Читать книгу Feed My Dear Dogs - Emma Richler - Страница 8

When Gus came home that first time, wrapped up in Harriet’s pink baby blanket, I had a thought regarding Mum and unknown origins, and how you might expect a foundling to be a bit edgy about babies of her own, worrying, perhaps, they will go astray like a gang of puppies in a park, to be scooped up later by a dog-catcher, unless they meet a bad end in the sweeping beams of onrushing cars, like sorry spies in wartime.

The dog-catcher delivers them to a dog home, a Salvation Army type place, but for dogs, and now they are puppies of unknown origin, each one hoping for a person to come along and choose him, and take him to a better place, but whatever happens, even if the new owner is one fine person, the dog will always be looking over his dog shoulder for the other puppies and his first home, and wondering what happened and was it his fault, etc., and maybe give in to a lifelong identity crisis, who knows.

Clearly, this dark matter of unknown origins is not a problem for Mum, because instead of looking over her shoulder and acting edgy, she has gone all out for babies, with Gus the latest, and between the day he first came to us up to now, I can only recall a single event which might be understood as an open display of nerves on her part, and that was the day of the Harness Affair, when Mum unwrapped a parcel before our very eyes, unfolding leaf after leaf of white tissue paper to reveal an arrangement of white suede straps resembling reins, reins most typically attached to sledge dogs in Antarctic regions.

‘For you, Gus!’

‘Mum,’ I say. ‘Um. He doesn’t have a dog. We don’t have a dog. Are we getting one?’

‘No, no!’ she says, laughing now, and tickling me in the neck so I don’t feel too much of an eejit. ‘It’s for holding Gus. In busy roads. Until he is older.’

Well, blow me down. I never knew they made leashes for kids. One time I strapped it on Gus myself and held on patiently, waggling the reins a little in an encouraging manner, waiting for him to go walkabout in the garden.

‘Walk on!’ I said, which is what coachmen say to coach horses in old films. ‘Walk on, Gus!’

And Gus just stands there, in contemplation of the flowers or something, not budging an inch.

‘Roses,’ he says.

‘Right. Roses.’

I am not worried that Gus’s vocabulary is limited at present to the names of flowers. He has a long life ahead of him and therefore it is not a cause for anxiety in me. Neither am I all that worried about accidents of the scurrying into traffic kind. This baby is simply not aiming to scoot off anywhere in a reckless manner, I don’t think so. He is not the type.

I unstrap the harness and have a go on Harriet. I ought to have foreseen the difficulties ahead. Harriet is very meek and polite as I wrangle with straps and buckles and then her eyes grow large and suddenly she is scampering all over the joint at gallop speed with me flying on behind, missing a step or two, until I realise I just do not have to be doing this, grappling on to my sister in a frenzy of determination like a charioteer in a chariot race, no. I drop the reins and decide to let her be a wild pony in a field all by herself, the harness flapping loose, and me going in for deep breaths on the sidelines. Bloody.

The thing is, Mum never used the harness on Gus. I believe there was just something about it she fell for, the soft white leather, the beautiful silver buckles, the idea of it, I don’t know, but I saw it, two years or so into Gus’s life, how Mum has her own way with this dark matter of unknown origins, how it is different for everyone maybe, one person ending up a one-man band, taking no chances on spreading out and having a family that might go astray, and another being Mum, fearless, filling a whole house with kids, no leashes required. It works the same in a bad-mood situation, my sister, for instance, turning to song and dance in moments of strife and confusion whereas I imagine even worse calamities, hoping my bad situation might seem rosy in the fearsome light of my imaginings, and now it’s just a habit, I can’t stop it, my bad mood opening a door on a whole roomful of bad-mood ideas, such as naval disasters and captains going down with ships, and firing squads, and amputations in wartime, no anaesthetic, and so on, and then I usually feel a lot worse. Clearly, my method is not a prize-winning method. I may need to review the situation.

Sometimes my dad helps out. If he happens to come along and catch me in a pathetic droop over some maths homework I am messing up, or a drawing of footballers that is an outright disaster because I have been so busy doing all the muscles in their legs, I have not noticed, until too late, there is no space left to draw heads and sky. It’s awful. This is when my dad will do a boxing count in a loud boxing referee voice, and a frantic sports commentator voice, while raising one arm in the air above me, to bang it down sharpish on each count, his pointy finger grazing the top of my drooping head.

One! Two! Three! … IS SHE OUT FOR THE COUNT? Six! Seven! …’

Etc. It is pretty annoying, except that I do perk up before he reaches the count of ten, braving this task of recovery with show-off vigour and a spirit of endeavour, whereupon my dad walks off beaming, because he has sorted me out again, and all it takes is to yell a boxing count over my head and waltz off to tell Mum the fine job he did. Jem is OK now. Well done, Dad.

My mother is the top person to seek out in perilous times, at any station from mystery grumps to head wounds. A head wound can bring on stark-eyed horror and a sense of being pretty close to the end of things, like dropping out of an aeroplane on to enemy territory, and at times like this, she can calm me straight down while patching me up, until suddenly I am interested in how the head bleeds (profusely), and I have a new word (profusely) and a new subject.

To begin. There are groups for blood. I never knew that. Anyway, the main idea is not to mingle the groups in emergency situations, when you might be running low on blood and need someone else’s for a top-up. You have to check first off about groups. Whoa! Hold on! What group are you? If you are too weak, you must hope for someone to ask on your behalf, so it might be best just to leave a note in some handy place upon your person, with the name of your group in neat writing. Or simply make sure never to be alone in a dangerous place, never to be without a member of your family who has the right blood, the same type, that’s how it goes, it’s a family thing. OK. Next. Blood is made of cells and platelets. Cells come in red and white. In red there is haemoglobin, meaning iron plus globin. What is globin? I don’t know. I could not pay attention, too busy wondering about this news there is iron in me, and having visions of blacksmiths in bare chests and leather aprons plunging bits of iron into boiling vats, and then bashing them into horseshoes and weapons, farm implements and household knives, red sparks flying everywhere, like drips of haemoglobin perhaps, so the blacksmith is in a state of wonder also, not about ironworks in him, but about blood in the ironworks. It’s possible.

Haemoglobin is responsible for colour and carrying oxygen, and white cells are for fighting off disease and so on, and then there are platelets. Very important. Platelets are for clotting, i.e. to stop all your blood flowing out after injury, the blood going from watery to sticky and hard, reminding me of the coating on toffee apples. It’s all very interesting, and pretty soon, listening to Mum, I lose my throw-uppy feeling, waiting out for it keenly, this clotting of platelets, and thinking deeply on the subject of blood flow, and the whole business of ferrying and fighting, and how I am in this O group, Mum says, which will be a breeze to recall in an emergency situation as it is the shape of a mouth calling out after injury, before the clotting part of things, white bandages, some nice toast with Cheddar, and friendly cuffs in the upper arm from immediate family, same as winning a medal. For Valour.

On other days, without a wound to show for it, everything hurts for no good reason, and I want to unzip my body and make a hasty exit, slamming the door on myself, no goodbyes.

‘Mum! Everything hurts!’

‘Growing pains,’ replies my mother who is in the know about such matters.

‘Oh.’

My mother is sitting at her dressing table with the lovely bottles on it, some with little tubes poking out and bulbs you squish, as in Ben’s chemistry set, except these are covered in velvet with golden tassels and are not dangerous to play with. The table has delicate drawers and one of them contains wide silver bracelets that are great for armlets when Jude and I are Romans. Mum lets us borrow them, no problem, and sometimes we invite Harriet to join in, because the bracelets fit right around her ankles and she is so good at slaves, though we tell her straight off she is a mute slave, otherwise she might mess up the game with inappropriate dialogue. We keep her instructions brief. For instance, we make sure not to tell her she had her tongue cut out in torture, or she will go overboard in terms of emotions and take over the whole game and it will be embarrassing. Harriet is not always appropriate but one day, maybe, she will be famous for acting.

Over the creamy gold wood surface of Mum’s table with the design of twigs and leaves carved in it, is a thin sheet of glass, kind of like ice, and there are mirrors at this table, a middle mirror that tips to and fro, and two side ones you can adjust the way my dad does in our car, frowning as he reaches up to twiddle the oblong driver mirror, like someone has done sabotage and moved it on purpose, then he fixes the side mirrors, wing mirrors, he calls them, and plunges out his window, before stretching across the passenger seat to do the other one, huffing and puffing the whole time. They have to be angled just right, so he can see what’s coming, and I suppose Mum can do the same, fiddle about with her wing mirrors so she can see who is coming in the room, such as Dad with a glass of wine, or me, today, with growing pains I am not thinking about any more.

The dressing-table mirrors are framed in creamy gold wood also, reminding me of famous paintings in museums, those three-in-one pictures with a middle bit and right and left bits connected by hinges, but here the famous painting is always Mum. Three of her, one in three. Cool.

When Gus came home that first time, it seemed to me things were just right, no more Weisses required. I’m not saying if Mum left us and bashed off to hospital again, coming home with one more Weiss wrapped in the pink blanket, my dad hovering and shoving us gently not so gently out of the way, that it would be not OK with me, no, it’s only a feeling. Things are just right. Now we are seven, counting Mum and my dad, not counting birds, i.e. two doves, two budgies and two finches so far, and how we might get a dog when Gus is bigger, but not yet, because at present any dog is bound to be bigger than Gus, which would be spooky for him, so we will hang on until he is round about dog-size, no smaller.

King Arthur must have felt this way too one day, thinking, OK, that’s enough knights, no more knights! King Arthur was very welcoming, and anyone brave and fine with good works in mind could come along and be a knight at his Table, and then the other knights would squish up to make room, while, of course, there were a few casualty knights making room for unhappy reasons (demise), but I do not see this accounting for all that many free places. There cannot have been endless space at the Round Table. In Arthur’s heyday, perhaps there was standing room also, but a great king ought to keep track of his knights, otherwise things will get slapdash and he might mix up everyone’s names, simply too tired to pay attention to each knight as is befitting, due to overcrowding of knights, with some of the more complicated ones, the softy knights, growing offended consequently, kind of hurt and dithery and likely to slip up on the job, I don’t know. It could happen so quickly.

I have borrowed Ben’s King Arthur book and it is the real thing, written nearly five hundred years ago and it has a French title, which is quite unusual, as the book is in English. I have read a few versions so far but they are not the real thing, the way those Bible storybooks for little kids with a lot of coloured drawings of animals and flowers and smiley types in tunics wandering about the countryside are not the real thing, and a bad mistake in my opinion, inviting high hopes and confusion. How are you going to break it to little kids as they grow up, that the Bible is not about farmyards in warm countries but a story featuring plenty of death and war and leprosy and so on? It won’t be easy, and I’ve seen it, how when the time comes to talk about strife in the Bible, nuns try to nip on by the strife parts and head straight for the miracle parts, because the bare facts have become a problem for them.

Take that twin brother story, the one about the sons of Isaac, Esau and Jacob. The Esau and Jacob story is really not hard to take for little kids, but the nuns make a right mess of it, thinking the only way to make it OK that the younger brother (Jacob) goes in for a passing phase of criminal behaviour is to say that the older brother (Esau) had a terrible personality and was extremely hairy, resembling a beast, making it OK what Jacob did, buying his land for only a few pence and then disguising himself by wearing a hairy jacket so their father would mistake him for Esau and give him a blessing as the firstborn, which is a top important blessing, and ought to have gone to Esau, but Esau is very hairy and not all that smart, making everything OK but very confusing for kids regarding men and beasts, and land deals, and whether or not hairy = bad. What a mess.

Mum cleared this story up for me in no time and here’s how I see it. Jacob slipped up due to extreme youth. It’s forgivable. He fell into criminal activity because he did not know how to come out with it plain, how he is a leader of men and Esau is not, and maybe Jacob should get the firstborn blessing so he can get on with being a leader of men. Plus, Esau is only interested in hunting, he is not one bit interested in farming and being a leader of men, meaning he and Jacob can shake hands in later life, and bury the hatchet, because Esau is happy with the turn of events, free now to hunt at all hours with no other responsibilities, reminding me of Westerns, where there are two main types of cowboy, the homesteader-farmer type and the hunter-cattleman type, and the homesteader is usually more sensitive, and has a long-term view of matters, whereas the cattleman is always rushing around on horseback and shooting from the hip, as the saying goes. A hunter is prone to rash behaviour, and excitable activities, deep thinking is simply not his bag, and this is how I will break the story to Harriet when the time comes. I cannot leave it to nuns. The Bible ought to be a nun’s best subject, a real thing and not a story about farmyards in warm countries, but this is clearly not the case. Oh well.

Ben’s King Arthur book is definitely the real thing, and it is very good. It is complicated.

‘Jem, you’re a bit young,’ Ben says, handing over Le Morte D’Arthur. He says it gentle, not bossy. ‘You’re not ready’

‘I’m ready, Ben.’

‘Well, remember the glossary at the back, OK?’

‘Glossary?’

‘See? See what I mean?’

‘What? See what?’

Here is why the book is complicated. 1) There are 999 pages in it. In two volumes comprising XXI Books comprising maybe 35 chapters each, though every chapter has a handy headline at the beginning, announcing the main topics and events therein, which is very helpful, without spoiling the suspense as you might suppose. 2) There are odd words here, ones not in the dictionary. If Ben is passing, he will help. Or I can flip to the glossary at the back, which is sometimes no help, as I have to look up the meanings of meanings, there being an example of this straight off, right there in the ‘a’ list.

Assoil v. to absolve.

I skip down the list. Ubblye n. oblation.

Then there are words with two separate meanings, completely different ones. Memorising these is recommended, so you only have the one job of picking the right meaning, and no second job of flipping to the glossary also. Example: wot v. to know/to blame. Whoa! It seems to me knowing a person and blaming a person are completely different things. Maybe not.

When you have to look up the meanings of meanings, and memorise at least some, so you can read a few pages in peace without filching in the glossary, and/or getting up for a dictionary every two minutes, things are complicated, but I don’t care, I am in a fever to learn this book and reach the parts Ben has already read out to me, such as the part about the Round Table and how it is symbolic, which is how I can sort this problem of too many knights and concentrate instead on symbolism, how King Arthur flung his arms open wide in a welcoming and heartfelt manner that is a bit symbolic, with no stampede of knights or anything, no dangerous overcrowding, a bad scene caused by my dodgy thinking, my concentration on numbers and hard facts instead of symbolism also, and you have to go for both ways of thinking, or else you get mixed up and depressed.

I race ahead to the place Ben marked for me because I like it so much, the Round Table part which is also the Queen of the Waste Lands part, and I remember her especially because of the stupid thought I had at the time to do with nuns, and how they are always threatening me with starvation, pointing at my plate in an accusing fashion, at remains of spam and peas, or smears of rice pudding and rhubarb I am trying to hide under my cutlery, food I am WASTING, a terrible sight for a nun, and all she needs to get going with speeches on starvation in far-off lands, and that is what I saw the day Ben read to me about the Queen of the Waste Lands, a sad and angry nun waving her arms in the night sky, over a field of terrible waste, of spam and peas stretching to the horizon, out of reach of the starving children of India, and it is all my fault. Sorry, Sister.

The Queen of the Waste Lands is a recluse, having fallen on hard times. She used to have the most riches in the world and now she has Waste Lands, and this is symbolic, I believe, and to do with war and grave human failings, which is what she muses upon in her recluse, recluse being a person AND a place, she muses upon grave human failings and related topics, chiefly the Holy Grail, and who will find it, and will it be found, etc. OK. When she meets Perceval, who has dropped into her recluse for some road directions, he doesn’t know she is his auntie, maybe because she has undergone physical change in her new life as a recluse, or because they never met before, I don’t know. Never mind. When this matter is cleared up, she asks Perceval has he heard from his mother lately. When heard ye tidings? She asks, which is kind of a trick question, because she knows perfectly well Perceval’s mother died from grief, waving goodbye to her son as he bashed off to join the Round Table, but she won’t say so, no, she waits for him to say he has had no tidings, except in dreams. I dream of her much in my sleep, he says. And therefore, he adds, I wot not whether she be dead or alive.

Wot v. to know.

Now she tells him. Now he knows.

It’s all very interesting, and goes to show two things. First, how when you are a recluse your behaviour may be open to question, a recluse may lose touch with the niceties of behaviour and conversation, that’s one thing, and the other is how valour and dreaminess in a knight can go together, how dreams are not sissy or anything, and all the knights are apprised of this. This is why Merlin, or a passing gentlewoman, a complete stranger even, can step up and talk pretty freely on any manner of extravagant issues, such as God and dreams and symbols, etc., boldly interrupting some knightly chat, perhaps, about sports and jousts and war injuries and so on, and no one is embarrassed or annoyed. This is how it is when the Queen of the Waste Lands, who has lost touch with the niceties of regular conversation, addresses her nephew quite suddenly, and out of nowhere, it seems, on several pressing matters regarding the Round Table, such as why it is round / why he is sitting there / why his mother died waving goodbye to him when he left home to sit there / why there is an empty place no one can sit in / and why he has to go on a quest for the Grail which will heal the Lands, so they are not Waste Lands any more, whereupon he is expected to come back and sit in the special empty place. It’s an awful lot to take in in one go, and it’s symbolic, so Perceval listens carefully, though he is a bit young for symbolism and is no doubt wondering, is his auntie blaming him about his mother, and how much should he pack for the journey and how long will he be away, how many days, how many pairs of pants and hankies should he bring? Perceval is counting, instead of thinking about symbolism, and he is in a tizzy. He has a lot to learn, but he listens carefully. It’s a start.

‘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.

When Harriet’s time is up and it is my turn to take my first peep at Gustavus, Gus, I tug at her green jumper twice, meaning, move along, your time is up, it’s my go, and as she steps past me, I can tell she has something to say.

‘Don’t say manger or the Little Lord thing,’ she whispers.

I roll my eyes and move in close, and the funny thing is, I think about it, the manger situation and how with Jude and Ben behind me, we are like the three kings, I can’t help thinking it. I have been in three Nativity plays so far at my convent, the Nativity being the only play the nuns know how to do, I guess, and my dad is OK with this as long as I have the low-down.

‘It’s just a story, you know,’ he says, all serious, a bit gruff, leaning up against the kitchen counter where Mum is cooking, crowding her a little, it’s a habit of his.

‘Right, Dad,’ I say in a patient but busy voice. I am trying to finish my homework before supper so I can play Action Man with Jude afterwards. Also, my dad tells me this every December, how the Nativity business is just a story, and God can’t have sons who are also God, etc., and I know what’s coming next.

‘Jesus Christ was a Jew. A rabbi. Don’t forget that. OK, Jem?’

‘A rabbi. Jewish. Not God. Got it,’ I reply, and my dad yanks my hair three times, which is his way of saying, I am not mad at you, although I sound mad at you. I know, Dad. No worries, Dad.

I have just about had it with Nativity. The fact is, I don’t want to be in any kind of play, it’s so embarrassing, but I am especially fed up with Nativity ones because of shepherding, quite a vexing role, though not too bad compared to Drummer Boy.

One year I was tried out as the Drummer Boy. I was fairly keen, due to having no words to speak and due to the military aspect and the bravery of drummer boys in military history but what I do not understand is how he comes into the Nativity story. What is he doing here? Does he think there is a war on? Or is he just wild for parades and processions? Never mind. My one job was to do drum rolls on a tin drum looped around my neck and head up the parade to the Baby Jesus while the girls sing that depressing song about the Little Drummer Boy and his drum, ra ta ta tum, but I lost my job and was switched to Shepherd because I was pathetic at drum rolls. My effort at drum rolls was deeply frustrating and induced palpitations in me, and a feeling close to terror, what with Music Nun glaring at me in that horrible manner. It was a horrible experience all in all and definitely a relief to be shepherding flocks again.

A shepherd has two jobs only. 1) Lurk about a fire at night in a shepherdly fashion, at the end of a long day of herding up lambs and sheep, sitting up with two other shepherds usually, unless there is a girl going spare in which case we might be four. We are careful NOT to act like we are waiting for the Angel Gabriel. Whichever girl shepherd knows how to play a recorder has a recorder stuck in her shepherd costume and she has to WAIT for some other designated girl shepherd to say, Dan! DO play us a tune on your pipe! Then she plucks out the recorder and plays a tune. She must not jump the gun or the girl with the line about the pipe, a Nativity play word for wind instrument, will feel downright silly and not know what to do, to say it or skip it. That girl was me one time, another horrible experience, my ears aching like someone had turned the volume up everywhere, the breathing of the audience, soft, the breathing of Directing Nun in the pit, cross, the flutter of girls in the wings, and the awful noise of Lucy White rustling her garments and hauling out her pipe, playing a tune without being asked first. Last year, though, it came out all right, though I was pretty knocked out from how my heart raced gearing up for my big moment and as soon as I spoke it, Dan! DO play us a tune on your pipe, I had a ferocious desire to lie down in a faint and have ministrations. No, Jem. Remember job number two.

Lo! Here comes the Angel Gabriel.

Gabriel points two fingers at us to signify the dual nature of Christ, even though catechism has not been invented yet and it will make no sense to shepherds, Gabriel waving two fingers in the air like that. Never mind. When Gabriel shows up, shepherds have to act spooked and make ridiculous movements, lunging away from the angel and throwing arms aloft like we are being ambushed by German Waffen SS and have no weapons. This is goofy, let’s face it. If I were a shepherd and an angel came my way, I would have no problem with it, but you cannot tell nuns this because they are too excited directing this play and will get confused if they have to make changes, such as maybe having one shepherd NOT in a state of fear and terror. The way they see it, shepherds have to act spooked so the Angel Gabriel can say, Lo! Be not afraid! I am the angel of the Lord! etc. If we do not act as if we were riding the ghost train at the funfair, it just won’t work for nuns. We have to show some hysteria and then we cool our jets for the next bit, the tidings bit, so all the attention can be on Gabriel, no distractions. ‘I bring you great tidings!’ Meaning, news. The news = the Nativity = the birth of Jesus. The Queen of the Waste Lands speaks this word also. When heard ye tidings? I tried it out on my dad once.

‘Any good tidings?’ I asked from the doorway of the living room. ‘In your tidings-paper?’

‘Jem, take my dirty plate back to the kitchen, will you?’

‘OK, Dad.’

Shepherd job number two. Go to Nativity. This is the topmost important part of the play for nuns and they get fretful trying to organise it. It is the Adoration part wherein we all traipse to the manger to peek at Jesus, all the shepherds, royalty and Drummer Boy, and Mr and Mrs Innkeeper who would not let Mary and Joseph have a room, maybe because Mary and Joseph were too shabby for their inn, and now, of course, since the great tidings and ensuing events, the innkeepers feel pretty bad about this. Thems the breaks. OK. Now we crowd around the Little Lord Jesus and show our great joy and next, it is time to face the audience and hold hands and sing We WISH you a merry Christmas, we WISH you a merry Christmas and a HA-ppy New Year, which is quite a boring song but it is the end of the play, one more Nativity over and out, and after the clapping, we take off costumes and go home and have a big snack and this is the beginning of the Xmas holidays. Yay.

Last year, Directing Nun had a big idea for the Adoration part. She decided the shepherds and kings and Drummer Boy (girl), etc., ought to go on a long march to the Baby Jesus and not merely sweep in from offstage in the usual scrummage, making it so obvious how we are all just waiting to do this, huddled in the wings ready to sweep in all at once and do some adoring. It’s not realistic, she said. I don’t think realism is a big issue for nuns. I think Directing Nun wanted more of a party scene last year, that’s all, like a Trooping of the Colour parade involving a long march, drum rolls and singing and gifts at the end.

Directing Nun decided we must go down the stairs on the offstage side that leads to outdoors, putting on outdoor shoes first, of course, as we are all in olden times bare feet or sandals and also because nuns are very keen on the right shoes in the right places no matter what kind of emergency situation a girl is in. Girls have three types of shoes. 1) Outdoor shoes: dark brown / lace-ups. I choose Clarks Commandos for type 1 due to the word commando. 2) Indoor shoes: dark brown / buckles. Most girls have the kind I have, with buckles and little holes over the toes part like on a cheese grater, and soft soles so as not to scuff up the stone floors or old wooden floors of our convent. In my view, you would need ice skates to scuff up convent floors, but you cannot say this to nuns. 3) Plimsolls. This is a nun word for gym shoes: black canvas / lace-ups or slip-ons. I choose slip-ons for variety and for the funny feel of stretchy elastic in a tongue shape where laces or buckles usually go. I slip them on and off, on and off. These shoes are like gloves for feet.

Playground Nun is an old nun who watches over us in the playground. I don’t know what else she does apart from praying and wandering up and down the playground. Sometimes she plays tricks. I am patient with Playground Nun who is maybe not all that well. She seeks me out quite often.

‘Jemima Weiss!’

‘Yes, Sister!’

‘What is plimsoll?’

‘Um. Gym shoes, Sister. For gym only.’

‘No! It’s the waterline on the hull of a cargo ship! A safety mark! Named after Samuel Plimsoll, MP, and his Merchant Shipping Act, 1876!’

‘I see. Great. Thank you, Sister. Is that all, Sister?’

‘Yes, my girl!’

Playground Nun pushes her glasses from the speaking to girls position (all the way down the nose for close-up inspection purposes) to her wandering the playground position (top of nose for general countryside vision). She pats me on the head, well chuffed with her trick on me. I don’t like pats on the head because I am not a dog, but Playground Nun is old and she is a nun and she may not be entirely well and you have to allow for things. Furthermore, she is full of special information that is not all to do with God and I believe she needs to impart it from time to time. She chooses Jem. Fine with me.

Three types of shoes. And then come rules. Shoes rules: Do not wear plimsolls outdoors. Even in sports. Do not wear Clarks Commandos indoors. Do not wear indoor shoes in gym (unless you have forgotten your plimsolls) and definitely not outdoors where they will get ruined and become perplexing, unfit for indoors or out. Nowhere shoes. If you have the wrong shoes, a nun will get flustered and usually call upon Mean Nun to sort out the bad situation of the wrong shoes. Mean Nun has an eye out for crime. She is the only no-good nun around, though I am not wild about Sister Clothilda, Nativity play Directing Nun who is also Music Nun. She makes me sing separately from the other girls, standing on a chair on my own, far off from the other girls standing up on benches and singing happily in one voice on the stage of the assembly hall.

Music Nun sits down below in the nun pit, looking up at girls and glancing my way now and again with a cross and confused expression on her face, like she is not quite sure what the bloody-bloody I am doing on her stage, or why I am causing such a terrible disturbance in the sound department. The waves. She is also confused due to my Jewish side. Not all nuns are the same, not all of them have this problem, and I can easily tell the ones who do, catching them looking at me with a cross face and confusion in their eyes, as they try to fathom it, and simply cannot, how I am alive and not Catholic, and nevertheless quite hearty, by which I mean not downtrodden or obviously impaired in any way. Mean Nun has a very bad case of confusion and she will watch me until she comes up with a crime of some sort and then she makes straight for me.

The day Susannah Bonnington found a maggot in her banger, I was right there and saw it poking its little head up like a periscope in a U-boat, weaving left and right, checking out the scene aloft, and I must say, I never want to see a thing like that again, not ever.

‘Sister!’ says Susannah, keeping pretty cool in the circumstances. ‘There’s a maggot in my banger!’

‘So there is, my child,’ replies Dining-Room Nun who is definitely crazy, ‘so there is.’

Sister Catherine is Dining-Room Nun and Babies Nun. Sister Catherine escorts those first year kids all over the joint like she is a bodyguard, and when they are dining, she is happy, as she can do her two jobs at the same time in one same place and she is free to carry on her favourite activity of strolling up and down the alley between dining tables, muttering to herself and twiddling her thumbs in a demented manner, hands clasped before her in woolly gloves she wears in all weathers, woolly gloves with the fingers cut off.

In my opinion, some of her behaviour is open to question. For instance, babies need their own little chairs for dining, due to their small size, and they have to transport the chairs from their classroom to the dining room under the eyes of Sister Catherine, passing by her like a row of ants struggling with crumbs nearly twice their body weight and it is painful to see the little kids stumbling along, crashing the chairs against their little legs and generally making a mess of things, looking sad and worn out but resigned to fate, reminding me of the galley slaves in Ben-Hur, men chained together and marching in the hot sun on the way to the Roman galley ship in which they will be chained to oars and fated to row at varying speeds unto the end of days. Babies enter the dining room first and bigger kids queue up with plates after the babies have settled in and been served. They get served because they are deemed too young and wobbly to carry plates of food without tipping everything on to the decks. It seems to me carrying a plate is not such a hard task, but grappling with a chair round about two-thirds your size is definitely a hard task. Possibly, for Dining-Room Nun, an avalanche of spam and peas and gravy on the nice convent floor is more of a problem than bruisy shins and outright exhaustion in a four-year-old, and this is one instance of behaviour in Sister Catherine which is open to question, and another is when she said, So there is, my child to Susannah Bonnington, bashing off straight away to do some more strolling and muttering, and leaving Susannah and me in the lurch, stark-eyed as in a horror scene from a horror film featuring graveyards and screaming.

A few words on horror. So far, I have seen the beginnings of three horror films only, as I am always sent to bed before things get too grim. Here are reasons why. I am too young for horror films and will have bad dreams and get hysterical. Horror films are not much good or educational, and so there are no loopholes regarding bedtime the way there are with good films and/or documentaries. Fine with me. Horror films are frustrating and give me a headache, due to the endless screaming and the lack of daylight, requiring a lot of squinting to make out what the bejesus is going on, usually just endless screaming and silly things such as people going walkabout in graveyards way past their bedtime when everyone knows there are killers and/or wild beasts on the rampage. Why? Why not stay home until it blows over, or go for a saunter in a more populous area where there are bobbies and lamplight and means of transport for hire in case of emergency? Because it is a horror film, that’s why. So there is screaming in the dark when characters are getting murdered, screaming in the dark when characters are stumbling across maggoty murder victims in graveyards, and in two out of the three films I have seen the beginnings of so far, there is screaming in the dark from raving maniacs in loony bins and it is no wonder so many people are losing their marbles, what with the high rate of murder and all that strolling about in graveyards, etc.

I would quite like to go in for some screaming in plain daylight right this minute because of the maggot before me, but I do not. I am not a baby. I am seven going on eight and have a fair grasp of language, and decent manners, and screaming and howling is not fashionable behaviour in a person my age who is not in a horror film. I do feel sick though, and ask to be excused. I step out into the courtyard for a deep breath or two, a remedy of Mum’s, and extremely useful, according to her, in all walks of life and eventualities of a trying nature. It is something I recommend for characters in horror films.

Oh no. Here comes Mean Nun, flapping my way.

‘Weiss!’

Mean Nun has a big thing for calling my name out, ever since I corrected her pronunciation one time, informing her as gently as possible about the V sound in the W, so that now she hits the V sound real hard and lingers over the double SS at the end. It’s annoying and it is her revenge on me for correcting her for the second time in my life. What is the problem here? Some grownups correct kids about every little thing, blaring hasty hints and instructions before you touch anything or go anywhere, so sure you are going to slip up or do some destruction, and that your mind is merely an empty place with breezes blowing through it, but the moment you correct a grown-up of that type, it’s a criminal act, worse than sticking your tongue out and swearing which can usually be chalked up to insanity, whereas correcting is close to a capital offence, i.e. deserving of death. Jude says capital comes from the Latin word for head, and denotes beheading by axe, sword or guillotine and even though there are many kinds of capital punishment that do not involve having your head chopped off necessarily, the word capital still applies for all methods, and I can see why. Let’s face it, when a person is killed, his head is no good to him, attached or not attached, but this has me thinking again about graveyards and screaming, so I try to concentrate instead on deep breaths and recovery from the sight of that maggot poking its white head out of Susannah’s banger.

‘Weiss! Where are we?’ demands Mean Nun.

This is a trap. What does she want? The month, the country? Is it a nun-type question, a matter of catechism? Right near me in the courtyard is a statue of the Virgin Mary, Mother of God with the Baby Jesus in her arms. Mary has a dreamy limp look, like Jesus is just a bunch of flowers or something. Maybe Mean Nun does not like me standing so close to the statue, due to my Jewish side. Is that it?

‘Well, child? Are we indoors or outdoors?’

‘Sort of half-half,’ I say, wondering about covered courtyards and what category they are in. I don’t want to make a mistake.

‘Sister!’

‘Sister! Sorry.’

‘We are outdoors. What shoes are you wearing?’

Oh. It’s a shoe crime. Bloody. ‘Indoor shoes, Sister. Thing is, I feel sick and I need deep breaths, I had to rush out here!’

‘Outside, we wear outdoor shoes. Inside, indoor shoes. Plimsolls for PE. If you are poorly, see Sister Martha. You are a very rude girl, Weiss.’

I want to tell her that she wears the same type shoes all over the shop, indoors, outdoors, the same hard noisy black nun shoes, and that I am not rude, my mother knows I am not rude, and then I think about something Jude told me, because of my new big thing for knights and chivalry, he said not all knights are good, and Crusader knights were downright dodgy, going in for massacres of Jews, or else selling them into slavery and this is very depressing news for me, how being a knight is not necessarily good, and wearing a big red cross on your knightly tunic, like on an ambulance, is not always a sign of hope and rescue, and therefore, perhaps, seeing a lady flapping your way dressed in nun clothes and wearing a cross around her neck does not always mean you are safe. It’s confusing and I want to see Sister Martha now, but I need to do some crying first. Not in front of Mean Nun. Go away, Mean Nun.

At my convent, it is important to wear the right shoes in the right places, no matter what emergency situation you are in, such as on the night of the Nativity the year of the big idea, when Directing Nun sent girls on a long march outdoors in the dark and back indoors, and all the way down the aisle through the audience in an embarrassing procession of kings and shepherds, Drummer Boy (girl) and innkeepers, and up the little wheely front steps, no tripping on garments allowed, up on to the stage to kneel in our specially organised places around the angels and Mary and Joseph and baby, kneeling so as to indicate Adoration and also, so as not to hide the angels and blessed family from plain view because angels and blessed family are more important, they are the stars.

I am looking for my shoebag. Where is my shoebag? Oh-oh. I scramble about in heaps of costumes and stuff and my shepherd hat is slapping at my cheeks and it’s dark back here and pretty quiet all of a sudden. Hey. Where is Mrs McCabe? Mrs McCabe is a non-nun teacher and Irish and she wears a great white cardigan with brown leather buttons and bumps in the knitting. Mrs McCabe is quite lively and jovial and prone to short sharp hugs, which is an Irish custom, I believe, as Sister Martha is prone likewise, though a Sister Martha hug is a less hazardous experience than being in the grip of Mrs McCabe who mashes me against her so I can feel all the knitting bumps digging into my temples and eye sockets. I like Mrs McCabe very much, but I make a note never to wear bumpy apparel in my lifetime, in case I am prone to doling out hugs also, and hugs ought to be all good, with no risks involved, no smothering or bruising. I take note. Smooth apparel is better and less hazardous. OK.

Where is Mrs McCabe? On Nativity night, she is supposed to be here, she is always here in the offstage regions, cracking jokes and larking about in a lively Irish manner and all the while doing her important job of snapping on angel wings and haloes and shoving us onstage at the right times, and she is not here, she has already shuffled off outside with the shepherds and kings, etc. They have left me behind. This is a bad feeling. I am hot and I cannot think straight and I wish I were in bed, waking up on a Saturday with nothing to do but play with Jude all day.

There is my shoebag, glowing white with a red F embroidered on it, the bag Mum gave me, hers, and now mine, old, not new, and very nice indeed with the first letter of Mum’s name there-upon, better than J for Jem, a gift to me from her, and a fine thing, a bag made especially for shoes, and I never knew there were such things, bags made especially for footwear with fancy embroidered letters standing proudly for the name of shoebag owners upon them. Whoa. I fumble with the drawstring and haul out my shoes but they are the wrong shoes. Indoor, not outdoor, and yikes, I know who is in the cloakroom ready to receive shepherds and kings coming in from the cold and send them down the aisle in the assembly hall, making sure all our bits are on just so. Sister Teresa. Mean Nun. Now I am having a nightmare of epic proportions as Ben would say. Epic, a short sharp word to do with gravity and size.

I slip my bare shepherd feet into shoes and skip out on the buckling action. I’m late, I’m late, for a very important date. I push the door open and clamber down the stairs with my toes curled tight to keep my shoes from flying off. It strikes me I might as well head straight for the wire and wait there for Mum and Dad and not bother with the Adoration seeing as I’ve spoken my nine words and done the abiding and the fear not part, and anyway, there will be two other shepherds in a whole gang of adorers, that’s enough, plus I cannot sing and Music Nun will show me her cross face and Mean Nun is waiting for me and there isn’t a king or a shepherd in sight out here. Fuck-hell.

Come on, Jem.

Go to cloakroom doors. Knock softly. Sister Teresa will let you in. These are my orders. I dash like a commando for the double doors and lose an indoor shoe on the way. The grass is wet and I have bad visions of slugs and worms and spiders in the dark wet grass so I run back for my shoe. OK. Now, knock softly. No answer. Knock louder. Nothing. Here come prickly tears, a rush of them, and I don’t care any more about orders, I pound the doors like a maniac until I hear Mean Nun calling for me. Where is she? She is poking her head out of some doors further along and waving her arms in a frantic manner. What is she doing over there? Oh no. Wrong doors, Jem. You have been pounding on the assembly-hall doors with audience on the other side wondering what all the racket is and who is causing this big-noise crime. It’s me. Jem Weiss.

Mean Nun is speechless, she hates me beyond words. I kick off my shoes and let her grapple me in the shoulders and propel me out of the cloakroom into the assembly hall and I get whiplash in the process so that my shepherd hat slips over my eyes and I have to fix it quick sticks. It’s not really a hat, it’s a dishcloth with an elastic strip around the forehead to hold it snug and I hate it, it makes my ears hot and the elastic gives me a headache. I would quite like to ditch my shepherd hat but I am already in trouble and going in bareheaded would freak out Directing Nun for whom a dishcloth on the head is the main distinguishing mark for a shepherd who might otherwise get mistaken for a fourth king, some character NOT in the Bible, and thereby her great fame in the Nativity department will be in ruins, ruins.

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.

Watson: You have an extraordinary genius for minutiae.

Holmes: I appreciate their importance. Here is my monograph upon the tracing of footsteps, with some remarks upon the uses of plaster of Paris as a preserver of impresses!

I want to tell you, Mrs Rosenfeld, about something I read in the Book of Ruth, something concerning the transfer of shoes, and redemption, and how this offering of shoes is symbolic, it’s a symbolic act. With this shoe, I redeem you, I redeem her, him, this house, this debatable land. I am in a fever to tell you about it, I am not sure why, perhaps because Israel is your country, and it might be mine. I need to tell you this thing about shoes, Ruth 4:7.

Now this was the manner in former time in Israel concerning redeeming and concerning changing, for to confirm all things; a man plucked off his shoe, and gave it to his neighbour; and this was a testimony in Israel.

I am in a fever to tell you, but when I arrive and lie down, I think about lying down, how it is a symbolic act, a sign of grief, as is walking barefoot, I read that also. Then Job arose, and rent his mantle, and shaved his head, and fell down upon the ground. Job 1:20.

I remember it, how I walked barefoot, to and fro, to and fro, and how it happened, the thing I did, my experiment in escape velocity, and how I fell upon the ground, seeing stars. My hair was cut, not quite shaved and now I am here, because hope is still a problem for me.

—It’s very difficult for you to talk to me today. I wonder what’s going on.

—I am writing a monograph upon the tracing of footsteps!

—Ah. Do you want to tell me about it?

—No! I need to ask something. Did you choose me or was I assigned to you? Did you choose me? Did you choose me, did you choose me? I don’t see why you can’t answer that question.

—No, you don’t see.

—What if I die from this? I think I am going to die from this and no one can stop me, you can’t stop me.

—That is true. But you can let me try. I can try not to let it happen.

Then pluck off your shoe, Mrs Rosenfeld. Pluck off your shoe.