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‘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.