Feed My Dear Dogs

FOUR

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.