Free The Flask by Nicky Singer

the excitement of it all and I’m still staring out of the window. Which is, of course, entirely my own fault.
    “You haven’t seen the film yet then, Jess?” says Mrs Paddy, picking up on my silence.
    And I know the yet is just to let me off the hook, to make it clear that I’m not really some excluded saddo, it’s just that I haven’t seen the film yet.
    “No,” I say. “Not yet.”
    “Bit too much going on at your house probably,” says Mrs Paddy kindly.
    Bit too much going on in my mind.
    About a million years later we arrive at the Buddhist Centre.
    “Do you know what this building used to be?” Mrs Paddy asks, as we draw up.
    “No,” I say. Paddy and Zoe are still on the film.
    “An old shoe factory,” says Mrs Paddy.
    We tip out on to the street.
    “I’ll be back for you in an hour,” says Mrs Paddy.
    The double doors to the centre open on to a small porch with hooks for coats and racks for shoes. Beyond this the ground floor is divided into an open-plan office, a library, a tiny kitchen and a reception area with comfy chairs and cushions and rugs which looks like someone’s sitting room. We all hesitate long enough in the porch for someone to ask us our business and suggest we remove our shoes.
    “We’ve come to see,” Paddy pauses, “Lalitavajri.”
    “Ah, that’s me.” A small, smiling woman with oceans of curly orange hair rises from one of the comfy chairs. “You must be Maxim.”
    Paddy nods. “And this is Zoe, and Jess.”
    “Welcome,” says Lalitavajri. “You’re all very welcome.” Her orange curls bob as she talks. “Shall we go to the Shrine Room then?”
    We follow her up three flights of stairs, passing a number of small rooms and shut doors, so the Shrine Room is a surprise. It runs the full length of the building, a spacious airy room with a huge skylight beyond which frothy white clouds scud across the sky. At the far end of the room, where the altar would be in a church, there’s a golden screen painted with the image of the Buddha, and arranged simply on the floor in front of him, are some candles and vases of flowers. The flowers don’t look shop bought, they look like they’ve been cut from people’s gardens. There are a couple of branches, heavy with pink cherry blossom, some hyacinths in a jam jar and a vase with some tall bell-shaped flowers I don’t know the name of. There are also three bendy stems of eucalyptus.
    Yes, eucalyptus.
    Si would probably say it’s just a coincidence that some of the fragrant, oily leaves that Aunt Edie pressed for me to smell, are here in this room where I’ve only come because Zoe wanted to do the project with Paddy and Paddy thinks our RE teacher is a goon, but it doesn’t feel that way to me. It feels that this room is welcoming me. And then I think a bit more about coincidences. Was it a coincidence that instead of getting Aunt Edie’s piano I got the bureau and inside the bureau was the flask? And was it a coincidence that I found that flask? Or was that to do with my real father, whose slide rule wouldn’t fit? And was it a coincidence that Gran gave me that slide rule in the first place? How far can you trace back these so-called coincidences? All the things that might have happened but didn’t because you made this choice, not that one. All the coincidences that have led me into this room with the eucalyptus. And then I wish I’d brought the flask with me, instead of leaving it behind in my bedroom, thinking that this project was just some homework thing and not part of my real life. Maybe the flask would have had something to say about the eucalyptus.
    “Now,” says Lalitavajri, “how do you want to do this?”
    “We’ve got a questionnaire,” says Paddy, waving it as though it’s a map of the known universe.
    Lalitavajri sits down on a mat beside a golden gong and invites us to sit beside her.
    “Fire away,” she says.
    “What drew you personally to Buddhism?” reads Paddy solemnly.
    “Ah,