Feed My Dear Dogs

My dad ruffles some pages and pays me no attention at all. ‘Jem, have you done your homework?’ he says.

‘Why should I do my homework? What is homework? Why?’ I am losing heart and getting flustered. This is not working at all.

‘Jem. Go and get me a tomato. A big, firm red one. Ripe. A tomato and a knife on a plate.’

‘OK Dad.’ End of game. And remember, Jem. Do not cut up the tomato, he likes to do it himself. Don’t ask why.

The other chief grown-up in my house not to play the Why game with is Mum. Here are a few things to know about her first off. 1) She is very beautiful and was a mannequin. This word had me very confused at first because I know mannequins are plastic life-sized dolls who stand in shop windows and have pointy fingers and zombie looks. Mum is just being shy and using a poor word in place of the posh one. Model. Mum was a model, and quite famous. OK. 2) She is pretty weird in a spooky but friendly way. 3) She is of unknown origins. I have a few theories about these unknown origins, however, they are only in the development stages and still require all-out investigation. I am on the case. Mum explained to me once, how she was a foundling, definitely a new word to my ears, and a pretty one, it seems to me, for something it is not very good to be. When Mum said, I was a foundling!, she said it in a voice that gave me a suspicious feeling, because it was sad and lively at the same time, like when you fall down and cut your body someplace and need to communicate the blood situation you are in without freaking anyone out, or being sissy. OK. I knew it was not the time to ask a lot of questions, this is what you learn if you listen hard to people and watch them carefully, that you have to pick the right time for questions. My first one would have been, What is a foundling exactly? But it was not the time to ask that question, so I just said, Oh, in a momentous way, the way you speak in the cinema when someone passes you a liquorice toffee and you do not want to disturb anyone in the audience but you want to say thank you for the liquorice toffee.

Here is one thing I am pretty sure of. When you are a foundling, your ideas about countries are more free and loose than most people’s, and you do not suppose, for instance, that your country is the best just because you were born in it, meaning a foundling can grow up being always on the lookout for a better place, the top place, and in some cases, maybe even the sky is no limit. I believe Mum is such a case. I definitely have my suspicions and she is aware of my suspicions and tries to throw me off the scent. Here is an example. I am sitting at the kitchen table messing with homework and my Tintin book is right nearby, a reward for when I finish up my homework. The Tintin book is Objectif Lune, called Destination Moon in English. Mum is cooking.

‘As soon as there is a passenger ship to the Moon, Jem, I will be at the head of the queue for tickets! How divine!’

This idea of being first in the queue has me worried, my insides feeling all hot and empty at the same time, like when I arrive at school and realise I have left something very important at home, such as homework and money for tuck. Oh no. Does she want to leave us? Would she rather be up there where the Moon is? I hope the passenger ships do not start up any time soon and I am going to have to look in my dad’s newspapers for news. Which part of the paper will that be in? I will ask Ben, who is well up on weird stuff most people are not yet apprised of. Right now, though, I try to forget this worry about passenger ships.

‘Maybe I’d like to go too,’ I say. ‘And, Mum? Tintin went on the Moon way before the Apollo, Apollo, what number?’

‘Apollo 11,’ Mum says, no thinking required, no pausing and eyes lifted skywards in reflection or anything.

‘Right! 11, and they landed in, um …’

‘1969, the 20th of July. They stepped out at 9.56 p.m.,’ she says in a gentle voice, chopping things with a big knife and stirring up stuff.

‘Yes? Well, Tintin was there in 1953. So there.’

Here’s how it goes playing the Why game with Mum.

We are going to Zetland’s in town and this is a favourite bakery of the Weiss family’s. OK.

‘Mum?’ I say. ‘Where are we going?’

‘Well now, that’s quite a philosophical question. I’ll have to think about it. Is that all right with you?’

End of game.

We ride a bus and if I lean forward too far as I gaze at things out of the window, Mum lays her hand on the metal bar of the seats in front of me, she wraps her long fingers right around the spot where if the bus stops suddenly, I would go crashing into it and smash my chin or bite my lip and get into a casualty situation, the way a lot of kids do if someone like Mum is not looking out for them. Mum has long arms so she can do this without making a big thing of it, lifting her arm slowly and resting her hand there like it is nothing to do with you, and this way you do not end up feeling pathetic and helpless. Also, she never says, Be careful! or, Don’t do that! or, Lean back! or anything because I think she wants us to be free and move around and gaze at things in a spirit of investigation, so that even if you do something kind of crazy like test out the sharpness of a knife by running your finger over the edge, she won’t yell at you which can be downright spooky for a kid, no, she will open up a discussion about that knife and pretty soon you find something a little less crazy to do, as well as having a few new thoughts on that particular experiment, and how to go about it if you feel the urge again, to test the sharpness of knives. Mum is a very cool person, and has special ways.

I am pretty keen to get to Zetland’s and Jude is going to be happy when we bring binoculars home, it is a favourite comestible of Jude’s and mine. A stranger might not be able to tell Jude is happy, watching him open up a paper bag with Zetland’s written across it and containing binoculars, a stranger thinks you ought to crease up in a big smile and say how happy you are, etc., but you do not, not always, not if you are Jude who will go ‘hmmm’ in a slow and quiet manner, and raise one, maybe two eyebrows, and push out his lower lip, that is to say, he is happy about the binoculars, even though he may not want one straight off. When you know a really fine thing is around, such as a binocular in a bag, you don’t need it straight off, sometimes it is better saving it for later, and just knowing it is there.

A binocular is a roll with a crunchy crust in two parts and a crease in the middle but connected, therefore resembling binoculars. They do not call them that at the shop. They look confused if you say, Whoa! binoculars, and point to the big wicker basket they are heaped in, they won’t know what you mean, although it is pretty easy to work out. Never mind. There is a lady there who never smiles and is a bit scary. I decide she is Mrs Zetland because she seems in command, the way a teacher does, or an officer in a war film. She wears a white ribbon around her head like a bandage, and most of her hair is on top, sort of growing up out of the bandage, so her hair reminds me of candyfloss on a stick at the fair except hers is grey not pink. I look at her and I kind of want to get the scissors out and do some trimming. Topiary work.

Mrs Zetland is OK and does not scare me any more ever since Mum sent Jude and me in once, on our own, to pay the bill and collect some rolls, whereupon Mrs Zetland slipped us each a lemon tart. Jude and I have been in a few times now. Two lemon tarts, every time, slipped to us like she is a World War II spy and we are two other spies on the same side. I don’t like lemon tarts much or any kind of tarts and just about two bites is all I need to be sure of this, and then I pass it on to Jude who likes a lot more stuff than I do, adventurous is what Mum calls him. I would never tell Mrs Zetland though, or she might be hurt, and I think she has a thing for Jude and me, something probably Mum knew all along, which is why she sent us on the solo mission with no fear in the first place.

After the bus ride, we walk. Mum is a great type to go out walking with. Here is why. Sometimes you will see a little kid out walking with a grown-up and you can tell right away he is having a hard time. He is reaching up high to squeeze his hand into the big grown-up hand and he is getting a bad shoulder ache, plus he is stumbling along with loose crazy legs like a drunk, just trying to keep the pace, and carry the flag, and not let anyone down. He is sending a few frantic looks upwards at the grown-up as if to say, Whoa, can’t you see what’s going on here? I’m in trouble. And each time he sends that frantic look skywards, he nearly trips himself up and sometimes there is no choice but to tip right over in a messy sprawl in an effort to put the brakes on the grown-up, which is when you might see the little kid dangling like a stuffed animal, his limbs making no contact with earth at all, just swinging there pointy-toed and skimming the surface in a desperate and foolish manner. This can happen when the grown-up is mad about something, I believe, which is why he is barrelling along at high speed with scanty regard for the kid, and nothing can stop him. Or else he does not know that a regular pace for a long-legged person is racing speed for a kid. You have to explain some things to grownups you would not think necessary. It’s disappointing, but those are the facts.

My dad walks slow. He does a lot of thinking when he walks, requiring a slow pace, which is perfect for our Gus, who is new at being upright and walking to and fro in the earth, but it is too slow for me at times, so I find myself drifting ahead of my dad, I can’t help it, and I do this until I get a wrenching feeling in my wrist and have to pause and hang back a little, and go at my dad’s pace, looking all around, and staring at the pavement, and doing some deep thinking. You can learn a lot from the different walks of people, the speed they move along at, and the way they hold your hand, and all of this is interesting and surprising if you are crazy about a person and want to fit in with their pace and way of doing things when you are together and out for a stroll, instead of struggling and trying to do everything your own way which is already familiar and not very educational or surprising at all.

When I walk with my dad, I do not say, ‘Dad, do you mind holding my hand the way Mum does? You are mashing all my fingers and my thumb is trapped and it feels bad.’ No, I don’t. I don’t even wiggle my fingers to restore the blood flow, or just so I can recall how they are separate digits and not one single clump of fingers like that crazy feeling I get if I have to wear mittens for school regulations, a feeling of being impaired and suffering from leprosy or something, only having a thumb available for active duty. I try to steer clear of mittens in life, and when my dad holds my hand, I get a mitten feeling and it is pretty terrible, but the thing is, I don’t mind, because it is cool to be with him, and to see how he is so different from Mum, and everything on our walk is different, and newish, even if I have walked the same ground with her, and this is what I mean by not struggling against a person you are crazy about. I get busy thinking about my dad, and wondering what he is thinking, and other matters. Will there be an ice-cream cone at the end of this walk, or a packet of crisps? He doesn’t talk much at all. Has he forgotten I’m here? No. He gives me a big hand squeeze, a torture-type squeeze, and I yell out, and this creases him up with mirth. He knows I’m here, yes.

Mum walks at kid pace, no matter which kid she is out with, and she does it without making you feel bad, like she has to make this big adjustment just for you. No. She acts as if this is the very pace she had her heart set on when she decided to go out strolling with you. Why, thanks, Mum! Also, I notice things I would not normally pay a lot of attention to. Let’s say there is woodland roundabout, I will notice what stage the buds and leaves are at, what type of tree it is, and whether or not it is healthy and so on. If there is birdlife, I will think about the birds hanging out in the trees, and muse on bird varieties and the ins and outs of general bird activity. In town, now, on our way to Zetland’s, walking past buildings I have seen many times before, Mum has me noticing nice gates and windows, carvings and decorations, angels and lions and mythic things, and I wonder how I missed them every time. I wonder if topography changes according to the person walking about in it, like in the theatre, especially in ballet, with scenery shifting in the blink of an eye almost, I love that, how you are in a whole new place suddenly, according to good swans or bad swans. When the nice swans are out, the scenery is pretty cheery. When the bad swans dance in, quick sticks there are big waves and stormy lighting and the music is noisy and makes my heart pound. In my opinion, they go a bit overboard in ballet, as if they cannot trust the audience to tell the difference between good and bad behaviour in a swan, which is why they dress them in two colours for extra emphasis, and the two colours, of course, are black (bad) and white (good). Heavens to Betsy. If one swan with stary eyes is casting evil spells and committing felonies right there in the spotlights, a person will not require all those big hints in scenery and costume to be sure that swan is on the wrong track and in sore need of reform. Never mind.

I look up, I look down, I hold her hand. We walk, my Clarks Commandos just breezing alongside Mum’s fine and marvellous shoes. I do not know many people yet, but I do not expect to see finer or more marvellous shoes looking so natural on a human being, as if they were made just for her, one pair with little scales on it like a snake but not scary, and another pair of dusty-pink suede with a fine bow, and all of them long and narrow with heels of various heights and widths and pointy fronts, like sailing boats. We sail along.

Hands. I think if you are an artist and want to go all out for Art, then you have to practise eyes and hands a lot. Eyes need to be seeing things and hands need to look as though they can feel. I take note of eyes in old paintings on gallery outings and most of them have a zombie look, which is quite disturbing, so I cannot concentrate on the rest of the painting. Statue eyes are the worst. All the details are nicely carved out, the lids and eyeball separate and everything, with sometimes even a tiny bump where the pupil and iris go, but it is still plain naked white stone, and worse than a blind person staring at you and making you feel terrible for having vision and not being able to help the blind person in the vision department. In the Tintin books, M. Hergé draws two black dots for Tintin. These are his eyes, and they are always seeing, which goes to show how an artist does not need a lot of detail to make a thing real. At times, hands are painted in so much detail, limbs and clothing are a bit boring, as if the artist knocked himself out doing the hand part and kind of gave up after that. Other times, hands resemble stumps of wood with little bits of kindling for fingers.

I don’t like to see tons of paintings all at once, because I get them all mixed up, and that can be depressing, but here is my favourite so far. This is the name of the painting. The Annunciation, by Fra Filippo Lippi, b.1406?, d.1469. I am quite interested in dates, partly since the nuns told me how in olden times people had very short lives, and it made me a bit anxious, so I like to do some calculations of my own. B.1406? I don’t understand why they are not sure of Filippo’s birth year, did his parents forget to write it down? Mr and Mrs Lippi were so happy when Filippo came along, they just forget, and friends ask, how old is he now, when was he born? And the Lippis scratch their heads and look at each other in a merry distracted fashion and say, We don’t know! About 1406? Or maybe Filippo was a foundling. Of unknown origins. It’s possible. They knew when he died though, someone wrote that down all right.

In the painting, the Angel Gabriel is giving the big news to Mary about the Immaculate Conception that is coming up for her. She is reading a book before calling it a night, and you can see her bedroom with the blanket neatly folded back at one corner like in a hotel. I have been to two hotels and I am most impressed by this foldy thing they do, some stranger worrying about you last thing at night, and just not wanting you to tussle with sheets and blankets at this difficult time in the day when you are all worn out from life. I do it to my own bed now and then, and pretend someone else did it. OK. Mary is listening to Gabriel and she is quite pleased about the news, even though she will not be able to get much reading done for a while, which was the only bad thing for Mum regarding the five babyhoods in our house, the loss of reading time, but she is catching up now that we are not so pathetic and helpless.

In the painting, Gabriel’s right hand is doing something strange. His first and second fingers are in that two-finger position signifying, I happen to know from nuns who are well up on this sort of information, the dual nature of Christ, human and divine. For nuns, these are the facts. Gabriel’s third and fourth fingers are furled backwards, holding on to his red cloak, and I tried to do this myself, pointing with two fingers and gripping my jumper at the same time, and what I got was an almighty pain in the hand, meaning an angel maybe develops special muscles in his hands the way piano players do. Special-purposes muscles. Most of all, I want to touch Gabriel’s hand, I want it to touch me. I do not care if it is unrealistic.

It’s autumn and Mum wears kid gloves, this is the kind she always wears. She wears kid gloves and has a kid on the end of her hand. Kid gloves are very soft and thin and made out of baby goats, a piece of news I aim to keep from my little sister as she has a very big thing for fauna, especially the lamb species to whom goats are closely related, and she does not need to be reminded that Mum’s gloves are made from goats who never had the chance to be grown-up goats and lead a full life, b.Monday, d.Friday, over and out, goodbye.

I can sense Mum right through the gloves, the gentleness, the slender bones, the little changes in pressure she applies for fun, she knows I’m here. I imagine the blood flowing in her fingers, and the little pulses pulsing until I cannot tell the difference any more between the feelings in her hand and the feelings in mine, like we are only one hand now, and suddenly I am in panic stations about it, I start flipping my thumb wildly from inside her palm, to the back of her hand, and as we get closer and closer to Zetland’s, I have a superstition moment, involving having to count to eighteen before we reach the door and Mum lets go of my hand, or else. Or else there will be no binoculars left. Or else there will be only one, and all seven Weisses will have to share it out, tearing off seven miserable pieces and saying prayers over them, and eating very, very slowly with a poignant cheery expression on our faces, signifying courage in the face of asperity as in nice poor families in books by Dickens. It will be terrible.

One, two, three … don’t let go … eighteen!

‘Here we are,’ says Mum, releasing my hand and maybe wondering why I am close to fainting and in need of stretcher-bearers.

Mrs Zetland smiles an all-out smile at Mum, because Mum is the kind of person people smile at, no matter what, even if it is not their big thing in life, to show signs of merriment for no obvious reason, and I clip my thumbs into my jeans pockets, and waltz up real casual to the binocular basket in the front of the shop, worrying that even though I made it to eighteen, I had called upon disaster anyway, because I am a fallen type, and must stay on my toes and never count on soft landings in passing ships.

The basket is brimfull of binoculars, and they strike me as the most rare and miraculous binoculars of all time, because fate did not mess with me, and also because of this new thing, how if I imagine a bad thing happening, I have a lot of grief, as if that bad thing has already happened, it is news. Mostly I do this late at night when I cannot sleep, I picture it, all the ghastly outcomes, beginning with small things, such as no more binoculars and always ending up with the same doomy thing, Mum going missing, which is a ridiculous fear to have and plain silly, but I saw it in my head, so now I worry, and I feel responsible, so I will have to watch out, like in that poem Mum reads to Gus from Christopher Robin.

James James

Morrison Morrison

Weatherby George Dupree

Took great

Care of his Mother,

Though he was only three.

James James

Said to his Mother,

‘Mother,’ he said, said he;

‘You must never go down to the end of the town,

if you don’t go down with me.’

There is a tip-off in this poem, when the mother goes missing, that James may be imagining things. Here it is. James bashes off on his tricycle at breakneck speed and petitions the King. Nothing wrong with that. But the King’s name is JOHN. I looked this up. The right king at the time of Christopher Robin was George VI. Good work, Jem.

King John

Put up a notice,

‘LOST or STOLEN or STRAYED!

JAMES JAMES

MORRISON’S MOTHER,

SEEMS TO HAVE BEEN MISLAID.’

James may be imagining things, but he worries, and you can’t take the worry out of the boy, even with bare facts. Your mother is right here, around the corner, coming soon. James James has a problem with fear and worry, and he is only three.

I check out the basket, which is brimfull.

‘Whoa!’ I say. ‘Binoculars.’

There are questions I want to ask my mother today, but never will, not even in fun, in the spirit of the Why game, say, because these questions would worry her, and worrying is bad for her, alarming as I now find strong light and some frequencies, and society at large. The great world. Everyone needs protection from something.

Worry. This is an interesting word and it derives from the Old English wyrgan, a hunting term meaning to kill by strangulation, and worrier, for so long, meant someone tormenting something or someone else, most typically an object of desire, and not until modern times has worrying become a word for a self-inflicted torment, that passion all one’s own. I worry.

Whither thou goest, I will go.

Come back.

Still no passenger ships, but I do not rule it out, I do not rule out the Moon. Or thereabouts.

When the small lovestruck boy with the fluffy blond head and single suit of fine clothes, finally touches down to Earth, in an African desert, he meets a snake, a funny old creature, he observes politely, slender as a finger, flicking through the sand, he reflects, a chain, colour of the Moon.

—Bonne nuit, he says.

—Bonne nuit.

—Where did I fall? What planet is this?

This prince is homesick.

—I can take you farther than any ship.

—Will it hurt much?

The prince has a single vision of a rose and he closes his eyes, I am sure of it, to keep the vision in, and just as he falls, ever so briefly, both feet lift off the ground.

Navigation is an art. The DFC is an award for distinction in flying. Well done, little prince.

Whoa, the Moon.

On 20 July 1969, Apollo 11 approaches the Moon by way of its shadowy side, lit only by earthshine, and seeming blue-grey to Neil Armstrong whose heart rate rises to 156 beats a minute. He has a vision of a great sphere, a perfect round evoking Earth, something he takes as a sign of welcome, and the blackness of the sky is so intense, the surface so inviting, it recalls Earth again, a night scene illuminated for the cameras.

The Apollo lands in the Sea of Tranquillity and, before stepping out, Buzz Aldrin celebrates Communion with a chalice lent to him by a Presbyterian church. On the Moon, he appreciates one-sixth gravity and the sense of direction it gives him, a feeling of being somewhere, he says, something he will miss once home, where he drinks too much and suffers from bipolar disorder, quite understandable in a person who has flown so high, achieving a flight of true distinction, only to splash down suddenly to hopeless dreams of return.