ancient TV. The piano, alone at the far end of the room, looks abandoned, cheerless. Its lid is down. Down! Aunt Edie's piano lid was never down.

“Who's going to have it?” I blurt out. “Who's getting Aunt Edie's piano? Where's it going?”

“It's not going anywhere,” says Gran quickly. “Well, only next door.”

“You're going to have it?” I must sound astonished.

“It's not that surprising,” says Gran.

“But you don't play!”

“Ah, but you do. So instead of going to Aunt Edie's to play, you can come to my house, can't you?”

And I should be glad, I should be grateful. The piano won't be sold, won't to go into some stranger's house. It will be just next door; I can play it any time I want. Any time I visit. But I still feel like someone threw a blanket over my head, hot and suffocated.

“Of course I'll have to make some space in my drawing room,” says Gran. “Move things around, sell a few more bits and pieces at auction. But it'll be worth it, Jess, to have you coming to play.”

I can't meet her eyes, so I turn my back, go over to the piano, lift the lid, and try a chord. Still in perfect tune.

“Are you pleased?” Gran asks.

“I love this piano,” I say. This at least is true.

“Oh, and one more thing. Look.” Gran scrabbles beside the pile of books. “I found this.”

It's a stack of music books—Bach, Beethoven, Chopin, Mozart.

“Bit beyond you at the moment, probably,” Gran says. “But practice makes perfect. You'll be needing to come over to my house a lot.”

Gran hands me the stack and goes off to
sort the vases
. I hear her clattering about in the kitchen.

Music.

Aunt Edie and I never read music. Notes have always filled me with fear. There, I've said it. Right from the beginning, they swam in front of my eyes. I never knew what lines they sat on, or why. I didn't understand the spaces or the clefs or the time signatures.

“She doesn't seem to be making much progress,” my mother reported.

Nor was I making much progress with reading. I was—I am—dyslexic, but nobody knew it then. Except perhaps Aunt Edie. Despite the fact she'd never even heard the word
dyslexic
, she just
knew
.

“Her music's all here,” said Aunt Edie, tapping her ears. “Where it should be. And also here.” She tapped her heart.

It was Aunt Edie who suggested I give up learning with a conventional teacher and start learning the Suzuki way. She even managed to convince Si on the subject. The founder of the Suzuki method, Aunt Edie told him, observed how effortlessly Japanese children learned their mother tongue. No one taught them their letters; they just listened to words and repeated them, like every other child in the world. A child could learn music the same way, said Shinichi Suzuki, by using his or her ears, by listening and then repeating.
If a child hears fine music from the day of his birth and learns to play it himself
, the master said,
he develops sensitivity, discipline, and endurance. He gets a beautiful heart
.

So finding a slew of music books belonging to Aunt Edie feels like a betrayal. Which is stupid, because of course I know Aunt Edie could read music—even I can read some now—but I just don't want these books right now. I throw them on the floor. Concertos and sonatas and sonatinas skid about on the carpetless boards.

Then I sit down to play.

I play something very simple, a song we used to call “Spring Garden.”

“This is the grass growing,” Aunt Edie would say. “And this, this is a cherry tree bursting into bloom. And these are the birds. Can you hear the birds, Jess?”

I didn't cry when they told me Aunt Edie was dead. I didn't cry at the funeral or at the wake. But when I hear those birds singing again, I sob my heart out.

After a while I stop playing and blow my nose. Then I think I should pick up the music books because Gran has never been very good with messiness. There is the Beethoven, the Bach, the Mozart, the Chopin, and a single sheet of paper. At first I think it's blank, because it's upside down, face to the floor. I am just about to slip it back inside
Chopin's Preludes
when I see that it is music, too. A handwritten song, or a composition anyway, tiny little blue ink notes jumping about on neatly ruled (if fading) blue ink staves. The piece doesn't have a title, but in the top left-hand corner there is a dedication. In Aunt Edie's distinctive, loopy handwriting it says:
For Rob
.

This is even more of a shock to me than the books of music. Aunt Edie—writing a song down, committing it to
paper? Aunt Edie, who could remember every note of a piece, but who also liked to change things, experiment, improvise according to her mood—or mine?

And worse than this: Rob.

Who is Rob that Aunt Edie should dedicate a song to him? Something flashes hot across my heart.

Jealousy.

Aunt Edie and I made many songs together, but she never dedicated one to me. Never wrote it, fixed it down, put my name in blue at the top.
For Jess
.

I put the music on the piano stand, sit myself down, stare at the notes. I need to hear this piece, need to know what Aunt Edie has written to this Rob I've never heard of. I'm a good player, I really am, but I have to count the lines and spaces, try to find where the first ink dot lands. It makes me cross to look at all of Aunt Edie's notes arranged in front of me like some locked-up treasure chest to which I do not have the key.