Feed My Dear Dogs. Emma Richler

company. Yay!

      We were on holiday when I fell in the bog and Harriet needed some airing in a field because of throwing up all over Mum in the car on the way to a fishing village. I’m not sure there are cities in that country, only towns and fishing villages and rivers and fields in between, some of them with booby traps. It was raining pretty hard and Harriet had been staring at the windscreen wipers for some time, whipping her eyes from right to left like she was witnessing a duel about to start between two people in a frozen landscape. I felt a bit sick myself just watching her. We stepped out for some air, feeling bad for Mum who kept trying to make Harriet perk up and get back on the road to health, etc., which was very friendly on Mum’s part, considering she was all covered in barf. That is when I fell in the bog, cheering everyone up no end, and that is also when I thought of Lawrence of Arabia crossing the desert with two small boy guides and one of the boys slips into quick sand, never to reappear, despite Lawrence’s long white scarf and a lot of goodwill and encouragement, don’t let go! When there is suddenly no more pull on the scarf and it comes away with no boy on the end, Lawrence drops his head in the dune. He is pretty depressed. He has one less boy.

      Jude and my dad like to remind me of Bog Day, though for Harriet it is probably Windscreen Wiper Day, a day she recalls being hypnotised by two wipers making a groaning sound on glass and clearing up half-circles of space for Dad to see through, spaces obscured by rain almost as soon as they are wiped clean, a game with no winning in it and a bad sight for Harriet, maybe as if she were waking up on a Monday and wishing it were Saturday, opening and closing her eyes to change the picture, squeezing them tight shut with this high hope, but every time she snaps them open, it’s Monday, still Monday.

      Jacket problem number two. Growing. A day will come when I must pass on the Custer jacket, but not to Harriet, no, it will have to skip right on by Harriet and wait for Gus. She will not look seemly. She looks seemly in girl things. Why, she even has a little furry jacket and a furry bonnet and muff to match, and in this finery she resembles the child of a Russian king (tsar) and his wife (tsarina) which pleases her much when I tell her so as she has a particular fondness for Russian history involving finery and big chandeliers and revels in fine houses as well as the dark side featuring prejudice and the sudden uprisings of serfs, and the fleeing of Jews in ships, a dark side brought to her attention by my dad when he discussed his roots, some of which are in Poland where we are not headed, Poland that was once in Russia and once in the Austro-Hungarian Empire and now out there on its own. It sounds a bit dodgy over there and I am glad we are not going to Poland. Russian history, however, is now on Harriet’s list of dear subjects and she is prone to questioning my dad thereupon, out of nowhere.

      ‘Explain about the fleeing and the ships!’ she demands, out of nowhere.

      ‘When you’re older! I’ll give you a book.’

      My dad has books on everything.

      ‘Big fur trade in Russia,’ says Jude. ‘For hats and muffs and coats. Little animals jumping in the snow. Then nothing.’

      ‘All quiet in the forest,’ I say.

      ‘Stop it!’ says Harriet.

      ‘Sorry,’ says Jude.

      ‘Yeh, sorry,’ I add.

      I see it for a moment, a Harriet vision of Jude’s little animals jumping around in snow, scurrying across winter forests in a light-hearted manner, but leaving tiny footsteps for fur traders to trace, leaving footsteps when they ought to have fled in ships, to clutch the rails of tall vessels on billowy seas and take in deep breaths signifying safety, sailing farther and farther away from Russians waving angry weapons in the air and shouting terrible oaths.

      ‘They ought to have fled in ships,’ I tell Harriet.

      ‘Yes, my dear,’ replies my little sister in a small sad voice, patting my hand in a soothing manner like I am the one having the bad vision, not her.

      It’s kind of hot for my jacket today.

      Maybe I should find Jude before I go. He will need to know where I am going and how long I’ll be, even if he has no outright plans for us.

      There are so many ways to leave this house, different paths, and it’s weird now, how the house and all the ways to leave it seem like new things and not old things I have known all my born days. I don’t know if we will ever come back, though Dad says if things do not work out over there we can come home, except he didn’t use the word home, he said here, because this may be home for us but not for him, not really, his roots are in other places, he has to find them.

      What does he mean, if it doesn’t work out? I have dangers in mind again, things such as criminals in snowstorms and snow-blindness and our ship smashing up in a tempest and my having to learn to swim as fine as Harriet, to swim like a fish or die. And I think about boxing lessons, how they have come to a halt because of the too many questions I ask and how I am all at sea when it comes to facing up to dangers because of insufficient training in the ring. All I have is a stance and it is a bit out of date. I don’t think Jude will box me any more. Last Christmas, which is a PAGAN HOLIDAY! according to Dad, Jude and I both got the same gift of red boxing gloves, one pair each, proper lace-up ones with black elastic on the cuff part and the rest all red, and such a blazing red, I believe I was more excited than Jude, though it was strange too, to get boxing-glove gifts, like we were enemies or something instead of twin types in a field of gravity. We have only had one match together. It’s too hard fighting with Jude. Here’s how it went.

      ‘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,