Feed My Dear Dogs

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!’