Читать книгу Feed My Dear Dogs - Emma Richler - Страница 9

Holmes: How are you? You have been in Afghanistan, I perceive.

Watson: How on earth did you know that?

Holmes: Never mind. The question now is about haemoglobin. No doubt you see the significance of this discovery of mine?

If the brain can know one hundred trillion things, can a person ask one hundred trillion questions? That’s one. Here’s two. Why don’t you wear the red dress any more, the one I saw you in when I was born, the one you wear every Christmas until now, red you, falling snow, you’ve stopped wearing it, I want to know why. Red, white.

Whoa, the Moon.

The Earth has one natural satellite, the Moon, its twin, born around the same time, 4,600 million years ago. The Moon is almost all rock, with an iron-rich core, the haem in haemoglobin. It has no atmosphere, gravity at the surface being too weak, only one-sixth that of the Earth. Early in its lifetime, the Moon was bombarded by asteroids, so its surface is scarred and crenellated and distinguished by plains and seas. Birthmarks. Because tidal forces have slowed the rotation of the Moon, it is locked in orbit around the Earth and shows the same side always, completing one orbit every 27.322 days, at a distance of around 1.3 light seconds, showing this same face always. Are you there? Whither thou goest, I will go. Where thou diest, will I die.

A star the same mass as the Sun, at the end of its life, will collapse into a white dwarf, though a white dwarf is not really white at all, ranging in colour from blue to red, depending on the temperature at the surface. A star collapses because nuclear fusion at the heart of it can no longer sustain it, the white dwarf now an ember of itself, a stellar remnant, shedding the last of its heat into space, cooling and fading and compressing until its surface is so close to the centre, the beginning so close to its end, gravity at the surface is 100,000 times that of the Earth and light has to fight an uphill struggle to escape, and because light always travels at the same speed, it shows this loss of energy in increasing wavelengths, the light redshifting. Red, white.

One hundred trillion things.

According to a rabbi writing in fourteenth-century Spain, the Talmud states that the father ‘contributes the semen of the white substance’ that makes up the bones and sinews in a body, the nails, the brain, the white of the eye. The mother contributes the semen of the red substance that is flesh, hair, blood and the black of the eye. God’s contribution is the soul, but it is only on loan. The red and the white stuff dies with you, but the soul is up for grabs, or the Rightful Owner calls it in, no interest. It depends how you look at it.

In alchemy, red and white are the colours of man and bride and they ought to be together, masculine and feminine, in one same person, between two people, in Nature itself, it is the best state of affairs, the union of the opposites as they call it, with far-reaching consequences otherwise, dark times, wastelands, the lot. What a palaver. This was Merlin’s subject also, red and white, his Grail, a mission that pressed him so hard in his role as Lightbringer, he simply fell apart, going through a very bad spell of lurking in the forest and acting up, more like a wild animal than a bringer of light, everybody said so. And then his sister rescues him, building him a house in the forest, a house like an observatory, with seventy windows and doors so he can indulge his passions for astronomy and prophecy, closing himself up, as Blake might say, seeing all things thro’ narrow chinks of his cavern. His sister does all the cooking and she pours the wine and Merlin teaches her the fine arts of astronomy and prophecy until, he tells her, she is his match.

Merlin does not forget about the Grail, he does not forget about Perceval, a knight who dreams much in his sleep, Merlin appearing to him in many forms, sometimes as a hermit all dressed in white.

‘I’ll never drink milk again. Never.’ That’s what I say to Jude.

‘Yeh, I know. You’ll feel better soon,’ says Jude.

‘When?’

Jude does not answer me. You don’t get a lot of answers from Jude who is nearly my twin, and hardly ever when you expect one. You could ask him a question and get an answer some three days later, when you are riding bikes together or coming back from doing a shopping message for Mum. I am used to it, but some types are spooked by it. Not me.

We are reading comics. Well, his is not really a comic though it has little pictures in rows running across the page in separate boxes just like in regular comics and is the same shape and size as the comics I like most, such as Victor, Valiant and Tiger but these are largely to do with war and sporting prowess and not so full of special knowledge as Jude’s, which is called World of Wonder and to which he has a subscription, or a prescription as Harriet would say. It’s quite special to have a subscription. Jude’s comic has ‘Weiss’ written in the top left-hand corner and he goes to collect it each week at the newsagent. Whoa. I would like a subscription to Victor, or to Commando, which comes in a very nice book shape and has long stories in it featuring commandos having hard knocks before defeating Nazis who throw their hands in the air and go Kamerad! but neither of these comics are all that serious, so I only get them once in a while, for a treat, or else Jude steals one for me, sliding it away with his World of Wonder, or just walking out with it under his arm all casual, like he paid for it of course, of course. I’ve seen him do it and he is very good, but I am not witness to all his thefts any more, being so stark-eyed watching him, that nowadays Jude makes me stand outside. He mainly steals for me and Ben, comics, sweets, that sort of thing.

I am reading a story in Jude’s World of Wonder about stars, etc. It has pictures of olden times scientists, Sir Isaac Newton and René Descartes, a man with a lot of curly hair like a girl, plus Einstein, and I’ve definitely heard of him, and also Galileo, a man from the seventeenth century in a big beard and a wee hat resembling a yarmulke, a hat worn by my dad and the boys on Passover, but not by me, due to sex and me being the wrong sex for nice hats. I don’t think Galileo was Jewish at all, it is just an Italian-type hat, and quite fashionable in olden times, as I suppose.

‘Jude?’ I say. ‘Light year. What is that?’

Jude is reading the latest World of Wonder and he is lying on his back holding his magazine in the air not far from his face, sometimes switching hands to avoid pins and needles, turning pages and breathing in and out without any palaver, no shuffling and rustling or unnecessary movements. Jude never flaps about the way I do, it’s nice to watch, how he is, how he moves. Answering my question might disturb his whole set-up, but I ask anyway, he always hears me, he’ll remember, and three days later, here we are walking home from the fishmonger.

Mum has rung up Mr Jarvis and Mr Jarvis has all the fish ready for Jude and me. I refuse to carry it, not having a big thing for fish, especially slimy fishies with heads still on and staring-right-at-you eyes, no thanks. We made a pit stop at the newsagent and Jude has stolen a packet of fruit gums, my favourite. Wait outside, he said.

‘Light year,’ he says, stepping out of the shop. ‘The space light can travel in a year. It’s distance, not time.’

This is hard. ‘Oh. Do I need to know this, is it important?’

Jude frowns as we stroll along and he takes another fruit gum from the roll. He is thinking. The fruit gum is red, my topmost favourite, so he passes it on and eats the next one, which is yellow and also pretty good if you are not in the mood for red. ‘Yeh. Important.’

This means I have work to do and will need to go to Ben for more information, Ben who is patient and can do a lot of talking all at once without getting fed up. Suddenly Jude chucks our sweets right over the fence by the pavement we are walking home along.

‘Hey, Jude.’ Jude does strange things and if you get upset, his forehead bunches up and blue veins show at the temples, like railroad tracks. So I say it quiet. Hey, Jude.

‘Too many sweets. Bad for you.’

OK, Jude.

So that is one example of how long it can take to get an answer from my brother, three days in this case and something I do not mind because Jude is great and nearly my twin and it is why I don’t really expect him to tell me straight off when I will feel better, what does he mean by soon, and what is a light year, on the day we had the milk race and lay about reading comics, feeling mighty throw-uppy and pathetic.

I am in Ben and Jude’s room, I am lying on Ben’s bed, which is the top bunk of the bunk beds and Jude is down below on his bunk. He never wanted the top one because of all the movement involved, going up and down the ladder. I am crazy for going up and down the ladder, it’s like being an officer in a submarine in World War II. Cool. Jude and I have used the bunk beds for a lot of military situations, as a submarine, a Roman galley in wars against Egyptians, a tent in the desert war against the Afrika Korps and a hut in a Nazi prison camp before we dig our way out. We are happy that Mum and Dad bought the bunk beds and sometimes I even get to sleep in here with Jude if Ben is staying over at a friend’s house, though this is upsetting for Harriet, who will ignore me completely the next morning, building a wall of cereal boxes around her place so she won’t have to look at me, but spending the whole breakfast time peeking through the cracks and then quickly shutting her eyes and turning her head away if I happen to catch her, signifying her great disgust regarding me, and how I am the most boring and stupid person she has ever known. But I like sleeping with Jude because there is no end to our game and we can do night scenes if we are not too sleepy. It’s very realistic.

‘Jude, are we taking the bunk beds with us, do you think?’

‘Doubt it. Bet not.’

‘Too bad,’ I say.

‘Yeh.’

Things are kind of messed up in our house at the moment, what with items not in the right places and this feeling all the time of nearly being late for school even when it is not a school day, and my dad stomping around the joint with his hair all mussed and breathing hard, sometimes stopping short and scratching his head with both hands and a lost expression. This is because we are leaving this house soon, not only for a new house but a whole new country, my dad’s country, and it is his idea so I do not see why he is acting so huffy and puffy. I am not sure I want to go, I don’t know what they’ve got over there, do they have good things, maybe it will be fun, maybe not. When my dad gave us the big news one night before supper, like an annunciation meeting I guess, he said we could come right back home if it doesn’t work out over there, but he just has to go now, it’s something he has to do due to his roots. Roots. Like my dad is a plant or something. During the tidings, I kept looking at Mum to see what might show up on her face and she said nothing and just smiled and played with Gus, who was trying to pull the mats out from under the cutlery and plates in a spirit of scientific endeavour, I believe. He seems quite interested in the motion of things through the air ever since he can walk about by himself for great lengths of time without falling down drunk like most little kids, falling down and staring at the ground that hit them before going in for some howling and screaming. I kept looking at Mum because I thought I could tell if this were a good or bad thing we were about to do, go to my dad’s country, and in a ship, but it was hard to tell, as if Mum were not in the meeting at all, here and not here, and I got a racy scared feeling for a second, like when bike riding and my feet come off the pedals and the pedals spin wild so all I can do is steer away from large impediments such as trees and lamp-posts and other people and hope for the best.

One of the messed-up things around here at the moment is too much milk delivered by the milkman. Maybe he got it wrong or maybe Mum was too busy to put a note out saying how much milk, etc., I don’t know, but Jude decided we should have a milk race so as not to waste the milk and that is why we are lying around on bunk beds like sea lions at the zoo on a hot day, not budging much, even when zoo men are pitching slimy fish snacks at them. We lie on our backs like sea lions and keep our arms to the side because any pressure on our stomachs leads to a throw-uppy feeling. We stare at the ceiling and try to forget about milk, which is not easy.

‘I wish we could take the bunk beds, do you think they have bunk beds over there, Jude?’ No answer. ‘Jude? I was talking to Sister Martha – I told you about her – and I must have said something about you, some football thing, and she went, Jude. Patron saint of lost causes! and kind of laughed. In a nice way, not a bad way. But still, what does it mean, how does that work, patron saint, is it the top saint, and what is that, lost causes? And are you named after him? I wish she hadn’t said that, it’s weird.’

‘We’re Jewish, we don’t have saints.’

‘What do we have then?’

‘I don’t know. Rabbis. No saints. Anyway, I’m named for a book,’ says Jude, and I can feel the bunks sway, meaning Jude is rolling over. Meaning Jude is getting better and can take the pressure. Possibly my time for feeling better is coming up too. Coming soon. I hope so.

‘What book?’

‘You don’t know it.’

‘I might. I might know it, tell me,’ I say, a bit hurt he maybe thinks I am a dummy due to getting less homework than he does and being at a school with lots of nuns and girls where the books are thinner and have a lot more pictures inside them. Illustrations. Sometimes Jude comes right up to my homework stuff splayed out on the oak table or outdoors on the white wrought-iron table near all those statues Mum has of Italian people with not a lot of clothes on and one hip poking out to the side in a relaxed manner, Italian people carrying maybe a flower or a bunch of wheat or some fish or something weird. Where are they going? If I had a fish to haul someplace, I’d do it quick sticks and not in a relaxed manner with hips swaying side to side, or I’d make Jude do it like when we collect them from Jarvis for Mum, when I refuse to carry the bag even. A fish never looks properly dead to me. It’s a problem. Jude comes right up to my work and fingers the books, flipping pages and going mmmm and waltzing off with this private decision he has just made about my homework and my mental capacities and how I might be losing my mind because of nuns. He thinks my books are a bit sissy, I can tell. I feel bad when he does that and I would like to go to Jude and Ben’s school and peruse heavy tomes with small diagrams in black and white, and wear a blue cap like a cricket cap the way they do, and grey shorts down to the knees and so on, but I cannot because I am a girl, I am Jem.

I also wear school hats, two types. In winter, Harriet and I have navy-blue beret hats and my dad says we look like U-boat officers and when he sees us traipse in from the convent, he salutes and goes Heil Hitler! and wanders off, shaking with mirth. He never gets tired of this joke, not ever. In summer, we have to wear flowy dresses with blue-and-white up-and-down stripes and the skirt part flies all around in the merest breeze unlike the winter tunic which stays neat and close to the legs, making it hard in summer to run with a football, for instance, without stripy material flapping in the air and your undies showing. Bloody. Whenever outdoors, a girl has to wear the summer hat, a creamy white straw hat with a hatband and a metal school badge in front and turnups like on a bowler hat except for the gruesome white elastic running under the chin to hold it all in place which gives me a choky feeling if I concentrate too hard on it, suddenly conscious of every single swallow going down my throat so that I start gulping like baby birds do when the mother is feeding them and you see it all happening, the entire voyage down the throat of the little worm bit or whatever and that’s when I get throw-uppy and have to sit down for a while for some recovery time, same as today, for different causes, for milk-race causes.

‘Jude the Obscure,’ says Jude.

‘Oh yeh,’ I say. ‘What’s obscure again?’

‘It’s Latin for dark, obscurus. Or strange. Difficult, I mean. Hard to see. See?’

‘Think so. Anyway, I’ll read that book then.’

‘No,’ says Jude, quite firm.

‘Why not?’ I roll over, feeling a bit better now, and I hang over the edge to peek at Jude, my hair dangling his way.

‘It’s bad at the end and you’re not ready, I’ll tell you when.’

‘OK.’ I flip on to my back and I think about it, how Jude looks out for me, knowing what is good and bad and when I am ready for things, even if he will not explain it in a lot of words when I want him to, because he has tons of things on his mind at all times. He is busy. ‘Jude, will you tell me about lost causes?’

‘Later.’

‘You might forget. Please. Just a bit.’

Jude rises and ambles over to the big bay window with the piano in front of it that Ben can play, and he sits on the piano bench and stares out the window. Jude won’t take lessons in piano, just pausing when Mum asked him if he wanted to and saying no thank you, very politely, and that was it. Harriet and I have piano at the convent. Harriet never studies and I study hard and then we sit with Mum who helps us practise and when it is Harriet’s turn, my sister flies all over the keys making some pretty fine sounds though I am pretty sure not one is in the piano homework she is supposed to do. She sits up straight and makes this whole rush of sound, whipping her head from side to side in a dramatic fashion and turning round now and again to grin at Mum. It’s all very unusual. When Harriet is keen to stop, never wanting to practise long, she shuts the piano lid and scoots across the piano bench to lean into Mum, resting her head there, like she has just been on some long journey and not everything she saw was good.

I myself have some piano problems and the solution to my piano problems is not in sight. I note that it is possible to overcome human failure in some fields and this is quite cheering, but it is not a rule and I am not foxed by my occasional prowess in those fields where I suffer from human failure. Bike riding for one. I am not all that good. I get by. However, I did a feat for Jude the other day when we were riding with Zach and Jeremy, a feat I have never done before and will not try again by myself, but the other day I did it just like that, no problem, because Jude wanted me to and it was important to him, plus he told his friends I could.

‘Jem can do that,’ he said meaning push-start the bike with one foot on one pedal, flinging the other leg over while the bike is careening ahead before settling in the saddle, cool as anything. And I did it, I did it for Jude, no crashing, just as I would like to overcome my piano problems for Mum, but I simply cannot match the notes in my book to the keys without taking a lot of time and then poking at the piano with stiff fingers and it’s awful, because you are supposed to string the notes together to make a tune, not let a lot of time pass between them and this makes me so edgy I can hardly see any more, I know I’m taking far too long and thinking about that makes me even slower, and the sounds I make are downright bad and give me a sick heavy feeling. I look Mum’s way and she smiles that smile, but we both know it’s all up with me, I’m no piano man, nowhere near.

Unlike my mother. I just know it, how she can play this piano though I never see her play this piano, and how she can do it without books, easy, something I am sure of while knowing also not to ask her about, sure of without ever being told, like I heard it in my sleep. There is some stuff you can count on in dreams as real and true, even when you know it is a dream thing, such as eating peanut butter sandwiches with Jude and he says 1942 was the year of the Great Raids, and you wake up thinking I know he said that, but you cannot tell which came first, the sleep time or the real-life time but it doesn’t really matter, because it’s a true thing and has some bearing on life. Other stuff in dreams is not so reliable. I rule out flying, for instance. If you are flying without an engine or glider wings, there is usually no head-scratching in the morning as to when and where it happened, and in which realm did you do it first, the sleeping one or the waking one. Forget it.

I know she can play, it doesn’t matter how I do. And I know not to ask her to play, or why she never touches the keys, not ever, even when she is helping me practise, sitting there at the far edge of the piano with her hands in her lap, sometimes counting out beats for me in a soft voice and when it is very bad, she will reach my way, gently shifting my hand to the right keys, her long fingers covering mine and I can hear the music in her, I swear it, like she is playing, no hands, and all the sounds come out right, beautiful, the kind of tune that makes you down tools and stop breathing because you may never hear it the same again, a sound like everybody you are crazy about calling your name all at once. This is the only good thing about piano practice and why I stick with it for now, all because of Mum and this feeling I get, making me forget my trouble with clefs and joined-up notes and one notes, and pedals I slam like a racing driver, I can’t help it, and most gruesome of all, my non-nun piano mistress who stabs me in the hand with a pointy pencil when I make a mistake, going in for fisticuffs when I get slouchy, winding up like a boxer before crashing her fist into my vertebrae and smiling at me in a shifty manner thereafter. Once, when I came through a whole tune no problem, she gave me two sweets, one green, one yellow, boiled sweets in see-through paper, the kind I hate, but never mind, I was so surprised, I stared at them in my palm for a while before saying thanks, still quite depressed by stabbings and thumps and thinking about secret agents captured by Nazis, fingering suicide capsules in their pocket, coloured capsules perhaps, wrapped in see-through paper. This woman definitely comes low on my list of favourite persons in life, and I am very glad Harriet has prowess in piano and a fine posture, and an improving effect on people in general, no doubt bringing out the sweetie handout mood at all times. I don’t tell Mum about piano mistress because it will upset her and anyway, pretty soon piano mistress and Jem will be in separate countries, no goodbyes, and Mum has too much on her mind right now, everything is messed up in our house.

Jude is staring out the big bay window. ‘Let’s go outside,’ he says.

‘Lost causes, Jude, please!’

‘When you work very hard even though you’ll never win, you’ll never change a thing.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Well. Like wars, there will always be wars.’

‘Why, why will there?’

‘That’s how it is, Jem. But you fight anyway, even if it’s a lost cause.’

‘Why, what’s the point, I don’t understand.’

‘It’s good to try, it makes you good – forget it, Jem, ask Mum, it’s hard to explain, I’m tired.’

‘OK, sorry. We can go outside now. I think I’m better.’ I start to climb down the ladder. ‘Know what? Dad might be a lost cause in the mess department. We can try to help him be less messy, but it’s no good. We can say, Oh Dad, when he drops food between the plate and the pot and make little suggestions like Wait till I get a bit closer with my plate, Dad, or Slow down there! or some such thing, but it’s no good, he’s a lost cause, right? And Harriet! She –’

‘Jem. You have to stop making everything to do with us. We are not the world, the Weiss family is not the world, you have to learn the big things, science, history, all that. And you can’t stay in your family for ever, I mean, you don’t even know what you want to do.’

‘I do!’

‘What then?’

‘I’ll tell you later. I’M TIRED.’

‘Yeh-yeh.’

‘I have ideas. I might do what Dad does.’

‘See? Just because Dad does it. And you can’t anyway. Sports writing is not a girl job, I want you to do a girl job.’

‘It was just one idea, I have others. I’m only ten, Jude, it’ll be OK.’

I get it all wrong with Jude sometimes, nothing I say is right, and I hate it when he is cross with me, why can’t he explain properly, what does he mean about the world and our family, what did I do wrong? I have this bad-news feeling now, a locked-in-the-attic feeling and I need to get rid of it fast.

‘Let’s drink milk!’ I say.

‘Don’t say milk.’ Jude hauls on his blue rugby top and I have one too, one that is a bit too small for him and I think to grab it from my room but he might not be in the mood for me to wear the same top as him so I decide to wear something else. We are going outside. We’ll play some game. Great.

‘Jude? Just one thing. Is it good, do you think, going to Dad’s country, changing countries like that?’

‘Sure. It will be fine. We have to travel.’

‘Why? Why do we?’

‘We just do. It’s important, travel is important,’ he says in a voice meaning this is the end of the talk we are having, it is time to move on.

‘MILK,’ I say, stepping up to him with a horror film killer look. ‘MILK.’

I am running now, Jude chasing, both of us scrambling down the stairs and I forget about other Judes, there is only one, not lost, no saint, not obscure, but my own brother who is only fifteen months older and so nearly my twin, it’s scientific, it’s historical, it’s nothing to do with me.

‘Mum! Mummy!’ I am kind of cross, and stomping all over the house, where is she?

I ask Lisa who is feeding Gus in the kitchen. Lisa comes from Portugal and she lives with us. She wears a shiny blue dress with buttons down the front like our painting smocks at school, same colour, same arrangement of buttons and pockets, different feel. Convent painting smocks are matte and soft, not slidy and shiny, and they are for ART ONLY. Lisa is sometimes friendly, sometimes not. She is not very friendly if some item has gone missing and you ask her about it. If you ask her if she knows where a thing might be, she grabs the edge of one pocket of her shiny blue dress open and holds it like that until she has finished saying, IS IT IN MY POCKET?!

I like Lisa even though she is grumpy. Also, she needs me. Some days, when she is having a rest in her room, she calls me into her room and we do one of two activities, sometimes both. 1) Photographs. Lisa shows me the same old photos of her family every time, pictures of scowly boys with dark floppy hair standing near big white walls and old men with pipes and dark hats on, black hats with little brims. Then there are ladies in dark dresses and black napkins wrapped around their heads though it is not raining. The focus is not all that great but I don’t remark upon it. It would be rude and clearly it is not a problem for Lisa who tells me the names of all the people and I pretend I remember some of the names that go with the people, though this is hard because they all look pretty much the same to me and because Lisa covers each face as she goes, kind of lingering there a while and mumbling soft things in the Portuguese language. 2) Football Pools. I help Lisa choose which football team to bet on for the match on Saturday and I fill out the forms for her. My dad says little kids are not allowed to bet, it is against the law and I am now on the slippery slope and had better watch out, etc. Yeh-yeh. I like to help Lisa out and I know quite a bit about football and I can spell Sheffield Wednesday and Norwich no problem whereas it is not so easy for her without checking every single letter and still getting it wrong. English spelling is a bit weird, I tell her in a comforting manner. And hey, Dad can’t spell! I do not want her to get depressed. Lisa comes from Portugal.

Lisa is never grumpy with Gus who is taking his time right now over some squashed-up bananas, eating slowly, with a thoughtful expression, holding his right foot in his left hand and flexing the toes to and fro, a habit of his I believe will stick with him. I can see it. And I see a day when Gus will catch up with me and be at an age when the difference between us doesn’t count any more, we are grown-ups, and we sit in a bar and have drinks, wine for me, like Mum, and Scotch for Gus, like Dad, Scotch he will sip with a thoughtful expression, maybe reaching for his foot now and then, he doesn’t know why. I do.

‘Lisa, have you seen Mum, please?’

‘IS SHE IN MY POCKET?!’

Bloody.

Lisa is not coming on the ship with us due to love and sex. Mum says she has a boyfriend here but I can tell Mum is worried about the boyfriend situation. Dad says, He’s a ganef! Shiker, shmuck! This sounds bad. In my opinion, though, Lisa will go back to her old country with scowly dark-haired boys standing against white walls and old ladies with napkins on their heads, that’s what I think.

‘Mum? Mummy?’ I’m calling a lot louder now, reminding myself of Joey in Shane, my dad’s favourite Western he took us to the cinema to see. A revival, he said, whatever that means. I never saw him so excited. At the end of the story, the boy Joey calls out for Shane, he calls his name many times, Sha-ne! Shane! Come back! Etc. He runs after him a long way, running with his dog, but Shane is not coming back, not ever, he is not coming back even though part of him would like to stay because he has a big feeling for little Joe’s family and they have a big feeling for him, but he rides off anyway, maybe thinking like Jude. Travel is important.

When we came home from the cinema, Ben, Jude and I were a bit giddy from going, Sha-ne! Sha-aane! in the same voice as the boy, the whole way home in the car, flopping around in hysterics in the back seat and driving Dad a bit crazy. At supper, any time anyone stood up for a glass of water or something, one of us would call out, Come back! in poignant tones and I believe Dad was a bit disappointed as Shane is a favourite film of his, and this was a little traitorous on my behalf because I remember feeling a bit desperate at the end of the film, tears rising up in me when Joey chased after Shane who is not coming back, Shane who is a hero and ought to stick around. I don’t tell Jude or Ben, they might think I am a bit sissy, which is strange, as my dad certainly has a big thing for Shane and he is not a sissy. Oh well.

‘Mum!’ Where is she?

‘Jem!’ My dad is calling for me from the living room.

‘Yes?’

‘Come here!’

‘I’m busy!’ My dad always wants you to get real close when he has a thing to tell you, especially if he is about to send you off on a mission, like he needs you to travel the greatest distance, go a long way for him, even for some little thing he wants. ‘I’m looking for Mum, what do you want, Dad?’ I try not to sound too cross, it’s bad for my dad, he gets rattled.

‘Come here,’ he says, lowering the mess of newspapers to his knees.

I can hardly stand still. ‘What, Dad? What? I have to go now.’

‘I am taking your mother out to dinner, I want you to let her be while she gets ready and you can’t eat those before dinner.’

He means my packet of crisps I am clutching, chicken curry flavour, not the ones I wanted, but Jude said I couldn’t have smoky bacon due to being Jewish and pigs are not allowed for Jews, even half-Jews. I’m not sure about this. I think smoky bacon flavour is just fake bacon, not from real-life pig juice or anything like that and also I think Jude is just being mean but I am too tired to fight him today. Dad sent us across to the shops saying we could have crisps for later which usually means he is taking Mum out to dinner, a time when we all need some kind of treat to make up for her not being around, I guess. Fine with us. Crisps are very nice.

‘I know that, I know both those things, can I go now? May I?’ Damn and bloody, I’m always getting this wrong. Mum says anyone CAN go, do you see, Jem? You are perfectly ABLE to go, MAY I is different, it’s permission, right, OK. I do not think my dad notices what I say.

‘So. Leave Mum alone,’ he says, raising his newspapers.

Like I’m about to hurt her, like I would do that.

‘Dad? You eat bacon, right? I’ve seen you.’

‘Yup.’

‘Isn’t there a rule or something?’ I ask. ‘For um, if you’re Jewish?’

‘Well, yes. It was about order and purity, I’ll explain some other time. Pigs eat everything … it’s not godly, you understand? But I’m not kosher, this is not a kosher house, we are not Orthodox, don’t eat those crisps before dinner.’

‘Dad? Are you in a bad mood?’

‘Not yet. How about a head rub for your old Dad?’

‘No, sorry, I have to do my homework, I’m going now.’

It’s scary saying no to my dad, my insides go all fluttery but I don’t feel like getting my fingers all greasy in his hair, not today. I don’t mind mostly. I like the smell of Dad’s head and how his hair sticks up at the end of the head rub and how now and again he goes, Ahhh, that’s great, Jem! while I am in the thick of it. Ahhh! he says, making me quite happy and proud when I leave him, even though my fingers are a bit slippery and the tips of them are all tingly and worn out, like I have lost a layer of skin maybe.

I have noticed something about him, how he is more prone to telling a person what not to do instead of what to do, unless it’s a mission, such as go get me a tomato and a knife on a plate, etc. He says, Don’t bother Mum, Don’t eat those crisps yet, Don’t read in the dark. And how does he expect me to know all the rules for being Jewish when I go to a convent, a school I think makes him mad at me because of nuns who are possibly contaminating me with nun-ideas and turning me into a kid who is not his all-out daughter, confusing him and giving him a cross look like when he can’t find something in the fridge, a thing that is usually right in front of his eyes. It’s there, Dad. It’s me, Dad.

I think my dad sees nuns and being Catholic, or even Protestant like Mum, as kind of weak, full of fancy clothes and secret things, quiet voices and angel paintings and his religion is big, with tough rules to do with comestibles and other matters, and full of beards and dark clothing and loud praying and calamities in history, in World War II for instance, the Holocaust, a calamity he is very worried about, like it is not all over yet and we must not forget it, we must be prepared for all eventualities, and his religion is maybe better for that, for readiness. Dad is happy I am a girl but I have to be ready also, cowboy-tough. Shane has put away his gun, it is for emergency purposes only and he will only ever need one shot. I don’t know what religion Shane is, it’s a private matter with him, but he has readiness.

What kind of school will I go to in Dad’s country, do they have convents over there? If I go to a convent, will he give me that speech about signs of the cross and spiritualities and not joining in, a speech I know by heart? Of course he will. In the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost, say the girls in time with one another, looking a bit depressed and all sounding the same, like zombies. Then comes the prayer part, the sad one about daily bread, and I can’t help but say it in my own head, just because I have heard it so often and because it puts me in mind of tribulations and of Oliver Twist in his workhouse days, days of bread truly unworthy of the name and in far too meagre allowances for a boy not yet fully formed. Give us this day our daily bread. Please can I have some more? Daily.

After the prayer, the girls speak those same words and sign off once more, like this is code for Hello God, Goodbye God. In the name of the Father, they say, and I say it too, seeing my dad every time, my father with a cross face because I have joined in by mistake when he asked me not to. It’s not a catechism thing, it’s a Charles Dickens thing, it’s really not a problem.

Don’t bother Mum.

I don’t call her name out, I do not want Dad to hear me, I just nip in close to the door of their bedroom which is nearly but not shut, they never fully close it though that does not mean waltz straight in, it’s not polite. I speak through the open part of the door, squishing my face into the space she left.

‘Mummy?’

‘Just one minute, darling.’

I count. She doesn’t mind this, it’s a thing we do. I sit with my back to the door, on the long raised step outside, the landing she calls it, like a railway station platform. I sit there with my crisps, my crisps for later. ‘One, two, three …’ Maybe I could go back to the shops and swap for smoky bacon. No. ‘… fifty-eight, fifty-nine, SIXTY. Ready now? Is it OK now, can I – may I come in?’

I think about Oliver for a moment, and how he gets it wrong. Please can I have some more? This is sad too, and maybe no mistake, just something to do with duress and despair, that he simply cannot tell the difference any more, the space between capability and permission. I step into Mum’s room.

‘He-llo!’ she says, like she is all surprised to see me.

She is striding in from the bathroom that connects her room to Gus’s and she heads for the dressing table. Her bathroom contains a bidet, a bidet is for women although she lets Gus play with it, watching him peer over the side and faff with the taps, giggling like a wild man when the spray goes in his face. I walk over to my mother and stand next to her.

‘I’m going to stand right here and watch, is that OK?’

‘You know it is, what’s wrong, Jem?’

‘Jude said I couldn’t have smoky bacon crisps, Dad wouldn’t like it because of um, kosher rules.’

‘I think Jude was joking, what do you think?’

‘Yeh, well. Anyway, that’s not it, I heard something bad.’

‘What did you hear?’

‘Ben’s not coming on the ship with us. Why not, I want him to.’

Mum lays down her little eye make-up stick, it’s like a conductor’s wand for orchestration. Not wand, baton. She turns my way on her little piano-type bench, the one with gold legs and a little cushion with a pattern of pale stripes and wispy leaves, the cushion attached to the legs by way of posh drawing pins with rounded ends coloured gold also. It’s the nicest bench I’ve ever seen. Mum holds her arms out and I lean in there and I want to cry suddenly. I swallow hard the way Harriet does when she is eating something undesirable and wants everyone to know about it and mark the occasion so it will never happen again. Do not ever press a sardine on me again. Thank you.

‘Do you remember I told you Ben has special exams to write, O levels, and then he’ll join us, he’ll come by air?’

‘No. Maybe I wasn’t listening, maybe I forgot, maybe you just said O levels, I don’t know what that is, are you sure you told me?’

‘Yes, Jem.’

‘Why can’t we wait for him?’

‘We have to find a house and furniture, all kinds of things, it will be fun, I’ll need your help.’

‘Everything’s changing, it’s all different, I hate it – will Ben stay in the house by himself?’

‘No,’ my mother says. ‘He’ll stay with Chris, with Chris and his family.’

‘Well, do they know he needs nuts and raisins in a bowl when he comes in from school, do they?’ I feel right pathetic now, I can’t do much about it, and the tears fall, kind of leaping out of my eyes, it’s weird. ‘Do they have binoculars where we’re going? You don’t want to go, do you, Mum, I know you don’t!’

‘Jem. Sometimes we do things we don’t want to do because we love someone.’ Mum wipes my tears away, her long fingers brushing my cheeks like windscreen wipers on a car.

‘Dad, you mean Dad. Because he has to go, right?’

I think of learning to change Gus’s nappies, trying to copy Mum, how she raises his ankles with one hand and slides the old nappy out from under him with the other, then swabs the decks with damp tissues and pats him dry and bundles him up neatly again, all the while having a friendly chat and tickling him in the ribs. It’s not so smooth an operation with me but that is not the main thing, the main thing is how it does not feel like a poo situation, usually quite grievous and appalling, situations such as walking slap into a mound of poo on the pavement or in a field and having a doomy feeling for hours thereafter. Gus’s poo is not a problem for me at all, just as Harriet barf is not nearly so bad as stranger barf and the day she marched up to my table at the convent and spewed a wee pile of swedes at my feet like I was the only person who could handle the barf situation with poise and even temper, that was not a problem for me either. In my opinion, Harriet displayed fine judgement that day. No one should have to eat swedes in their lifetime. I had a conviction swedes are nun food only and do not exist in the great world so I looked them up and I was nearly right. Brassica napus: used as a vegetable or as CATTLE FOOD. Hmm. This is possibly a catechism issue with nuns, how we should all eat off the same menu, cows and girls, the whole zoo. We are ALL God’s creatures.

The main thing is, not everything that spews forth from a person is lovely and charming, poo, barf, blood, but depending on your feelings for that person, this will or will not be a problem for you, and fine feelings are likely to predispose you to cheery mop-up operations, and willing journeys by sea to uncertain destinations.

‘Can Ben bring some binoculars when he comes?’

‘Maybe,’ says my mother, turning back to face the mirrors, ‘or maybe we can go out hunting for something you will like as much, something new. We will look until we find it. What do you think of that idea?’

I am not hopeful. A not-binocular, just as good? I don’t know.

‘OK,’ I reply because I don’t want to let her down. She needs me, she said so.

Mum loops that cross around herself, the one with the pale stone at the heart of it. It is art, she says, made by an artist, a man from Ireland, and I wonder about him, whether he is prone to cracking jokes and doling out hugs or whether he is too caught up with the forging of silver and the embedding of pale stones for such things. Mum tucks the cross under her clothes because of Dad and Judaism, or else she hangs other stuff about her neck, shimmery silver chains or a wispy scarf so the fine cross is kind of hidden, like seeing a person you know standing under a weeping willow in a slight breeze and the picture keeps breaking up. Kaleidoscopes give me the same feeling, part excited, part depressed. I twist the tube and the pattern comes, marvellous, and just as I get an idea about it, close to recognition, it turns into some new pattern and I have to start all over again, like nothing is clear for long enough, there is nothing you can swear to. Hey, you, standing there, do I know you? Is that a cross I see?

‘I love that,’ I say, pointing to the cross, trying not to say the word though my dad is downstairs. ‘And in the middle, the –’

‘Moonstone,’ says Mum drawing it out from the tangle of chains, willow. Binocular, moonstone. Memento. Where she’s been, where she is headed. Mrs Yaakov Weiss, destination Moon.

‘Well, I love it.’

‘It’s lovely, but you don’t really love it, Jem. You love people, not things.’ She says this gently, stroking the top of my head and taking the opportunity, as per usual, to untangle some of the mess up there. Like my dad, I do not have a big thing for combs and combing.

Here comes my dad. You can hear him coming a mile off. Is he worried about spooking people, is that why he goes in for all that shoe scuffling and throat clearing? I don’t think so. He finds it very funny indeed if you suddenly leap in the air limbs akimbo because someone has just spoken loudly in a quiet room or you are watching a film and there is a gunshot out of nowhere. Ha ha ha, he goes, watching you try to recover your senses. He loves this, people losing their cool. So that’s not the reason. He wants to make an announcement, that’s all. It’s a long hello. When an important cowboy enters a bar, he will pause a moment at the swing doors, stopping short in a slap of heels so everyone has a moment to turn round and get the picture before he bats the doors open, and this is no show-off thing, but a courtesy and a greeting, the only kind he knows, because he is an important cowboy and a man of few words.

Dad is carrying two glasses, white wine for Mum, Scotch for him. It is time for him to slap soapy water under the arms and put on a new shirt and tie it up with a tie. This will take him about three and a half minutes and there will be a lot of commotion.

‘Jem,’ he says. ‘We’ll have another boxing lesson soon. Maybe tomorrow.’

I think he has forgotten about telling me not to bother Mum. Anyway, why can’t I be in here if I want to?

‘Tomorrow? OK.’

My dad pulls on my hair, two tugs, like my hair is a bell pull and he is ringing for servants. It’s a show of affection and now I feel guilty about skipping out on his head rub, something I hope he has also forgotten.

‘Tomorrow we’ll do the rope-a-dope!’ says my dad, putting his glass down and shuffling from foot to foot like he is doing a war dance or some such thing. I have no idea what rope-a-dope means, or whether I am supposed to shuffle around also. I don’t bother. ‘Put up your dukes! Ha ha ha! And don’t eat those before dinner,’ he adds, prodding my bag of crisps and picking his glass up again.

Bloody. Not again. It is possible Mum asked him to look out for this tonight, the eating of crisps before dinner, because she is always in charge of health matters and that can be a full-time job when there are a lot of kids roaming around like in our house. The thing is, when Dad takes on a task of this kind, of handing out advice or rules, he is a lot bossier, clearly believing a kid will not get the message unless you yell out the advice and make a cross face and repeat it eight or nine times. We are not spooked, but if one of us has a friend around when Dad is marching through the house, poking us in the ribs in passing and yelling out advice, or going Heil Hitler! ha ha ha, the type of friend who is a bit jumpy near my dad, wondering if he is a crazy person or dangerous or something, for a moment I think I should explain to the friend that my dad is not scary, he is funny, that’s how he is, he’s not mad or anything, and then just as quickly, I feel clapped out and know it is time to get a new friend, because some things are too hard to explain, and I am real choosy about friends now, finding ones who can relax around Dad, which is a lot easier than trying to explain things to people who will never really understand. This may be an unusual way to pick friends, I don’t know, but that’s how it goes.

I pause on the landing outside Mum and Dad’s room. Where are you headed, Jem? I’m not sure. I am not wild about this time of day, it’s kind of lonely, too soon for supper, long since school, what’s it for, this time of day? I am skipping homework as it is Friday, which is my day off from homework and tomorrow is Saturday, Harriet’s favourite. She gets so excited about Saturday, she will rise up quite often in the night to tell me the latest in her departments of special expertise, or fill me in regarding what happened to her on Friday and what she aims to do on Saturday. A lot happens to Harriet, so there is a lot to say and sometimes she will also ask me to sing in my no-good singing voice or else we make beastie shadows on the wall in the light of passing cars. Saturday will never be as great for me as it is for her, but I would never have learned this were it not for Harriet waking me up all night to tell me stuff, waking up and chirping at me like a bird just so she can have that fine moment over and over maybe, of falling asleep with this exciting idea she will be waking up on a Saturday, a feeling like rewrapping your own present late at night at the end of your birthday, and unwrapping it slowly to have the surprise again, or something close, never quite the same, but not too bad and definitely worth a go on a long night.

I take a step or two on the landing and I know what’s up. I’m heading for Jude. I think I could find him in a room with no lights, easy. When we walk together, sometimes we veer into each other, not quite crashing, it’s more of a gravity thing, I believe. I’m not that well up on gravity yet and I have written the word in my Questions Notebook, the one I am filling up too quick which is why I do tiny writing, in the Brontë manner. I have read two books so far about the Brontës, a family of three sisters, Charlotte, Emily, Anne, and one brother, Branwell, who all did a great deal of tiny writing in small books wherein they made up stories about soldiers. They lived on the moors, rocky, cold, windy, not a very good place when it comes to health matters. There was a lot of dropping dead up there, especially from consumption, anxiety and too much walking in cold weather, and too much drinking at the Black Bull Inn in the case of Branwell, a great worry to his family who sat up waiting for him in darkened rooms, waiting for him to come home, and then waiting for him to stop raving in tussled sheets, raving from too much walking and drinking, etc. Branwell was a bit of a lost cause in all callings in life, and he took it to heart in the end, I guess, and even in his heyday of making a stab at things, when he painted a portrait of Charlotte, Emily and Anne with himself among them, he scratched his own face right out of the painting, which is a sad thing, one of the saddest.

Consumption. I add this word to my Questions Notebook. Consumption does not sound like a doomy disease, it sounds like what a person does to a peanut butter sandwich. I write it in near Gravity, making sure to leave enough space for notes and answers. My notebook is filling up fast. It measures 15×10½cm and the pages are sewn to the binding, not stapled. The cover has a painting of an olden times boxer with no gloves on and my dad gave it to me.

‘That’s Daniel Mendoza,’ he said in a proud voice meaning there is more to come, more information regarding Mr Mendoza. ‘He was Jewish, a Jewish boxer.’

I knew it. I take a look at Daniel who is putting up his dukes though there is no one else in the painting to box and I feel proud also. Maybe Daniel is practising. He is ready, always ready and he knows all the rules for boxing. He is a gentleman boxer. And maybe Jude is wrong, I can be a sports writer too, it’s not only a man job.

Gravity. What did Ben say? Pull, there is pull in gravity and a field where the pulling happens. Gravity is not just about not falling but about forces also, forces in a gravitational field, that’s it, and I think there is one between Jude and me, one I aim to fight because Jude is not in the mood for Jem today, I can tell by the smoky bacon crisps joke he played on me, a pushing-away joke, not a Jem-and-Jude-together joke, which is much nicer, close to a friendly cuff on the arm whereas the pushing kind makes my ears ring. Everything is messed up in our house and Jude is edgy, he does not want to be with me. Travel is important.

I move on past Jude and Ben’s room quick sticks. Jude is in there reading and thinking, going way past me in terms of world knowledge. I don’t care. I move on downstairs and across the kitchen, staring down at the red tiled floor and frowning like I have some great purpose in mind but mainly I do not want to see Lisa, I am not in the mood for Lisa, though I cannot help tossing some info her way before making it out the back door. Lisa is laying fish fingers in rows on a grill and cutting up broccoli for our supper, without separating the treetop part of the broccoli from the stem part. Harriet does not eat treetops and she is going to get depressed. Treetops are for birds, she says. She eats a broccoli top and all she can think about is a mouthful of dear birds and Lisa ought to know that by now. I glance swiftly at Gus who is in his pen, which resembles the sea lion cage at the zoo, a pen with no roof due to tameness of sea lions, and he is playing with his rubber hammer, tapping thoughtfully at the frame of his cage like he is doing repairs or something.

‘Mummy was UPSTAIRS,’ I tell Lisa. ‘She is in her room getting ready!’ I say, barging out the back door, not even looking at her as I speak, knowing she knew all along where Mum was and was too bloody to say so, bloody. I am on to Lisa and I am fed up with that pocket business.

I tuck my crisps in the bushes in case of robbers/animals/accidental crushing by passing feet, and I climb up into our tree, Jude’s and mine, the tree with twisty limbs and no fruit to bruise that is a great commando lookout, planted not far from the back door and right at the edge of the big garden for full strategic viewing in many directions all at once. A soldier will always find a lookout post, it’s the first thing he does, the very first. I can see everything from up here.

Jude and I read up here, lying back on the branches as if they were sofas in the living room. I prefer it with Jude, like crossing the road or riding a bike, I do it with him and I don’t think about crashing or calamity. I get the wobblies up here and there is Jude to grab my elbow, calm and firm, and I’m OK, no falling. Alone, it’s weird. Climbing the tree, I have to concentrate hard on each step, put your foot there, Jem, now there, hey, is that how we usually do it? Hold tight, do I always hold this tight? Suddenly I am all conscious of handholds and footholds, same as when I wear my summer hat with the strangly elastic and go all conscious of swallowing. And I even forgot to bring reading material. I’ll just have to do some more thinking. Fuck-hell. I’m tired out today.

Ben is at Chris’s house, he went there straight after our trip to the shops, I don’t know if he will come home for dinner, meaning Lisa will seem about three times the size she usually is. Looming. When Ben is around on Mum and Dad nights out, I don’t notice Lisa so much, she is just regular-sized, even when hovering in the doorway of the study after supper while Ben and Jude and I watch some not-allowed telly programme, Lisa standing there on the sidelines whimpering, and hauling out a hanky from her pocket to pat her eyes, a hanky being the only thing that’s ever actually in her pocket, I guess. Lisa weeps no matter what we are watching, even if it’s a horror film or a film with larks, a comedy. Maybe there is no TV in Portugal and for her, all telly programmes are strange and sad.

When Harriet and Gus are stashed safely in their beds, and I sit up close to Ben with Jude lying on the floor, it’s a good time and if Lisa shows up to lurk in the doorway, we say, Come on in, Lisa, come in, and she never does. I am busy, she says, I am just leaving, but she always stays a while, patting her eyes with a hanky while Ben and I dig each other in the ribs and get a pain from holding in hysterics. If Ben is not there, but at Chris’s house, it’s no fun and watching Lisa in the doorway makes me sad and kind of cross and I give up on telly, going for Tintin books instead, to read in bed by torchlight so as not to wake Harriet. I hold out hopes for not waking her, but she usually knows if I am reading and will do two things to annoy me. 1) Slowly rise up from under her sheets with one outstretched arm and pointy finger and very straight back and wide-open stary eyes after the manner of Egyptian mummies in a spook film she once saw, the only ten minutes of horror film she has ever seen. This slow rise and pointy-finger act can have a terrible effect on me and Harriet loves that. Here is the second annoying thing she does. Pop right up from pretend sleep and wave her little arms around yelling Boo! Even if I am expecting it, it gets me. If it doesn’t get me, I must act scared anyway or Harriet will feel a big failure in the horror department.

Chris is Ben’s best friend and I am pretty sure I want to marry him although he doesn’t know that, I don’t think you can tell a person a thing like that when you are not in your prime, and especially not when you are a girl. It’s not a girl job. I am a bit worried because Chris will reach the marrying time way before me due to being a whole five years and one month older plus I am going to another country and I don’t know how to keep an eye on things from so far away. I will have to come back, that’s all, and show up at his house and maybe he’ll take a look at me and I won’t be just Ben’s little sister any more, and he’ll say I am pretty sure I want to marry you and I won’t have to say anything at all on my part. I’ll just nod sagely or something.

I think it went this way between Mum and Dad when they first clapped eyes on each other. Not many words necessary to get things going, no weighing up of matters, no decision time. When you have a big feeling for someone, nothing can stop you, like in World War I, in the case of a soldier rushing out to save a wounded friend lying out there in no man’s land, and the soldier has only this one idea of rescue in mind, nothing can stop him, not fear, not other soldiers flying in the air around him, exploded by shells and whiz-bangs from Big Berthas (Krupp 420mm) and Slim Emmas (Skoda 305mm), from howitzers and mortars, from all the great guns blazing, nothing. When you have a singlemost desire and no time to lose, fear is like an engine not a stop light, switching on at all the right moments, for all pressing engagements in trying times, for grabbing a tool in the spider shed, for marching up to Chris’s front door one day in the future, and for Nelson, yes, Nelson in the Cape of Trafalgar, facing the enemy while not in the best of health, missing bodily parts usually thought vital for a leader of men, one hand, one eye, never mind, who needs two? He has a singlemost desire.

Right now would be a good time for a boxing lesson but my dad is busy. He is probably all dressed and shaved, with maybe one little cut on his face like a war wound on an Action Man. A going-out-to-dinner wound. He will be standing around Mum right about now, drinking his drink and going, Ready, dear? Ready, dear? and driving her a little bit crazy. Five minutes, darling. Why don’t you check on the children? Yes, right now would be a good time for a boxing lesson. Oh well. Maybe that is what this time of day is for, figuring out when is a good time for things, I don’t know.

My dad does not give lessons in a lot of things, or many lessons in any one thing and when he does, they do not last very long, maybe eight minutes or so and then he’s knackered and needs a drink or a tomato on a plate because he has had enough of your company, the only person he wants for long is Mum. When he decides to give a lesson in a thing, it’s wise to be at the ready and abandon all other activity. Up in the tree, Jude’s and mine, I try to think of what else besides boxing I have ever had a lesson in from my dad. Not much. But that is because we need to learn for ourselves plus we go to school five days a week and we have Mum. And Ben. I don’t believe my dad knows how much Ben teaches us.

I’m not tired any more. I’m getting stiff up here.

Here’s a thing. Dad is a sports writer and he hardly ever plays sports with us. A football rolls up to him on the terrace when he is reading and he ignores it completely, or he says, Oh! the way he does when the telephone rings and ruins his concentration. One time he tossed a cricket ball at Jude but kept aiming at his head for some reason, with Jude stepping away neatly each time and me chasing all over the shop for the ball and trying to explain the rules of bowling to my dad all by myself, because it was just too many words for Jude who could only say, She’s right, Dad, she’s right, Dad, while Dad shifts impatiently and says, OK OK OK, to my instructions, and then goes right on pelting the ball skyward like Jude is a coconut on a stick, my dad simply unable to do two things at once, listen and bowl. It was pretty terrible all round and I do not recall which one of them walked off first, dropping bat and ball in the middle of the garden for me to stare at, both of them slamming the door on sports.

What exactly does my father do around here besides sports writing and lying on sofas and talking to Mum, sometimes twirling her about the room in an olden times dance step involving twirls and sudden dips that look a bit dangerous? Sometimes he messes about in the kitchen, OK, and mostly on Saturdays. Other times he grapples with our homework mainly to see where we are in terms of world knowledge. NOT VERY FAR, he thinks. Also, he drives Ben and Jude to school, yelling at them in a jovial manner while shaking the car keys in the air. Make tracks! Shake a leg! Did we get you out of bed, Jude? Keeping you awake, are we? Feel like walking to school? Ha ha ha! It’s kind of noisy, but my brothers do not mind, carrying on cramming their satchels in a leisurely manner, with pieces of toast clamped in their jaws and Gus peering at them with great attention and a slight frown, and Harriet raising her arms aloft and crying out What larks! We shall have larks! which is her new favourite expression from another book Mum is reading to us right now by Mr Charles Dickens, Great Expectations it is called, and this sounds to me always like the name of a house but it is not, it is the name of a feeling.

Here’s another thing. My dad is good at short cuts and he has taught me one or two. 1) How to tidy up your hair when you do not have a big thing for combs and are in a needing-to-be-neat situation. Step out of sight and make your fingers comblike, as in a garden fork, say. Keep your fingers stiff and push them through your hair from the front to the back, going slow to allow for snags. Too fast and you get a pain in the roots. You can use both hands. 2) If you are not in the mood for cutting and cutlery, here is how to have a sandwich snack quick sticks. Spread out what you want on one slice of bread, peanut butter, Cheddar, etc. Now FOLD over the bread. This way there is one less edge things can spill out of and your sandwich is ready fast, and you need a single knife only, a spreading knife. Lastly, use your palm or a napkin for a plate, or eat outside to reduce clean-up operations. 3) In an emergency, here is how to unscuff your shoes. Stand on one leg and polish the toe part on the back of your standing leg. Forget about the heels. It is too hard and people do not pay a lot of attention to heels unless they have very fine eyesight and are watching you walk away and by then, you are gone, so what. Unscuffing works best on trousers, but socks and tights will do also. Another shoe tip from Dad is handy for when you are bashing off to school in a flurry, or from indoors to outdoors when at school. Do not tie your laces too tight. That’s it. Now you can slip your feet in and out, no tying and untying necessary, just as if your lace-ups are slip-ons! Be careful NOT to do this in front of Mean Nun who hates you, or she will say, as she did one time, Weiss! Weiss! Untie those laces and tie them up at once! You are a very lazy girl! Mean Nun is a bit crazed when it comes to shoes.

So these are some useful short cuts my dad has taught me, and I certainly hope he will teach me more as we go along because I am only ten going on eleven and cannot take everything in at once and there are things I do not need to know just yet. It changes all the time, the things a person needs to know. A stranger might think a small girl does not need to know how to box, but that is an opinion among others. I have had just one boxing lesson so far and here is how it went.

‘Hey, Jem,’ my dad says. ‘It’s time for a boxing lesson. You will need to know how to box where I come from!’

Whoa. What does he mean? I am getting all kinds of strange ideas about this place, this place where in winter it never stops snowing, which is what I explained to Lucy White, how it snows all the time, all-out snow, nothing like the wee sprinkling of frost and fluff we have here.

‘In winter,’ I said in a proud voice, in the manner of an Antarctic explorer, ‘it snows non-stop. That’s how it is.’

One proof I have of this ferocious snowing in my dad’s country is from Victor, my second favourite comic after Commando. In Victor there is a story about a dog called Black Bob, who is a sheepdog, not the roly-poly hairy kind resembling a sheep himself who traipses about Alpine passes bearing a tiny keg of cognac for types who have fainted in Alpine passes, no, Black Bob is a real sheepdog, the looking after sheep kind. There is a proper name for this kind of dog and Harriet will know it. All I have to do is slide my comic her way one day without asking anything directly, and she will tell me the name of this dog plus related details. It is not important right now.

Black Bob is good-looking and pretty sleek, a word denoting strength and slimness in a dog or horse, and possibly even a human, and seeming to me a handy word to call upon if I get to be a sports writer. I make a note of it in my Mendoza notebook. Black Bob goes to Canada in this story, though I do not know how he got there from Yorkshire where he lives with a handsome shepherd in a flat cap and waistcoat, thick black belt and dashing little white scarf. I do not know how he ended up in Canada having adventures because I missed out on some issues of Victor due to Jude taking a little time off from robbery. Never mind. Maybe for Black Bob travel is important, who knows.

In Canada, Black Bob stays with a Mountie, a Canadian type of policeman in a very big hat which must be downright annoying to run with against the wind. It could fall off, the chinstrap grabbing at the Mountie’s throat, or it could hold him up like a sail on a boat. It is not an aerodynamic hat. Jude has explained a thing or two to me regarding aerodynamics. This is no hat for a man on active duty. The Mountie and Bob have a big feeling for each other, close to how it was with the shepherd, a man Bob misses a lot. He needs to get back to Yorkshire, but meanwhile he has adventures in Canada largely involving the chasing of criminals in snowstorms, meaning nearly all the boxes in the story are white spaces except for Black Bob and the Mountie peeping through the snow, and skinny lines scraping across the page at a slant to indicate fierce winds, not very hard work for the artist, it seems to me, when the background is all snow.

The Mountie has a problem. He has a problem of snow-blindness, which I am now quite worried about also even though it seems to be a passing sort of blindness, for storms only. There is the Mountie, suddenly snow-blind, trying to chase criminals with his arms outstretched like Harriet doing her Egyptian mummy act and now Bob has to do everything, catch the criminals, take care of the Mountie, all of it. This is no surprise to me because Black Bob is always the main hero in every adventure, having a single-most desire plus the qualities of calm and modesty, making him an even bigger hero. Nothing matters to Bob except that his master is safe and the criminals not safe. In Canada then, it all ends OK, with the Mountie drinking a nice drink, cognac maybe, and his eyes carefully swaddled in a bandage until he can see straight again, and a fire going in the log cabin. There is no box to show him doing all this, feeling his way around the cabin and so on, so Bob must be the one who poured the drink, lit up a fire and wrapped the Mountie’s snow-blind eyes. There is no one else. Stories in comics are not always very realistic. Never mind.

It is possible I need to learn boxing because of criminals wandering around with bad intentions in concealing snowstorms, though I doubt it, I think this is just another cowboy lesson from my dad, another sign of his anxiety regarding me and my convent life and the weakening effect it may be having upon me. Don’t worry, Dad.

Here is where my first boxing lesson takes place: in the kitchen at the end of my dad’s day of sports writing. Here is why. When he gets fed up, and tired of teaching, he can turn around and, lo! there is Mum making dinner, Mum, his all-out favourite relief from everything, sports writing, giving lessons, talking to kids. Here is what else he needs after a lesson. A drink. I notice he already has one poured and waiting, right there on the kitchen table.

My dad stops me as I amble across the room.

‘Hey, Jem. It’s time for your first boxing lesson. You will need to know how to box where I come from!’ Then he goes, Ha ha ha! but I take it pretty seriously, that’s how it is with me.

‘OK, Dad.’

I put my book on the white oak table, far far from his Scotch glass, so as to allow for spill situations which are quite regular with him. And that is the moment I realise the lesson will not last long and I might as well take a chance on my dad as teacher and not ask too many questions. Spotting the glass and making this time calculation is a sleuthing activity, something you can do about people the more you stick with them and get to know things. It is possible to sleuth strangers also, and it is good practice, though you cannot always be sure where clues lead. The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes are very good and they are written by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who was first a doctor and then a writer and then a man who died of heart failure. I wonder did he see it coming, with his medical insight, and was that better or worse, to see it coming? Sherlock Holmes is a top unofficial sleuth and sleuthing is his chief preoccupation, whereas Tintin, another unofficial sleuth, also has a dog, and later on he meets a sea captain, and for the companionship of le Capitaine and Milou, I believe, Tintin has gentler manners and a less edgy temperament. OK.

‘Right. Now. Take a stance!’ says Dad, jumping around in front of me.

I stare at my dad. What is he talking about? He is going to have to do better than this. Teaching is not his big thing, I can see that.

‘What do you mean, Dad? Where?’ I look around for what he might mean, I look around for a stance.

‘Get into position, Jem! Stay loose, drop your shoulder, bend your knees, so you’re a moving target, not so easy to hit, get it?’

‘Oh. OK.’ I bend my knees and hold up my fists just like Daniel Mendoza the Jewish boxer on my Questions Notebook. I feel a bit silly, my knees pointing in opposite directions and my chin in the air.

My dad is laughing at me, he laughs at my stance, ha ha ha! ‘Jem, remember Cassius Clay? We saw him on TV, remember?’

‘Yup,’ I say.

‘He dances around the ring! He does the rope-a-dope. Right? Right!’

‘Oh, Dad, that’s so ridiculous, rope-a-dope, what does it mean?’

‘Just do it, Jem! Dance around, stay loose, come on!’

My dad is getting a bit testy. His drink is waiting and my time will be up, cut the questions, Jem. then!’ I say. I dance around.

‘Now. Very important. Always, always hold one hand in front of your face. Make a fist and hold it there. To protect your face. Most fights end with head injuries. Use the hand you don’t write with. Go on! I’m a southpaw, I hold up my right. Got that?’

‘Southpaw?’ I can’t help it, I have to ask. If he is going to use technical terms, I will need to understand them, that’s how it works in teaching.

‘Leftie, I’m a leftie!’

‘So I’m a northpaw then, am I? Um, whatever’s your best hand is what you are? Or, does everyone have a north and south? Is it for sports only? Or what?’

‘No no no! It’s a word for the left-handed, all right? And only if you are left-handed,’ says my dad scraping both hands through his hair and breathing in and out noisily.

‘That doesn’t seem right, Dad. Are you sure?’

I think about Horatio, Lord Nelson, probably born right-handed and suddenly with no choice in the matter and I wonder if it counts, if he is never really a true southpaw because in his head he is always reaching for things with a hand not there, his right, and always looking to one side for a man he can never have again, a right-hand man.

‘Jem! Come on, I’m teaching you, goddammit! Stop standing there like a goof!’

‘OK, sorry.’

I hold my left hand up, my southpaw not a southpaw because I am right-handed, making it just a regular paw, I guess, I hold it right there in a fist shape in front of my face. I dance around, doing the rope-a-dope, bloody, I do it all for my dad who is looking happy now.

‘Great! Let’s go. Try and protect yourself, remember? Now – BOX!’

Then my dad pushes my left hand, which is protecting my face from head injury, right into my face.

‘Hey!’ I shout. ‘You can’t do that! Unfair! And that hurt!’

‘Ha ha ha! You were holding it too loose! It didn’t really hurt, did it?’ he says, ruffling my hair. ‘I said hold your fist up but don’t forget about it, or that’ll happen every time. I didn’t need to punch you! You knocked yourself out! End of lesson!’ he adds, turning away to collect his drink, walking close to Mum and standing next to her with his back against the kitchen counter and his legs crossed at the ankles, reminding me of one of the dark-haired boys in Lisa’s photograph, leaning up against sunny white walls, and feeling jaunty. My dad tricked me and he feels jaunty and he has gone right back into boyhood, I think so.

‘Not fair, Dad,’ I tell him, settling in at the table with my Tintin book. I’m not mad though.

‘That’s right, Jem! Not fair!’ he says, real pleased. ‘Tough bananas!’

‘Thems the breaks?’ I ask.

‘RIGHT!’ he says, sliding an arm around my mother and squeezing her tight.

I’m not mad at my dad, though I have changed my mind about this being a good time for another boxing lesson. I’m not in the mood. And my dad knows I am not going to join the boxing profession, he is just training me in cowboy toughness, he trains us in games and by other methods, by way of documentaries and little speeches. When he mentions the Holocaust for instance, he gets a grave look which is a warning to us, that’s all, a reminder to keep on our toes and hold that non-writing hand up in front of the face, don’t let it go loose and limp, keep it in a fist shape, just in case.

My dad reminds me of another commander. He reminds me of Julius Caesar in some ways. In his prime, Caesar was a soldier and then he became the first emperor of the Roman Empire whereupon he messed up and lost control of things. Julius had no time out between commanding legionaries and ruling a whole empire and he got that lost feeling when it was just not timely.

When Caesar was a soldier and at his best, his men were devoted, as Mum would say, meaning they would do anything for him, go anywhere, no matter what, no questions asked, no Who started this war? or What are we doing here? or Maybe we should just go home. No doubts. There was fear of the sensible kind but no cowardice in Caesar’s army because of trust and devotion on the part of the men, and because Caesar had great expectations. On the eve of a battle, he exaggerates the might of the enemy, that is Caesar’s trick, and suddenly his men have twice the might, out of pride and so on, and they smite the enemy in half the time, a breeze for them since they expected to be smitten themselves by an enemy so much greater, Caesar had said, in numbers and in might. It’s a good trick.

Smite. This is a little bit like wot, having two meanings to bear in mind, usually very easy to tell apart. Smite is largely an olden times battle term so when Mum says I was smitten! there ought to be no confusion. She does not mean she was assaulted by battleaxe, halberd, poisoned arrow, javelin, sabre, scimitar, crossbow or mace in a field of battle, of course not, she means she had a very nice feeling due to something a person said or did in her presence. I hope she will be smitten by me one day, for something fine I do or say, because she is so happy when she says it, I was smitten! like she is about ready for song and dance.

My dad and Caesar are the same in some ways, not all. Dad may exaggerate the might of the enemy but he is in his prime as ruler, with no lost feelings, quite unlike Caesar who kept looking back in a wistful manner during his days as ruler, days that came upon him too quickly, and spent musing on the good trick he played on his men and on his prowess in commanding soldiers who were smitten by him and his leadership of soldiers. He wants his old job back. He can’t have it.

The Caesar method of facing the enemy is not uncommon. My swimming master has the same idea. In his opinion, the enemy here is fear of water, a fear he supposes to be lurking in every girl. This belief is the main influence on his teaching method. It could be worse. My friend Lucy White told me something very interesting one day on the way to swimming lessons and I summon up this thing she said when I am in the middle of a swimming lesson and am suffering horribly from the Caesar method. I am not sure I had fear of water before, but I think it’s coming.

It strikes me swimming baths would make a very good setting for a horror film, what with the non-stop scary echoes and shrieks giving me a pain in the ears, and shards of light bouncing off the water and ceiling and walls, hurting my eyes, sharp as needles. Swimming master prances up and down, always laughing and yelling out instructions, no pausing, and I wonder if he is like that at home, yelling and laughing and giving his kids a headache because he thinks maybe if he falls quiet no one will know what to do any more, or how to do it, his family now a gaggle of lost souls wandering the house in a state of perplexity, sometimes stopping in front of him to gaze his way in a pleading manner, just waiting for him to start yelling and laughing instructions.

‘HOLD ON!’ he shouts. ‘LINE UP! KICK! KICK! KICK! PUT SOME LIFE INTO IT!’

This means it is time to swarm against one edge of the pool and hold on to the edge and kick up a storm of water. This is quite a horrible experience. Clearly, life for swimming master = a great deal of frantic activity and noise. Jude lying on his back and staring at the ceiling in deep thought, for instance $ life. Now swimming master strolls up and down the deck doing his favourite thing, filling a bathing cap full of water and dashing it over our heads from a great height. Filling and emptying, filling and emptying. Why? He wants us to overcome our fear of water by all-out exposure and heavy attack by water. Soon we will all be cured of water fear.

‘WATER IS SAFE AS HOUSES!’

I have a different feeling though, involving a desire never to be in a swimming baths again while I walk this earth.

In the next part of the lesson we have to about face and let go. ‘LET GO!’

Off we go into the open, grappling on to a white polystyrene slab and kicking like crazy. The slab is a life raft but this is only an afterthought, the main thought is how it is meant to lead you into real swimming so that before you know it, you simply cast off your slab and there you are, swimming, like in a miracle involving crutches then no-crutches. Yay! There is probably something wrong with me because this never works and I am still very far from the miracle stage. My polystyrene slab flips up in the air in a grotesque manner and bops me on the head on the way down, falling out of reach so I have five or six near-death situations a lesson, with swimming master hauling me out of the water each time, by one arm only, laughing and yelling and nearly wrenching my limb out of its socket.

‘TRY AGAIN! THERE’S A GIRL! DON’T GIVE UP!’

Why not? I can’t wait to get home. I can’t wait for the whistle signifying the end of the lesson and friendly cuffs and slaps on the back from our teacher who is so pleased to be battling fear of water on our behalf. He must be proud of Harriet. I am. Harriet swims like a fish. I see her in all the commotion, floating and flipping around happily, no struggling, just about ready to pass up on the polystyrene, an amphibian perhaps, a duck-billed platypus, I have learned about those, equally happy on land and water, amphibian. My sister swims like a fish.

I do not. I just don’t see it, this business of floating and so on, of larking about in water like it is a proper home for a human, water see-through as air but SAFE AS HOUSES! Maybe the Caesar method is a problem for me, simple as that. It could be worse though, it’s what I tell myself ever since the day Lucy White informed me how some kids learn to swim, a day we were waiting with Harriet at the convent gates, waiting for Mrs White to meet us and take us to the baths.

Harriet is on a wee wander roundabouts. I keep her in my field of vision.

‘Kids are thrown right into the pool,’ says Lucy. ‘Or the sea. And they swim because they must. Otherwise they sink and die.’

‘That can’t be right,’ I say, frowning.

‘Oh yes.’ Lucy knows.

This would definitely save a lot of time, I think. One lesson. And Mum would not have to come on a bus and collect us once a week. Maybe we could even skip out on the single lesson and learn only when truly necessary, in an emergency situation such as a sinking ship, or a fall from a Hawker Hurricane shot down over the ocean in a dogfight whereupon we wait for rescue in the freezing waters, doing the dog-paddle. You swim or die, it’s a mechanism, coming naturally as breathing, unless you are not a regular person and are missing this mechanism, in which case you die. It is not always easy to tell who is regular and who is not which is why we need lessons, I guess. Just in case.

‘Anyway,’ says Lucy. ‘It’s a bit cruel but it happens. In some cultures.’

Lucy knows about cultures, she is half-Indian. I am half-Jewish, maybe more than half.

‘Please don’t tell Harriet, OK? The swim or die thing. Please.’

Harriet is sitting under the conker tree, perched on her towel with her bathing suit furled up neatly within, elbows on knees and her little face in her hands and her straw hat hanging by the elastic around her neck and tipped right back over the shoulders like she is a Mexican in a Western. My sister clearly is not bothered by elastic. She doesn’t get that strangly feeling. She calls out to me suddenly.

‘A straight line is the shortest distance between two points! Sister Martha said!’

Though she does have the swim mechanism, my sister is definitely not a regular person.

‘Great, Harriet!’ I call back.

‘Why not?’ asks Lucy. ‘Why can’t I tell her?’

Not can’t, I think. Shouldn’t. Anyone CAN tell her. Anyone could. ‘Just don’t,’ I say. ‘She won’t like it. Please.’

‘OK – oh! There’s Mummy!’ says my friend and we pile into the car, Harriet in front where she will chirp away at Mrs White the whole journey. Harriet and Mrs White are friends. I feel glad we are learning to swim in a lessons fashion and not the toss into a pool and hope for the best fashion. I am also glad my dad is not apprised of this last method, as it might fit into his style of teaching. Maybe he does know. Maybe he suggested it to Mum.

‘No, darling. I don’t think so. No,’ she says.

Mum is the only person he obeys at all times, no problem, and that is the third thing I am glad about.

If I lose my grip up here without Jude, if I give in to the force of gravity, I will fall splat on to the stone terrace below, falling in a straight line, unless of course I am thrown off this line by a protruding branch on the way down. I doubt it. I think I will fall in a straight line which is the shortest distance between two points. If this happens, there will be a lot of crying plus a funeral and then maybe no one in the Weiss family will go to my dad’s country, the place where he has roots, because the Weiss family will be in shock and travel will not be that important any more.

I may skip dinner. I may just stay up here all night until someone finds me. I may have to scoot down and grab my chicken curry crisps from the bushes in case of starvation and climb back up again. Maybe Mum is saying, ‘No, I cannot go out to dinner without saying goodnight to Jem! No! Jem? Jemima? Je-MIII-ma!’

No answer.

Soon comes the search party and men in uniform spraying torchlight all over the back garden and dogs sniffing the air and pulling hard on the leashes so the men lean backwards as they walk, digging their heels into the dark ground, arms at full stretch. The dogs are hunting me, like I am an escaped prisoner of war and have nearly made it to Switzerland and when I am found, there will be bear hugs and everyone will stick by me, everyone will stick together, a little lost for words, thinking deeply, counting lucky stars, it’s been such a close shave.

I recall stitches under my chin, six of them, three years ago, and a car ride back from hospital and a big white bandage and everyone speaking soft when I got home and giving me careful looks, kind of shy. Harriet even did me some dance steps, a jig, a celebration, because my six stitches, I suppose, could so easily have been two hundred. Do you need anything? I’ll get it! Don’t move, stay right there, Jem. It was a close shave. It can happen so quickly. Sometimes people need reminding.

It’s really not much of a drop. I’d get a few scrapes, that’s all. Or I might mess it up and things will end in maiming and paralysis and being pushed around in a wheelchair whereby there goes my career in sports writing, a roving type of job, though not a girl job according to Jude, who may be wrong for once.

I think about supper and how if I am not there Harriet will be oppressed by broccoli because Lisa will try to make her eat the tops as well as the bottoms and Harriet will not know what to say. If I am there we can do a broccoli exchange, my bottoms for your tops. Without me, it’s a problem. Here’s another. A picture of Mum with a worried look – Where is Jem, where is Jem? – a picture that gives me a rushing pain in the chest. And one more problem. I have to pee.

Someone’s coming. It’s Jude.

‘When are you coming down?’ he says.

Whoa. I watched him all the way since hearing the back door slam, all the way along the path and he never once looked upwards. He just knows I’m here. He knows.

‘Why?’ I ask, sounding breezy.

‘Just wondering,’ he says, strolling to the edge of the terrace to gaze deep into the back garden, stuffing his hands in pockets. ‘Oh yeh. Forgot to say. Got something for you. Black Cat, two pieces, all yours.’

Black Cat gum is my favourite, liquorice-flavoured. It is very good gum. Jude probably stole it when Ben was paying for the crisps.

‘I might come down in a bit. Well, I was coming down anyway, actually.’

‘We need to sort our Action Man stuff,’ he says. ‘For the ship. I’ve already started.’

I climb down. I pick up a twig and swish it about and don’t look at him. I try to sound as bored as Jude. ‘I’m free now. I could help.’

‘OK, let’s go,’ he says and we head for the back door.

‘Jude, do you think I’m a lost cause? I might be a lost cause in everything, do you think so?’ I forget to sound bored. I sound lively.

‘Yeh … probably. Hey. You left your crisps in the bushes.’

‘Oh right, thanks,’ I say, dashing back for them. ‘Wait for me.’

Jude waits. ‘Don’t eat them before supper,’ he says.

OK, Jude.

Hope is not a problem for the starmen any more and pride is not a problem for them either. It is never a problem. They have no time for modesty, which is very time-consuming. Pride is definitely not a problem for many scientists and this is a help to them because there ought to be no distractions in this business of making discoveries which is a full-time job chiefly requiring hope and foresight, and it is why the men at NASA fell apart only very briefly when they discovered a flaw in the most perfect mirror in the world and were able so soon to turn calamity into triumph, instead of slamming the door on NASA and maybe wandering off into forests without shoes.

Edwin Hubble, champion boxer! war hero! publishes a paper with his colleague Milton Humason in 1929 on what he discovers to be an expanding Universe, based on thoughts to do with redshift and distance, and in it he is largely removing the vagueness in previous speculations made by Georges Lemaître two years earlier, but he never mentions Georges, not once, Georges who was an ordained priest before taking up astronomy, a pursuit interrupted by the Great War in which he won La Croix de Guerre avec palmes, a great distinction in my opinion, though he may well have preferred something else, a telescope in his name, a theory, rules and laws.

The recession velocity of a distant galaxy, its redshift, is directly proportional to its distance. Hubble’s Law. The number representing the rate at which the Universe is expanding = Hubble constant. There is Hubble time and a Hubble radius and a Hubble diagram and there is the HST, the Hubble Space Telescope.

Milton Humason went to summer camp near Mount Wilson in 1904 when he was fourteen years old and he fell in love with the mountain, quitting school shortly thereafter and taking on joe jobs when they were building the dome of the observatory at an altitude of 1,750 metres to house the Hooker telescope designed by George Ellery Hale. Milton begins as donkey driver, hauling equipment up the slopes and then he is janitor, then night assistant, until Harlow Shapley takes note of Milton’s great skills of observation and his ability to make photographic plates of faint astronomical objects, and offers him a post in 1920, putting him to work with Edwin Hubble.

Humason is shy about his lack of education but he is a great observer, one of the best ever, even Shapley says so, and Hubble certainly knows it, making him do a new kind of donkey work, Humason the one spending long dark nights in winter which are best for star watching, freezing in an observatory open to the sky and lit by a dim red bulb only, so as not to mar the photographic plates, and unheated because currents of convection can blur the field of vision. Because of the Earth’s rotation and the vagaries of the clockwork tracking system, Milton must never let go of the telescope if he wants to hold one same object in his sight across the sky, the telescope becoming an extension of him, in step with him, it is him.

There was quite a lot of fighting in the astronomy community of the 1920s, the heat of argument, say, tending to blur the field of vision. In science, these are called debates. Here are men arguing about the distance to the stars based on the observation of variable stars, measuring absolute magnitude and periods of luminosity, unsure whether the nebulae they see are part of the Milky Way or galaxies out on their own, confused by stellar outbursts of light and power they don’t yet know are supernovae, signifying the gravitational collapse of massive stars that can shine briefly, each one, as hot as a hundred billion suns. How can a star so bright be so far away? Or so close?

Wishful thinking can blur the field of vision.

When Milton Humason compares plates he has taken of the Andromeda Nebula, he finds minute specks of light in some plates and not in others, variable stars he believes, variable stars Shapley insists do not exist in the Andromeda and so when Milton brings him his finest photographic plate with the careful ink marks mapping what he has seen, specks of light he has been told are not there, Shapley takes the plate away and wipes it free with a white hanky produced from a pocket, making a little nothing out of something, setting his own limits on the possible, an example perhaps, of how pride is not a problem for him.

I don’t see it, it’s not there.

Saturday, and you watch the clock you have placed at the kitchen table. You are going to the cinema, you don’t want to be late, you are never late. You love the way time works, how one same stretch of time can take for ever to pass or else slip by in a reverie, you love this, it’s lovely. Your books are spread out. Homework. Everything is lined up neatly, the edges of books parallel to the rim of the table or at perfect angles to your right and left, leaving fine triangles of table in each corner. You appreciate geometry, straight lines, hospital corners, perfect folds in white linen, you learned this, you have a Brownie badge in bed-making. You are nearly a Girl Guide, the youngest ever. Most of all though, you appreciate words, you can travel with words as with music and the seasons. Change. You even love this word change, it’s a travelling word and travel is important.

The soldier marches around the kitchen, keeping busy, he doesn’t want you to know he is watching you, he can’t help it, he loves to look at you. Frances. He wants to say I won’t let you run late, let me do this thing, watch the clock for you, but he stays quiet, tamping the tobacco down in the pipe he will not smoke inside, no smoking indoors, it gives Emily a headache. My wife, my wife, my old pal. In bed now, always in bed, his fault. He tamps the tobacco down, a sound like ticking, sound of the clock you are watching, it’s nearly time. The soldier is on the move, fiddling with the stove, stealing glances, like he is more than your father. Soldier, labourer, husband, father. What else? Nothing. Sometimes it hurts to watch you, what does it mean, forget it. Keep moving.

At times like this, he has a sudden urge to travel, not anywhere special, just to ride a train. A friend tells him a person can ride for whole days across this country and see nothing but fields of snow or corn until coming upon sea again, but mountains first, mountains like the edge of the world to stop you falling straight off, or the wall of a trench perhaps, craggy with things, limbs sometimes, and over the wall, noise, a sea of it. Stop that. It would be a fine thing to ride a train for whole days across this country he was not born in, a place he can fit his old country into twelve times over at least, but he walks instead, he walks for hours, fast, because the outdoors is good for him, for his lungs and everything else that hurts him indoors, a pain that can pass as he strides the city, passing sharply, quickly, a view from a train window.

He doesn’t see it though, making that train journey, not as long as you are here. He made choices, he is husband and father and he will not leave. He is not sure how long you will stay, it can all happen so quickly, comings and goings, the sea maybe his enemy, and all the things you know, his enemy too, each badge on your arm one step farther away from him, there is hardly any more room on your arms to show all the things you know, that you have learned so quickly, so easily, and meanwhile he knows one thing only, no one goes hungry in his house. He is not sure if that is an achievement, no one says anything, my wife never says anything.

Watching her is different. How can she be right here and so far away? He misses her. She is right here and he misses her. Watching you is different, special and fearful at the same time, a church feeling, there is a word for this, why does there have to be a word for everything? The soldier taps his pipe out and plugs it again. A church word, Creation, Incarnation, what’s that word, damnation, ha! Damnation. Bless my soul! Damn and blast it. No swearing, Bert, she won’t have it. Don’t swear, Albert. Damnation, bloody hell, Salvation … Salvation Army. He chose you, he remembers it, marching in, eyes right, eyes left, not at ease but proud, erect, and halted by you because you looked at him, you really did. Yes, please. That one. Sign here.

You are already beyond him, too much for his arms, though he could carry you if necessary, he has carried men, for heaven’s sake, dead weight. He thinks he ought not touch you somehow, it’s a feeling, that’s all. Don’t touch. You sit close some days, you are teaching him to read and you are so beautiful, he could never have made you. Don’t touch. Awe. That’s the word! As long as you stay, he will try to learn but he knows he will not do as well with words as you hope and this kills him, the way the sight of you does sometimes. He remembers signing for you with an X, a leaning cross, and he worries it is not good enough, it might not count at all and someone will be coming to take you away. Coming soon. He knows also that in history, kings sign with a seal, he has no seal, and he knows that all kings are soldiers but not all soldiers are kings.

‘I’ll be outside,’ he says. ‘I’m just stepping out. I’ll be right on the balcony.’

He is cross today, have you done something wrong? Is it Mummy? It’s so dark in there, she can’t take the light, she is in bed, hospital corners. Bed-making. Daddy, I can do it for you, lots of things, stoke the stove. Fire-lighting. Nearly time. You have a new ribbon, red, rose red, and you can tie it in your own hair, cleat, half hitch, sheepshank, bow. Knot-tying. You love the cinema, especially right before the beginning when everything is black except for tiny specks of light, electric candles on the walls, faint like distant stars. You have been to a planetarium, twice! It made your heart race, your blood rush. There is so much to learn.

My brain can know one hundred trillion things.

Charlemagne, King of the Franks and the Lombards became emperor in the year 800 but he was a reluctant emperor. He drank little and studied a lot and was in awe of teachers, showering them with honours, learning Latin and Greek and mathematics and how to trace the course of the stars, though he came so late to learning, it grieved him, he will never catch up. He kept writing tablets under his pillow for practice in times of insomnia, because this is the skill he prized most, the writing skill. He was a light sleeper and had high hopes of acquiring calligraphy but he did not get very far, nowhere near as far as hopes.

Charlemagne was a king and a soldier, a man with a particular devotion to St Peter and Peter, he learned, is not a name at all but a Greek translation of an Aramaic word meaning rock. There is so much to learn.

I read that our Galaxy is not the Universe itself, it is an island of stars amongst maybe fifty billion islands of stars and this news has no bearing on me, no withering effect, as much to me as ink marks I can swipe away with one flick of a hanky, hey presto, my universe still the Universe, a place I wander with a slight swagger, a cowboy entering a saloon and heading for the bar in a straight line which is the shortest distance between two points, and drinking his drink, intent on a world all his own, one with no trespassers and no change, and nothing to prevail against it, a place he knows, and upon this rock, he builds it. Everything.

Noli mi tangere.

What cannot be touched can never be taken away.