Emma Richler - Feed My Dear Dogs

Now we join hands and face front and swing our arms to and fro in an embarrassing fashion while singing that endless song, wishing everyone a merry Christmas and ha-ppy New Year, etc., a song to which I am to move my lips ONLY on orders from Music Nun, orders I do not require, seeing as she has put me off singing outside my own household for all my days, and I worry now about my shoebag, and where I left it, and will it get mucky, and is Jude out there with Mum and Dad, gazing at me up here in a silly old dressing gown and a dishcloth on my head tied up with elastic, elastic that was not even invented in Bible times, and I decide I am ready to turn my back on Nativity. I am ready, Ben. Next year, I will ask for a note.

Kindly excuse my daughter Jemima from Nativity. She has just about had it with Nativity. Thank you. Sincerely, Mrs Yaakov Weiss.

‘Don’t say manger or the Little Lord thing,’ whispers Harriet as I take her place in the queue for Gus, rolling my eyes at her before composing myself, trying not to think about embryos and how early embryo fish, early chicken, early pig and early person are no great shakes to look at and resemble each other much too closely to boot, seahorses, fish-hooks. I also try to forget about that picture of the human embryo a Few Weeks Before Birth, all tucked up and upside down and feeding off the mother by way of a cord, quite like those nice bendy straws Mum buys, straws with little curlicues at the top end for bending purposes, so you can drink and read at the same time, no little adjustments necessary, no interruptions, and that is exactly what I am trying not to think about, this nonstop feeding business, this emptying of Mum.

Mum looks fine, though, not worn out or empty at all, and Gus is lovely, more like a baby in a painting than a regular baby and regular babies, in my opinion, are often a bit dodgy in close-up, squirmy and cross with squeezed shut eyes and clenched fists, gearing up every few minutes for great displays of the singlemost skill babies are born with, the howling and screaming skill, a sound that fills me with doom and panic, though I note that grown-ups largely find it amusing and delightful, which goes to show there are different rules for babies regarding howling and screaming and other matters. The howling and screaming skill is not generally encouraged in a kid, and in a grown-up, unless they are in horror films, it is definitely not recommended and also quite rare. I look around at school, in shops, in parks and museums and I just never see it, grown-ups howling and screaming. I am on the lookout always. The fact is, once a person can speak in full sentences and listen to reason, he is not supposed to rely on howling and screaming for communication purposes except on special occasions like blood situations, world war or physical calamity in the dwelling place, i.e. damage by collapse, fire, flood or air raid, etc. That is to say, screaming and howling over the age of four or so is not delightful and amusing, it is a call-out for emergency services.

‘He can’t see you. Not yet,’ Mum says.

That’s another thing. A baby is born more or less blind but this is not a case for panic and blind person accoutrements, such as white sticks, golden retriever dogs, dark glasses and books with bumpy writing. Braille. No. Everything is OK, and it seems to me a wise plan for a baby to be born blind when every single thing in his field of vision is a new thing to him and too much surprise might tip him over the edge into howling and screaming. Furthermore, a person needs sight for self-defence. He needs to see the enemy approaching. What use is that to Gus when he cannot put up a fight yet, or run away, even? He might as well not see the enemy. It will only be depressing. And a person needs sight for navigation, so as not to bump into things or have crash landings. Gus is not going anywhere at the moment, not solo anyway. We are right here. There are six pairs of eyes looking out for Gustavus until he is ready for sightseeing and ruffling up newspapers and wandering about the Earth.

Gus is very pretty and he is also quite bald with fine blond hairs on his crown like the little feathers on a bird breast. I want to touch him there but I remember Ben telling me how the skull is not fully formed in a baby, having a hole on the top or something, reminding me of Harriet’s broken eggs, and I don’t like it. Maybe Gus should wear a hat for a while, I don’t know.

He makes barely any noise, definitely no howling, just a soft blowy sound like someone riding a bike and getting out of breath, and this is probably due to lung size in Gus and how a tiny scoop of breath for him is same as a deep breath. One puff and that’s it. Empty. Start again. It’s hard work, I can see that. I can hear it. Every breath for Gus is a deep breath. No. There is no deep for Gus. When you have been alive only a day or so, there is no such thing as deep or far, what with his beginning so close to his end and no spare room for anything but the important parts, his organs and little bones all wrapped up in a fine covering of pale skin with the blue veins showing through, like the first spray of snow in winter, how it makes you see the ground in a whole new way, frozen blades of grass and stones and earth sparkling for my special attention, showing up cold and clear and kind of marvellous and delicate, stopping me still because I don’t know where to go any more, I might break something. I don’t touch.

‘You can come closer.’

Mum hikes Gus up a bit for my viewing pleasure and the pink blanket slides down so I can see his heart bleating right there in his chest in a map of blue and white, and I want to touch it but I don’t want to hurt him, worried my light touch in the heart region would feel to him next stop to reaching inside and holding his heart in my very hand. I don’t touch. Maybe tomorrow, maybe later.

‘Hey, Gus,’ I say, real shy, stuffing my hands in my pockets. ‘Hey there.’

I glance up at Mum and my dad and I want to say, Well done, Mum! Good work, Dad! and, That’s enough knights! Now we are seven, our number is up, I know it, this is the real start of everything, like we are born on this day Gus came home for the first time. I am born, that’s how I feel, and I want to make an announcement or hand out nice certificates, something formal in joined-up writing with a red seal at the bottom and maybe a little red ribbon hanging out. Now these are the names, it will say, of the children of Frances and Yaakov: Ben, Jude, Jem, Harriet and Gus.

These are the names.

What country, friend, is this?

The Science of Deduction and Analysis.

Because the speed of light is finite, we can only see as far as the age of our Universe. The earliest light has simply not had time to reach us and when astronomers look at distant galaxies through an instrument such as the Hubble Space Telescope, launched in 1990 beyond the obscuring veil of the Earth’s atmosphere, what they are seeing is light as it was when it left that distant galaxy and not as it is today. They call it look-back time, the telescope a kind of time machine, and the astronomer, a sorcerer perhaps, gazing into the past with his tube of long-seeing and his particular passion for gathering light, looking farther and farther into space and into clouds that are the birthplace of stars, a place in the forever then, never now. Now is not visible, only imaginable, deducible, so what, the earliest light is so startling, it is so bright it obscures. It depends how you look at it.

I remember everything.

My mother groand! My father wept .

Into the dangerous world I leapt .

Before the Hubble, came the Hooker with its 100-inch mirror, the most powerful ground-based telescope in the world, set up in 1918 at the Mount Wilson Observatory in California and built by George Ellery Hale, an astronomer prone to nervous breaks, to howling and screaming maybe, and to headaches and visions and a strange ringing in his ears. The Hooker is the telescope through which Edwin Hubble stared at clouds of light, realising they were galaxies beyond ours, the Universe is expanding, there was a beginning. There he sat night after night in his plus fours and high leather boots and tweedy jacket nipped in at the waist, a pipe in his pocket, giving himself over to the science of deduction and analysis, a realm demanding such rigours of perception and truthfulness he shrouds the rest of life in fantasy and bold elaboration. Hubble writes a law measuring velocity and distance, stating that the farther away a galaxy is, the faster it flies. Speed increases with distance. He looks back on his past flirtations with amateur boxing and professional soldiery and sees what no one else ever saw. Fantasy increases with distance. He was so fine a boxer, he lies, he is urged to take on the world heavyweight champion Jack Johnson. In the war to end all wars, he is wounded in the right arm by flying shrapnel, despite arriving in France too late for hostilities, the war is over. Edwin, you might say, is an unknown soldier.