Emma Richler - Feed My Dear Dogs

‘Here,’ says Jude. ‘Wear these.’

Jude passes me a pair of shorts from his drawer. They are navy-blue baggy sports shorts for playing rugby in. I feel special but I act normal, like I wear his clothes all the time. Well, sometimes I do, but only when he has grown too big for a thing and then it’s not really his any more. This is different. He still wears these shorts. We change right in his room and take our tops off and then we gaze at our feet. We must have footwear. We are stuck. What we need are nice boxer boots, high boots with laces resembling the ones Victorian ladies stroll around in except without heels.

‘What do we do now?’ I ask.

‘Football boots. Take the studs out.’ Jude goes over to the cupboard for his boots and picks off clumps of mud, frowning. ‘Studs don’t come out of these. Forgot. Hmm.’

‘We should clean that up, the mud. But, Jude? There’s only one pair – so even if they did come out, what about me?’

‘We’ll have to pretend,’ he says, real decisive, gathering up the clumps of earth and swishing the dirt into a little pile and staring at it. ‘I’ll fix that later,’ he says.

‘Are we bare feet, then?’

‘Yeh,’ says Jude. ‘Bare.’

We sit on Jude’s bunk and I watch him, do what he’s doing. I pull on my gloves and we both have the same problem, gloves on and dangly laces with no fingers free for tying purposes. Jude hauls his gloves off by gripping them between his knees and does up my gloves and slips his back on.

‘Hmm,’ he says again. ‘I’ll ask Mum. Back in a minute.’

This dressing-up business is definitely taking a while and I’m kind of not in the mood any more and Jude looks all serious and spooky, like he’s doing some hard labour or whatever, homework, gardening.

‘Jude, let’s not,’ I say as he is leaving the room. ‘Let’s play something else.’

‘We have to try,’ he tells me, wandering off to get his gloves tied. When he comes back he has two rolled-up towels over his arm and he hangs one around my neck and the other around his. ‘They always have that,’ he says. ‘Towels. Oh wait. We need dressing gowns. I can wear Ben’s.’

We stop and look at our hands.

‘We’ll never fit through the sleeves now, Jude! And I’m not taking these off again.’ My brother is cross, I am really letting him down.

‘You wear it on the shoulders. No sleeves.’

‘Jude, my hands are like a mummy’s. I can’t grip a thing, do we have to? Can we skip the gowns? Please.’

‘Yeh, well, next time we do dressing gowns. It’s realistic’

‘OK then. Do we fight now?

‘Yuh.’

‘Where, here?’

‘In the hall,’ says Jude.

Jude starts jumping around on his toes and punching the air and breathing out in sharp puffs like a horse in a field, jumping all around his corner of the upstairs hall, doing the rope-a-dope I think, and I copy him, hopping up and down and jabbing my fists at nothing and when Jude flicks his towel away by jerking his shoulders quite sharply, I do the same. Now we are ready.

‘Ding-ding!’ I say, as I have heard on TV.

‘Wait!’ snaps Jude.

‘What? That’s what happens. Ding-ding.’

Jude stops dancing. ‘You say our names first. In this corner – in that corner, you know. Then, let the fight begin, then ding-ding.’

‘Oh. Isn’t that just for wrestling? In this corner, in that corner?’

‘Wrestling is fake.’

‘I know.’ Bloody. Everyone knows that. ‘So what are we called then? What names?’ I feel grumpy and I have a lump in my throat, I’m always getting things wrong, and this game is silly, it’s not our usual game, I don’t like it.

‘I don’t know, forget about the names this time, ding-ding!’ Jude says, dancing towards me.

‘Hey! I wasn’t ready!’

‘Come on!’

Jude cuffs me in the shoulder and I stumble slightly, my upper arm aching right away and pins and needles coming in a rush so for a moment I cannot wiggle my fingers or anything. This is realistic, he hurt me, I don’t like it. Then suddenly I start to pull myself together and concentrate hard, running through all the instructions for boxing step by step, making a picture in my head and hearing my dad’s voice in there.

Take a stance! I do it.

Be a moving target, not an easy one! Right.

Do the rope-a-dope! What is that, Dad?

Protect your face! Oh yeh.

I take it step by step but I am somewhere else already, I don’t know where. I am not here, I go missing. I step outside. Back in a minute. And who is that? Like Jude, not Jude, some stranger. I dance, I do the rope-a-dope, my punches will hit hard, right on target, I’m ready. She’s ready.

‘What are you doing?’ he shouts. ‘Get close, you’re out of the ring!’

I notice Jude’s eyes, how they are not grey-blue like mine and Harriet’s and Gus’s, and bright in a different way from the blue in Ben and Mum, Jude’s are a special blue, aquamarine, that’s the word, I’ve seen it on the box of pastel chalks at school, the chalks you only get to use if you are good at Art, otherwise you can only look, don’t touch. It is a beautiful box, flat and long with two rows of pastels in sets of colour, all the shades of one colour fading until the next colour begins fierce and dark until five or six chalks later, it is like a ghost of the first shade. I am allowed to use the chalks and I am miffed if I open the box and someone has messed with the order of things. I fix the order of things and then I draw and whatever colour I reach for is there in the right order of shade, dark to light, good. The box is wooden, it is oblong. A square has four equal sides. In an oblong the opposite sides are equal, and so a square = an oblong but an oblong ≠ always a square, that’s the rule.

Jude is on the opposite side. Jude = my brother but my brother ≠ always Jude. Ha!

I am losing concentration. I feel silly in my shorts and naked body, suddenly unseemly, and I stop boxing to push some hair out of my eyes, my eyes that are greyer than Jude’s, not aquamarine. I say his name real quiet. Jude? But he has not stopped, he is like a toy machine, a wind-up boxing man who has simply not finished fighting and so one red fist slams into my stomach because I have become an easy target, I’ve forgotten everything, all the rules for boxing. I crumple to the floor, feeling like I’ve swallowed a big stick, and I can’t think a single thought and I can’t speak.

‘YOU STOPPED! JEM, YOU STOPPED!’ Jude is angry, he is standing before me, stiff as a tree, yelling.

‘I –’ My breath floods back and I start crying and suddenly Jude is Jude again. He yanks his gloves off by pulling on the laces with his teeth and squeezing his fists between the knees and he flings the gloves so they fly through the air and slam against the bookcases in the hall as he falls to his knees.

‘Jem? Where does it hurt, are you OK, you stopped, sorry, sorry, come in my room, come on, it’s OK, you’re OK, come on.’ Jude puts his arm around me and walks me over to his bunk, pushing me down, pressing lightly on my shoulders. ‘Now lie down, Jem,’ he says.

‘I can’t. It hurts.’ I try to stop crying, but the tears just fall, I can’t help it.

‘Back in a sec!’ Jude says, scooting into the hall to gather up all our stuff, the towels and his gloves and the glasses of water and bath sponges we placed there for reality, for the splash a boxer needs between rounds. He scoops it all up like it is evidence of a crime or something, like mud stains, or sweet wrappers before dinner, broken pieces of crockery, dropped gloves, whatever’s left when you’ve done a thing you wish you hadn’t, when you stopped being careful, you stopped thinking.

Jude stashes our gear at the foot of the cupboard he shares with Ben and I watch him the whole time like he has answers for everything. I have given up for the day, and I am going to need instructions for all events until bedtime because a terrible injury has happened to me. Jude steps in the pile of mud and dirt he left for clearing up later, he’ll fix it later, and he wipes his feet on his shins and slaps the dirt off his legs.