Feed My Dear Dogs. Emma Richler

with a cross and confused expression on her face, like she is not quite sure what the bloody-bloody I am doing on her stage, or why I am causing such a terrible disturbance in the sound department. The waves. She is also confused due to my Jewish side. Not all nuns are the same, not all of them have this problem, and I can easily tell the ones who do, catching them looking at me with a cross face and confusion in their eyes, as they try to fathom it, and simply cannot, how I am alive and not Catholic, and nevertheless quite hearty, by which I mean not downtrodden or obviously impaired in any way. Mean Nun has a very bad case of confusion and she will watch me until she comes up with a crime of some sort and then she makes straight for me.

      The day Susannah Bonnington found a maggot in her banger, I was right there and saw it poking its little head up like a periscope in a U-boat, weaving left and right, checking out the scene aloft, and I must say, I never want to see a thing like that again, not ever.

      ‘Sister!’ says Susannah, keeping pretty cool in the circumstances. ‘There’s a maggot in my banger!’

      ‘So there is, my child,’ replies Dining-Room Nun who is definitely crazy, ‘so there is.’

      Sister Catherine is Dining-Room Nun and Babies Nun. Sister Catherine escorts those first year kids all over the joint like she is a bodyguard, and when they are dining, she is happy, as she can do her two jobs at the same time in one same place and she is free to carry on her favourite activity of strolling up and down the alley between dining tables, muttering to herself and twiddling her thumbs in a demented manner, hands clasped before her in woolly gloves she wears in all weathers, woolly gloves with the fingers cut off.

      In my opinion, some of her behaviour is open to question. For instance, babies need their own little chairs for dining, due to their small size, and they have to transport the chairs from their classroom to the dining room under the eyes of Sister Catherine, passing by her like a row of ants struggling with crumbs nearly twice their body weight and it is painful to see the little kids stumbling along, crashing the chairs against their little legs and generally making a mess of things, looking sad and worn out but resigned to fate, reminding me of the galley slaves in Ben-Hur, men chained together and marching in the hot sun on the way to the Roman galley ship in which they will be chained to oars and fated to row at varying speeds unto the end of days. Babies enter the dining room first and bigger kids queue up with plates after the babies have settled in and been served. They get served because they are deemed too young and wobbly to carry plates of food without tipping everything on to the decks. It seems to me carrying a plate is not such a hard task, but grappling with a chair round about two-thirds your size is definitely a hard task. Possibly, for Dining-Room Nun, an avalanche of spam and peas and gravy on the nice convent floor is more of a problem than bruisy shins and outright exhaustion in a four-year-old, and this is one instance of behaviour in Sister Catherine which is open to question, and another is when she said, So there is, my child to Susannah Bonnington, bashing off straight away to do some more strolling and muttering, and leaving Susannah and me in the lurch, stark-eyed as in a horror scene from a horror film featuring graveyards and screaming.

      A few words on horror. So far, I have seen the beginnings of three horror films only, as I am always sent to bed before things get too grim. Here are reasons why. I am too young for horror films and will have bad dreams and get hysterical. Horror films are not much good or educational, and so there are no loopholes regarding bedtime the way there are with good films and/or documentaries. Fine with me. Horror films are frustrating and give me a headache, due to the endless screaming and the lack of daylight, requiring a lot of squinting to make out what the bejesus is going on, usually just endless screaming and silly things such as people going walkabout in graveyards way past their bedtime when everyone knows there are killers and/or wild beasts on the rampage. Why? Why not stay home until it blows over, or go for a saunter in a more populous area where there are bobbies and lamplight and means of transport for hire in case of emergency? Because it is a horror film, that’s why. So there is screaming in the dark when characters are getting murdered, screaming in the dark when characters are stumbling across maggoty murder victims in graveyards, and in two out of the three films I have seen the beginnings of so far, there is screaming in the dark from raving maniacs in loony bins and it is no wonder so many people are losing their marbles, what with the high rate of murder and all that strolling about in graveyards, etc.

      I would quite like to go in for some screaming in plain daylight right this minute because of the maggot before me, but I do not. I am not a baby. I am seven going on eight and have a fair grasp of language, and decent manners, and screaming and howling is not fashionable behaviour in a person my age who is not in a horror film. I do feel sick though, and ask to be excused. I step out into the courtyard for a deep breath or two, a remedy of Mum’s, and extremely useful, according to her, in all walks of life and eventualities of a trying nature. It is something I recommend for characters in horror films.

      Oh no. Here comes Mean Nun, flapping my way.

      ‘Weiss!’

      Mean Nun has a big thing for calling my name out, ever since I corrected her pronunciation one time, informing her as gently as possible about the V sound in the W, so that now she hits the V sound real hard and lingers over the double SS at the end. It’s annoying and it is her revenge on me for correcting her for the second time in my life. What is the problem here? Some grownups correct kids about every little thing, blaring hasty hints and instructions before you touch anything or go anywhere, so sure you are going to slip up or do some destruction, and that your mind is merely an empty place with breezes blowing through it, but the moment you correct a grown-up of that type, it’s a criminal act, worse than sticking your tongue out and swearing which can usually be chalked up to insanity, whereas correcting is close to a capital offence, i.e. deserving of death. Jude says capital comes from the Latin word for head, and denotes beheading by axe, sword or guillotine and even though there are many kinds of capital punishment that do not involve having your head chopped off necessarily, the word capital still applies for all methods, and I can see why. Let’s face it, when a person is killed, his head is no good to him, attached or not attached, but this has me thinking again about graveyards and screaming, so I try to concentrate instead on deep breaths and recovery from the sight of that maggot poking its white head out of Susannah’s banger.

      ‘Weiss! Where are we?’ demands Mean Nun.

      This is a trap. What does she want? The month, the country? Is it a nun-type question, a matter of catechism? Right near me in the courtyard is a statue of the Virgin Mary, Mother of God with the Baby Jesus in her arms. Mary has a dreamy limp look, like Jesus is just a bunch of flowers or something. Maybe Mean Nun does not like me standing so close to the statue, due to my Jewish side. Is that it?

      ‘Well, child? Are we indoors or outdoors?’

      ‘Sort of half-half,’ I say, wondering about covered courtyards and what category they are in. I don’t want to make a mistake.

      ‘Sister!’

      ‘Sister! Sorry.’

      ‘We are outdoors. What shoes are you wearing?’

      Oh. It’s a shoe crime. Bloody. ‘Indoor shoes, Sister. Thing is, I feel sick and I need deep breaths, I had to rush out here!’

      ‘Outside, we wear outdoor shoes. Inside, indoor shoes. Plimsolls for PE. If you are poorly, see Sister Martha. You are a very rude girl, Weiss.’

      I want to tell her that she wears the same type shoes all over the shop, indoors, outdoors, the same hard noisy black nun shoes, and that I am not rude, my mother knows I am not rude, and then I think about something Jude told me, because of my new big thing for knights and chivalry, he said not all knights are good, and Crusader knights were downright dodgy, going in for massacres of Jews, or else selling them into slavery and this is very depressing news for me, how being a knight is not necessarily good, and wearing a big red cross on your knightly tunic, like on an ambulance, is not always a sign of hope and rescue, and therefore, perhaps, seeing a lady flapping your way dressed in nun clothes and wearing a cross around her neck does not always mean you are safe. It’s confusing and I want to see Sister Martha now, but I need to do some crying first. Not in front of Mean Nun. Go away, Mean Nun.

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