Emma Richler - Feed My Dear Dogs

‘Fuck-hell,’ he says in a whispery voice.

‘Bloody,’ I say, to show support, though it hurts to speak.

Jude kneels in front of me and unlaces my gloves, gentle but serious, very determined, like he has a lot to do now and not much time and he doesn’t want to forget anything, he aims to get things right.

Jude smells different from Harriet and I know Harriet’s smell very well, we have a lot of close-up encounters. First off, she has this habit of dancing towards me and around me and then she has that other fancy for flying out from hiding spots behind a door or under a bed and then draping herself over me in triumph like a sporting star at the end of a race in which he has come tops. Also, she will come up behind me when I am reading and rest her chin on my shoulder and read as I read, going in for a lot of little reactions such as surprise and horror and amusement, etc., and I have to try very hard not to get annoyed, bearing in mind the time I shrugged her off and she bit her lip and it was pretty tragic. Even if I am merely a bit haughty she gets offended, limping around the place for ages like some doomed person. I know her smell. Harriet smells like autumn grass and baby powder, she smells breezy. If a person can smell like windy days, that’s how she smells, and Jude’s smell is warmer, like rocks with moss on them, like earth, sometimes like butter and often like bonfires or smoky bacon crisps perhaps. I don’t know how I smell. I’d like to smell like a binocular, especially when it is in the basket at Zetland’s and I can make it out straight away in all the other scents there, just like I could find Jude in a whole crowd of boys, I could find him eyes closed the way Black Bob finds the Mountie in a snowstorm when everyone is stumbling around like mummies, arms outstretched, and snow-blind.

‘Can you lift your arms?’ asks Jude. ‘Are you cold?’

‘Kind of. Yeh.’ I sound a bit pathetic. This is permitted. I am a patient.

I lift my arms as Jude grapples with my sweater, forgetting about the vest I had on underneath before we became boxers and took our tops off. He struggles with the sleeves and I struggle with getting smothered, my head stuck in the chest part with only a bit of it poking through the collar where I can feel a welcome breeze, a little promise of open spaces. I try to be patient while Jude fights with sleeves and I contemplate death by smothering. I feel like crying again but it’s not because of smothering, it’s because of Jude working so hard to fix me and me wanting to help him and knowing not to, and because of this sudden surprise knowledge I have that he is spooked worse than I am about my terrible injury, about slamming his fist into my bare stomach by mistake, and there’s a word for this, that long word again, the old painting word I can’t think of, for arms raised aloft and fingers spread wide and large eyes, and an open mouth for sound to issue from, a strange sound of crying and laughing and no words.

Jude tugs off my shorts, I mean his shorts, and holds out my jeans for me to push my feet into and then I lie back on the bed, the big stick pain not so bad now, only a tired sensation in the stomach region. I lie back so I can lift my bum in the air and pull my jeans up the rest of the way, and snap the waist snap and do the zip, whereupon I sit back upright and stare at Jude, awaiting my next instruction. I feel like a lamb in a field, but never mind.

‘Are you hungry?’ asks Jude. ‘I’ll do fold-overs. And Ribena-milk. Yes?’

‘OK,’ I say, rising. ‘It hurts, standing up.’

‘Better soon. Better to move around. Come on, we’ll go slow.’

‘OK,’ I say, thinking about war heroes with shrapnel wounds in their legs and arms, and gashes in the head from bullets that missed the brain by a hair’s breadth. I think about an officer wiping the blood and gore away with an impatient swish of one hand so he can see clear to lead his men, showing the way with a wave of his pistol overhead, a man falling apart only when the job is done, and then calling out names of men he recommends for decoration, Victoria Cross, George Cross, Distinguished Service Order, calling them out as he is hauled off by stretcher to have a limb amputated and his dangling eye put out. I think about this all the way to the kitchen with Jude glancing at me like I am ready to collapse in a fainting heap right there on the stairs. I name you, Jude, for the VC, DSO. I name you for everything.

The kitchen has been hit. Big Bertha, Slim Emma. It is Lisa’s day off and I picture her struggling over the football pools without me, placing her life savings on the wrong horse because of love and sex, while my dad passes through our kitchen for a tomato sandwich and causes destruction of epic proportions. Jude told me once that there was no field radio in the trenches and observation could be pretty dodgy in winter and messages about enemy placement faulty sometimes, or out of date, and so shells fell too short, gunners bombarding their own side. My dad has bombarded his own side.

The cutlery drawer is open. He has used three knives, one small one for spreading mayonnaise and two huge ones, one for bread cutting and one for tomato cutting. He needs different implements for different ingredients, I’m not sure why, but he has a particular craze for separate implements and it is a good thing we have a lot of implements in this abode. His two big knives are lying akimbo on the chopping board and the bitty knife is in the sink, signifying his contribution to clean-up operations. Why, thanks, Dad. There are crumbs and mayonnaise and tomato juice and seeds just about everywhere, on the counter, on the floor, on the seat of his chair, in a great field around his place at the table, in a neat path between there and the fridge, and on the handles of all the drawers and cupboards he opened for plates and tools. It’s a battlefield.

Jude skids quite some distance in tomato fallout, slamming to a halt at the sink.

‘Whoosh!’ I say.

‘Fuck-hell,’ goes Jude.

‘Yeh,’ I say. ‘Fuck-hell.’

‘You sit, I’ll clean up and do the fold-overs.’

I slide up on to a chair at the white oak table, seating myself like I am about four years old instead of ten, remembering how it was when the seat of a chair is a lot higher than your own waist and merely sitting down is an activity requiring some thought and strategic planning, not too bad a situation in your own home amongst friends and allies, but worrying in my first year out in the world, at the convent or the shops, say, where people might look at me strangely as I fight with a door that opens outwards, not inwards and is also on a spring and is going to slap me straight in the back causing me to fly into a room I mean to enter at a seemly stroll. This is why there are no grave decisions to make at the age of four. A kid needs time to learn about doors and furniture, the height and weight of things.

Jude swabs the decks in the kitchen and then he makes peanut butter fold-overs. I can see he is having trouble with the rye bread which has a tendency to snap, not fold.

‘Jude?’ I say, spotting a magazine Dad left on the table, smeared red.

‘Yup.’

‘Good thing Dad is not a criminal-on-the-run.’

‘Why’s that?’

‘He leaves SO MANY CLUES. They’d track him in no time.’ ‘Ha ha ha,’ goes my brother, chuckling softly. ‘Now. Shall we go outside with these? Or do you want to stay in?’

‘Can we have Ribena-milk inside and fold-overs outside?’

‘Not a problem,’ says Jude.

I wonder if he aims to feed me. Like one of Mum’s wounded birds who have flown into windows and fallen splat on the terrace in a daze, or simply walked off the edge of a nest in an absent-minded manner before being awarded their pilot’s wings. They are not yet distinguished in flying. Mum gathers the small bird and we settle it in a shoebox filled with hay, speaking very softly as she feeds it very very patiently by way of an eye-dropper. Once, there was a bird hurt beyond rescue and we had to go in for burial services but the worst thing about it was watching the bird ruffle up its feathers and stop resembling a bird at all, just disappearing into a ball with its tiny legs poking out, and so quickly, without suitable warnings such as peeps for help or agitation of wings or any such things. Harriet was speechless with grief and horror.