Emma Richler - Feed My Dear Dogs

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.

I am on a mission.

I am going to the convent today and it is not a school day and this is down to a decision I made, though all the thinking on this matter was done by Mum. She has this way of throwing out an idea in a breezy manner which is really a solution to all your deep troubles, and you do not even realise it at the time. I am sitting at the kitchen table with a glum expression clutching a Tintin book it is impossible to concentrate on even though it is The Castafiore Emerald , a favourite.

‘Maybe you should go to school today and say goodbye to Sister Martha,’ Mum says, pausing in her activities to gaze out the big kitchen window, like she is talking to herself and not to me at all.

I didn’t know a kid could do such a thing, go to school on a not-school day, and the goodbye business definitely did not occur to me. Whoa. I sit up straight, same as when Ben showed me the other day how to unhook the straps on my satchel and carry it around by the handle in a grown-up fashion. I spent a whole four years of my life wondering why the satchel men sewed a handle smack in the middle of my satchel flap, feeling pretty sure they made a mistake due to sitting up too late sewing satchels. I check out everyone else’s satchel to see if theirs have a handle plus straps. Mostly they have a handle OR straps, meaning I have a downright strange satchel, a thought I had until recently, when Ben showed me how mine is a two-way satchel: an on the back kind which is fine when you are an Antarctic explorer or Coldstream Guard but a bit babyish when you are a mere person, and a carrying around by one hand kind, the man in a suit with urgent plans kind. Grown-up.

‘Now? Today? Shall I go now? I’m going to get my jacket!’ I tell Mum, jumping up from the table while she rings Sister Martha to warn her, I guess, that I am on my way, and that is another thing I never knew, that nuns can speak on the telephone just like non-nuns though it must be a bit hard for them with only a little part of the ear poking free of the headdress. Not headdress, Jem. There’s a proper word for it. What is the name of the nun hat? What is the name for the sit-up-straight whoa! feeling? Word questions go in the Words section. Write it down later. My Daniel Mendoza book is filling up fast.

Whoa. Sit up straight. Not Awe … a longer word. It’s the word for when the shepherds have recovered from shock and are listening carefully to Gabriel who has just introduced himself very politely the same way he does with Mary. Fear not! he says, etc. This is so they know he is on the same side as them, and not an enemy and now he can get on with Annunciations. Whereupon they all have a feeling denoted by a long word starting with a capital letter, as are most big feelings and situations in the Bible, written at a time people were not so used to words as nowadays, and might not know what’s important without capitals to make the words stand out.

Not Awe. Something else. Awe is the Adoration thing, different, what you have to act when you look at the baby, a feeling I will never get right because all I see in the word Awe is a plastic doll in swaddling with flippy horror-film eyelids, a doll held in the arms of a friend who is not a mother and has only been on this earth eight or so years herself, and then I see my sister in a sparkly halo and wings, dancing around with too much enthusiasm. Awe is all mixed up for me now. But what is that long word? Never mind. Anyway, I am not sure it is OK to take words out of religion straight into life in a non-religion situation, so I might as well forget about it. Maybe if you take out the capital letter it is OK, I don’t know.

‘I’ll get Harriet,’ I tell Mum. ‘She is a close friend of Sister Martha’s. Harriet and me could go together, Mum.’

‘Harriet and I,’ she says gently.

‘You’ll come too? Great!’

‘No, Jem. Harriet and I – not Harriet and me, remember?’

‘Oh, right,’ I say. I always get this wrong. There is so much to learn, bloody.

Going to the convent on a Saturday morning and wearing Saturday clothes instead of a uniform is a bit weird. I wonder if I will run into Mean Nun who will freak out even though she is not in charge of me on Saturdays, unless, of course, there are special rules about convent grounds and trespassing upon them in civvies. Maybe she is in charge at all times if I am on convent grounds. Oh well. I am not changing my shoes when I get there and she will just have to face the facts. It is the end of term and I am going on a ship, goodbye.