Feed My Dear Dogs. Emma Richler

we do dressing gowns. It’s realistic’

      ‘OK then. Do we fight now?

      ‘Yuh.’

      ‘Where, here?’

      ‘In the hall,’ says Jude.

      Jude starts jumping around on his toes and punching the air and breathing out in sharp puffs like a horse in a field, jumping all around his corner of the upstairs hall, doing the rope-a-dope I think, and I copy him, hopping up and down and jabbing my fists at nothing and when Jude flicks his towel away by jerking his shoulders quite sharply, I do the same. Now we are ready.

      ‘Ding-ding!’ I say, as I have heard on TV.

      ‘Wait!’ snaps Jude.

      ‘What? That’s what happens. Ding-ding.’

      Jude stops dancing. ‘You say our names first. In this corner – in that corner, you know. Then, let the fight begin, then ding-ding.’

      ‘Oh. Isn’t that just for wrestling? In this corner, in that corner?’

      ‘Wrestling is fake.’

      ‘I know.’ Bloody. Everyone knows that. ‘So what are we called then? What names?’ I feel grumpy and I have a lump in my throat, I’m always getting things wrong, and this game is silly, it’s not our usual game, I don’t like it.

      ‘I don’t know, forget about the names this time, ding-ding!’ Jude says, dancing towards me.

      ‘Hey! I wasn’t ready!’

      ‘Come on!’

      Jude cuffs me in the shoulder and I stumble slightly, my upper arm aching right away and pins and needles coming in a rush so for a moment I cannot wiggle my fingers or anything. This is realistic, he hurt me, I don’t like it. Then suddenly I start to pull myself together and concentrate hard, running through all the instructions for boxing step by step, making a picture in my head and hearing my dad’s voice in there.

      Take a stance! I do it.

      Be a moving target, not an easy one! Right.

      Do the rope-a-dope! What is that, Dad?

      Protect your face! Oh yeh.

      I take it step by step but I am somewhere else already, I don’t know where. I am not here, I go missing. I step outside. Back in a minute. And who is that? Like Jude, not Jude, some stranger. I dance, I do the rope-a-dope, my punches will hit hard, right on target, I’m ready. She’s ready.

      ‘What are you doing?’ he shouts. ‘Get close, you’re out of the ring!’

      I notice Jude’s eyes, how they are not grey-blue like mine and Harriet’s and Gus’s, and bright in a different way from the blue in Ben and Mum, Jude’s are a special blue, aquamarine, that’s the word, I’ve seen it on the box of pastel chalks at school, the chalks you only get to use if you are good at Art, otherwise you can only look, don’t touch. It is a beautiful box, flat and long with two rows of pastels in sets of colour, all the shades of one colour fading until the next colour begins fierce and dark until five or six chalks later, it is like a ghost of the first shade. I am allowed to use the chalks and I am miffed if I open the box and someone has messed with the order of things. I fix the order of things and then I draw and whatever colour I reach for is there in the right order of shade, dark to light, good. The box is wooden, it is oblong. A square has four equal sides. In an oblong the opposite sides are equal, and so a square = an oblong but an oblong ≠ always a square, that’s the rule.

      Jude is on the opposite side. Jude = my brother but my brother ≠ always Jude. Ha!

      I am losing concentration. I feel silly in my shorts and naked body, suddenly unseemly, and I stop boxing to push some hair out of my eyes, my eyes that are greyer than Jude’s, not aquamarine. I say his name real quiet. Jude? But he has not stopped, he is like a toy machine, a wind-up boxing man who has simply not finished fighting and so one red fist slams into my stomach because I have become an easy target, I’ve forgotten everything, all the rules for boxing. I crumple to the floor, feeling like I’ve swallowed a big stick, and I can’t think a single thought and I can’t speak.

      ‘YOU STOPPED! JEM, YOU STOPPED!’ Jude is angry, he is standing before me, stiff as a tree, yelling.

      ‘I –’ My breath floods back and I start crying and suddenly Jude is Jude again. He yanks his gloves off by pulling on the laces with his teeth and squeezing his fists between the knees and he flings the gloves so they fly through the air and slam against the bookcases in the hall as he falls to his knees.

      ‘Jem? Where does it hurt, are you OK, you stopped, sorry, sorry, come in my room, come on, it’s OK, you’re OK, come on.’ Jude puts his arm around me and walks me over to his bunk, pushing me down, pressing lightly on my shoulders. ‘Now lie down, Jem,’ he says.

      ‘I can’t. It hurts.’ I try to stop crying, but the tears just fall, I can’t help it.

      ‘Back in a sec!’ Jude says, scooting into the hall to gather up all our stuff, the towels and his gloves and the glasses of water and bath sponges we placed there for reality, for the splash a boxer needs between rounds. He scoops it all up like it is evidence of a crime or something, like mud stains, or sweet wrappers before dinner, broken pieces of crockery, dropped gloves, whatever’s left when you’ve done a thing you wish you hadn’t, when you stopped being careful, you stopped thinking.

      Jude stashes our gear at the foot of the cupboard he shares with Ben and I watch him the whole time like he has answers for everything. I have given up for the day, and I am going to need instructions for all events until bedtime because a terrible injury has happened to me. Jude steps in the pile of mud and dirt he left for clearing up later, he’ll fix it later, and he wipes his feet on his shins and slaps the dirt off his legs.

      ‘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