Feed My Dear Dogs. Emma Richler

tell, as if Mum were not in the meeting at all, here and not here, and I got a racy scared feeling for a second, like when bike riding and my feet come off the pedals and the pedals spin wild so all I can do is steer away from large impediments such as trees and lamp-posts and other people and hope for the best.

      One of the messed-up things around here at the moment is too much milk delivered by the milkman. Maybe he got it wrong or maybe Mum was too busy to put a note out saying how much milk, etc., I don’t know, but Jude decided we should have a milk race so as not to waste the milk and that is why we are lying around on bunk beds like sea lions at the zoo on a hot day, not budging much, even when zoo men are pitching slimy fish snacks at them. We lie on our backs like sea lions and keep our arms to the side because any pressure on our stomachs leads to a throw-uppy feeling. We stare at the ceiling and try to forget about milk, which is not easy.

      ‘I wish we could take the bunk beds, do you think they have bunk beds over there, Jude?’ No answer. ‘Jude? I was talking to Sister Martha – I told you about her – and I must have said something about you, some football thing, and she went, Jude. Patron saint of lost causes! and kind of laughed. In a nice way, not a bad way. But still, what does it mean, how does that work, patron saint, is it the top saint, and what is that, lost causes? And are you named after him? I wish she hadn’t said that, it’s weird.’

      ‘We’re Jewish, we don’t have saints.’

      ‘What do we have then?’

      ‘I don’t know. Rabbis. No saints. Anyway, I’m named for a book,’ says Jude, and I can feel the bunks sway, meaning Jude is rolling over. Meaning Jude is getting better and can take the pressure. Possibly my time for feeling better is coming up too. Coming soon. I hope so.

      ‘What book?’

      ‘You don’t know it.’

      ‘I might. I might know it, tell me,’ I say, a bit hurt he maybe thinks I am a dummy due to getting less homework than he does and being at a school with lots of nuns and girls where the books are thinner and have a lot more pictures inside them. Illustrations. Sometimes Jude comes right up to my homework stuff splayed out on the oak table or outdoors on the white wrought-iron table near all those statues Mum has of Italian people with not a lot of clothes on and one hip poking out to the side in a relaxed manner, Italian people carrying maybe a flower or a bunch of wheat or some fish or something weird. Where are they going? If I had a fish to haul someplace, I’d do it quick sticks and not in a relaxed manner with hips swaying side to side, or I’d make Jude do it like when we collect them from Jarvis for Mum, when I refuse to carry the bag even. A fish never looks properly dead to me. It’s a problem. Jude comes right up to my work and fingers the books, flipping pages and going mmmm and waltzing off with this private decision he has just made about my homework and my mental capacities and how I might be losing my mind because of nuns. He thinks my books are a bit sissy, I can tell. I feel bad when he does that and I would like to go to Jude and Ben’s school and peruse heavy tomes with small diagrams in black and white, and wear a blue cap like a cricket cap the way they do, and grey shorts down to the knees and so on, but I cannot because I am a girl, I am Jem.

      I also wear school hats, two types. In winter, Harriet and I have navy-blue beret hats and my dad says we look like U-boat officers and when he sees us traipse in from the convent, he salutes and goes Heil Hitler! and wanders off, shaking with mirth. He never gets tired of this joke, not ever. In summer, we have to wear flowy dresses with blue-and-white up-and-down stripes and the skirt part flies all around in the merest breeze unlike the winter tunic which stays neat and close to the legs, making it hard in summer to run with a football, for instance, without stripy material flapping in the air and your undies showing. Bloody. Whenever outdoors, a girl has to wear the summer hat, a creamy white straw hat with a hatband and a metal school badge in front and turnups like on a bowler hat except for the gruesome white elastic running under the chin to hold it all in place which gives me a choky feeling if I concentrate too hard on it, suddenly conscious of every single swallow going down my throat so that I start gulping like baby birds do when the mother is feeding them and you see it all happening, the entire voyage down the throat of the little worm bit or whatever and that’s when I get throw-uppy and have to sit down for a while for some recovery time, same as today, for different causes, for milk-race causes.

      ‘Jude the Obscure,’ says Jude.

      ‘Oh yeh,’ I say. ‘What’s obscure again?’

      ‘It’s Latin for dark, obscurus. Or strange. Difficult, I mean. Hard to see. See?’

      ‘Think so. Anyway, I’ll read that book then.’

      ‘No,’ says Jude, quite firm.

      ‘Why not?’ I roll over, feeling a bit better now, and I hang over the edge to peek at Jude, my hair dangling his way.

      ‘It’s bad at the end and you’re not ready, I’ll tell you when.’

      ‘OK.’ I flip on to my back and I think about it, how Jude looks out for me, knowing what is good and bad and when I am ready for things, even if he will not explain it in a lot of words when I want him to, because he has tons of things on his mind at all times. He is busy. ‘Jude, will you tell me about lost causes?’

      ‘Later.’

      ‘You might forget. Please. Just a bit.’

      Jude rises and ambles over to the big bay window with the piano in front of it that Ben can play, and he sits on the piano bench and stares out the window. Jude won’t take lessons in piano, just pausing when Mum asked him if he wanted to and saying no thank you, very politely, and that was it. Harriet and I have piano at the convent. Harriet never studies and I study hard and then we sit with Mum who helps us practise and when it is Harriet’s turn, my sister flies all over the keys making some pretty fine sounds though I am pretty sure not one is in the piano homework she is supposed to do. She sits up straight and makes this whole rush of sound, whipping her head from side to side in a dramatic fashion and turning round now and again to grin at Mum. It’s all very unusual. When Harriet is keen to stop, never wanting to practise long, she shuts the piano lid and scoots across the piano bench to lean into Mum, resting her head there, like she has just been on some long journey and not everything she saw was good.

      I myself have some piano problems and the solution to my piano problems is not in sight. I note that it is possible to overcome human failure in some fields and this is quite cheering, but it is not a rule and I am not foxed by my occasional prowess in those fields where I suffer from human failure. Bike riding for one. I am not all that good. I get by. However, I did a feat for Jude the other day when we were riding with Zach and Jeremy, a feat I have never done before and will not try again by myself, but the other day I did it just like that, no problem, because Jude wanted me to and it was important to him, plus he told his friends I could.

      ‘Jem can do that,’ he said meaning push-start the bike with one foot on one pedal, flinging the other leg over while the bike is careening ahead before settling in the saddle, cool as anything. And I did it, I did it for Jude, no crashing, just as I would like to overcome my piano problems for Mum, but I simply cannot match the notes in my book to the keys without taking a lot of time and then poking at the piano with stiff fingers and it’s awful, because you are supposed to string the notes together to make a tune, not let a lot of time pass between them and this makes me so edgy I can hardly see any more, I know I’m taking far too long and thinking about that makes me even slower, and the sounds I make are downright bad and give me a sick heavy feeling. I look Mum’s way and she smiles that smile, but we both know it’s all up with me, I’m no piano man, nowhere near.

      Unlike my mother. I just know it, how she can play this piano though I never see her play this piano, and how she can do it without books, easy, something I am sure of while knowing also not to ask her about, sure of without ever being told, like I heard it in my sleep. There is some stuff you can count on in dreams as real and true, even when you know it is a dream thing, such as eating peanut butter sandwiches with Jude and he says 1942 was the year of the Great Raids, and you wake up thinking I know he said that, but you cannot tell which came first, the sleep time or the real-life time but it doesn’t