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‘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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