Feed My Dear Dogs
Feed My Dear Dogs
Emma Richler
A warm, dark novel of family, distance and time from the author of the much-loved, highly-praised, prize-nominated Sister Crazy.Feed My Dear Dogs begins in outright observational comedy and slides into ever darker regions, while never losing its sharp tongue and wicked wit. Jem Weiss is the middle child of five and experiences childhood more acutely, more joyously and more entertainingly than most. The five Weiss siblings crackle with intelligence, camaraderie, competitiveness and individuality; they have their own running gags, jargon, skits and power struggles; they share a bearlike but adored father and an unflappable and omnicompetent mother.Jem's life hums with Shackleton and supernovas, boxing and cowboys, binocular doughnuts and naval underwear and at the centre of this galaxy of delights is her shining family. As Jem runs her childhood memories through her fingers, she entrances the reader with sharp observations, casual wisdom and tender wit. However, there's always something else looming, and now and again it sneaks up with some pressing tidings to impart – a child's terror at the prospect of moving on, growing up, leaving home.
EMMA RICHLER
Feed My Dear Dogs
Dedication (#ulink_a8543f47-d865-5aec-9f91-b4da85c196a4)
For Daniel, Noah, Martha & Jacob, and for my mother, my muse, and in memory of my father, with love.
Epigraph (#ulink_27e15f45-69ea-59d5-bb53-18031a36e513)
Every Space that a Man views around his dwelling place,
Standing on his own roof, or in his garden on a mount,
such Space is his Universe.
And on the verge the Sun rises and sets,
the Starry Heavens reach no further;
And if he moves his dwelling-place, his heavens also move
Wher’er he goes.
WILLIAM BLAKE
Tamar Rahmani,
for many things
Contents
Cover (#ucc7eba0c-bbff-5297-9e21-fbac601dc6b9)
Title Page (#uafbee0c1-cd3d-5c1e-891a-4e624730c6a9)
Dedication (#u3c41effc-a057-5c7e-a476-3608bb34b5aa)
Epigraph (#u1ebee4de-bd76-5fe8-a4f1-d0730a3ad832)
One (#uca211b9d-2c4a-52bd-a147-d150296fcc53)
Two (#ueffca195-1d0c-57b1-aeac-f28a05d63e44)
Three (#uf28e1fad-9645-5bf3-9014-1d5337183aea)
Four (#u0f05cada-fadf-592a-805e-4d05ea4acc12)
Five (#litres_trial_promo)
Six (#litres_trial_promo)
Seven (#litres_trial_promo)
Eight (#litres_trial_promo)
Nine (#litres_trial_promo)
Ten (#litres_trial_promo)
Eleven (#litres_trial_promo)
P.S. Ideas, Interviews & Features … (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)
Q and A with Emma Richler
Life at a Glance (#litres_trial_promo)
A Writing Life (#litres_trial_promo)
Top Ten Books (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Book (#litres_trial_promo)
On the Novelist in His Cavern, His Vision and Blindness
Read On (#litres_trial_promo)
Have You Read?
If You Loved This, You Might Like … (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)
Keep Reading (#litres_trial_promo)
Praise (#litres_trial_promo)
Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
ONE (#ulink_485d7b59-8bfc-592a-a2e7-1e961eb07d9a)
Jude always said a kid is supposed to get acclimatised to the great world and society and so on, and just as soon as he can bash around on his own two pins, but the feeling of dread and disquiet I experienced on leaving home in my earliest days was justified for me again and again on journeys out, beginning with the time Zachariah Levinthal bashed me on the head for no clear-cut reason with the wooden mallet he had borrowed from his mother’s kitchen. It did not hurt much, as I was wearing my Sherlock Holmes deerstalker hat with both ear flaps tied up neatly in a bow on top, providing extra protection from onslaught, but I must say it struck me that Zach, who was nearly a whole year and a half older than me, same age as my brother Jude in fact, Zach was the one in need of a few pointers regarding recommended behaviour in the great world and society at large. Never mind. The way I saw it, he was just testing out his enthusiasm for tools and surfaces, and, possibly, exploring a passing fancy for a future in architecture or construction work, and in my household, enthusiasms were encouraged, which is why I regularly went to and fro with a handful of 54mm World War I and World War II soldiers in my pocket for recreation purposes, with no one to stop me, although I am a girl and expected, in some circles, to have more seemly pursuits. You have to allow for enthusiasms, you never know where they may lead, so I knew to keep my composure the day Zach hit me on the head with a meat pulveriser. No. Tenderiser. So there you are, that is what I mean, it depends on how you look at things, how bashing away at a piece of beefsteak with a wooden hammer can induce a quality of tenderness in meat is just as surprising, perhaps, as my not protesting the risk of brain damage I incurred at the age of eight or so, instead, forgiving Zach on account of his enthusiasms and general spirit of endeavour.
I think all stories are like this, about looking out for a way to be in life without messing up in the end, a way to be that feels like home, and if you bear this in mind, it’s easy to see some situations as OK which might strike you otherwise as downright odd, and that story about Francis of Assisi and the crow is just one example of many. At the latter end of his life, Francis befriends a crow who is fiercely devoted, sitting right next to Francis at mealtimes, and traipsing after him on visits to the sick and leprous, and following his coffin when he died, whereupon the crow lost heart and simply fell apart, refusing to eat and so on, until he died also. Now, if you nip along the street or go about the shopping with a crow at your heels, you are not likely to make friends in a hurry, because it is odd behaviour, and not recommended. Unless you are a saint, in which case it is OK. So that’s one thing. The other OK-not-OK thing in this story is how that crow did not choose to make life easy and fall in love with his or her own kind, another crow with whom that bird might have a bright future and bring up little crows and so on. No. For the crow, Francis was home, that’s all there is to it, it is OK.
This is also how it goes for le petit prince in the book of that name by M. Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, a story about a small boy in a single suit of fine princely haberdashery, living on an asteroid with a volcano, a baobab tree and a rose, and having nothing much to do but watch the sunset. In the scheme of things, it is not so odd that he falls in love with the rose, and leaves his tiny planet in a fit of lovesickness, taking advantage of a migration of wild birds for his journey, hanging on to them, as it shows in the watercolour, by way of special reins. The prince finally lands on Earth wherein he has a shady encounter with a snake who has murder in mind, albeit concealed in a promise to this small lovestruck and visionary boy, a promise of return, a single ticket home by way of the eternal worlds.
Upon landing, the prince asks, Where did I fall, what planet is this?
I remember everything.
Everything and nothing is strange. It depends how you look at it.
Zach, now, is something in law, Jude says, although I keep forgetting the details, because all I can think is how Zach found a place where everything ought to come out right, and where even hammers crash down upon suitable surfaces for the tenderising of felony and injustice, and I hope he is happy, I hope so, though I don’t know, as I do not go in for telephones and letters these days, not now I have fallen out with society and the great world, but still I have enthusiasms, ones I pursue in low-lit rooms, with my handful of soldiers here, entering my world in unlikely ways, it might seem, to strangers.
October 1935. Joseph Goebbels issues a decree forbidding the inscription of names of fallen Jewish soldiers on war memorials, men who fell for the sake of younger men who are now getting busy scratching out offensive Jewish names from tablets of stone with what you might call corrupt and frenzied enthusiasm.
Me, I turn away and weep.
Where did I fall, what planet is this?
I hear it, I see it, and I was not there, it’s a vision. I remember everything.
Under the influence of gravity, stars in orbit in an elliptical galaxy such as ours are always falling, always falling without colliding, and the greater the mass, the greater the attraction, and the faster a thing falls, the faster it moves in orbit, so the Moon, for one, is always falling towards Earth, but never hits it, and I like to think William Blake, b.1757, d.1827, would appreciate this, as he was very interested in fallen man, and for William, memory is merely part of time, an aspect of the fall, and the visionary worlds are the true regions of reminiscence, a realm wherein every man is uncrowned king for eternity and there is no need for memorials because, so he wrote, Man the Imagination liveth for Ever.
I hate to say it, but William sounds like a man talking himself out of reality and hard knocks and brushes with dark times, a place where, for him, memory and vision meet in the most colourful manner, though not without violence, no, and the glorious thing is what he knew, from maybe the age of eight or so when he had his first visions, that as long as he was bound by time, and striding across London in an impecunious state and an ailing body, in a world that largely considered him crazy, he was OK, he had found it, the means of escape, a kind of resurrection in the eternal worlds, this was his country. William dies singing and when he is gone, a close friend reaches out and brushes William’s eyes closed, a drop of a curtain, a small gesture of infinite grace in one touch of the fingertips. To keep the vision in, that’s what he says. Blake was always falling, never colliding, it’s a trick of gravity. Everyone has a home.
—What country, friend, is this? William Shakespeare, b.1564, d.1616! Do I have an obsession with numbers? Ben says I do. Said. Ages ago.
—What do you think?
—I asked you first!
—Mmm.
—Holmes: I get down in the dumps at times, and don’t open my mouth for days on end. Just let me alone, and I’ll soon be right! A Study in Scarlet, 1887!
—I don’t think that is what you want, for me to leave you. And if I leave, you won’t have to talk to me about your bandages today.
—A tiny accident! I am always falling.
I tell you a brief story about Eadweard Muybridge, b.1830, d.1904, and his obsession with speed and motion, and most of all, with photography, how he set up a row of cameras in a great field, cameras with tripwires attached so the galloping horse in his experiment would race by and take self-portraits in rapid succession, enabling Eadweard to capture this one moment he craved, the picture of a horse with all four feet off the ground, a moment passing too quickly for the naked eye, and proof that a horse at speed is so close to flight, achieving lift-off ever so briefly, in joyous defiance of gravity. What I cannot tell you yet, and I think you know, is how my tiny accident is also an experiment in speed and motion and photography, in my mind’s eye, how for a moment, in a desire for return, I find a means of escape, rising, not quite falling, a dangerous trick of gravity, I know it, I said I was sorry three times.
I do tell you, though, about a postcard I received from my mother, a card postmarked in another country, depicting two cherubim either side of a woman holding a chalice with an egg aloft, they are heavenly escorts. Triptych. The three figures are all white, statuary, and the cherubs are saucy and graceful, and the woman is draped in elegant folds with an expression on her face of surprise and fatigue, as if she has just packed off all the kids to school and now it is time, finally, Breakfast! Except that the title of this painting by Raphael is Faith, and in Christian art, of course, the egg is symbolic of Resurrection. It depends how you look at it.
From the very day my little sister Harriet and I thrashed out this business of fallen man on our way home from the convent one afternoon in extreme youth, clearing up a small matter of catechism arising from morning assembly we are forced to attend as civilians, not Catholics, just for the headcount so to speak, a morning I saw Harriet twist around on her class bench to gaze at me wide-eyed in a mix of alarm and mirth it is not always easy to tell apart, from that very day, she took to these two words, fallen man, with great glee, and particular delight. She has an ear for sayings and will not let go of them, so any time now that she sees Gus tip over, a regular occurrence around our place as Gus is a baby still and only recently up on his feet and moving around under his own steam, Harriet will say it, in grave and knowing tones.
‘Fallen man,’ she pronounces, soon giving in to the wheezy snuffly sounds of Harriet laughing.
On the day we first discussed it, she was not so breezy.
‘I don’t get the snake part.’
‘Forget the snake, Harriet, it’s a symbol, OK? It’s not important.’
‘Is important. She said, snake, snake, snake. Sister Lucy did.’
‘We are not Catholics. It doesn’t count, so don’t worry.’
‘Is it in the Bible?’
‘Yeh. Look, um, try Mum, OK? I’m not sure I get it either.’
I remember it, this morning, the sudden picture I had in my head, of soldiers flying out of trenches into gunfire, falling men, and of people ambling along all casual and keeling over, hurling themselves to the ground, they can’t help it, and there were cartoon images too, of people falling down wells, or off clifftops, or through holes in a frozen lake, hovering in mid-air for a full horror moment of realisation, unless, of course, the character is a hero, in which case he will be saved by a skinny branch on the way down, or land softly in a passing boat, and this is what is so depressing about the snake part in Sister Lucy’s story, and what I do not want Harriet to know, that somehow, due to the events in the Garden, according to nuns, not even an all-out hero can count on a passing boat, which accounts for that story from Mum’s childhood, about the very nice boy at her school who fell down a lift shaft by mistake. In my opinion, telling the fallen man story first thing in the morning at assembly is dodgy behaviour on the part of nuns, kicking off everyone’s day with this terrible news, and giving kids like my sister a doomy outlook on life when they are barely seven years old and have yet to face the facts. Furthermore, I am now deeply worried about lifts, especially as I forget, each time I step into one, to check first off that it is there. I give myself a very hard time about it so I will not step through the doors unawares again, but it is hopeless. I have been lucky so far, but I am only nine and have a long way to go. It is very weird, if you are not a forgetful type, to carry on forgetting the same bitty thing every time. Bloody.
‘So why is everyone falling, then?’ says Harriet, kind of cross.
‘Fallen.’
‘It’s silly.’
‘Right. So let’s drop it.’
‘BARKIS is willin’,’ says Harriet in a growly voice, using her new favourite saying from David Copperfield, a book by Mr Charles Dickens Mum is reading to us at present, which is great, because she does all the voices in a very realistic manner, the posh ones going, my dear, my dear, all the time, and the rough ones, such as Barkis. Harriet is very keen on Barkis. It is possible he reminds her of our dad, who is also a man of few words with a growly voice that is not scary once you get to know him.
‘Harriet Weiss!’ my sister adds. ‘Where are your shoes, put on your shoes! BARKIS is willin’.’
‘Did you say that to nuns today? Barkis is willin’?’
‘Tired of shoes.’
‘Harriet. Don’t say the Barkis thing to them, they won’t understand. They’ll think you’re being rude. Save it for home, OK? And try to keep your shoes on at school. Please.’
‘Why?’
‘It’s rules, Harriet. They have to have rules.’
‘Why?’
‘Because they need to keep control of things. Like in wartime, in the army. You know.’
‘Is this the army?’
‘No. Forget that. I mean – they don’t want us to run wild, that’s all.’
‘Like golliwogs,’ Harriet says, her lower lip all trembly.
Oh-oh. It’s a Golliwog Day. I look at my sister who is only 3ft 4
/
in high since last measured, with her fluffy fair hair mashed down flat, that is, for top accuracy, my little sister with big blue eyes and, I happen to know, one or two tiny soft woollen chicks with plastic feet and beads for eyes in her pocket, I look at her and I wonder how it is nuns can foretell trouble, and suppose she will run wild, as if chaos begins with Harriet taking off her shoes in a classroom, like the first step on the way to the Fall of the Roman Empire and barbarian invasions and so on. Nuns are not very hopeful regarding Humanity.
‘Harriet. Remember what Mum said on that subject?’
‘Golliwogs are made up.’
‘Yup. And what else?’
‘Rude. It’s a rude word. It starts wars.’
‘Yes. No. That’s prejudice. Prejudice starts wars. Got that?’
‘Think so.’ Harriet is not happy, I can tell, because she does a little soft-shoe shuffle and then grins at me, meaning she is trying to forget something bad.
My sister is going through a golliwog phase and it will soon be over, I hope, but I do see her problem. We are five kids in the Weiss family with me bang in the middle and Ben the eldest, and very tallest, and the only one with a taste for jam and other stuff from jars, of the sweet kind, i.e. not peanut butter, aside from Mum who eats honey, though not on toast like a regular person, but mixed into plain yogurt. She has special ways, but that is another matter. OK. When Harriet first saw it, the golliwog leaping around on the label of a strawberry jam jar, she was downright spooked and refused henceforth to sit at the same table with golliwog jam upon it. Preparations had to be made. Everyone needs protection from something.
After my dad finished up laughing and teasing and leaping around with mussed hair, there was a discussion, beginning with Mum explaining about prejudice and African slavery and made-up words, and even my dad getting serious and telling us about yellow turbans on Jews in ancient times leading to yellow badges in later times and cartoons of pigs, until I had a sudden confused and stupid feeling going back to the golliwog, because I had no idea a golliwog was meant to be a person at all. I thought it was a grizzly bear. What an eejit, as Jude would say. The golliwog is deepest black with shaggy spiky hair and wild eyes and I always thought the artist drew stripy colourful clothing on it so it would be less scary for people like Harriet, the way stuffed bears in shops have little bow ties and other accoutrements so that a kid will think it is not an animal, it is a person, and therefore very friendly. No one is thinking straight. A plastic baby doll is a person, and just about the most gruesome thing a kid will ever clap eyes on, and no amount of stripy clothing can take away the spook element from a golliwog. Harriet’s fear of golliwogs has made me see the light on a few subjects of pressing importance, and I am now quite interested in prejudice, whereas Harriet has taken to slavery, and is now very inquisitive regarding slaves and slavery BC and AD, which is fine with me, as it means she is likely to find rescue in her big thing for slaves any time she is rattled by golliwogs, on a day when a golliwog is a monster chasing her straight off a label of a jam jar.
We do not buy this jam any more, but there was worse horror to come for Harriet the time she crossed paths with Mary Reade in the playground, Mary and her golliwog doll tucked under one arm, a sight so bad, my sister was a jibbering wreck and I was called for to restore sanity and peace. Harriet held my hand and would not let go, like she was right inside a nightmare and needed my company until she could remember that a made-up thing is a made-up thing and ought not to have lasting spook power, it does not exist. On that day, I tried to distract her courtesy of intellectual matters, raising fond issues of war and prejudice and slavery and so on, and today, I am wondering whether she has had another brush with Mary’s golliwog.
‘Anything else you want to tell me, Harriet?’
‘We are all God’s creatures.’
‘What? Was that Mean Nun? Did she give you the creatures speech?’
‘Yes. Mean Nun.’
Mean Nun is the only bad nun around the place and I am beginning to think she is a little bit crazy. Any time there is some kind of slip-up committed by a girl, spillage in the mess, lateness, shoddy penmanship, missing items of kit, scuffy shoes, or anything, Mean Nun lifts her gaze skyward and does the creatures speech. We are all God’s creatures, she says, not sounding too happy about it, and then she runs through a list of beasts of the field, usually selecting the less fetching type of animal such as aardvark and hippo, and then she numbers up the categories, colours, religions and countries, rich and poor, one-armed, blind, and those various nations of the wider world in need of missionary work. It’s a sorry list, if you ask me, and quite depressing, so one time, I just had to correct her, the urge came upon me to remind her that Jewish is not like Indian and African, it is not really a country-type situation, not really, and Mean Nun was not at all pleased with this news, probably because I did not ask special permission to pipe up, which is definitely against the rules and a very bad move on my part. Mean Nun hates me now and I am anxious she will declare war on Harriet also, although I doubt it, as my sister has a fine temperament and is very pleasant company compared to me, so everyone likes her even if they do not understand her all the time. If you have an unusual personality and a fine temperament to go with it, you will be OK in the world, I can see that.
‘Tell me what happened.’
‘Mary had her – I said, it’s a slave! It’s rude, it starts wars! We are ALL God’s creatures.’
‘I see. Look, Harriet. You are right about the golliwog thing but you can’t just do the headlines, like in a telegram, you have to fill in the gaps a bit, or people will get it all wrong. Do what Mum does, right? Slavery is a sad thing, golliwog is a stupid word, prejudice … rah-rah, etc. At home, no worries, we get you, but outside, you have to explain more. OK?’
‘Tired.’
‘I know it. Come on, let’s go.’
‘Creatures,’ my sister says in a mournful voice.
‘Creature sounds like monster, but it doesn’t mean monster. Got that? It’s just a word for all things, you know, everything breathing.’
‘Is Daddy one?’
‘Yup. Definitely. Feeling better now?’
‘Yes, my dear. I am going to sing.’
Great. If Harriet is plain happy, or has had a fright and is on the road to recovery, she sings. She skips ahead of me now, and sings that song Gus listens to over and over on his kid-sized private record player he got for his birthday, a small red player with a crank and a tiny speaker he sits huddled up against, hearing out this song with an expression of concentration and dreaminess, because it is a tune regarding flowers, and Gus is keen on flowers and is likely reminiscing, I believe, about trips around the garden in Mum’s arms, with Mum dipping him into flower beds, saying, Breathe, Gus, breathe in! which goes to show how even a three-year-old can look back on life, and even a three-year-old can have specialist subjects and a specialist vocabulary. Gus knows the names of flowers and he speaks them. Peony, clematis, lavender. Rose.
‘Lavender’s blue, dilly-dilly, lavender’s blue!’ sings my sister, suddenly stopping in her tracks and turning to frown at me. ‘What’s dilly-dilly?’
‘Um. Name of a person, I think. The one the person who is singing about lavender, is singing to. Yeh. It’s a person.’
‘A creature.’
‘Yup. Dilly.’
‘No,’ goes Harriet, correcting me. ‘Dilly-Dilly.’
‘It’s just Dilly. It’s a song thing. Poetic. Like if I said, Harriet, Harriet.’
‘You never do.’
‘Right. But if I did.’
‘Why? Why would you?’
‘Harriet. Is this the Why game?’
The Why game involves asking a lot of pesky useless questions, largely to blow off steam and get some attention, and it is a game to play when you are tired from kid-type pressures and want to hang up your gloves for a while and take a rest, which is the case with my sister who is clapped out just now due to catechism and rules and golliwogs. The Why game is best played on a grown-up who will rattle easily and fall apart where a kid will not, a kid knows the ropes. Usually I can handle it just fine, except I am not in the mood today, which is what I tell Harriet.
‘I am not really in the mood.’
‘Why?’
‘HARRIET!’
‘OK my dear. Amen. BARKIS is willin’.’
I hardly ever play this game myself because there are two chief grown-ups in my house and I do not want them to crack up and fall apart, and I know also they will not play it according to the rules. They are too smart. Here is my dad.
‘Dad, why are you reading that newspaper? Why are there three newspapers on the floor, why? Why do you always lie down on the sofa to read them? Why can’t you read sitting up? Why are your eyes brown when every single other Weiss has blue ones? Why?’
My dad ruffles some pages and pays me no attention at all. ‘Jem, have you done your homework?’ he says.
‘Why should I do my homework? What is homework? Why?’ I am losing heart and getting flustered. This is not working at all.
‘Jem. Go and get me a tomato. A big, firm red one. Ripe. A tomato and a knife on a plate.’
‘OK Dad.’ End of game. And remember, Jem. Do not cut up the tomato, he likes to do it himself. Don’t ask why.
The other chief grown-up in my house not to play the Why game with is Mum. Here are a few things to know about her first off. 1) She is very beautiful and was a mannequin. This word had me very confused at first because I know mannequins are plastic life-sized dolls who stand in shop windows and have pointy fingers and zombie looks. Mum is just being shy and using a poor word in place of the posh one. Model. Mum was a model, and quite famous. OK. 2) She is pretty weird in a spooky but friendly way. 3) She is of unknown origins. I have a few theories about these unknown origins, however, they are only in the development stages and still require all-out investigation. I am on the case. Mum explained to me once, how she was a foundling, definitely a new word to my ears, and a pretty one, it seems to me, for something it is not very good to be. When Mum said, I was a foundling!, she said it in a voice that gave me a suspicious feeling, because it was sad and lively at the same time, like when you fall down and cut your body someplace and need to communicate the blood situation you are in without freaking anyone out, or being sissy. OK. I knew it was not the time to ask a lot of questions, this is what you learn if you listen hard to people and watch them carefully, that you have to pick the right time for questions. My first one would have been, What is a foundling exactly? But it was not the time to ask that question, so I just said, Oh, in a momentous way, the way you speak in the cinema when someone passes you a liquorice toffee and you do not want to disturb anyone in the audience but you want to say thank you for the liquorice toffee.
Here is one thing I am pretty sure of. When you are a foundling, your ideas about countries are more free and loose than most people’s, and you do not suppose, for instance, that your country is the best just because you were born in it, meaning a foundling can grow up being always on the lookout for a better place, the top place, and in some cases, maybe even the sky is no limit. I believe Mum is such a case. I definitely have my suspicions and she is aware of my suspicions and tries to throw me off the scent. Here is an example. I am sitting at the kitchen table messing with homework and my Tintin book is right nearby, a reward for when I finish up my homework. The Tintin book is Objectif Lune, called Destination Moon in English. Mum is cooking.
‘As soon as there is a passenger ship to the Moon, Jem, I will be at the head of the queue for tickets! How divine!’
This idea of being first in the queue has me worried, my insides feeling all hot and empty at the same time, like when I arrive at school and realise I have left something very important at home, such as homework and money for tuck. Oh no. Does she want to leave us? Would she rather be up there where the Moon is? I hope the passenger ships do not start up any time soon and I am going to have to look in my dad’s newspapers for news. Which part of the paper will that be in? I will ask Ben, who is well up on weird stuff most people are not yet apprised of. Right now, though, I try to forget this worry about passenger ships.
‘Maybe I’d like to go too,’ I say. ‘And, Mum? Tintin went on the Moon way before the Apollo, Apollo, what number?’
‘Apollo 11,’ Mum says, no thinking required, no pausing and eyes lifted skywards in reflection or anything.
‘Right! 11, and they landed in, um …’
‘1969, the 20th of July. They stepped out at 9.56 p.m.,’ she says in a gentle voice, chopping things with a big knife and stirring up stuff.
‘Yes? Well, Tintin was there in 1953. So there.’
Here’s how it goes playing the Why game with Mum.
We are going to Zetland’s in town and this is a favourite bakery of the Weiss family’s. OK.
‘Mum?’ I say. ‘Where are we going?’
‘Well now, that’s quite a philosophical question. I’ll have to think about it. Is that all right with you?’
End of game.
We ride a bus and if I lean forward too far as I gaze at things out of the window, Mum lays her hand on the metal bar of the seats in front of me, she wraps her long fingers right around the spot where if the bus stops suddenly, I would go crashing into it and smash my chin or bite my lip and get into a casualty situation, the way a lot of kids do if someone like Mum is not looking out for them. Mum has long arms so she can do this without making a big thing of it, lifting her arm slowly and resting her hand there like it is nothing to do with you, and this way you do not end up feeling pathetic and helpless. Also, she never says, Be careful! or, Don’t do that! or, Lean back! or anything because I think she wants us to be free and move around and gaze at things in a spirit of investigation, so that even if you do something kind of crazy like test out the sharpness of a knife by running your finger over the edge, she won’t yell at you which can be downright spooky for a kid, no, she will open up a discussion about that knife and pretty soon you find something a little less crazy to do, as well as having a few new thoughts on that particular experiment, and how to go about it if you feel the urge again, to test the sharpness of knives. Mum is a very cool person, and has special ways.
I am pretty keen to get to Zetland’s and Jude is going to be happy when we bring binoculars home, it is a favourite comestible of Jude’s and mine. A stranger might not be able to tell Jude is happy, watching him open up a paper bag with Zetland’s written across it and containing binoculars, a stranger thinks you ought to crease up in a big smile and say how happy you are, etc., but you do not, not always, not if you are Jude who will go ‘hmmm’ in a slow and quiet manner, and raise one, maybe two eyebrows, and push out his lower lip, that is to say, he is happy about the binoculars, even though he may not want one straight off. When you know a really fine thing is around, such as a binocular in a bag, you don’t need it straight off, sometimes it is better saving it for later, and just knowing it is there.
A binocular is a roll with a crunchy crust in two parts and a crease in the middle but connected, therefore resembling binoculars. They do not call them that at the shop. They look confused if you say, Whoa! binoculars, and point to the big wicker basket they are heaped in, they won’t know what you mean, although it is pretty easy to work out. Never mind. There is a lady there who never smiles and is a bit scary. I decide she is Mrs Zetland because she seems in command, the way a teacher does, or an officer in a war film. She wears a white ribbon around her head like a bandage, and most of her hair is on top, sort of growing up out of the bandage, so her hair reminds me of candyfloss on a stick at the fair except hers is grey not pink. I look at her and I kind of want to get the scissors out and do some trimming. Topiary work.
Mrs Zetland is OK and does not scare me any more ever since Mum sent Jude and me in once, on our own, to pay the bill and collect some rolls, whereupon Mrs Zetland slipped us each a lemon tart. Jude and I have been in a few times now. Two lemon tarts, every time, slipped to us like she is a World War II spy and we are two other spies on the same side. I don’t like lemon tarts much or any kind of tarts and just about two bites is all I need to be sure of this, and then I pass it on to Jude who likes a lot more stuff than I do, adventurous is what Mum calls him. I would never tell Mrs Zetland though, or she might be hurt, and I think she has a thing for Jude and me, something probably Mum knew all along, which is why she sent us on the solo mission with no fear in the first place.
After the bus ride, we walk. Mum is a great type to go out walking with. Here is why. Sometimes you will see a little kid out walking with a grown-up and you can tell right away he is having a hard time. He is reaching up high to squeeze his hand into the big grown-up hand and he is getting a bad shoulder ache, plus he is stumbling along with loose crazy legs like a drunk, just trying to keep the pace, and carry the flag, and not let anyone down. He is sending a few frantic looks upwards at the grown-up as if to say, Whoa, can’t you see what’s going on here? I’m in trouble. And each time he sends that frantic look skywards, he nearly trips himself up and sometimes there is no choice but to tip right over in a messy sprawl in an effort to put the brakes on the grown-up, which is when you might see the little kid dangling like a stuffed animal, his limbs making no contact with earth at all, just swinging there pointy-toed and skimming the surface in a desperate and foolish manner. This can happen when the grown-up is mad about something, I believe, which is why he is barrelling along at high speed with scanty regard for the kid, and nothing can stop him. Or else he does not know that a regular pace for a long-legged person is racing speed for a kid. You have to explain some things to grownups you would not think necessary. It’s disappointing, but those are the facts.
My dad walks slow. He does a lot of thinking when he walks, requiring a slow pace, which is perfect for our Gus, who is new at being upright and walking to and fro in the earth, but it is too slow for me at times, so I find myself drifting ahead of my dad, I can’t help it, and I do this until I get a wrenching feeling in my wrist and have to pause and hang back a little, and go at my dad’s pace, looking all around, and staring at the pavement, and doing some deep thinking. You can learn a lot from the different walks of people, the speed they move along at, and the way they hold your hand, and all of this is interesting and surprising if you are crazy about a person and want to fit in with their pace and way of doing things when you are together and out for a stroll, instead of struggling and trying to do everything your own way which is already familiar and not very educational or surprising at all.
When I walk with my dad, I do not say, ‘Dad, do you mind holding my hand the way Mum does? You are mashing all my fingers and my thumb is trapped and it feels bad.’ No, I don’t. I don’t even wiggle my fingers to restore the blood flow, or just so I can recall how they are separate digits and not one single clump of fingers like that crazy feeling I get if I have to wear mittens for school regulations, a feeling of being impaired and suffering from leprosy or something, only having a thumb available for active duty. I try to steer clear of mittens in life, and when my dad holds my hand, I get a mitten feeling and it is pretty terrible, but the thing is, I don’t mind, because it is cool to be with him, and to see how he is so different from Mum, and everything on our walk is different, and newish, even if I have walked the same ground with her, and this is what I mean by not struggling against a person you are crazy about. I get busy thinking about my dad, and wondering what he is thinking, and other matters. Will there be an ice-cream cone at the end of this walk, or a packet of crisps? He doesn’t talk much at all. Has he forgotten I’m here? No. He gives me a big hand squeeze, a torture-type squeeze, and I yell out, and this creases him up with mirth. He knows I’m here, yes.
Mum walks at kid pace, no matter which kid she is out with, and she does it without making you feel bad, like she has to make this big adjustment just for you. No. She acts as if this is the very pace she had her heart set on when she decided to go out strolling with you. Why, thanks, Mum! Also, I notice things I would not normally pay a lot of attention to. Let’s say there is woodland roundabout, I will notice what stage the buds and leaves are at, what type of tree it is, and whether or not it is healthy and so on. If there is birdlife, I will think about the birds hanging out in the trees, and muse on bird varieties and the ins and outs of general bird activity. In town, now, on our way to Zetland’s, walking past buildings I have seen many times before, Mum has me noticing nice gates and windows, carvings and decorations, angels and lions and mythic things, and I wonder how I missed them every time. I wonder if topography changes according to the person walking about in it, like in the theatre, especially in ballet, with scenery shifting in the blink of an eye almost, I love that, how you are in a whole new place suddenly, according to good swans or bad swans. When the nice swans are out, the scenery is pretty cheery. When the bad swans dance in, quick sticks there are big waves and stormy lighting and the music is noisy and makes my heart pound. In my opinion, they go a bit overboard in ballet, as if they cannot trust the audience to tell the difference between good and bad behaviour in a swan, which is why they dress them in two colours for extra emphasis, and the two colours, of course, are black (bad) and white (good). Heavens to Betsy. If one swan with stary eyes is casting evil spells and committing felonies right there in the spotlights, a person will not require all those big hints in scenery and costume to be sure that swan is on the wrong track and in sore need of reform. Never mind.
I look up, I look down, I hold her hand. We walk, my Clarks Commandos just breezing alongside Mum’s fine and marvellous shoes. I do not know many people yet, but I do not expect to see finer or more marvellous shoes looking so natural on a human being, as if they were made just for her, one pair with little scales on it like a snake but not scary, and another pair of dusty-pink suede with a fine bow, and all of them long and narrow with heels of various heights and widths and pointy fronts, like sailing boats. We sail along.
Hands. I think if you are an artist and want to go all out for Art, then you have to practise eyes and hands a lot. Eyes need to be seeing things and hands need to look as though they can feel. I take note of eyes in old paintings on gallery outings and most of them have a zombie look, which is quite disturbing, so I cannot concentrate on the rest of the painting. Statue eyes are the worst. All the details are nicely carved out, the lids and eyeball separate and everything, with sometimes even a tiny bump where the pupil and iris go, but it is still plain naked white stone, and worse than a blind person staring at you and making you feel terrible for having vision and not being able to help the blind person in the vision department. In the Tintin books, M. Hergé draws two black dots for Tintin. These are his eyes, and they are always seeing, which goes to show how an artist does not need a lot of detail to make a thing real. At times, hands are painted in so much detail, limbs and clothing are a bit boring, as if the artist knocked himself out doing the hand part and kind of gave up after that. Other times, hands resemble stumps of wood with little bits of kindling for fingers.
I don’t like to see tons of paintings all at once, because I get them all mixed up, and that can be depressing, but here is my favourite so far. This is the name of the painting. The Annunciation, by Fra Filippo Lippi, b.1406?, d.1469. I am quite interested in dates, partly since the nuns told me how in olden times people had very short lives, and it made me a bit anxious, so I like to do some calculations of my own. B.1406? I don’t understand why they are not sure of Filippo’s birth year, did his parents forget to write it down? Mr and Mrs Lippi were so happy when Filippo came along, they just forget, and friends ask, how old is he now, when was he born? And the Lippis scratch their heads and look at each other in a merry distracted fashion and say, We don’t know! About 1406? Or maybe Filippo was a foundling. Of unknown origins. It’s possible. They knew when he died though, someone wrote that down all right.
In the painting, the Angel Gabriel is giving the big news to Mary about the Immaculate Conception that is coming up for her. She is reading a book before calling it a night, and you can see her bedroom with the blanket neatly folded back at one corner like in a hotel. I have been to two hotels and I am most impressed by this foldy thing they do, some stranger worrying about you last thing at night, and just not wanting you to tussle with sheets and blankets at this difficult time in the day when you are all worn out from life. I do it to my own bed now and then, and pretend someone else did it. OK. Mary is listening to Gabriel and she is quite pleased about the news, even though she will not be able to get much reading done for a while, which was the only bad thing for Mum regarding the five babyhoods in our house, the loss of reading time, but she is catching up now that we are not so pathetic and helpless.
In the painting, Gabriel’s right hand is doing something strange. His first and second fingers are in that two-finger position signifying, I happen to know from nuns who are well up on this sort of information, the dual nature of Christ, human and divine. For nuns, these are the facts. Gabriel’s third and fourth fingers are furled backwards, holding on to his red cloak, and I tried to do this myself, pointing with two fingers and gripping my jumper at the same time, and what I got was an almighty pain in the hand, meaning an angel maybe develops special muscles in his hands the way piano players do. Special-purposes muscles. Most of all, I want to touch Gabriel’s hand, I want it to touch me. I do not care if it is unrealistic.
It’s autumn and Mum wears kid gloves, this is the kind she always wears. She wears kid gloves and has a kid on the end of her hand. Kid gloves are very soft and thin and made out of baby goats, a piece of news I aim to keep from my little sister as she has a very big thing for fauna, especially the lamb species to whom goats are closely related, and she does not need to be reminded that Mum’s gloves are made from goats who never had the chance to be grown-up goats and lead a full life, b.Monday, d.Friday, over and out, goodbye.
I can sense Mum right through the gloves, the gentleness, the slender bones, the little changes in pressure she applies for fun, she knows I’m here. I imagine the blood flowing in her fingers, and the little pulses pulsing until I cannot tell the difference any more between the feelings in her hand and the feelings in mine, like we are only one hand now, and suddenly I am in panic stations about it, I start flipping my thumb wildly from inside her palm, to the back of her hand, and as we get closer and closer to Zetland’s, I have a superstition moment, involving having to count to eighteen before we reach the door and Mum lets go of my hand, or else. Or else there will be no binoculars left. Or else there will be only one, and all seven Weisses will have to share it out, tearing off seven miserable pieces and saying prayers over them, and eating very, very slowly with a poignant cheery expression on our faces, signifying courage in the face of asperity as in nice poor families in books by Dickens. It will be terrible.
One, two, three … don’t let go … eighteen!
‘Here we are,’ says Mum, releasing my hand and maybe wondering why I am close to fainting and in need of stretcher-bearers.
Mrs Zetland smiles an all-out smile at Mum, because Mum is the kind of person people smile at, no matter what, even if it is not their big thing in life, to show signs of merriment for no obvious reason, and I clip my thumbs into my jeans pockets, and waltz up real casual to the binocular basket in the front of the shop, worrying that even though I made it to eighteen, I had called upon disaster anyway, because I am a fallen type, and must stay on my toes and never count on soft landings in passing ships.
The basket is brimfull of binoculars, and they strike me as the most rare and miraculous binoculars of all time, because fate did not mess with me, and also because of this new thing, how if I imagine a bad thing happening, I have a lot of grief, as if that bad thing has already happened, it is news. Mostly I do this late at night when I cannot sleep, I picture it, all the ghastly outcomes, beginning with small things, such as no more binoculars and always ending up with the same doomy thing, Mum going missing, which is a ridiculous fear to have and plain silly, but I saw it in my head, so now I worry, and I feel responsible, so I will have to watch out, like in that poem Mum reads to Gus from Christopher Robin.
James James
Morrison Morrison
Weatherby George Dupree
Took great
Care of his Mother,
Though he was only three.
James James
Said to his Mother,
‘Mother,’ he said, said he;
‘You must never go down to the end of the town,
if you don’t go down with me.’
There is a tip-off in this poem, when the mother goes missing, that James may be imagining things. Here it is. James bashes off on his tricycle at breakneck speed and petitions the King. Nothing wrong with that. But the King’s name is JOHN. I looked this up. The right king at the time of Christopher Robin was George VI. Good work, Jem.
King John
Put up a notice,
‘LOST or STOLEN or STRAYED!
JAMES JAMES
MORRISON’S MOTHER,
SEEMS TO HAVE BEEN MISLAID.’
James may be imagining things, but he worries, and you can’t take the worry out of the boy, even with bare facts. Your mother is right here, around the corner, coming soon. James James has a problem with fear and worry, and he is only three.
I check out the basket, which is brimfull.
‘Whoa!’ I say. ‘Binoculars.’
There are questions I want to ask my mother today, but never will, not even in fun, in the spirit of the Why game, say, because these questions would worry her, and worrying is bad for her, alarming as I now find strong light and some frequencies, and society at large. The great world. Everyone needs protection from something.
Worry. This is an interesting word and it derives from the Old English wyrgan, a hunting term meaning to kill by strangulation, and worrier, for so long, meant someone tormenting something or someone else, most typically an object of desire, and not until modern times has worrying become a word for a self-inflicted torment, that passion all one’s own. I worry.
Whither thou goest, I will go.
Come back.
Still no passenger ships, but I do not rule it out, I do not rule out the Moon. Or thereabouts.
When the small lovestruck boy with the fluffy blond head and single suit of fine clothes, finally touches down to Earth, in an African desert, he meets a snake, a funny old creature, he observes politely, slender as a finger, flicking through the sand, he reflects, a chain, colour of the Moon.
—Bonne nuit, he says.
—Bonne nuit.
—Where did I fall? What planet is this?
This prince is homesick.
—I can take you farther than any ship.
—Will it hurt much?
The prince has a single vision of a rose and he closes his eyes, I am sure of it, to keep the vision in, and just as he falls, ever so briefly, both feet lift off the ground.
Navigation is an art. The DFC is an award for distinction in flying. Well done, little prince.
Whoa, the Moon.
On 20 July 1969, Apollo 11 approaches the Moon by way of its shadowy side, lit only by earthshine, and seeming blue-grey to Neil Armstrong whose heart rate rises to 156 beats a minute. He has a vision of a great sphere, a perfect round evoking Earth, something he takes as a sign of welcome, and the blackness of the sky is so intense, the surface so inviting, it recalls Earth again, a night scene illuminated for the cameras.
The Apollo lands in the Sea of Tranquillity and, before stepping out, Buzz Aldrin celebrates Communion with a chalice lent to him by a Presbyterian church. On the Moon, he appreciates one-sixth gravity and the sense of direction it gives him, a feeling of being somewhere, he says, something he will miss once home, where he drinks too much and suffers from bipolar disorder, quite understandable in a person who has flown so high, achieving a flight of true distinction, only to splash down suddenly to hopeless dreams of return.
—See my planet, says the prince. Right above us … but so far!
—So what are you doing here?
From here to there. How far? Not very.
Robert Falcon Scott. Wednesday, March 21. Got within 11 miles of depot Monday night; had to lay up all yesterday in severe blizzard. Thursday, March 29. Last entry. For God’s sake, look after our people.
From here to there. What do I need? A small suitcase, a fine pair of shoes. A tiny nip of venom, a stroke of a knife. Escape velocity.
Gravity is a universal law of attraction. Escape velocity is the minimum speed required to keep moving away from a planet or star without falling back to the surface or entering a closed orbit around it, and gravitational pull diminishes the farther the surface of a star or planet is from its centre. In the case of a black hole, a star with a concentration of matter so dense it falls in on itself, and with a gravitational field so strong, spacetime, as Karl Schwarzschild first explained, will curve around it and close it off from the rest of the Universe so nothing can escape it, not even light, trapped in a body whose radius is less than a certain critical number, and where the escape velocity is equal to the speed of light. This is the Schwarzschild radius, a short straight line to the horizon of a black hole through which no signal can pass, named after Karl, astronomer, pioneer in optics, soldier, German Jew, b.1873, d.1916, winner of a posthumous Iron Cross for his pains on the eastern front, a horizon, you might say, he never escaped.
Black hole, dark star, dark matter, over 90 per cent of the Universe is invisible, unknowable. So far. Black hole, foxhole, dugout, trench, dead soldier, unknown soldier, mark him with a cross. Lost, stolen or strayed. Dark matters. I will find her. What do I need?
Begin with an eye.
Galileo will go blind, but in 1609 he points a telescope at the Moon from his garden in Padua, and in the shadows, he finds mountains and seas, writing, ‘Its brighter part might very fitly represent the surface of the land and the watery regions darker.’
An eye is a camera and it is 80 per cent water, forming in the dark of the womb into a small sphere with a lens in front, and a screen at the back with 137 million separate seeing elements, and nerve lines leading to the brain where out of a storm of electrical charges, a picture ought to appear, with all the qualities a person expects, of colour and light, contour and transparency, near and far. The eye is subject to tiny flaws and aberrations, everything has to be right, the pressure in the aqueous solution determining the shape of an eye whose lens must be clear as glass, and curved just so, and placed at the correct distance to focus the light on to the retina with its photosensitive cells, able to screen and unscreen, and produce the purple pigment that will allow for seeing in low-lit rooms, call it visual purple.
I trap the light, I remember everything, nothing escapes me, and I see marvellous things, no ticket required, a great picture show, one night only, every night, a spectacular! Son et lumière, a starry cast, and I can see clearly, I’ve got visual purple.
The first time I saw you, Mummy, you wore a red dress. It was red velvet and very slim-fitting, and you smiled at me and reached out with long sensitive fingers, a small gesture of infinite grace. I remember, even though I was only eight days old. I saw you.
TWO (#ulink_cb0b139d-02fb-58f9-aed1-d4c785f73219)
When Gus came home that first time, wrapped up in Harriet’s pink baby blanket, I had a thought regarding Mum and unknown origins, and how you might expect a foundling to be a bit edgy about babies of her own, worrying, perhaps, they will go astray like a gang of puppies in a park, to be scooped up later by a dog-catcher, unless they meet a bad end in the sweeping beams of onrushing cars, like sorry spies in wartime.
The dog-catcher delivers them to a dog home, a Salvation Army type place, but for dogs, and now they are puppies of unknown origin, each one hoping for a person to come along and choose him, and take him to a better place, but whatever happens, even if the new owner is one fine person, the dog will always be looking over his dog shoulder for the other puppies and his first home, and wondering what happened and was it his fault, etc., and maybe give in to a lifelong identity crisis, who knows.
Clearly, this dark matter of unknown origins is not a problem for Mum, because instead of looking over her shoulder and acting edgy, she has gone all out for babies, with Gus the latest, and between the day he first came to us up to now, I can only recall a single event which might be understood as an open display of nerves on her part, and that was the day of the Harness Affair, when Mum unwrapped a parcel before our very eyes, unfolding leaf after leaf of white tissue paper to reveal an arrangement of white suede straps resembling reins, reins most typically attached to sledge dogs in Antarctic regions.
‘For you, Gus!’
‘Mum,’ I say. ‘Um. He doesn’t have a dog. We don’t have a dog. Are we getting one?’
‘No, no!’ she says, laughing now, and tickling me in the neck so I don’t feel too much of an eejit. ‘It’s for holding Gus. In busy roads. Until he is older.’
Well, blow me down. I never knew they made leashes for kids. One time I strapped it on Gus myself and held on patiently, waggling the reins a little in an encouraging manner, waiting for him to go walkabout in the garden.
‘Walk on!’ I said, which is what coachmen say to coach horses in old films. ‘Walk on, Gus!’
And Gus just stands there, in contemplation of the flowers or something, not budging an inch.
‘Roses,’ he says.
‘Right. Roses.’
I am not worried that Gus’s vocabulary is limited at present to the names of flowers. He has a long life ahead of him and therefore it is not a cause for anxiety in me. Neither am I all that worried about accidents of the scurrying into traffic kind. This baby is simply not aiming to scoot off anywhere in a reckless manner, I don’t think so. He is not the type.
I unstrap the harness and have a go on Harriet. I ought to have foreseen the difficulties ahead. Harriet is very meek and polite as I wrangle with straps and buckles and then her eyes grow large and suddenly she is scampering all over the joint at gallop speed with me flying on behind, missing a step or two, until I realise I just do not have to be doing this, grappling on to my sister in a frenzy of determination like a charioteer in a chariot race, no. I drop the reins and decide to let her be a wild pony in a field all by herself, the harness flapping loose, and me going in for deep breaths on the sidelines. Bloody.
The thing is, Mum never used the harness on Gus. I believe there was just something about it she fell for, the soft white leather, the beautiful silver buckles, the idea of it, I don’t know, but I saw it, two years or so into Gus’s life, how Mum has her own way with this dark matter of unknown origins, how it is different for everyone maybe, one person ending up a one-man band, taking no chances on spreading out and having a family that might go astray, and another being Mum, fearless, filling a whole house with kids, no leashes required. It works the same in a bad-mood situation, my sister, for instance, turning to song and dance in moments of strife and confusion whereas I imagine even worse calamities, hoping my bad situation might seem rosy in the fearsome light of my imaginings, and now it’s just a habit, I can’t stop it, my bad mood opening a door on a whole roomful of bad-mood ideas, such as naval disasters and captains going down with ships, and firing squads, and amputations in wartime, no anaesthetic, and so on, and then I usually feel a lot worse. Clearly, my method is not a prize-winning method. I may need to review the situation.
Sometimes my dad helps out. If he happens to come along and catch me in a pathetic droop over some maths homework I am messing up, or a drawing of footballers that is an outright disaster because I have been so busy doing all the muscles in their legs, I have not noticed, until too late, there is no space left to draw heads and sky. It’s awful. This is when my dad will do a boxing count in a loud boxing referee voice, and a frantic sports commentator voice, while raising one arm in the air above me, to bang it down sharpish on each count, his pointy finger grazing the top of my drooping head.
One! Two! Three! … IS SHE OUT FOR THE COUNT? Six! Seven! …’
Etc. It is pretty annoying, except that I do perk up before he reaches the count of ten, braving this task of recovery with show-off vigour and a spirit of endeavour, whereupon my dad walks off beaming, because he has sorted me out again, and all it takes is to yell a boxing count over my head and waltz off to tell Mum the fine job he did. Jem is OK now. Well done, Dad.
My mother is the top person to seek out in perilous times, at any station from mystery grumps to head wounds. A head wound can bring on stark-eyed horror and a sense of being pretty close to the end of things, like dropping out of an aeroplane on to enemy territory, and at times like this, she can calm me straight down while patching me up, until suddenly I am interested in how the head bleeds (profusely), and I have a new word (profusely) and a new subject.
To begin. There are groups for blood. I never knew that. Anyway, the main idea is not to mingle the groups in emergency situations, when you might be running low on blood and need someone else’s for a top-up. You have to check first off about groups. Whoa! Hold on! What group are you? If you are too weak, you must hope for someone to ask on your behalf, so it might be best just to leave a note in some handy place upon your person, with the name of your group in neat writing. Or simply make sure never to be alone in a dangerous place, never to be without a member of your family who has the right blood, the same type, that’s how it goes, it’s a family thing. OK. Next. Blood is made of cells and platelets. Cells come in red and white. In red there is haemoglobin, meaning iron plus globin. What is globin? I don’t know. I could not pay attention, too busy wondering about this news there is iron in me, and having visions of blacksmiths in bare chests and leather aprons plunging bits of iron into boiling vats, and then bashing them into horseshoes and weapons, farm implements and household knives, red sparks flying everywhere, like drips of haemoglobin perhaps, so the blacksmith is in a state of wonder also, not about ironworks in him, but about blood in the ironworks. It’s possible.
Haemoglobin is responsible for colour and carrying oxygen, and white cells are for fighting off disease and so on, and then there are platelets. Very important. Platelets are for clotting, i.e. to stop all your blood flowing out after injury, the blood going from watery to sticky and hard, reminding me of the coating on toffee apples. It’s all very interesting, and pretty soon, listening to Mum, I lose my throw-uppy feeling, waiting out for it keenly, this clotting of platelets, and thinking deeply on the subject of blood flow, and the whole business of ferrying and fighting, and how I am in this O group, Mum says, which will be a breeze to recall in an emergency situation as it is the shape of a mouth calling out after injury, before the clotting part of things, white bandages, some nice toast with Cheddar, and friendly cuffs in the upper arm from immediate family, same as winning a medal. For Valour.
On other days, without a wound to show for it, everything hurts for no good reason, and I want to unzip my body and make a hasty exit, slamming the door on myself, no goodbyes.
‘Mum! Everything hurts!’
‘Growing pains,’ replies my mother who is in the know about such matters.
‘Oh.’
My mother is sitting at her dressing table with the lovely bottles on it, some with little tubes poking out and bulbs you squish, as in Ben’s chemistry set, except these are covered in velvet with golden tassels and are not dangerous to play with. The table has delicate drawers and one of them contains wide silver bracelets that are great for armlets when Jude and I are Romans. Mum lets us borrow them, no problem, and sometimes we invite Harriet to join in, because the bracelets fit right around her ankles and she is so good at slaves, though we tell her straight off she is a mute slave, otherwise she might mess up the game with inappropriate dialogue. We keep her instructions brief. For instance, we make sure not to tell her she had her tongue cut out in torture, or she will go overboard in terms of emotions and take over the whole game and it will be embarrassing. Harriet is not always appropriate but one day, maybe, she will be famous for acting.
Over the creamy gold wood surface of Mum’s table with the design of twigs and leaves carved in it, is a thin sheet of glass, kind of like ice, and there are mirrors at this table, a middle mirror that tips to and fro, and two side ones you can adjust the way my dad does in our car, frowning as he reaches up to twiddle the oblong driver mirror, like someone has done sabotage and moved it on purpose, then he fixes the side mirrors, wing mirrors, he calls them, and plunges out his window, before stretching across the passenger seat to do the other one, huffing and puffing the whole time. They have to be angled just right, so he can see what’s coming, and I suppose Mum can do the same, fiddle about with her wing mirrors so she can see who is coming in the room, such as Dad with a glass of wine, or me, today, with growing pains I am not thinking about any more.
The dressing-table mirrors are framed in creamy gold wood also, reminding me of famous paintings in museums, those three-in-one pictures with a middle bit and right and left bits connected by hinges, but here the famous painting is always Mum. Three of her, one in three. Cool.
When Gus came home that first time, it seemed to me things were just right, no more Weisses required. I’m not saying if Mum left us and bashed off to hospital again, coming home with one more Weiss wrapped in the pink blanket, my dad hovering and shoving us gently not so gently out of the way, that it would be not OK with me, no, it’s only a feeling. Things are just right. Now we are seven, counting Mum and my dad, not counting birds, i.e. two doves, two budgies and two finches so far, and how we might get a dog when Gus is bigger, but not yet, because at present any dog is bound to be bigger than Gus, which would be spooky for him, so we will hang on until he is round about dog-size, no smaller.
King Arthur must have felt this way too one day, thinking, OK, that’s enough knights, no more knights! King Arthur was very welcoming, and anyone brave and fine with good works in mind could come along and be a knight at his Table, and then the other knights would squish up to make room, while, of course, there were a few casualty knights making room for unhappy reasons (demise), but I do not see this accounting for all that many free places. There cannot have been endless space at the Round Table. In Arthur’s heyday, perhaps there was standing room also, but a great king ought to keep track of his knights, otherwise things will get slapdash and he might mix up everyone’s names, simply too tired to pay attention to each knight as is befitting, due to overcrowding of knights, with some of the more complicated ones, the softy knights, growing offended consequently, kind of hurt and dithery and likely to slip up on the job, I don’t know. It could happen so quickly.
I have borrowed Ben’s King Arthur book and it is the real thing, written nearly five hundred years ago and it has a French title, which is quite unusual, as the book is in English. I have read a few versions so far but they are not the real thing, the way those Bible storybooks for little kids with a lot of coloured drawings of animals and flowers and smiley types in tunics wandering about the countryside are not the real thing, and a bad mistake in my opinion, inviting high hopes and confusion. How are you going to break it to little kids as they grow up, that the Bible is not about farmyards in warm countries but a story featuring plenty of death and war and leprosy and so on? It won’t be easy, and I’ve seen it, how when the time comes to talk about strife in the Bible, nuns try to nip on by the strife parts and head straight for the miracle parts, because the bare facts have become a problem for them.
Take that twin brother story, the one about the sons of Isaac, Esau and Jacob. The Esau and Jacob story is really not hard to take for little kids, but the nuns make a right mess of it, thinking the only way to make it OK that the younger brother (Jacob) goes in for a passing phase of criminal behaviour is to say that the older brother (Esau) had a terrible personality and was extremely hairy, resembling a beast, making it OK what Jacob did, buying his land for only a few pence and then disguising himself by wearing a hairy jacket so their father would mistake him for Esau and give him a blessing as the firstborn, which is a top important blessing, and ought to have gone to Esau, but Esau is very hairy and not all that smart, making everything OK but very confusing for kids regarding men and beasts, and land deals, and whether or not hairy = bad. What a mess.
Mum cleared this story up for me in no time and here’s how I see it. Jacob slipped up due to extreme youth. It’s forgivable. He fell into criminal activity because he did not know how to come out with it plain, how he is a leader of men and Esau is not, and maybe Jacob should get the firstborn blessing so he can get on with being a leader of men. Plus, Esau is only interested in hunting, he is not one bit interested in farming and being a leader of men, meaning he and Jacob can shake hands in later life, and bury the hatchet, because Esau is happy with the turn of events, free now to hunt at all hours with no other responsibilities, reminding me of Westerns, where there are two main types of cowboy, the homesteader-farmer type and the hunter-cattleman type, and the homesteader is usually more sensitive, and has a long-term view of matters, whereas the cattleman is always rushing around on horseback and shooting from the hip, as the saying goes. A hunter is prone to rash behaviour, and excitable activities, deep thinking is simply not his bag, and this is how I will break the story to Harriet when the time comes. I cannot leave it to nuns. The Bible ought to be a nun’s best subject, a real thing and not a story about farmyards in warm countries, but this is clearly not the case. Oh well.
Ben’s King Arthur book is definitely the real thing, and it is very good. It is complicated.
‘Jem, you’re a bit young,’ Ben says, handing over Le Morte D’Arthur. He says it gentle, not bossy. ‘You’re not ready’
‘I’m ready, Ben.’
‘Well, remember the glossary at the back, OK?’
‘Glossary?’
‘See? See what I mean?’
‘What? See what?’
Here is why the book is complicated. 1) There are 999 pages in it. In two volumes comprising XXI Books comprising maybe 35 chapters each, though every chapter has a handy headline at the beginning, announcing the main topics and events therein, which is very helpful, without spoiling the suspense as you might suppose. 2) There are odd words here, ones not in the dictionary. If Ben is passing, he will help. Or I can flip to the glossary at the back, which is sometimes no help, as I have to look up the meanings of meanings, there being an example of this straight off, right there in the ‘a’ list.
Assoil v. to absolve.
I skip down the list. Ubblye n. oblation.
Then there are words with two separate meanings, completely different ones. Memorising these is recommended, so you only have the one job of picking the right meaning, and no second job of flipping to the glossary also. Example: wot v. to know/to blame. Whoa! It seems to me knowing a person and blaming a person are completely different things. Maybe not.
When you have to look up the meanings of meanings, and memorise at least some, so you can read a few pages in peace without filching in the glossary, and/or getting up for a dictionary every two minutes, things are complicated, but I don’t care, I am in a fever to learn this book and reach the parts Ben has already read out to me, such as the part about the Round Table and how it is symbolic, which is how I can sort this problem of too many knights and concentrate instead on symbolism, how King Arthur flung his arms open wide in a welcoming and heartfelt manner that is a bit symbolic, with no stampede of knights or anything, no dangerous overcrowding, a bad scene caused by my dodgy thinking, my concentration on numbers and hard facts instead of symbolism also, and you have to go for both ways of thinking, or else you get mixed up and depressed.
I race ahead to the place Ben marked for me because I like it so much, the Round Table part which is also the Queen of the Waste Lands part, and I remember her especially because of the stupid thought I had at the time to do with nuns, and how they are always threatening me with starvation, pointing at my plate in an accusing fashion, at remains of spam and peas, or smears of rice pudding and rhubarb I am trying to hide under my cutlery, food I am WASTING, a terrible sight for a nun, and all she needs to get going with speeches on starvation in far-off lands, and that is what I saw the day Ben read to me about the Queen of the Waste Lands, a sad and angry nun waving her arms in the night sky, over a field of terrible waste, of spam and peas stretching to the horizon, out of reach of the starving children of India, and it is all my fault. Sorry, Sister.
The Queen of the Waste Lands is a recluse, having fallen on hard times. She used to have the most riches in the world and now she has Waste Lands, and this is symbolic, I believe, and to do with war and grave human failings, which is what she muses upon in her recluse, recluse being a person AND a place, she muses upon grave human failings and related topics, chiefly the Holy Grail, and who will find it, and will it be found, etc. OK. When she meets Perceval, who has dropped into her recluse for some road directions, he doesn’t know she is his auntie, maybe because she has undergone physical change in her new life as a recluse, or because they never met before, I don’t know. Never mind. When this matter is cleared up, she asks Perceval has he heard from his mother lately. When heard ye tidings? She asks, which is kind of a trick question, because she knows perfectly well Perceval’s mother died from grief, waving goodbye to her son as he bashed off to join the Round Table, but she won’t say so, no, she waits for him to say he has had no tidings, except in dreams. I dream of her much in my sleep, he says. And therefore, he adds, I wot not whether she be dead or alive.
Wot v. to know.
Now she tells him. Now he knows.
It’s all very interesting, and goes to show two things. First, how when you are a recluse your behaviour may be open to question, a recluse may lose touch with the niceties of behaviour and conversation, that’s one thing, and the other is how valour and dreaminess in a knight can go together, how dreams are not sissy or anything, and all the knights are apprised of this. This is why Merlin, or a passing gentlewoman, a complete stranger even, can step up and talk pretty freely on any manner of extravagant issues, such as God and dreams and symbols, etc., boldly interrupting some knightly chat, perhaps, about sports and jousts and war injuries and so on, and no one is embarrassed or annoyed. This is how it is when the Queen of the Waste Lands, who has lost touch with the niceties of regular conversation, addresses her nephew quite suddenly, and out of nowhere, it seems, on several pressing matters regarding the Round Table, such as why it is round / why he is sitting there / why his mother died waving goodbye to him when he left home to sit there / why there is an empty place no one can sit in / and why he has to go on a quest for the Grail which will heal the Lands, so they are not Waste Lands any more, whereupon he is expected to come back and sit in the special empty place. It’s an awful lot to take in in one go, and it’s symbolic, so Perceval listens carefully, though he is a bit young for symbolism and is no doubt wondering, is his auntie blaming him about his mother, and how much should he pack for the journey and how long will he be away, how many days, how many pairs of pants and hankies should he bring? Perceval is counting, instead of thinking about symbolism, and he is in a tizzy. He has a lot to learn, but he listens carefully. It’s a start.
‘Also Merlin,’ begins the Queen of the Waste Lands, ‘made the Round Table in tokening of roundness of the world, for by the Round Table is the world signified by right, for all the world, Christian and heathen, repairen unto the Round Table; and when they are chosen to be of the fellowship of the Round Table they think them more blessed and more in worship than if they had gotten half the world …’
When Ben first read this part out to me, when he said, ALL the world, Christian and heathen, I had a second thought to do with nuns. It was about Mean Nun and the creatures speech, with heathen meaning dodgy, i.e. Jews and Africans and aardvarks and maimed types. Since I corrected her on that little matter of countries and religions, Mean Nun will sometimes say LOST SHEEP OF ISRAEL instead of Jews, thinking she can fox me with this line about runaway sheep in Israel when I know full well this is merely code for Jews, because I checked it out with Jude who is very learned in many departments, something not many people are aware of, seeing as Jude is not forthcoming, he is more the silent type. I drew up a list of his departments of learning so far: history / inventions / explorers / Latin / prejudice and wars / mythology / pollution / football / rugby / brass rubbings / Roman digs / criminals / spies / trains and locomotion. Oh. And boxing, I forgot boxing.
Anyway, the round business is very interesting and Ben says it is a holy shape and astronomical also, the table with all the knights around it akin to the Earth in a firmament of stars, and he says round is symbolic of wholeness, the way a straight line is not, because a circle has no beginning and no end, and everyone is equal around it, all the world, Christian and heathen, etc., and I think how my dad would hate that, as he needs to sit at the same place always, at one end, and he would be downright confused at a round table.
If you sit in my dad’s place, he will pull up short and look at you like this is the wildest thing he has ever seen, same as if he went upstairs to bed at night and you are lying in his bed next to Mum, ruffling up a newspaper and saying, What, dear? That’s how weird it is for him. No one sits in Dad’s seat, not even in extreme circumstances such as illness or temporary loss of mental faculties.
Another reason I thought that’s enough knights, no more knights! is that my dad needs about three or four people’s worth of space everywhere he goes, though he is a regular-sized man and not very tall. I watch him walk along in our big house, and he will get tangled up in things like books or shoes or one of his kids lying around on the floor, in spite of the fact there is plenty of room for him to step in, reminding me of Westerns again, how a sheriff, or some top important cowboy in a Western, my dad’s favourite type of film, walks straight down the middle of a main road if he feels like it, even if there is tons of traffic. When he strolls into a saloon for a wee drink or a spot of steak and beans, and coffee in a tin cup, everyone nearby shuffles over, no problem, no protest. They know he is a top important cowboy and needs all this space. They make room.
The whole journey up the stairs to Mum and Dad’s room, my dad keeps batting us away and running his hands through his hair in a ragged manner, nearly ready to fall apart in his effort to protect Mum from us, though he is the one in need of protection and a lie-down in a quiet room, it seems to me, not Mum who is calm and smiling, and once we all make it to the bedroom, she perches on the end of the bed and lays the pink bundle down.
‘Say hello to Gustavus,’ she says.
Suddenly we are shy and helpless. We don’t know whether to move in close in a single huddle like Roman legionaries locked tight with oblong shields overhead in what is called a turtle formation, or to nip in one by one, single file, and Dad is no help, looking cross without meaning to, merely trying to get everything right and protect Mum. It’s a hard time for him.
‘Shake a leg!’ is all he can think to say, one of the two things he might yell at us in the morning when we are messing about with duffel coats and satchels and pieces of toast, not really in the mood for school. The other thing he yells is Make tracks! I hope he does not do so now, as it would be a bit rowdy in the circumstances. You have to be quiet around a baby. Settle down, Dad.
Gustavus. How is it the last of the Weisses has a weird name, a centuries-old name with a strange sound of snowy countries, countries with kings at the helm, a name too big for a baby unless you know he is headed for kingship of a snowy kingdom? Gustavus.
‘He can’t see you. Not yet,’ Mum says. ‘You can come closer,’ she adds, turning to Gus and reaching a long finger towards him and slowly pulling the pink blanket away from his head so we can get a better view. Gus is definitely bald. ‘Hello, Gus!’ she says, which is kind of an invitation for us to get going with the greetings and stop standing around all shuffly-toed and pathetic.
Ben gives Harriet a little shove, a tiny one so Harriet will keep her cool and not have one of her unusual reactions to very usual things, a small shove, a slightly raised voice, minor events that will send my sister reeling as if she has just been shot by firing squad, or stumbling about in a desperate fashion in the manner of Oliver Twist’s mother at the beginning of that black-and-white film. Oliver’s mother is pregnant and lost in a storm at night. She has been abandoned or some such thing, and is on the run and has to give birth in a workhouse, the only pit stop on that stormy night, and Oliver is of unknown origins forthwith, because his mother dies from childbirth moments after kissing him gently on his bald head, falling back on her pillows with a sad and painful sigh, whereupon her identity locket is stolen by an old woman who is suffering from poverty and grave human failings, and now Oliver is in for a lot of hard knocks, all because of this sleight of hand, this one small flutter in a darkened room, passing too quickly for pause.
I don’t like it, this business of death and childbirth and I am stricken suddenly, even though I can see Mum right here on the edge of the bed, completely alive, with a completely alive baby in her arms and there is simply no cause for grief and anxiety. Stop it, Jem. Everything’s OK.
I watch my sister trip forward a step or two, very courteous and everything, leaning forward at the waist, and bending a little at the knees, her hands slipped neatly between them and her fluffy head dipping Gus’s way like she is smelling flowers in a flower bed. I just know she is struggling with some instructions I have given her lately in the run-up to Gus’s birth, advice regarding unseemly comments and how not to say them, beginning with, Isn’t that my pink blanket?
‘Hello, Gustavus,’ says Harriet in a fine display of seemliness. I feel proud. Here is why.
Walking to school is a much bigger job than it used to be for me since Harriet joined me at the convent in the year 1 BG. Before Gus. The bare fact is Harriet rarely moves in a straight line or at regular and unchanging speed, so the main thing is to keep her in my field of vision. I pretend I am a commando with a pair of binoculars, concentrating hard on a fellow commando. I watch him with my binoculars and I am ready to cover him with gunfire (Thompson sub-machine gun) and nip in close, if need be, in a hand-to-hand combat situation (Colt 45, Fairbairn-Sykes knife). It is the year of the Great Raids in France, 1942. In that same year, Jude says, Hitler ordered the execution of captured commandos, an order some German soldiers refused. Some, not many. I made a note of this. I try to keep an open mind about German soldiers and not give in to prejudice, recalling what Jude said. Some, not many, because for most, orders are orders, even if the chief is crazy, reminding me now of Mean Nun who is in charge of clocks and tidiness and being on time for school and so on, no excuses. No prisoners.
Where is Harriet?
I try not to boss my sister. She needs to stray a little and explore the flora and fauna on her way to places, though she will come across a sad sight now and again, mashed up wildflowers a person has stomped all over by mistake, or a limping bird or some such thing, and this is grievous for my sister though not so grievous as it is if I boss her, calling out, Forward march! or, Move it! Instead, I keep a 1½ oz box of raisins in my pocket and call out, Raisins! if ever she strays too far and, mostly, this reels her in like a fish. Raisins are second best after chocolate, her favourite comestible, which we are not allowed except on special occasions, and definitely not in the morning apart from Christmas Day. Raisins are permissible at all times.
‘Harriet! Raisins!’
Harriet scuffles out of the bushes in a shivery sad state like she is a small animal herself, with no mother animal around and no animal homestead or anything. Oh-oh.
‘What, Harriet?’
My sister points into the bushes. She just can’t look, so I brush through to investigate. Lo! I spy four, maybe five eggs, not the eating in an eggcup kind which come from chickens for that very purpose and with their full knowledge, I believe, but eggs that were on their way to be birds and will now never be birds. The shells are swirly with colour like decorated Easter eggs hidden in the garden, but these are broken, and sprawled across the ground, the guts spilling red, streaks of red like ribbons. It is impossible not to think about blood and baby birds who never got anywhere. It’s a battlefield.
I cross my fingers in a wish I can help Harriet recover from this bad scene, and get her to school on time also, I cross two fingers of one hand, not both, or the wish is cancelled out, Jude says. I aim to tell my sister about embryos and I need to get it straight first in my own head, I need to recall the main points, so I stare at the ground for a moment, I look down in thought as opposed to nuns who look up in thought, because they are married to God and look to Him for answers to all questions, except ones to do with sports. Sister Martha, for instance, is keen on sports and she looks me right in the eye when she has a sporting question, largely Manchester United questions due to her big thing for Charlton, Bobby, and Best, George. Sister Martha supports Manchester United although she comes from County Cork. This is because she goes for the man and then the team, and there is nothing unusual about that, not to me anyway.
Nuns look up, and in paintings relating to catechism, all eyes are on the sky, aside from the eyes of criminals and heathens. The sky will take up a lot of space in the painting, and bristle with angel activity and light beams and doves and so on, though in reality, that sky is empty and all the activity is symbolic, and the artist knows this, but he has painted it in, same as he paints trees and buildings and passers-by with their feet on the ground. It depends how you look at it. Maybe I should look up more, maybe there are too many distractions on the ground for clear thinking, or maybe I look down because I am not a Catholic or a nun.
Embryo.
Not long before Gus arrives, I press Ben with a question on the subject of something Mum described to me, how the baby is an embryo and feeds IN THE WOMB, and it is all so wondrous, etc. Yikes. If our new baby is feeding off Mum, in my opinion, she needs to pop a few more snacks to make up the shortfall. My mother does not eat much in regular life, and I certainly do not see her changing her ways now that she has an embryo within. In the weeks before Gus, therefore, I keep pushing my toast her way in the mornings, going, Sorry, I’m not very hungry, sorry, because I know she does not approve of waste, though she is not a bad case like nuns are, nowhere near. I do think she is likely to finish my toast, however, so I pretend I cannot finish the toast, or have a big urge to share, or, for variety, I act like I am in a terrible hurry. I am simply trying to save this woman from starvation, that’s all.
‘Want a bite, Mum? I’m late!’ I say, waving my toast in the air.
‘I’m LATE! I’m LATE, for a very important DATE!’ she sings, whereupon Harriet leaps out of her chair to do some accompaniment, singing along, and dancing a jig. ‘My fuzzy hair and whiskers took me MUCH TOO LONG TO SHAVE!’
Jiminy Cricket.
I take the problem to Ben and he puts me straight on this question of embryos and not being fully formed, and early stages of life, etc., hauling out an encyclopaedia and splaying it open on the floor. Embryo. Various vertebrate embryos.
‘What’s vertebrate?’
‘Having backs and spines. For locomotion, right?’
‘OK’ I say, reading on. ‘The different species are hard to distinguish in the early stages of development; later they develop individual characteristics.’
Above the words are two rows of drawings in a large box with three up-and-down lines, making eight compartments, with the top row for early embryos of a fish, chicken, pig, man and the bottom row for late embryos of a fish, chicken, pig, man, reminding me of Harriet’s bedside cabinet with her display of little animals within, little chicks and lambs, each one in a box, no man in any box. I stare at this drawing and feel a bit woozy. All the early embryos LOOK THE SAME. Kind of like fishhooks or seahorses. Yuck. Below, there is a second drawing of a late embryo with lots of pointing arrows and detailed information such as: ‘A few weeks before birth this foetus is practically fully formed.’ A few weeks. The embryo has a head and squeezed-up eyes, and feet, ears, all the accoutrements. A mouth and a stomach. Hands for wielding cutlery. I close up the book.
‘Ben?’
‘Yup.’
‘Does Mum look OK to you? Thin?’
‘She’s fine, Jem. She’s always thin.’
‘Right,’ I say, flipping on to my back to stare at the ceiling, like Jude, my brother who does a lot of lying down and staring at ceilings. ‘Ben? Is Jude a vertebrate? Ha ha. Joke.’
‘Let’s go ask him,’ he says. ‘Ambush time.’
‘Weapons?’
‘Pillows,’ commands Ben.
I salute him and we gather up pillows, and on the way to Jude, I wonder if there is a moment in the womb when the embryo is aware he is fully formed, I wonder do growing pains start then, and is it the same for everyone, every embryo of mankind? I make a note to quiz Mum on these points as she must know the ropes by now. Some day I’ll ask her, but not today, I’m not in the mood.
‘Raisins?’ I ask Harriet who is still quivering from shock and so on.
‘No! Explain!’
Whoa. ‘Harriet. I’m going to explain, but we have to move along at the same time, OK? Now don’t look back, it’s a mess, I know it, but listen to this. NO ONE GOT HURT BACK THERE. It’s a blood-no pain situation, I mean it. OK, come on, let’s make tracks.’
I take my sister’s hand and I don’t have to stretch for it or anything due to being just about the same size as Harriet. We are different but the same, i.e. if I comb my hair out of a tangly state into a fluffy flying around state and put on a big smile, a stranger might confuse the two of us, though I’d also have to be in motion, Harriet is almost always in motion, usually of the dancing and skipping kind. Harriet is a deep thinker but she does not show the marks so much, or maybe her thoughts come out better than mine, I don’t know, but anyway, that is the chief difference between us and pretty plain it is too, so there ought not to be the mix-up there is for some nuns and non-nuns at our school. It’s annoying. The mixed-up type will say Harriet-Jem and Jem-Harriet and this is the same type who will say, Girls! to a whole classroom, looking somewhere over our heads, like she simply can’t do it any more, pick out the differences between us, and no doubt she goes home and looks at a plate of food and says, Supper! instead of checking out all the different items and taking them in separately for a moment, chicken and broccoli and potatoes, it’s just the way she sees it now, everything in groups, a pair of sisters, a gaggle of girls, a plate of food. Things could get worse. Pretty soon, this lady is wandering around in her own street at night, key in hand, not even recognising which house is the right house. Where is her house? Her husband has dark hair and a close beard. One day, all men with dark hair and close beards are her husband. Hello, dear. Hello dear, hello dear. She has a problem with me maybe, and my sister, two girls about the same size with a last name she cannot pronounce. Now she has a problem with all girls bearing last names she cannot pronounce. It’s depressing.
Sister Martha always gets it right. Harriet collapses into me in the dining room or in the playground, nestling her head against me because she is a small beast fed up with running around in too much company and if Sister Martha comes our way, she makes no mistake, looking us straight in the eye, saying the right name to the right Weiss. When she is put in charge of a body count, a practice nuns go in for at regular intervals, unfolding that list of names tucked away in each nun pocket, reading them out in a feverish manner like we are prisoners of war just waiting to dash for the wire, Sister Martha is calm, hand on hip, speaking soft, eyeing us one by one, with a kind of amused expression. Harriet, she says. Jem. She always gets it right.
Harriet is not supposed to collapse into me in the dining room. She is supposed to stay at her table with the other little kids and Sister Martha is the only nun who does not freak out about this, the only one who can lead Harriet away, my sister sliding off my bench and slipping her hand into Sister Martha’s, quite happy, like she is off to a garden party. If you do not understand Harriet, you will not be her friend and the main thing is not to boss her, which is what I bear in mind the day of the broken eggs with blood spilling out. The carnage.
‘It was an accident. Here’s what I think happened. Are you listening? The parent birds made many eggs, they had to keep flying off for supplies and they picked the wrong tree. Too wobbly. They were tired and not thinking straight. Big breeze, skinny tree, accident. Nobody was pushed, got that?’
This is hard for my sister. She has a special relationship with animals, I’ve seen it, animals coming right up to her and taking food from her, from an open window, say, and they don’t just pinch the food and bash off, no, they hang out with her a while, and for Harriet, this is nothing strange, which is the best thing for me about her special relationship with animals, how it is nothing strange to Harriet.
‘Now. I need to tell you about the blood part. Ready?’
‘Ready.’
‘You know when Mum breaks an egg in a bowl, she looks out for a tiny red speck, a blood spot? OK. That speck MIGHT have become bird but it never happened because the egg was taken away before the mother could warm it through all the stages, early embryo, late embryo, bird. See? The blood is left over from then, but it’s not a sign of pain or death or anything because it was never alive. That’s why it’s better to be a mammal, you know about mammals, humans are mammals. Eggs INSIDE, not rolling about on the ground for someone to step on, or going cold in a nest on a busy day for the parents. No. You stay warm through all the right stages and it’s convenient for the mother. Wherever she goes, you go, no problem, until it’s time, and even then, a baby gets swaddled up in blankets so the temperature shock isn’t too bad. So that’s it.’
‘My dear! Just like the Little Lord Jesus!’
‘Harriet! Remember what I told you? We don’t talk about that at home, we don’t say Little Lord Jesus. Because of Daddy. Remember?’
‘Away in a manger,’ begins my sister, singing in a dreamy voice, fluttering her lashes.
This is one of the two hit tunes everyone in our convent learns from the very first year. These are the two hits. 1) ‘Silent Night’. 2) ‘Away in a Manger’. In the first year, or Preparatory as it is called by nuns, or Babies as it is known to girls, tune one or two is played on the wind-up music box on the mantelpiece every single day ten minutes or so before lunch. Dining-room Nun, who is also Babies Nun, cranks it up and says, Now put your heads down, whereupon you fold your arms on top of your desk and rest your head there, sleepy or not. Why these tunes? In song number one, there are the words silent and night. It’s a hint. OK. In song number two, there is a line that goes: The Little Lord Jesus lays down his sweet head. Nuns think this is very persuasive to little kids who may be too old to take naps in the middle of the day but are going to want to do like Jesus, no matter what, because Jesus is the best who ever lived. I hate to say it, but frankly, being a baby and sleeping is nothing special, it is not a remarkable Jesus activity in my opinion. As I see it, babies are always dozing off, lolling about in pushchairs or out for the count on blankets spread out in the shade, like just getting here, birth itself, is going to take a lot of recovery time.
Harriet sings all the way to the gates where I get serious with her, assuming a grave expression the way my dad does when he wants to warn me that if I do not read enough I will end up stupid and have to work in a soup kitchen or the shmatte trade. What is a soup kitchen? What is the shmatte trade? Is he talking about slaves? I do not ask, as it is hard to reason with my dad on a day it slips his mind I am not quite eight and have plenty of reading years ahead of me and furthermore, I read all the time, goddammit.
I lay my hands on Harriet’s shoulders and swivel her round to face me and she goes all googly-eyed like she has completely lost her balance. I try to stay serious.
‘Now. What did I say?’
‘Little Lord Jesus, don’t say it.’
‘Right. And no singing it. Away in a manger.’
‘Where is Amanger?’
‘It’s not a country, Harriet! It’s a shed or something.’
‘Spider shed!’
Harriet is thinking of the shed in our back garden, the shed of fear for most Weiss kids who are not keen to ferret about in there when Dad says, Bring me a hoe! A rake! Or Mum asks for twine, meaning gardening string. The shed is always dark for a start, especially when it is super bright outside and you are blinded and helpless as you step within, and at a disadvantage, knowing anything you go for, in any part of the shed, you have to grab and scoot away with, slamming the door after you, because there will be some huge spider rushing straight for you on all occasions. Why do they do that? Why can’t a spider pause and merely move elsewhere in a seemly manner? Everyone is an enemy to a spider, like for shell-shocked soldiers in World War I, so used to scrambling out of trenches, going over the top, as Jude says, and roaring into the dark, guns blazing, they just don’t know how to stay cool any more, even in the face of nurses and doctors and so on. There are enemies everywhere. For Jude, the shed is not a problem, so we all make him go for tools and stuff. He may take some time, which drives Dad wild, Where’s my hoe?! Where’s my rake?! but this is not a problem for Jude either.
In a minute, Dad, says Jude.
And then we all say it. In a minute Dad, in a minute Dad, in a minute Dad, whereupon Dad turns on the hose and nobody is safe from ablutions except Mum, of course, and Gus, who is too young for torture.
We don’t get a lot of gardening done, but it’s not a bad time.
‘OK then. Don’t say the manger or the Little Lord thing. Got that?’
Harriet salutes me and slaps her heels together smartish. This is the only thing she knows about soldiers, the only thing. War is not her subject.
‘I’ll see you later. Right here, Harriet. At the gates.’ I swivel her back around and give her a bitty push in the shoulder area and she flies forward like she has been shot from a cannon as in that famous circus act.
‘When Harriet is FREEEE!’ she says, running towards the little kids’ entrance, and that is how it is for Harriet as she enters the gates in a little uniform she has to wear just so with different rules for different seasons, and special times to work and eat and lay her head down to the sound of tunes chosen by nuns, it’s not quite right, like a bird in a cage, not prison and hard labour exactly but not quite right, not until ten to four in the afternoon when she flaps free and meets me at the gates. My sister needs a lot of air and open spaces, that’s how it is.
When Harriet’s time is up and it is my turn to take my first peep at Gustavus, Gus, I tug at her green jumper twice, meaning, move along, your time is up, it’s my go, and as she steps past me, I can tell she has something to say.
‘Don’t say manger or the Little Lord thing,’ she whispers.
I roll my eyes and move in close, and the funny thing is, I think about it, the manger situation and how with Jude and Ben behind me, we are like the three kings, I can’t help thinking it. I have been in three Nativity plays so far at my convent, the Nativity being the only play the nuns know how to do, I guess, and my dad is OK with this as long as I have the low-down.
‘It’s just a story, you know,’ he says, all serious, a bit gruff, leaning up against the kitchen counter where Mum is cooking, crowding her a little, it’s a habit of his.
‘Right, Dad,’ I say in a patient but busy voice. I am trying to finish my homework before supper so I can play Action Man with Jude afterwards. Also, my dad tells me this every December, how the Nativity business is just a story, and God can’t have sons who are also God, etc., and I know what’s coming next.
‘Jesus Christ was a Jew. A rabbi. Don’t forget that. OK, Jem?’
‘A rabbi. Jewish. Not God. Got it,’ I reply, and my dad yanks my hair three times, which is his way of saying, I am not mad at you, although I sound mad at you. I know, Dad. No worries, Dad.
I have just about had it with Nativity. The fact is, I don’t want to be in any kind of play, it’s so embarrassing, but I am especially fed up with Nativity ones because of shepherding, quite a vexing role, though not too bad compared to Drummer Boy.
One year I was tried out as the Drummer Boy. I was fairly keen, due to having no words to speak and due to the military aspect and the bravery of drummer boys in military history but what I do not understand is how he comes into the Nativity story. What is he doing here? Does he think there is a war on? Or is he just wild for parades and processions? Never mind. My one job was to do drum rolls on a tin drum looped around my neck and head up the parade to the Baby Jesus while the girls sing that depressing song about the Little Drummer Boy and his drum, ra ta ta tum, but I lost my job and was switched to Shepherd because I was pathetic at drum rolls. My effort at drum rolls was deeply frustrating and induced palpitations in me, and a feeling close to terror, what with Music Nun glaring at me in that horrible manner. It was a horrible experience all in all and definitely a relief to be shepherding flocks again.
A shepherd has two jobs only. 1) Lurk about a fire at night in a shepherdly fashion, at the end of a long day of herding up lambs and sheep, sitting up with two other shepherds usually, unless there is a girl going spare in which case we might be four. We are careful NOT to act like we are waiting for the Angel Gabriel. Whichever girl shepherd knows how to play a recorder has a recorder stuck in her shepherd costume and she has to WAIT for some other designated girl shepherd to say, Dan! DO play us a tune on your pipe! Then she plucks out the recorder and plays a tune. She must not jump the gun or the girl with the line about the pipe, a Nativity play word for wind instrument, will feel downright silly and not know what to do, to say it or skip it. That girl was me one time, another horrible experience, my ears aching like someone had turned the volume up everywhere, the breathing of the audience, soft, the breathing of Directing Nun in the pit, cross, the flutter of girls in the wings, and the awful noise of Lucy White rustling her garments and hauling out her pipe, playing a tune without being asked first. Last year, though, it came out all right, though I was pretty knocked out from how my heart raced gearing up for my big moment and as soon as I spoke it, Dan! DO play us a tune on your pipe, I had a ferocious desire to lie down in a faint and have ministrations. No, Jem. Remember job number two.
Lo! Here comes the Angel Gabriel.
Gabriel points two fingers at us to signify the dual nature of Christ, even though catechism has not been invented yet and it will make no sense to shepherds, Gabriel waving two fingers in the air like that. Never mind. When Gabriel shows up, shepherds have to act spooked and make ridiculous movements, lunging away from the angel and throwing arms aloft like we are being ambushed by German Waffen SS and have no weapons. This is goofy, let’s face it. If I were a shepherd and an angel came my way, I would have no problem with it, but you cannot tell nuns this because they are too excited directing this play and will get confused if they have to make changes, such as maybe having one shepherd NOT in a state of fear and terror. The way they see it, shepherds have to act spooked so the Angel Gabriel can say, Lo! Be not afraid! I am the angel of the Lord! etc. If we do not act as if we were riding the ghost train at the funfair, it just won’t work for nuns. We have to show some hysteria and then we cool our jets for the next bit, the tidings bit, so all the attention can be on Gabriel, no distractions. ‘I bring you great tidings!’ Meaning, news. The news = the Nativity = the birth of Jesus. The Queen of the Waste Lands speaks this word also. When heard ye tidings? I tried it out on my dad once.
‘Any good tidings?’ I asked from the doorway of the living room. ‘In your tidings-paper?’
‘Jem, take my dirty plate back to the kitchen, will you?’
‘OK, Dad.’
Shepherd job number two. Go to Nativity. This is the topmost important part of the play for nuns and they get fretful trying to organise it. It is the Adoration part wherein we all traipse to the manger to peek at Jesus, all the shepherds, royalty and Drummer Boy, and Mr and Mrs Innkeeper who would not let Mary and Joseph have a room, maybe because Mary and Joseph were too shabby for their inn, and now, of course, since the great tidings and ensuing events, the innkeepers feel pretty bad about this. Thems the breaks. OK. Now we crowd around the Little Lord Jesus and show our great joy and next, it is time to face the audience and hold hands and sing We WISH you a merry Christmas, we WISH you a merry Christmas and a HA-ppy New Year, which is quite a boring song but it is the end of the play, one more Nativity over and out, and after the clapping, we take off costumes and go home and have a big snack and this is the beginning of the Xmas holidays. Yay.
Last year, Directing Nun had a big idea for the Adoration part. She decided the shepherds and kings and Drummer Boy (girl), etc., ought to go on a long march to the Baby Jesus and not merely sweep in from offstage in the usual scrummage, making it so obvious how we are all just waiting to do this, huddled in the wings ready to sweep in all at once and do some adoring. It’s not realistic, she said. I don’t think realism is a big issue for nuns. I think Directing Nun wanted more of a party scene last year, that’s all, like a Trooping of the Colour parade involving a long march, drum rolls and singing and gifts at the end.
Directing Nun decided we must go down the stairs on the offstage side that leads to outdoors, putting on outdoor shoes first, of course, as we are all in olden times bare feet or sandals and also because nuns are very keen on the right shoes in the right places no matter what kind of emergency situation a girl is in. Girls have three types of shoes. 1) Outdoor shoes: dark brown / lace-ups. I choose Clarks Commandos for type 1 due to the word commando. 2) Indoor shoes: dark brown / buckles. Most girls have the kind I have, with buckles and little holes over the toes part like on a cheese grater, and soft soles so as not to scuff up the stone floors or old wooden floors of our convent. In my view, you would need ice skates to scuff up convent floors, but you cannot say this to nuns. 3) Plimsolls. This is a nun word for gym shoes: black canvas / lace-ups or slip-ons. I choose slip-ons for variety and for the funny feel of stretchy elastic in a tongue shape where laces or buckles usually go. I slip them on and off, on and off. These shoes are like gloves for feet.
Playground Nun is an old nun who watches over us in the playground. I don’t know what else she does apart from praying and wandering up and down the playground. Sometimes she plays tricks. I am patient with Playground Nun who is maybe not all that well. She seeks me out quite often.
‘Jemima Weiss!’
‘Yes, Sister!’
‘What is plimsoll?’
‘Um. Gym shoes, Sister. For gym only.’
‘No! It’s the waterline on the hull of a cargo ship! A safety mark! Named after Samuel Plimsoll, MP, and his Merchant Shipping Act, 1876!’
‘I see. Great. Thank you, Sister. Is that all, Sister?’
‘Yes, my girl!’
Playground Nun pushes her glasses from the speaking to girls position (all the way down the nose for close-up inspection purposes) to her wandering the playground position (top of nose for general countryside vision). She pats me on the head, well chuffed with her trick on me. I don’t like pats on the head because I am not a dog, but Playground Nun is old and she is a nun and she may not be entirely well and you have to allow for things. Furthermore, she is full of special information that is not all to do with God and I believe she needs to impart it from time to time. She chooses Jem. Fine with me.
Three types of shoes. And then come rules. Shoes rules: Do not wear plimsolls outdoors. Even in sports. Do not wear Clarks Commandos indoors. Do not wear indoor shoes in gym (unless you have forgotten your plimsolls) and definitely not outdoors where they will get ruined and become perplexing, unfit for indoors or out. Nowhere shoes. If you have the wrong shoes, a nun will get flustered and usually call upon Mean Nun to sort out the bad situation of the wrong shoes. Mean Nun has an eye out for crime. She is the only no-good nun around, though I am not wild about Sister Clothilda, Nativity play Directing Nun who is also Music Nun. She makes me sing separately from the other girls, standing on a chair on my own, far off from the other girls standing up on benches and singing happily in one voice on the stage of the assembly hall.
Music Nun sits down below in the nun pit, looking up at girls and glancing my way now and again with a cross and confused expression on her face, like she is not quite sure what the bloody-bloody I am doing on her stage, or why I am causing such a terrible disturbance in the sound department. The waves. She is also confused due to my Jewish side. Not all nuns are the same, not all of them have this problem, and I can easily tell the ones who do, catching them looking at me with a cross face and confusion in their eyes, as they try to fathom it, and simply cannot, how I am alive and not Catholic, and nevertheless quite hearty, by which I mean not downtrodden or obviously impaired in any way. Mean Nun has a very bad case of confusion and she will watch me until she comes up with a crime of some sort and then she makes straight for me.
The day Susannah Bonnington found a maggot in her banger, I was right there and saw it poking its little head up like a periscope in a U-boat, weaving left and right, checking out the scene aloft, and I must say, I never want to see a thing like that again, not ever.
‘Sister!’ says Susannah, keeping pretty cool in the circumstances. ‘There’s a maggot in my banger!’
‘So there is, my child,’ replies Dining-Room Nun who is definitely crazy, ‘so there is.’
Sister Catherine is Dining-Room Nun and Babies Nun. Sister Catherine escorts those first year kids all over the joint like she is a bodyguard, and when they are dining, she is happy, as she can do her two jobs at the same time in one same place and she is free to carry on her favourite activity of strolling up and down the alley between dining tables, muttering to herself and twiddling her thumbs in a demented manner, hands clasped before her in woolly gloves she wears in all weathers, woolly gloves with the fingers cut off.
In my opinion, some of her behaviour is open to question. For instance, babies need their own little chairs for dining, due to their small size, and they have to transport the chairs from their classroom to the dining room under the eyes of Sister Catherine, passing by her like a row of ants struggling with crumbs nearly twice their body weight and it is painful to see the little kids stumbling along, crashing the chairs against their little legs and generally making a mess of things, looking sad and worn out but resigned to fate, reminding me of the galley slaves in Ben-Hur, men chained together and marching in the hot sun on the way to the Roman galley ship in which they will be chained to oars and fated to row at varying speeds unto the end of days. Babies enter the dining room first and bigger kids queue up with plates after the babies have settled in and been served. They get served because they are deemed too young and wobbly to carry plates of food without tipping everything on to the decks. It seems to me carrying a plate is not such a hard task, but grappling with a chair round about two-thirds your size is definitely a hard task. Possibly, for Dining-Room Nun, an avalanche of spam and peas and gravy on the nice convent floor is more of a problem than bruisy shins and outright exhaustion in a four-year-old, and this is one instance of behaviour in Sister Catherine which is open to question, and another is when she said, So there is, my child to Susannah Bonnington, bashing off straight away to do some more strolling and muttering, and leaving Susannah and me in the lurch, stark-eyed as in a horror scene from a horror film featuring graveyards and screaming.
A few words on horror. So far, I have seen the beginnings of three horror films only, as I am always sent to bed before things get too grim. Here are reasons why. I am too young for horror films and will have bad dreams and get hysterical. Horror films are not much good or educational, and so there are no loopholes regarding bedtime the way there are with good films and/or documentaries. Fine with me. Horror films are frustrating and give me a headache, due to the endless screaming and the lack of daylight, requiring a lot of squinting to make out what the bejesus is going on, usually just endless screaming and silly things such as people going walkabout in graveyards way past their bedtime when everyone knows there are killers and/or wild beasts on the rampage. Why? Why not stay home until it blows over, or go for a saunter in a more populous area where there are bobbies and lamplight and means of transport for hire in case of emergency? Because it is a horror film, that’s why. So there is screaming in the dark when characters are getting murdered, screaming in the dark when characters are stumbling across maggoty murder victims in graveyards, and in two out of the three films I have seen the beginnings of so far, there is screaming in the dark from raving maniacs in loony bins and it is no wonder so many people are losing their marbles, what with the high rate of murder and all that strolling about in graveyards, etc.
I would quite like to go in for some screaming in plain daylight right this minute because of the maggot before me, but I do not. I am not a baby. I am seven going on eight and have a fair grasp of language, and decent manners, and screaming and howling is not fashionable behaviour in a person my age who is not in a horror film. I do feel sick though, and ask to be excused. I step out into the courtyard for a deep breath or two, a remedy of Mum’s, and extremely useful, according to her, in all walks of life and eventualities of a trying nature. It is something I recommend for characters in horror films.
Oh no. Here comes Mean Nun, flapping my way.
‘Weiss!’
Mean Nun has a big thing for calling my name out, ever since I corrected her pronunciation one time, informing her as gently as possible about the V sound in the W, so that now she hits the V sound real hard and lingers over the double SS at the end. It’s annoying and it is her revenge on me for correcting her for the second time in my life. What is the problem here? Some grownups correct kids about every little thing, blaring hasty hints and instructions before you touch anything or go anywhere, so sure you are going to slip up or do some destruction, and that your mind is merely an empty place with breezes blowing through it, but the moment you correct a grown-up of that type, it’s a criminal act, worse than sticking your tongue out and swearing which can usually be chalked up to insanity, whereas correcting is close to a capital offence, i.e. deserving of death. Jude says capital comes from the Latin word for head, and denotes beheading by axe, sword or guillotine and even though there are many kinds of capital punishment that do not involve having your head chopped off necessarily, the word capital still applies for all methods, and I can see why. Let’s face it, when a person is killed, his head is no good to him, attached or not attached, but this has me thinking again about graveyards and screaming, so I try to concentrate instead on deep breaths and recovery from the sight of that maggot poking its white head out of Susannah’s banger.
‘Weiss! Where are we?’ demands Mean Nun.
This is a trap. What does she want? The month, the country? Is it a nun-type question, a matter of catechism? Right near me in the courtyard is a statue of the Virgin Mary, Mother of God with the Baby Jesus in her arms. Mary has a dreamy limp look, like Jesus is just a bunch of flowers or something. Maybe Mean Nun does not like me standing so close to the statue, due to my Jewish side. Is that it?
‘Well, child? Are we indoors or outdoors?’
‘Sort of half-half,’ I say, wondering about covered courtyards and what category they are in. I don’t want to make a mistake.
‘Sister!’
‘Sister! Sorry.’
‘We are outdoors. What shoes are you wearing?’
Oh. It’s a shoe crime. Bloody. ‘Indoor shoes, Sister. Thing is, I feel sick and I need deep breaths, I had to rush out here!’
‘Outside, we wear outdoor shoes. Inside, indoor shoes. Plimsolls for PE. If you are poorly, see Sister Martha. You are a very rude girl, Weiss.’
I want to tell her that she wears the same type shoes all over the shop, indoors, outdoors, the same hard noisy black nun shoes, and that I am not rude, my mother knows I am not rude, and then I think about something Jude told me, because of my new big thing for knights and chivalry, he said not all knights are good, and Crusader knights were downright dodgy, going in for massacres of Jews, or else selling them into slavery and this is very depressing news for me, how being a knight is not necessarily good, and wearing a big red cross on your knightly tunic, like on an ambulance, is not always a sign of hope and rescue, and therefore, perhaps, seeing a lady flapping your way dressed in nun clothes and wearing a cross around her neck does not always mean you are safe. It’s confusing and I want to see Sister Martha now, but I need to do some crying first. Not in front of Mean Nun. Go away, Mean Nun.
At my convent, it is important to wear the right shoes in the right places, no matter what emergency situation you are in, such as on the night of the Nativity the year of the big idea, when Directing Nun sent girls on a long march outdoors in the dark and back indoors, and all the way down the aisle through the audience in an embarrassing procession of kings and shepherds, Drummer Boy (girl) and innkeepers, and up the little wheely front steps, no tripping on garments allowed, up on to the stage to kneel in our specially organised places around the angels and Mary and Joseph and baby, kneeling so as to indicate Adoration and also, so as not to hide the angels and blessed family from plain view because angels and blessed family are more important, they are the stars.
I am looking for my shoebag. Where is my shoebag? Oh-oh. I scramble about in heaps of costumes and stuff and my shepherd hat is slapping at my cheeks and it’s dark back here and pretty quiet all of a sudden. Hey. Where is Mrs McCabe? Mrs McCabe is a non-nun teacher and Irish and she wears a great white cardigan with brown leather buttons and bumps in the knitting. Mrs McCabe is quite lively and jovial and prone to short sharp hugs, which is an Irish custom, I believe, as Sister Martha is prone likewise, though a Sister Martha hug is a less hazardous experience than being in the grip of Mrs McCabe who mashes me against her so I can feel all the knitting bumps digging into my temples and eye sockets. I like Mrs McCabe very much, but I make a note never to wear bumpy apparel in my lifetime, in case I am prone to doling out hugs also, and hugs ought to be all good, with no risks involved, no smothering or bruising. I take note. Smooth apparel is better and less hazardous. OK.
Where is Mrs McCabe? On Nativity night, she is supposed to be here, she is always here in the offstage regions, cracking jokes and larking about in a lively Irish manner and all the while doing her important job of snapping on angel wings and haloes and shoving us onstage at the right times, and she is not here, she has already shuffled off outside with the shepherds and kings, etc. They have left me behind. This is a bad feeling. I am hot and I cannot think straight and I wish I were in bed, waking up on a Saturday with nothing to do but play with Jude all day.
There is my shoebag, glowing white with a red F embroidered on it, the bag Mum gave me, hers, and now mine, old, not new, and very nice indeed with the first letter of Mum’s name there-upon, better than J for Jem, a gift to me from her, and a fine thing, a bag made especially for shoes, and I never knew there were such things, bags made especially for footwear with fancy embroidered letters standing proudly for the name of shoebag owners upon them. Whoa. I fumble with the drawstring and haul out my shoes but they are the wrong shoes. Indoor, not outdoor, and yikes, I know who is in the cloakroom ready to receive shepherds and kings coming in from the cold and send them down the aisle in the assembly hall, making sure all our bits are on just so. Sister Teresa. Mean Nun. Now I am having a nightmare of epic proportions as Ben would say. Epic, a short sharp word to do with gravity and size.
I slip my bare shepherd feet into shoes and skip out on the buckling action. I’m late, I’m late, for a very important date. I push the door open and clamber down the stairs with my toes curled tight to keep my shoes from flying off. It strikes me I might as well head straight for the wire and wait there for Mum and Dad and not bother with the Adoration seeing as I’ve spoken my nine words and done the abiding and the fear not part, and anyway, there will be two other shepherds in a whole gang of adorers, that’s enough, plus I cannot sing and Music Nun will show me her cross face and Mean Nun is waiting for me and there isn’t a king or a shepherd in sight out here. Fuck-hell.
Come on, Jem.
Go to cloakroom doors. Knock softly. Sister Teresa will let you in. These are my orders. I dash like a commando for the double doors and lose an indoor shoe on the way. The grass is wet and I have bad visions of slugs and worms and spiders in the dark wet grass so I run back for my shoe. OK. Now, knock softly. No answer. Knock louder. Nothing. Here come prickly tears, a rush of them, and I don’t care any more about orders, I pound the doors like a maniac until I hear Mean Nun calling for me. Where is she? She is poking her head out of some doors further along and waving her arms in a frantic manner. What is she doing over there? Oh no. Wrong doors, Jem. You have been pounding on the assembly-hall doors with audience on the other side wondering what all the racket is and who is causing this big-noise crime. It’s me. Jem Weiss.
Mean Nun is speechless, she hates me beyond words. I kick off my shoes and let her grapple me in the shoulders and propel me out of the cloakroom into the assembly hall and I get whiplash in the process so that my shepherd hat slips over my eyes and I have to fix it quick sticks. It’s not really a hat, it’s a dishcloth with an elastic strip around the forehead to hold it snug and I hate it, it makes my ears hot and the elastic gives me a headache. I would quite like to ditch my shepherd hat but I am already in trouble and going in bareheaded would freak out Directing Nun for whom a dishcloth on the head is the main distinguishing mark for a shepherd who might otherwise get mistaken for a fourth king, some character NOT in the Bible, and thereby her great fame in the Nativity department will be in ruins, ruins.
The worst thing is having to catch up the other shepherds in the procession headed by Drummer Boy and kings. Kings are posh and the boy is symbolic so they are most important, they go first and I note they have just about hit the stage steps, with the lowly shepherds following on, and last of all, the innkeepers who made a bad mistake shutting out Mary and Joseph due to snobbery and prejudice. I need to scoot past Mr and Mrs Innkeeper and join the shepherds, then slow my pace right down to seemly Adoration speed, but both shepherds turn round to gaze at me in pity and accusation, making it plain obvious it was me doing the horrible noise at the doors, and now I can hear my dad’s laugh out there in the audience, I picture him in my head, his hair flopping around and his shoulders shaking and then there are chuckles from other people, strangers, so I try to think about Mum and how she might say, Never mind, darling, and stroke some hair from my eyes so that, before too long, the horror scene is over and I feel it is OK to carry on being Jem, to carry on being alive. I work real hard to see her face.
It’s always the same. I tell myself, don’t blush and a blush stains me hot and fierce, red as a traffic light, an alarm. I tell myself, don’t cry and my eyes fill and the world is a haze of sharp sound and coloured light and impending doom, worse than stepping out of the bright sun into the spider shed. My face is wet, I want dry land, somewhere safe to sling my hook and that’s when I look up and spot Harriet flouncing around with the rest of the angels. It’s her first go as an angel and she is a natural, no directions required, only Mrs McCabe to pin on a halo and a pair of spangly wings and launch her mangerwards. Go on, Harriet. Be an angel. I must say, though, regulation kit for angels is definitely helpful for identification purposes, much more so than in the case of shepherds, because, frankly, the sight of all those babies flapping about the manger with dreamy expressions on their faces brings to mind runaway loonies, and this is Sister Clothilda’s fault, she has simply not come up with reasonable guidelines for the behaviour of angels, such as the possibility of even temper and serenity. There is not one single angel out here in command of her senses and my sister is Chief Angel, waltzing about the manger with great swoops of her wings, batting her eyelashes in Adoration whenever she does a flyby, and halfway into one of her circuits of the manger, she looks straight at me and smiles a spooky smile, lips apart and teeth snapped tight and then she does it, she goes cross-eyed. It happens in a flash and in that flash of time I know she is trying to tell me something, my sister who is a whole three years younger than I am, and new to Nativity, but not one bit nervous tonight, knowing what is important and what is not so important, and how this is not worth crying about, being late for the Adoration, it’s only a play, Jem, and we’ll be home soon, having a snack at the white oak table and gearing up for holidays, with Christmas stockings in mind, and hopes of snow. Thanks, Harriet.
Lucy White is the Virgin Mary this year and, so far in life, she is my best friend in the outside world. I like her brother also, even though he locked me in their attic once and left me there for a while, I have no idea why. Never mind. Lucy’s mother comes from India and she is a very gentle lady who serves me biscuits on a blue-and-white stripy plate and tea in a blue-and-white stripy cup and saucer in their dark and polished dining room whenever I come round to play, and she is such a gentle lady, I just cannot tell her tea makes me gag a little and is very low on my list of favourite drinks. One weekend, Mr and Mrs White invite me out for my first Indian meal and I am quite excited in the back of the Whites’ car, up until when Lucy’s mum asks me whether I like ladies’ fingers, a question that throws me into despair and perplexity, especially with Lucy and Paul behaving in a raucous manner, going ha ha ha and poking me in the ribs with pointy fingers while Mrs White explains in a gentle voice, ladies’ fingers are a SIDE DISH, information I accept with a wise nod and a slight frown, not understanding at all. Do they have special plates in India? Or is it a biscuit? Mrs White likes to give me biscuits. I have never been to a restaurant without my family and am already quite worried about where to sit and who will order for me and will I say yes to something expensive by mistake, and now all I see are long delicate fingers on a blue-and-white stripy plate, fingers on a side dish with bloody stumps where they once joined happily at the knuckles to form a lady’s hand, fingers that danced across piano keys and the fluffy heads of small children. Stop it. I try to think about comestibles with finger in the title and no death. Shortbread fingers, chocolate fingers, fish fingers. Lady fingers. Two pointing fingers, human and divine.
Lucy is pretty good at the Virgin Mary, doing a fine job of pretending she is NOT seven years old going on eight, no, she is the mother of an immaculate conception type baby and she is doing a fine job of pretending that baby is Jesus and NOT a plastic girl doll with a stark-eyed expression and real eyelids that shake loose at irregular intervals, flying open and slamming shut in an alarming manner, suggesting shock and outrage and giving me palpitations and a strange guilty feeling. Lucy is doing a fine job but I avoid looking her way or at the terrible doll, I gaze at the floor of the manger instead, trying to keep my cool and my face hidden, because I am thinking about Harriet’s angel act and an unseemly roar of hilarity is rising within. I wonder what would happen if one shepherd suddenly fell apart and had a fit of hysteria bang in front of the Little Lord Jesus, would he get carted off to a place where there are other mad shepherds dressed in white jackets tied up at the back, wandering a field, going in for wild bursts of laughter and maybe muttering in a demented fashion about angels and lost sheep? Or would it seem realistic, and forgivable therefore, this shepherd simply overcome by awe and ceremony, the hard work of bearing witness and so on, the sheer weight of it all, which is kind of how I am on special occasions, my birthday, anyone’s birthday in my family, an outing with Mum, a game with Jude, Christmas night, how I am kind of crazed and slap-happy due to festivity, lying awake to linger over the marvels of the day until I have this desire to leap out of bed in a flap of blankets and check on every Weiss, and sit up in their beds and review the day in all its marvels, as if by staying up and talking the day over, I can stop this thing a while, a feeling close to pain and sickness I do not understand.
Now we join hands and face front and swing our arms to and fro in an embarrassing fashion while singing that endless song, wishing everyone a merry Christmas and ha-ppy New Year, etc., a song to which I am to move my lips ONLY on orders from Music Nun, orders I do not require, seeing as she has put me off singing outside my own household for all my days, and I worry now about my shoebag, and where I left it, and will it get mucky, and is Jude out there with Mum and Dad, gazing at me up here in a silly old dressing gown and a dishcloth on my head tied up with elastic, elastic that was not even invented in Bible times, and I decide I am ready to turn my back on Nativity. I am ready, Ben. Next year, I will ask for a note.
Kindly excuse my daughter Jemima from Nativity. She has just about had it with Nativity. Thank you. Sincerely, Mrs Yaakov Weiss.
‘Don’t say manger or the Little Lord thing,’ whispers Harriet as I take her place in the queue for Gus, rolling my eyes at her before composing myself, trying not to think about embryos and how early embryo fish, early chicken, early pig and early person are no great shakes to look at and resemble each other much too closely to boot, seahorses, fish-hooks. I also try to forget about that picture of the human embryo a Few Weeks Before Birth, all tucked up and upside down and feeding off the mother by way of a cord, quite like those nice bendy straws Mum buys, straws with little curlicues at the top end for bending purposes, so you can drink and read at the same time, no little adjustments necessary, no interruptions, and that is exactly what I am trying not to think about, this nonstop feeding business, this emptying of Mum.
Mum looks fine, though, not worn out or empty at all, and Gus is lovely, more like a baby in a painting than a regular baby and regular babies, in my opinion, are often a bit dodgy in close-up, squirmy and cross with squeezed shut eyes and clenched fists, gearing up every few minutes for great displays of the singlemost skill babies are born with, the howling and screaming skill, a sound that fills me with doom and panic, though I note that grown-ups largely find it amusing and delightful, which goes to show there are different rules for babies regarding howling and screaming and other matters. The howling and screaming skill is not generally encouraged in a kid, and in a grown-up, unless they are in horror films, it is definitely not recommended and also quite rare. I look around at school, in shops, in parks and museums and I just never see it, grown-ups howling and screaming. I am on the lookout always. The fact is, once a person can speak in full sentences and listen to reason, he is not supposed to rely on howling and screaming for communication purposes except on special occasions like blood situations, world war or physical calamity in the dwelling place, i.e. damage by collapse, fire, flood or air raid, etc. That is to say, screaming and howling over the age of four or so is not delightful and amusing, it is a call-out for emergency services.
‘He can’t see you. Not yet,’ Mum says.
That’s another thing. A baby is born more or less blind but this is not a case for panic and blind person accoutrements, such as white sticks, golden retriever dogs, dark glasses and books with bumpy writing. Braille. No. Everything is OK, and it seems to me a wise plan for a baby to be born blind when every single thing in his field of vision is a new thing to him and too much surprise might tip him over the edge into howling and screaming. Furthermore, a person needs sight for self-defence. He needs to see the enemy approaching. What use is that to Gus when he cannot put up a fight yet, or run away, even? He might as well not see the enemy. It will only be depressing. And a person needs sight for navigation, so as not to bump into things or have crash landings. Gus is not going anywhere at the moment, not solo anyway. We are right here. There are six pairs of eyes looking out for Gustavus until he is ready for sightseeing and ruffling up newspapers and wandering about the Earth.
Gus is very pretty and he is also quite bald with fine blond hairs on his crown like the little feathers on a bird breast. I want to touch him there but I remember Ben telling me how the skull is not fully formed in a baby, having a hole on the top or something, reminding me of Harriet’s broken eggs, and I don’t like it. Maybe Gus should wear a hat for a while, I don’t know.
He makes barely any noise, definitely no howling, just a soft blowy sound like someone riding a bike and getting out of breath, and this is probably due to lung size in Gus and how a tiny scoop of breath for him is same as a deep breath. One puff and that’s it. Empty. Start again. It’s hard work, I can see that. I can hear it. Every breath for Gus is a deep breath. No. There is no deep for Gus. When you have been alive only a day or so, there is no such thing as deep or far, what with his beginning so close to his end and no spare room for anything but the important parts, his organs and little bones all wrapped up in a fine covering of pale skin with the blue veins showing through, like the first spray of snow in winter, how it makes you see the ground in a whole new way, frozen blades of grass and stones and earth sparkling for my special attention, showing up cold and clear and kind of marvellous and delicate, stopping me still because I don’t know where to go any more, I might break something. I don’t touch.
‘You can come closer.’
Mum hikes Gus up a bit for my viewing pleasure and the pink blanket slides down so I can see his heart bleating right there in his chest in a map of blue and white, and I want to touch it but I don’t want to hurt him, worried my light touch in the heart region would feel to him next stop to reaching inside and holding his heart in my very hand. I don’t touch. Maybe tomorrow, maybe later.
‘Hey, Gus,’ I say, real shy, stuffing my hands in my pockets. ‘Hey there.’
I glance up at Mum and my dad and I want to say, Well done, Mum! Good work, Dad! and, That’s enough knights! Now we are seven, our number is up, I know it, this is the real start of everything, like we are born on this day Gus came home for the first time. I am born, that’s how I feel, and I want to make an announcement or hand out nice certificates, something formal in joined-up writing with a red seal at the bottom and maybe a little red ribbon hanging out. Now these are the names, it will say, of the children of Frances and Yaakov: Ben, Jude, Jem, Harriet and Gus.
These are the names.
What country, friend, is this?
The Science of Deduction and Analysis.
Because the speed of light is finite, we can only see as far as the age of our Universe. The earliest light has simply not had time to reach us and when astronomers look at distant galaxies through an instrument such as the Hubble Space Telescope, launched in 1990 beyond the obscuring veil of the Earth’s atmosphere, what they are seeing is light as it was when it left that distant galaxy and not as it is today. They call it look-back time, the telescope a kind of time machine, and the astronomer, a sorcerer perhaps, gazing into the past with his tube of long-seeing and his particular passion for gathering light, looking farther and farther into space and into clouds that are the birthplace of stars, a place in the forever then, never now. Now is not visible, only imaginable, deducible, so what, the earliest light is so startling, it is so bright it obscures. It depends how you look at it.
I remember everything.
My mother groand! My father wept.
Into the dangerous world I leapt.
Before the Hubble, came the Hooker with its 100-inch mirror, the most powerful ground-based telescope in the world, set up in 1918 at the Mount Wilson Observatory in California and built by George Ellery Hale, an astronomer prone to nervous breaks, to howling and screaming maybe, and to headaches and visions and a strange ringing in his ears. The Hooker is the telescope through which Edwin Hubble stared at clouds of light, realising they were galaxies beyond ours, the Universe is expanding, there was a beginning. There he sat night after night in his plus fours and high leather boots and tweedy jacket nipped in at the waist, a pipe in his pocket, giving himself over to the science of deduction and analysis, a realm demanding such rigours of perception and truthfulness he shrouds the rest of life in fantasy and bold elaboration. Hubble writes a law measuring velocity and distance, stating that the farther away a galaxy is, the faster it flies. Speed increases with distance. He looks back on his past flirtations with amateur boxing and professional soldiery and sees what no one else ever saw. Fantasy increases with distance. He was so fine a boxer, he lies, he is urged to take on the world heavyweight champion Jack Johnson. In the war to end all wars, he is wounded in the right arm by flying shrapnel, despite arriving in France too late for hostilities, the war is over. Edwin, you might say, is an unknown soldier.
It is possible that on some long nights in the observatory, Hubble sees exploding shells in the showers of light that are galaxies rushing away from him in every direction, or Jack Johnson, maybe, dropping to the floor in a knockout punch, Jack at his feet, a man seeing stars. Liar, fabulist. Never mind. It’s a tiny flaw in his makeup, whatever keeps a man going on a long night in a dangerous world, fantasy nothing but a deep breath to someone else. It depends how you look at it.
A tiny flaw.
When the Hubble Space Telescope is launched in 1990, all the starmen huddle around the computer terminals for the first images from deep space, but the Hubble does not focus, it has spherical aberration. They believed they had built the most perfect mirror in the world, testing its shape before launch, again and again, by way of little mirrors and lenses and measuring rods ½m long and lcm wide, but in the end the mirror is too flat, the light reflecting from the edge and from the centre focusing in two different places. How did it happen?
The Science of Deduction and Analysis.
It is discovered that the cap of one measuring rod is chipped, a 2mm fleck of black paint falling away to expose a chink of metal, deflecting light, and so distorting the dimensions of the most perfect mirror in the world by one-fiftieth the width of a human hair.
Watson: You have an extraordinary genius for minutiae.
Holmes: I appreciate their importance.
The science community at NASA falls apart. Hope has become a problem for them. Astronomers are carted off by guards to rehab centres where they lie next to each other in identical beds, suffering from drug and alcohol abuse, from hopelessness, a state of temporary aberration lasting long enough only for the starmen to swing loose a while, and take the time to make a little order out of chaos.
In three years’ time they are ready to correct the optics on the Hubble, installing a new camera and fitting a new mirror to match the flaw in reverse, and so cancel it out, a mission entrusted to seven astronauts who will go on five space walks to achieve it, stepping out from their space shuttle named Endeavour, just like the ship James Cook captained in 1768 under the auspices of the Royal Society, sailing off to observe the transit of Venus across the Sun and finding time also to locate New Zealand and the east coast of Australia, and come up with fine ideas about diet and sickness and high doses of vitamin C. In three years aboard the Endeavour, not one of James’s men suffers from scurvy.
Navigation is an art.
1993. The astronauts step out with great resolve and fortitude and the special encouragement of their space commander, a leader of men.
‘We are inspired,’ he says, before the first walk. ‘We are ready! Let’s go fix this thing!’
The men fit the new mirror, they install a camera.
‘Good work, guys!’
Now the starmen huddle around their screens again, pointing the HST into clouds of gas where new stars are forming, and in an experiment named Hubble Deep Field, they focus the telescope for ten days on the least obscured, the most bland patch of sky they can find, looking for the earliest light from the earliest stars from the beginning of time, and in that seemingly bland patch of sky, they see some four thousand new galaxies, but these galaxies are fully formed, kids, as one astronomer puts it, not babies at all. What is going on here?
The scientists realise they are not looking back far enough, and to probe what they call the Dark Ages and see galaxies taking shape and coming together and changing in time, they will need to build a new telescope with a more perfect mirror, so large it will have to fold away. Will it work? one of the starmen is asked.
‘I can’t tell you how long it will take or how much it will cost,’ he replies, leaping around a model of a folding mirror. ‘But it will work. Eventually,’ he adds, smiling, because hope is not a problem for him any more.
Mrs Rosenfeld, my mother has unknown origins. Nobody knows them. But one day, a soldier comes for her and takes her home with him, because it’s a dangerous world and everyone needs protection from something.
Be prepared, the soldier learned that, he remembers everything. The night before he chooses you, he lays out his things, he is ready, he will be well turned out, he can see himself in his shoes and they are the right shoes, always the right shoes, no matter what emergency situation he is in. He has ironed his shirt, Sunday best, the cuffs still fine. He has filled the stove for tomorrow. He won’t be gone long and when he is back, the soldier will be two not one. It’s late, he’s not sleepy.
He fills his pipe and steps on to the little balcony. No smoking inside, she doesn’t like it, it makes her cough, it makes her tired, she is always tired. No one in the courtyard, no one about but him, and he stares through the archway to the big tree, he loves that tree. It’s so big. A pint would be good. No drinking, he doesn’t drink any more, not since she left him in the lock-up that night. Wow. She was right though, she is always right, and now it makes him smile, and there is spare money too, he’ll need it, for little shoes and things, hair ribbons, you need all kinds of things for a baby.
Things will be different this time, it’s a choice he makes, no pretending this time, no pillow under her dress when they go out, the shame of it, except it’s all his fault, there is something wrong with him, from the gas, the poison in his lungs, in his body, it must be his fault, how she can’t have children, not since the awful first time, her dead son and the dead woman in the next bed and her live son, and the swap the nurse made, pass the parcel. Thomas. They never told anyone, he’d like to tell someone. About Tom. Then Dot, Dot who was a pillow once.
She says she won’t come with him tomorrow, so much to do. He misses her, he has known her for ever, she used to be so funny. Things will be different soon, tomorrow, she will be different. Maybe even let him back in. He just wants to smell her again, but he can’t say it, he can’t find the right words, and something else, something he’ll never tell her, how he hates this moment each night, unfolding his camp bed in the kitchen, the ringing in his ears suddenly so loud, a sound like bells, and then always the same thing, this sound of other men unfolding other beds around him, other men not there. He wants it to stop.
At the Salvation Army Foundling Hospital, they are expecting him, he has an appointment. This morning he is immaculate, he walks a firm line, his step is light, no shuffling, back straight, he is a soldier. Eyes right, eyes left, the nurse following on, take your time. Thank you, Sister. The soldier is looking for someone, he will know her when he sees her. Yes. That one.
She is six months old, fully formed, with large blue eyes, and dimples, and she is smiling at him, he could swear to it, but it’s not only that, he can’t describe it, a rattle in his guts, not fear, something new, and so he chooses her or she chooses him. No, that’s silly. He chooses, he thinks so. Never mind.
‘Yes, please. Her, please.’
When he scoops her up, he is worried someone will stop him. You can’t have her, stop there. But no one stops him and he holds her in his corded arms, tight not too tight, as he remembers holding a man once, feeling the looseness in the man’s neck, limp as a dead pigeon, knowing it was nearly up with him, how he tried not to hurt the other soldier, just hold him a while without hurting him, tight but free, like they are just one body. What was his name? He doesn’t remember that. Don’t think about that.
Please sign here and here.
He hands the baby to the nurse and this worries him also, he might never see her again, the big blue eyes on him still, the dimples, the dark hair. Silly man. Pull yourself together. The soldier signs for her, there, and there, he does it proud, he makes an X, like a leaning cross, it’s all he knows.
Hope is not a problem for him any more.
Science, says Carl Sagan, is what we call our search for rules, and the ideal universe is a place governed by regularities of nature as well as the experimental, somewhere, I guess, between stasis and motion, between knowledge and abandon.
Into the dangerous world I leapt.
Carl writes there are 10
neurons in the brain, circuits in charge of chemical activity, circuits and switches. A neuron has close to a thousand dendrites, these are wires, connections. If one connection corresponds to one piece of information, then the brain can know one hundred trillion things, 10
, not very many things, Sagan says, as one hundred trillion is only 1 per cent of the number of atoms in a grain of salt.
Watson: You have an extraordinary genius for minutiae.
Holmes: I appreciate their importance. Here is my monograph upon the tracing of footsteps, with some remarks upon the uses of plaster of Paris as a preserver of impresses!
I want to tell you, Mrs Rosenfeld, about something I read in the Book of Ruth, something concerning the transfer of shoes, and redemption, and how this offering of shoes is symbolic, it’s a symbolic act. With this shoe, I redeem you, I redeem her, him, this house, this debatable land. I am in a fever to tell you about it, I am not sure why, perhaps because Israel is your country, and it might be mine. I need to tell you this thing about shoes, Ruth 4:7.
Now this was the manner in former time in Israel concerning redeeming and concerning changing, for to confirm all things; a man plucked off his shoe, and gave it to his neighbour; and this was a testimony in Israel.
I am in a fever to tell you, but when I arrive and lie down, I think about lying down, how it is a symbolic act, a sign of grief, as is walking barefoot, I read that also. Then Job arose, and rent his mantle, and shaved his head, and fell down upon the ground. Job 1:20.
I remember it, how I walked barefoot, to and fro, to and fro, and how it happened, the thing I did, my experiment in escape velocity, and how I fell upon the ground, seeing stars. My hair was cut, not quite shaved and now I am here, because hope is still a problem for me.
—It’s very difficult for you to talk to me today. I wonder what’s going on.
—I am writing a monograph upon the tracing of footsteps!
—Ah. Do you want to tell me about it?
—No! I need to ask something. Did you choose me or was I assigned to you? Did you choose me? Did you choose me, did you choose me? I don’t see why you can’t answer that question.
—No, you don’t see.
—What if I die from this? I think I am going to die from this and no one can stop me, you can’t stop me.
—That is true. But you can let me try. I can try not to let it happen.
Then pluck off your shoe, Mrs Rosenfeld. Pluck off your shoe.
THREE (#ulink_d50bee6d-3ae6-59bc-ae74-91bd8698ab9d)
Holmes: How are you? You have been in Afghanistan, I perceive.
Watson: How on earth did you know that?
Holmes: Never mind. The question now is about haemoglobin. No doubt you see the significance of this discovery of mine?
If the brain can know one hundred trillion things, can a person ask one hundred trillion questions? That’s one. Here’s two. Why don’t you wear the red dress any more, the one I saw you in when I was born, the one you wear every Christmas until now, red you, falling snow, you’ve stopped wearing it, I want to know why. Red, white.
Whoa, the Moon.
The Earth has one natural satellite, the Moon, its twin, born around the same time, 4,600 million years ago. The Moon is almost all rock, with an iron-rich core, the haem in haemoglobin. It has no atmosphere, gravity at the surface being too weak, only one-sixth that of the Earth. Early in its lifetime, the Moon was bombarded by asteroids, so its surface is scarred and crenellated and distinguished by plains and seas. Birthmarks. Because tidal forces have slowed the rotation of the Moon, it is locked in orbit around the Earth and shows the same side always, completing one orbit every 27.322 days, at a distance of around 1.3 light seconds, showing this same face always. Are you there? Whither thou goest, I will go. Where thou diest, will I die.
A star the same mass as the Sun, at the end of its life, will collapse into a white dwarf, though a white dwarf is not really white at all, ranging in colour from blue to red, depending on the temperature at the surface. A star collapses because nuclear fusion at the heart of it can no longer sustain it, the white dwarf now an ember of itself, a stellar remnant, shedding the last of its heat into space, cooling and fading and compressing until its surface is so close to the centre, the beginning so close to its end, gravity at the surface is 100,000 times that of the Earth and light has to fight an uphill struggle to escape, and because light always travels at the same speed, it shows this loss of energy in increasing wavelengths, the light redshifting. Red, white.
One hundred trillion things.
According to a rabbi writing in fourteenth-century Spain, the Talmud states that the father ‘contributes the semen of the white substance’ that makes up the bones and sinews in a body, the nails, the brain, the white of the eye. The mother contributes the semen of the red substance that is flesh, hair, blood and the black of the eye. God’s contribution is the soul, but it is only on loan. The red and the white stuff dies with you, but the soul is up for grabs, or the Rightful Owner calls it in, no interest. It depends how you look at it.
In alchemy, red and white are the colours of man and bride and they ought to be together, masculine and feminine, in one same person, between two people, in Nature itself, it is the best state of affairs, the union of the opposites as they call it, with far-reaching consequences otherwise, dark times, wastelands, the lot. What a palaver. This was Merlin’s subject also, red and white, his Grail, a mission that pressed him so hard in his role as Lightbringer, he simply fell apart, going through a very bad spell of lurking in the forest and acting up, more like a wild animal than a bringer of light, everybody said so. And then his sister rescues him, building him a house in the forest, a house like an observatory, with seventy windows and doors so he can indulge his passions for astronomy and prophecy, closing himself up, as Blake might say, seeing all things thro’ narrow chinks of his cavern. His sister does all the cooking and she pours the wine and Merlin teaches her the fine arts of astronomy and prophecy until, he tells her, she is his match.
Merlin does not forget about the Grail, he does not forget about Perceval, a knight who dreams much in his sleep, Merlin appearing to him in many forms, sometimes as a hermit all dressed in white.
‘I’ll never drink milk again. Never.’ That’s what I say to Jude.
‘Yeh, I know. You’ll feel better soon,’ says Jude.
‘When?’
Jude does not answer me. You don’t get a lot of answers from Jude who is nearly my twin, and hardly ever when you expect one. You could ask him a question and get an answer some three days later, when you are riding bikes together or coming back from doing a shopping message for Mum. I am used to it, but some types are spooked by it. Not me.
We are reading comics. Well, his is not really a comic though it has little pictures in rows running across the page in separate boxes just like in regular comics and is the same shape and size as the comics I like most, such as Victor, Valiant and Tiger but these are largely to do with war and sporting prowess and not so full of special knowledge as Jude’s, which is called World of Wonder and to which he has a subscription, or a prescription as Harriet would say. It’s quite special to have a subscription. Jude’s comic has ‘Weiss’ written in the top left-hand corner and he goes to collect it each week at the newsagent. Whoa. I would like a subscription to Victor, or to Commando, which comes in a very nice book shape and has long stories in it featuring commandos having hard knocks before defeating Nazis who throw their hands in the air and go Kamerad! but neither of these comics are all that serious, so I only get them once in a while, for a treat, or else Jude steals one for me, sliding it away with his World of Wonder, or just walking out with it under his arm all casual, like he paid for it of course, of course. I’ve seen him do it and he is very good, but I am not witness to all his thefts any more, being so stark-eyed watching him, that nowadays Jude makes me stand outside. He mainly steals for me and Ben, comics, sweets, that sort of thing.
I am reading a story in Jude’s World of Wonder about stars, etc. It has pictures of olden times scientists, Sir Isaac Newton and René Descartes, a man with a lot of curly hair like a girl, plus Einstein, and I’ve definitely heard of him, and also Galileo, a man from the seventeenth century in a big beard and a wee hat resembling a yarmulke, a hat worn by my dad and the boys on Passover, but not by me, due to sex and me being the wrong sex for nice hats. I don’t think Galileo was Jewish at all, it is just an Italian-type hat, and quite fashionable in olden times, as I suppose.
‘Jude?’ I say. ‘Light year. What is that?’
Jude is reading the latest World of Wonder and he is lying on his back holding his magazine in the air not far from his face, sometimes switching hands to avoid pins and needles, turning pages and breathing in and out without any palaver, no shuffling and rustling or unnecessary movements. Jude never flaps about the way I do, it’s nice to watch, how he is, how he moves. Answering my question might disturb his whole set-up, but I ask anyway, he always hears me, he’ll remember, and three days later, here we are walking home from the fishmonger.
Mum has rung up Mr Jarvis and Mr Jarvis has all the fish ready for Jude and me. I refuse to carry it, not having a big thing for fish, especially slimy fishies with heads still on and staring-right-at-you eyes, no thanks. We made a pit stop at the newsagent and Jude has stolen a packet of fruit gums, my favourite. Wait outside, he said.
‘Light year,’ he says, stepping out of the shop. ‘The space light can travel in a year. It’s distance, not time.’
This is hard. ‘Oh. Do I need to know this, is it important?’
Jude frowns as we stroll along and he takes another fruit gum from the roll. He is thinking. The fruit gum is red, my topmost favourite, so he passes it on and eats the next one, which is yellow and also pretty good if you are not in the mood for red. ‘Yeh. Important.’
This means I have work to do and will need to go to Ben for more information, Ben who is patient and can do a lot of talking all at once without getting fed up. Suddenly Jude chucks our sweets right over the fence by the pavement we are walking home along.
‘Hey, Jude.’ Jude does strange things and if you get upset, his forehead bunches up and blue veins show at the temples, like railroad tracks. So I say it quiet. Hey, Jude.
‘Too many sweets. Bad for you.’
OK, Jude.
So that is one example of how long it can take to get an answer from my brother, three days in this case and something I do not mind because Jude is great and nearly my twin and it is why I don’t really expect him to tell me straight off when I will feel better, what does he mean by soon, and what is a light year, on the day we had the milk race and lay about reading comics, feeling mighty throw-uppy and pathetic.
I am in Ben and Jude’s room, I am lying on Ben’s bed, which is the top bunk of the bunk beds and Jude is down below on his bunk. He never wanted the top one because of all the movement involved, going up and down the ladder. I am crazy for going up and down the ladder, it’s like being an officer in a submarine in World War II. Cool. Jude and I have used the bunk beds for a lot of military situations, as a submarine, a Roman galley in wars against Egyptians, a tent in the desert war against the Afrika Korps and a hut in a Nazi prison camp before we dig our way out. We are happy that Mum and Dad bought the bunk beds and sometimes I even get to sleep in here with Jude if Ben is staying over at a friend’s house, though this is upsetting for Harriet, who will ignore me completely the next morning, building a wall of cereal boxes around her place so she won’t have to look at me, but spending the whole breakfast time peeking through the cracks and then quickly shutting her eyes and turning her head away if I happen to catch her, signifying her great disgust regarding me, and how I am the most boring and stupid person she has ever known. But I like sleeping with Jude because there is no end to our game and we can do night scenes if we are not too sleepy. It’s very realistic.
‘Jude, are we taking the bunk beds with us, do you think?’
‘Doubt it. Bet not.’
‘Too bad,’ I say.
‘Yeh.’
Things are kind of messed up in our house at the moment, what with items not in the right places and this feeling all the time of nearly being late for school even when it is not a school day, and my dad stomping around the joint with his hair all mussed and breathing hard, sometimes stopping short and scratching his head with both hands and a lost expression. This is because we are leaving this house soon, not only for a new house but a whole new country, my dad’s country, and it is his idea so I do not see why he is acting so huffy and puffy. I am not sure I want to go, I don’t know what they’ve got over there, do they have good things, maybe it will be fun, maybe not. When my dad gave us the big news one night before supper, like an annunciation meeting I guess, he said we could come right back home if it doesn’t work out over there, but he just has to go now, it’s something he has to do due to his roots. Roots. Like my dad is a plant or something. During the tidings, I kept looking at Mum to see what might show up on her face and she said nothing and just smiled and played with Gus, who was trying to pull the mats out from under the cutlery and plates in a spirit of scientific endeavour, I believe. He seems quite interested in the motion of things through the air ever since he can walk about by himself for great lengths of time without falling down drunk like most little kids, falling down and staring at the ground that hit them before going in for some howling and screaming. I kept looking at Mum because I thought I could tell if this were a good or bad thing we were about to do, go to my dad’s country, and in a ship, but it was hard to tell, as if Mum were not in the meeting at all, here and not here, and I got a racy scared feeling for a second, like when bike riding and my feet come off the pedals and the pedals spin wild so all I can do is steer away from large impediments such as trees and lamp-posts and other people and hope for the best.
One of the messed-up things around here at the moment is too much milk delivered by the milkman. Maybe he got it wrong or maybe Mum was too busy to put a note out saying how much milk, etc., I don’t know, but Jude decided we should have a milk race so as not to waste the milk and that is why we are lying around on bunk beds like sea lions at the zoo on a hot day, not budging much, even when zoo men are pitching slimy fish snacks at them. We lie on our backs like sea lions and keep our arms to the side because any pressure on our stomachs leads to a throw-uppy feeling. We stare at the ceiling and try to forget about milk, which is not easy.
‘I wish we could take the bunk beds, do you think they have bunk beds over there, Jude?’ No answer. ‘Jude? I was talking to Sister Martha – I told you about her – and I must have said something about you, some football thing, and she went, Jude. Patron saint of lost causes! and kind of laughed. In a nice way, not a bad way. But still, what does it mean, how does that work, patron saint, is it the top saint, and what is that, lost causes? And are you named after him? I wish she hadn’t said that, it’s weird.’
‘We’re Jewish, we don’t have saints.’
‘What do we have then?’
‘I don’t know. Rabbis. No saints. Anyway, I’m named for a book,’ says Jude, and I can feel the bunks sway, meaning Jude is rolling over. Meaning Jude is getting better and can take the pressure. Possibly my time for feeling better is coming up too. Coming soon. I hope so.
‘What book?’
‘You don’t know it.’
‘I might. I might know it, tell me,’ I say, a bit hurt he maybe thinks I am a dummy due to getting less homework than he does and being at a school with lots of nuns and girls where the books are thinner and have a lot more pictures inside them. Illustrations. Sometimes Jude comes right up to my homework stuff splayed out on the oak table or outdoors on the white wrought-iron table near all those statues Mum has of Italian people with not a lot of clothes on and one hip poking out to the side in a relaxed manner, Italian people carrying maybe a flower or a bunch of wheat or some fish or something weird. Where are they going? If I had a fish to haul someplace, I’d do it quick sticks and not in a relaxed manner with hips swaying side to side, or I’d make Jude do it like when we collect them from Jarvis for Mum, when I refuse to carry the bag even. A fish never looks properly dead to me. It’s a problem. Jude comes right up to my work and fingers the books, flipping pages and going mmmm and waltzing off with this private decision he has just made about my homework and my mental capacities and how I might be losing my mind because of nuns. He thinks my books are a bit sissy, I can tell. I feel bad when he does that and I would like to go to Jude and Ben’s school and peruse heavy tomes with small diagrams in black and white, and wear a blue cap like a cricket cap the way they do, and grey shorts down to the knees and so on, but I cannot because I am a girl, I am Jem.
I also wear school hats, two types. In winter, Harriet and I have navy-blue beret hats and my dad says we look like U-boat officers and when he sees us traipse in from the convent, he salutes and goes Heil Hitler! and wanders off, shaking with mirth. He never gets tired of this joke, not ever. In summer, we have to wear flowy dresses with blue-and-white up-and-down stripes and the skirt part flies all around in the merest breeze unlike the winter tunic which stays neat and close to the legs, making it hard in summer to run with a football, for instance, without stripy material flapping in the air and your undies showing. Bloody. Whenever outdoors, a girl has to wear the summer hat, a creamy white straw hat with a hatband and a metal school badge in front and turnups like on a bowler hat except for the gruesome white elastic running under the chin to hold it all in place which gives me a choky feeling if I concentrate too hard on it, suddenly conscious of every single swallow going down my throat so that I start gulping like baby birds do when the mother is feeding them and you see it all happening, the entire voyage down the throat of the little worm bit or whatever and that’s when I get throw-uppy and have to sit down for a while for some recovery time, same as today, for different causes, for milk-race causes.
‘Jude the Obscure,’ says Jude.
‘Oh yeh,’ I say. ‘What’s obscure again?’
‘It’s Latin for dark, obscurus. Or strange. Difficult, I mean. Hard to see. See?’
‘Think so. Anyway, I’ll read that book then.’
‘No,’ says Jude, quite firm.
‘Why not?’ I roll over, feeling a bit better now, and I hang over the edge to peek at Jude, my hair dangling his way.
‘It’s bad at the end and you’re not ready, I’ll tell you when.’
‘OK.’ I flip on to my back and I think about it, how Jude looks out for me, knowing what is good and bad and when I am ready for things, even if he will not explain it in a lot of words when I want him to, because he has tons of things on his mind at all times. He is busy. ‘Jude, will you tell me about lost causes?’
‘Later.’
‘You might forget. Please. Just a bit.’
Jude rises and ambles over to the big bay window with the piano in front of it that Ben can play, and he sits on the piano bench and stares out the window. Jude won’t take lessons in piano, just pausing when Mum asked him if he wanted to and saying no thank you, very politely, and that was it. Harriet and I have piano at the convent. Harriet never studies and I study hard and then we sit with Mum who helps us practise and when it is Harriet’s turn, my sister flies all over the keys making some pretty fine sounds though I am pretty sure not one is in the piano homework she is supposed to do. She sits up straight and makes this whole rush of sound, whipping her head from side to side in a dramatic fashion and turning round now and again to grin at Mum. It’s all very unusual. When Harriet is keen to stop, never wanting to practise long, she shuts the piano lid and scoots across the piano bench to lean into Mum, resting her head there, like she has just been on some long journey and not everything she saw was good.
I myself have some piano problems and the solution to my piano problems is not in sight. I note that it is possible to overcome human failure in some fields and this is quite cheering, but it is not a rule and I am not foxed by my occasional prowess in those fields where I suffer from human failure. Bike riding for one. I am not all that good. I get by. However, I did a feat for Jude the other day when we were riding with Zach and Jeremy, a feat I have never done before and will not try again by myself, but the other day I did it just like that, no problem, because Jude wanted me to and it was important to him, plus he told his friends I could.
‘Jem can do that,’ he said meaning push-start the bike with one foot on one pedal, flinging the other leg over while the bike is careening ahead before settling in the saddle, cool as anything. And I did it, I did it for Jude, no crashing, just as I would like to overcome my piano problems for Mum, but I simply cannot match the notes in my book to the keys without taking a lot of time and then poking at the piano with stiff fingers and it’s awful, because you are supposed to string the notes together to make a tune, not let a lot of time pass between them and this makes me so edgy I can hardly see any more, I know I’m taking far too long and thinking about that makes me even slower, and the sounds I make are downright bad and give me a sick heavy feeling. I look Mum’s way and she smiles that smile, but we both know it’s all up with me, I’m no piano man, nowhere near.
Unlike my mother. I just know it, how she can play this piano though I never see her play this piano, and how she can do it without books, easy, something I am sure of while knowing also not to ask her about, sure of without ever being told, like I heard it in my sleep. There is some stuff you can count on in dreams as real and true, even when you know it is a dream thing, such as eating peanut butter sandwiches with Jude and he says 1942 was the year of the Great Raids, and you wake up thinking I know he said that, but you cannot tell which came first, the sleep time or the real-life time but it doesn’t really matter, because it’s a true thing and has some bearing on life. Other stuff in dreams is not so reliable. I rule out flying, for instance. If you are flying without an engine or glider wings, there is usually no head-scratching in the morning as to when and where it happened, and in which realm did you do it first, the sleeping one or the waking one. Forget it.
I know she can play, it doesn’t matter how I do. And I know not to ask her to play, or why she never touches the keys, not ever, even when she is helping me practise, sitting there at the far edge of the piano with her hands in her lap, sometimes counting out beats for me in a soft voice and when it is very bad, she will reach my way, gently shifting my hand to the right keys, her long fingers covering mine and I can hear the music in her, I swear it, like she is playing, no hands, and all the sounds come out right, beautiful, the kind of tune that makes you down tools and stop breathing because you may never hear it the same again, a sound like everybody you are crazy about calling your name all at once. This is the only good thing about piano practice and why I stick with it for now, all because of Mum and this feeling I get, making me forget my trouble with clefs and joined-up notes and one notes, and pedals I slam like a racing driver, I can’t help it, and most gruesome of all, my non-nun piano mistress who stabs me in the hand with a pointy pencil when I make a mistake, going in for fisticuffs when I get slouchy, winding up like a boxer before crashing her fist into my vertebrae and smiling at me in a shifty manner thereafter. Once, when I came through a whole tune no problem, she gave me two sweets, one green, one yellow, boiled sweets in see-through paper, the kind I hate, but never mind, I was so surprised, I stared at them in my palm for a while before saying thanks, still quite depressed by stabbings and thumps and thinking about secret agents captured by Nazis, fingering suicide capsules in their pocket, coloured capsules perhaps, wrapped in see-through paper. This woman definitely comes low on my list of favourite persons in life, and I am very glad Harriet has prowess in piano and a fine posture, and an improving effect on people in general, no doubt bringing out the sweetie handout mood at all times. I don’t tell Mum about piano mistress because it will upset her and anyway, pretty soon piano mistress and Jem will be in separate countries, no goodbyes, and Mum has too much on her mind right now, everything is messed up in our house.
Jude is staring out the big bay window. ‘Let’s go outside,’ he says.
‘Lost causes, Jude, please!’
‘When you work very hard even though you’ll never win, you’ll never change a thing.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Well. Like wars, there will always be wars.’
‘Why, why will there?’
‘That’s how it is, Jem. But you fight anyway, even if it’s a lost cause.’
‘Why, what’s the point, I don’t understand.’
‘It’s good to try, it makes you good – forget it, Jem, ask Mum, it’s hard to explain, I’m tired.’
‘OK, sorry. We can go outside now. I think I’m better.’ I start to climb down the ladder. ‘Know what? Dad might be a lost cause in the mess department. We can try to help him be less messy, but it’s no good. We can say, Oh Dad, when he drops food between the plate and the pot and make little suggestions like Wait till I get a bit closer with my plate, Dad, or Slow down there! or some such thing, but it’s no good, he’s a lost cause, right? And Harriet! She –’
‘Jem. You have to stop making everything to do with us. We are not the world, the Weiss family is not the world, you have to learn the big things, science, history, all that. And you can’t stay in your family for ever, I mean, you don’t even know what you want to do.’
‘I do!’
‘What then?’
‘I’ll tell you later. I’M TIRED.’
‘Yeh-yeh.’
‘I have ideas. I might do what Dad does.’
‘See? Just because Dad does it. And you can’t anyway. Sports writing is not a girl job, I want you to do a girl job.’
‘It was just one idea, I have others. I’m only ten, Jude, it’ll be OK.’
I get it all wrong with Jude sometimes, nothing I say is right, and I hate it when he is cross with me, why can’t he explain properly, what does he mean about the world and our family, what did I do wrong? I have this bad-news feeling now, a locked-in-the-attic feeling and I need to get rid of it fast.
‘Let’s drink milk!’ I say.
‘Don’t say milk.’ Jude hauls on his blue rugby top and I have one too, one that is a bit too small for him and I think to grab it from my room but he might not be in the mood for me to wear the same top as him so I decide to wear something else. We are going outside. We’ll play some game. Great.
‘Jude? Just one thing. Is it good, do you think, going to Dad’s country, changing countries like that?’
‘Sure. It will be fine. We have to travel.’
‘Why? Why do we?’
‘We just do. It’s important, travel is important,’ he says in a voice meaning this is the end of the talk we are having, it is time to move on.
‘MILK,’ I say, stepping up to him with a horror film killer look. ‘MILK.’
I am running now, Jude chasing, both of us scrambling down the stairs and I forget about other Judes, there is only one, not lost, no saint, not obscure, but my own brother who is only fifteen months older and so nearly my twin, it’s scientific, it’s historical, it’s nothing to do with me.
‘Mum! Mummy!’ I am kind of cross, and stomping all over the house, where is she?
I ask Lisa who is feeding Gus in the kitchen. Lisa comes from Portugal and she lives with us. She wears a shiny blue dress with buttons down the front like our painting smocks at school, same colour, same arrangement of buttons and pockets, different feel. Convent painting smocks are matte and soft, not slidy and shiny, and they are for ART ONLY. Lisa is sometimes friendly, sometimes not. She is not very friendly if some item has gone missing and you ask her about it. If you ask her if she knows where a thing might be, she grabs the edge of one pocket of her shiny blue dress open and holds it like that until she has finished saying, IS IT IN MY POCKET?!
I like Lisa even though she is grumpy. Also, she needs me. Some days, when she is having a rest in her room, she calls me into her room and we do one of two activities, sometimes both. 1) Photographs. Lisa shows me the same old photos of her family every time, pictures of scowly boys with dark floppy hair standing near big white walls and old men with pipes and dark hats on, black hats with little brims. Then there are ladies in dark dresses and black napkins wrapped around their heads though it is not raining. The focus is not all that great but I don’t remark upon it. It would be rude and clearly it is not a problem for Lisa who tells me the names of all the people and I pretend I remember some of the names that go with the people, though this is hard because they all look pretty much the same to me and because Lisa covers each face as she goes, kind of lingering there a while and mumbling soft things in the Portuguese language. 2) Football Pools. I help Lisa choose which football team to bet on for the match on Saturday and I fill out the forms for her. My dad says little kids are not allowed to bet, it is against the law and I am now on the slippery slope and had better watch out, etc. Yeh-yeh. I like to help Lisa out and I know quite a bit about football and I can spell Sheffield Wednesday and Norwich no problem whereas it is not so easy for her without checking every single letter and still getting it wrong. English spelling is a bit weird, I tell her in a comforting manner. And hey, Dad can’t spell! I do not want her to get depressed. Lisa comes from Portugal.
Lisa is never grumpy with Gus who is taking his time right now over some squashed-up bananas, eating slowly, with a thoughtful expression, holding his right foot in his left hand and flexing the toes to and fro, a habit of his I believe will stick with him. I can see it. And I see a day when Gus will catch up with me and be at an age when the difference between us doesn’t count any more, we are grown-ups, and we sit in a bar and have drinks, wine for me, like Mum, and Scotch for Gus, like Dad, Scotch he will sip with a thoughtful expression, maybe reaching for his foot now and then, he doesn’t know why. I do.
‘Lisa, have you seen Mum, please?’
‘IS SHE IN MY POCKET?!’
Bloody.
Lisa is not coming on the ship with us due to love and sex. Mum says she has a boyfriend here but I can tell Mum is worried about the boyfriend situation. Dad says, He’s a ganef! Shiker, shmuck! This sounds bad. In my opinion, though, Lisa will go back to her old country with scowly dark-haired boys standing against white walls and old ladies with napkins on their heads, that’s what I think.
‘Mum? Mummy?’ I’m calling a lot louder now, reminding myself of Joey in Shane, my dad’s favourite Western he took us to the cinema to see. A revival, he said, whatever that means. I never saw him so excited. At the end of the story, the boy Joey calls out for Shane, he calls his name many times, Sha-ne! Shane! Come back! Etc. He runs after him a long way, running with his dog, but Shane is not coming back, not ever, he is not coming back even though part of him would like to stay because he has a big feeling for little Joe’s family and they have a big feeling for him, but he rides off anyway, maybe thinking like Jude. Travel is important.
When we came home from the cinema, Ben, Jude and I were a bit giddy from going, Sha-ne! Sha-aane! in the same voice as the boy, the whole way home in the car, flopping around in hysterics in the back seat and driving Dad a bit crazy. At supper, any time anyone stood up for a glass of water or something, one of us would call out, Come back! in poignant tones and I believe Dad was a bit disappointed as Shane is a favourite film of his, and this was a little traitorous on my behalf because I remember feeling a bit desperate at the end of the film, tears rising up in me when Joey chased after Shane who is not coming back, Shane who is a hero and ought to stick around. I don’t tell Jude or Ben, they might think I am a bit sissy, which is strange, as my dad certainly has a big thing for Shane and he is not a sissy. Oh well.
‘Mum!’ Where is she?
‘Jem!’ My dad is calling for me from the living room.
‘Yes?’
‘Come here!’
‘I’m busy!’ My dad always wants you to get real close when he has a thing to tell you, especially if he is about to send you off on a mission, like he needs you to travel the greatest distance, go a long way for him, even for some little thing he wants. ‘I’m looking for Mum, what do you want, Dad?’ I try not to sound too cross, it’s bad for my dad, he gets rattled.
‘Come here,’ he says, lowering the mess of newspapers to his knees.
I can hardly stand still. ‘What, Dad? What? I have to go now.’
‘I am taking your mother out to dinner, I want you to let her be while she gets ready and you can’t eat those before dinner.’
He means my packet of crisps I am clutching, chicken curry flavour, not the ones I wanted, but Jude said I couldn’t have smoky bacon due to being Jewish and pigs are not allowed for Jews, even half-Jews. I’m not sure about this. I think smoky bacon flavour is just fake bacon, not from real-life pig juice or anything like that and also I think Jude is just being mean but I am too tired to fight him today. Dad sent us across to the shops saying we could have crisps for later which usually means he is taking Mum out to dinner, a time when we all need some kind of treat to make up for her not being around, I guess. Fine with us. Crisps are very nice.
‘I know that, I know both those things, can I go now? May I?’ Damn and bloody, I’m always getting this wrong. Mum says anyone CAN go, do you see, Jem? You are perfectly ABLE to go, MAY I is different, it’s permission, right, OK. I do not think my dad notices what I say.
‘So. Leave Mum alone,’ he says, raising his newspapers.
Like I’m about to hurt her, like I would do that.
‘Dad? You eat bacon, right? I’ve seen you.’
‘Yup.’
‘Isn’t there a rule or something?’ I ask. ‘For um, if you’re Jewish?’
‘Well, yes. It was about order and purity, I’ll explain some other time. Pigs eat everything … it’s not godly, you understand? But I’m not kosher, this is not a kosher house, we are not Orthodox, don’t eat those crisps before dinner.’
‘Dad? Are you in a bad mood?’
‘Not yet. How about a head rub for your old Dad?’
‘No, sorry, I have to do my homework, I’m going now.’
It’s scary saying no to my dad, my insides go all fluttery but I don’t feel like getting my fingers all greasy in his hair, not today. I don’t mind mostly. I like the smell of Dad’s head and how his hair sticks up at the end of the head rub and how now and again he goes, Ahhh, that’s great, Jem! while I am in the thick of it. Ahhh! he says, making me quite happy and proud when I leave him, even though my fingers are a bit slippery and the tips of them are all tingly and worn out, like I have lost a layer of skin maybe.
I have noticed something about him, how he is more prone to telling a person what not to do instead of what to do, unless it’s a mission, such as go get me a tomato and a knife on a plate, etc. He says, Don’t bother Mum, Don’t eat those crisps yet, Don’t read in the dark. And how does he expect me to know all the rules for being Jewish when I go to a convent, a school I think makes him mad at me because of nuns who are possibly contaminating me with nun-ideas and turning me into a kid who is not his all-out daughter, confusing him and giving him a cross look like when he can’t find something in the fridge, a thing that is usually right in front of his eyes. It’s there, Dad. It’s me, Dad.
I think my dad sees nuns and being Catholic, or even Protestant like Mum, as kind of weak, full of fancy clothes and secret things, quiet voices and angel paintings and his religion is big, with tough rules to do with comestibles and other matters, and full of beards and dark clothing and loud praying and calamities in history, in World War II for instance, the Holocaust, a calamity he is very worried about, like it is not all over yet and we must not forget it, we must be prepared for all eventualities, and his religion is maybe better for that, for readiness. Dad is happy I am a girl but I have to be ready also, cowboy-tough. Shane has put away his gun, it is for emergency purposes only and he will only ever need one shot. I don’t know what religion Shane is, it’s a private matter with him, but he has readiness.
What kind of school will I go to in Dad’s country, do they have convents over there? If I go to a convent, will he give me that speech about signs of the cross and spiritualities and not joining in, a speech I know by heart? Of course he will. In the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost, say the girls in time with one another, looking a bit depressed and all sounding the same, like zombies. Then comes the prayer part, the sad one about daily bread, and I can’t help but say it in my own head, just because I have heard it so often and because it puts me in mind of tribulations and of Oliver Twist in his workhouse days, days of bread truly unworthy of the name and in far too meagre allowances for a boy not yet fully formed. Give us this day our daily bread. Please can I have some more? Daily.
After the prayer, the girls speak those same words and sign off once more, like this is code for Hello God, Goodbye God. In the name of the Father, they say, and I say it too, seeing my dad every time, my father with a cross face because I have joined in by mistake when he asked me not to. It’s not a catechism thing, it’s a Charles Dickens thing, it’s really not a problem.
Don’t bother Mum.
I don’t call her name out, I do not want Dad to hear me, I just nip in close to the door of their bedroom which is nearly but not shut, they never fully close it though that does not mean waltz straight in, it’s not polite. I speak through the open part of the door, squishing my face into the space she left.
‘Mummy?’
‘Just one minute, darling.’
I count. She doesn’t mind this, it’s a thing we do. I sit with my back to the door, on the long raised step outside, the landing she calls it, like a railway station platform. I sit there with my crisps, my crisps for later. ‘One, two, three …’ Maybe I could go back to the shops and swap for smoky bacon. No. ‘… fifty-eight, fifty-nine, SIXTY. Ready now? Is it OK now, can I – may I come in?’
I think about Oliver for a moment, and how he gets it wrong. Please can I have some more? This is sad too, and maybe no mistake, just something to do with duress and despair, that he simply cannot tell the difference any more, the space between capability and permission. I step into Mum’s room.
‘He-llo!’ she says, like she is all surprised to see me.
She is striding in from the bathroom that connects her room to Gus’s and she heads for the dressing table. Her bathroom contains a bidet, a bidet is for women although she lets Gus play with it, watching him peer over the side and faff with the taps, giggling like a wild man when the spray goes in his face. I walk over to my mother and stand next to her.
‘I’m going to stand right here and watch, is that OK?’
‘You know it is, what’s wrong, Jem?’
‘Jude said I couldn’t have smoky bacon crisps, Dad wouldn’t like it because of um, kosher rules.’
‘I think Jude was joking, what do you think?’
‘Yeh, well. Anyway, that’s not it, I heard something bad.’
‘What did you hear?’
‘Ben’s not coming on the ship with us. Why not, I want him to.’
Mum lays down her little eye make-up stick, it’s like a conductor’s wand for orchestration. Not wand, baton. She turns my way on her little piano-type bench, the one with gold legs and a little cushion with a pattern of pale stripes and wispy leaves, the cushion attached to the legs by way of posh drawing pins with rounded ends coloured gold also. It’s the nicest bench I’ve ever seen. Mum holds her arms out and I lean in there and I want to cry suddenly. I swallow hard the way Harriet does when she is eating something undesirable and wants everyone to know about it and mark the occasion so it will never happen again. Do not ever press a sardine on me again. Thank you.
‘Do you remember I told you Ben has special exams to write, O levels, and then he’ll join us, he’ll come by air?’
‘No. Maybe I wasn’t listening, maybe I forgot, maybe you just said O levels, I don’t know what that is, are you sure you told me?’
‘Yes, Jem.’
‘Why can’t we wait for him?’
‘We have to find a house and furniture, all kinds of things, it will be fun, I’ll need your help.’
‘Everything’s changing, it’s all different, I hate it – will Ben stay in the house by himself?’
‘No,’ my mother says. ‘He’ll stay with Chris, with Chris and his family.’
‘Well, do they know he needs nuts and raisins in a bowl when he comes in from school, do they?’ I feel right pathetic now, I can’t do much about it, and the tears fall, kind of leaping out of my eyes, it’s weird. ‘Do they have binoculars where we’re going? You don’t want to go, do you, Mum, I know you don’t!’
‘Jem. Sometimes we do things we don’t want to do because we love someone.’ Mum wipes my tears away, her long fingers brushing my cheeks like windscreen wipers on a car.
‘Dad, you mean Dad. Because he has to go, right?’
I think of learning to change Gus’s nappies, trying to copy Mum, how she raises his ankles with one hand and slides the old nappy out from under him with the other, then swabs the decks with damp tissues and pats him dry and bundles him up neatly again, all the while having a friendly chat and tickling him in the ribs. It’s not so smooth an operation with me but that is not the main thing, the main thing is how it does not feel like a poo situation, usually quite grievous and appalling, situations such as walking slap into a mound of poo on the pavement or in a field and having a doomy feeling for hours thereafter. Gus’s poo is not a problem for me at all, just as Harriet barf is not nearly so bad as stranger barf and the day she marched up to my table at the convent and spewed a wee pile of swedes at my feet like I was the only person who could handle the barf situation with poise and even temper, that was not a problem for me either. In my opinion, Harriet displayed fine judgement that day. No one should have to eat swedes in their lifetime. I had a conviction swedes are nun food only and do not exist in the great world so I looked them up and I was nearly right. Brassica napus: used as a vegetable or as CATTLE FOOD. Hmm. This is possibly a catechism issue with nuns, how we should all eat off the same menu, cows and girls, the whole zoo. We are ALL God’s creatures.
The main thing is, not everything that spews forth from a person is lovely and charming, poo, barf, blood, but depending on your feelings for that person, this will or will not be a problem for you, and fine feelings are likely to predispose you to cheery mop-up operations, and willing journeys by sea to uncertain destinations.
‘Can Ben bring some binoculars when he comes?’
‘Maybe,’ says my mother, turning back to face the mirrors, ‘or maybe we can go out hunting for something you will like as much, something new. We will look until we find it. What do you think of that idea?’
I am not hopeful. A not-binocular, just as good? I don’t know.
‘OK,’ I reply because I don’t want to let her down. She needs me, she said so.
Mum loops that cross around herself, the one with the pale stone at the heart of it. It is art, she says, made by an artist, a man from Ireland, and I wonder about him, whether he is prone to cracking jokes and doling out hugs or whether he is too caught up with the forging of silver and the embedding of pale stones for such things. Mum tucks the cross under her clothes because of Dad and Judaism, or else she hangs other stuff about her neck, shimmery silver chains or a wispy scarf so the fine cross is kind of hidden, like seeing a person you know standing under a weeping willow in a slight breeze and the picture keeps breaking up. Kaleidoscopes give me the same feeling, part excited, part depressed. I twist the tube and the pattern comes, marvellous, and just as I get an idea about it, close to recognition, it turns into some new pattern and I have to start all over again, like nothing is clear for long enough, there is nothing you can swear to. Hey, you, standing there, do I know you? Is that a cross I see?
‘I love that,’ I say, pointing to the cross, trying not to say the word though my dad is downstairs. ‘And in the middle, the –’
‘Moonstone,’ says Mum drawing it out from the tangle of chains, willow. Binocular, moonstone. Memento. Where she’s been, where she is headed. Mrs Yaakov Weiss, destination Moon.
‘Well, I love it.’
‘It’s lovely, but you don’t really love it, Jem. You love people, not things.’ She says this gently, stroking the top of my head and taking the opportunity, as per usual, to untangle some of the mess up there. Like my dad, I do not have a big thing for combs and combing.
Here comes my dad. You can hear him coming a mile off. Is he worried about spooking people, is that why he goes in for all that shoe scuffling and throat clearing? I don’t think so. He finds it very funny indeed if you suddenly leap in the air limbs akimbo because someone has just spoken loudly in a quiet room or you are watching a film and there is a gunshot out of nowhere. Ha ha ha, he goes, watching you try to recover your senses. He loves this, people losing their cool. So that’s not the reason. He wants to make an announcement, that’s all. It’s a long hello. When an important cowboy enters a bar, he will pause a moment at the swing doors, stopping short in a slap of heels so everyone has a moment to turn round and get the picture before he bats the doors open, and this is no show-off thing, but a courtesy and a greeting, the only kind he knows, because he is an important cowboy and a man of few words.
Dad is carrying two glasses, white wine for Mum, Scotch for him. It is time for him to slap soapy water under the arms and put on a new shirt and tie it up with a tie. This will take him about three and a half minutes and there will be a lot of commotion.
‘Jem,’ he says. ‘We’ll have another boxing lesson soon. Maybe tomorrow.’
I think he has forgotten about telling me not to bother Mum. Anyway, why can’t I be in here if I want to?
‘Tomorrow? OK.’
My dad pulls on my hair, two tugs, like my hair is a bell pull and he is ringing for servants. It’s a show of affection and now I feel guilty about skipping out on his head rub, something I hope he has also forgotten.
‘Tomorrow we’ll do the rope-a-dope!’ says my dad, putting his glass down and shuffling from foot to foot like he is doing a war dance or some such thing. I have no idea what rope-a-dope means, or whether I am supposed to shuffle around also. I don’t bother. ‘Put up your dukes! Ha ha ha! And don’t eat those before dinner,’ he adds, prodding my bag of crisps and picking his glass up again.
Bloody. Not again. It is possible Mum asked him to look out for this tonight, the eating of crisps before dinner, because she is always in charge of health matters and that can be a full-time job when there are a lot of kids roaming around like in our house. The thing is, when Dad takes on a task of this kind, of handing out advice or rules, he is a lot bossier, clearly believing a kid will not get the message unless you yell out the advice and make a cross face and repeat it eight or nine times. We are not spooked, but if one of us has a friend around when Dad is marching through the house, poking us in the ribs in passing and yelling out advice, or going Heil Hitler! ha ha ha, the type of friend who is a bit jumpy near my dad, wondering if he is a crazy person or dangerous or something, for a moment I think I should explain to the friend that my dad is not scary, he is funny, that’s how he is, he’s not mad or anything, and then just as quickly, I feel clapped out and know it is time to get a new friend, because some things are too hard to explain, and I am real choosy about friends now, finding ones who can relax around Dad, which is a lot easier than trying to explain things to people who will never really understand. This may be an unusual way to pick friends, I don’t know, but that’s how it goes.
I pause on the landing outside Mum and Dad’s room. Where are you headed, Jem? I’m not sure. I am not wild about this time of day, it’s kind of lonely, too soon for supper, long since school, what’s it for, this time of day? I am skipping homework as it is Friday, which is my day off from homework and tomorrow is Saturday, Harriet’s favourite. She gets so excited about Saturday, she will rise up quite often in the night to tell me the latest in her departments of special expertise, or fill me in regarding what happened to her on Friday and what she aims to do on Saturday. A lot happens to Harriet, so there is a lot to say and sometimes she will also ask me to sing in my no-good singing voice or else we make beastie shadows on the wall in the light of passing cars. Saturday will never be as great for me as it is for her, but I would never have learned this were it not for Harriet waking me up all night to tell me stuff, waking up and chirping at me like a bird just so she can have that fine moment over and over maybe, of falling asleep with this exciting idea she will be waking up on a Saturday, a feeling like rewrapping your own present late at night at the end of your birthday, and unwrapping it slowly to have the surprise again, or something close, never quite the same, but not too bad and definitely worth a go on a long night.
I take a step or two on the landing and I know what’s up. I’m heading for Jude. I think I could find him in a room with no lights, easy. When we walk together, sometimes we veer into each other, not quite crashing, it’s more of a gravity thing, I believe. I’m not that well up on gravity yet and I have written the word in my Questions Notebook, the one I am filling up too quick which is why I do tiny writing, in the Brontë manner. I have read two books so far about the Brontës, a family of three sisters, Charlotte, Emily, Anne, and one brother, Branwell, who all did a great deal of tiny writing in small books wherein they made up stories about soldiers. They lived on the moors, rocky, cold, windy, not a very good place when it comes to health matters. There was a lot of dropping dead up there, especially from consumption, anxiety and too much walking in cold weather, and too much drinking at the Black Bull Inn in the case of Branwell, a great worry to his family who sat up waiting for him in darkened rooms, waiting for him to come home, and then waiting for him to stop raving in tussled sheets, raving from too much walking and drinking, etc. Branwell was a bit of a lost cause in all callings in life, and he took it to heart in the end, I guess, and even in his heyday of making a stab at things, when he painted a portrait of Charlotte, Emily and Anne with himself among them, he scratched his own face right out of the painting, which is a sad thing, one of the saddest.
Consumption. I add this word to my Questions Notebook. Consumption does not sound like a doomy disease, it sounds like what a person does to a peanut butter sandwich. I write it in near Gravity, making sure to leave enough space for notes and answers. My notebook is filling up fast. It measures 15×10½cm and the pages are sewn to the binding, not stapled. The cover has a painting of an olden times boxer with no gloves on and my dad gave it to me.
‘That’s Daniel Mendoza,’ he said in a proud voice meaning there is more to come, more information regarding Mr Mendoza. ‘He was Jewish, a Jewish boxer.’
I knew it. I take a look at Daniel who is putting up his dukes though there is no one else in the painting to box and I feel proud also. Maybe Daniel is practising. He is ready, always ready and he knows all the rules for boxing. He is a gentleman boxer. And maybe Jude is wrong, I can be a sports writer too, it’s not only a man job.
Gravity. What did Ben say? Pull, there is pull in gravity and a field where the pulling happens. Gravity is not just about not falling but about forces also, forces in a gravitational field, that’s it, and I think there is one between Jude and me, one I aim to fight because Jude is not in the mood for Jem today, I can tell by the smoky bacon crisps joke he played on me, a pushing-away joke, not a Jem-and-Jude-together joke, which is much nicer, close to a friendly cuff on the arm whereas the pushing kind makes my ears ring. Everything is messed up in our house and Jude is edgy, he does not want to be with me. Travel is important.
I move on past Jude and Ben’s room quick sticks. Jude is in there reading and thinking, going way past me in terms of world knowledge. I don’t care. I move on downstairs and across the kitchen, staring down at the red tiled floor and frowning like I have some great purpose in mind but mainly I do not want to see Lisa, I am not in the mood for Lisa, though I cannot help tossing some info her way before making it out the back door. Lisa is laying fish fingers in rows on a grill and cutting up broccoli for our supper, without separating the treetop part of the broccoli from the stem part. Harriet does not eat treetops and she is going to get depressed. Treetops are for birds, she says. She eats a broccoli top and all she can think about is a mouthful of dear birds and Lisa ought to know that by now. I glance swiftly at Gus who is in his pen, which resembles the sea lion cage at the zoo, a pen with no roof due to tameness of sea lions, and he is playing with his rubber hammer, tapping thoughtfully at the frame of his cage like he is doing repairs or something.
‘Mummy was UPSTAIRS,’ I tell Lisa. ‘She is in her room getting ready!’ I say, barging out the back door, not even looking at her as I speak, knowing she knew all along where Mum was and was too bloody to say so, bloody. I am on to Lisa and I am fed up with that pocket business.
I tuck my crisps in the bushes in case of robbers/animals/accidental crushing by passing feet, and I climb up into our tree, Jude’s and mine, the tree with twisty limbs and no fruit to bruise that is a great commando lookout, planted not far from the back door and right at the edge of the big garden for full strategic viewing in many directions all at once. A soldier will always find a lookout post, it’s the first thing he does, the very first. I can see everything from up here.
Jude and I read up here, lying back on the branches as if they were sofas in the living room. I prefer it with Jude, like crossing the road or riding a bike, I do it with him and I don’t think about crashing or calamity. I get the wobblies up here and there is Jude to grab my elbow, calm and firm, and I’m OK, no falling. Alone, it’s weird. Climbing the tree, I have to concentrate hard on each step, put your foot there, Jem, now there, hey, is that how we usually do it? Hold tight, do I always hold this tight? Suddenly I am all conscious of handholds and footholds, same as when I wear my summer hat with the strangly elastic and go all conscious of swallowing. And I even forgot to bring reading material. I’ll just have to do some more thinking. Fuck-hell. I’m tired out today.
Ben is at Chris’s house, he went there straight after our trip to the shops, I don’t know if he will come home for dinner, meaning Lisa will seem about three times the size she usually is. Looming. When Ben is around on Mum and Dad nights out, I don’t notice Lisa so much, she is just regular-sized, even when hovering in the doorway of the study after supper while Ben and Jude and I watch some not-allowed telly programme, Lisa standing there on the sidelines whimpering, and hauling out a hanky from her pocket to pat her eyes, a hanky being the only thing that’s ever actually in her pocket, I guess. Lisa weeps no matter what we are watching, even if it’s a horror film or a film with larks, a comedy. Maybe there is no TV in Portugal and for her, all telly programmes are strange and sad.
When Harriet and Gus are stashed safely in their beds, and I sit up close to Ben with Jude lying on the floor, it’s a good time and if Lisa shows up to lurk in the doorway, we say, Come on in, Lisa, come in, and she never does. I am busy, she says, I am just leaving, but she always stays a while, patting her eyes with a hanky while Ben and I dig each other in the ribs and get a pain from holding in hysterics. If Ben is not there, but at Chris’s house, it’s no fun and watching Lisa in the doorway makes me sad and kind of cross and I give up on telly, going for Tintin books instead, to read in bed by torchlight so as not to wake Harriet. I hold out hopes for not waking her, but she usually knows if I am reading and will do two things to annoy me. 1) Slowly rise up from under her sheets with one outstretched arm and pointy finger and very straight back and wide-open stary eyes after the manner of Egyptian mummies in a spook film she once saw, the only ten minutes of horror film she has ever seen. This slow rise and pointy-finger act can have a terrible effect on me and Harriet loves that. Here is the second annoying thing she does. Pop right up from pretend sleep and wave her little arms around yelling Boo! Even if I am expecting it, it gets me. If it doesn’t get me, I must act scared anyway or Harriet will feel a big failure in the horror department.
Chris is Ben’s best friend and I am pretty sure I want to marry him although he doesn’t know that, I don’t think you can tell a person a thing like that when you are not in your prime, and especially not when you are a girl. It’s not a girl job. I am a bit worried because Chris will reach the marrying time way before me due to being a whole five years and one month older plus I am going to another country and I don’t know how to keep an eye on things from so far away. I will have to come back, that’s all, and show up at his house and maybe he’ll take a look at me and I won’t be just Ben’s little sister any more, and he’ll say I am pretty sure I want to marry you and I won’t have to say anything at all on my part. I’ll just nod sagely or something.
I think it went this way between Mum and Dad when they first clapped eyes on each other. Not many words necessary to get things going, no weighing up of matters, no decision time. When you have a big feeling for someone, nothing can stop you, like in World War I, in the case of a soldier rushing out to save a wounded friend lying out there in no man’s land, and the soldier has only this one idea of rescue in mind, nothing can stop him, not fear, not other soldiers flying in the air around him, exploded by shells and whiz-bangs from Big Berthas (Krupp 420mm) and Slim Emmas (Skoda 305mm), from howitzers and mortars, from all the great guns blazing, nothing. When you have a singlemost desire and no time to lose, fear is like an engine not a stop light, switching on at all the right moments, for all pressing engagements in trying times, for grabbing a tool in the spider shed, for marching up to Chris’s front door one day in the future, and for Nelson, yes, Nelson in the Cape of Trafalgar, facing the enemy while not in the best of health, missing bodily parts usually thought vital for a leader of men, one hand, one eye, never mind, who needs two? He has a singlemost desire.
Right now would be a good time for a boxing lesson but my dad is busy. He is probably all dressed and shaved, with maybe one little cut on his face like a war wound on an Action Man. A going-out-to-dinner wound. He will be standing around Mum right about now, drinking his drink and going, Ready, dear? Ready, dear? and driving her a little bit crazy. Five minutes, darling. Why don’t you check on the children? Yes, right now would be a good time for a boxing lesson. Oh well. Maybe that is what this time of day is for, figuring out when is a good time for things, I don’t know.
My dad does not give lessons in a lot of things, or many lessons in any one thing and when he does, they do not last very long, maybe eight minutes or so and then he’s knackered and needs a drink or a tomato on a plate because he has had enough of your company, the only person he wants for long is Mum. When he decides to give a lesson in a thing, it’s wise to be at the ready and abandon all other activity. Up in the tree, Jude’s and mine, I try to think of what else besides boxing I have ever had a lesson in from my dad. Not much. But that is because we need to learn for ourselves plus we go to school five days a week and we have Mum. And Ben. I don’t believe my dad knows how much Ben teaches us.
I’m not tired any more. I’m getting stiff up here.
Here’s a thing. Dad is a sports writer and he hardly ever plays sports with us. A football rolls up to him on the terrace when he is reading and he ignores it completely, or he says, Oh! the way he does when the telephone rings and ruins his concentration. One time he tossed a cricket ball at Jude but kept aiming at his head for some reason, with Jude stepping away neatly each time and me chasing all over the shop for the ball and trying to explain the rules of bowling to my dad all by myself, because it was just too many words for Jude who could only say, She’s right, Dad, she’s right, Dad, while Dad shifts impatiently and says, OK OK OK, to my instructions, and then goes right on pelting the ball skyward like Jude is a coconut on a stick, my dad simply unable to do two things at once, listen and bowl. It was pretty terrible all round and I do not recall which one of them walked off first, dropping bat and ball in the middle of the garden for me to stare at, both of them slamming the door on sports.
What exactly does my father do around here besides sports writing and lying on sofas and talking to Mum, sometimes twirling her about the room in an olden times dance step involving twirls and sudden dips that look a bit dangerous? Sometimes he messes about in the kitchen, OK, and mostly on Saturdays. Other times he grapples with our homework mainly to see where we are in terms of world knowledge. NOT VERY FAR, he thinks. Also, he drives Ben and Jude to school, yelling at them in a jovial manner while shaking the car keys in the air. Make tracks! Shake a leg! Did we get you out of bed, Jude? Keeping you awake, are we? Feel like walking to school? Ha ha ha! It’s kind of noisy, but my brothers do not mind, carrying on cramming their satchels in a leisurely manner, with pieces of toast clamped in their jaws and Gus peering at them with great attention and a slight frown, and Harriet raising her arms aloft and crying out What larks! We shall have larks! which is her new favourite expression from another book Mum is reading to us right now by Mr Charles Dickens, Great Expectations it is called, and this sounds to me always like the name of a house but it is not, it is the name of a feeling.
Here’s another thing. My dad is good at short cuts and he has taught me one or two. 1) How to tidy up your hair when you do not have a big thing for combs and are in a needing-to-be-neat situation. Step out of sight and make your fingers comblike, as in a garden fork, say. Keep your fingers stiff and push them through your hair from the front to the back, going slow to allow for snags. Too fast and you get a pain in the roots. You can use both hands. 2) If you are not in the mood for cutting and cutlery, here is how to have a sandwich snack quick sticks. Spread out what you want on one slice of bread, peanut butter, Cheddar, etc. Now FOLD over the bread. This way there is one less edge things can spill out of and your sandwich is ready fast, and you need a single knife only, a spreading knife. Lastly, use your palm or a napkin for a plate, or eat outside to reduce clean-up operations. 3) In an emergency, here is how to unscuff your shoes. Stand on one leg and polish the toe part on the back of your standing leg. Forget about the heels. It is too hard and people do not pay a lot of attention to heels unless they have very fine eyesight and are watching you walk away and by then, you are gone, so what. Unscuffing works best on trousers, but socks and tights will do also. Another shoe tip from Dad is handy for when you are bashing off to school in a flurry, or from indoors to outdoors when at school. Do not tie your laces too tight. That’s it. Now you can slip your feet in and out, no tying and untying necessary, just as if your lace-ups are slip-ons! Be careful NOT to do this in front of Mean Nun who hates you, or she will say, as she did one time, Weiss! Weiss! Untie those laces and tie them up at once! You are a very lazy girl! Mean Nun is a bit crazed when it comes to shoes.
So these are some useful short cuts my dad has taught me, and I certainly hope he will teach me more as we go along because I am only ten going on eleven and cannot take everything in at once and there are things I do not need to know just yet. It changes all the time, the things a person needs to know. A stranger might think a small girl does not need to know how to box, but that is an opinion among others. I have had just one boxing lesson so far and here is how it went.
‘Hey, Jem,’ my dad says. ‘It’s time for a boxing lesson. You will need to know how to box where I come from!’
Whoa. What does he mean? I am getting all kinds of strange ideas about this place, this place where in winter it never stops snowing, which is what I explained to Lucy White, how it snows all the time, all-out snow, nothing like the wee sprinkling of frost and fluff we have here.
‘In winter,’ I said in a proud voice, in the manner of an Antarctic explorer, ‘it snows non-stop. That’s how it is.’
One proof I have of this ferocious snowing in my dad’s country is from Victor, my second favourite comic after Commando. In Victor there is a story about a dog called Black Bob, who is a sheepdog, not the roly-poly hairy kind resembling a sheep himself who traipses about Alpine passes bearing a tiny keg of cognac for types who have fainted in Alpine passes, no, Black Bob is a real sheepdog, the looking after sheep kind. There is a proper name for this kind of dog and Harriet will know it. All I have to do is slide my comic her way one day without asking anything directly, and she will tell me the name of this dog plus related details. It is not important right now.
Black Bob is good-looking and pretty sleek, a word denoting strength and slimness in a dog or horse, and possibly even a human, and seeming to me a handy word to call upon if I get to be a sports writer. I make a note of it in my Mendoza notebook. Black Bob goes to Canada in this story, though I do not know how he got there from Yorkshire where he lives with a handsome shepherd in a flat cap and waistcoat, thick black belt and dashing little white scarf. I do not know how he ended up in Canada having adventures because I missed out on some issues of Victor due to Jude taking a little time off from robbery. Never mind. Maybe for Black Bob travel is important, who knows.
In Canada, Black Bob stays with a Mountie, a Canadian type of policeman in a very big hat which must be downright annoying to run with against the wind. It could fall off, the chinstrap grabbing at the Mountie’s throat, or it could hold him up like a sail on a boat. It is not an aerodynamic hat. Jude has explained a thing or two to me regarding aerodynamics. This is no hat for a man on active duty. The Mountie and Bob have a big feeling for each other, close to how it was with the shepherd, a man Bob misses a lot. He needs to get back to Yorkshire, but meanwhile he has adventures in Canada largely involving the chasing of criminals in snowstorms, meaning nearly all the boxes in the story are white spaces except for Black Bob and the Mountie peeping through the snow, and skinny lines scraping across the page at a slant to indicate fierce winds, not very hard work for the artist, it seems to me, when the background is all snow.
The Mountie has a problem. He has a problem of snow-blindness, which I am now quite worried about also even though it seems to be a passing sort of blindness, for storms only. There is the Mountie, suddenly snow-blind, trying to chase criminals with his arms outstretched like Harriet doing her Egyptian mummy act and now Bob has to do everything, catch the criminals, take care of the Mountie, all of it. This is no surprise to me because Black Bob is always the main hero in every adventure, having a single-most desire plus the qualities of calm and modesty, making him an even bigger hero. Nothing matters to Bob except that his master is safe and the criminals not safe. In Canada then, it all ends OK, with the Mountie drinking a nice drink, cognac maybe, and his eyes carefully swaddled in a bandage until he can see straight again, and a fire going in the log cabin. There is no box to show him doing all this, feeling his way around the cabin and so on, so Bob must be the one who poured the drink, lit up a fire and wrapped the Mountie’s snow-blind eyes. There is no one else. Stories in comics are not always very realistic. Never mind.
It is possible I need to learn boxing because of criminals wandering around with bad intentions in concealing snowstorms, though I doubt it, I think this is just another cowboy lesson from my dad, another sign of his anxiety regarding me and my convent life and the weakening effect it may be having upon me. Don’t worry, Dad.
Here is where my first boxing lesson takes place: in the kitchen at the end of my dad’s day of sports writing. Here is why. When he gets fed up, and tired of teaching, he can turn around and, lo! there is Mum making dinner, Mum, his all-out favourite relief from everything, sports writing, giving lessons, talking to kids. Here is what else he needs after a lesson. A drink. I notice he already has one poured and waiting, right there on the kitchen table.
My dad stops me as I amble across the room.
‘Hey, Jem. It’s time for your first boxing lesson. You will need to know how to box where I come from!’ Then he goes, Ha ha ha! but I take it pretty seriously, that’s how it is with me.
‘OK, Dad.’
I put my book on the white oak table, far far from his Scotch glass, so as to allow for spill situations which are quite regular with him. And that is the moment I realise the lesson will not last long and I might as well take a chance on my dad as teacher and not ask too many questions. Spotting the glass and making this time calculation is a sleuthing activity, something you can do about people the more you stick with them and get to know things. It is possible to sleuth strangers also, and it is good practice, though you cannot always be sure where clues lead. The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes are very good and they are written by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who was first a doctor and then a writer and then a man who died of heart failure. I wonder did he see it coming, with his medical insight, and was that better or worse, to see it coming? Sherlock Holmes is a top unofficial sleuth and sleuthing is his chief preoccupation, whereas Tintin, another unofficial sleuth, also has a dog, and later on he meets a sea captain, and for the companionship of le Capitaine and Milou, I believe, Tintin has gentler manners and a less edgy temperament. OK.
‘Right. Now. Take a stance!’ says Dad, jumping around in front of me.
I stare at my dad. What is he talking about? He is going to have to do better than this. Teaching is not his big thing, I can see that.
‘What do you mean, Dad? Where?’ I look around for what he might mean, I look around for a stance.
‘Get into position, Jem! Stay loose, drop your shoulder, bend your knees, so you’re a moving target, not so easy to hit, get it?’
‘Oh. OK.’ I bend my knees and hold up my fists just like Daniel Mendoza the Jewish boxer on my Questions Notebook. I feel a bit silly, my knees pointing in opposite directions and my chin in the air.
My dad is laughing at me, he laughs at my stance, ha ha ha! ‘Jem, remember Cassius Clay? We saw him on TV, remember?’
‘Yup,’ I say.
‘He dances around the ring! He does the rope-a-dope. Right? Right!’
‘Oh, Dad, that’s so ridiculous, rope-a-dope, what does it mean?’
‘Just do it, Jem! Dance around, stay loose, come on!’
My dad is getting a bit testy. His drink is waiting and my time will be up, cut the questions, Jem. then!’ I say. I dance around.
‘Now. Very important. Always, always hold one hand in front of your face. Make a fist and hold it there. To protect your face. Most fights end with head injuries. Use the hand you don’t write with. Go on! I’m a southpaw, I hold up my right. Got that?’
‘Southpaw?’ I can’t help it, I have to ask. If he is going to use technical terms, I will need to understand them, that’s how it works in teaching.
‘Leftie, I’m a leftie!’
‘So I’m a northpaw then, am I? Um, whatever’s your best hand is what you are? Or, does everyone have a north and south? Is it for sports only? Or what?’
‘No no no! It’s a word for the left-handed, all right? And only if you are left-handed,’ says my dad scraping both hands through his hair and breathing in and out noisily.
‘That doesn’t seem right, Dad. Are you sure?’
I think about Horatio, Lord Nelson, probably born right-handed and suddenly with no choice in the matter and I wonder if it counts, if he is never really a true southpaw because in his head he is always reaching for things with a hand not there, his right, and always looking to one side for a man he can never have again, a right-hand man.
‘Jem! Come on, I’m teaching you, goddammit! Stop standing there like a goof!’
‘OK, sorry.’
I hold my left hand up, my southpaw not a southpaw because I am right-handed, making it just a regular paw, I guess, I hold it right there in a fist shape in front of my face. I dance around, doing the rope-a-dope, bloody, I do it all for my dad who is looking happy now.
‘Great! Let’s go. Try and protect yourself, remember? Now – BOX!’
Then my dad pushes my left hand, which is protecting my face from head injury, right into my face.
‘Hey!’ I shout. ‘You can’t do that! Unfair! And that hurt!’
‘Ha ha ha! You were holding it too loose! It didn’t really hurt, did it?’ he says, ruffling my hair. ‘I said hold your fist up but don’t forget about it, or that’ll happen every time. I didn’t need to punch you! You knocked yourself out! End of lesson!’ he adds, turning away to collect his drink, walking close to Mum and standing next to her with his back against the kitchen counter and his legs crossed at the ankles, reminding me of one of the dark-haired boys in Lisa’s photograph, leaning up against sunny white walls, and feeling jaunty. My dad tricked me and he feels jaunty and he has gone right back into boyhood, I think so.
‘Not fair, Dad,’ I tell him, settling in at the table with my Tintin book. I’m not mad though.
‘That’s right, Jem! Not fair!’ he says, real pleased. ‘Tough bananas!’
‘Thems the breaks?’ I ask.
‘RIGHT!’ he says, sliding an arm around my mother and squeezing her tight.
I’m not mad at my dad, though I have changed my mind about this being a good time for another boxing lesson. I’m not in the mood. And my dad knows I am not going to join the boxing profession, he is just training me in cowboy toughness, he trains us in games and by other methods, by way of documentaries and little speeches. When he mentions the Holocaust for instance, he gets a grave look which is a warning to us, that’s all, a reminder to keep on our toes and hold that non-writing hand up in front of the face, don’t let it go loose and limp, keep it in a fist shape, just in case.
My dad reminds me of another commander. He reminds me of Julius Caesar in some ways. In his prime, Caesar was a soldier and then he became the first emperor of the Roman Empire whereupon he messed up and lost control of things. Julius had no time out between commanding legionaries and ruling a whole empire and he got that lost feeling when it was just not timely.
When Caesar was a soldier and at his best, his men were devoted, as Mum would say, meaning they would do anything for him, go anywhere, no matter what, no questions asked, no Who started this war? or What are we doing here? or Maybe we should just go home. No doubts. There was fear of the sensible kind but no cowardice in Caesar’s army because of trust and devotion on the part of the men, and because Caesar had great expectations. On the eve of a battle, he exaggerates the might of the enemy, that is Caesar’s trick, and suddenly his men have twice the might, out of pride and so on, and they smite the enemy in half the time, a breeze for them since they expected to be smitten themselves by an enemy so much greater, Caesar had said, in numbers and in might. It’s a good trick.
Smite. This is a little bit like wot, having two meanings to bear in mind, usually very easy to tell apart. Smite is largely an olden times battle term so when Mum says I was smitten! there ought to be no confusion. She does not mean she was assaulted by battleaxe, halberd, poisoned arrow, javelin, sabre, scimitar, crossbow or mace in a field of battle, of course not, she means she had a very nice feeling due to something a person said or did in her presence. I hope she will be smitten by me one day, for something fine I do or say, because she is so happy when she says it, I was smitten! like she is about ready for song and dance.
My dad and Caesar are the same in some ways, not all. Dad may exaggerate the might of the enemy but he is in his prime as ruler, with no lost feelings, quite unlike Caesar who kept looking back in a wistful manner during his days as ruler, days that came upon him too quickly, and spent musing on the good trick he played on his men and on his prowess in commanding soldiers who were smitten by him and his leadership of soldiers. He wants his old job back. He can’t have it.
The Caesar method of facing the enemy is not uncommon. My swimming master has the same idea. In his opinion, the enemy here is fear of water, a fear he supposes to be lurking in every girl. This belief is the main influence on his teaching method. It could be worse. My friend Lucy White told me something very interesting one day on the way to swimming lessons and I summon up this thing she said when I am in the middle of a swimming lesson and am suffering horribly from the Caesar method. I am not sure I had fear of water before, but I think it’s coming.
It strikes me swimming baths would make a very good setting for a horror film, what with the non-stop scary echoes and shrieks giving me a pain in the ears, and shards of light bouncing off the water and ceiling and walls, hurting my eyes, sharp as needles. Swimming master prances up and down, always laughing and yelling out instructions, no pausing, and I wonder if he is like that at home, yelling and laughing and giving his kids a headache because he thinks maybe if he falls quiet no one will know what to do any more, or how to do it, his family now a gaggle of lost souls wandering the house in a state of perplexity, sometimes stopping in front of him to gaze his way in a pleading manner, just waiting for him to start yelling and laughing instructions.
‘HOLD ON!’ he shouts. ‘LINE UP! KICK! KICK! KICK! PUT SOME LIFE INTO IT!’
This means it is time to swarm against one edge of the pool and hold on to the edge and kick up a storm of water. This is quite a horrible experience. Clearly, life for swimming master = a great deal of frantic activity and noise. Jude lying on his back and staring at the ceiling in deep thought, for instance $ life. Now swimming master strolls up and down the deck doing his favourite thing, filling a bathing cap full of water and dashing it over our heads from a great height. Filling and emptying, filling and emptying. Why? He wants us to overcome our fear of water by all-out exposure and heavy attack by water. Soon we will all be cured of water fear.
‘WATER IS SAFE AS HOUSES!’
I have a different feeling though, involving a desire never to be in a swimming baths again while I walk this earth.
In the next part of the lesson we have to about face and let go. ‘LET GO!’
Off we go into the open, grappling on to a white polystyrene slab and kicking like crazy. The slab is a life raft but this is only an afterthought, the main thought is how it is meant to lead you into real swimming so that before you know it, you simply cast off your slab and there you are, swimming, like in a miracle involving crutches then no-crutches. Yay! There is probably something wrong with me because this never works and I am still very far from the miracle stage. My polystyrene slab flips up in the air in a grotesque manner and bops me on the head on the way down, falling out of reach so I have five or six near-death situations a lesson, with swimming master hauling me out of the water each time, by one arm only, laughing and yelling and nearly wrenching my limb out of its socket.
‘TRY AGAIN! THERE’S A GIRL! DON’T GIVE UP!’
Why not? I can’t wait to get home. I can’t wait for the whistle signifying the end of the lesson and friendly cuffs and slaps on the back from our teacher who is so pleased to be battling fear of water on our behalf. He must be proud of Harriet. I am. Harriet swims like a fish. I see her in all the commotion, floating and flipping around happily, no struggling, just about ready to pass up on the polystyrene, an amphibian perhaps, a duck-billed platypus, I have learned about those, equally happy on land and water, amphibian. My sister swims like a fish.
I do not. I just don’t see it, this business of floating and so on, of larking about in water like it is a proper home for a human, water see-through as air but SAFE AS HOUSES! Maybe the Caesar method is a problem for me, simple as that. It could be worse though, it’s what I tell myself ever since the day Lucy White informed me how some kids learn to swim, a day we were waiting with Harriet at the convent gates, waiting for Mrs White to meet us and take us to the baths.
Harriet is on a wee wander roundabouts. I keep her in my field of vision.
‘Kids are thrown right into the pool,’ says Lucy. ‘Or the sea. And they swim because they must. Otherwise they sink and die.’
‘That can’t be right,’ I say, frowning.
‘Oh yes.’ Lucy knows.
This would definitely save a lot of time, I think. One lesson. And Mum would not have to come on a bus and collect us once a week. Maybe we could even skip out on the single lesson and learn only when truly necessary, in an emergency situation such as a sinking ship, or a fall from a Hawker Hurricane shot down over the ocean in a dogfight whereupon we wait for rescue in the freezing waters, doing the dog-paddle. You swim or die, it’s a mechanism, coming naturally as breathing, unless you are not a regular person and are missing this mechanism, in which case you die. It is not always easy to tell who is regular and who is not which is why we need lessons, I guess. Just in case.
‘Anyway,’ says Lucy. ‘It’s a bit cruel but it happens. In some cultures.’
Lucy knows about cultures, she is half-Indian. I am half-Jewish, maybe more than half.
‘Please don’t tell Harriet, OK? The swim or die thing. Please.’
Harriet is sitting under the conker tree, perched on her towel with her bathing suit furled up neatly within, elbows on knees and her little face in her hands and her straw hat hanging by the elastic around her neck and tipped right back over the shoulders like she is a Mexican in a Western. My sister clearly is not bothered by elastic. She doesn’t get that strangly feeling. She calls out to me suddenly.
‘A straight line is the shortest distance between two points! Sister Martha said!’
Though she does have the swim mechanism, my sister is definitely not a regular person.
‘Great, Harriet!’ I call back.
‘Why not?’ asks Lucy. ‘Why can’t I tell her?’
Not can’t, I think. Shouldn’t. Anyone CAN tell her. Anyone could. ‘Just don’t,’ I say. ‘She won’t like it. Please.’
‘OK – oh! There’s Mummy!’ says my friend and we pile into the car, Harriet in front where she will chirp away at Mrs White the whole journey. Harriet and Mrs White are friends. I feel glad we are learning to swim in a lessons fashion and not the toss into a pool and hope for the best fashion. I am also glad my dad is not apprised of this last method, as it might fit into his style of teaching. Maybe he does know. Maybe he suggested it to Mum.
‘No, darling. I don’t think so. No,’ she says.
Mum is the only person he obeys at all times, no problem, and that is the third thing I am glad about.
If I lose my grip up here without Jude, if I give in to the force of gravity, I will fall splat on to the stone terrace below, falling in a straight line, unless of course I am thrown off this line by a protruding branch on the way down. I doubt it. I think I will fall in a straight line which is the shortest distance between two points. If this happens, there will be a lot of crying plus a funeral and then maybe no one in the Weiss family will go to my dad’s country, the place where he has roots, because the Weiss family will be in shock and travel will not be that important any more.
I may skip dinner. I may just stay up here all night until someone finds me. I may have to scoot down and grab my chicken curry crisps from the bushes in case of starvation and climb back up again. Maybe Mum is saying, ‘No, I cannot go out to dinner without saying goodnight to Jem! No! Jem? Jemima? Je-MIII-ma!’
No answer.
Soon comes the search party and men in uniform spraying torchlight all over the back garden and dogs sniffing the air and pulling hard on the leashes so the men lean backwards as they walk, digging their heels into the dark ground, arms at full stretch. The dogs are hunting me, like I am an escaped prisoner of war and have nearly made it to Switzerland and when I am found, there will be bear hugs and everyone will stick by me, everyone will stick together, a little lost for words, thinking deeply, counting lucky stars, it’s been such a close shave.
I recall stitches under my chin, six of them, three years ago, and a car ride back from hospital and a big white bandage and everyone speaking soft when I got home and giving me careful looks, kind of shy. Harriet even did me some dance steps, a jig, a celebration, because my six stitches, I suppose, could so easily have been two hundred. Do you need anything? I’ll get it! Don’t move, stay right there, Jem. It was a close shave. It can happen so quickly. Sometimes people need reminding.
It’s really not much of a drop. I’d get a few scrapes, that’s all. Or I might mess it up and things will end in maiming and paralysis and being pushed around in a wheelchair whereby there goes my career in sports writing, a roving type of job, though not a girl job according to Jude, who may be wrong for once.
I think about supper and how if I am not there Harriet will be oppressed by broccoli because Lisa will try to make her eat the tops as well as the bottoms and Harriet will not know what to say. If I am there we can do a broccoli exchange, my bottoms for your tops. Without me, it’s a problem. Here’s another. A picture of Mum with a worried look – Where is Jem, where is Jem? – a picture that gives me a rushing pain in the chest. And one more problem. I have to pee.
Someone’s coming. It’s Jude.
‘When are you coming down?’ he says.
Whoa. I watched him all the way since hearing the back door slam, all the way along the path and he never once looked upwards. He just knows I’m here. He knows.
‘Why?’ I ask, sounding breezy.
‘Just wondering,’ he says, strolling to the edge of the terrace to gaze deep into the back garden, stuffing his hands in pockets. ‘Oh yeh. Forgot to say. Got something for you. Black Cat, two pieces, all yours.’
Black Cat gum is my favourite, liquorice-flavoured. It is very good gum. Jude probably stole it when Ben was paying for the crisps.
‘I might come down in a bit. Well, I was coming down anyway, actually.’
‘We need to sort our Action Man stuff,’ he says. ‘For the ship. I’ve already started.’
I climb down. I pick up a twig and swish it about and don’t look at him. I try to sound as bored as Jude. ‘I’m free now. I could help.’
‘OK, let’s go,’ he says and we head for the back door.
‘Jude, do you think I’m a lost cause? I might be a lost cause in everything, do you think so?’ I forget to sound bored. I sound lively.
‘Yeh … probably. Hey. You left your crisps in the bushes.’
‘Oh right, thanks,’ I say, dashing back for them. ‘Wait for me.’
Jude waits. ‘Don’t eat them before supper,’ he says.
OK, Jude.
Hope is not a problem for the starmen any more and pride is not a problem for them either. It is never a problem. They have no time for modesty, which is very time-consuming. Pride is definitely not a problem for many scientists and this is a help to them because there ought to be no distractions in this business of making discoveries which is a full-time job chiefly requiring hope and foresight, and it is why the men at NASA fell apart only very briefly when they discovered a flaw in the most perfect mirror in the world and were able so soon to turn calamity into triumph, instead of slamming the door on NASA and maybe wandering off into forests without shoes.
Edwin Hubble, champion boxer! war hero! publishes a paper with his colleague Milton Humason in 1929 on what he discovers to be an expanding Universe, based on thoughts to do with redshift and distance, and in it he is largely removing the vagueness in previous speculations made by Georges Lemaître two years earlier, but he never mentions Georges, not once, Georges who was an ordained priest before taking up astronomy, a pursuit interrupted by the Great War in which he won La Croix de Guerre avec palmes, a great distinction in my opinion, though he may well have preferred something else, a telescope in his name, a theory, rules and laws.
The recession velocity of a distant galaxy, its redshift, is directly proportional to its distance. Hubble’s Law. The number representing the rate at which the Universe is expanding = Hubble constant. There is Hubble time and a Hubble radius and a Hubble diagram and there is the HST, the Hubble Space Telescope.
Milton Humason went to summer camp near Mount Wilson in 1904 when he was fourteen years old and he fell in love with the mountain, quitting school shortly thereafter and taking on joe jobs when they were building the dome of the observatory at an altitude of 1,750 metres to house the Hooker telescope designed by George Ellery Hale. Milton begins as donkey driver, hauling equipment up the slopes and then he is janitor, then night assistant, until Harlow Shapley takes note of Milton’s great skills of observation and his ability to make photographic plates of faint astronomical objects, and offers him a post in 1920, putting him to work with Edwin Hubble.
Humason is shy about his lack of education but he is a great observer, one of the best ever, even Shapley says so, and Hubble certainly knows it, making him do a new kind of donkey work, Humason the one spending long dark nights in winter which are best for star watching, freezing in an observatory open to the sky and lit by a dim red bulb only, so as not to mar the photographic plates, and unheated because currents of convection can blur the field of vision. Because of the Earth’s rotation and the vagaries of the clockwork tracking system, Milton must never let go of the telescope if he wants to hold one same object in his sight across the sky, the telescope becoming an extension of him, in step with him, it is him.
There was quite a lot of fighting in the astronomy community of the 1920s, the heat of argument, say, tending to blur the field of vision. In science, these are called debates. Here are men arguing about the distance to the stars based on the observation of variable stars, measuring absolute magnitude and periods of luminosity, unsure whether the nebulae they see are part of the Milky Way or galaxies out on their own, confused by stellar outbursts of light and power they don’t yet know are supernovae, signifying the gravitational collapse of massive stars that can shine briefly, each one, as hot as a hundred billion suns. How can a star so bright be so far away? Or so close?
Wishful thinking can blur the field of vision.
When Milton Humason compares plates he has taken of the Andromeda Nebula, he finds minute specks of light in some plates and not in others, variable stars he believes, variable stars Shapley insists do not exist in the Andromeda and so when Milton brings him his finest photographic plate with the careful ink marks mapping what he has seen, specks of light he has been told are not there, Shapley takes the plate away and wipes it free with a white hanky produced from a pocket, making a little nothing out of something, setting his own limits on the possible, an example perhaps, of how pride is not a problem for him.
I don’t see it, it’s not there.
Saturday, and you watch the clock you have placed at the kitchen table. You are going to the cinema, you don’t want to be late, you are never late. You love the way time works, how one same stretch of time can take for ever to pass or else slip by in a reverie, you love this, it’s lovely. Your books are spread out. Homework. Everything is lined up neatly, the edges of books parallel to the rim of the table or at perfect angles to your right and left, leaving fine triangles of table in each corner. You appreciate geometry, straight lines, hospital corners, perfect folds in white linen, you learned this, you have a Brownie badge in bed-making. You are nearly a Girl Guide, the youngest ever. Most of all though, you appreciate words, you can travel with words as with music and the seasons. Change. You even love this word change, it’s a travelling word and travel is important.
The soldier marches around the kitchen, keeping busy, he doesn’t want you to know he is watching you, he can’t help it, he loves to look at you. Frances. He wants to say I won’t let you run late, let me do this thing, watch the clock for you, but he stays quiet, tamping the tobacco down in the pipe he will not smoke inside, no smoking indoors, it gives Emily a headache. My wife, my wife, my old pal. In bed now, always in bed, his fault. He tamps the tobacco down, a sound like ticking, sound of the clock you are watching, it’s nearly time. The soldier is on the move, fiddling with the stove, stealing glances, like he is more than your father. Soldier, labourer, husband, father. What else? Nothing. Sometimes it hurts to watch you, what does it mean, forget it. Keep moving.
At times like this, he has a sudden urge to travel, not anywhere special, just to ride a train. A friend tells him a person can ride for whole days across this country and see nothing but fields of snow or corn until coming upon sea again, but mountains first, mountains like the edge of the world to stop you falling straight off, or the wall of a trench perhaps, craggy with things, limbs sometimes, and over the wall, noise, a sea of it. Stop that. It would be a fine thing to ride a train for whole days across this country he was not born in, a place he can fit his old country into twelve times over at least, but he walks instead, he walks for hours, fast, because the outdoors is good for him, for his lungs and everything else that hurts him indoors, a pain that can pass as he strides the city, passing sharply, quickly, a view from a train window.
He doesn’t see it though, making that train journey, not as long as you are here. He made choices, he is husband and father and he will not leave. He is not sure how long you will stay, it can all happen so quickly, comings and goings, the sea maybe his enemy, and all the things you know, his enemy too, each badge on your arm one step farther away from him, there is hardly any more room on your arms to show all the things you know, that you have learned so quickly, so easily, and meanwhile he knows one thing only, no one goes hungry in his house. He is not sure if that is an achievement, no one says anything, my wife never says anything.
Watching her is different. How can she be right here and so far away? He misses her. She is right here and he misses her. Watching you is different, special and fearful at the same time, a church feeling, there is a word for this, why does there have to be a word for everything? The soldier taps his pipe out and plugs it again. A church word, Creation, Incarnation, what’s that word, damnation, ha! Damnation. Bless my soul! Damn and blast it. No swearing, Bert, she won’t have it. Don’t swear, Albert. Damnation, bloody hell, Salvation … Salvation Army. He chose you, he remembers it, marching in, eyes right, eyes left, not at ease but proud, erect, and halted by you because you looked at him, you really did. Yes, please. That one. Sign here.
You are already beyond him, too much for his arms, though he could carry you if necessary, he has carried men, for heaven’s sake, dead weight. He thinks he ought not touch you somehow, it’s a feeling, that’s all. Don’t touch. You sit close some days, you are teaching him to read and you are so beautiful, he could never have made you. Don’t touch. Awe. That’s the word! As long as you stay, he will try to learn but he knows he will not do as well with words as you hope and this kills him, the way the sight of you does sometimes. He remembers signing for you with an X, a leaning cross, and he worries it is not good enough, it might not count at all and someone will be coming to take you away. Coming soon. He knows also that in history, kings sign with a seal, he has no seal, and he knows that all kings are soldiers but not all soldiers are kings.
‘I’ll be outside,’ he says. ‘I’m just stepping out. I’ll be right on the balcony.’
He is cross today, have you done something wrong? Is it Mummy? It’s so dark in there, she can’t take the light, she is in bed, hospital corners. Bed-making. Daddy, I can do it for you, lots of things, stoke the stove. Fire-lighting. Nearly time. You have a new ribbon, red, rose red, and you can tie it in your own hair, cleat, half hitch, sheepshank, bow. Knot-tying. You love the cinema, especially right before the beginning when everything is black except for tiny specks of light, electric candles on the walls, faint like distant stars. You have been to a planetarium, twice! It made your heart race, your blood rush. There is so much to learn.
My brain can know one hundred trillion things.
Charlemagne, King of the Franks and the Lombards became emperor in the year 800 but he was a reluctant emperor. He drank little and studied a lot and was in awe of teachers, showering them with honours, learning Latin and Greek and mathematics and how to trace the course of the stars, though he came so late to learning, it grieved him, he will never catch up. He kept writing tablets under his pillow for practice in times of insomnia, because this is the skill he prized most, the writing skill. He was a light sleeper and had high hopes of acquiring calligraphy but he did not get very far, nowhere near as far as hopes.
Charlemagne was a king and a soldier, a man with a particular devotion to St Peter and Peter, he learned, is not a name at all but a Greek translation of an Aramaic word meaning rock. There is so much to learn.
I read that our Galaxy is not the Universe itself, it is an island of stars amongst maybe fifty billion islands of stars and this news has no bearing on me, no withering effect, as much to me as ink marks I can swipe away with one flick of a hanky, hey presto, my universe still the Universe, a place I wander with a slight swagger, a cowboy entering a saloon and heading for the bar in a straight line which is the shortest distance between two points, and drinking his drink, intent on a world all his own, one with no trespassers and no change, and nothing to prevail against it, a place he knows, and upon this rock, he builds it. Everything.
Noli mi tangere.
What cannot be touched can never be taken away.
FOUR (#ulink_7563483b-bd8f-5726-bc88-afd05f05d485)
I am on a mission.
I am going to the convent today and it is not a school day and this is down to a decision I made, though all the thinking on this matter was done by Mum. She has this way of throwing out an idea in a breezy manner which is really a solution to all your deep troubles, and you do not even realise it at the time. I am sitting at the kitchen table with a glum expression clutching a Tintin book it is impossible to concentrate on even though it is The Castafiore Emerald, a favourite.
‘Maybe you should go to school today and say goodbye to Sister Martha,’ Mum says, pausing in her activities to gaze out the big kitchen window, like she is talking to herself and not to me at all.
I didn’t know a kid could do such a thing, go to school on a not-school day, and the goodbye business definitely did not occur to me. Whoa. I sit up straight, same as when Ben showed me the other day how to unhook the straps on my satchel and carry it around by the handle in a grown-up fashion. I spent a whole four years of my life wondering why the satchel men sewed a handle smack in the middle of my satchel flap, feeling pretty sure they made a mistake due to sitting up too late sewing satchels. I check out everyone else’s satchel to see if theirs have a handle plus straps. Mostly they have a handle OR straps, meaning I have a downright strange satchel, a thought I had until recently, when Ben showed me how mine is a two-way satchel: an on the back kind which is fine when you are an Antarctic explorer or Coldstream Guard but a bit babyish when you are a mere person, and a carrying around by one hand kind, the man in a suit with urgent plans kind. Grown-up.
‘Now? Today? Shall I go now? I’m going to get my jacket!’ I tell Mum, jumping up from the table while she rings Sister Martha to warn her, I guess, that I am on my way, and that is another thing I never knew, that nuns can speak on the telephone just like non-nuns though it must be a bit hard for them with only a little part of the ear poking free of the headdress. Not headdress, Jem. There’s a proper word for it. What is the name of the nun hat? What is the name for the sit-up-straight whoa! feeling? Word questions go in the Words section. Write it down later. My Daniel Mendoza book is filling up fast.
Whoa. Sit up straight. Not Awe … a longer word. It’s the word for when the shepherds have recovered from shock and are listening carefully to Gabriel who has just introduced himself very politely the same way he does with Mary. Fear not! he says, etc. This is so they know he is on the same side as them, and not an enemy and now he can get on with Annunciations. Whereupon they all have a feeling denoted by a long word starting with a capital letter, as are most big feelings and situations in the Bible, written at a time people were not so used to words as nowadays, and might not know what’s important without capitals to make the words stand out.
Not Awe. Something else. Awe is the Adoration thing, different, what you have to act when you look at the baby, a feeling I will never get right because all I see in the word Awe is a plastic doll in swaddling with flippy horror-film eyelids, a doll held in the arms of a friend who is not a mother and has only been on this earth eight or so years herself, and then I see my sister in a sparkly halo and wings, dancing around with too much enthusiasm. Awe is all mixed up for me now. But what is that long word? Never mind. Anyway, I am not sure it is OK to take words out of religion straight into life in a non-religion situation, so I might as well forget about it. Maybe if you take out the capital letter it is OK, I don’t know.
‘I’ll get Harriet,’ I tell Mum. ‘She is a close friend of Sister Martha’s. Harriet and me could go together, Mum.’
‘Harriet and I,’ she says gently.
‘You’ll come too? Great!’
‘No, Jem. Harriet and I – not Harriet and me, remember?’
‘Oh, right,’ I say. I always get this wrong. There is so much to learn, bloody.
Going to the convent on a Saturday morning and wearing Saturday clothes instead of a uniform is a bit weird. I wonder if I will run into Mean Nun who will freak out even though she is not in charge of me on Saturdays, unless, of course, there are special rules about convent grounds and trespassing upon them in civvies. Maybe she is in charge at all times if I am on convent grounds. Oh well. I am not changing my shoes when I get there and she will just have to face the facts. It is the end of term and I am going on a ship, goodbye.
I think Sister Martha will like my clothes. They are pretty cool. I have my suede desert boots on plus my favourite jeans plus my BRITAIN IS GREAT T-shirt, all white except for those three words in black and the Union Jack below it which is our flag, depicting the union of crosses of saints, of St George (red) and St Patrick (red) and St Andrew (white). Nuns are quite keen to teach the flag story due to the saints part. The Union Jack has a blue background and this also has to do with St Andrew. I cannot remember why. Andrew was the big brother of Simon Peter, meaning the apostle skills and fishing skills clearly ran in the family. Andrew died by crucifixion, so maybe blue is for sky, the background against which he died, and for blue waters, because he was a fisherman and because he was a witness when Jesus was baptised in the river. Andrew did some good works in Russia, met his bad end in Greece and his bones are in Scotland. St Andrew is patron saint of Russia and Greece and Scotland. Saints have very busy lives and often do a lot of travelling.
I am wearing my best jacket, my General Custer jacket for special occasions. I love it, I mean it’s lovely or whatever. It is coloured light brown suede, almost gold, a lot like Gus’s hair. It has snaps for doing up and fringy suede on the underside of my sleeves and another nice row of fringes at the back across my shoulder blades. There is a silky lining, same as the borders of Harriet’s ex-pink blanket. There are two problems with this jacket. 1) I once fell into a bog while wearing this jacket and it bears a small dark stain of bog on one cuff no one will notice except upon close inspection or else if Jude sees me in the jacket and reminds me how I fell into a bog while wearing this jacket. In a showy voice.
‘Hey, Jem. Remember when you fell in the bog?’
‘Yeh-yeh,’ I usually reply, like who cares.
I do remember though. I remember trying not to cry, not because I hurt myself and was going in for bravery or anything, but because this is my favourite item of clothing and I didn’t want it wrecked, and I wanted to hide it, my grief over stains and possible rips in the fabric, because I know things are not important, that’s what they tell you. People are important, not things, you don’t cry over things. Still, when you own a suede jacket like General Custer’s, it can feel quite important.
Everyone had quite a good time when I fell in the bog. I did not incur injury so it was permissible to crease up like this was the best comedy moment in my family’s lifetime so far, especially in the case of my dad who loves this type of event, a person tripping himself up on the cuffs of his very own trousers or walking slam into a lamp-post while reading a book or losing a battle with a trayload of tippy objects, crash! Ha ha ha ha! This is quite an interesting reaction in my dad, seeing as he is the singlemost unsteady person I have ever met. It is possible he is just happy not to be the only one crashing into things. Now there is me to keep him company. Yay!
We were on holiday when I fell in the bog and Harriet needed some airing in a field because of throwing up all over Mum in the car on the way to a fishing village. I’m not sure there are cities in that country, only towns and fishing villages and rivers and fields in between, some of them with booby traps. It was raining pretty hard and Harriet had been staring at the windscreen wipers for some time, whipping her eyes from right to left like she was witnessing a duel about to start between two people in a frozen landscape. I felt a bit sick myself just watching her. We stepped out for some air, feeling bad for Mum who kept trying to make Harriet perk up and get back on the road to health, etc., which was very friendly on Mum’s part, considering she was all covered in barf. That is when I fell in the bog, cheering everyone up no end, and that is also when I thought of Lawrence of Arabia crossing the desert with two small boy guides and one of the boys slips into quick sand, never to reappear, despite Lawrence’s long white scarf and a lot of goodwill and encouragement, don’t let go! When there is suddenly no more pull on the scarf and it comes away with no boy on the end, Lawrence drops his head in the dune. He is pretty depressed. He has one less boy.
Jude and my dad like to remind me of Bog Day, though for Harriet it is probably Windscreen Wiper Day, a day she recalls being hypnotised by two wipers making a groaning sound on glass and clearing up half-circles of space for Dad to see through, spaces obscured by rain almost as soon as they are wiped clean, a game with no winning in it and a bad sight for Harriet, maybe as if she were waking up on a Monday and wishing it were Saturday, opening and closing her eyes to change the picture, squeezing them tight shut with this high hope, but every time she snaps them open, it’s Monday, still Monday.
Jacket problem number two. Growing. A day will come when I must pass on the Custer jacket, but not to Harriet, no, it will have to skip right on by Harriet and wait for Gus. She will not look seemly. She looks seemly in girl things. Why, she even has a little furry jacket and a furry bonnet and muff to match, and in this finery she resembles the child of a Russian king (tsar) and his wife (tsarina) which pleases her much when I tell her so as she has a particular fondness for Russian history involving finery and big chandeliers and revels in fine houses as well as the dark side featuring prejudice and the sudden uprisings of serfs, and the fleeing of Jews in ships, a dark side brought to her attention by my dad when he discussed his roots, some of which are in Poland where we are not headed, Poland that was once in Russia and once in the Austro-Hungarian Empire and now out there on its own. It sounds a bit dodgy over there and I am glad we are not going to Poland. Russian history, however, is now on Harriet’s list of dear subjects and she is prone to questioning my dad thereupon, out of nowhere.
‘Explain about the fleeing and the ships!’ she demands, out of nowhere.
‘When you’re older! I’ll give you a book.’
My dad has books on everything.
‘Big fur trade in Russia,’ says Jude. ‘For hats and muffs and coats. Little animals jumping in the snow. Then nothing.’
‘All quiet in the forest,’ I say.
‘Stop it!’ says Harriet.
‘Sorry,’ says Jude.
‘Yeh, sorry,’ I add.
I see it for a moment, a Harriet vision of Jude’s little animals jumping around in snow, scurrying across winter forests in a light-hearted manner, but leaving tiny footsteps for fur traders to trace, leaving footsteps when they ought to have fled in ships, to clutch the rails of tall vessels on billowy seas and take in deep breaths signifying safety, sailing farther and farther away from Russians waving angry weapons in the air and shouting terrible oaths.
‘They ought to have fled in ships,’ I tell Harriet.
‘Yes, my dear,’ replies my little sister in a small sad voice, patting my hand in a soothing manner like I am the one having the bad vision, not her.
It’s kind of hot for my jacket today.
Maybe I should find Jude before I go. He will need to know where I am going and how long I’ll be, even if he has no outright plans for us.
There are so many ways to leave this house, different paths, and it’s weird now, how the house and all the ways to leave it seem like new things and not old things I have known all my born days. I don’t know if we will ever come back, though Dad says if things do not work out over there we can come home, except he didn’t use the word home, he said here, because this may be home for us but not for him, not really, his roots are in other places, he has to find them.
What does he mean, if it doesn’t work out? I have dangers in mind again, things such as criminals in snowstorms and snow-blindness and our ship smashing up in a tempest and my having to learn to swim as fine as Harriet, to swim like a fish or die. And I think about boxing lessons, how they have come to a halt because of the too many questions I ask and how I am all at sea when it comes to facing up to dangers because of insufficient training in the ring. All I have is a stance and it is a bit out of date. I don’t think Jude will box me any more. Last Christmas, which is a PAGAN HOLIDAY! according to Dad, Jude and I both got the same gift of red boxing gloves, one pair each, proper lace-up ones with black elastic on the cuff part and the rest all red, and such a blazing red, I believe I was more excited than Jude, though it was strange too, to get boxing-glove gifts, like we were enemies or something instead of twin types in a field of gravity. We have only had one match together. It’s too hard fighting with Jude. Here’s how it went.
‘Here,’ says Jude. ‘Wear these.’
Jude passes me a pair of shorts from his drawer. They are navy-blue baggy sports shorts for playing rugby in. I feel special but I act normal, like I wear his clothes all the time. Well, sometimes I do, but only when he has grown too big for a thing and then it’s not really his any more. This is different. He still wears these shorts. We change right in his room and take our tops off and then we gaze at our feet. We must have footwear. We are stuck. What we need are nice boxer boots, high boots with laces resembling the ones Victorian ladies stroll around in except without heels.
‘What do we do now?’ I ask.
‘Football boots. Take the studs out.’ Jude goes over to the cupboard for his boots and picks off clumps of mud, frowning. ‘Studs don’t come out of these. Forgot. Hmm.’
‘We should clean that up, the mud. But, Jude? There’s only one pair – so even if they did come out, what about me?’
‘We’ll have to pretend,’ he says, real decisive, gathering up the clumps of earth and swishing the dirt into a little pile and staring at it. ‘I’ll fix that later,’ he says.
‘Are we bare feet, then?’
‘Yeh,’ says Jude. ‘Bare.’
We sit on Jude’s bunk and I watch him, do what he’s doing. I pull on my gloves and we both have the same problem, gloves on and dangly laces with no fingers free for tying purposes. Jude hauls his gloves off by gripping them between his knees and does up my gloves and slips his back on.
‘Hmm,’ he says again. ‘I’ll ask Mum. Back in a minute.’
This dressing-up business is definitely taking a while and I’m kind of not in the mood any more and Jude looks all serious and spooky, like he’s doing some hard labour or whatever, homework, gardening.
‘Jude, let’s not,’ I say as he is leaving the room. ‘Let’s play something else.’
‘We have to try,’ he tells me, wandering off to get his gloves tied. When he comes back he has two rolled-up towels over his arm and he hangs one around my neck and the other around his. ‘They always have that,’ he says. ‘Towels. Oh wait. We need dressing gowns. I can wear Ben’s.’
We stop and look at our hands.
‘We’ll never fit through the sleeves now, Jude! And I’m not taking these off again.’ My brother is cross, I am really letting him down.
‘You wear it on the shoulders. No sleeves.’
‘Jude, my hands are like a mummy’s. I can’t grip a thing, do we have to? Can we skip the gowns? Please.’
‘Yeh, well, next time we do dressing gowns. It’s realistic’
‘OK then. Do we fight now?
‘Yuh.’
‘Where, here?’
‘In the hall,’ says Jude.
Jude starts jumping around on his toes and punching the air and breathing out in sharp puffs like a horse in a field, jumping all around his corner of the upstairs hall, doing the rope-a-dope I think, and I copy him, hopping up and down and jabbing my fists at nothing and when Jude flicks his towel away by jerking his shoulders quite sharply, I do the same. Now we are ready.
‘Ding-ding!’ I say, as I have heard on TV.
‘Wait!’ snaps Jude.
‘What? That’s what happens. Ding-ding.’
Jude stops dancing. ‘You say our names first. In this corner – in that corner, you know. Then, let the fight begin, then ding-ding.’
‘Oh. Isn’t that just for wrestling? In this corner, in that corner?’
‘Wrestling is fake.’
‘I know.’ Bloody. Everyone knows that. ‘So what are we called then? What names?’ I feel grumpy and I have a lump in my throat, I’m always getting things wrong, and this game is silly, it’s not our usual game, I don’t like it.
‘I don’t know, forget about the names this time, ding-ding!’ Jude says, dancing towards me.
‘Hey! I wasn’t ready!’
‘Come on!’
Jude cuffs me in the shoulder and I stumble slightly, my upper arm aching right away and pins and needles coming in a rush so for a moment I cannot wiggle my fingers or anything. This is realistic, he hurt me, I don’t like it. Then suddenly I start to pull myself together and concentrate hard, running through all the instructions for boxing step by step, making a picture in my head and hearing my dad’s voice in there.
Take a stance! I do it.
Be a moving target, not an easy one! Right.
Do the rope-a-dope! What is that, Dad?
Protect your face! Oh yeh.
I take it step by step but I am somewhere else already, I don’t know where. I am not here, I go missing. I step outside. Back in a minute. And who is that? Like Jude, not Jude, some stranger. I dance, I do the rope-a-dope, my punches will hit hard, right on target, I’m ready. She’s ready.
‘What are you doing?’ he shouts. ‘Get close, you’re out of the ring!’
I notice Jude’s eyes, how they are not grey-blue like mine and Harriet’s and Gus’s, and bright in a different way from the blue in Ben and Mum, Jude’s are a special blue, aquamarine, that’s the word, I’ve seen it on the box of pastel chalks at school, the chalks you only get to use if you are good at Art, otherwise you can only look, don’t touch. It is a beautiful box, flat and long with two rows of pastels in sets of colour, all the shades of one colour fading until the next colour begins fierce and dark until five or six chalks later, it is like a ghost of the first shade. I am allowed to use the chalks and I am miffed if I open the box and someone has messed with the order of things. I fix the order of things and then I draw and whatever colour I reach for is there in the right order of shade, dark to light, good. The box is wooden, it is oblong. A square has four equal sides. In an oblong the opposite sides are equal, and so a square = an oblong but an oblong ≠ always a square, that’s the rule.
Jude is on the opposite side. Jude = my brother but my brother ≠ always Jude. Ha!
I am losing concentration. I feel silly in my shorts and naked body, suddenly unseemly, and I stop boxing to push some hair out of my eyes, my eyes that are greyer than Jude’s, not aquamarine. I say his name real quiet. Jude? But he has not stopped, he is like a toy machine, a wind-up boxing man who has simply not finished fighting and so one red fist slams into my stomach because I have become an easy target, I’ve forgotten everything, all the rules for boxing. I crumple to the floor, feeling like I’ve swallowed a big stick, and I can’t think a single thought and I can’t speak.
‘YOU STOPPED! JEM, YOU STOPPED!’ Jude is angry, he is standing before me, stiff as a tree, yelling.
‘I –’ My breath floods back and I start crying and suddenly Jude is Jude again. He yanks his gloves off by pulling on the laces with his teeth and squeezing his fists between the knees and he flings the gloves so they fly through the air and slam against the bookcases in the hall as he falls to his knees.
‘Jem? Where does it hurt, are you OK, you stopped, sorry, sorry, come in my room, come on, it’s OK, you’re OK, come on.’ Jude puts his arm around me and walks me over to his bunk, pushing me down, pressing lightly on my shoulders. ‘Now lie down, Jem,’ he says.
‘I can’t. It hurts.’ I try to stop crying, but the tears just fall, I can’t help it.
‘Back in a sec!’ Jude says, scooting into the hall to gather up all our stuff, the towels and his gloves and the glasses of water and bath sponges we placed there for reality, for the splash a boxer needs between rounds. He scoops it all up like it is evidence of a crime or something, like mud stains, or sweet wrappers before dinner, broken pieces of crockery, dropped gloves, whatever’s left when you’ve done a thing you wish you hadn’t, when you stopped being careful, you stopped thinking.
Jude stashes our gear at the foot of the cupboard he shares with Ben and I watch him the whole time like he has answers for everything. I have given up for the day, and I am going to need instructions for all events until bedtime because a terrible injury has happened to me. Jude steps in the pile of mud and dirt he left for clearing up later, he’ll fix it later, and he wipes his feet on his shins and slaps the dirt off his legs.
‘Fuck-hell,’ he says in a whispery voice.
‘Bloody,’ I say, to show support, though it hurts to speak.
Jude kneels in front of me and unlaces my gloves, gentle but serious, very determined, like he has a lot to do now and not much time and he doesn’t want to forget anything, he aims to get things right.
Jude smells different from Harriet and I know Harriet’s smell very well, we have a lot of close-up encounters. First off, she has this habit of dancing towards me and around me and then she has that other fancy for flying out from hiding spots behind a door or under a bed and then draping herself over me in triumph like a sporting star at the end of a race in which he has come tops. Also, she will come up behind me when I am reading and rest her chin on my shoulder and read as I read, going in for a lot of little reactions such as surprise and horror and amusement, etc., and I have to try very hard not to get annoyed, bearing in mind the time I shrugged her off and she bit her lip and it was pretty tragic. Even if I am merely a bit haughty she gets offended, limping around the place for ages like some doomed person. I know her smell. Harriet smells like autumn grass and baby powder, she smells breezy. If a person can smell like windy days, that’s how she smells, and Jude’s smell is warmer, like rocks with moss on them, like earth, sometimes like butter and often like bonfires or smoky bacon crisps perhaps. I don’t know how I smell. I’d like to smell like a binocular, especially when it is in the basket at Zetland’s and I can make it out straight away in all the other scents there, just like I could find Jude in a whole crowd of boys, I could find him eyes closed the way Black Bob finds the Mountie in a snowstorm when everyone is stumbling around like mummies, arms outstretched, and snow-blind.
‘Can you lift your arms?’ asks Jude. ‘Are you cold?’
‘Kind of. Yeh.’ I sound a bit pathetic. This is permitted. I am a patient.
I lift my arms as Jude grapples with my sweater, forgetting about the vest I had on underneath before we became boxers and took our tops off. He struggles with the sleeves and I struggle with getting smothered, my head stuck in the chest part with only a bit of it poking through the collar where I can feel a welcome breeze, a little promise of open spaces. I try to be patient while Jude fights with sleeves and I contemplate death by smothering. I feel like crying again but it’s not because of smothering, it’s because of Jude working so hard to fix me and me wanting to help him and knowing not to, and because of this sudden surprise knowledge I have that he is spooked worse than I am about my terrible injury, about slamming his fist into my bare stomach by mistake, and there’s a word for this, that long word again, the old painting word I can’t think of, for arms raised aloft and fingers spread wide and large eyes, and an open mouth for sound to issue from, a strange sound of crying and laughing and no words.
Jude tugs off my shorts, I mean his shorts, and holds out my jeans for me to push my feet into and then I lie back on the bed, the big stick pain not so bad now, only a tired sensation in the stomach region. I lie back so I can lift my bum in the air and pull my jeans up the rest of the way, and snap the waist snap and do the zip, whereupon I sit back upright and stare at Jude, awaiting my next instruction. I feel like a lamb in a field, but never mind.
‘Are you hungry?’ asks Jude. ‘I’ll do fold-overs. And Ribena-milk. Yes?’
‘OK,’ I say, rising. ‘It hurts, standing up.’
‘Better soon. Better to move around. Come on, we’ll go slow.’
‘OK,’ I say, thinking about war heroes with shrapnel wounds in their legs and arms, and gashes in the head from bullets that missed the brain by a hair’s breadth. I think about an officer wiping the blood and gore away with an impatient swish of one hand so he can see clear to lead his men, showing the way with a wave of his pistol overhead, a man falling apart only when the job is done, and then calling out names of men he recommends for decoration, Victoria Cross, George Cross, Distinguished Service Order, calling them out as he is hauled off by stretcher to have a limb amputated and his dangling eye put out. I think about this all the way to the kitchen with Jude glancing at me like I am ready to collapse in a fainting heap right there on the stairs. I name you, Jude, for the VC, DSO. I name you for everything.
The kitchen has been hit. Big Bertha, Slim Emma. It is Lisa’s day off and I picture her struggling over the football pools without me, placing her life savings on the wrong horse because of love and sex, while my dad passes through our kitchen for a tomato sandwich and causes destruction of epic proportions. Jude told me once that there was no field radio in the trenches and observation could be pretty dodgy in winter and messages about enemy placement faulty sometimes, or out of date, and so shells fell too short, gunners bombarding their own side. My dad has bombarded his own side.
The cutlery drawer is open. He has used three knives, one small one for spreading mayonnaise and two huge ones, one for bread cutting and one for tomato cutting. He needs different implements for different ingredients, I’m not sure why, but he has a particular craze for separate implements and it is a good thing we have a lot of implements in this abode. His two big knives are lying akimbo on the chopping board and the bitty knife is in the sink, signifying his contribution to clean-up operations. Why, thanks, Dad. There are crumbs and mayonnaise and tomato juice and seeds just about everywhere, on the counter, on the floor, on the seat of his chair, in a great field around his place at the table, in a neat path between there and the fridge, and on the handles of all the drawers and cupboards he opened for plates and tools. It’s a battlefield.
Jude skids quite some distance in tomato fallout, slamming to a halt at the sink.
‘Whoosh!’ I say.
‘Fuck-hell,’ goes Jude.
‘Yeh,’ I say. ‘Fuck-hell.’
‘You sit, I’ll clean up and do the fold-overs.’
I slide up on to a chair at the white oak table, seating myself like I am about four years old instead of ten, remembering how it was when the seat of a chair is a lot higher than your own waist and merely sitting down is an activity requiring some thought and strategic planning, not too bad a situation in your own home amongst friends and allies, but worrying in my first year out in the world, at the convent or the shops, say, where people might look at me strangely as I fight with a door that opens outwards, not inwards and is also on a spring and is going to slap me straight in the back causing me to fly into a room I mean to enter at a seemly stroll. This is why there are no grave decisions to make at the age of four. A kid needs time to learn about doors and furniture, the height and weight of things.
Jude swabs the decks in the kitchen and then he makes peanut butter fold-overs. I can see he is having trouble with the rye bread which has a tendency to snap, not fold.
‘Jude?’ I say, spotting a magazine Dad left on the table, smeared red.
‘Yup.’
‘Good thing Dad is not a criminal-on-the-run.’
‘Why’s that?’
‘He leaves SO MANY CLUES. They’d track him in no time.’ ‘Ha ha ha,’ goes my brother, chuckling softly. ‘Now. Shall we go outside with these? Or do you want to stay in?’
‘Can we have Ribena-milk inside and fold-overs outside?’
‘Not a problem,’ says Jude.
I wonder if he aims to feed me. Like one of Mum’s wounded birds who have flown into windows and fallen splat on the terrace in a daze, or simply walked off the edge of a nest in an absent-minded manner before being awarded their pilot’s wings. They are not yet distinguished in flying. Mum gathers the small bird and we settle it in a shoebox filled with hay, speaking very softly as she feeds it very very patiently by way of an eye-dropper. Once, there was a bird hurt beyond rescue and we had to go in for burial services but the worst thing about it was watching the bird ruffle up its feathers and stop resembling a bird at all, just disappearing into a ball with its tiny legs poking out, and so quickly, without suitable warnings such as peeps for help or agitation of wings or any such things. Harriet was speechless with grief and horror.
At school, older kids are sometimes called upon by Dining-Room Nun to feed stragglers, i.e. Babies who have not finished their slops, downing tools in misery and defeat, unaware, quite clearly, of the starving children in India who are of great concern to nuns. I want to put it to Sister Catherine that the little kid is not suffering from disregard for starvation in far-off countries but merely from oppression by spam and bangers and horror vegetables such as swedes which are more regularly destined for consumption by cows and other hardy beasts of the field who have one pastime only, the eating pastime. I saw a cow in a field chewing on a pair of socks and shoes one time. They are definitely not fussy.
I am happy to be called upon for slops duty when Sister Catherine is too busy as I have made a study of my mother’s method of feeding wounded birds. I do not have an eye-dropper but I have patience, unlike Sister Catherine who is not a bad nun but is simply overcome by visions of starvation and gets in a muddle, looking deep into her dining room and seeing a workhouse full of scrawny kids, or a desert plain where no crops grow, crowded only by families with eight or nine small children each and no dinner bells ringing. The starvation problem is a mission with nuns and there is no reasoning with them on this matter.
This is why Sister Catherine has no time for waste and will hover over a small child who cannot finish her slops like the little kid has committed a criminal act. She stands there in terrible proximity, wielding a heavy forkload of leftover mush which must not go to waste while the four-year-old is still chewing like a maniac on the previous forkload of mush, eyes wide with oppression, swallowing in painful lumps and listening to the echoes of all the other kids who are running free after lunch, frolicking amongst the trees and squirrels and so on.
I feed the little kid with great patience, walking her over to the window seat with her napkin tied around her neck, and offering up tiny portions of peas the way I’ve seen my dad feed Gus, turning the fork into a racing car or aeroplane or other exciting mode of transport, and in between bites, I prod the window open a little more, so she can feel closer to home, and because I have the keys to the jail and I can tell the difference between a small kid and a felon. I know this kid is dreaming of home. The kid has a homing instinct. The kid is Harriet.
I remember it, how her eyes glazed over and she fell so quiet as I tried to feed her, I thought about the bird in the box, the one who had death throes and lost her bird identity and became a mere ball of feathers with stiff little legs and no life. I wanted to throw open the windows. Run, Harriet! But she had never worn that path alone. Later, I looked up homing instinct, in case of eventualities, in case my sister has to make her way home without me one day. Be prepared.
Homing instinct. ‘See migration, animal.’ OK.
Migration. ‘The mechanism of navigation and homing is not completely understood. In birds it seems to involve sighting of visible landmarks, such as mountains and vegetation, as well as a compass sense, using the sun or the stars as bearings. Land mammals may lay scent trails for local direction finding.’
This may be an animal thing only, though humans are land mammals and this business of scent trails certainly reminds me of how I think about Jude, how I know his smell and so on. Sometimes you look a word up, a word or a person in history, and you get some bonus information, answers to things you did not even know you had questions about. I love that. Jude is a land mammal leaving scent trails for me and my sister swims like a fish. She may go astray but she will not go missing because when it comes to homing, Harriet reads the stars, Harriet is a bird.
‘Jude? Where’s Harriet? Where is everyone?’
‘Oh yeh. Forgot. Mum was going to Jarvis. Took Harriet and Gus.’
‘She did? Did she ask if I wanted to come?’
‘We were busy. Did you want to go?’
‘No. I’m with you. We’re busy’
‘Right.’
I hate it though, when she leaves without telling me. I hate it.
‘So we’re having fish tonight,’ I say. ‘Fish pie or something. I hate fish pie. It’s spooky.’
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Emma Richler
A warm, dark novel of family, distance and time from the author of the much-loved, highly-praised, prize-nominated Sister Crazy.Feed My Dear Dogs begins in outright observational comedy and slides into ever darker regions, while never losing its sharp tongue and wicked wit. Jem Weiss is the middle child of five and experiences childhood more acutely, more joyously and more entertainingly than most. The five Weiss siblings crackle with intelligence, camaraderie, competitiveness and individuality; they have their own running gags, jargon, skits and power struggles; they share a bearlike but adored father and an unflappable and omnicompetent mother.Jem's life hums with Shackleton and supernovas, boxing and cowboys, binocular doughnuts and naval underwear and at the centre of this galaxy of delights is her shining family. As Jem runs her childhood memories through her fingers, she entrances the reader with sharp observations, casual wisdom and tender wit. However, there's always something else looming, and now and again it sneaks up with some pressing tidings to impart – a child's terror at the prospect of moving on, growing up, leaving home.
EMMA RICHLER
Feed My Dear Dogs
Dedication (#ulink_a8543f47-d865-5aec-9f91-b4da85c196a4)
For Daniel, Noah, Martha & Jacob, and for my mother, my muse, and in memory of my father, with love.
Epigraph (#ulink_27e15f45-69ea-59d5-bb53-18031a36e513)
Every Space that a Man views around his dwelling place,
Standing on his own roof, or in his garden on a mount,
such Space is his Universe.
And on the verge the Sun rises and sets,
the Starry Heavens reach no further;
And if he moves his dwelling-place, his heavens also move
Wher’er he goes.
WILLIAM BLAKE
Tamar Rahmani,
for many things
Contents
Cover (#ucc7eba0c-bbff-5297-9e21-fbac601dc6b9)
Title Page (#uafbee0c1-cd3d-5c1e-891a-4e624730c6a9)
Dedication (#u3c41effc-a057-5c7e-a476-3608bb34b5aa)
Epigraph (#u1ebee4de-bd76-5fe8-a4f1-d0730a3ad832)
One (#uca211b9d-2c4a-52bd-a147-d150296fcc53)
Two (#ueffca195-1d0c-57b1-aeac-f28a05d63e44)
Three (#uf28e1fad-9645-5bf3-9014-1d5337183aea)
Four (#u0f05cada-fadf-592a-805e-4d05ea4acc12)
Five (#litres_trial_promo)
Six (#litres_trial_promo)
Seven (#litres_trial_promo)
Eight (#litres_trial_promo)
Nine (#litres_trial_promo)
Ten (#litres_trial_promo)
Eleven (#litres_trial_promo)
P.S. Ideas, Interviews & Features … (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)
Q and A with Emma Richler
Life at a Glance (#litres_trial_promo)
A Writing Life (#litres_trial_promo)
Top Ten Books (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Book (#litres_trial_promo)
On the Novelist in His Cavern, His Vision and Blindness
Read On (#litres_trial_promo)
Have You Read?
If You Loved This, You Might Like … (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)
Keep Reading (#litres_trial_promo)
Praise (#litres_trial_promo)
Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
ONE (#ulink_485d7b59-8bfc-592a-a2e7-1e961eb07d9a)
Jude always said a kid is supposed to get acclimatised to the great world and society and so on, and just as soon as he can bash around on his own two pins, but the feeling of dread and disquiet I experienced on leaving home in my earliest days was justified for me again and again on journeys out, beginning with the time Zachariah Levinthal bashed me on the head for no clear-cut reason with the wooden mallet he had borrowed from his mother’s kitchen. It did not hurt much, as I was wearing my Sherlock Holmes deerstalker hat with both ear flaps tied up neatly in a bow on top, providing extra protection from onslaught, but I must say it struck me that Zach, who was nearly a whole year and a half older than me, same age as my brother Jude in fact, Zach was the one in need of a few pointers regarding recommended behaviour in the great world and society at large. Never mind. The way I saw it, he was just testing out his enthusiasm for tools and surfaces, and, possibly, exploring a passing fancy for a future in architecture or construction work, and in my household, enthusiasms were encouraged, which is why I regularly went to and fro with a handful of 54mm World War I and World War II soldiers in my pocket for recreation purposes, with no one to stop me, although I am a girl and expected, in some circles, to have more seemly pursuits. You have to allow for enthusiasms, you never know where they may lead, so I knew to keep my composure the day Zach hit me on the head with a meat pulveriser. No. Tenderiser. So there you are, that is what I mean, it depends on how you look at things, how bashing away at a piece of beefsteak with a wooden hammer can induce a quality of tenderness in meat is just as surprising, perhaps, as my not protesting the risk of brain damage I incurred at the age of eight or so, instead, forgiving Zach on account of his enthusiasms and general spirit of endeavour.
I think all stories are like this, about looking out for a way to be in life without messing up in the end, a way to be that feels like home, and if you bear this in mind, it’s easy to see some situations as OK which might strike you otherwise as downright odd, and that story about Francis of Assisi and the crow is just one example of many. At the latter end of his life, Francis befriends a crow who is fiercely devoted, sitting right next to Francis at mealtimes, and traipsing after him on visits to the sick and leprous, and following his coffin when he died, whereupon the crow lost heart and simply fell apart, refusing to eat and so on, until he died also. Now, if you nip along the street or go about the shopping with a crow at your heels, you are not likely to make friends in a hurry, because it is odd behaviour, and not recommended. Unless you are a saint, in which case it is OK. So that’s one thing. The other OK-not-OK thing in this story is how that crow did not choose to make life easy and fall in love with his or her own kind, another crow with whom that bird might have a bright future and bring up little crows and so on. No. For the crow, Francis was home, that’s all there is to it, it is OK.
This is also how it goes for le petit prince in the book of that name by M. Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, a story about a small boy in a single suit of fine princely haberdashery, living on an asteroid with a volcano, a baobab tree and a rose, and having nothing much to do but watch the sunset. In the scheme of things, it is not so odd that he falls in love with the rose, and leaves his tiny planet in a fit of lovesickness, taking advantage of a migration of wild birds for his journey, hanging on to them, as it shows in the watercolour, by way of special reins. The prince finally lands on Earth wherein he has a shady encounter with a snake who has murder in mind, albeit concealed in a promise to this small lovestruck and visionary boy, a promise of return, a single ticket home by way of the eternal worlds.
Upon landing, the prince asks, Where did I fall, what planet is this?
I remember everything.
Everything and nothing is strange. It depends how you look at it.
Zach, now, is something in law, Jude says, although I keep forgetting the details, because all I can think is how Zach found a place where everything ought to come out right, and where even hammers crash down upon suitable surfaces for the tenderising of felony and injustice, and I hope he is happy, I hope so, though I don’t know, as I do not go in for telephones and letters these days, not now I have fallen out with society and the great world, but still I have enthusiasms, ones I pursue in low-lit rooms, with my handful of soldiers here, entering my world in unlikely ways, it might seem, to strangers.
October 1935. Joseph Goebbels issues a decree forbidding the inscription of names of fallen Jewish soldiers on war memorials, men who fell for the sake of younger men who are now getting busy scratching out offensive Jewish names from tablets of stone with what you might call corrupt and frenzied enthusiasm.
Me, I turn away and weep.
Where did I fall, what planet is this?
I hear it, I see it, and I was not there, it’s a vision. I remember everything.
Under the influence of gravity, stars in orbit in an elliptical galaxy such as ours are always falling, always falling without colliding, and the greater the mass, the greater the attraction, and the faster a thing falls, the faster it moves in orbit, so the Moon, for one, is always falling towards Earth, but never hits it, and I like to think William Blake, b.1757, d.1827, would appreciate this, as he was very interested in fallen man, and for William, memory is merely part of time, an aspect of the fall, and the visionary worlds are the true regions of reminiscence, a realm wherein every man is uncrowned king for eternity and there is no need for memorials because, so he wrote, Man the Imagination liveth for Ever.
I hate to say it, but William sounds like a man talking himself out of reality and hard knocks and brushes with dark times, a place where, for him, memory and vision meet in the most colourful manner, though not without violence, no, and the glorious thing is what he knew, from maybe the age of eight or so when he had his first visions, that as long as he was bound by time, and striding across London in an impecunious state and an ailing body, in a world that largely considered him crazy, he was OK, he had found it, the means of escape, a kind of resurrection in the eternal worlds, this was his country. William dies singing and when he is gone, a close friend reaches out and brushes William’s eyes closed, a drop of a curtain, a small gesture of infinite grace in one touch of the fingertips. To keep the vision in, that’s what he says. Blake was always falling, never colliding, it’s a trick of gravity. Everyone has a home.
—What country, friend, is this? William Shakespeare, b.1564, d.1616! Do I have an obsession with numbers? Ben says I do. Said. Ages ago.
—What do you think?
—I asked you first!
—Mmm.
—Holmes: I get down in the dumps at times, and don’t open my mouth for days on end. Just let me alone, and I’ll soon be right! A Study in Scarlet, 1887!
—I don’t think that is what you want, for me to leave you. And if I leave, you won’t have to talk to me about your bandages today.
—A tiny accident! I am always falling.
I tell you a brief story about Eadweard Muybridge, b.1830, d.1904, and his obsession with speed and motion, and most of all, with photography, how he set up a row of cameras in a great field, cameras with tripwires attached so the galloping horse in his experiment would race by and take self-portraits in rapid succession, enabling Eadweard to capture this one moment he craved, the picture of a horse with all four feet off the ground, a moment passing too quickly for the naked eye, and proof that a horse at speed is so close to flight, achieving lift-off ever so briefly, in joyous defiance of gravity. What I cannot tell you yet, and I think you know, is how my tiny accident is also an experiment in speed and motion and photography, in my mind’s eye, how for a moment, in a desire for return, I find a means of escape, rising, not quite falling, a dangerous trick of gravity, I know it, I said I was sorry three times.
I do tell you, though, about a postcard I received from my mother, a card postmarked in another country, depicting two cherubim either side of a woman holding a chalice with an egg aloft, they are heavenly escorts. Triptych. The three figures are all white, statuary, and the cherubs are saucy and graceful, and the woman is draped in elegant folds with an expression on her face of surprise and fatigue, as if she has just packed off all the kids to school and now it is time, finally, Breakfast! Except that the title of this painting by Raphael is Faith, and in Christian art, of course, the egg is symbolic of Resurrection. It depends how you look at it.
From the very day my little sister Harriet and I thrashed out this business of fallen man on our way home from the convent one afternoon in extreme youth, clearing up a small matter of catechism arising from morning assembly we are forced to attend as civilians, not Catholics, just for the headcount so to speak, a morning I saw Harriet twist around on her class bench to gaze at me wide-eyed in a mix of alarm and mirth it is not always easy to tell apart, from that very day, she took to these two words, fallen man, with great glee, and particular delight. She has an ear for sayings and will not let go of them, so any time now that she sees Gus tip over, a regular occurrence around our place as Gus is a baby still and only recently up on his feet and moving around under his own steam, Harriet will say it, in grave and knowing tones.
‘Fallen man,’ she pronounces, soon giving in to the wheezy snuffly sounds of Harriet laughing.
On the day we first discussed it, she was not so breezy.
‘I don’t get the snake part.’
‘Forget the snake, Harriet, it’s a symbol, OK? It’s not important.’
‘Is important. She said, snake, snake, snake. Sister Lucy did.’
‘We are not Catholics. It doesn’t count, so don’t worry.’
‘Is it in the Bible?’
‘Yeh. Look, um, try Mum, OK? I’m not sure I get it either.’
I remember it, this morning, the sudden picture I had in my head, of soldiers flying out of trenches into gunfire, falling men, and of people ambling along all casual and keeling over, hurling themselves to the ground, they can’t help it, and there were cartoon images too, of people falling down wells, or off clifftops, or through holes in a frozen lake, hovering in mid-air for a full horror moment of realisation, unless, of course, the character is a hero, in which case he will be saved by a skinny branch on the way down, or land softly in a passing boat, and this is what is so depressing about the snake part in Sister Lucy’s story, and what I do not want Harriet to know, that somehow, due to the events in the Garden, according to nuns, not even an all-out hero can count on a passing boat, which accounts for that story from Mum’s childhood, about the very nice boy at her school who fell down a lift shaft by mistake. In my opinion, telling the fallen man story first thing in the morning at assembly is dodgy behaviour on the part of nuns, kicking off everyone’s day with this terrible news, and giving kids like my sister a doomy outlook on life when they are barely seven years old and have yet to face the facts. Furthermore, I am now deeply worried about lifts, especially as I forget, each time I step into one, to check first off that it is there. I give myself a very hard time about it so I will not step through the doors unawares again, but it is hopeless. I have been lucky so far, but I am only nine and have a long way to go. It is very weird, if you are not a forgetful type, to carry on forgetting the same bitty thing every time. Bloody.
‘So why is everyone falling, then?’ says Harriet, kind of cross.
‘Fallen.’
‘It’s silly.’
‘Right. So let’s drop it.’
‘BARKIS is willin’,’ says Harriet in a growly voice, using her new favourite saying from David Copperfield, a book by Mr Charles Dickens Mum is reading to us at present, which is great, because she does all the voices in a very realistic manner, the posh ones going, my dear, my dear, all the time, and the rough ones, such as Barkis. Harriet is very keen on Barkis. It is possible he reminds her of our dad, who is also a man of few words with a growly voice that is not scary once you get to know him.
‘Harriet Weiss!’ my sister adds. ‘Where are your shoes, put on your shoes! BARKIS is willin’.’
‘Did you say that to nuns today? Barkis is willin’?’
‘Tired of shoes.’
‘Harriet. Don’t say the Barkis thing to them, they won’t understand. They’ll think you’re being rude. Save it for home, OK? And try to keep your shoes on at school. Please.’
‘Why?’
‘It’s rules, Harriet. They have to have rules.’
‘Why?’
‘Because they need to keep control of things. Like in wartime, in the army. You know.’
‘Is this the army?’
‘No. Forget that. I mean – they don’t want us to run wild, that’s all.’
‘Like golliwogs,’ Harriet says, her lower lip all trembly.
Oh-oh. It’s a Golliwog Day. I look at my sister who is only 3ft 4
/
in high since last measured, with her fluffy fair hair mashed down flat, that is, for top accuracy, my little sister with big blue eyes and, I happen to know, one or two tiny soft woollen chicks with plastic feet and beads for eyes in her pocket, I look at her and I wonder how it is nuns can foretell trouble, and suppose she will run wild, as if chaos begins with Harriet taking off her shoes in a classroom, like the first step on the way to the Fall of the Roman Empire and barbarian invasions and so on. Nuns are not very hopeful regarding Humanity.
‘Harriet. Remember what Mum said on that subject?’
‘Golliwogs are made up.’
‘Yup. And what else?’
‘Rude. It’s a rude word. It starts wars.’
‘Yes. No. That’s prejudice. Prejudice starts wars. Got that?’
‘Think so.’ Harriet is not happy, I can tell, because she does a little soft-shoe shuffle and then grins at me, meaning she is trying to forget something bad.
My sister is going through a golliwog phase and it will soon be over, I hope, but I do see her problem. We are five kids in the Weiss family with me bang in the middle and Ben the eldest, and very tallest, and the only one with a taste for jam and other stuff from jars, of the sweet kind, i.e. not peanut butter, aside from Mum who eats honey, though not on toast like a regular person, but mixed into plain yogurt. She has special ways, but that is another matter. OK. When Harriet first saw it, the golliwog leaping around on the label of a strawberry jam jar, she was downright spooked and refused henceforth to sit at the same table with golliwog jam upon it. Preparations had to be made. Everyone needs protection from something.
After my dad finished up laughing and teasing and leaping around with mussed hair, there was a discussion, beginning with Mum explaining about prejudice and African slavery and made-up words, and even my dad getting serious and telling us about yellow turbans on Jews in ancient times leading to yellow badges in later times and cartoons of pigs, until I had a sudden confused and stupid feeling going back to the golliwog, because I had no idea a golliwog was meant to be a person at all. I thought it was a grizzly bear. What an eejit, as Jude would say. The golliwog is deepest black with shaggy spiky hair and wild eyes and I always thought the artist drew stripy colourful clothing on it so it would be less scary for people like Harriet, the way stuffed bears in shops have little bow ties and other accoutrements so that a kid will think it is not an animal, it is a person, and therefore very friendly. No one is thinking straight. A plastic baby doll is a person, and just about the most gruesome thing a kid will ever clap eyes on, and no amount of stripy clothing can take away the spook element from a golliwog. Harriet’s fear of golliwogs has made me see the light on a few subjects of pressing importance, and I am now quite interested in prejudice, whereas Harriet has taken to slavery, and is now very inquisitive regarding slaves and slavery BC and AD, which is fine with me, as it means she is likely to find rescue in her big thing for slaves any time she is rattled by golliwogs, on a day when a golliwog is a monster chasing her straight off a label of a jam jar.
We do not buy this jam any more, but there was worse horror to come for Harriet the time she crossed paths with Mary Reade in the playground, Mary and her golliwog doll tucked under one arm, a sight so bad, my sister was a jibbering wreck and I was called for to restore sanity and peace. Harriet held my hand and would not let go, like she was right inside a nightmare and needed my company until she could remember that a made-up thing is a made-up thing and ought not to have lasting spook power, it does not exist. On that day, I tried to distract her courtesy of intellectual matters, raising fond issues of war and prejudice and slavery and so on, and today, I am wondering whether she has had another brush with Mary’s golliwog.
‘Anything else you want to tell me, Harriet?’
‘We are all God’s creatures.’
‘What? Was that Mean Nun? Did she give you the creatures speech?’
‘Yes. Mean Nun.’
Mean Nun is the only bad nun around the place and I am beginning to think she is a little bit crazy. Any time there is some kind of slip-up committed by a girl, spillage in the mess, lateness, shoddy penmanship, missing items of kit, scuffy shoes, or anything, Mean Nun lifts her gaze skyward and does the creatures speech. We are all God’s creatures, she says, not sounding too happy about it, and then she runs through a list of beasts of the field, usually selecting the less fetching type of animal such as aardvark and hippo, and then she numbers up the categories, colours, religions and countries, rich and poor, one-armed, blind, and those various nations of the wider world in need of missionary work. It’s a sorry list, if you ask me, and quite depressing, so one time, I just had to correct her, the urge came upon me to remind her that Jewish is not like Indian and African, it is not really a country-type situation, not really, and Mean Nun was not at all pleased with this news, probably because I did not ask special permission to pipe up, which is definitely against the rules and a very bad move on my part. Mean Nun hates me now and I am anxious she will declare war on Harriet also, although I doubt it, as my sister has a fine temperament and is very pleasant company compared to me, so everyone likes her even if they do not understand her all the time. If you have an unusual personality and a fine temperament to go with it, you will be OK in the world, I can see that.
‘Tell me what happened.’
‘Mary had her – I said, it’s a slave! It’s rude, it starts wars! We are ALL God’s creatures.’
‘I see. Look, Harriet. You are right about the golliwog thing but you can’t just do the headlines, like in a telegram, you have to fill in the gaps a bit, or people will get it all wrong. Do what Mum does, right? Slavery is a sad thing, golliwog is a stupid word, prejudice … rah-rah, etc. At home, no worries, we get you, but outside, you have to explain more. OK?’
‘Tired.’
‘I know it. Come on, let’s go.’
‘Creatures,’ my sister says in a mournful voice.
‘Creature sounds like monster, but it doesn’t mean monster. Got that? It’s just a word for all things, you know, everything breathing.’
‘Is Daddy one?’
‘Yup. Definitely. Feeling better now?’
‘Yes, my dear. I am going to sing.’
Great. If Harriet is plain happy, or has had a fright and is on the road to recovery, she sings. She skips ahead of me now, and sings that song Gus listens to over and over on his kid-sized private record player he got for his birthday, a small red player with a crank and a tiny speaker he sits huddled up against, hearing out this song with an expression of concentration and dreaminess, because it is a tune regarding flowers, and Gus is keen on flowers and is likely reminiscing, I believe, about trips around the garden in Mum’s arms, with Mum dipping him into flower beds, saying, Breathe, Gus, breathe in! which goes to show how even a three-year-old can look back on life, and even a three-year-old can have specialist subjects and a specialist vocabulary. Gus knows the names of flowers and he speaks them. Peony, clematis, lavender. Rose.
‘Lavender’s blue, dilly-dilly, lavender’s blue!’ sings my sister, suddenly stopping in her tracks and turning to frown at me. ‘What’s dilly-dilly?’
‘Um. Name of a person, I think. The one the person who is singing about lavender, is singing to. Yeh. It’s a person.’
‘A creature.’
‘Yup. Dilly.’
‘No,’ goes Harriet, correcting me. ‘Dilly-Dilly.’
‘It’s just Dilly. It’s a song thing. Poetic. Like if I said, Harriet, Harriet.’
‘You never do.’
‘Right. But if I did.’
‘Why? Why would you?’
‘Harriet. Is this the Why game?’
The Why game involves asking a lot of pesky useless questions, largely to blow off steam and get some attention, and it is a game to play when you are tired from kid-type pressures and want to hang up your gloves for a while and take a rest, which is the case with my sister who is clapped out just now due to catechism and rules and golliwogs. The Why game is best played on a grown-up who will rattle easily and fall apart where a kid will not, a kid knows the ropes. Usually I can handle it just fine, except I am not in the mood today, which is what I tell Harriet.
‘I am not really in the mood.’
‘Why?’
‘HARRIET!’
‘OK my dear. Amen. BARKIS is willin’.’
I hardly ever play this game myself because there are two chief grown-ups in my house and I do not want them to crack up and fall apart, and I know also they will not play it according to the rules. They are too smart. Here is my dad.
‘Dad, why are you reading that newspaper? Why are there three newspapers on the floor, why? Why do you always lie down on the sofa to read them? Why can’t you read sitting up? Why are your eyes brown when every single other Weiss has blue ones? Why?’
My dad ruffles some pages and pays me no attention at all. ‘Jem, have you done your homework?’ he says.
‘Why should I do my homework? What is homework? Why?’ I am losing heart and getting flustered. This is not working at all.
‘Jem. Go and get me a tomato. A big, firm red one. Ripe. A tomato and a knife on a plate.’
‘OK Dad.’ End of game. And remember, Jem. Do not cut up the tomato, he likes to do it himself. Don’t ask why.
The other chief grown-up in my house not to play the Why game with is Mum. Here are a few things to know about her first off. 1) She is very beautiful and was a mannequin. This word had me very confused at first because I know mannequins are plastic life-sized dolls who stand in shop windows and have pointy fingers and zombie looks. Mum is just being shy and using a poor word in place of the posh one. Model. Mum was a model, and quite famous. OK. 2) She is pretty weird in a spooky but friendly way. 3) She is of unknown origins. I have a few theories about these unknown origins, however, they are only in the development stages and still require all-out investigation. I am on the case. Mum explained to me once, how she was a foundling, definitely a new word to my ears, and a pretty one, it seems to me, for something it is not very good to be. When Mum said, I was a foundling!, she said it in a voice that gave me a suspicious feeling, because it was sad and lively at the same time, like when you fall down and cut your body someplace and need to communicate the blood situation you are in without freaking anyone out, or being sissy. OK. I knew it was not the time to ask a lot of questions, this is what you learn if you listen hard to people and watch them carefully, that you have to pick the right time for questions. My first one would have been, What is a foundling exactly? But it was not the time to ask that question, so I just said, Oh, in a momentous way, the way you speak in the cinema when someone passes you a liquorice toffee and you do not want to disturb anyone in the audience but you want to say thank you for the liquorice toffee.
Here is one thing I am pretty sure of. When you are a foundling, your ideas about countries are more free and loose than most people’s, and you do not suppose, for instance, that your country is the best just because you were born in it, meaning a foundling can grow up being always on the lookout for a better place, the top place, and in some cases, maybe even the sky is no limit. I believe Mum is such a case. I definitely have my suspicions and she is aware of my suspicions and tries to throw me off the scent. Here is an example. I am sitting at the kitchen table messing with homework and my Tintin book is right nearby, a reward for when I finish up my homework. The Tintin book is Objectif Lune, called Destination Moon in English. Mum is cooking.
‘As soon as there is a passenger ship to the Moon, Jem, I will be at the head of the queue for tickets! How divine!’
This idea of being first in the queue has me worried, my insides feeling all hot and empty at the same time, like when I arrive at school and realise I have left something very important at home, such as homework and money for tuck. Oh no. Does she want to leave us? Would she rather be up there where the Moon is? I hope the passenger ships do not start up any time soon and I am going to have to look in my dad’s newspapers for news. Which part of the paper will that be in? I will ask Ben, who is well up on weird stuff most people are not yet apprised of. Right now, though, I try to forget this worry about passenger ships.
‘Maybe I’d like to go too,’ I say. ‘And, Mum? Tintin went on the Moon way before the Apollo, Apollo, what number?’
‘Apollo 11,’ Mum says, no thinking required, no pausing and eyes lifted skywards in reflection or anything.
‘Right! 11, and they landed in, um …’
‘1969, the 20th of July. They stepped out at 9.56 p.m.,’ she says in a gentle voice, chopping things with a big knife and stirring up stuff.
‘Yes? Well, Tintin was there in 1953. So there.’
Here’s how it goes playing the Why game with Mum.
We are going to Zetland’s in town and this is a favourite bakery of the Weiss family’s. OK.
‘Mum?’ I say. ‘Where are we going?’
‘Well now, that’s quite a philosophical question. I’ll have to think about it. Is that all right with you?’
End of game.
We ride a bus and if I lean forward too far as I gaze at things out of the window, Mum lays her hand on the metal bar of the seats in front of me, she wraps her long fingers right around the spot where if the bus stops suddenly, I would go crashing into it and smash my chin or bite my lip and get into a casualty situation, the way a lot of kids do if someone like Mum is not looking out for them. Mum has long arms so she can do this without making a big thing of it, lifting her arm slowly and resting her hand there like it is nothing to do with you, and this way you do not end up feeling pathetic and helpless. Also, she never says, Be careful! or, Don’t do that! or, Lean back! or anything because I think she wants us to be free and move around and gaze at things in a spirit of investigation, so that even if you do something kind of crazy like test out the sharpness of a knife by running your finger over the edge, she won’t yell at you which can be downright spooky for a kid, no, she will open up a discussion about that knife and pretty soon you find something a little less crazy to do, as well as having a few new thoughts on that particular experiment, and how to go about it if you feel the urge again, to test the sharpness of knives. Mum is a very cool person, and has special ways.
I am pretty keen to get to Zetland’s and Jude is going to be happy when we bring binoculars home, it is a favourite comestible of Jude’s and mine. A stranger might not be able to tell Jude is happy, watching him open up a paper bag with Zetland’s written across it and containing binoculars, a stranger thinks you ought to crease up in a big smile and say how happy you are, etc., but you do not, not always, not if you are Jude who will go ‘hmmm’ in a slow and quiet manner, and raise one, maybe two eyebrows, and push out his lower lip, that is to say, he is happy about the binoculars, even though he may not want one straight off. When you know a really fine thing is around, such as a binocular in a bag, you don’t need it straight off, sometimes it is better saving it for later, and just knowing it is there.
A binocular is a roll with a crunchy crust in two parts and a crease in the middle but connected, therefore resembling binoculars. They do not call them that at the shop. They look confused if you say, Whoa! binoculars, and point to the big wicker basket they are heaped in, they won’t know what you mean, although it is pretty easy to work out. Never mind. There is a lady there who never smiles and is a bit scary. I decide she is Mrs Zetland because she seems in command, the way a teacher does, or an officer in a war film. She wears a white ribbon around her head like a bandage, and most of her hair is on top, sort of growing up out of the bandage, so her hair reminds me of candyfloss on a stick at the fair except hers is grey not pink. I look at her and I kind of want to get the scissors out and do some trimming. Topiary work.
Mrs Zetland is OK and does not scare me any more ever since Mum sent Jude and me in once, on our own, to pay the bill and collect some rolls, whereupon Mrs Zetland slipped us each a lemon tart. Jude and I have been in a few times now. Two lemon tarts, every time, slipped to us like she is a World War II spy and we are two other spies on the same side. I don’t like lemon tarts much or any kind of tarts and just about two bites is all I need to be sure of this, and then I pass it on to Jude who likes a lot more stuff than I do, adventurous is what Mum calls him. I would never tell Mrs Zetland though, or she might be hurt, and I think she has a thing for Jude and me, something probably Mum knew all along, which is why she sent us on the solo mission with no fear in the first place.
After the bus ride, we walk. Mum is a great type to go out walking with. Here is why. Sometimes you will see a little kid out walking with a grown-up and you can tell right away he is having a hard time. He is reaching up high to squeeze his hand into the big grown-up hand and he is getting a bad shoulder ache, plus he is stumbling along with loose crazy legs like a drunk, just trying to keep the pace, and carry the flag, and not let anyone down. He is sending a few frantic looks upwards at the grown-up as if to say, Whoa, can’t you see what’s going on here? I’m in trouble. And each time he sends that frantic look skywards, he nearly trips himself up and sometimes there is no choice but to tip right over in a messy sprawl in an effort to put the brakes on the grown-up, which is when you might see the little kid dangling like a stuffed animal, his limbs making no contact with earth at all, just swinging there pointy-toed and skimming the surface in a desperate and foolish manner. This can happen when the grown-up is mad about something, I believe, which is why he is barrelling along at high speed with scanty regard for the kid, and nothing can stop him. Or else he does not know that a regular pace for a long-legged person is racing speed for a kid. You have to explain some things to grownups you would not think necessary. It’s disappointing, but those are the facts.
My dad walks slow. He does a lot of thinking when he walks, requiring a slow pace, which is perfect for our Gus, who is new at being upright and walking to and fro in the earth, but it is too slow for me at times, so I find myself drifting ahead of my dad, I can’t help it, and I do this until I get a wrenching feeling in my wrist and have to pause and hang back a little, and go at my dad’s pace, looking all around, and staring at the pavement, and doing some deep thinking. You can learn a lot from the different walks of people, the speed they move along at, and the way they hold your hand, and all of this is interesting and surprising if you are crazy about a person and want to fit in with their pace and way of doing things when you are together and out for a stroll, instead of struggling and trying to do everything your own way which is already familiar and not very educational or surprising at all.
When I walk with my dad, I do not say, ‘Dad, do you mind holding my hand the way Mum does? You are mashing all my fingers and my thumb is trapped and it feels bad.’ No, I don’t. I don’t even wiggle my fingers to restore the blood flow, or just so I can recall how they are separate digits and not one single clump of fingers like that crazy feeling I get if I have to wear mittens for school regulations, a feeling of being impaired and suffering from leprosy or something, only having a thumb available for active duty. I try to steer clear of mittens in life, and when my dad holds my hand, I get a mitten feeling and it is pretty terrible, but the thing is, I don’t mind, because it is cool to be with him, and to see how he is so different from Mum, and everything on our walk is different, and newish, even if I have walked the same ground with her, and this is what I mean by not struggling against a person you are crazy about. I get busy thinking about my dad, and wondering what he is thinking, and other matters. Will there be an ice-cream cone at the end of this walk, or a packet of crisps? He doesn’t talk much at all. Has he forgotten I’m here? No. He gives me a big hand squeeze, a torture-type squeeze, and I yell out, and this creases him up with mirth. He knows I’m here, yes.
Mum walks at kid pace, no matter which kid she is out with, and she does it without making you feel bad, like she has to make this big adjustment just for you. No. She acts as if this is the very pace she had her heart set on when she decided to go out strolling with you. Why, thanks, Mum! Also, I notice things I would not normally pay a lot of attention to. Let’s say there is woodland roundabout, I will notice what stage the buds and leaves are at, what type of tree it is, and whether or not it is healthy and so on. If there is birdlife, I will think about the birds hanging out in the trees, and muse on bird varieties and the ins and outs of general bird activity. In town, now, on our way to Zetland’s, walking past buildings I have seen many times before, Mum has me noticing nice gates and windows, carvings and decorations, angels and lions and mythic things, and I wonder how I missed them every time. I wonder if topography changes according to the person walking about in it, like in the theatre, especially in ballet, with scenery shifting in the blink of an eye almost, I love that, how you are in a whole new place suddenly, according to good swans or bad swans. When the nice swans are out, the scenery is pretty cheery. When the bad swans dance in, quick sticks there are big waves and stormy lighting and the music is noisy and makes my heart pound. In my opinion, they go a bit overboard in ballet, as if they cannot trust the audience to tell the difference between good and bad behaviour in a swan, which is why they dress them in two colours for extra emphasis, and the two colours, of course, are black (bad) and white (good). Heavens to Betsy. If one swan with stary eyes is casting evil spells and committing felonies right there in the spotlights, a person will not require all those big hints in scenery and costume to be sure that swan is on the wrong track and in sore need of reform. Never mind.
I look up, I look down, I hold her hand. We walk, my Clarks Commandos just breezing alongside Mum’s fine and marvellous shoes. I do not know many people yet, but I do not expect to see finer or more marvellous shoes looking so natural on a human being, as if they were made just for her, one pair with little scales on it like a snake but not scary, and another pair of dusty-pink suede with a fine bow, and all of them long and narrow with heels of various heights and widths and pointy fronts, like sailing boats. We sail along.
Hands. I think if you are an artist and want to go all out for Art, then you have to practise eyes and hands a lot. Eyes need to be seeing things and hands need to look as though they can feel. I take note of eyes in old paintings on gallery outings and most of them have a zombie look, which is quite disturbing, so I cannot concentrate on the rest of the painting. Statue eyes are the worst. All the details are nicely carved out, the lids and eyeball separate and everything, with sometimes even a tiny bump where the pupil and iris go, but it is still plain naked white stone, and worse than a blind person staring at you and making you feel terrible for having vision and not being able to help the blind person in the vision department. In the Tintin books, M. Hergé draws two black dots for Tintin. These are his eyes, and they are always seeing, which goes to show how an artist does not need a lot of detail to make a thing real. At times, hands are painted in so much detail, limbs and clothing are a bit boring, as if the artist knocked himself out doing the hand part and kind of gave up after that. Other times, hands resemble stumps of wood with little bits of kindling for fingers.
I don’t like to see tons of paintings all at once, because I get them all mixed up, and that can be depressing, but here is my favourite so far. This is the name of the painting. The Annunciation, by Fra Filippo Lippi, b.1406?, d.1469. I am quite interested in dates, partly since the nuns told me how in olden times people had very short lives, and it made me a bit anxious, so I like to do some calculations of my own. B.1406? I don’t understand why they are not sure of Filippo’s birth year, did his parents forget to write it down? Mr and Mrs Lippi were so happy when Filippo came along, they just forget, and friends ask, how old is he now, when was he born? And the Lippis scratch their heads and look at each other in a merry distracted fashion and say, We don’t know! About 1406? Or maybe Filippo was a foundling. Of unknown origins. It’s possible. They knew when he died though, someone wrote that down all right.
In the painting, the Angel Gabriel is giving the big news to Mary about the Immaculate Conception that is coming up for her. She is reading a book before calling it a night, and you can see her bedroom with the blanket neatly folded back at one corner like in a hotel. I have been to two hotels and I am most impressed by this foldy thing they do, some stranger worrying about you last thing at night, and just not wanting you to tussle with sheets and blankets at this difficult time in the day when you are all worn out from life. I do it to my own bed now and then, and pretend someone else did it. OK. Mary is listening to Gabriel and she is quite pleased about the news, even though she will not be able to get much reading done for a while, which was the only bad thing for Mum regarding the five babyhoods in our house, the loss of reading time, but she is catching up now that we are not so pathetic and helpless.
In the painting, Gabriel’s right hand is doing something strange. His first and second fingers are in that two-finger position signifying, I happen to know from nuns who are well up on this sort of information, the dual nature of Christ, human and divine. For nuns, these are the facts. Gabriel’s third and fourth fingers are furled backwards, holding on to his red cloak, and I tried to do this myself, pointing with two fingers and gripping my jumper at the same time, and what I got was an almighty pain in the hand, meaning an angel maybe develops special muscles in his hands the way piano players do. Special-purposes muscles. Most of all, I want to touch Gabriel’s hand, I want it to touch me. I do not care if it is unrealistic.
It’s autumn and Mum wears kid gloves, this is the kind she always wears. She wears kid gloves and has a kid on the end of her hand. Kid gloves are very soft and thin and made out of baby goats, a piece of news I aim to keep from my little sister as she has a very big thing for fauna, especially the lamb species to whom goats are closely related, and she does not need to be reminded that Mum’s gloves are made from goats who never had the chance to be grown-up goats and lead a full life, b.Monday, d.Friday, over and out, goodbye.
I can sense Mum right through the gloves, the gentleness, the slender bones, the little changes in pressure she applies for fun, she knows I’m here. I imagine the blood flowing in her fingers, and the little pulses pulsing until I cannot tell the difference any more between the feelings in her hand and the feelings in mine, like we are only one hand now, and suddenly I am in panic stations about it, I start flipping my thumb wildly from inside her palm, to the back of her hand, and as we get closer and closer to Zetland’s, I have a superstition moment, involving having to count to eighteen before we reach the door and Mum lets go of my hand, or else. Or else there will be no binoculars left. Or else there will be only one, and all seven Weisses will have to share it out, tearing off seven miserable pieces and saying prayers over them, and eating very, very slowly with a poignant cheery expression on our faces, signifying courage in the face of asperity as in nice poor families in books by Dickens. It will be terrible.
One, two, three … don’t let go … eighteen!
‘Here we are,’ says Mum, releasing my hand and maybe wondering why I am close to fainting and in need of stretcher-bearers.
Mrs Zetland smiles an all-out smile at Mum, because Mum is the kind of person people smile at, no matter what, even if it is not their big thing in life, to show signs of merriment for no obvious reason, and I clip my thumbs into my jeans pockets, and waltz up real casual to the binocular basket in the front of the shop, worrying that even though I made it to eighteen, I had called upon disaster anyway, because I am a fallen type, and must stay on my toes and never count on soft landings in passing ships.
The basket is brimfull of binoculars, and they strike me as the most rare and miraculous binoculars of all time, because fate did not mess with me, and also because of this new thing, how if I imagine a bad thing happening, I have a lot of grief, as if that bad thing has already happened, it is news. Mostly I do this late at night when I cannot sleep, I picture it, all the ghastly outcomes, beginning with small things, such as no more binoculars and always ending up with the same doomy thing, Mum going missing, which is a ridiculous fear to have and plain silly, but I saw it in my head, so now I worry, and I feel responsible, so I will have to watch out, like in that poem Mum reads to Gus from Christopher Robin.
James James
Morrison Morrison
Weatherby George Dupree
Took great
Care of his Mother,
Though he was only three.
James James
Said to his Mother,
‘Mother,’ he said, said he;
‘You must never go down to the end of the town,
if you don’t go down with me.’
There is a tip-off in this poem, when the mother goes missing, that James may be imagining things. Here it is. James bashes off on his tricycle at breakneck speed and petitions the King. Nothing wrong with that. But the King’s name is JOHN. I looked this up. The right king at the time of Christopher Robin was George VI. Good work, Jem.
King John
Put up a notice,
‘LOST or STOLEN or STRAYED!
JAMES JAMES
MORRISON’S MOTHER,
SEEMS TO HAVE BEEN MISLAID.’
James may be imagining things, but he worries, and you can’t take the worry out of the boy, even with bare facts. Your mother is right here, around the corner, coming soon. James James has a problem with fear and worry, and he is only three.
I check out the basket, which is brimfull.
‘Whoa!’ I say. ‘Binoculars.’
There are questions I want to ask my mother today, but never will, not even in fun, in the spirit of the Why game, say, because these questions would worry her, and worrying is bad for her, alarming as I now find strong light and some frequencies, and society at large. The great world. Everyone needs protection from something.
Worry. This is an interesting word and it derives from the Old English wyrgan, a hunting term meaning to kill by strangulation, and worrier, for so long, meant someone tormenting something or someone else, most typically an object of desire, and not until modern times has worrying become a word for a self-inflicted torment, that passion all one’s own. I worry.
Whither thou goest, I will go.
Come back.
Still no passenger ships, but I do not rule it out, I do not rule out the Moon. Or thereabouts.
When the small lovestruck boy with the fluffy blond head and single suit of fine clothes, finally touches down to Earth, in an African desert, he meets a snake, a funny old creature, he observes politely, slender as a finger, flicking through the sand, he reflects, a chain, colour of the Moon.
—Bonne nuit, he says.
—Bonne nuit.
—Where did I fall? What planet is this?
This prince is homesick.
—I can take you farther than any ship.
—Will it hurt much?
The prince has a single vision of a rose and he closes his eyes, I am sure of it, to keep the vision in, and just as he falls, ever so briefly, both feet lift off the ground.
Navigation is an art. The DFC is an award for distinction in flying. Well done, little prince.
Whoa, the Moon.
On 20 July 1969, Apollo 11 approaches the Moon by way of its shadowy side, lit only by earthshine, and seeming blue-grey to Neil Armstrong whose heart rate rises to 156 beats a minute. He has a vision of a great sphere, a perfect round evoking Earth, something he takes as a sign of welcome, and the blackness of the sky is so intense, the surface so inviting, it recalls Earth again, a night scene illuminated for the cameras.
The Apollo lands in the Sea of Tranquillity and, before stepping out, Buzz Aldrin celebrates Communion with a chalice lent to him by a Presbyterian church. On the Moon, he appreciates one-sixth gravity and the sense of direction it gives him, a feeling of being somewhere, he says, something he will miss once home, where he drinks too much and suffers from bipolar disorder, quite understandable in a person who has flown so high, achieving a flight of true distinction, only to splash down suddenly to hopeless dreams of return.
—See my planet, says the prince. Right above us … but so far!
—So what are you doing here?
From here to there. How far? Not very.
Robert Falcon Scott. Wednesday, March 21. Got within 11 miles of depot Monday night; had to lay up all yesterday in severe blizzard. Thursday, March 29. Last entry. For God’s sake, look after our people.
From here to there. What do I need? A small suitcase, a fine pair of shoes. A tiny nip of venom, a stroke of a knife. Escape velocity.
Gravity is a universal law of attraction. Escape velocity is the minimum speed required to keep moving away from a planet or star without falling back to the surface or entering a closed orbit around it, and gravitational pull diminishes the farther the surface of a star or planet is from its centre. In the case of a black hole, a star with a concentration of matter so dense it falls in on itself, and with a gravitational field so strong, spacetime, as Karl Schwarzschild first explained, will curve around it and close it off from the rest of the Universe so nothing can escape it, not even light, trapped in a body whose radius is less than a certain critical number, and where the escape velocity is equal to the speed of light. This is the Schwarzschild radius, a short straight line to the horizon of a black hole through which no signal can pass, named after Karl, astronomer, pioneer in optics, soldier, German Jew, b.1873, d.1916, winner of a posthumous Iron Cross for his pains on the eastern front, a horizon, you might say, he never escaped.
Black hole, dark star, dark matter, over 90 per cent of the Universe is invisible, unknowable. So far. Black hole, foxhole, dugout, trench, dead soldier, unknown soldier, mark him with a cross. Lost, stolen or strayed. Dark matters. I will find her. What do I need?
Begin with an eye.
Galileo will go blind, but in 1609 he points a telescope at the Moon from his garden in Padua, and in the shadows, he finds mountains and seas, writing, ‘Its brighter part might very fitly represent the surface of the land and the watery regions darker.’
An eye is a camera and it is 80 per cent water, forming in the dark of the womb into a small sphere with a lens in front, and a screen at the back with 137 million separate seeing elements, and nerve lines leading to the brain where out of a storm of electrical charges, a picture ought to appear, with all the qualities a person expects, of colour and light, contour and transparency, near and far. The eye is subject to tiny flaws and aberrations, everything has to be right, the pressure in the aqueous solution determining the shape of an eye whose lens must be clear as glass, and curved just so, and placed at the correct distance to focus the light on to the retina with its photosensitive cells, able to screen and unscreen, and produce the purple pigment that will allow for seeing in low-lit rooms, call it visual purple.
I trap the light, I remember everything, nothing escapes me, and I see marvellous things, no ticket required, a great picture show, one night only, every night, a spectacular! Son et lumière, a starry cast, and I can see clearly, I’ve got visual purple.
The first time I saw you, Mummy, you wore a red dress. It was red velvet and very slim-fitting, and you smiled at me and reached out with long sensitive fingers, a small gesture of infinite grace. I remember, even though I was only eight days old. I saw you.
TWO (#ulink_cb0b139d-02fb-58f9-aed1-d4c785f73219)
When Gus came home that first time, wrapped up in Harriet’s pink baby blanket, I had a thought regarding Mum and unknown origins, and how you might expect a foundling to be a bit edgy about babies of her own, worrying, perhaps, they will go astray like a gang of puppies in a park, to be scooped up later by a dog-catcher, unless they meet a bad end in the sweeping beams of onrushing cars, like sorry spies in wartime.
The dog-catcher delivers them to a dog home, a Salvation Army type place, but for dogs, and now they are puppies of unknown origin, each one hoping for a person to come along and choose him, and take him to a better place, but whatever happens, even if the new owner is one fine person, the dog will always be looking over his dog shoulder for the other puppies and his first home, and wondering what happened and was it his fault, etc., and maybe give in to a lifelong identity crisis, who knows.
Clearly, this dark matter of unknown origins is not a problem for Mum, because instead of looking over her shoulder and acting edgy, she has gone all out for babies, with Gus the latest, and between the day he first came to us up to now, I can only recall a single event which might be understood as an open display of nerves on her part, and that was the day of the Harness Affair, when Mum unwrapped a parcel before our very eyes, unfolding leaf after leaf of white tissue paper to reveal an arrangement of white suede straps resembling reins, reins most typically attached to sledge dogs in Antarctic regions.
‘For you, Gus!’
‘Mum,’ I say. ‘Um. He doesn’t have a dog. We don’t have a dog. Are we getting one?’
‘No, no!’ she says, laughing now, and tickling me in the neck so I don’t feel too much of an eejit. ‘It’s for holding Gus. In busy roads. Until he is older.’
Well, blow me down. I never knew they made leashes for kids. One time I strapped it on Gus myself and held on patiently, waggling the reins a little in an encouraging manner, waiting for him to go walkabout in the garden.
‘Walk on!’ I said, which is what coachmen say to coach horses in old films. ‘Walk on, Gus!’
And Gus just stands there, in contemplation of the flowers or something, not budging an inch.
‘Roses,’ he says.
‘Right. Roses.’
I am not worried that Gus’s vocabulary is limited at present to the names of flowers. He has a long life ahead of him and therefore it is not a cause for anxiety in me. Neither am I all that worried about accidents of the scurrying into traffic kind. This baby is simply not aiming to scoot off anywhere in a reckless manner, I don’t think so. He is not the type.
I unstrap the harness and have a go on Harriet. I ought to have foreseen the difficulties ahead. Harriet is very meek and polite as I wrangle with straps and buckles and then her eyes grow large and suddenly she is scampering all over the joint at gallop speed with me flying on behind, missing a step or two, until I realise I just do not have to be doing this, grappling on to my sister in a frenzy of determination like a charioteer in a chariot race, no. I drop the reins and decide to let her be a wild pony in a field all by herself, the harness flapping loose, and me going in for deep breaths on the sidelines. Bloody.
The thing is, Mum never used the harness on Gus. I believe there was just something about it she fell for, the soft white leather, the beautiful silver buckles, the idea of it, I don’t know, but I saw it, two years or so into Gus’s life, how Mum has her own way with this dark matter of unknown origins, how it is different for everyone maybe, one person ending up a one-man band, taking no chances on spreading out and having a family that might go astray, and another being Mum, fearless, filling a whole house with kids, no leashes required. It works the same in a bad-mood situation, my sister, for instance, turning to song and dance in moments of strife and confusion whereas I imagine even worse calamities, hoping my bad situation might seem rosy in the fearsome light of my imaginings, and now it’s just a habit, I can’t stop it, my bad mood opening a door on a whole roomful of bad-mood ideas, such as naval disasters and captains going down with ships, and firing squads, and amputations in wartime, no anaesthetic, and so on, and then I usually feel a lot worse. Clearly, my method is not a prize-winning method. I may need to review the situation.
Sometimes my dad helps out. If he happens to come along and catch me in a pathetic droop over some maths homework I am messing up, or a drawing of footballers that is an outright disaster because I have been so busy doing all the muscles in their legs, I have not noticed, until too late, there is no space left to draw heads and sky. It’s awful. This is when my dad will do a boxing count in a loud boxing referee voice, and a frantic sports commentator voice, while raising one arm in the air above me, to bang it down sharpish on each count, his pointy finger grazing the top of my drooping head.
One! Two! Three! … IS SHE OUT FOR THE COUNT? Six! Seven! …’
Etc. It is pretty annoying, except that I do perk up before he reaches the count of ten, braving this task of recovery with show-off vigour and a spirit of endeavour, whereupon my dad walks off beaming, because he has sorted me out again, and all it takes is to yell a boxing count over my head and waltz off to tell Mum the fine job he did. Jem is OK now. Well done, Dad.
My mother is the top person to seek out in perilous times, at any station from mystery grumps to head wounds. A head wound can bring on stark-eyed horror and a sense of being pretty close to the end of things, like dropping out of an aeroplane on to enemy territory, and at times like this, she can calm me straight down while patching me up, until suddenly I am interested in how the head bleeds (profusely), and I have a new word (profusely) and a new subject.
To begin. There are groups for blood. I never knew that. Anyway, the main idea is not to mingle the groups in emergency situations, when you might be running low on blood and need someone else’s for a top-up. You have to check first off about groups. Whoa! Hold on! What group are you? If you are too weak, you must hope for someone to ask on your behalf, so it might be best just to leave a note in some handy place upon your person, with the name of your group in neat writing. Or simply make sure never to be alone in a dangerous place, never to be without a member of your family who has the right blood, the same type, that’s how it goes, it’s a family thing. OK. Next. Blood is made of cells and platelets. Cells come in red and white. In red there is haemoglobin, meaning iron plus globin. What is globin? I don’t know. I could not pay attention, too busy wondering about this news there is iron in me, and having visions of blacksmiths in bare chests and leather aprons plunging bits of iron into boiling vats, and then bashing them into horseshoes and weapons, farm implements and household knives, red sparks flying everywhere, like drips of haemoglobin perhaps, so the blacksmith is in a state of wonder also, not about ironworks in him, but about blood in the ironworks. It’s possible.
Haemoglobin is responsible for colour and carrying oxygen, and white cells are for fighting off disease and so on, and then there are platelets. Very important. Platelets are for clotting, i.e. to stop all your blood flowing out after injury, the blood going from watery to sticky and hard, reminding me of the coating on toffee apples. It’s all very interesting, and pretty soon, listening to Mum, I lose my throw-uppy feeling, waiting out for it keenly, this clotting of platelets, and thinking deeply on the subject of blood flow, and the whole business of ferrying and fighting, and how I am in this O group, Mum says, which will be a breeze to recall in an emergency situation as it is the shape of a mouth calling out after injury, before the clotting part of things, white bandages, some nice toast with Cheddar, and friendly cuffs in the upper arm from immediate family, same as winning a medal. For Valour.
On other days, without a wound to show for it, everything hurts for no good reason, and I want to unzip my body and make a hasty exit, slamming the door on myself, no goodbyes.
‘Mum! Everything hurts!’
‘Growing pains,’ replies my mother who is in the know about such matters.
‘Oh.’
My mother is sitting at her dressing table with the lovely bottles on it, some with little tubes poking out and bulbs you squish, as in Ben’s chemistry set, except these are covered in velvet with golden tassels and are not dangerous to play with. The table has delicate drawers and one of them contains wide silver bracelets that are great for armlets when Jude and I are Romans. Mum lets us borrow them, no problem, and sometimes we invite Harriet to join in, because the bracelets fit right around her ankles and she is so good at slaves, though we tell her straight off she is a mute slave, otherwise she might mess up the game with inappropriate dialogue. We keep her instructions brief. For instance, we make sure not to tell her she had her tongue cut out in torture, or she will go overboard in terms of emotions and take over the whole game and it will be embarrassing. Harriet is not always appropriate but one day, maybe, she will be famous for acting.
Over the creamy gold wood surface of Mum’s table with the design of twigs and leaves carved in it, is a thin sheet of glass, kind of like ice, and there are mirrors at this table, a middle mirror that tips to and fro, and two side ones you can adjust the way my dad does in our car, frowning as he reaches up to twiddle the oblong driver mirror, like someone has done sabotage and moved it on purpose, then he fixes the side mirrors, wing mirrors, he calls them, and plunges out his window, before stretching across the passenger seat to do the other one, huffing and puffing the whole time. They have to be angled just right, so he can see what’s coming, and I suppose Mum can do the same, fiddle about with her wing mirrors so she can see who is coming in the room, such as Dad with a glass of wine, or me, today, with growing pains I am not thinking about any more.
The dressing-table mirrors are framed in creamy gold wood also, reminding me of famous paintings in museums, those three-in-one pictures with a middle bit and right and left bits connected by hinges, but here the famous painting is always Mum. Three of her, one in three. Cool.
When Gus came home that first time, it seemed to me things were just right, no more Weisses required. I’m not saying if Mum left us and bashed off to hospital again, coming home with one more Weiss wrapped in the pink blanket, my dad hovering and shoving us gently not so gently out of the way, that it would be not OK with me, no, it’s only a feeling. Things are just right. Now we are seven, counting Mum and my dad, not counting birds, i.e. two doves, two budgies and two finches so far, and how we might get a dog when Gus is bigger, but not yet, because at present any dog is bound to be bigger than Gus, which would be spooky for him, so we will hang on until he is round about dog-size, no smaller.
King Arthur must have felt this way too one day, thinking, OK, that’s enough knights, no more knights! King Arthur was very welcoming, and anyone brave and fine with good works in mind could come along and be a knight at his Table, and then the other knights would squish up to make room, while, of course, there were a few casualty knights making room for unhappy reasons (demise), but I do not see this accounting for all that many free places. There cannot have been endless space at the Round Table. In Arthur’s heyday, perhaps there was standing room also, but a great king ought to keep track of his knights, otherwise things will get slapdash and he might mix up everyone’s names, simply too tired to pay attention to each knight as is befitting, due to overcrowding of knights, with some of the more complicated ones, the softy knights, growing offended consequently, kind of hurt and dithery and likely to slip up on the job, I don’t know. It could happen so quickly.
I have borrowed Ben’s King Arthur book and it is the real thing, written nearly five hundred years ago and it has a French title, which is quite unusual, as the book is in English. I have read a few versions so far but they are not the real thing, the way those Bible storybooks for little kids with a lot of coloured drawings of animals and flowers and smiley types in tunics wandering about the countryside are not the real thing, and a bad mistake in my opinion, inviting high hopes and confusion. How are you going to break it to little kids as they grow up, that the Bible is not about farmyards in warm countries but a story featuring plenty of death and war and leprosy and so on? It won’t be easy, and I’ve seen it, how when the time comes to talk about strife in the Bible, nuns try to nip on by the strife parts and head straight for the miracle parts, because the bare facts have become a problem for them.
Take that twin brother story, the one about the sons of Isaac, Esau and Jacob. The Esau and Jacob story is really not hard to take for little kids, but the nuns make a right mess of it, thinking the only way to make it OK that the younger brother (Jacob) goes in for a passing phase of criminal behaviour is to say that the older brother (Esau) had a terrible personality and was extremely hairy, resembling a beast, making it OK what Jacob did, buying his land for only a few pence and then disguising himself by wearing a hairy jacket so their father would mistake him for Esau and give him a blessing as the firstborn, which is a top important blessing, and ought to have gone to Esau, but Esau is very hairy and not all that smart, making everything OK but very confusing for kids regarding men and beasts, and land deals, and whether or not hairy = bad. What a mess.
Mum cleared this story up for me in no time and here’s how I see it. Jacob slipped up due to extreme youth. It’s forgivable. He fell into criminal activity because he did not know how to come out with it plain, how he is a leader of men and Esau is not, and maybe Jacob should get the firstborn blessing so he can get on with being a leader of men. Plus, Esau is only interested in hunting, he is not one bit interested in farming and being a leader of men, meaning he and Jacob can shake hands in later life, and bury the hatchet, because Esau is happy with the turn of events, free now to hunt at all hours with no other responsibilities, reminding me of Westerns, where there are two main types of cowboy, the homesteader-farmer type and the hunter-cattleman type, and the homesteader is usually more sensitive, and has a long-term view of matters, whereas the cattleman is always rushing around on horseback and shooting from the hip, as the saying goes. A hunter is prone to rash behaviour, and excitable activities, deep thinking is simply not his bag, and this is how I will break the story to Harriet when the time comes. I cannot leave it to nuns. The Bible ought to be a nun’s best subject, a real thing and not a story about farmyards in warm countries, but this is clearly not the case. Oh well.
Ben’s King Arthur book is definitely the real thing, and it is very good. It is complicated.
‘Jem, you’re a bit young,’ Ben says, handing over Le Morte D’Arthur. He says it gentle, not bossy. ‘You’re not ready’
‘I’m ready, Ben.’
‘Well, remember the glossary at the back, OK?’
‘Glossary?’
‘See? See what I mean?’
‘What? See what?’
Here is why the book is complicated. 1) There are 999 pages in it. In two volumes comprising XXI Books comprising maybe 35 chapters each, though every chapter has a handy headline at the beginning, announcing the main topics and events therein, which is very helpful, without spoiling the suspense as you might suppose. 2) There are odd words here, ones not in the dictionary. If Ben is passing, he will help. Or I can flip to the glossary at the back, which is sometimes no help, as I have to look up the meanings of meanings, there being an example of this straight off, right there in the ‘a’ list.
Assoil v. to absolve.
I skip down the list. Ubblye n. oblation.
Then there are words with two separate meanings, completely different ones. Memorising these is recommended, so you only have the one job of picking the right meaning, and no second job of flipping to the glossary also. Example: wot v. to know/to blame. Whoa! It seems to me knowing a person and blaming a person are completely different things. Maybe not.
When you have to look up the meanings of meanings, and memorise at least some, so you can read a few pages in peace without filching in the glossary, and/or getting up for a dictionary every two minutes, things are complicated, but I don’t care, I am in a fever to learn this book and reach the parts Ben has already read out to me, such as the part about the Round Table and how it is symbolic, which is how I can sort this problem of too many knights and concentrate instead on symbolism, how King Arthur flung his arms open wide in a welcoming and heartfelt manner that is a bit symbolic, with no stampede of knights or anything, no dangerous overcrowding, a bad scene caused by my dodgy thinking, my concentration on numbers and hard facts instead of symbolism also, and you have to go for both ways of thinking, or else you get mixed up and depressed.
I race ahead to the place Ben marked for me because I like it so much, the Round Table part which is also the Queen of the Waste Lands part, and I remember her especially because of the stupid thought I had at the time to do with nuns, and how they are always threatening me with starvation, pointing at my plate in an accusing fashion, at remains of spam and peas, or smears of rice pudding and rhubarb I am trying to hide under my cutlery, food I am WASTING, a terrible sight for a nun, and all she needs to get going with speeches on starvation in far-off lands, and that is what I saw the day Ben read to me about the Queen of the Waste Lands, a sad and angry nun waving her arms in the night sky, over a field of terrible waste, of spam and peas stretching to the horizon, out of reach of the starving children of India, and it is all my fault. Sorry, Sister.
The Queen of the Waste Lands is a recluse, having fallen on hard times. She used to have the most riches in the world and now she has Waste Lands, and this is symbolic, I believe, and to do with war and grave human failings, which is what she muses upon in her recluse, recluse being a person AND a place, she muses upon grave human failings and related topics, chiefly the Holy Grail, and who will find it, and will it be found, etc. OK. When she meets Perceval, who has dropped into her recluse for some road directions, he doesn’t know she is his auntie, maybe because she has undergone physical change in her new life as a recluse, or because they never met before, I don’t know. Never mind. When this matter is cleared up, she asks Perceval has he heard from his mother lately. When heard ye tidings? She asks, which is kind of a trick question, because she knows perfectly well Perceval’s mother died from grief, waving goodbye to her son as he bashed off to join the Round Table, but she won’t say so, no, she waits for him to say he has had no tidings, except in dreams. I dream of her much in my sleep, he says. And therefore, he adds, I wot not whether she be dead or alive.
Wot v. to know.
Now she tells him. Now he knows.
It’s all very interesting, and goes to show two things. First, how when you are a recluse your behaviour may be open to question, a recluse may lose touch with the niceties of behaviour and conversation, that’s one thing, and the other is how valour and dreaminess in a knight can go together, how dreams are not sissy or anything, and all the knights are apprised of this. This is why Merlin, or a passing gentlewoman, a complete stranger even, can step up and talk pretty freely on any manner of extravagant issues, such as God and dreams and symbols, etc., boldly interrupting some knightly chat, perhaps, about sports and jousts and war injuries and so on, and no one is embarrassed or annoyed. This is how it is when the Queen of the Waste Lands, who has lost touch with the niceties of regular conversation, addresses her nephew quite suddenly, and out of nowhere, it seems, on several pressing matters regarding the Round Table, such as why it is round / why he is sitting there / why his mother died waving goodbye to him when he left home to sit there / why there is an empty place no one can sit in / and why he has to go on a quest for the Grail which will heal the Lands, so they are not Waste Lands any more, whereupon he is expected to come back and sit in the special empty place. It’s an awful lot to take in in one go, and it’s symbolic, so Perceval listens carefully, though he is a bit young for symbolism and is no doubt wondering, is his auntie blaming him about his mother, and how much should he pack for the journey and how long will he be away, how many days, how many pairs of pants and hankies should he bring? Perceval is counting, instead of thinking about symbolism, and he is in a tizzy. He has a lot to learn, but he listens carefully. It’s a start.
‘Also Merlin,’ begins the Queen of the Waste Lands, ‘made the Round Table in tokening of roundness of the world, for by the Round Table is the world signified by right, for all the world, Christian and heathen, repairen unto the Round Table; and when they are chosen to be of the fellowship of the Round Table they think them more blessed and more in worship than if they had gotten half the world …’
When Ben first read this part out to me, when he said, ALL the world, Christian and heathen, I had a second thought to do with nuns. It was about Mean Nun and the creatures speech, with heathen meaning dodgy, i.e. Jews and Africans and aardvarks and maimed types. Since I corrected her on that little matter of countries and religions, Mean Nun will sometimes say LOST SHEEP OF ISRAEL instead of Jews, thinking she can fox me with this line about runaway sheep in Israel when I know full well this is merely code for Jews, because I checked it out with Jude who is very learned in many departments, something not many people are aware of, seeing as Jude is not forthcoming, he is more the silent type. I drew up a list of his departments of learning so far: history / inventions / explorers / Latin / prejudice and wars / mythology / pollution / football / rugby / brass rubbings / Roman digs / criminals / spies / trains and locomotion. Oh. And boxing, I forgot boxing.
Anyway, the round business is very interesting and Ben says it is a holy shape and astronomical also, the table with all the knights around it akin to the Earth in a firmament of stars, and he says round is symbolic of wholeness, the way a straight line is not, because a circle has no beginning and no end, and everyone is equal around it, all the world, Christian and heathen, etc., and I think how my dad would hate that, as he needs to sit at the same place always, at one end, and he would be downright confused at a round table.
If you sit in my dad’s place, he will pull up short and look at you like this is the wildest thing he has ever seen, same as if he went upstairs to bed at night and you are lying in his bed next to Mum, ruffling up a newspaper and saying, What, dear? That’s how weird it is for him. No one sits in Dad’s seat, not even in extreme circumstances such as illness or temporary loss of mental faculties.
Another reason I thought that’s enough knights, no more knights! is that my dad needs about three or four people’s worth of space everywhere he goes, though he is a regular-sized man and not very tall. I watch him walk along in our big house, and he will get tangled up in things like books or shoes or one of his kids lying around on the floor, in spite of the fact there is plenty of room for him to step in, reminding me of Westerns again, how a sheriff, or some top important cowboy in a Western, my dad’s favourite type of film, walks straight down the middle of a main road if he feels like it, even if there is tons of traffic. When he strolls into a saloon for a wee drink or a spot of steak and beans, and coffee in a tin cup, everyone nearby shuffles over, no problem, no protest. They know he is a top important cowboy and needs all this space. They make room.
The whole journey up the stairs to Mum and Dad’s room, my dad keeps batting us away and running his hands through his hair in a ragged manner, nearly ready to fall apart in his effort to protect Mum from us, though he is the one in need of protection and a lie-down in a quiet room, it seems to me, not Mum who is calm and smiling, and once we all make it to the bedroom, she perches on the end of the bed and lays the pink bundle down.
‘Say hello to Gustavus,’ she says.
Suddenly we are shy and helpless. We don’t know whether to move in close in a single huddle like Roman legionaries locked tight with oblong shields overhead in what is called a turtle formation, or to nip in one by one, single file, and Dad is no help, looking cross without meaning to, merely trying to get everything right and protect Mum. It’s a hard time for him.
‘Shake a leg!’ is all he can think to say, one of the two things he might yell at us in the morning when we are messing about with duffel coats and satchels and pieces of toast, not really in the mood for school. The other thing he yells is Make tracks! I hope he does not do so now, as it would be a bit rowdy in the circumstances. You have to be quiet around a baby. Settle down, Dad.
Gustavus. How is it the last of the Weisses has a weird name, a centuries-old name with a strange sound of snowy countries, countries with kings at the helm, a name too big for a baby unless you know he is headed for kingship of a snowy kingdom? Gustavus.
‘He can’t see you. Not yet,’ Mum says. ‘You can come closer,’ she adds, turning to Gus and reaching a long finger towards him and slowly pulling the pink blanket away from his head so we can get a better view. Gus is definitely bald. ‘Hello, Gus!’ she says, which is kind of an invitation for us to get going with the greetings and stop standing around all shuffly-toed and pathetic.
Ben gives Harriet a little shove, a tiny one so Harriet will keep her cool and not have one of her unusual reactions to very usual things, a small shove, a slightly raised voice, minor events that will send my sister reeling as if she has just been shot by firing squad, or stumbling about in a desperate fashion in the manner of Oliver Twist’s mother at the beginning of that black-and-white film. Oliver’s mother is pregnant and lost in a storm at night. She has been abandoned or some such thing, and is on the run and has to give birth in a workhouse, the only pit stop on that stormy night, and Oliver is of unknown origins forthwith, because his mother dies from childbirth moments after kissing him gently on his bald head, falling back on her pillows with a sad and painful sigh, whereupon her identity locket is stolen by an old woman who is suffering from poverty and grave human failings, and now Oliver is in for a lot of hard knocks, all because of this sleight of hand, this one small flutter in a darkened room, passing too quickly for pause.
I don’t like it, this business of death and childbirth and I am stricken suddenly, even though I can see Mum right here on the edge of the bed, completely alive, with a completely alive baby in her arms and there is simply no cause for grief and anxiety. Stop it, Jem. Everything’s OK.
I watch my sister trip forward a step or two, very courteous and everything, leaning forward at the waist, and bending a little at the knees, her hands slipped neatly between them and her fluffy head dipping Gus’s way like she is smelling flowers in a flower bed. I just know she is struggling with some instructions I have given her lately in the run-up to Gus’s birth, advice regarding unseemly comments and how not to say them, beginning with, Isn’t that my pink blanket?
‘Hello, Gustavus,’ says Harriet in a fine display of seemliness. I feel proud. Here is why.
Walking to school is a much bigger job than it used to be for me since Harriet joined me at the convent in the year 1 BG. Before Gus. The bare fact is Harriet rarely moves in a straight line or at regular and unchanging speed, so the main thing is to keep her in my field of vision. I pretend I am a commando with a pair of binoculars, concentrating hard on a fellow commando. I watch him with my binoculars and I am ready to cover him with gunfire (Thompson sub-machine gun) and nip in close, if need be, in a hand-to-hand combat situation (Colt 45, Fairbairn-Sykes knife). It is the year of the Great Raids in France, 1942. In that same year, Jude says, Hitler ordered the execution of captured commandos, an order some German soldiers refused. Some, not many. I made a note of this. I try to keep an open mind about German soldiers and not give in to prejudice, recalling what Jude said. Some, not many, because for most, orders are orders, even if the chief is crazy, reminding me now of Mean Nun who is in charge of clocks and tidiness and being on time for school and so on, no excuses. No prisoners.
Where is Harriet?
I try not to boss my sister. She needs to stray a little and explore the flora and fauna on her way to places, though she will come across a sad sight now and again, mashed up wildflowers a person has stomped all over by mistake, or a limping bird or some such thing, and this is grievous for my sister though not so grievous as it is if I boss her, calling out, Forward march! or, Move it! Instead, I keep a 1½ oz box of raisins in my pocket and call out, Raisins! if ever she strays too far and, mostly, this reels her in like a fish. Raisins are second best after chocolate, her favourite comestible, which we are not allowed except on special occasions, and definitely not in the morning apart from Christmas Day. Raisins are permissible at all times.
‘Harriet! Raisins!’
Harriet scuffles out of the bushes in a shivery sad state like she is a small animal herself, with no mother animal around and no animal homestead or anything. Oh-oh.
‘What, Harriet?’
My sister points into the bushes. She just can’t look, so I brush through to investigate. Lo! I spy four, maybe five eggs, not the eating in an eggcup kind which come from chickens for that very purpose and with their full knowledge, I believe, but eggs that were on their way to be birds and will now never be birds. The shells are swirly with colour like decorated Easter eggs hidden in the garden, but these are broken, and sprawled across the ground, the guts spilling red, streaks of red like ribbons. It is impossible not to think about blood and baby birds who never got anywhere. It’s a battlefield.
I cross my fingers in a wish I can help Harriet recover from this bad scene, and get her to school on time also, I cross two fingers of one hand, not both, or the wish is cancelled out, Jude says. I aim to tell my sister about embryos and I need to get it straight first in my own head, I need to recall the main points, so I stare at the ground for a moment, I look down in thought as opposed to nuns who look up in thought, because they are married to God and look to Him for answers to all questions, except ones to do with sports. Sister Martha, for instance, is keen on sports and she looks me right in the eye when she has a sporting question, largely Manchester United questions due to her big thing for Charlton, Bobby, and Best, George. Sister Martha supports Manchester United although she comes from County Cork. This is because she goes for the man and then the team, and there is nothing unusual about that, not to me anyway.
Nuns look up, and in paintings relating to catechism, all eyes are on the sky, aside from the eyes of criminals and heathens. The sky will take up a lot of space in the painting, and bristle with angel activity and light beams and doves and so on, though in reality, that sky is empty and all the activity is symbolic, and the artist knows this, but he has painted it in, same as he paints trees and buildings and passers-by with their feet on the ground. It depends how you look at it. Maybe I should look up more, maybe there are too many distractions on the ground for clear thinking, or maybe I look down because I am not a Catholic or a nun.
Embryo.
Not long before Gus arrives, I press Ben with a question on the subject of something Mum described to me, how the baby is an embryo and feeds IN THE WOMB, and it is all so wondrous, etc. Yikes. If our new baby is feeding off Mum, in my opinion, she needs to pop a few more snacks to make up the shortfall. My mother does not eat much in regular life, and I certainly do not see her changing her ways now that she has an embryo within. In the weeks before Gus, therefore, I keep pushing my toast her way in the mornings, going, Sorry, I’m not very hungry, sorry, because I know she does not approve of waste, though she is not a bad case like nuns are, nowhere near. I do think she is likely to finish my toast, however, so I pretend I cannot finish the toast, or have a big urge to share, or, for variety, I act like I am in a terrible hurry. I am simply trying to save this woman from starvation, that’s all.
‘Want a bite, Mum? I’m late!’ I say, waving my toast in the air.
‘I’m LATE! I’m LATE, for a very important DATE!’ she sings, whereupon Harriet leaps out of her chair to do some accompaniment, singing along, and dancing a jig. ‘My fuzzy hair and whiskers took me MUCH TOO LONG TO SHAVE!’
Jiminy Cricket.
I take the problem to Ben and he puts me straight on this question of embryos and not being fully formed, and early stages of life, etc., hauling out an encyclopaedia and splaying it open on the floor. Embryo. Various vertebrate embryos.
‘What’s vertebrate?’
‘Having backs and spines. For locomotion, right?’
‘OK’ I say, reading on. ‘The different species are hard to distinguish in the early stages of development; later they develop individual characteristics.’
Above the words are two rows of drawings in a large box with three up-and-down lines, making eight compartments, with the top row for early embryos of a fish, chicken, pig, man and the bottom row for late embryos of a fish, chicken, pig, man, reminding me of Harriet’s bedside cabinet with her display of little animals within, little chicks and lambs, each one in a box, no man in any box. I stare at this drawing and feel a bit woozy. All the early embryos LOOK THE SAME. Kind of like fishhooks or seahorses. Yuck. Below, there is a second drawing of a late embryo with lots of pointing arrows and detailed information such as: ‘A few weeks before birth this foetus is practically fully formed.’ A few weeks. The embryo has a head and squeezed-up eyes, and feet, ears, all the accoutrements. A mouth and a stomach. Hands for wielding cutlery. I close up the book.
‘Ben?’
‘Yup.’
‘Does Mum look OK to you? Thin?’
‘She’s fine, Jem. She’s always thin.’
‘Right,’ I say, flipping on to my back to stare at the ceiling, like Jude, my brother who does a lot of lying down and staring at ceilings. ‘Ben? Is Jude a vertebrate? Ha ha. Joke.’
‘Let’s go ask him,’ he says. ‘Ambush time.’
‘Weapons?’
‘Pillows,’ commands Ben.
I salute him and we gather up pillows, and on the way to Jude, I wonder if there is a moment in the womb when the embryo is aware he is fully formed, I wonder do growing pains start then, and is it the same for everyone, every embryo of mankind? I make a note to quiz Mum on these points as she must know the ropes by now. Some day I’ll ask her, but not today, I’m not in the mood.
‘Raisins?’ I ask Harriet who is still quivering from shock and so on.
‘No! Explain!’
Whoa. ‘Harriet. I’m going to explain, but we have to move along at the same time, OK? Now don’t look back, it’s a mess, I know it, but listen to this. NO ONE GOT HURT BACK THERE. It’s a blood-no pain situation, I mean it. OK, come on, let’s make tracks.’
I take my sister’s hand and I don’t have to stretch for it or anything due to being just about the same size as Harriet. We are different but the same, i.e. if I comb my hair out of a tangly state into a fluffy flying around state and put on a big smile, a stranger might confuse the two of us, though I’d also have to be in motion, Harriet is almost always in motion, usually of the dancing and skipping kind. Harriet is a deep thinker but she does not show the marks so much, or maybe her thoughts come out better than mine, I don’t know, but anyway, that is the chief difference between us and pretty plain it is too, so there ought not to be the mix-up there is for some nuns and non-nuns at our school. It’s annoying. The mixed-up type will say Harriet-Jem and Jem-Harriet and this is the same type who will say, Girls! to a whole classroom, looking somewhere over our heads, like she simply can’t do it any more, pick out the differences between us, and no doubt she goes home and looks at a plate of food and says, Supper! instead of checking out all the different items and taking them in separately for a moment, chicken and broccoli and potatoes, it’s just the way she sees it now, everything in groups, a pair of sisters, a gaggle of girls, a plate of food. Things could get worse. Pretty soon, this lady is wandering around in her own street at night, key in hand, not even recognising which house is the right house. Where is her house? Her husband has dark hair and a close beard. One day, all men with dark hair and close beards are her husband. Hello, dear. Hello dear, hello dear. She has a problem with me maybe, and my sister, two girls about the same size with a last name she cannot pronounce. Now she has a problem with all girls bearing last names she cannot pronounce. It’s depressing.
Sister Martha always gets it right. Harriet collapses into me in the dining room or in the playground, nestling her head against me because she is a small beast fed up with running around in too much company and if Sister Martha comes our way, she makes no mistake, looking us straight in the eye, saying the right name to the right Weiss. When she is put in charge of a body count, a practice nuns go in for at regular intervals, unfolding that list of names tucked away in each nun pocket, reading them out in a feverish manner like we are prisoners of war just waiting to dash for the wire, Sister Martha is calm, hand on hip, speaking soft, eyeing us one by one, with a kind of amused expression. Harriet, she says. Jem. She always gets it right.
Harriet is not supposed to collapse into me in the dining room. She is supposed to stay at her table with the other little kids and Sister Martha is the only nun who does not freak out about this, the only one who can lead Harriet away, my sister sliding off my bench and slipping her hand into Sister Martha’s, quite happy, like she is off to a garden party. If you do not understand Harriet, you will not be her friend and the main thing is not to boss her, which is what I bear in mind the day of the broken eggs with blood spilling out. The carnage.
‘It was an accident. Here’s what I think happened. Are you listening? The parent birds made many eggs, they had to keep flying off for supplies and they picked the wrong tree. Too wobbly. They were tired and not thinking straight. Big breeze, skinny tree, accident. Nobody was pushed, got that?’
This is hard for my sister. She has a special relationship with animals, I’ve seen it, animals coming right up to her and taking food from her, from an open window, say, and they don’t just pinch the food and bash off, no, they hang out with her a while, and for Harriet, this is nothing strange, which is the best thing for me about her special relationship with animals, how it is nothing strange to Harriet.
‘Now. I need to tell you about the blood part. Ready?’
‘Ready.’
‘You know when Mum breaks an egg in a bowl, she looks out for a tiny red speck, a blood spot? OK. That speck MIGHT have become bird but it never happened because the egg was taken away before the mother could warm it through all the stages, early embryo, late embryo, bird. See? The blood is left over from then, but it’s not a sign of pain or death or anything because it was never alive. That’s why it’s better to be a mammal, you know about mammals, humans are mammals. Eggs INSIDE, not rolling about on the ground for someone to step on, or going cold in a nest on a busy day for the parents. No. You stay warm through all the right stages and it’s convenient for the mother. Wherever she goes, you go, no problem, until it’s time, and even then, a baby gets swaddled up in blankets so the temperature shock isn’t too bad. So that’s it.’
‘My dear! Just like the Little Lord Jesus!’
‘Harriet! Remember what I told you? We don’t talk about that at home, we don’t say Little Lord Jesus. Because of Daddy. Remember?’
‘Away in a manger,’ begins my sister, singing in a dreamy voice, fluttering her lashes.
This is one of the two hit tunes everyone in our convent learns from the very first year. These are the two hits. 1) ‘Silent Night’. 2) ‘Away in a Manger’. In the first year, or Preparatory as it is called by nuns, or Babies as it is known to girls, tune one or two is played on the wind-up music box on the mantelpiece every single day ten minutes or so before lunch. Dining-room Nun, who is also Babies Nun, cranks it up and says, Now put your heads down, whereupon you fold your arms on top of your desk and rest your head there, sleepy or not. Why these tunes? In song number one, there are the words silent and night. It’s a hint. OK. In song number two, there is a line that goes: The Little Lord Jesus lays down his sweet head. Nuns think this is very persuasive to little kids who may be too old to take naps in the middle of the day but are going to want to do like Jesus, no matter what, because Jesus is the best who ever lived. I hate to say it, but frankly, being a baby and sleeping is nothing special, it is not a remarkable Jesus activity in my opinion. As I see it, babies are always dozing off, lolling about in pushchairs or out for the count on blankets spread out in the shade, like just getting here, birth itself, is going to take a lot of recovery time.
Harriet sings all the way to the gates where I get serious with her, assuming a grave expression the way my dad does when he wants to warn me that if I do not read enough I will end up stupid and have to work in a soup kitchen or the shmatte trade. What is a soup kitchen? What is the shmatte trade? Is he talking about slaves? I do not ask, as it is hard to reason with my dad on a day it slips his mind I am not quite eight and have plenty of reading years ahead of me and furthermore, I read all the time, goddammit.
I lay my hands on Harriet’s shoulders and swivel her round to face me and she goes all googly-eyed like she has completely lost her balance. I try to stay serious.
‘Now. What did I say?’
‘Little Lord Jesus, don’t say it.’
‘Right. And no singing it. Away in a manger.’
‘Where is Amanger?’
‘It’s not a country, Harriet! It’s a shed or something.’
‘Spider shed!’
Harriet is thinking of the shed in our back garden, the shed of fear for most Weiss kids who are not keen to ferret about in there when Dad says, Bring me a hoe! A rake! Or Mum asks for twine, meaning gardening string. The shed is always dark for a start, especially when it is super bright outside and you are blinded and helpless as you step within, and at a disadvantage, knowing anything you go for, in any part of the shed, you have to grab and scoot away with, slamming the door after you, because there will be some huge spider rushing straight for you on all occasions. Why do they do that? Why can’t a spider pause and merely move elsewhere in a seemly manner? Everyone is an enemy to a spider, like for shell-shocked soldiers in World War I, so used to scrambling out of trenches, going over the top, as Jude says, and roaring into the dark, guns blazing, they just don’t know how to stay cool any more, even in the face of nurses and doctors and so on. There are enemies everywhere. For Jude, the shed is not a problem, so we all make him go for tools and stuff. He may take some time, which drives Dad wild, Where’s my hoe?! Where’s my rake?! but this is not a problem for Jude either.
In a minute, Dad, says Jude.
And then we all say it. In a minute Dad, in a minute Dad, in a minute Dad, whereupon Dad turns on the hose and nobody is safe from ablutions except Mum, of course, and Gus, who is too young for torture.
We don’t get a lot of gardening done, but it’s not a bad time.
‘OK then. Don’t say the manger or the Little Lord thing. Got that?’
Harriet salutes me and slaps her heels together smartish. This is the only thing she knows about soldiers, the only thing. War is not her subject.
‘I’ll see you later. Right here, Harriet. At the gates.’ I swivel her back around and give her a bitty push in the shoulder area and she flies forward like she has been shot from a cannon as in that famous circus act.
‘When Harriet is FREEEE!’ she says, running towards the little kids’ entrance, and that is how it is for Harriet as she enters the gates in a little uniform she has to wear just so with different rules for different seasons, and special times to work and eat and lay her head down to the sound of tunes chosen by nuns, it’s not quite right, like a bird in a cage, not prison and hard labour exactly but not quite right, not until ten to four in the afternoon when she flaps free and meets me at the gates. My sister needs a lot of air and open spaces, that’s how it is.
When Harriet’s time is up and it is my turn to take my first peep at Gustavus, Gus, I tug at her green jumper twice, meaning, move along, your time is up, it’s my go, and as she steps past me, I can tell she has something to say.
‘Don’t say manger or the Little Lord thing,’ she whispers.
I roll my eyes and move in close, and the funny thing is, I think about it, the manger situation and how with Jude and Ben behind me, we are like the three kings, I can’t help thinking it. I have been in three Nativity plays so far at my convent, the Nativity being the only play the nuns know how to do, I guess, and my dad is OK with this as long as I have the low-down.
‘It’s just a story, you know,’ he says, all serious, a bit gruff, leaning up against the kitchen counter where Mum is cooking, crowding her a little, it’s a habit of his.
‘Right, Dad,’ I say in a patient but busy voice. I am trying to finish my homework before supper so I can play Action Man with Jude afterwards. Also, my dad tells me this every December, how the Nativity business is just a story, and God can’t have sons who are also God, etc., and I know what’s coming next.
‘Jesus Christ was a Jew. A rabbi. Don’t forget that. OK, Jem?’
‘A rabbi. Jewish. Not God. Got it,’ I reply, and my dad yanks my hair three times, which is his way of saying, I am not mad at you, although I sound mad at you. I know, Dad. No worries, Dad.
I have just about had it with Nativity. The fact is, I don’t want to be in any kind of play, it’s so embarrassing, but I am especially fed up with Nativity ones because of shepherding, quite a vexing role, though not too bad compared to Drummer Boy.
One year I was tried out as the Drummer Boy. I was fairly keen, due to having no words to speak and due to the military aspect and the bravery of drummer boys in military history but what I do not understand is how he comes into the Nativity story. What is he doing here? Does he think there is a war on? Or is he just wild for parades and processions? Never mind. My one job was to do drum rolls on a tin drum looped around my neck and head up the parade to the Baby Jesus while the girls sing that depressing song about the Little Drummer Boy and his drum, ra ta ta tum, but I lost my job and was switched to Shepherd because I was pathetic at drum rolls. My effort at drum rolls was deeply frustrating and induced palpitations in me, and a feeling close to terror, what with Music Nun glaring at me in that horrible manner. It was a horrible experience all in all and definitely a relief to be shepherding flocks again.
A shepherd has two jobs only. 1) Lurk about a fire at night in a shepherdly fashion, at the end of a long day of herding up lambs and sheep, sitting up with two other shepherds usually, unless there is a girl going spare in which case we might be four. We are careful NOT to act like we are waiting for the Angel Gabriel. Whichever girl shepherd knows how to play a recorder has a recorder stuck in her shepherd costume and she has to WAIT for some other designated girl shepherd to say, Dan! DO play us a tune on your pipe! Then she plucks out the recorder and plays a tune. She must not jump the gun or the girl with the line about the pipe, a Nativity play word for wind instrument, will feel downright silly and not know what to do, to say it or skip it. That girl was me one time, another horrible experience, my ears aching like someone had turned the volume up everywhere, the breathing of the audience, soft, the breathing of Directing Nun in the pit, cross, the flutter of girls in the wings, and the awful noise of Lucy White rustling her garments and hauling out her pipe, playing a tune without being asked first. Last year, though, it came out all right, though I was pretty knocked out from how my heart raced gearing up for my big moment and as soon as I spoke it, Dan! DO play us a tune on your pipe, I had a ferocious desire to lie down in a faint and have ministrations. No, Jem. Remember job number two.
Lo! Here comes the Angel Gabriel.
Gabriel points two fingers at us to signify the dual nature of Christ, even though catechism has not been invented yet and it will make no sense to shepherds, Gabriel waving two fingers in the air like that. Never mind. When Gabriel shows up, shepherds have to act spooked and make ridiculous movements, lunging away from the angel and throwing arms aloft like we are being ambushed by German Waffen SS and have no weapons. This is goofy, let’s face it. If I were a shepherd and an angel came my way, I would have no problem with it, but you cannot tell nuns this because they are too excited directing this play and will get confused if they have to make changes, such as maybe having one shepherd NOT in a state of fear and terror. The way they see it, shepherds have to act spooked so the Angel Gabriel can say, Lo! Be not afraid! I am the angel of the Lord! etc. If we do not act as if we were riding the ghost train at the funfair, it just won’t work for nuns. We have to show some hysteria and then we cool our jets for the next bit, the tidings bit, so all the attention can be on Gabriel, no distractions. ‘I bring you great tidings!’ Meaning, news. The news = the Nativity = the birth of Jesus. The Queen of the Waste Lands speaks this word also. When heard ye tidings? I tried it out on my dad once.
‘Any good tidings?’ I asked from the doorway of the living room. ‘In your tidings-paper?’
‘Jem, take my dirty plate back to the kitchen, will you?’
‘OK, Dad.’
Shepherd job number two. Go to Nativity. This is the topmost important part of the play for nuns and they get fretful trying to organise it. It is the Adoration part wherein we all traipse to the manger to peek at Jesus, all the shepherds, royalty and Drummer Boy, and Mr and Mrs Innkeeper who would not let Mary and Joseph have a room, maybe because Mary and Joseph were too shabby for their inn, and now, of course, since the great tidings and ensuing events, the innkeepers feel pretty bad about this. Thems the breaks. OK. Now we crowd around the Little Lord Jesus and show our great joy and next, it is time to face the audience and hold hands and sing We WISH you a merry Christmas, we WISH you a merry Christmas and a HA-ppy New Year, which is quite a boring song but it is the end of the play, one more Nativity over and out, and after the clapping, we take off costumes and go home and have a big snack and this is the beginning of the Xmas holidays. Yay.
Last year, Directing Nun had a big idea for the Adoration part. She decided the shepherds and kings and Drummer Boy (girl), etc., ought to go on a long march to the Baby Jesus and not merely sweep in from offstage in the usual scrummage, making it so obvious how we are all just waiting to do this, huddled in the wings ready to sweep in all at once and do some adoring. It’s not realistic, she said. I don’t think realism is a big issue for nuns. I think Directing Nun wanted more of a party scene last year, that’s all, like a Trooping of the Colour parade involving a long march, drum rolls and singing and gifts at the end.
Directing Nun decided we must go down the stairs on the offstage side that leads to outdoors, putting on outdoor shoes first, of course, as we are all in olden times bare feet or sandals and also because nuns are very keen on the right shoes in the right places no matter what kind of emergency situation a girl is in. Girls have three types of shoes. 1) Outdoor shoes: dark brown / lace-ups. I choose Clarks Commandos for type 1 due to the word commando. 2) Indoor shoes: dark brown / buckles. Most girls have the kind I have, with buckles and little holes over the toes part like on a cheese grater, and soft soles so as not to scuff up the stone floors or old wooden floors of our convent. In my view, you would need ice skates to scuff up convent floors, but you cannot say this to nuns. 3) Plimsolls. This is a nun word for gym shoes: black canvas / lace-ups or slip-ons. I choose slip-ons for variety and for the funny feel of stretchy elastic in a tongue shape where laces or buckles usually go. I slip them on and off, on and off. These shoes are like gloves for feet.
Playground Nun is an old nun who watches over us in the playground. I don’t know what else she does apart from praying and wandering up and down the playground. Sometimes she plays tricks. I am patient with Playground Nun who is maybe not all that well. She seeks me out quite often.
‘Jemima Weiss!’
‘Yes, Sister!’
‘What is plimsoll?’
‘Um. Gym shoes, Sister. For gym only.’
‘No! It’s the waterline on the hull of a cargo ship! A safety mark! Named after Samuel Plimsoll, MP, and his Merchant Shipping Act, 1876!’
‘I see. Great. Thank you, Sister. Is that all, Sister?’
‘Yes, my girl!’
Playground Nun pushes her glasses from the speaking to girls position (all the way down the nose for close-up inspection purposes) to her wandering the playground position (top of nose for general countryside vision). She pats me on the head, well chuffed with her trick on me. I don’t like pats on the head because I am not a dog, but Playground Nun is old and she is a nun and she may not be entirely well and you have to allow for things. Furthermore, she is full of special information that is not all to do with God and I believe she needs to impart it from time to time. She chooses Jem. Fine with me.
Three types of shoes. And then come rules. Shoes rules: Do not wear plimsolls outdoors. Even in sports. Do not wear Clarks Commandos indoors. Do not wear indoor shoes in gym (unless you have forgotten your plimsolls) and definitely not outdoors where they will get ruined and become perplexing, unfit for indoors or out. Nowhere shoes. If you have the wrong shoes, a nun will get flustered and usually call upon Mean Nun to sort out the bad situation of the wrong shoes. Mean Nun has an eye out for crime. She is the only no-good nun around, though I am not wild about Sister Clothilda, Nativity play Directing Nun who is also Music Nun. She makes me sing separately from the other girls, standing on a chair on my own, far off from the other girls standing up on benches and singing happily in one voice on the stage of the assembly hall.
Music Nun sits down below in the nun pit, looking up at girls and glancing my way now and again with a cross and confused expression on her face, like she is not quite sure what the bloody-bloody I am doing on her stage, or why I am causing such a terrible disturbance in the sound department. The waves. She is also confused due to my Jewish side. Not all nuns are the same, not all of them have this problem, and I can easily tell the ones who do, catching them looking at me with a cross face and confusion in their eyes, as they try to fathom it, and simply cannot, how I am alive and not Catholic, and nevertheless quite hearty, by which I mean not downtrodden or obviously impaired in any way. Mean Nun has a very bad case of confusion and she will watch me until she comes up with a crime of some sort and then she makes straight for me.
The day Susannah Bonnington found a maggot in her banger, I was right there and saw it poking its little head up like a periscope in a U-boat, weaving left and right, checking out the scene aloft, and I must say, I never want to see a thing like that again, not ever.
‘Sister!’ says Susannah, keeping pretty cool in the circumstances. ‘There’s a maggot in my banger!’
‘So there is, my child,’ replies Dining-Room Nun who is definitely crazy, ‘so there is.’
Sister Catherine is Dining-Room Nun and Babies Nun. Sister Catherine escorts those first year kids all over the joint like she is a bodyguard, and when they are dining, she is happy, as she can do her two jobs at the same time in one same place and she is free to carry on her favourite activity of strolling up and down the alley between dining tables, muttering to herself and twiddling her thumbs in a demented manner, hands clasped before her in woolly gloves she wears in all weathers, woolly gloves with the fingers cut off.
In my opinion, some of her behaviour is open to question. For instance, babies need their own little chairs for dining, due to their small size, and they have to transport the chairs from their classroom to the dining room under the eyes of Sister Catherine, passing by her like a row of ants struggling with crumbs nearly twice their body weight and it is painful to see the little kids stumbling along, crashing the chairs against their little legs and generally making a mess of things, looking sad and worn out but resigned to fate, reminding me of the galley slaves in Ben-Hur, men chained together and marching in the hot sun on the way to the Roman galley ship in which they will be chained to oars and fated to row at varying speeds unto the end of days. Babies enter the dining room first and bigger kids queue up with plates after the babies have settled in and been served. They get served because they are deemed too young and wobbly to carry plates of food without tipping everything on to the decks. It seems to me carrying a plate is not such a hard task, but grappling with a chair round about two-thirds your size is definitely a hard task. Possibly, for Dining-Room Nun, an avalanche of spam and peas and gravy on the nice convent floor is more of a problem than bruisy shins and outright exhaustion in a four-year-old, and this is one instance of behaviour in Sister Catherine which is open to question, and another is when she said, So there is, my child to Susannah Bonnington, bashing off straight away to do some more strolling and muttering, and leaving Susannah and me in the lurch, stark-eyed as in a horror scene from a horror film featuring graveyards and screaming.
A few words on horror. So far, I have seen the beginnings of three horror films only, as I am always sent to bed before things get too grim. Here are reasons why. I am too young for horror films and will have bad dreams and get hysterical. Horror films are not much good or educational, and so there are no loopholes regarding bedtime the way there are with good films and/or documentaries. Fine with me. Horror films are frustrating and give me a headache, due to the endless screaming and the lack of daylight, requiring a lot of squinting to make out what the bejesus is going on, usually just endless screaming and silly things such as people going walkabout in graveyards way past their bedtime when everyone knows there are killers and/or wild beasts on the rampage. Why? Why not stay home until it blows over, or go for a saunter in a more populous area where there are bobbies and lamplight and means of transport for hire in case of emergency? Because it is a horror film, that’s why. So there is screaming in the dark when characters are getting murdered, screaming in the dark when characters are stumbling across maggoty murder victims in graveyards, and in two out of the three films I have seen the beginnings of so far, there is screaming in the dark from raving maniacs in loony bins and it is no wonder so many people are losing their marbles, what with the high rate of murder and all that strolling about in graveyards, etc.
I would quite like to go in for some screaming in plain daylight right this minute because of the maggot before me, but I do not. I am not a baby. I am seven going on eight and have a fair grasp of language, and decent manners, and screaming and howling is not fashionable behaviour in a person my age who is not in a horror film. I do feel sick though, and ask to be excused. I step out into the courtyard for a deep breath or two, a remedy of Mum’s, and extremely useful, according to her, in all walks of life and eventualities of a trying nature. It is something I recommend for characters in horror films.
Oh no. Here comes Mean Nun, flapping my way.
‘Weiss!’
Mean Nun has a big thing for calling my name out, ever since I corrected her pronunciation one time, informing her as gently as possible about the V sound in the W, so that now she hits the V sound real hard and lingers over the double SS at the end. It’s annoying and it is her revenge on me for correcting her for the second time in my life. What is the problem here? Some grownups correct kids about every little thing, blaring hasty hints and instructions before you touch anything or go anywhere, so sure you are going to slip up or do some destruction, and that your mind is merely an empty place with breezes blowing through it, but the moment you correct a grown-up of that type, it’s a criminal act, worse than sticking your tongue out and swearing which can usually be chalked up to insanity, whereas correcting is close to a capital offence, i.e. deserving of death. Jude says capital comes from the Latin word for head, and denotes beheading by axe, sword or guillotine and even though there are many kinds of capital punishment that do not involve having your head chopped off necessarily, the word capital still applies for all methods, and I can see why. Let’s face it, when a person is killed, his head is no good to him, attached or not attached, but this has me thinking again about graveyards and screaming, so I try to concentrate instead on deep breaths and recovery from the sight of that maggot poking its white head out of Susannah’s banger.
‘Weiss! Where are we?’ demands Mean Nun.
This is a trap. What does she want? The month, the country? Is it a nun-type question, a matter of catechism? Right near me in the courtyard is a statue of the Virgin Mary, Mother of God with the Baby Jesus in her arms. Mary has a dreamy limp look, like Jesus is just a bunch of flowers or something. Maybe Mean Nun does not like me standing so close to the statue, due to my Jewish side. Is that it?
‘Well, child? Are we indoors or outdoors?’
‘Sort of half-half,’ I say, wondering about covered courtyards and what category they are in. I don’t want to make a mistake.
‘Sister!’
‘Sister! Sorry.’
‘We are outdoors. What shoes are you wearing?’
Oh. It’s a shoe crime. Bloody. ‘Indoor shoes, Sister. Thing is, I feel sick and I need deep breaths, I had to rush out here!’
‘Outside, we wear outdoor shoes. Inside, indoor shoes. Plimsolls for PE. If you are poorly, see Sister Martha. You are a very rude girl, Weiss.’
I want to tell her that she wears the same type shoes all over the shop, indoors, outdoors, the same hard noisy black nun shoes, and that I am not rude, my mother knows I am not rude, and then I think about something Jude told me, because of my new big thing for knights and chivalry, he said not all knights are good, and Crusader knights were downright dodgy, going in for massacres of Jews, or else selling them into slavery and this is very depressing news for me, how being a knight is not necessarily good, and wearing a big red cross on your knightly tunic, like on an ambulance, is not always a sign of hope and rescue, and therefore, perhaps, seeing a lady flapping your way dressed in nun clothes and wearing a cross around her neck does not always mean you are safe. It’s confusing and I want to see Sister Martha now, but I need to do some crying first. Not in front of Mean Nun. Go away, Mean Nun.
At my convent, it is important to wear the right shoes in the right places, no matter what emergency situation you are in, such as on the night of the Nativity the year of the big idea, when Directing Nun sent girls on a long march outdoors in the dark and back indoors, and all the way down the aisle through the audience in an embarrassing procession of kings and shepherds, Drummer Boy (girl) and innkeepers, and up the little wheely front steps, no tripping on garments allowed, up on to the stage to kneel in our specially organised places around the angels and Mary and Joseph and baby, kneeling so as to indicate Adoration and also, so as not to hide the angels and blessed family from plain view because angels and blessed family are more important, they are the stars.
I am looking for my shoebag. Where is my shoebag? Oh-oh. I scramble about in heaps of costumes and stuff and my shepherd hat is slapping at my cheeks and it’s dark back here and pretty quiet all of a sudden. Hey. Where is Mrs McCabe? Mrs McCabe is a non-nun teacher and Irish and she wears a great white cardigan with brown leather buttons and bumps in the knitting. Mrs McCabe is quite lively and jovial and prone to short sharp hugs, which is an Irish custom, I believe, as Sister Martha is prone likewise, though a Sister Martha hug is a less hazardous experience than being in the grip of Mrs McCabe who mashes me against her so I can feel all the knitting bumps digging into my temples and eye sockets. I like Mrs McCabe very much, but I make a note never to wear bumpy apparel in my lifetime, in case I am prone to doling out hugs also, and hugs ought to be all good, with no risks involved, no smothering or bruising. I take note. Smooth apparel is better and less hazardous. OK.
Where is Mrs McCabe? On Nativity night, she is supposed to be here, she is always here in the offstage regions, cracking jokes and larking about in a lively Irish manner and all the while doing her important job of snapping on angel wings and haloes and shoving us onstage at the right times, and she is not here, she has already shuffled off outside with the shepherds and kings, etc. They have left me behind. This is a bad feeling. I am hot and I cannot think straight and I wish I were in bed, waking up on a Saturday with nothing to do but play with Jude all day.
There is my shoebag, glowing white with a red F embroidered on it, the bag Mum gave me, hers, and now mine, old, not new, and very nice indeed with the first letter of Mum’s name there-upon, better than J for Jem, a gift to me from her, and a fine thing, a bag made especially for shoes, and I never knew there were such things, bags made especially for footwear with fancy embroidered letters standing proudly for the name of shoebag owners upon them. Whoa. I fumble with the drawstring and haul out my shoes but they are the wrong shoes. Indoor, not outdoor, and yikes, I know who is in the cloakroom ready to receive shepherds and kings coming in from the cold and send them down the aisle in the assembly hall, making sure all our bits are on just so. Sister Teresa. Mean Nun. Now I am having a nightmare of epic proportions as Ben would say. Epic, a short sharp word to do with gravity and size.
I slip my bare shepherd feet into shoes and skip out on the buckling action. I’m late, I’m late, for a very important date. I push the door open and clamber down the stairs with my toes curled tight to keep my shoes from flying off. It strikes me I might as well head straight for the wire and wait there for Mum and Dad and not bother with the Adoration seeing as I’ve spoken my nine words and done the abiding and the fear not part, and anyway, there will be two other shepherds in a whole gang of adorers, that’s enough, plus I cannot sing and Music Nun will show me her cross face and Mean Nun is waiting for me and there isn’t a king or a shepherd in sight out here. Fuck-hell.
Come on, Jem.
Go to cloakroom doors. Knock softly. Sister Teresa will let you in. These are my orders. I dash like a commando for the double doors and lose an indoor shoe on the way. The grass is wet and I have bad visions of slugs and worms and spiders in the dark wet grass so I run back for my shoe. OK. Now, knock softly. No answer. Knock louder. Nothing. Here come prickly tears, a rush of them, and I don’t care any more about orders, I pound the doors like a maniac until I hear Mean Nun calling for me. Where is she? She is poking her head out of some doors further along and waving her arms in a frantic manner. What is she doing over there? Oh no. Wrong doors, Jem. You have been pounding on the assembly-hall doors with audience on the other side wondering what all the racket is and who is causing this big-noise crime. It’s me. Jem Weiss.
Mean Nun is speechless, she hates me beyond words. I kick off my shoes and let her grapple me in the shoulders and propel me out of the cloakroom into the assembly hall and I get whiplash in the process so that my shepherd hat slips over my eyes and I have to fix it quick sticks. It’s not really a hat, it’s a dishcloth with an elastic strip around the forehead to hold it snug and I hate it, it makes my ears hot and the elastic gives me a headache. I would quite like to ditch my shepherd hat but I am already in trouble and going in bareheaded would freak out Directing Nun for whom a dishcloth on the head is the main distinguishing mark for a shepherd who might otherwise get mistaken for a fourth king, some character NOT in the Bible, and thereby her great fame in the Nativity department will be in ruins, ruins.
The worst thing is having to catch up the other shepherds in the procession headed by Drummer Boy and kings. Kings are posh and the boy is symbolic so they are most important, they go first and I note they have just about hit the stage steps, with the lowly shepherds following on, and last of all, the innkeepers who made a bad mistake shutting out Mary and Joseph due to snobbery and prejudice. I need to scoot past Mr and Mrs Innkeeper and join the shepherds, then slow my pace right down to seemly Adoration speed, but both shepherds turn round to gaze at me in pity and accusation, making it plain obvious it was me doing the horrible noise at the doors, and now I can hear my dad’s laugh out there in the audience, I picture him in my head, his hair flopping around and his shoulders shaking and then there are chuckles from other people, strangers, so I try to think about Mum and how she might say, Never mind, darling, and stroke some hair from my eyes so that, before too long, the horror scene is over and I feel it is OK to carry on being Jem, to carry on being alive. I work real hard to see her face.
It’s always the same. I tell myself, don’t blush and a blush stains me hot and fierce, red as a traffic light, an alarm. I tell myself, don’t cry and my eyes fill and the world is a haze of sharp sound and coloured light and impending doom, worse than stepping out of the bright sun into the spider shed. My face is wet, I want dry land, somewhere safe to sling my hook and that’s when I look up and spot Harriet flouncing around with the rest of the angels. It’s her first go as an angel and she is a natural, no directions required, only Mrs McCabe to pin on a halo and a pair of spangly wings and launch her mangerwards. Go on, Harriet. Be an angel. I must say, though, regulation kit for angels is definitely helpful for identification purposes, much more so than in the case of shepherds, because, frankly, the sight of all those babies flapping about the manger with dreamy expressions on their faces brings to mind runaway loonies, and this is Sister Clothilda’s fault, she has simply not come up with reasonable guidelines for the behaviour of angels, such as the possibility of even temper and serenity. There is not one single angel out here in command of her senses and my sister is Chief Angel, waltzing about the manger with great swoops of her wings, batting her eyelashes in Adoration whenever she does a flyby, and halfway into one of her circuits of the manger, she looks straight at me and smiles a spooky smile, lips apart and teeth snapped tight and then she does it, she goes cross-eyed. It happens in a flash and in that flash of time I know she is trying to tell me something, my sister who is a whole three years younger than I am, and new to Nativity, but not one bit nervous tonight, knowing what is important and what is not so important, and how this is not worth crying about, being late for the Adoration, it’s only a play, Jem, and we’ll be home soon, having a snack at the white oak table and gearing up for holidays, with Christmas stockings in mind, and hopes of snow. Thanks, Harriet.
Lucy White is the Virgin Mary this year and, so far in life, she is my best friend in the outside world. I like her brother also, even though he locked me in their attic once and left me there for a while, I have no idea why. Never mind. Lucy’s mother comes from India and she is a very gentle lady who serves me biscuits on a blue-and-white stripy plate and tea in a blue-and-white stripy cup and saucer in their dark and polished dining room whenever I come round to play, and she is such a gentle lady, I just cannot tell her tea makes me gag a little and is very low on my list of favourite drinks. One weekend, Mr and Mrs White invite me out for my first Indian meal and I am quite excited in the back of the Whites’ car, up until when Lucy’s mum asks me whether I like ladies’ fingers, a question that throws me into despair and perplexity, especially with Lucy and Paul behaving in a raucous manner, going ha ha ha and poking me in the ribs with pointy fingers while Mrs White explains in a gentle voice, ladies’ fingers are a SIDE DISH, information I accept with a wise nod and a slight frown, not understanding at all. Do they have special plates in India? Or is it a biscuit? Mrs White likes to give me biscuits. I have never been to a restaurant without my family and am already quite worried about where to sit and who will order for me and will I say yes to something expensive by mistake, and now all I see are long delicate fingers on a blue-and-white stripy plate, fingers on a side dish with bloody stumps where they once joined happily at the knuckles to form a lady’s hand, fingers that danced across piano keys and the fluffy heads of small children. Stop it. I try to think about comestibles with finger in the title and no death. Shortbread fingers, chocolate fingers, fish fingers. Lady fingers. Two pointing fingers, human and divine.
Lucy is pretty good at the Virgin Mary, doing a fine job of pretending she is NOT seven years old going on eight, no, she is the mother of an immaculate conception type baby and she is doing a fine job of pretending that baby is Jesus and NOT a plastic girl doll with a stark-eyed expression and real eyelids that shake loose at irregular intervals, flying open and slamming shut in an alarming manner, suggesting shock and outrage and giving me palpitations and a strange guilty feeling. Lucy is doing a fine job but I avoid looking her way or at the terrible doll, I gaze at the floor of the manger instead, trying to keep my cool and my face hidden, because I am thinking about Harriet’s angel act and an unseemly roar of hilarity is rising within. I wonder what would happen if one shepherd suddenly fell apart and had a fit of hysteria bang in front of the Little Lord Jesus, would he get carted off to a place where there are other mad shepherds dressed in white jackets tied up at the back, wandering a field, going in for wild bursts of laughter and maybe muttering in a demented fashion about angels and lost sheep? Or would it seem realistic, and forgivable therefore, this shepherd simply overcome by awe and ceremony, the hard work of bearing witness and so on, the sheer weight of it all, which is kind of how I am on special occasions, my birthday, anyone’s birthday in my family, an outing with Mum, a game with Jude, Christmas night, how I am kind of crazed and slap-happy due to festivity, lying awake to linger over the marvels of the day until I have this desire to leap out of bed in a flap of blankets and check on every Weiss, and sit up in their beds and review the day in all its marvels, as if by staying up and talking the day over, I can stop this thing a while, a feeling close to pain and sickness I do not understand.
Now we join hands and face front and swing our arms to and fro in an embarrassing fashion while singing that endless song, wishing everyone a merry Christmas and ha-ppy New Year, etc., a song to which I am to move my lips ONLY on orders from Music Nun, orders I do not require, seeing as she has put me off singing outside my own household for all my days, and I worry now about my shoebag, and where I left it, and will it get mucky, and is Jude out there with Mum and Dad, gazing at me up here in a silly old dressing gown and a dishcloth on my head tied up with elastic, elastic that was not even invented in Bible times, and I decide I am ready to turn my back on Nativity. I am ready, Ben. Next year, I will ask for a note.
Kindly excuse my daughter Jemima from Nativity. She has just about had it with Nativity. Thank you. Sincerely, Mrs Yaakov Weiss.
‘Don’t say manger or the Little Lord thing,’ whispers Harriet as I take her place in the queue for Gus, rolling my eyes at her before composing myself, trying not to think about embryos and how early embryo fish, early chicken, early pig and early person are no great shakes to look at and resemble each other much too closely to boot, seahorses, fish-hooks. I also try to forget about that picture of the human embryo a Few Weeks Before Birth, all tucked up and upside down and feeding off the mother by way of a cord, quite like those nice bendy straws Mum buys, straws with little curlicues at the top end for bending purposes, so you can drink and read at the same time, no little adjustments necessary, no interruptions, and that is exactly what I am trying not to think about, this nonstop feeding business, this emptying of Mum.
Mum looks fine, though, not worn out or empty at all, and Gus is lovely, more like a baby in a painting than a regular baby and regular babies, in my opinion, are often a bit dodgy in close-up, squirmy and cross with squeezed shut eyes and clenched fists, gearing up every few minutes for great displays of the singlemost skill babies are born with, the howling and screaming skill, a sound that fills me with doom and panic, though I note that grown-ups largely find it amusing and delightful, which goes to show there are different rules for babies regarding howling and screaming and other matters. The howling and screaming skill is not generally encouraged in a kid, and in a grown-up, unless they are in horror films, it is definitely not recommended and also quite rare. I look around at school, in shops, in parks and museums and I just never see it, grown-ups howling and screaming. I am on the lookout always. The fact is, once a person can speak in full sentences and listen to reason, he is not supposed to rely on howling and screaming for communication purposes except on special occasions like blood situations, world war or physical calamity in the dwelling place, i.e. damage by collapse, fire, flood or air raid, etc. That is to say, screaming and howling over the age of four or so is not delightful and amusing, it is a call-out for emergency services.
‘He can’t see you. Not yet,’ Mum says.
That’s another thing. A baby is born more or less blind but this is not a case for panic and blind person accoutrements, such as white sticks, golden retriever dogs, dark glasses and books with bumpy writing. Braille. No. Everything is OK, and it seems to me a wise plan for a baby to be born blind when every single thing in his field of vision is a new thing to him and too much surprise might tip him over the edge into howling and screaming. Furthermore, a person needs sight for self-defence. He needs to see the enemy approaching. What use is that to Gus when he cannot put up a fight yet, or run away, even? He might as well not see the enemy. It will only be depressing. And a person needs sight for navigation, so as not to bump into things or have crash landings. Gus is not going anywhere at the moment, not solo anyway. We are right here. There are six pairs of eyes looking out for Gustavus until he is ready for sightseeing and ruffling up newspapers and wandering about the Earth.
Gus is very pretty and he is also quite bald with fine blond hairs on his crown like the little feathers on a bird breast. I want to touch him there but I remember Ben telling me how the skull is not fully formed in a baby, having a hole on the top or something, reminding me of Harriet’s broken eggs, and I don’t like it. Maybe Gus should wear a hat for a while, I don’t know.
He makes barely any noise, definitely no howling, just a soft blowy sound like someone riding a bike and getting out of breath, and this is probably due to lung size in Gus and how a tiny scoop of breath for him is same as a deep breath. One puff and that’s it. Empty. Start again. It’s hard work, I can see that. I can hear it. Every breath for Gus is a deep breath. No. There is no deep for Gus. When you have been alive only a day or so, there is no such thing as deep or far, what with his beginning so close to his end and no spare room for anything but the important parts, his organs and little bones all wrapped up in a fine covering of pale skin with the blue veins showing through, like the first spray of snow in winter, how it makes you see the ground in a whole new way, frozen blades of grass and stones and earth sparkling for my special attention, showing up cold and clear and kind of marvellous and delicate, stopping me still because I don’t know where to go any more, I might break something. I don’t touch.
‘You can come closer.’
Mum hikes Gus up a bit for my viewing pleasure and the pink blanket slides down so I can see his heart bleating right there in his chest in a map of blue and white, and I want to touch it but I don’t want to hurt him, worried my light touch in the heart region would feel to him next stop to reaching inside and holding his heart in my very hand. I don’t touch. Maybe tomorrow, maybe later.
‘Hey, Gus,’ I say, real shy, stuffing my hands in my pockets. ‘Hey there.’
I glance up at Mum and my dad and I want to say, Well done, Mum! Good work, Dad! and, That’s enough knights! Now we are seven, our number is up, I know it, this is the real start of everything, like we are born on this day Gus came home for the first time. I am born, that’s how I feel, and I want to make an announcement or hand out nice certificates, something formal in joined-up writing with a red seal at the bottom and maybe a little red ribbon hanging out. Now these are the names, it will say, of the children of Frances and Yaakov: Ben, Jude, Jem, Harriet and Gus.
These are the names.
What country, friend, is this?
The Science of Deduction and Analysis.
Because the speed of light is finite, we can only see as far as the age of our Universe. The earliest light has simply not had time to reach us and when astronomers look at distant galaxies through an instrument such as the Hubble Space Telescope, launched in 1990 beyond the obscuring veil of the Earth’s atmosphere, what they are seeing is light as it was when it left that distant galaxy and not as it is today. They call it look-back time, the telescope a kind of time machine, and the astronomer, a sorcerer perhaps, gazing into the past with his tube of long-seeing and his particular passion for gathering light, looking farther and farther into space and into clouds that are the birthplace of stars, a place in the forever then, never now. Now is not visible, only imaginable, deducible, so what, the earliest light is so startling, it is so bright it obscures. It depends how you look at it.
I remember everything.
My mother groand! My father wept.
Into the dangerous world I leapt.
Before the Hubble, came the Hooker with its 100-inch mirror, the most powerful ground-based telescope in the world, set up in 1918 at the Mount Wilson Observatory in California and built by George Ellery Hale, an astronomer prone to nervous breaks, to howling and screaming maybe, and to headaches and visions and a strange ringing in his ears. The Hooker is the telescope through which Edwin Hubble stared at clouds of light, realising they were galaxies beyond ours, the Universe is expanding, there was a beginning. There he sat night after night in his plus fours and high leather boots and tweedy jacket nipped in at the waist, a pipe in his pocket, giving himself over to the science of deduction and analysis, a realm demanding such rigours of perception and truthfulness he shrouds the rest of life in fantasy and bold elaboration. Hubble writes a law measuring velocity and distance, stating that the farther away a galaxy is, the faster it flies. Speed increases with distance. He looks back on his past flirtations with amateur boxing and professional soldiery and sees what no one else ever saw. Fantasy increases with distance. He was so fine a boxer, he lies, he is urged to take on the world heavyweight champion Jack Johnson. In the war to end all wars, he is wounded in the right arm by flying shrapnel, despite arriving in France too late for hostilities, the war is over. Edwin, you might say, is an unknown soldier.
It is possible that on some long nights in the observatory, Hubble sees exploding shells in the showers of light that are galaxies rushing away from him in every direction, or Jack Johnson, maybe, dropping to the floor in a knockout punch, Jack at his feet, a man seeing stars. Liar, fabulist. Never mind. It’s a tiny flaw in his makeup, whatever keeps a man going on a long night in a dangerous world, fantasy nothing but a deep breath to someone else. It depends how you look at it.
A tiny flaw.
When the Hubble Space Telescope is launched in 1990, all the starmen huddle around the computer terminals for the first images from deep space, but the Hubble does not focus, it has spherical aberration. They believed they had built the most perfect mirror in the world, testing its shape before launch, again and again, by way of little mirrors and lenses and measuring rods ½m long and lcm wide, but in the end the mirror is too flat, the light reflecting from the edge and from the centre focusing in two different places. How did it happen?
The Science of Deduction and Analysis.
It is discovered that the cap of one measuring rod is chipped, a 2mm fleck of black paint falling away to expose a chink of metal, deflecting light, and so distorting the dimensions of the most perfect mirror in the world by one-fiftieth the width of a human hair.
Watson: You have an extraordinary genius for minutiae.
Holmes: I appreciate their importance.
The science community at NASA falls apart. Hope has become a problem for them. Astronomers are carted off by guards to rehab centres where they lie next to each other in identical beds, suffering from drug and alcohol abuse, from hopelessness, a state of temporary aberration lasting long enough only for the starmen to swing loose a while, and take the time to make a little order out of chaos.
In three years’ time they are ready to correct the optics on the Hubble, installing a new camera and fitting a new mirror to match the flaw in reverse, and so cancel it out, a mission entrusted to seven astronauts who will go on five space walks to achieve it, stepping out from their space shuttle named Endeavour, just like the ship James Cook captained in 1768 under the auspices of the Royal Society, sailing off to observe the transit of Venus across the Sun and finding time also to locate New Zealand and the east coast of Australia, and come up with fine ideas about diet and sickness and high doses of vitamin C. In three years aboard the Endeavour, not one of James’s men suffers from scurvy.
Navigation is an art.
1993. The astronauts step out with great resolve and fortitude and the special encouragement of their space commander, a leader of men.
‘We are inspired,’ he says, before the first walk. ‘We are ready! Let’s go fix this thing!’
The men fit the new mirror, they install a camera.
‘Good work, guys!’
Now the starmen huddle around their screens again, pointing the HST into clouds of gas where new stars are forming, and in an experiment named Hubble Deep Field, they focus the telescope for ten days on the least obscured, the most bland patch of sky they can find, looking for the earliest light from the earliest stars from the beginning of time, and in that seemingly bland patch of sky, they see some four thousand new galaxies, but these galaxies are fully formed, kids, as one astronomer puts it, not babies at all. What is going on here?
The scientists realise they are not looking back far enough, and to probe what they call the Dark Ages and see galaxies taking shape and coming together and changing in time, they will need to build a new telescope with a more perfect mirror, so large it will have to fold away. Will it work? one of the starmen is asked.
‘I can’t tell you how long it will take or how much it will cost,’ he replies, leaping around a model of a folding mirror. ‘But it will work. Eventually,’ he adds, smiling, because hope is not a problem for him any more.
Mrs Rosenfeld, my mother has unknown origins. Nobody knows them. But one day, a soldier comes for her and takes her home with him, because it’s a dangerous world and everyone needs protection from something.
Be prepared, the soldier learned that, he remembers everything. The night before he chooses you, he lays out his things, he is ready, he will be well turned out, he can see himself in his shoes and they are the right shoes, always the right shoes, no matter what emergency situation he is in. He has ironed his shirt, Sunday best, the cuffs still fine. He has filled the stove for tomorrow. He won’t be gone long and when he is back, the soldier will be two not one. It’s late, he’s not sleepy.
He fills his pipe and steps on to the little balcony. No smoking inside, she doesn’t like it, it makes her cough, it makes her tired, she is always tired. No one in the courtyard, no one about but him, and he stares through the archway to the big tree, he loves that tree. It’s so big. A pint would be good. No drinking, he doesn’t drink any more, not since she left him in the lock-up that night. Wow. She was right though, she is always right, and now it makes him smile, and there is spare money too, he’ll need it, for little shoes and things, hair ribbons, you need all kinds of things for a baby.
Things will be different this time, it’s a choice he makes, no pretending this time, no pillow under her dress when they go out, the shame of it, except it’s all his fault, there is something wrong with him, from the gas, the poison in his lungs, in his body, it must be his fault, how she can’t have children, not since the awful first time, her dead son and the dead woman in the next bed and her live son, and the swap the nurse made, pass the parcel. Thomas. They never told anyone, he’d like to tell someone. About Tom. Then Dot, Dot who was a pillow once.
She says she won’t come with him tomorrow, so much to do. He misses her, he has known her for ever, she used to be so funny. Things will be different soon, tomorrow, she will be different. Maybe even let him back in. He just wants to smell her again, but he can’t say it, he can’t find the right words, and something else, something he’ll never tell her, how he hates this moment each night, unfolding his camp bed in the kitchen, the ringing in his ears suddenly so loud, a sound like bells, and then always the same thing, this sound of other men unfolding other beds around him, other men not there. He wants it to stop.
At the Salvation Army Foundling Hospital, they are expecting him, he has an appointment. This morning he is immaculate, he walks a firm line, his step is light, no shuffling, back straight, he is a soldier. Eyes right, eyes left, the nurse following on, take your time. Thank you, Sister. The soldier is looking for someone, he will know her when he sees her. Yes. That one.
She is six months old, fully formed, with large blue eyes, and dimples, and she is smiling at him, he could swear to it, but it’s not only that, he can’t describe it, a rattle in his guts, not fear, something new, and so he chooses her or she chooses him. No, that’s silly. He chooses, he thinks so. Never mind.
‘Yes, please. Her, please.’
When he scoops her up, he is worried someone will stop him. You can’t have her, stop there. But no one stops him and he holds her in his corded arms, tight not too tight, as he remembers holding a man once, feeling the looseness in the man’s neck, limp as a dead pigeon, knowing it was nearly up with him, how he tried not to hurt the other soldier, just hold him a while without hurting him, tight but free, like they are just one body. What was his name? He doesn’t remember that. Don’t think about that.
Please sign here and here.
He hands the baby to the nurse and this worries him also, he might never see her again, the big blue eyes on him still, the dimples, the dark hair. Silly man. Pull yourself together. The soldier signs for her, there, and there, he does it proud, he makes an X, like a leaning cross, it’s all he knows.
Hope is not a problem for him any more.
Science, says Carl Sagan, is what we call our search for rules, and the ideal universe is a place governed by regularities of nature as well as the experimental, somewhere, I guess, between stasis and motion, between knowledge and abandon.
Into the dangerous world I leapt.
Carl writes there are 10
neurons in the brain, circuits in charge of chemical activity, circuits and switches. A neuron has close to a thousand dendrites, these are wires, connections. If one connection corresponds to one piece of information, then the brain can know one hundred trillion things, 10
, not very many things, Sagan says, as one hundred trillion is only 1 per cent of the number of atoms in a grain of salt.
Watson: You have an extraordinary genius for minutiae.
Holmes: I appreciate their importance. Here is my monograph upon the tracing of footsteps, with some remarks upon the uses of plaster of Paris as a preserver of impresses!
I want to tell you, Mrs Rosenfeld, about something I read in the Book of Ruth, something concerning the transfer of shoes, and redemption, and how this offering of shoes is symbolic, it’s a symbolic act. With this shoe, I redeem you, I redeem her, him, this house, this debatable land. I am in a fever to tell you about it, I am not sure why, perhaps because Israel is your country, and it might be mine. I need to tell you this thing about shoes, Ruth 4:7.
Now this was the manner in former time in Israel concerning redeeming and concerning changing, for to confirm all things; a man plucked off his shoe, and gave it to his neighbour; and this was a testimony in Israel.
I am in a fever to tell you, but when I arrive and lie down, I think about lying down, how it is a symbolic act, a sign of grief, as is walking barefoot, I read that also. Then Job arose, and rent his mantle, and shaved his head, and fell down upon the ground. Job 1:20.
I remember it, how I walked barefoot, to and fro, to and fro, and how it happened, the thing I did, my experiment in escape velocity, and how I fell upon the ground, seeing stars. My hair was cut, not quite shaved and now I am here, because hope is still a problem for me.
—It’s very difficult for you to talk to me today. I wonder what’s going on.
—I am writing a monograph upon the tracing of footsteps!
—Ah. Do you want to tell me about it?
—No! I need to ask something. Did you choose me or was I assigned to you? Did you choose me? Did you choose me, did you choose me? I don’t see why you can’t answer that question.
—No, you don’t see.
—What if I die from this? I think I am going to die from this and no one can stop me, you can’t stop me.
—That is true. But you can let me try. I can try not to let it happen.
Then pluck off your shoe, Mrs Rosenfeld. Pluck off your shoe.
THREE (#ulink_d50bee6d-3ae6-59bc-ae74-91bd8698ab9d)
Holmes: How are you? You have been in Afghanistan, I perceive.
Watson: How on earth did you know that?
Holmes: Never mind. The question now is about haemoglobin. No doubt you see the significance of this discovery of mine?
If the brain can know one hundred trillion things, can a person ask one hundred trillion questions? That’s one. Here’s two. Why don’t you wear the red dress any more, the one I saw you in when I was born, the one you wear every Christmas until now, red you, falling snow, you’ve stopped wearing it, I want to know why. Red, white.
Whoa, the Moon.
The Earth has one natural satellite, the Moon, its twin, born around the same time, 4,600 million years ago. The Moon is almost all rock, with an iron-rich core, the haem in haemoglobin. It has no atmosphere, gravity at the surface being too weak, only one-sixth that of the Earth. Early in its lifetime, the Moon was bombarded by asteroids, so its surface is scarred and crenellated and distinguished by plains and seas. Birthmarks. Because tidal forces have slowed the rotation of the Moon, it is locked in orbit around the Earth and shows the same side always, completing one orbit every 27.322 days, at a distance of around 1.3 light seconds, showing this same face always. Are you there? Whither thou goest, I will go. Where thou diest, will I die.
A star the same mass as the Sun, at the end of its life, will collapse into a white dwarf, though a white dwarf is not really white at all, ranging in colour from blue to red, depending on the temperature at the surface. A star collapses because nuclear fusion at the heart of it can no longer sustain it, the white dwarf now an ember of itself, a stellar remnant, shedding the last of its heat into space, cooling and fading and compressing until its surface is so close to the centre, the beginning so close to its end, gravity at the surface is 100,000 times that of the Earth and light has to fight an uphill struggle to escape, and because light always travels at the same speed, it shows this loss of energy in increasing wavelengths, the light redshifting. Red, white.
One hundred trillion things.
According to a rabbi writing in fourteenth-century Spain, the Talmud states that the father ‘contributes the semen of the white substance’ that makes up the bones and sinews in a body, the nails, the brain, the white of the eye. The mother contributes the semen of the red substance that is flesh, hair, blood and the black of the eye. God’s contribution is the soul, but it is only on loan. The red and the white stuff dies with you, but the soul is up for grabs, or the Rightful Owner calls it in, no interest. It depends how you look at it.
In alchemy, red and white are the colours of man and bride and they ought to be together, masculine and feminine, in one same person, between two people, in Nature itself, it is the best state of affairs, the union of the opposites as they call it, with far-reaching consequences otherwise, dark times, wastelands, the lot. What a palaver. This was Merlin’s subject also, red and white, his Grail, a mission that pressed him so hard in his role as Lightbringer, he simply fell apart, going through a very bad spell of lurking in the forest and acting up, more like a wild animal than a bringer of light, everybody said so. And then his sister rescues him, building him a house in the forest, a house like an observatory, with seventy windows and doors so he can indulge his passions for astronomy and prophecy, closing himself up, as Blake might say, seeing all things thro’ narrow chinks of his cavern. His sister does all the cooking and she pours the wine and Merlin teaches her the fine arts of astronomy and prophecy until, he tells her, she is his match.
Merlin does not forget about the Grail, he does not forget about Perceval, a knight who dreams much in his sleep, Merlin appearing to him in many forms, sometimes as a hermit all dressed in white.
‘I’ll never drink milk again. Never.’ That’s what I say to Jude.
‘Yeh, I know. You’ll feel better soon,’ says Jude.
‘When?’
Jude does not answer me. You don’t get a lot of answers from Jude who is nearly my twin, and hardly ever when you expect one. You could ask him a question and get an answer some three days later, when you are riding bikes together or coming back from doing a shopping message for Mum. I am used to it, but some types are spooked by it. Not me.
We are reading comics. Well, his is not really a comic though it has little pictures in rows running across the page in separate boxes just like in regular comics and is the same shape and size as the comics I like most, such as Victor, Valiant and Tiger but these are largely to do with war and sporting prowess and not so full of special knowledge as Jude’s, which is called World of Wonder and to which he has a subscription, or a prescription as Harriet would say. It’s quite special to have a subscription. Jude’s comic has ‘Weiss’ written in the top left-hand corner and he goes to collect it each week at the newsagent. Whoa. I would like a subscription to Victor, or to Commando, which comes in a very nice book shape and has long stories in it featuring commandos having hard knocks before defeating Nazis who throw their hands in the air and go Kamerad! but neither of these comics are all that serious, so I only get them once in a while, for a treat, or else Jude steals one for me, sliding it away with his World of Wonder, or just walking out with it under his arm all casual, like he paid for it of course, of course. I’ve seen him do it and he is very good, but I am not witness to all his thefts any more, being so stark-eyed watching him, that nowadays Jude makes me stand outside. He mainly steals for me and Ben, comics, sweets, that sort of thing.
I am reading a story in Jude’s World of Wonder about stars, etc. It has pictures of olden times scientists, Sir Isaac Newton and René Descartes, a man with a lot of curly hair like a girl, plus Einstein, and I’ve definitely heard of him, and also Galileo, a man from the seventeenth century in a big beard and a wee hat resembling a yarmulke, a hat worn by my dad and the boys on Passover, but not by me, due to sex and me being the wrong sex for nice hats. I don’t think Galileo was Jewish at all, it is just an Italian-type hat, and quite fashionable in olden times, as I suppose.
‘Jude?’ I say. ‘Light year. What is that?’
Jude is reading the latest World of Wonder and he is lying on his back holding his magazine in the air not far from his face, sometimes switching hands to avoid pins and needles, turning pages and breathing in and out without any palaver, no shuffling and rustling or unnecessary movements. Jude never flaps about the way I do, it’s nice to watch, how he is, how he moves. Answering my question might disturb his whole set-up, but I ask anyway, he always hears me, he’ll remember, and three days later, here we are walking home from the fishmonger.
Mum has rung up Mr Jarvis and Mr Jarvis has all the fish ready for Jude and me. I refuse to carry it, not having a big thing for fish, especially slimy fishies with heads still on and staring-right-at-you eyes, no thanks. We made a pit stop at the newsagent and Jude has stolen a packet of fruit gums, my favourite. Wait outside, he said.
‘Light year,’ he says, stepping out of the shop. ‘The space light can travel in a year. It’s distance, not time.’
This is hard. ‘Oh. Do I need to know this, is it important?’
Jude frowns as we stroll along and he takes another fruit gum from the roll. He is thinking. The fruit gum is red, my topmost favourite, so he passes it on and eats the next one, which is yellow and also pretty good if you are not in the mood for red. ‘Yeh. Important.’
This means I have work to do and will need to go to Ben for more information, Ben who is patient and can do a lot of talking all at once without getting fed up. Suddenly Jude chucks our sweets right over the fence by the pavement we are walking home along.
‘Hey, Jude.’ Jude does strange things and if you get upset, his forehead bunches up and blue veins show at the temples, like railroad tracks. So I say it quiet. Hey, Jude.
‘Too many sweets. Bad for you.’
OK, Jude.
So that is one example of how long it can take to get an answer from my brother, three days in this case and something I do not mind because Jude is great and nearly my twin and it is why I don’t really expect him to tell me straight off when I will feel better, what does he mean by soon, and what is a light year, on the day we had the milk race and lay about reading comics, feeling mighty throw-uppy and pathetic.
I am in Ben and Jude’s room, I am lying on Ben’s bed, which is the top bunk of the bunk beds and Jude is down below on his bunk. He never wanted the top one because of all the movement involved, going up and down the ladder. I am crazy for going up and down the ladder, it’s like being an officer in a submarine in World War II. Cool. Jude and I have used the bunk beds for a lot of military situations, as a submarine, a Roman galley in wars against Egyptians, a tent in the desert war against the Afrika Korps and a hut in a Nazi prison camp before we dig our way out. We are happy that Mum and Dad bought the bunk beds and sometimes I even get to sleep in here with Jude if Ben is staying over at a friend’s house, though this is upsetting for Harriet, who will ignore me completely the next morning, building a wall of cereal boxes around her place so she won’t have to look at me, but spending the whole breakfast time peeking through the cracks and then quickly shutting her eyes and turning her head away if I happen to catch her, signifying her great disgust regarding me, and how I am the most boring and stupid person she has ever known. But I like sleeping with Jude because there is no end to our game and we can do night scenes if we are not too sleepy. It’s very realistic.
‘Jude, are we taking the bunk beds with us, do you think?’
‘Doubt it. Bet not.’
‘Too bad,’ I say.
‘Yeh.’
Things are kind of messed up in our house at the moment, what with items not in the right places and this feeling all the time of nearly being late for school even when it is not a school day, and my dad stomping around the joint with his hair all mussed and breathing hard, sometimes stopping short and scratching his head with both hands and a lost expression. This is because we are leaving this house soon, not only for a new house but a whole new country, my dad’s country, and it is his idea so I do not see why he is acting so huffy and puffy. I am not sure I want to go, I don’t know what they’ve got over there, do they have good things, maybe it will be fun, maybe not. When my dad gave us the big news one night before supper, like an annunciation meeting I guess, he said we could come right back home if it doesn’t work out over there, but he just has to go now, it’s something he has to do due to his roots. Roots. Like my dad is a plant or something. During the tidings, I kept looking at Mum to see what might show up on her face and she said nothing and just smiled and played with Gus, who was trying to pull the mats out from under the cutlery and plates in a spirit of scientific endeavour, I believe. He seems quite interested in the motion of things through the air ever since he can walk about by himself for great lengths of time without falling down drunk like most little kids, falling down and staring at the ground that hit them before going in for some howling and screaming. I kept looking at Mum because I thought I could tell if this were a good or bad thing we were about to do, go to my dad’s country, and in a ship, but it was hard to tell, as if Mum were not in the meeting at all, here and not here, and I got a racy scared feeling for a second, like when bike riding and my feet come off the pedals and the pedals spin wild so all I can do is steer away from large impediments such as trees and lamp-posts and other people and hope for the best.
One of the messed-up things around here at the moment is too much milk delivered by the milkman. Maybe he got it wrong or maybe Mum was too busy to put a note out saying how much milk, etc., I don’t know, but Jude decided we should have a milk race so as not to waste the milk and that is why we are lying around on bunk beds like sea lions at the zoo on a hot day, not budging much, even when zoo men are pitching slimy fish snacks at them. We lie on our backs like sea lions and keep our arms to the side because any pressure on our stomachs leads to a throw-uppy feeling. We stare at the ceiling and try to forget about milk, which is not easy.
‘I wish we could take the bunk beds, do you think they have bunk beds over there, Jude?’ No answer. ‘Jude? I was talking to Sister Martha – I told you about her – and I must have said something about you, some football thing, and she went, Jude. Patron saint of lost causes! and kind of laughed. In a nice way, not a bad way. But still, what does it mean, how does that work, patron saint, is it the top saint, and what is that, lost causes? And are you named after him? I wish she hadn’t said that, it’s weird.’
‘We’re Jewish, we don’t have saints.’
‘What do we have then?’
‘I don’t know. Rabbis. No saints. Anyway, I’m named for a book,’ says Jude, and I can feel the bunks sway, meaning Jude is rolling over. Meaning Jude is getting better and can take the pressure. Possibly my time for feeling better is coming up too. Coming soon. I hope so.
‘What book?’
‘You don’t know it.’
‘I might. I might know it, tell me,’ I say, a bit hurt he maybe thinks I am a dummy due to getting less homework than he does and being at a school with lots of nuns and girls where the books are thinner and have a lot more pictures inside them. Illustrations. Sometimes Jude comes right up to my homework stuff splayed out on the oak table or outdoors on the white wrought-iron table near all those statues Mum has of Italian people with not a lot of clothes on and one hip poking out to the side in a relaxed manner, Italian people carrying maybe a flower or a bunch of wheat or some fish or something weird. Where are they going? If I had a fish to haul someplace, I’d do it quick sticks and not in a relaxed manner with hips swaying side to side, or I’d make Jude do it like when we collect them from Jarvis for Mum, when I refuse to carry the bag even. A fish never looks properly dead to me. It’s a problem. Jude comes right up to my work and fingers the books, flipping pages and going mmmm and waltzing off with this private decision he has just made about my homework and my mental capacities and how I might be losing my mind because of nuns. He thinks my books are a bit sissy, I can tell. I feel bad when he does that and I would like to go to Jude and Ben’s school and peruse heavy tomes with small diagrams in black and white, and wear a blue cap like a cricket cap the way they do, and grey shorts down to the knees and so on, but I cannot because I am a girl, I am Jem.
I also wear school hats, two types. In winter, Harriet and I have navy-blue beret hats and my dad says we look like U-boat officers and when he sees us traipse in from the convent, he salutes and goes Heil Hitler! and wanders off, shaking with mirth. He never gets tired of this joke, not ever. In summer, we have to wear flowy dresses with blue-and-white up-and-down stripes and the skirt part flies all around in the merest breeze unlike the winter tunic which stays neat and close to the legs, making it hard in summer to run with a football, for instance, without stripy material flapping in the air and your undies showing. Bloody. Whenever outdoors, a girl has to wear the summer hat, a creamy white straw hat with a hatband and a metal school badge in front and turnups like on a bowler hat except for the gruesome white elastic running under the chin to hold it all in place which gives me a choky feeling if I concentrate too hard on it, suddenly conscious of every single swallow going down my throat so that I start gulping like baby birds do when the mother is feeding them and you see it all happening, the entire voyage down the throat of the little worm bit or whatever and that’s when I get throw-uppy and have to sit down for a while for some recovery time, same as today, for different causes, for milk-race causes.
‘Jude the Obscure,’ says Jude.
‘Oh yeh,’ I say. ‘What’s obscure again?’
‘It’s Latin for dark, obscurus. Or strange. Difficult, I mean. Hard to see. See?’
‘Think so. Anyway, I’ll read that book then.’
‘No,’ says Jude, quite firm.
‘Why not?’ I roll over, feeling a bit better now, and I hang over the edge to peek at Jude, my hair dangling his way.
‘It’s bad at the end and you’re not ready, I’ll tell you when.’
‘OK.’ I flip on to my back and I think about it, how Jude looks out for me, knowing what is good and bad and when I am ready for things, even if he will not explain it in a lot of words when I want him to, because he has tons of things on his mind at all times. He is busy. ‘Jude, will you tell me about lost causes?’
‘Later.’
‘You might forget. Please. Just a bit.’
Jude rises and ambles over to the big bay window with the piano in front of it that Ben can play, and he sits on the piano bench and stares out the window. Jude won’t take lessons in piano, just pausing when Mum asked him if he wanted to and saying no thank you, very politely, and that was it. Harriet and I have piano at the convent. Harriet never studies and I study hard and then we sit with Mum who helps us practise and when it is Harriet’s turn, my sister flies all over the keys making some pretty fine sounds though I am pretty sure not one is in the piano homework she is supposed to do. She sits up straight and makes this whole rush of sound, whipping her head from side to side in a dramatic fashion and turning round now and again to grin at Mum. It’s all very unusual. When Harriet is keen to stop, never wanting to practise long, she shuts the piano lid and scoots across the piano bench to lean into Mum, resting her head there, like she has just been on some long journey and not everything she saw was good.
I myself have some piano problems and the solution to my piano problems is not in sight. I note that it is possible to overcome human failure in some fields and this is quite cheering, but it is not a rule and I am not foxed by my occasional prowess in those fields where I suffer from human failure. Bike riding for one. I am not all that good. I get by. However, I did a feat for Jude the other day when we were riding with Zach and Jeremy, a feat I have never done before and will not try again by myself, but the other day I did it just like that, no problem, because Jude wanted me to and it was important to him, plus he told his friends I could.
‘Jem can do that,’ he said meaning push-start the bike with one foot on one pedal, flinging the other leg over while the bike is careening ahead before settling in the saddle, cool as anything. And I did it, I did it for Jude, no crashing, just as I would like to overcome my piano problems for Mum, but I simply cannot match the notes in my book to the keys without taking a lot of time and then poking at the piano with stiff fingers and it’s awful, because you are supposed to string the notes together to make a tune, not let a lot of time pass between them and this makes me so edgy I can hardly see any more, I know I’m taking far too long and thinking about that makes me even slower, and the sounds I make are downright bad and give me a sick heavy feeling. I look Mum’s way and she smiles that smile, but we both know it’s all up with me, I’m no piano man, nowhere near.
Unlike my mother. I just know it, how she can play this piano though I never see her play this piano, and how she can do it without books, easy, something I am sure of while knowing also not to ask her about, sure of without ever being told, like I heard it in my sleep. There is some stuff you can count on in dreams as real and true, even when you know it is a dream thing, such as eating peanut butter sandwiches with Jude and he says 1942 was the year of the Great Raids, and you wake up thinking I know he said that, but you cannot tell which came first, the sleep time or the real-life time but it doesn’t really matter, because it’s a true thing and has some bearing on life. Other stuff in dreams is not so reliable. I rule out flying, for instance. If you are flying without an engine or glider wings, there is usually no head-scratching in the morning as to when and where it happened, and in which realm did you do it first, the sleeping one or the waking one. Forget it.
I know she can play, it doesn’t matter how I do. And I know not to ask her to play, or why she never touches the keys, not ever, even when she is helping me practise, sitting there at the far edge of the piano with her hands in her lap, sometimes counting out beats for me in a soft voice and when it is very bad, she will reach my way, gently shifting my hand to the right keys, her long fingers covering mine and I can hear the music in her, I swear it, like she is playing, no hands, and all the sounds come out right, beautiful, the kind of tune that makes you down tools and stop breathing because you may never hear it the same again, a sound like everybody you are crazy about calling your name all at once. This is the only good thing about piano practice and why I stick with it for now, all because of Mum and this feeling I get, making me forget my trouble with clefs and joined-up notes and one notes, and pedals I slam like a racing driver, I can’t help it, and most gruesome of all, my non-nun piano mistress who stabs me in the hand with a pointy pencil when I make a mistake, going in for fisticuffs when I get slouchy, winding up like a boxer before crashing her fist into my vertebrae and smiling at me in a shifty manner thereafter. Once, when I came through a whole tune no problem, she gave me two sweets, one green, one yellow, boiled sweets in see-through paper, the kind I hate, but never mind, I was so surprised, I stared at them in my palm for a while before saying thanks, still quite depressed by stabbings and thumps and thinking about secret agents captured by Nazis, fingering suicide capsules in their pocket, coloured capsules perhaps, wrapped in see-through paper. This woman definitely comes low on my list of favourite persons in life, and I am very glad Harriet has prowess in piano and a fine posture, and an improving effect on people in general, no doubt bringing out the sweetie handout mood at all times. I don’t tell Mum about piano mistress because it will upset her and anyway, pretty soon piano mistress and Jem will be in separate countries, no goodbyes, and Mum has too much on her mind right now, everything is messed up in our house.
Jude is staring out the big bay window. ‘Let’s go outside,’ he says.
‘Lost causes, Jude, please!’
‘When you work very hard even though you’ll never win, you’ll never change a thing.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Well. Like wars, there will always be wars.’
‘Why, why will there?’
‘That’s how it is, Jem. But you fight anyway, even if it’s a lost cause.’
‘Why, what’s the point, I don’t understand.’
‘It’s good to try, it makes you good – forget it, Jem, ask Mum, it’s hard to explain, I’m tired.’
‘OK, sorry. We can go outside now. I think I’m better.’ I start to climb down the ladder. ‘Know what? Dad might be a lost cause in the mess department. We can try to help him be less messy, but it’s no good. We can say, Oh Dad, when he drops food between the plate and the pot and make little suggestions like Wait till I get a bit closer with my plate, Dad, or Slow down there! or some such thing, but it’s no good, he’s a lost cause, right? And Harriet! She –’
‘Jem. You have to stop making everything to do with us. We are not the world, the Weiss family is not the world, you have to learn the big things, science, history, all that. And you can’t stay in your family for ever, I mean, you don’t even know what you want to do.’
‘I do!’
‘What then?’
‘I’ll tell you later. I’M TIRED.’
‘Yeh-yeh.’
‘I have ideas. I might do what Dad does.’
‘See? Just because Dad does it. And you can’t anyway. Sports writing is not a girl job, I want you to do a girl job.’
‘It was just one idea, I have others. I’m only ten, Jude, it’ll be OK.’
I get it all wrong with Jude sometimes, nothing I say is right, and I hate it when he is cross with me, why can’t he explain properly, what does he mean about the world and our family, what did I do wrong? I have this bad-news feeling now, a locked-in-the-attic feeling and I need to get rid of it fast.
‘Let’s drink milk!’ I say.
‘Don’t say milk.’ Jude hauls on his blue rugby top and I have one too, one that is a bit too small for him and I think to grab it from my room but he might not be in the mood for me to wear the same top as him so I decide to wear something else. We are going outside. We’ll play some game. Great.
‘Jude? Just one thing. Is it good, do you think, going to Dad’s country, changing countries like that?’
‘Sure. It will be fine. We have to travel.’
‘Why? Why do we?’
‘We just do. It’s important, travel is important,’ he says in a voice meaning this is the end of the talk we are having, it is time to move on.
‘MILK,’ I say, stepping up to him with a horror film killer look. ‘MILK.’
I am running now, Jude chasing, both of us scrambling down the stairs and I forget about other Judes, there is only one, not lost, no saint, not obscure, but my own brother who is only fifteen months older and so nearly my twin, it’s scientific, it’s historical, it’s nothing to do with me.
‘Mum! Mummy!’ I am kind of cross, and stomping all over the house, where is she?
I ask Lisa who is feeding Gus in the kitchen. Lisa comes from Portugal and she lives with us. She wears a shiny blue dress with buttons down the front like our painting smocks at school, same colour, same arrangement of buttons and pockets, different feel. Convent painting smocks are matte and soft, not slidy and shiny, and they are for ART ONLY. Lisa is sometimes friendly, sometimes not. She is not very friendly if some item has gone missing and you ask her about it. If you ask her if she knows where a thing might be, she grabs the edge of one pocket of her shiny blue dress open and holds it like that until she has finished saying, IS IT IN MY POCKET?!
I like Lisa even though she is grumpy. Also, she needs me. Some days, when she is having a rest in her room, she calls me into her room and we do one of two activities, sometimes both. 1) Photographs. Lisa shows me the same old photos of her family every time, pictures of scowly boys with dark floppy hair standing near big white walls and old men with pipes and dark hats on, black hats with little brims. Then there are ladies in dark dresses and black napkins wrapped around their heads though it is not raining. The focus is not all that great but I don’t remark upon it. It would be rude and clearly it is not a problem for Lisa who tells me the names of all the people and I pretend I remember some of the names that go with the people, though this is hard because they all look pretty much the same to me and because Lisa covers each face as she goes, kind of lingering there a while and mumbling soft things in the Portuguese language. 2) Football Pools. I help Lisa choose which football team to bet on for the match on Saturday and I fill out the forms for her. My dad says little kids are not allowed to bet, it is against the law and I am now on the slippery slope and had better watch out, etc. Yeh-yeh. I like to help Lisa out and I know quite a bit about football and I can spell Sheffield Wednesday and Norwich no problem whereas it is not so easy for her without checking every single letter and still getting it wrong. English spelling is a bit weird, I tell her in a comforting manner. And hey, Dad can’t spell! I do not want her to get depressed. Lisa comes from Portugal.
Lisa is never grumpy with Gus who is taking his time right now over some squashed-up bananas, eating slowly, with a thoughtful expression, holding his right foot in his left hand and flexing the toes to and fro, a habit of his I believe will stick with him. I can see it. And I see a day when Gus will catch up with me and be at an age when the difference between us doesn’t count any more, we are grown-ups, and we sit in a bar and have drinks, wine for me, like Mum, and Scotch for Gus, like Dad, Scotch he will sip with a thoughtful expression, maybe reaching for his foot now and then, he doesn’t know why. I do.
‘Lisa, have you seen Mum, please?’
‘IS SHE IN MY POCKET?!’
Bloody.
Lisa is not coming on the ship with us due to love and sex. Mum says she has a boyfriend here but I can tell Mum is worried about the boyfriend situation. Dad says, He’s a ganef! Shiker, shmuck! This sounds bad. In my opinion, though, Lisa will go back to her old country with scowly dark-haired boys standing against white walls and old ladies with napkins on their heads, that’s what I think.
‘Mum? Mummy?’ I’m calling a lot louder now, reminding myself of Joey in Shane, my dad’s favourite Western he took us to the cinema to see. A revival, he said, whatever that means. I never saw him so excited. At the end of the story, the boy Joey calls out for Shane, he calls his name many times, Sha-ne! Shane! Come back! Etc. He runs after him a long way, running with his dog, but Shane is not coming back, not ever, he is not coming back even though part of him would like to stay because he has a big feeling for little Joe’s family and they have a big feeling for him, but he rides off anyway, maybe thinking like Jude. Travel is important.
When we came home from the cinema, Ben, Jude and I were a bit giddy from going, Sha-ne! Sha-aane! in the same voice as the boy, the whole way home in the car, flopping around in hysterics in the back seat and driving Dad a bit crazy. At supper, any time anyone stood up for a glass of water or something, one of us would call out, Come back! in poignant tones and I believe Dad was a bit disappointed as Shane is a favourite film of his, and this was a little traitorous on my behalf because I remember feeling a bit desperate at the end of the film, tears rising up in me when Joey chased after Shane who is not coming back, Shane who is a hero and ought to stick around. I don’t tell Jude or Ben, they might think I am a bit sissy, which is strange, as my dad certainly has a big thing for Shane and he is not a sissy. Oh well.
‘Mum!’ Where is she?
‘Jem!’ My dad is calling for me from the living room.
‘Yes?’
‘Come here!’
‘I’m busy!’ My dad always wants you to get real close when he has a thing to tell you, especially if he is about to send you off on a mission, like he needs you to travel the greatest distance, go a long way for him, even for some little thing he wants. ‘I’m looking for Mum, what do you want, Dad?’ I try not to sound too cross, it’s bad for my dad, he gets rattled.
‘Come here,’ he says, lowering the mess of newspapers to his knees.
I can hardly stand still. ‘What, Dad? What? I have to go now.’
‘I am taking your mother out to dinner, I want you to let her be while she gets ready and you can’t eat those before dinner.’
He means my packet of crisps I am clutching, chicken curry flavour, not the ones I wanted, but Jude said I couldn’t have smoky bacon due to being Jewish and pigs are not allowed for Jews, even half-Jews. I’m not sure about this. I think smoky bacon flavour is just fake bacon, not from real-life pig juice or anything like that and also I think Jude is just being mean but I am too tired to fight him today. Dad sent us across to the shops saying we could have crisps for later which usually means he is taking Mum out to dinner, a time when we all need some kind of treat to make up for her not being around, I guess. Fine with us. Crisps are very nice.
‘I know that, I know both those things, can I go now? May I?’ Damn and bloody, I’m always getting this wrong. Mum says anyone CAN go, do you see, Jem? You are perfectly ABLE to go, MAY I is different, it’s permission, right, OK. I do not think my dad notices what I say.
‘So. Leave Mum alone,’ he says, raising his newspapers.
Like I’m about to hurt her, like I would do that.
‘Dad? You eat bacon, right? I’ve seen you.’
‘Yup.’
‘Isn’t there a rule or something?’ I ask. ‘For um, if you’re Jewish?’
‘Well, yes. It was about order and purity, I’ll explain some other time. Pigs eat everything … it’s not godly, you understand? But I’m not kosher, this is not a kosher house, we are not Orthodox, don’t eat those crisps before dinner.’
‘Dad? Are you in a bad mood?’
‘Not yet. How about a head rub for your old Dad?’
‘No, sorry, I have to do my homework, I’m going now.’
It’s scary saying no to my dad, my insides go all fluttery but I don’t feel like getting my fingers all greasy in his hair, not today. I don’t mind mostly. I like the smell of Dad’s head and how his hair sticks up at the end of the head rub and how now and again he goes, Ahhh, that’s great, Jem! while I am in the thick of it. Ahhh! he says, making me quite happy and proud when I leave him, even though my fingers are a bit slippery and the tips of them are all tingly and worn out, like I have lost a layer of skin maybe.
I have noticed something about him, how he is more prone to telling a person what not to do instead of what to do, unless it’s a mission, such as go get me a tomato and a knife on a plate, etc. He says, Don’t bother Mum, Don’t eat those crisps yet, Don’t read in the dark. And how does he expect me to know all the rules for being Jewish when I go to a convent, a school I think makes him mad at me because of nuns who are possibly contaminating me with nun-ideas and turning me into a kid who is not his all-out daughter, confusing him and giving him a cross look like when he can’t find something in the fridge, a thing that is usually right in front of his eyes. It’s there, Dad. It’s me, Dad.
I think my dad sees nuns and being Catholic, or even Protestant like Mum, as kind of weak, full of fancy clothes and secret things, quiet voices and angel paintings and his religion is big, with tough rules to do with comestibles and other matters, and full of beards and dark clothing and loud praying and calamities in history, in World War II for instance, the Holocaust, a calamity he is very worried about, like it is not all over yet and we must not forget it, we must be prepared for all eventualities, and his religion is maybe better for that, for readiness. Dad is happy I am a girl but I have to be ready also, cowboy-tough. Shane has put away his gun, it is for emergency purposes only and he will only ever need one shot. I don’t know what religion Shane is, it’s a private matter with him, but he has readiness.
What kind of school will I go to in Dad’s country, do they have convents over there? If I go to a convent, will he give me that speech about signs of the cross and spiritualities and not joining in, a speech I know by heart? Of course he will. In the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost, say the girls in time with one another, looking a bit depressed and all sounding the same, like zombies. Then comes the prayer part, the sad one about daily bread, and I can’t help but say it in my own head, just because I have heard it so often and because it puts me in mind of tribulations and of Oliver Twist in his workhouse days, days of bread truly unworthy of the name and in far too meagre allowances for a boy not yet fully formed. Give us this day our daily bread. Please can I have some more? Daily.
After the prayer, the girls speak those same words and sign off once more, like this is code for Hello God, Goodbye God. In the name of the Father, they say, and I say it too, seeing my dad every time, my father with a cross face because I have joined in by mistake when he asked me not to. It’s not a catechism thing, it’s a Charles Dickens thing, it’s really not a problem.
Don’t bother Mum.
I don’t call her name out, I do not want Dad to hear me, I just nip in close to the door of their bedroom which is nearly but not shut, they never fully close it though that does not mean waltz straight in, it’s not polite. I speak through the open part of the door, squishing my face into the space she left.
‘Mummy?’
‘Just one minute, darling.’
I count. She doesn’t mind this, it’s a thing we do. I sit with my back to the door, on the long raised step outside, the landing she calls it, like a railway station platform. I sit there with my crisps, my crisps for later. ‘One, two, three …’ Maybe I could go back to the shops and swap for smoky bacon. No. ‘… fifty-eight, fifty-nine, SIXTY. Ready now? Is it OK now, can I – may I come in?’
I think about Oliver for a moment, and how he gets it wrong. Please can I have some more? This is sad too, and maybe no mistake, just something to do with duress and despair, that he simply cannot tell the difference any more, the space between capability and permission. I step into Mum’s room.
‘He-llo!’ she says, like she is all surprised to see me.
She is striding in from the bathroom that connects her room to Gus’s and she heads for the dressing table. Her bathroom contains a bidet, a bidet is for women although she lets Gus play with it, watching him peer over the side and faff with the taps, giggling like a wild man when the spray goes in his face. I walk over to my mother and stand next to her.
‘I’m going to stand right here and watch, is that OK?’
‘You know it is, what’s wrong, Jem?’
‘Jude said I couldn’t have smoky bacon crisps, Dad wouldn’t like it because of um, kosher rules.’
‘I think Jude was joking, what do you think?’
‘Yeh, well. Anyway, that’s not it, I heard something bad.’
‘What did you hear?’
‘Ben’s not coming on the ship with us. Why not, I want him to.’
Mum lays down her little eye make-up stick, it’s like a conductor’s wand for orchestration. Not wand, baton. She turns my way on her little piano-type bench, the one with gold legs and a little cushion with a pattern of pale stripes and wispy leaves, the cushion attached to the legs by way of posh drawing pins with rounded ends coloured gold also. It’s the nicest bench I’ve ever seen. Mum holds her arms out and I lean in there and I want to cry suddenly. I swallow hard the way Harriet does when she is eating something undesirable and wants everyone to know about it and mark the occasion so it will never happen again. Do not ever press a sardine on me again. Thank you.
‘Do you remember I told you Ben has special exams to write, O levels, and then he’ll join us, he’ll come by air?’
‘No. Maybe I wasn’t listening, maybe I forgot, maybe you just said O levels, I don’t know what that is, are you sure you told me?’
‘Yes, Jem.’
‘Why can’t we wait for him?’
‘We have to find a house and furniture, all kinds of things, it will be fun, I’ll need your help.’
‘Everything’s changing, it’s all different, I hate it – will Ben stay in the house by himself?’
‘No,’ my mother says. ‘He’ll stay with Chris, with Chris and his family.’
‘Well, do they know he needs nuts and raisins in a bowl when he comes in from school, do they?’ I feel right pathetic now, I can’t do much about it, and the tears fall, kind of leaping out of my eyes, it’s weird. ‘Do they have binoculars where we’re going? You don’t want to go, do you, Mum, I know you don’t!’
‘Jem. Sometimes we do things we don’t want to do because we love someone.’ Mum wipes my tears away, her long fingers brushing my cheeks like windscreen wipers on a car.
‘Dad, you mean Dad. Because he has to go, right?’
I think of learning to change Gus’s nappies, trying to copy Mum, how she raises his ankles with one hand and slides the old nappy out from under him with the other, then swabs the decks with damp tissues and pats him dry and bundles him up neatly again, all the while having a friendly chat and tickling him in the ribs. It’s not so smooth an operation with me but that is not the main thing, the main thing is how it does not feel like a poo situation, usually quite grievous and appalling, situations such as walking slap into a mound of poo on the pavement or in a field and having a doomy feeling for hours thereafter. Gus’s poo is not a problem for me at all, just as Harriet barf is not nearly so bad as stranger barf and the day she marched up to my table at the convent and spewed a wee pile of swedes at my feet like I was the only person who could handle the barf situation with poise and even temper, that was not a problem for me either. In my opinion, Harriet displayed fine judgement that day. No one should have to eat swedes in their lifetime. I had a conviction swedes are nun food only and do not exist in the great world so I looked them up and I was nearly right. Brassica napus: used as a vegetable or as CATTLE FOOD. Hmm. This is possibly a catechism issue with nuns, how we should all eat off the same menu, cows and girls, the whole zoo. We are ALL God’s creatures.
The main thing is, not everything that spews forth from a person is lovely and charming, poo, barf, blood, but depending on your feelings for that person, this will or will not be a problem for you, and fine feelings are likely to predispose you to cheery mop-up operations, and willing journeys by sea to uncertain destinations.
‘Can Ben bring some binoculars when he comes?’
‘Maybe,’ says my mother, turning back to face the mirrors, ‘or maybe we can go out hunting for something you will like as much, something new. We will look until we find it. What do you think of that idea?’
I am not hopeful. A not-binocular, just as good? I don’t know.
‘OK,’ I reply because I don’t want to let her down. She needs me, she said so.
Mum loops that cross around herself, the one with the pale stone at the heart of it. It is art, she says, made by an artist, a man from Ireland, and I wonder about him, whether he is prone to cracking jokes and doling out hugs or whether he is too caught up with the forging of silver and the embedding of pale stones for such things. Mum tucks the cross under her clothes because of Dad and Judaism, or else she hangs other stuff about her neck, shimmery silver chains or a wispy scarf so the fine cross is kind of hidden, like seeing a person you know standing under a weeping willow in a slight breeze and the picture keeps breaking up. Kaleidoscopes give me the same feeling, part excited, part depressed. I twist the tube and the pattern comes, marvellous, and just as I get an idea about it, close to recognition, it turns into some new pattern and I have to start all over again, like nothing is clear for long enough, there is nothing you can swear to. Hey, you, standing there, do I know you? Is that a cross I see?
‘I love that,’ I say, pointing to the cross, trying not to say the word though my dad is downstairs. ‘And in the middle, the –’
‘Moonstone,’ says Mum drawing it out from the tangle of chains, willow. Binocular, moonstone. Memento. Where she’s been, where she is headed. Mrs Yaakov Weiss, destination Moon.
‘Well, I love it.’
‘It’s lovely, but you don’t really love it, Jem. You love people, not things.’ She says this gently, stroking the top of my head and taking the opportunity, as per usual, to untangle some of the mess up there. Like my dad, I do not have a big thing for combs and combing.
Here comes my dad. You can hear him coming a mile off. Is he worried about spooking people, is that why he goes in for all that shoe scuffling and throat clearing? I don’t think so. He finds it very funny indeed if you suddenly leap in the air limbs akimbo because someone has just spoken loudly in a quiet room or you are watching a film and there is a gunshot out of nowhere. Ha ha ha, he goes, watching you try to recover your senses. He loves this, people losing their cool. So that’s not the reason. He wants to make an announcement, that’s all. It’s a long hello. When an important cowboy enters a bar, he will pause a moment at the swing doors, stopping short in a slap of heels so everyone has a moment to turn round and get the picture before he bats the doors open, and this is no show-off thing, but a courtesy and a greeting, the only kind he knows, because he is an important cowboy and a man of few words.
Dad is carrying two glasses, white wine for Mum, Scotch for him. It is time for him to slap soapy water under the arms and put on a new shirt and tie it up with a tie. This will take him about three and a half minutes and there will be a lot of commotion.
‘Jem,’ he says. ‘We’ll have another boxing lesson soon. Maybe tomorrow.’
I think he has forgotten about telling me not to bother Mum. Anyway, why can’t I be in here if I want to?
‘Tomorrow? OK.’
My dad pulls on my hair, two tugs, like my hair is a bell pull and he is ringing for servants. It’s a show of affection and now I feel guilty about skipping out on his head rub, something I hope he has also forgotten.
‘Tomorrow we’ll do the rope-a-dope!’ says my dad, putting his glass down and shuffling from foot to foot like he is doing a war dance or some such thing. I have no idea what rope-a-dope means, or whether I am supposed to shuffle around also. I don’t bother. ‘Put up your dukes! Ha ha ha! And don’t eat those before dinner,’ he adds, prodding my bag of crisps and picking his glass up again.
Bloody. Not again. It is possible Mum asked him to look out for this tonight, the eating of crisps before dinner, because she is always in charge of health matters and that can be a full-time job when there are a lot of kids roaming around like in our house. The thing is, when Dad takes on a task of this kind, of handing out advice or rules, he is a lot bossier, clearly believing a kid will not get the message unless you yell out the advice and make a cross face and repeat it eight or nine times. We are not spooked, but if one of us has a friend around when Dad is marching through the house, poking us in the ribs in passing and yelling out advice, or going Heil Hitler! ha ha ha, the type of friend who is a bit jumpy near my dad, wondering if he is a crazy person or dangerous or something, for a moment I think I should explain to the friend that my dad is not scary, he is funny, that’s how he is, he’s not mad or anything, and then just as quickly, I feel clapped out and know it is time to get a new friend, because some things are too hard to explain, and I am real choosy about friends now, finding ones who can relax around Dad, which is a lot easier than trying to explain things to people who will never really understand. This may be an unusual way to pick friends, I don’t know, but that’s how it goes.
I pause on the landing outside Mum and Dad’s room. Where are you headed, Jem? I’m not sure. I am not wild about this time of day, it’s kind of lonely, too soon for supper, long since school, what’s it for, this time of day? I am skipping homework as it is Friday, which is my day off from homework and tomorrow is Saturday, Harriet’s favourite. She gets so excited about Saturday, she will rise up quite often in the night to tell me the latest in her departments of special expertise, or fill me in regarding what happened to her on Friday and what she aims to do on Saturday. A lot happens to Harriet, so there is a lot to say and sometimes she will also ask me to sing in my no-good singing voice or else we make beastie shadows on the wall in the light of passing cars. Saturday will never be as great for me as it is for her, but I would never have learned this were it not for Harriet waking me up all night to tell me stuff, waking up and chirping at me like a bird just so she can have that fine moment over and over maybe, of falling asleep with this exciting idea she will be waking up on a Saturday, a feeling like rewrapping your own present late at night at the end of your birthday, and unwrapping it slowly to have the surprise again, or something close, never quite the same, but not too bad and definitely worth a go on a long night.
I take a step or two on the landing and I know what’s up. I’m heading for Jude. I think I could find him in a room with no lights, easy. When we walk together, sometimes we veer into each other, not quite crashing, it’s more of a gravity thing, I believe. I’m not that well up on gravity yet and I have written the word in my Questions Notebook, the one I am filling up too quick which is why I do tiny writing, in the Brontë manner. I have read two books so far about the Brontës, a family of three sisters, Charlotte, Emily, Anne, and one brother, Branwell, who all did a great deal of tiny writing in small books wherein they made up stories about soldiers. They lived on the moors, rocky, cold, windy, not a very good place when it comes to health matters. There was a lot of dropping dead up there, especially from consumption, anxiety and too much walking in cold weather, and too much drinking at the Black Bull Inn in the case of Branwell, a great worry to his family who sat up waiting for him in darkened rooms, waiting for him to come home, and then waiting for him to stop raving in tussled sheets, raving from too much walking and drinking, etc. Branwell was a bit of a lost cause in all callings in life, and he took it to heart in the end, I guess, and even in his heyday of making a stab at things, when he painted a portrait of Charlotte, Emily and Anne with himself among them, he scratched his own face right out of the painting, which is a sad thing, one of the saddest.
Consumption. I add this word to my Questions Notebook. Consumption does not sound like a doomy disease, it sounds like what a person does to a peanut butter sandwich. I write it in near Gravity, making sure to leave enough space for notes and answers. My notebook is filling up fast. It measures 15×10½cm and the pages are sewn to the binding, not stapled. The cover has a painting of an olden times boxer with no gloves on and my dad gave it to me.
‘That’s Daniel Mendoza,’ he said in a proud voice meaning there is more to come, more information regarding Mr Mendoza. ‘He was Jewish, a Jewish boxer.’
I knew it. I take a look at Daniel who is putting up his dukes though there is no one else in the painting to box and I feel proud also. Maybe Daniel is practising. He is ready, always ready and he knows all the rules for boxing. He is a gentleman boxer. And maybe Jude is wrong, I can be a sports writer too, it’s not only a man job.
Gravity. What did Ben say? Pull, there is pull in gravity and a field where the pulling happens. Gravity is not just about not falling but about forces also, forces in a gravitational field, that’s it, and I think there is one between Jude and me, one I aim to fight because Jude is not in the mood for Jem today, I can tell by the smoky bacon crisps joke he played on me, a pushing-away joke, not a Jem-and-Jude-together joke, which is much nicer, close to a friendly cuff on the arm whereas the pushing kind makes my ears ring. Everything is messed up in our house and Jude is edgy, he does not want to be with me. Travel is important.
I move on past Jude and Ben’s room quick sticks. Jude is in there reading and thinking, going way past me in terms of world knowledge. I don’t care. I move on downstairs and across the kitchen, staring down at the red tiled floor and frowning like I have some great purpose in mind but mainly I do not want to see Lisa, I am not in the mood for Lisa, though I cannot help tossing some info her way before making it out the back door. Lisa is laying fish fingers in rows on a grill and cutting up broccoli for our supper, without separating the treetop part of the broccoli from the stem part. Harriet does not eat treetops and she is going to get depressed. Treetops are for birds, she says. She eats a broccoli top and all she can think about is a mouthful of dear birds and Lisa ought to know that by now. I glance swiftly at Gus who is in his pen, which resembles the sea lion cage at the zoo, a pen with no roof due to tameness of sea lions, and he is playing with his rubber hammer, tapping thoughtfully at the frame of his cage like he is doing repairs or something.
‘Mummy was UPSTAIRS,’ I tell Lisa. ‘She is in her room getting ready!’ I say, barging out the back door, not even looking at her as I speak, knowing she knew all along where Mum was and was too bloody to say so, bloody. I am on to Lisa and I am fed up with that pocket business.
I tuck my crisps in the bushes in case of robbers/animals/accidental crushing by passing feet, and I climb up into our tree, Jude’s and mine, the tree with twisty limbs and no fruit to bruise that is a great commando lookout, planted not far from the back door and right at the edge of the big garden for full strategic viewing in many directions all at once. A soldier will always find a lookout post, it’s the first thing he does, the very first. I can see everything from up here.
Jude and I read up here, lying back on the branches as if they were sofas in the living room. I prefer it with Jude, like crossing the road or riding a bike, I do it with him and I don’t think about crashing or calamity. I get the wobblies up here and there is Jude to grab my elbow, calm and firm, and I’m OK, no falling. Alone, it’s weird. Climbing the tree, I have to concentrate hard on each step, put your foot there, Jem, now there, hey, is that how we usually do it? Hold tight, do I always hold this tight? Suddenly I am all conscious of handholds and footholds, same as when I wear my summer hat with the strangly elastic and go all conscious of swallowing. And I even forgot to bring reading material. I’ll just have to do some more thinking. Fuck-hell. I’m tired out today.
Ben is at Chris’s house, he went there straight after our trip to the shops, I don’t know if he will come home for dinner, meaning Lisa will seem about three times the size she usually is. Looming. When Ben is around on Mum and Dad nights out, I don’t notice Lisa so much, she is just regular-sized, even when hovering in the doorway of the study after supper while Ben and Jude and I watch some not-allowed telly programme, Lisa standing there on the sidelines whimpering, and hauling out a hanky from her pocket to pat her eyes, a hanky being the only thing that’s ever actually in her pocket, I guess. Lisa weeps no matter what we are watching, even if it’s a horror film or a film with larks, a comedy. Maybe there is no TV in Portugal and for her, all telly programmes are strange and sad.
When Harriet and Gus are stashed safely in their beds, and I sit up close to Ben with Jude lying on the floor, it’s a good time and if Lisa shows up to lurk in the doorway, we say, Come on in, Lisa, come in, and she never does. I am busy, she says, I am just leaving, but she always stays a while, patting her eyes with a hanky while Ben and I dig each other in the ribs and get a pain from holding in hysterics. If Ben is not there, but at Chris’s house, it’s no fun and watching Lisa in the doorway makes me sad and kind of cross and I give up on telly, going for Tintin books instead, to read in bed by torchlight so as not to wake Harriet. I hold out hopes for not waking her, but she usually knows if I am reading and will do two things to annoy me. 1) Slowly rise up from under her sheets with one outstretched arm and pointy finger and very straight back and wide-open stary eyes after the manner of Egyptian mummies in a spook film she once saw, the only ten minutes of horror film she has ever seen. This slow rise and pointy-finger act can have a terrible effect on me and Harriet loves that. Here is the second annoying thing she does. Pop right up from pretend sleep and wave her little arms around yelling Boo! Even if I am expecting it, it gets me. If it doesn’t get me, I must act scared anyway or Harriet will feel a big failure in the horror department.
Chris is Ben’s best friend and I am pretty sure I want to marry him although he doesn’t know that, I don’t think you can tell a person a thing like that when you are not in your prime, and especially not when you are a girl. It’s not a girl job. I am a bit worried because Chris will reach the marrying time way before me due to being a whole five years and one month older plus I am going to another country and I don’t know how to keep an eye on things from so far away. I will have to come back, that’s all, and show up at his house and maybe he’ll take a look at me and I won’t be just Ben’s little sister any more, and he’ll say I am pretty sure I want to marry you and I won’t have to say anything at all on my part. I’ll just nod sagely or something.
I think it went this way between Mum and Dad when they first clapped eyes on each other. Not many words necessary to get things going, no weighing up of matters, no decision time. When you have a big feeling for someone, nothing can stop you, like in World War I, in the case of a soldier rushing out to save a wounded friend lying out there in no man’s land, and the soldier has only this one idea of rescue in mind, nothing can stop him, not fear, not other soldiers flying in the air around him, exploded by shells and whiz-bangs from Big Berthas (Krupp 420mm) and Slim Emmas (Skoda 305mm), from howitzers and mortars, from all the great guns blazing, nothing. When you have a singlemost desire and no time to lose, fear is like an engine not a stop light, switching on at all the right moments, for all pressing engagements in trying times, for grabbing a tool in the spider shed, for marching up to Chris’s front door one day in the future, and for Nelson, yes, Nelson in the Cape of Trafalgar, facing the enemy while not in the best of health, missing bodily parts usually thought vital for a leader of men, one hand, one eye, never mind, who needs two? He has a singlemost desire.
Right now would be a good time for a boxing lesson but my dad is busy. He is probably all dressed and shaved, with maybe one little cut on his face like a war wound on an Action Man. A going-out-to-dinner wound. He will be standing around Mum right about now, drinking his drink and going, Ready, dear? Ready, dear? and driving her a little bit crazy. Five minutes, darling. Why don’t you check on the children? Yes, right now would be a good time for a boxing lesson. Oh well. Maybe that is what this time of day is for, figuring out when is a good time for things, I don’t know.
My dad does not give lessons in a lot of things, or many lessons in any one thing and when he does, they do not last very long, maybe eight minutes or so and then he’s knackered and needs a drink or a tomato on a plate because he has had enough of your company, the only person he wants for long is Mum. When he decides to give a lesson in a thing, it’s wise to be at the ready and abandon all other activity. Up in the tree, Jude’s and mine, I try to think of what else besides boxing I have ever had a lesson in from my dad. Not much. But that is because we need to learn for ourselves plus we go to school five days a week and we have Mum. And Ben. I don’t believe my dad knows how much Ben teaches us.
I’m not tired any more. I’m getting stiff up here.
Here’s a thing. Dad is a sports writer and he hardly ever plays sports with us. A football rolls up to him on the terrace when he is reading and he ignores it completely, or he says, Oh! the way he does when the telephone rings and ruins his concentration. One time he tossed a cricket ball at Jude but kept aiming at his head for some reason, with Jude stepping away neatly each time and me chasing all over the shop for the ball and trying to explain the rules of bowling to my dad all by myself, because it was just too many words for Jude who could only say, She’s right, Dad, she’s right, Dad, while Dad shifts impatiently and says, OK OK OK, to my instructions, and then goes right on pelting the ball skyward like Jude is a coconut on a stick, my dad simply unable to do two things at once, listen and bowl. It was pretty terrible all round and I do not recall which one of them walked off first, dropping bat and ball in the middle of the garden for me to stare at, both of them slamming the door on sports.
What exactly does my father do around here besides sports writing and lying on sofas and talking to Mum, sometimes twirling her about the room in an olden times dance step involving twirls and sudden dips that look a bit dangerous? Sometimes he messes about in the kitchen, OK, and mostly on Saturdays. Other times he grapples with our homework mainly to see where we are in terms of world knowledge. NOT VERY FAR, he thinks. Also, he drives Ben and Jude to school, yelling at them in a jovial manner while shaking the car keys in the air. Make tracks! Shake a leg! Did we get you out of bed, Jude? Keeping you awake, are we? Feel like walking to school? Ha ha ha! It’s kind of noisy, but my brothers do not mind, carrying on cramming their satchels in a leisurely manner, with pieces of toast clamped in their jaws and Gus peering at them with great attention and a slight frown, and Harriet raising her arms aloft and crying out What larks! We shall have larks! which is her new favourite expression from another book Mum is reading to us right now by Mr Charles Dickens, Great Expectations it is called, and this sounds to me always like the name of a house but it is not, it is the name of a feeling.
Here’s another thing. My dad is good at short cuts and he has taught me one or two. 1) How to tidy up your hair when you do not have a big thing for combs and are in a needing-to-be-neat situation. Step out of sight and make your fingers comblike, as in a garden fork, say. Keep your fingers stiff and push them through your hair from the front to the back, going slow to allow for snags. Too fast and you get a pain in the roots. You can use both hands. 2) If you are not in the mood for cutting and cutlery, here is how to have a sandwich snack quick sticks. Spread out what you want on one slice of bread, peanut butter, Cheddar, etc. Now FOLD over the bread. This way there is one less edge things can spill out of and your sandwich is ready fast, and you need a single knife only, a spreading knife. Lastly, use your palm or a napkin for a plate, or eat outside to reduce clean-up operations. 3) In an emergency, here is how to unscuff your shoes. Stand on one leg and polish the toe part on the back of your standing leg. Forget about the heels. It is too hard and people do not pay a lot of attention to heels unless they have very fine eyesight and are watching you walk away and by then, you are gone, so what. Unscuffing works best on trousers, but socks and tights will do also. Another shoe tip from Dad is handy for when you are bashing off to school in a flurry, or from indoors to outdoors when at school. Do not tie your laces too tight. That’s it. Now you can slip your feet in and out, no tying and untying necessary, just as if your lace-ups are slip-ons! Be careful NOT to do this in front of Mean Nun who hates you, or she will say, as she did one time, Weiss! Weiss! Untie those laces and tie them up at once! You are a very lazy girl! Mean Nun is a bit crazed when it comes to shoes.
So these are some useful short cuts my dad has taught me, and I certainly hope he will teach me more as we go along because I am only ten going on eleven and cannot take everything in at once and there are things I do not need to know just yet. It changes all the time, the things a person needs to know. A stranger might think a small girl does not need to know how to box, but that is an opinion among others. I have had just one boxing lesson so far and here is how it went.
‘Hey, Jem,’ my dad says. ‘It’s time for a boxing lesson. You will need to know how to box where I come from!’
Whoa. What does he mean? I am getting all kinds of strange ideas about this place, this place where in winter it never stops snowing, which is what I explained to Lucy White, how it snows all the time, all-out snow, nothing like the wee sprinkling of frost and fluff we have here.
‘In winter,’ I said in a proud voice, in the manner of an Antarctic explorer, ‘it snows non-stop. That’s how it is.’
One proof I have of this ferocious snowing in my dad’s country is from Victor, my second favourite comic after Commando. In Victor there is a story about a dog called Black Bob, who is a sheepdog, not the roly-poly hairy kind resembling a sheep himself who traipses about Alpine passes bearing a tiny keg of cognac for types who have fainted in Alpine passes, no, Black Bob is a real sheepdog, the looking after sheep kind. There is a proper name for this kind of dog and Harriet will know it. All I have to do is slide my comic her way one day without asking anything directly, and she will tell me the name of this dog plus related details. It is not important right now.
Black Bob is good-looking and pretty sleek, a word denoting strength and slimness in a dog or horse, and possibly even a human, and seeming to me a handy word to call upon if I get to be a sports writer. I make a note of it in my Mendoza notebook. Black Bob goes to Canada in this story, though I do not know how he got there from Yorkshire where he lives with a handsome shepherd in a flat cap and waistcoat, thick black belt and dashing little white scarf. I do not know how he ended up in Canada having adventures because I missed out on some issues of Victor due to Jude taking a little time off from robbery. Never mind. Maybe for Black Bob travel is important, who knows.
In Canada, Black Bob stays with a Mountie, a Canadian type of policeman in a very big hat which must be downright annoying to run with against the wind. It could fall off, the chinstrap grabbing at the Mountie’s throat, or it could hold him up like a sail on a boat. It is not an aerodynamic hat. Jude has explained a thing or two to me regarding aerodynamics. This is no hat for a man on active duty. The Mountie and Bob have a big feeling for each other, close to how it was with the shepherd, a man Bob misses a lot. He needs to get back to Yorkshire, but meanwhile he has adventures in Canada largely involving the chasing of criminals in snowstorms, meaning nearly all the boxes in the story are white spaces except for Black Bob and the Mountie peeping through the snow, and skinny lines scraping across the page at a slant to indicate fierce winds, not very hard work for the artist, it seems to me, when the background is all snow.
The Mountie has a problem. He has a problem of snow-blindness, which I am now quite worried about also even though it seems to be a passing sort of blindness, for storms only. There is the Mountie, suddenly snow-blind, trying to chase criminals with his arms outstretched like Harriet doing her Egyptian mummy act and now Bob has to do everything, catch the criminals, take care of the Mountie, all of it. This is no surprise to me because Black Bob is always the main hero in every adventure, having a single-most desire plus the qualities of calm and modesty, making him an even bigger hero. Nothing matters to Bob except that his master is safe and the criminals not safe. In Canada then, it all ends OK, with the Mountie drinking a nice drink, cognac maybe, and his eyes carefully swaddled in a bandage until he can see straight again, and a fire going in the log cabin. There is no box to show him doing all this, feeling his way around the cabin and so on, so Bob must be the one who poured the drink, lit up a fire and wrapped the Mountie’s snow-blind eyes. There is no one else. Stories in comics are not always very realistic. Never mind.
It is possible I need to learn boxing because of criminals wandering around with bad intentions in concealing snowstorms, though I doubt it, I think this is just another cowboy lesson from my dad, another sign of his anxiety regarding me and my convent life and the weakening effect it may be having upon me. Don’t worry, Dad.
Here is where my first boxing lesson takes place: in the kitchen at the end of my dad’s day of sports writing. Here is why. When he gets fed up, and tired of teaching, he can turn around and, lo! there is Mum making dinner, Mum, his all-out favourite relief from everything, sports writing, giving lessons, talking to kids. Here is what else he needs after a lesson. A drink. I notice he already has one poured and waiting, right there on the kitchen table.
My dad stops me as I amble across the room.
‘Hey, Jem. It’s time for your first boxing lesson. You will need to know how to box where I come from!’ Then he goes, Ha ha ha! but I take it pretty seriously, that’s how it is with me.
‘OK, Dad.’
I put my book on the white oak table, far far from his Scotch glass, so as to allow for spill situations which are quite regular with him. And that is the moment I realise the lesson will not last long and I might as well take a chance on my dad as teacher and not ask too many questions. Spotting the glass and making this time calculation is a sleuthing activity, something you can do about people the more you stick with them and get to know things. It is possible to sleuth strangers also, and it is good practice, though you cannot always be sure where clues lead. The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes are very good and they are written by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who was first a doctor and then a writer and then a man who died of heart failure. I wonder did he see it coming, with his medical insight, and was that better or worse, to see it coming? Sherlock Holmes is a top unofficial sleuth and sleuthing is his chief preoccupation, whereas Tintin, another unofficial sleuth, also has a dog, and later on he meets a sea captain, and for the companionship of le Capitaine and Milou, I believe, Tintin has gentler manners and a less edgy temperament. OK.
‘Right. Now. Take a stance!’ says Dad, jumping around in front of me.
I stare at my dad. What is he talking about? He is going to have to do better than this. Teaching is not his big thing, I can see that.
‘What do you mean, Dad? Where?’ I look around for what he might mean, I look around for a stance.
‘Get into position, Jem! Stay loose, drop your shoulder, bend your knees, so you’re a moving target, not so easy to hit, get it?’
‘Oh. OK.’ I bend my knees and hold up my fists just like Daniel Mendoza the Jewish boxer on my Questions Notebook. I feel a bit silly, my knees pointing in opposite directions and my chin in the air.
My dad is laughing at me, he laughs at my stance, ha ha ha! ‘Jem, remember Cassius Clay? We saw him on TV, remember?’
‘Yup,’ I say.
‘He dances around the ring! He does the rope-a-dope. Right? Right!’
‘Oh, Dad, that’s so ridiculous, rope-a-dope, what does it mean?’
‘Just do it, Jem! Dance around, stay loose, come on!’
My dad is getting a bit testy. His drink is waiting and my time will be up, cut the questions, Jem. then!’ I say. I dance around.
‘Now. Very important. Always, always hold one hand in front of your face. Make a fist and hold it there. To protect your face. Most fights end with head injuries. Use the hand you don’t write with. Go on! I’m a southpaw, I hold up my right. Got that?’
‘Southpaw?’ I can’t help it, I have to ask. If he is going to use technical terms, I will need to understand them, that’s how it works in teaching.
‘Leftie, I’m a leftie!’
‘So I’m a northpaw then, am I? Um, whatever’s your best hand is what you are? Or, does everyone have a north and south? Is it for sports only? Or what?’
‘No no no! It’s a word for the left-handed, all right? And only if you are left-handed,’ says my dad scraping both hands through his hair and breathing in and out noisily.
‘That doesn’t seem right, Dad. Are you sure?’
I think about Horatio, Lord Nelson, probably born right-handed and suddenly with no choice in the matter and I wonder if it counts, if he is never really a true southpaw because in his head he is always reaching for things with a hand not there, his right, and always looking to one side for a man he can never have again, a right-hand man.
‘Jem! Come on, I’m teaching you, goddammit! Stop standing there like a goof!’
‘OK, sorry.’
I hold my left hand up, my southpaw not a southpaw because I am right-handed, making it just a regular paw, I guess, I hold it right there in a fist shape in front of my face. I dance around, doing the rope-a-dope, bloody, I do it all for my dad who is looking happy now.
‘Great! Let’s go. Try and protect yourself, remember? Now – BOX!’
Then my dad pushes my left hand, which is protecting my face from head injury, right into my face.
‘Hey!’ I shout. ‘You can’t do that! Unfair! And that hurt!’
‘Ha ha ha! You were holding it too loose! It didn’t really hurt, did it?’ he says, ruffling my hair. ‘I said hold your fist up but don’t forget about it, or that’ll happen every time. I didn’t need to punch you! You knocked yourself out! End of lesson!’ he adds, turning away to collect his drink, walking close to Mum and standing next to her with his back against the kitchen counter and his legs crossed at the ankles, reminding me of one of the dark-haired boys in Lisa’s photograph, leaning up against sunny white walls, and feeling jaunty. My dad tricked me and he feels jaunty and he has gone right back into boyhood, I think so.
‘Not fair, Dad,’ I tell him, settling in at the table with my Tintin book. I’m not mad though.
‘That’s right, Jem! Not fair!’ he says, real pleased. ‘Tough bananas!’
‘Thems the breaks?’ I ask.
‘RIGHT!’ he says, sliding an arm around my mother and squeezing her tight.
I’m not mad at my dad, though I have changed my mind about this being a good time for another boxing lesson. I’m not in the mood. And my dad knows I am not going to join the boxing profession, he is just training me in cowboy toughness, he trains us in games and by other methods, by way of documentaries and little speeches. When he mentions the Holocaust for instance, he gets a grave look which is a warning to us, that’s all, a reminder to keep on our toes and hold that non-writing hand up in front of the face, don’t let it go loose and limp, keep it in a fist shape, just in case.
My dad reminds me of another commander. He reminds me of Julius Caesar in some ways. In his prime, Caesar was a soldier and then he became the first emperor of the Roman Empire whereupon he messed up and lost control of things. Julius had no time out between commanding legionaries and ruling a whole empire and he got that lost feeling when it was just not timely.
When Caesar was a soldier and at his best, his men were devoted, as Mum would say, meaning they would do anything for him, go anywhere, no matter what, no questions asked, no Who started this war? or What are we doing here? or Maybe we should just go home. No doubts. There was fear of the sensible kind but no cowardice in Caesar’s army because of trust and devotion on the part of the men, and because Caesar had great expectations. On the eve of a battle, he exaggerates the might of the enemy, that is Caesar’s trick, and suddenly his men have twice the might, out of pride and so on, and they smite the enemy in half the time, a breeze for them since they expected to be smitten themselves by an enemy so much greater, Caesar had said, in numbers and in might. It’s a good trick.
Smite. This is a little bit like wot, having two meanings to bear in mind, usually very easy to tell apart. Smite is largely an olden times battle term so when Mum says I was smitten! there ought to be no confusion. She does not mean she was assaulted by battleaxe, halberd, poisoned arrow, javelin, sabre, scimitar, crossbow or mace in a field of battle, of course not, she means she had a very nice feeling due to something a person said or did in her presence. I hope she will be smitten by me one day, for something fine I do or say, because she is so happy when she says it, I was smitten! like she is about ready for song and dance.
My dad and Caesar are the same in some ways, not all. Dad may exaggerate the might of the enemy but he is in his prime as ruler, with no lost feelings, quite unlike Caesar who kept looking back in a wistful manner during his days as ruler, days that came upon him too quickly, and spent musing on the good trick he played on his men and on his prowess in commanding soldiers who were smitten by him and his leadership of soldiers. He wants his old job back. He can’t have it.
The Caesar method of facing the enemy is not uncommon. My swimming master has the same idea. In his opinion, the enemy here is fear of water, a fear he supposes to be lurking in every girl. This belief is the main influence on his teaching method. It could be worse. My friend Lucy White told me something very interesting one day on the way to swimming lessons and I summon up this thing she said when I am in the middle of a swimming lesson and am suffering horribly from the Caesar method. I am not sure I had fear of water before, but I think it’s coming.
It strikes me swimming baths would make a very good setting for a horror film, what with the non-stop scary echoes and shrieks giving me a pain in the ears, and shards of light bouncing off the water and ceiling and walls, hurting my eyes, sharp as needles. Swimming master prances up and down, always laughing and yelling out instructions, no pausing, and I wonder if he is like that at home, yelling and laughing and giving his kids a headache because he thinks maybe if he falls quiet no one will know what to do any more, or how to do it, his family now a gaggle of lost souls wandering the house in a state of perplexity, sometimes stopping in front of him to gaze his way in a pleading manner, just waiting for him to start yelling and laughing instructions.
‘HOLD ON!’ he shouts. ‘LINE UP! KICK! KICK! KICK! PUT SOME LIFE INTO IT!’
This means it is time to swarm against one edge of the pool and hold on to the edge and kick up a storm of water. This is quite a horrible experience. Clearly, life for swimming master = a great deal of frantic activity and noise. Jude lying on his back and staring at the ceiling in deep thought, for instance $ life. Now swimming master strolls up and down the deck doing his favourite thing, filling a bathing cap full of water and dashing it over our heads from a great height. Filling and emptying, filling and emptying. Why? He wants us to overcome our fear of water by all-out exposure and heavy attack by water. Soon we will all be cured of water fear.
‘WATER IS SAFE AS HOUSES!’
I have a different feeling though, involving a desire never to be in a swimming baths again while I walk this earth.
In the next part of the lesson we have to about face and let go. ‘LET GO!’
Off we go into the open, grappling on to a white polystyrene slab and kicking like crazy. The slab is a life raft but this is only an afterthought, the main thought is how it is meant to lead you into real swimming so that before you know it, you simply cast off your slab and there you are, swimming, like in a miracle involving crutches then no-crutches. Yay! There is probably something wrong with me because this never works and I am still very far from the miracle stage. My polystyrene slab flips up in the air in a grotesque manner and bops me on the head on the way down, falling out of reach so I have five or six near-death situations a lesson, with swimming master hauling me out of the water each time, by one arm only, laughing and yelling and nearly wrenching my limb out of its socket.
‘TRY AGAIN! THERE’S A GIRL! DON’T GIVE UP!’
Why not? I can’t wait to get home. I can’t wait for the whistle signifying the end of the lesson and friendly cuffs and slaps on the back from our teacher who is so pleased to be battling fear of water on our behalf. He must be proud of Harriet. I am. Harriet swims like a fish. I see her in all the commotion, floating and flipping around happily, no struggling, just about ready to pass up on the polystyrene, an amphibian perhaps, a duck-billed platypus, I have learned about those, equally happy on land and water, amphibian. My sister swims like a fish.
I do not. I just don’t see it, this business of floating and so on, of larking about in water like it is a proper home for a human, water see-through as air but SAFE AS HOUSES! Maybe the Caesar method is a problem for me, simple as that. It could be worse though, it’s what I tell myself ever since the day Lucy White informed me how some kids learn to swim, a day we were waiting with Harriet at the convent gates, waiting for Mrs White to meet us and take us to the baths.
Harriet is on a wee wander roundabouts. I keep her in my field of vision.
‘Kids are thrown right into the pool,’ says Lucy. ‘Or the sea. And they swim because they must. Otherwise they sink and die.’
‘That can’t be right,’ I say, frowning.
‘Oh yes.’ Lucy knows.
This would definitely save a lot of time, I think. One lesson. And Mum would not have to come on a bus and collect us once a week. Maybe we could even skip out on the single lesson and learn only when truly necessary, in an emergency situation such as a sinking ship, or a fall from a Hawker Hurricane shot down over the ocean in a dogfight whereupon we wait for rescue in the freezing waters, doing the dog-paddle. You swim or die, it’s a mechanism, coming naturally as breathing, unless you are not a regular person and are missing this mechanism, in which case you die. It is not always easy to tell who is regular and who is not which is why we need lessons, I guess. Just in case.
‘Anyway,’ says Lucy. ‘It’s a bit cruel but it happens. In some cultures.’
Lucy knows about cultures, she is half-Indian. I am half-Jewish, maybe more than half.
‘Please don’t tell Harriet, OK? The swim or die thing. Please.’
Harriet is sitting under the conker tree, perched on her towel with her bathing suit furled up neatly within, elbows on knees and her little face in her hands and her straw hat hanging by the elastic around her neck and tipped right back over the shoulders like she is a Mexican in a Western. My sister clearly is not bothered by elastic. She doesn’t get that strangly feeling. She calls out to me suddenly.
‘A straight line is the shortest distance between two points! Sister Martha said!’
Though she does have the swim mechanism, my sister is definitely not a regular person.
‘Great, Harriet!’ I call back.
‘Why not?’ asks Lucy. ‘Why can’t I tell her?’
Not can’t, I think. Shouldn’t. Anyone CAN tell her. Anyone could. ‘Just don’t,’ I say. ‘She won’t like it. Please.’
‘OK – oh! There’s Mummy!’ says my friend and we pile into the car, Harriet in front where she will chirp away at Mrs White the whole journey. Harriet and Mrs White are friends. I feel glad we are learning to swim in a lessons fashion and not the toss into a pool and hope for the best fashion. I am also glad my dad is not apprised of this last method, as it might fit into his style of teaching. Maybe he does know. Maybe he suggested it to Mum.
‘No, darling. I don’t think so. No,’ she says.
Mum is the only person he obeys at all times, no problem, and that is the third thing I am glad about.
If I lose my grip up here without Jude, if I give in to the force of gravity, I will fall splat on to the stone terrace below, falling in a straight line, unless of course I am thrown off this line by a protruding branch on the way down. I doubt it. I think I will fall in a straight line which is the shortest distance between two points. If this happens, there will be a lot of crying plus a funeral and then maybe no one in the Weiss family will go to my dad’s country, the place where he has roots, because the Weiss family will be in shock and travel will not be that important any more.
I may skip dinner. I may just stay up here all night until someone finds me. I may have to scoot down and grab my chicken curry crisps from the bushes in case of starvation and climb back up again. Maybe Mum is saying, ‘No, I cannot go out to dinner without saying goodnight to Jem! No! Jem? Jemima? Je-MIII-ma!’
No answer.
Soon comes the search party and men in uniform spraying torchlight all over the back garden and dogs sniffing the air and pulling hard on the leashes so the men lean backwards as they walk, digging their heels into the dark ground, arms at full stretch. The dogs are hunting me, like I am an escaped prisoner of war and have nearly made it to Switzerland and when I am found, there will be bear hugs and everyone will stick by me, everyone will stick together, a little lost for words, thinking deeply, counting lucky stars, it’s been such a close shave.
I recall stitches under my chin, six of them, three years ago, and a car ride back from hospital and a big white bandage and everyone speaking soft when I got home and giving me careful looks, kind of shy. Harriet even did me some dance steps, a jig, a celebration, because my six stitches, I suppose, could so easily have been two hundred. Do you need anything? I’ll get it! Don’t move, stay right there, Jem. It was a close shave. It can happen so quickly. Sometimes people need reminding.
It’s really not much of a drop. I’d get a few scrapes, that’s all. Or I might mess it up and things will end in maiming and paralysis and being pushed around in a wheelchair whereby there goes my career in sports writing, a roving type of job, though not a girl job according to Jude, who may be wrong for once.
I think about supper and how if I am not there Harriet will be oppressed by broccoli because Lisa will try to make her eat the tops as well as the bottoms and Harriet will not know what to say. If I am there we can do a broccoli exchange, my bottoms for your tops. Without me, it’s a problem. Here’s another. A picture of Mum with a worried look – Where is Jem, where is Jem? – a picture that gives me a rushing pain in the chest. And one more problem. I have to pee.
Someone’s coming. It’s Jude.
‘When are you coming down?’ he says.
Whoa. I watched him all the way since hearing the back door slam, all the way along the path and he never once looked upwards. He just knows I’m here. He knows.
‘Why?’ I ask, sounding breezy.
‘Just wondering,’ he says, strolling to the edge of the terrace to gaze deep into the back garden, stuffing his hands in pockets. ‘Oh yeh. Forgot to say. Got something for you. Black Cat, two pieces, all yours.’
Black Cat gum is my favourite, liquorice-flavoured. It is very good gum. Jude probably stole it when Ben was paying for the crisps.
‘I might come down in a bit. Well, I was coming down anyway, actually.’
‘We need to sort our Action Man stuff,’ he says. ‘For the ship. I’ve already started.’
I climb down. I pick up a twig and swish it about and don’t look at him. I try to sound as bored as Jude. ‘I’m free now. I could help.’
‘OK, let’s go,’ he says and we head for the back door.
‘Jude, do you think I’m a lost cause? I might be a lost cause in everything, do you think so?’ I forget to sound bored. I sound lively.
‘Yeh … probably. Hey. You left your crisps in the bushes.’
‘Oh right, thanks,’ I say, dashing back for them. ‘Wait for me.’
Jude waits. ‘Don’t eat them before supper,’ he says.
OK, Jude.
Hope is not a problem for the starmen any more and pride is not a problem for them either. It is never a problem. They have no time for modesty, which is very time-consuming. Pride is definitely not a problem for many scientists and this is a help to them because there ought to be no distractions in this business of making discoveries which is a full-time job chiefly requiring hope and foresight, and it is why the men at NASA fell apart only very briefly when they discovered a flaw in the most perfect mirror in the world and were able so soon to turn calamity into triumph, instead of slamming the door on NASA and maybe wandering off into forests without shoes.
Edwin Hubble, champion boxer! war hero! publishes a paper with his colleague Milton Humason in 1929 on what he discovers to be an expanding Universe, based on thoughts to do with redshift and distance, and in it he is largely removing the vagueness in previous speculations made by Georges Lemaître two years earlier, but he never mentions Georges, not once, Georges who was an ordained priest before taking up astronomy, a pursuit interrupted by the Great War in which he won La Croix de Guerre avec palmes, a great distinction in my opinion, though he may well have preferred something else, a telescope in his name, a theory, rules and laws.
The recession velocity of a distant galaxy, its redshift, is directly proportional to its distance. Hubble’s Law. The number representing the rate at which the Universe is expanding = Hubble constant. There is Hubble time and a Hubble radius and a Hubble diagram and there is the HST, the Hubble Space Telescope.
Milton Humason went to summer camp near Mount Wilson in 1904 when he was fourteen years old and he fell in love with the mountain, quitting school shortly thereafter and taking on joe jobs when they were building the dome of the observatory at an altitude of 1,750 metres to house the Hooker telescope designed by George Ellery Hale. Milton begins as donkey driver, hauling equipment up the slopes and then he is janitor, then night assistant, until Harlow Shapley takes note of Milton’s great skills of observation and his ability to make photographic plates of faint astronomical objects, and offers him a post in 1920, putting him to work with Edwin Hubble.
Humason is shy about his lack of education but he is a great observer, one of the best ever, even Shapley says so, and Hubble certainly knows it, making him do a new kind of donkey work, Humason the one spending long dark nights in winter which are best for star watching, freezing in an observatory open to the sky and lit by a dim red bulb only, so as not to mar the photographic plates, and unheated because currents of convection can blur the field of vision. Because of the Earth’s rotation and the vagaries of the clockwork tracking system, Milton must never let go of the telescope if he wants to hold one same object in his sight across the sky, the telescope becoming an extension of him, in step with him, it is him.
There was quite a lot of fighting in the astronomy community of the 1920s, the heat of argument, say, tending to blur the field of vision. In science, these are called debates. Here are men arguing about the distance to the stars based on the observation of variable stars, measuring absolute magnitude and periods of luminosity, unsure whether the nebulae they see are part of the Milky Way or galaxies out on their own, confused by stellar outbursts of light and power they don’t yet know are supernovae, signifying the gravitational collapse of massive stars that can shine briefly, each one, as hot as a hundred billion suns. How can a star so bright be so far away? Or so close?
Wishful thinking can blur the field of vision.
When Milton Humason compares plates he has taken of the Andromeda Nebula, he finds minute specks of light in some plates and not in others, variable stars he believes, variable stars Shapley insists do not exist in the Andromeda and so when Milton brings him his finest photographic plate with the careful ink marks mapping what he has seen, specks of light he has been told are not there, Shapley takes the plate away and wipes it free with a white hanky produced from a pocket, making a little nothing out of something, setting his own limits on the possible, an example perhaps, of how pride is not a problem for him.
I don’t see it, it’s not there.
Saturday, and you watch the clock you have placed at the kitchen table. You are going to the cinema, you don’t want to be late, you are never late. You love the way time works, how one same stretch of time can take for ever to pass or else slip by in a reverie, you love this, it’s lovely. Your books are spread out. Homework. Everything is lined up neatly, the edges of books parallel to the rim of the table or at perfect angles to your right and left, leaving fine triangles of table in each corner. You appreciate geometry, straight lines, hospital corners, perfect folds in white linen, you learned this, you have a Brownie badge in bed-making. You are nearly a Girl Guide, the youngest ever. Most of all though, you appreciate words, you can travel with words as with music and the seasons. Change. You even love this word change, it’s a travelling word and travel is important.
The soldier marches around the kitchen, keeping busy, he doesn’t want you to know he is watching you, he can’t help it, he loves to look at you. Frances. He wants to say I won’t let you run late, let me do this thing, watch the clock for you, but he stays quiet, tamping the tobacco down in the pipe he will not smoke inside, no smoking indoors, it gives Emily a headache. My wife, my wife, my old pal. In bed now, always in bed, his fault. He tamps the tobacco down, a sound like ticking, sound of the clock you are watching, it’s nearly time. The soldier is on the move, fiddling with the stove, stealing glances, like he is more than your father. Soldier, labourer, husband, father. What else? Nothing. Sometimes it hurts to watch you, what does it mean, forget it. Keep moving.
At times like this, he has a sudden urge to travel, not anywhere special, just to ride a train. A friend tells him a person can ride for whole days across this country and see nothing but fields of snow or corn until coming upon sea again, but mountains first, mountains like the edge of the world to stop you falling straight off, or the wall of a trench perhaps, craggy with things, limbs sometimes, and over the wall, noise, a sea of it. Stop that. It would be a fine thing to ride a train for whole days across this country he was not born in, a place he can fit his old country into twelve times over at least, but he walks instead, he walks for hours, fast, because the outdoors is good for him, for his lungs and everything else that hurts him indoors, a pain that can pass as he strides the city, passing sharply, quickly, a view from a train window.
He doesn’t see it though, making that train journey, not as long as you are here. He made choices, he is husband and father and he will not leave. He is not sure how long you will stay, it can all happen so quickly, comings and goings, the sea maybe his enemy, and all the things you know, his enemy too, each badge on your arm one step farther away from him, there is hardly any more room on your arms to show all the things you know, that you have learned so quickly, so easily, and meanwhile he knows one thing only, no one goes hungry in his house. He is not sure if that is an achievement, no one says anything, my wife never says anything.
Watching her is different. How can she be right here and so far away? He misses her. She is right here and he misses her. Watching you is different, special and fearful at the same time, a church feeling, there is a word for this, why does there have to be a word for everything? The soldier taps his pipe out and plugs it again. A church word, Creation, Incarnation, what’s that word, damnation, ha! Damnation. Bless my soul! Damn and blast it. No swearing, Bert, she won’t have it. Don’t swear, Albert. Damnation, bloody hell, Salvation … Salvation Army. He chose you, he remembers it, marching in, eyes right, eyes left, not at ease but proud, erect, and halted by you because you looked at him, you really did. Yes, please. That one. Sign here.
You are already beyond him, too much for his arms, though he could carry you if necessary, he has carried men, for heaven’s sake, dead weight. He thinks he ought not touch you somehow, it’s a feeling, that’s all. Don’t touch. You sit close some days, you are teaching him to read and you are so beautiful, he could never have made you. Don’t touch. Awe. That’s the word! As long as you stay, he will try to learn but he knows he will not do as well with words as you hope and this kills him, the way the sight of you does sometimes. He remembers signing for you with an X, a leaning cross, and he worries it is not good enough, it might not count at all and someone will be coming to take you away. Coming soon. He knows also that in history, kings sign with a seal, he has no seal, and he knows that all kings are soldiers but not all soldiers are kings.
‘I’ll be outside,’ he says. ‘I’m just stepping out. I’ll be right on the balcony.’
He is cross today, have you done something wrong? Is it Mummy? It’s so dark in there, she can’t take the light, she is in bed, hospital corners. Bed-making. Daddy, I can do it for you, lots of things, stoke the stove. Fire-lighting. Nearly time. You have a new ribbon, red, rose red, and you can tie it in your own hair, cleat, half hitch, sheepshank, bow. Knot-tying. You love the cinema, especially right before the beginning when everything is black except for tiny specks of light, electric candles on the walls, faint like distant stars. You have been to a planetarium, twice! It made your heart race, your blood rush. There is so much to learn.
My brain can know one hundred trillion things.
Charlemagne, King of the Franks and the Lombards became emperor in the year 800 but he was a reluctant emperor. He drank little and studied a lot and was in awe of teachers, showering them with honours, learning Latin and Greek and mathematics and how to trace the course of the stars, though he came so late to learning, it grieved him, he will never catch up. He kept writing tablets under his pillow for practice in times of insomnia, because this is the skill he prized most, the writing skill. He was a light sleeper and had high hopes of acquiring calligraphy but he did not get very far, nowhere near as far as hopes.
Charlemagne was a king and a soldier, a man with a particular devotion to St Peter and Peter, he learned, is not a name at all but a Greek translation of an Aramaic word meaning rock. There is so much to learn.
I read that our Galaxy is not the Universe itself, it is an island of stars amongst maybe fifty billion islands of stars and this news has no bearing on me, no withering effect, as much to me as ink marks I can swipe away with one flick of a hanky, hey presto, my universe still the Universe, a place I wander with a slight swagger, a cowboy entering a saloon and heading for the bar in a straight line which is the shortest distance between two points, and drinking his drink, intent on a world all his own, one with no trespassers and no change, and nothing to prevail against it, a place he knows, and upon this rock, he builds it. Everything.
Noli mi tangere.
What cannot be touched can never be taken away.
FOUR (#ulink_7563483b-bd8f-5726-bc88-afd05f05d485)
I am on a mission.
I am going to the convent today and it is not a school day and this is down to a decision I made, though all the thinking on this matter was done by Mum. She has this way of throwing out an idea in a breezy manner which is really a solution to all your deep troubles, and you do not even realise it at the time. I am sitting at the kitchen table with a glum expression clutching a Tintin book it is impossible to concentrate on even though it is The Castafiore Emerald, a favourite.
‘Maybe you should go to school today and say goodbye to Sister Martha,’ Mum says, pausing in her activities to gaze out the big kitchen window, like she is talking to herself and not to me at all.
I didn’t know a kid could do such a thing, go to school on a not-school day, and the goodbye business definitely did not occur to me. Whoa. I sit up straight, same as when Ben showed me the other day how to unhook the straps on my satchel and carry it around by the handle in a grown-up fashion. I spent a whole four years of my life wondering why the satchel men sewed a handle smack in the middle of my satchel flap, feeling pretty sure they made a mistake due to sitting up too late sewing satchels. I check out everyone else’s satchel to see if theirs have a handle plus straps. Mostly they have a handle OR straps, meaning I have a downright strange satchel, a thought I had until recently, when Ben showed me how mine is a two-way satchel: an on the back kind which is fine when you are an Antarctic explorer or Coldstream Guard but a bit babyish when you are a mere person, and a carrying around by one hand kind, the man in a suit with urgent plans kind. Grown-up.
‘Now? Today? Shall I go now? I’m going to get my jacket!’ I tell Mum, jumping up from the table while she rings Sister Martha to warn her, I guess, that I am on my way, and that is another thing I never knew, that nuns can speak on the telephone just like non-nuns though it must be a bit hard for them with only a little part of the ear poking free of the headdress. Not headdress, Jem. There’s a proper word for it. What is the name of the nun hat? What is the name for the sit-up-straight whoa! feeling? Word questions go in the Words section. Write it down later. My Daniel Mendoza book is filling up fast.
Whoa. Sit up straight. Not Awe … a longer word. It’s the word for when the shepherds have recovered from shock and are listening carefully to Gabriel who has just introduced himself very politely the same way he does with Mary. Fear not! he says, etc. This is so they know he is on the same side as them, and not an enemy and now he can get on with Annunciations. Whereupon they all have a feeling denoted by a long word starting with a capital letter, as are most big feelings and situations in the Bible, written at a time people were not so used to words as nowadays, and might not know what’s important without capitals to make the words stand out.
Not Awe. Something else. Awe is the Adoration thing, different, what you have to act when you look at the baby, a feeling I will never get right because all I see in the word Awe is a plastic doll in swaddling with flippy horror-film eyelids, a doll held in the arms of a friend who is not a mother and has only been on this earth eight or so years herself, and then I see my sister in a sparkly halo and wings, dancing around with too much enthusiasm. Awe is all mixed up for me now. But what is that long word? Never mind. Anyway, I am not sure it is OK to take words out of religion straight into life in a non-religion situation, so I might as well forget about it. Maybe if you take out the capital letter it is OK, I don’t know.
‘I’ll get Harriet,’ I tell Mum. ‘She is a close friend of Sister Martha’s. Harriet and me could go together, Mum.’
‘Harriet and I,’ she says gently.
‘You’ll come too? Great!’
‘No, Jem. Harriet and I – not Harriet and me, remember?’
‘Oh, right,’ I say. I always get this wrong. There is so much to learn, bloody.
Going to the convent on a Saturday morning and wearing Saturday clothes instead of a uniform is a bit weird. I wonder if I will run into Mean Nun who will freak out even though she is not in charge of me on Saturdays, unless, of course, there are special rules about convent grounds and trespassing upon them in civvies. Maybe she is in charge at all times if I am on convent grounds. Oh well. I am not changing my shoes when I get there and she will just have to face the facts. It is the end of term and I am going on a ship, goodbye.
I think Sister Martha will like my clothes. They are pretty cool. I have my suede desert boots on plus my favourite jeans plus my BRITAIN IS GREAT T-shirt, all white except for those three words in black and the Union Jack below it which is our flag, depicting the union of crosses of saints, of St George (red) and St Patrick (red) and St Andrew (white). Nuns are quite keen to teach the flag story due to the saints part. The Union Jack has a blue background and this also has to do with St Andrew. I cannot remember why. Andrew was the big brother of Simon Peter, meaning the apostle skills and fishing skills clearly ran in the family. Andrew died by crucifixion, so maybe blue is for sky, the background against which he died, and for blue waters, because he was a fisherman and because he was a witness when Jesus was baptised in the river. Andrew did some good works in Russia, met his bad end in Greece and his bones are in Scotland. St Andrew is patron saint of Russia and Greece and Scotland. Saints have very busy lives and often do a lot of travelling.
I am wearing my best jacket, my General Custer jacket for special occasions. I love it, I mean it’s lovely or whatever. It is coloured light brown suede, almost gold, a lot like Gus’s hair. It has snaps for doing up and fringy suede on the underside of my sleeves and another nice row of fringes at the back across my shoulder blades. There is a silky lining, same as the borders of Harriet’s ex-pink blanket. There are two problems with this jacket. 1) I once fell into a bog while wearing this jacket and it bears a small dark stain of bog on one cuff no one will notice except upon close inspection or else if Jude sees me in the jacket and reminds me how I fell into a bog while wearing this jacket. In a showy voice.
‘Hey, Jem. Remember when you fell in the bog?’
‘Yeh-yeh,’ I usually reply, like who cares.
I do remember though. I remember trying not to cry, not because I hurt myself and was going in for bravery or anything, but because this is my favourite item of clothing and I didn’t want it wrecked, and I wanted to hide it, my grief over stains and possible rips in the fabric, because I know things are not important, that’s what they tell you. People are important, not things, you don’t cry over things. Still, when you own a suede jacket like General Custer’s, it can feel quite important.
Everyone had quite a good time when I fell in the bog. I did not incur injury so it was permissible to crease up like this was the best comedy moment in my family’s lifetime so far, especially in the case of my dad who loves this type of event, a person tripping himself up on the cuffs of his very own trousers or walking slam into a lamp-post while reading a book or losing a battle with a trayload of tippy objects, crash! Ha ha ha ha! This is quite an interesting reaction in my dad, seeing as he is the singlemost unsteady person I have ever met. It is possible he is just happy not to be the only one crashing into things. Now there is me to keep him company. Yay!
We were on holiday when I fell in the bog and Harriet needed some airing in a field because of throwing up all over Mum in the car on the way to a fishing village. I’m not sure there are cities in that country, only towns and fishing villages and rivers and fields in between, some of them with booby traps. It was raining pretty hard and Harriet had been staring at the windscreen wipers for some time, whipping her eyes from right to left like she was witnessing a duel about to start between two people in a frozen landscape. I felt a bit sick myself just watching her. We stepped out for some air, feeling bad for Mum who kept trying to make Harriet perk up and get back on the road to health, etc., which was very friendly on Mum’s part, considering she was all covered in barf. That is when I fell in the bog, cheering everyone up no end, and that is also when I thought of Lawrence of Arabia crossing the desert with two small boy guides and one of the boys slips into quick sand, never to reappear, despite Lawrence’s long white scarf and a lot of goodwill and encouragement, don’t let go! When there is suddenly no more pull on the scarf and it comes away with no boy on the end, Lawrence drops his head in the dune. He is pretty depressed. He has one less boy.
Jude and my dad like to remind me of Bog Day, though for Harriet it is probably Windscreen Wiper Day, a day she recalls being hypnotised by two wipers making a groaning sound on glass and clearing up half-circles of space for Dad to see through, spaces obscured by rain almost as soon as they are wiped clean, a game with no winning in it and a bad sight for Harriet, maybe as if she were waking up on a Monday and wishing it were Saturday, opening and closing her eyes to change the picture, squeezing them tight shut with this high hope, but every time she snaps them open, it’s Monday, still Monday.
Jacket problem number two. Growing. A day will come when I must pass on the Custer jacket, but not to Harriet, no, it will have to skip right on by Harriet and wait for Gus. She will not look seemly. She looks seemly in girl things. Why, she even has a little furry jacket and a furry bonnet and muff to match, and in this finery she resembles the child of a Russian king (tsar) and his wife (tsarina) which pleases her much when I tell her so as she has a particular fondness for Russian history involving finery and big chandeliers and revels in fine houses as well as the dark side featuring prejudice and the sudden uprisings of serfs, and the fleeing of Jews in ships, a dark side brought to her attention by my dad when he discussed his roots, some of which are in Poland where we are not headed, Poland that was once in Russia and once in the Austro-Hungarian Empire and now out there on its own. It sounds a bit dodgy over there and I am glad we are not going to Poland. Russian history, however, is now on Harriet’s list of dear subjects and she is prone to questioning my dad thereupon, out of nowhere.
‘Explain about the fleeing and the ships!’ she demands, out of nowhere.
‘When you’re older! I’ll give you a book.’
My dad has books on everything.
‘Big fur trade in Russia,’ says Jude. ‘For hats and muffs and coats. Little animals jumping in the snow. Then nothing.’
‘All quiet in the forest,’ I say.
‘Stop it!’ says Harriet.
‘Sorry,’ says Jude.
‘Yeh, sorry,’ I add.
I see it for a moment, a Harriet vision of Jude’s little animals jumping around in snow, scurrying across winter forests in a light-hearted manner, but leaving tiny footsteps for fur traders to trace, leaving footsteps when they ought to have fled in ships, to clutch the rails of tall vessels on billowy seas and take in deep breaths signifying safety, sailing farther and farther away from Russians waving angry weapons in the air and shouting terrible oaths.
‘They ought to have fled in ships,’ I tell Harriet.
‘Yes, my dear,’ replies my little sister in a small sad voice, patting my hand in a soothing manner like I am the one having the bad vision, not her.
It’s kind of hot for my jacket today.
Maybe I should find Jude before I go. He will need to know where I am going and how long I’ll be, even if he has no outright plans for us.
There are so many ways to leave this house, different paths, and it’s weird now, how the house and all the ways to leave it seem like new things and not old things I have known all my born days. I don’t know if we will ever come back, though Dad says if things do not work out over there we can come home, except he didn’t use the word home, he said here, because this may be home for us but not for him, not really, his roots are in other places, he has to find them.
What does he mean, if it doesn’t work out? I have dangers in mind again, things such as criminals in snowstorms and snow-blindness and our ship smashing up in a tempest and my having to learn to swim as fine as Harriet, to swim like a fish or die. And I think about boxing lessons, how they have come to a halt because of the too many questions I ask and how I am all at sea when it comes to facing up to dangers because of insufficient training in the ring. All I have is a stance and it is a bit out of date. I don’t think Jude will box me any more. Last Christmas, which is a PAGAN HOLIDAY! according to Dad, Jude and I both got the same gift of red boxing gloves, one pair each, proper lace-up ones with black elastic on the cuff part and the rest all red, and such a blazing red, I believe I was more excited than Jude, though it was strange too, to get boxing-glove gifts, like we were enemies or something instead of twin types in a field of gravity. We have only had one match together. It’s too hard fighting with Jude. Here’s how it went.
‘Here,’ says Jude. ‘Wear these.’
Jude passes me a pair of shorts from his drawer. They are navy-blue baggy sports shorts for playing rugby in. I feel special but I act normal, like I wear his clothes all the time. Well, sometimes I do, but only when he has grown too big for a thing and then it’s not really his any more. This is different. He still wears these shorts. We change right in his room and take our tops off and then we gaze at our feet. We must have footwear. We are stuck. What we need are nice boxer boots, high boots with laces resembling the ones Victorian ladies stroll around in except without heels.
‘What do we do now?’ I ask.
‘Football boots. Take the studs out.’ Jude goes over to the cupboard for his boots and picks off clumps of mud, frowning. ‘Studs don’t come out of these. Forgot. Hmm.’
‘We should clean that up, the mud. But, Jude? There’s only one pair – so even if they did come out, what about me?’
‘We’ll have to pretend,’ he says, real decisive, gathering up the clumps of earth and swishing the dirt into a little pile and staring at it. ‘I’ll fix that later,’ he says.
‘Are we bare feet, then?’
‘Yeh,’ says Jude. ‘Bare.’
We sit on Jude’s bunk and I watch him, do what he’s doing. I pull on my gloves and we both have the same problem, gloves on and dangly laces with no fingers free for tying purposes. Jude hauls his gloves off by gripping them between his knees and does up my gloves and slips his back on.
‘Hmm,’ he says again. ‘I’ll ask Mum. Back in a minute.’
This dressing-up business is definitely taking a while and I’m kind of not in the mood any more and Jude looks all serious and spooky, like he’s doing some hard labour or whatever, homework, gardening.
‘Jude, let’s not,’ I say as he is leaving the room. ‘Let’s play something else.’
‘We have to try,’ he tells me, wandering off to get his gloves tied. When he comes back he has two rolled-up towels over his arm and he hangs one around my neck and the other around his. ‘They always have that,’ he says. ‘Towels. Oh wait. We need dressing gowns. I can wear Ben’s.’
We stop and look at our hands.
‘We’ll never fit through the sleeves now, Jude! And I’m not taking these off again.’ My brother is cross, I am really letting him down.
‘You wear it on the shoulders. No sleeves.’
‘Jude, my hands are like a mummy’s. I can’t grip a thing, do we have to? Can we skip the gowns? Please.’
‘Yeh, well, next time we do dressing gowns. It’s realistic’
‘OK then. Do we fight now?
‘Yuh.’
‘Where, here?’
‘In the hall,’ says Jude.
Jude starts jumping around on his toes and punching the air and breathing out in sharp puffs like a horse in a field, jumping all around his corner of the upstairs hall, doing the rope-a-dope I think, and I copy him, hopping up and down and jabbing my fists at nothing and when Jude flicks his towel away by jerking his shoulders quite sharply, I do the same. Now we are ready.
‘Ding-ding!’ I say, as I have heard on TV.
‘Wait!’ snaps Jude.
‘What? That’s what happens. Ding-ding.’
Jude stops dancing. ‘You say our names first. In this corner – in that corner, you know. Then, let the fight begin, then ding-ding.’
‘Oh. Isn’t that just for wrestling? In this corner, in that corner?’
‘Wrestling is fake.’
‘I know.’ Bloody. Everyone knows that. ‘So what are we called then? What names?’ I feel grumpy and I have a lump in my throat, I’m always getting things wrong, and this game is silly, it’s not our usual game, I don’t like it.
‘I don’t know, forget about the names this time, ding-ding!’ Jude says, dancing towards me.
‘Hey! I wasn’t ready!’
‘Come on!’
Jude cuffs me in the shoulder and I stumble slightly, my upper arm aching right away and pins and needles coming in a rush so for a moment I cannot wiggle my fingers or anything. This is realistic, he hurt me, I don’t like it. Then suddenly I start to pull myself together and concentrate hard, running through all the instructions for boxing step by step, making a picture in my head and hearing my dad’s voice in there.
Take a stance! I do it.
Be a moving target, not an easy one! Right.
Do the rope-a-dope! What is that, Dad?
Protect your face! Oh yeh.
I take it step by step but I am somewhere else already, I don’t know where. I am not here, I go missing. I step outside. Back in a minute. And who is that? Like Jude, not Jude, some stranger. I dance, I do the rope-a-dope, my punches will hit hard, right on target, I’m ready. She’s ready.
‘What are you doing?’ he shouts. ‘Get close, you’re out of the ring!’
I notice Jude’s eyes, how they are not grey-blue like mine and Harriet’s and Gus’s, and bright in a different way from the blue in Ben and Mum, Jude’s are a special blue, aquamarine, that’s the word, I’ve seen it on the box of pastel chalks at school, the chalks you only get to use if you are good at Art, otherwise you can only look, don’t touch. It is a beautiful box, flat and long with two rows of pastels in sets of colour, all the shades of one colour fading until the next colour begins fierce and dark until five or six chalks later, it is like a ghost of the first shade. I am allowed to use the chalks and I am miffed if I open the box and someone has messed with the order of things. I fix the order of things and then I draw and whatever colour I reach for is there in the right order of shade, dark to light, good. The box is wooden, it is oblong. A square has four equal sides. In an oblong the opposite sides are equal, and so a square = an oblong but an oblong ≠ always a square, that’s the rule.
Jude is on the opposite side. Jude = my brother but my brother ≠ always Jude. Ha!
I am losing concentration. I feel silly in my shorts and naked body, suddenly unseemly, and I stop boxing to push some hair out of my eyes, my eyes that are greyer than Jude’s, not aquamarine. I say his name real quiet. Jude? But he has not stopped, he is like a toy machine, a wind-up boxing man who has simply not finished fighting and so one red fist slams into my stomach because I have become an easy target, I’ve forgotten everything, all the rules for boxing. I crumple to the floor, feeling like I’ve swallowed a big stick, and I can’t think a single thought and I can’t speak.
‘YOU STOPPED! JEM, YOU STOPPED!’ Jude is angry, he is standing before me, stiff as a tree, yelling.
‘I –’ My breath floods back and I start crying and suddenly Jude is Jude again. He yanks his gloves off by pulling on the laces with his teeth and squeezing his fists between the knees and he flings the gloves so they fly through the air and slam against the bookcases in the hall as he falls to his knees.
‘Jem? Where does it hurt, are you OK, you stopped, sorry, sorry, come in my room, come on, it’s OK, you’re OK, come on.’ Jude puts his arm around me and walks me over to his bunk, pushing me down, pressing lightly on my shoulders. ‘Now lie down, Jem,’ he says.
‘I can’t. It hurts.’ I try to stop crying, but the tears just fall, I can’t help it.
‘Back in a sec!’ Jude says, scooting into the hall to gather up all our stuff, the towels and his gloves and the glasses of water and bath sponges we placed there for reality, for the splash a boxer needs between rounds. He scoops it all up like it is evidence of a crime or something, like mud stains, or sweet wrappers before dinner, broken pieces of crockery, dropped gloves, whatever’s left when you’ve done a thing you wish you hadn’t, when you stopped being careful, you stopped thinking.
Jude stashes our gear at the foot of the cupboard he shares with Ben and I watch him the whole time like he has answers for everything. I have given up for the day, and I am going to need instructions for all events until bedtime because a terrible injury has happened to me. Jude steps in the pile of mud and dirt he left for clearing up later, he’ll fix it later, and he wipes his feet on his shins and slaps the dirt off his legs.
‘Fuck-hell,’ he says in a whispery voice.
‘Bloody,’ I say, to show support, though it hurts to speak.
Jude kneels in front of me and unlaces my gloves, gentle but serious, very determined, like he has a lot to do now and not much time and he doesn’t want to forget anything, he aims to get things right.
Jude smells different from Harriet and I know Harriet’s smell very well, we have a lot of close-up encounters. First off, she has this habit of dancing towards me and around me and then she has that other fancy for flying out from hiding spots behind a door or under a bed and then draping herself over me in triumph like a sporting star at the end of a race in which he has come tops. Also, she will come up behind me when I am reading and rest her chin on my shoulder and read as I read, going in for a lot of little reactions such as surprise and horror and amusement, etc., and I have to try very hard not to get annoyed, bearing in mind the time I shrugged her off and she bit her lip and it was pretty tragic. Even if I am merely a bit haughty she gets offended, limping around the place for ages like some doomed person. I know her smell. Harriet smells like autumn grass and baby powder, she smells breezy. If a person can smell like windy days, that’s how she smells, and Jude’s smell is warmer, like rocks with moss on them, like earth, sometimes like butter and often like bonfires or smoky bacon crisps perhaps. I don’t know how I smell. I’d like to smell like a binocular, especially when it is in the basket at Zetland’s and I can make it out straight away in all the other scents there, just like I could find Jude in a whole crowd of boys, I could find him eyes closed the way Black Bob finds the Mountie in a snowstorm when everyone is stumbling around like mummies, arms outstretched, and snow-blind.
‘Can you lift your arms?’ asks Jude. ‘Are you cold?’
‘Kind of. Yeh.’ I sound a bit pathetic. This is permitted. I am a patient.
I lift my arms as Jude grapples with my sweater, forgetting about the vest I had on underneath before we became boxers and took our tops off. He struggles with the sleeves and I struggle with getting smothered, my head stuck in the chest part with only a bit of it poking through the collar where I can feel a welcome breeze, a little promise of open spaces. I try to be patient while Jude fights with sleeves and I contemplate death by smothering. I feel like crying again but it’s not because of smothering, it’s because of Jude working so hard to fix me and me wanting to help him and knowing not to, and because of this sudden surprise knowledge I have that he is spooked worse than I am about my terrible injury, about slamming his fist into my bare stomach by mistake, and there’s a word for this, that long word again, the old painting word I can’t think of, for arms raised aloft and fingers spread wide and large eyes, and an open mouth for sound to issue from, a strange sound of crying and laughing and no words.
Jude tugs off my shorts, I mean his shorts, and holds out my jeans for me to push my feet into and then I lie back on the bed, the big stick pain not so bad now, only a tired sensation in the stomach region. I lie back so I can lift my bum in the air and pull my jeans up the rest of the way, and snap the waist snap and do the zip, whereupon I sit back upright and stare at Jude, awaiting my next instruction. I feel like a lamb in a field, but never mind.
‘Are you hungry?’ asks Jude. ‘I’ll do fold-overs. And Ribena-milk. Yes?’
‘OK,’ I say, rising. ‘It hurts, standing up.’
‘Better soon. Better to move around. Come on, we’ll go slow.’
‘OK,’ I say, thinking about war heroes with shrapnel wounds in their legs and arms, and gashes in the head from bullets that missed the brain by a hair’s breadth. I think about an officer wiping the blood and gore away with an impatient swish of one hand so he can see clear to lead his men, showing the way with a wave of his pistol overhead, a man falling apart only when the job is done, and then calling out names of men he recommends for decoration, Victoria Cross, George Cross, Distinguished Service Order, calling them out as he is hauled off by stretcher to have a limb amputated and his dangling eye put out. I think about this all the way to the kitchen with Jude glancing at me like I am ready to collapse in a fainting heap right there on the stairs. I name you, Jude, for the VC, DSO. I name you for everything.
The kitchen has been hit. Big Bertha, Slim Emma. It is Lisa’s day off and I picture her struggling over the football pools without me, placing her life savings on the wrong horse because of love and sex, while my dad passes through our kitchen for a tomato sandwich and causes destruction of epic proportions. Jude told me once that there was no field radio in the trenches and observation could be pretty dodgy in winter and messages about enemy placement faulty sometimes, or out of date, and so shells fell too short, gunners bombarding their own side. My dad has bombarded his own side.
The cutlery drawer is open. He has used three knives, one small one for spreading mayonnaise and two huge ones, one for bread cutting and one for tomato cutting. He needs different implements for different ingredients, I’m not sure why, but he has a particular craze for separate implements and it is a good thing we have a lot of implements in this abode. His two big knives are lying akimbo on the chopping board and the bitty knife is in the sink, signifying his contribution to clean-up operations. Why, thanks, Dad. There are crumbs and mayonnaise and tomato juice and seeds just about everywhere, on the counter, on the floor, on the seat of his chair, in a great field around his place at the table, in a neat path between there and the fridge, and on the handles of all the drawers and cupboards he opened for plates and tools. It’s a battlefield.
Jude skids quite some distance in tomato fallout, slamming to a halt at the sink.
‘Whoosh!’ I say.
‘Fuck-hell,’ goes Jude.
‘Yeh,’ I say. ‘Fuck-hell.’
‘You sit, I’ll clean up and do the fold-overs.’
I slide up on to a chair at the white oak table, seating myself like I am about four years old instead of ten, remembering how it was when the seat of a chair is a lot higher than your own waist and merely sitting down is an activity requiring some thought and strategic planning, not too bad a situation in your own home amongst friends and allies, but worrying in my first year out in the world, at the convent or the shops, say, where people might look at me strangely as I fight with a door that opens outwards, not inwards and is also on a spring and is going to slap me straight in the back causing me to fly into a room I mean to enter at a seemly stroll. This is why there are no grave decisions to make at the age of four. A kid needs time to learn about doors and furniture, the height and weight of things.
Jude swabs the decks in the kitchen and then he makes peanut butter fold-overs. I can see he is having trouble with the rye bread which has a tendency to snap, not fold.
‘Jude?’ I say, spotting a magazine Dad left on the table, smeared red.
‘Yup.’
‘Good thing Dad is not a criminal-on-the-run.’
‘Why’s that?’
‘He leaves SO MANY CLUES. They’d track him in no time.’ ‘Ha ha ha,’ goes my brother, chuckling softly. ‘Now. Shall we go outside with these? Or do you want to stay in?’
‘Can we have Ribena-milk inside and fold-overs outside?’
‘Not a problem,’ says Jude.
I wonder if he aims to feed me. Like one of Mum’s wounded birds who have flown into windows and fallen splat on the terrace in a daze, or simply walked off the edge of a nest in an absent-minded manner before being awarded their pilot’s wings. They are not yet distinguished in flying. Mum gathers the small bird and we settle it in a shoebox filled with hay, speaking very softly as she feeds it very very patiently by way of an eye-dropper. Once, there was a bird hurt beyond rescue and we had to go in for burial services but the worst thing about it was watching the bird ruffle up its feathers and stop resembling a bird at all, just disappearing into a ball with its tiny legs poking out, and so quickly, without suitable warnings such as peeps for help or agitation of wings or any such things. Harriet was speechless with grief and horror.
At school, older kids are sometimes called upon by Dining-Room Nun to feed stragglers, i.e. Babies who have not finished their slops, downing tools in misery and defeat, unaware, quite clearly, of the starving children in India who are of great concern to nuns. I want to put it to Sister Catherine that the little kid is not suffering from disregard for starvation in far-off countries but merely from oppression by spam and bangers and horror vegetables such as swedes which are more regularly destined for consumption by cows and other hardy beasts of the field who have one pastime only, the eating pastime. I saw a cow in a field chewing on a pair of socks and shoes one time. They are definitely not fussy.
I am happy to be called upon for slops duty when Sister Catherine is too busy as I have made a study of my mother’s method of feeding wounded birds. I do not have an eye-dropper but I have patience, unlike Sister Catherine who is not a bad nun but is simply overcome by visions of starvation and gets in a muddle, looking deep into her dining room and seeing a workhouse full of scrawny kids, or a desert plain where no crops grow, crowded only by families with eight or nine small children each and no dinner bells ringing. The starvation problem is a mission with nuns and there is no reasoning with them on this matter.
This is why Sister Catherine has no time for waste and will hover over a small child who cannot finish her slops like the little kid has committed a criminal act. She stands there in terrible proximity, wielding a heavy forkload of leftover mush which must not go to waste while the four-year-old is still chewing like a maniac on the previous forkload of mush, eyes wide with oppression, swallowing in painful lumps and listening to the echoes of all the other kids who are running free after lunch, frolicking amongst the trees and squirrels and so on.
I feed the little kid with great patience, walking her over to the window seat with her napkin tied around her neck, and offering up tiny portions of peas the way I’ve seen my dad feed Gus, turning the fork into a racing car or aeroplane or other exciting mode of transport, and in between bites, I prod the window open a little more, so she can feel closer to home, and because I have the keys to the jail and I can tell the difference between a small kid and a felon. I know this kid is dreaming of home. The kid has a homing instinct. The kid is Harriet.
I remember it, how her eyes glazed over and she fell so quiet as I tried to feed her, I thought about the bird in the box, the one who had death throes and lost her bird identity and became a mere ball of feathers with stiff little legs and no life. I wanted to throw open the windows. Run, Harriet! But she had never worn that path alone. Later, I looked up homing instinct, in case of eventualities, in case my sister has to make her way home without me one day. Be prepared.
Homing instinct. ‘See migration, animal.’ OK.
Migration. ‘The mechanism of navigation and homing is not completely understood. In birds it seems to involve sighting of visible landmarks, such as mountains and vegetation, as well as a compass sense, using the sun or the stars as bearings. Land mammals may lay scent trails for local direction finding.’
This may be an animal thing only, though humans are land mammals and this business of scent trails certainly reminds me of how I think about Jude, how I know his smell and so on. Sometimes you look a word up, a word or a person in history, and you get some bonus information, answers to things you did not even know you had questions about. I love that. Jude is a land mammal leaving scent trails for me and my sister swims like a fish. She may go astray but she will not go missing because when it comes to homing, Harriet reads the stars, Harriet is a bird.
‘Jude? Where’s Harriet? Where is everyone?’
‘Oh yeh. Forgot. Mum was going to Jarvis. Took Harriet and Gus.’
‘She did? Did she ask if I wanted to come?’
‘We were busy. Did you want to go?’
‘No. I’m with you. We’re busy’
‘Right.’
I hate it though, when she leaves without telling me. I hate it.
‘So we’re having fish tonight,’ I say. ‘Fish pie or something. I hate fish pie. It’s spooky.’
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Emma Richler
Тип: электронная книга
Жанр: Современная зарубежная литература
Язык: на английском языке
Издательство: HarperCollins
Дата публикации: 16.04.2024
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О книге: A warm, dark novel of family, distance and time from the author of the much-loved, highly-praised, prize-nominated Sister Crazy.Feed My Dear Dogs begins in outright observational comedy and slides into ever darker regions, while never losing its sharp tongue and wicked wit. Jem Weiss is the middle child of five and experiences childhood more acutely, more joyously and more entertainingly than most. The five Weiss siblings crackle with intelligence, camaraderie, competitiveness and individuality; they have their own running gags, jargon, skits and power struggles; they share a bearlike but adored father and an unflappable and omnicompetent mother.Jem′s life hums with Shackleton and supernovas, boxing and cowboys, binocular doughnuts and naval underwear and at the centre of this galaxy of delights is her shining family. As Jem runs her childhood memories through her fingers, she entrances the reader with sharp observations, casual wisdom and tender wit. However, there′s always something else looming, and now and again it sneaks up with some pressing tidings to impart – a child′s terror at the prospect of moving on, growing up, leaving home.