Feed My Dear Dogs

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 1011 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, 1014, 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.