Feed My Dear Dogs. Emma Richler

is a bell pull and he is ringing for servants. It’s a show of affection and now I feel guilty about skipping out on his head rub, something I hope he has also forgotten.

      ‘Tomorrow we’ll do the rope-a-dope!’ says my dad, putting his glass down and shuffling from foot to foot like he is doing a war dance or some such thing. I have no idea what rope-a-dope means, or whether I am supposed to shuffle around also. I don’t bother. ‘Put up your dukes! Ha ha ha! And don’t eat those before dinner,’ he adds, prodding my bag of crisps and picking his glass up again.

      Bloody. Not again. It is possible Mum asked him to look out for this tonight, the eating of crisps before dinner, because she is always in charge of health matters and that can be a full-time job when there are a lot of kids roaming around like in our house. The thing is, when Dad takes on a task of this kind, of handing out advice or rules, he is a lot bossier, clearly believing a kid will not get the message unless you yell out the advice and make a cross face and repeat it eight or nine times. We are not spooked, but if one of us has a friend around when Dad is marching through the house, poking us in the ribs in passing and yelling out advice, or going Heil Hitler! ha ha ha, the type of friend who is a bit jumpy near my dad, wondering if he is a crazy person or dangerous or something, for a moment I think I should explain to the friend that my dad is not scary, he is funny, that’s how he is, he’s not mad or anything, and then just as quickly, I feel clapped out and know it is time to get a new friend, because some things are too hard to explain, and I am real choosy about friends now, finding ones who can relax around Dad, which is a lot easier than trying to explain things to people who will never really understand. This may be an unusual way to pick friends, I don’t know, but that’s how it goes.

      I pause on the landing outside Mum and Dad’s room. Where are you headed, Jem? I’m not sure. I am not wild about this time of day, it’s kind of lonely, too soon for supper, long since school, what’s it for, this time of day? I am skipping homework as it is Friday, which is my day off from homework and tomorrow is Saturday, Harriet’s favourite. She gets so excited about Saturday, she will rise up quite often in the night to tell me the latest in her departments of special expertise, or fill me in regarding what happened to her on Friday and what she aims to do on Saturday. A lot happens to Harriet, so there is a lot to say and sometimes she will also ask me to sing in my no-good singing voice or else we make beastie shadows on the wall in the light of passing cars. Saturday will never be as great for me as it is for her, but I would never have learned this were it not for Harriet waking me up all night to tell me stuff, waking up and chirping at me like a bird just so she can have that fine moment over and over maybe, of falling asleep with this exciting idea she will be waking up on a Saturday, a feeling like rewrapping your own present late at night at the end of your birthday, and unwrapping it slowly to have the surprise again, or something close, never quite the same, but not too bad and definitely worth a go on a long night.

      I take a step or two on the landing and I know what’s up. I’m heading for Jude. I think I could find him in a room with no lights, easy. When we walk together, sometimes we veer into each other, not quite crashing, it’s more of a gravity thing, I believe. I’m not that well up on gravity yet and I have written the word in my Questions Notebook, the one I am filling up too quick which is why I do tiny writing, in the Brontë manner. I have read two books so far about the Brontës, a family of three sisters, Charlotte, Emily, Anne, and one brother, Branwell, who all did a great deal of tiny writing in small books wherein they made up stories about soldiers. They lived on the moors, rocky, cold, windy, not a very good place when it comes to health matters. There was a lot of dropping dead up there, especially from consumption, anxiety and too much walking in cold weather, and too much drinking at the Black Bull Inn in the case of Branwell, a great worry to his family who sat up waiting for him in darkened rooms, waiting for him to come home, and then waiting for him to stop raving in tussled sheets, raving from too much walking and drinking, etc. Branwell was a bit of a lost cause in all callings in life, and he took it to heart in the end, I guess, and even in his heyday of making a stab at things, when he painted a portrait of Charlotte, Emily and Anne with himself among them, he scratched his own face right out of the painting, which is a sad thing, one of the saddest.

      Consumption. I add this word to my Questions Notebook. Consumption does not sound like a doomy disease, it sounds like what a person does to a peanut butter sandwich. I write it in near Gravity, making sure to leave enough space for notes and answers. My notebook is filling up fast. It measures 15×10½cm and the pages are sewn to the binding, not stapled. The cover has a painting of an olden times boxer with no gloves on and my dad gave it to me.

      ‘That’s Daniel Mendoza,’ he said in a proud voice meaning there is more to come, more information regarding Mr Mendoza. ‘He was Jewish, a Jewish boxer.’

      I knew it. I take a look at Daniel who is putting up his dukes though there is no one else in the painting to box and I feel proud also. Maybe Daniel is practising. He is ready, always ready and he knows all the rules for boxing. He is a gentleman boxer. And maybe Jude is wrong, I can be a sports writer too, it’s not only a man job.

      Gravity. What did Ben say? Pull, there is pull in gravity and a field where the pulling happens. Gravity is not just about not falling but about forces also, forces in a gravitational field, that’s it, and I think there is one between Jude and me, one I aim to fight because Jude is not in the mood for Jem today, I can tell by the smoky bacon crisps joke he played on me, a pushing-away joke, not a Jem-and-Jude-together joke, which is much nicer, close to a friendly cuff on the arm whereas the pushing kind makes my ears ring. Everything is messed up in our house and Jude is edgy, he does not want to be with me. Travel is important.

      I move on past Jude and Ben’s room quick sticks. Jude is in there reading and thinking, going way past me in terms of world knowledge. I don’t care. I move on downstairs and across the kitchen, staring down at the red tiled floor and frowning like I have some great purpose in mind but mainly I do not want to see Lisa, I am not in the mood for Lisa, though I cannot help tossing some info her way before making it out the back door. Lisa is laying fish fingers in rows on a grill and cutting up broccoli for our supper, without separating the treetop part of the broccoli from the stem part. Harriet does not eat treetops and she is going to get depressed. Treetops are for birds, she says. She eats a broccoli top and all she can think about is a mouthful of dear birds and Lisa ought to know that by now. I glance swiftly at Gus who is in his pen, which resembles the sea lion cage at the zoo, a pen with no roof due to tameness of sea lions, and he is playing with his rubber hammer, tapping thoughtfully at the frame of his cage like he is doing repairs or something.

      ‘Mummy was UPSTAIRS,’ I tell Lisa. ‘She is in her room getting ready!’ I say, barging out the back door, not even looking at her as I speak, knowing she knew all along where Mum was and was too bloody to say so, bloody. I am on to Lisa and I am fed up with that pocket business.

      I tuck my crisps in the bushes in case of robbers/animals/accidental crushing by passing feet, and I climb up into our tree, Jude’s and mine, the tree with twisty limbs and no fruit to bruise that is a great commando lookout, planted not far from the back door and right at the edge of the big garden for full strategic viewing in many directions all at once. A soldier will always find a lookout post, it’s the first thing he does, the very first. I can see everything from up here.

      Jude and I read up here, lying back on the branches as if they were sofas in the living room. I prefer it with Jude, like crossing the road or riding a bike, I do it with him and I don’t think about crashing or calamity. I get the wobblies up here and there is Jude to grab my elbow, calm and firm, and I’m OK, no falling. Alone, it’s weird. Climbing the tree, I have to concentrate hard on each step, put your foot there, Jem, now there, hey, is that how we usually do it? Hold tight, do I always hold this tight? Suddenly I am all conscious of handholds and footholds, same as when I wear my summer hat with the strangly elastic and go all conscious of swallowing. And I even forgot to bring reading material. I’ll just have to do some more thinking. Fuck-hell. I’m tired out today.

      Ben is at Chris’s house, he went there straight after our trip to the shops, I don’t know if he will come home for dinner, meaning Lisa will seem about three times the size she usually is. Looming. When Ben is around on Mum and Dad nights out, I don’t notice Lisa so much, she