Feed My Dear Dogs. Emma Richler

used the harness on Gus. I believe there was just something about it she fell for, the soft white leather, the beautiful silver buckles, the idea of it, I don’t know, but I saw it, two years or so into Gus’s life, how Mum has her own way with this dark matter of unknown origins, how it is different for everyone maybe, one person ending up a one-man band, taking no chances on spreading out and having a family that might go astray, and another being Mum, fearless, filling a whole house with kids, no leashes required. It works the same in a bad-mood situation, my sister, for instance, turning to song and dance in moments of strife and confusion whereas I imagine even worse calamities, hoping my bad situation might seem rosy in the fearsome light of my imaginings, and now it’s just a habit, I can’t stop it, my bad mood opening a door on a whole roomful of bad-mood ideas, such as naval disasters and captains going down with ships, and firing squads, and amputations in wartime, no anaesthetic, and so on, and then I usually feel a lot worse. Clearly, my method is not a prize-winning method. I may need to review the situation.

      Sometimes my dad helps out. If he happens to come along and catch me in a pathetic droop over some maths homework I am messing up, or a drawing of footballers that is an outright disaster because I have been so busy doing all the muscles in their legs, I have not noticed, until too late, there is no space left to draw heads and sky. It’s awful. This is when my dad will do a boxing count in a loud boxing referee voice, and a frantic sports commentator voice, while raising one arm in the air above me, to bang it down sharpish on each count, his pointy finger grazing the top of my drooping head.

      One! Two! Three! … IS SHE OUT FOR THE COUNT? Six! Seven! …’

      Etc. It is pretty annoying, except that I do perk up before he reaches the count of ten, braving this task of recovery with show-off vigour and a spirit of endeavour, whereupon my dad walks off beaming, because he has sorted me out again, and all it takes is to yell a boxing count over my head and waltz off to tell Mum the fine job he did. Jem is OK now. Well done, Dad.

      My mother is the top person to seek out in perilous times, at any station from mystery grumps to head wounds. A head wound can bring on stark-eyed horror and a sense of being pretty close to the end of things, like dropping out of an aeroplane on to enemy territory, and at times like this, she can calm me straight down while patching me up, until suddenly I am interested in how the head bleeds (profusely), and I have a new word (profusely) and a new subject.

      To begin. There are groups for blood. I never knew that. Anyway, the main idea is not to mingle the groups in emergency situations, when you might be running low on blood and need someone else’s for a top-up. You have to check first off about groups. Whoa! Hold on! What group are you? If you are too weak, you must hope for someone to ask on your behalf, so it might be best just to leave a note in some handy place upon your person, with the name of your group in neat writing. Or simply make sure never to be alone in a dangerous place, never to be without a member of your family who has the right blood, the same type, that’s how it goes, it’s a family thing. OK. Next. Blood is made of cells and platelets. Cells come in red and white. In red there is haemoglobin, meaning iron plus globin. What is globin? I don’t know. I could not pay attention, too busy wondering about this news there is iron in me, and having visions of blacksmiths in bare chests and leather aprons plunging bits of iron into boiling vats, and then bashing them into horseshoes and weapons, farm implements and household knives, red sparks flying everywhere, like drips of haemoglobin perhaps, so the blacksmith is in a state of wonder also, not about ironworks in him, but about blood in the ironworks. It’s possible.

      Haemoglobin is responsible for colour and carrying oxygen, and white cells are for fighting off disease and so on, and then there are platelets. Very important. Platelets are for clotting, i.e. to stop all your blood flowing out after injury, the blood going from watery to sticky and hard, reminding me of the coating on toffee apples. It’s all very interesting, and pretty soon, listening to Mum, I lose my throw-uppy feeling, waiting out for it keenly, this clotting of platelets, and thinking deeply on the subject of blood flow, and the whole business of ferrying and fighting, and how I am in this O group, Mum says, which will be a breeze to recall in an emergency situation as it is the shape of a mouth calling out after injury, before the clotting part of things, white bandages, some nice toast with Cheddar, and friendly cuffs in the upper arm from immediate family, same as winning a medal. For Valour.

      On other days, without a wound to show for it, everything hurts for no good reason, and I want to unzip my body and make a hasty exit, slamming the door on myself, no goodbyes.

      ‘Mum! Everything hurts!’

      ‘Growing pains,’ replies my mother who is in the know about such matters.

      ‘Oh.’

      My mother is sitting at her dressing table with the lovely bottles on it, some with little tubes poking out and bulbs you squish, as in Ben’s chemistry set, except these are covered in velvet with golden tassels and are not dangerous to play with. The table has delicate drawers and one of them contains wide silver bracelets that are great for armlets when Jude and I are Romans. Mum lets us borrow them, no problem, and sometimes we invite Harriet to join in, because the bracelets fit right around her ankles and she is so good at slaves, though we tell her straight off she is a mute slave, otherwise she might mess up the game with inappropriate dialogue. We keep her instructions brief. For instance, we make sure not to tell her she had her tongue cut out in torture, or she will go overboard in terms of emotions and take over the whole game and it will be embarrassing. Harriet is not always appropriate but one day, maybe, she will be famous for acting.

      Over the creamy gold wood surface of Mum’s table with the design of twigs and leaves carved in it, is a thin sheet of glass, kind of like ice, and there are mirrors at this table, a middle mirror that tips to and fro, and two side ones you can adjust the way my dad does in our car, frowning as he reaches up to twiddle the oblong driver mirror, like someone has done sabotage and moved it on purpose, then he fixes the side mirrors, wing mirrors, he calls them, and plunges out his window, before stretching across the passenger seat to do the other one, huffing and puffing the whole time. They have to be angled just right, so he can see what’s coming, and I suppose Mum can do the same, fiddle about with her wing mirrors so she can see who is coming in the room, such as Dad with a glass of wine, or me, today, with growing pains I am not thinking about any more.

      The dressing-table mirrors are framed in creamy gold wood also, reminding me of famous paintings in museums, those three-in-one pictures with a middle bit and right and left bits connected by hinges, but here the famous painting is always Mum. Three of her, one in three. Cool.

      When Gus came home that first time, it seemed to me things were just right, no more Weisses required. I’m not saying if Mum left us and bashed off to hospital again, coming home with one more Weiss wrapped in the pink blanket, my dad hovering and shoving us gently not so gently out of the way, that it would be not OK with me, no, it’s only a feeling. Things are just right. Now we are seven, counting Mum and my dad, not counting birds, i.e. two doves, two budgies and two finches so far, and how we might get a dog when Gus is bigger, but not yet, because at present any dog is bound to be bigger than Gus, which would be spooky for him, so we will hang on until he is round about dog-size, no smaller.

      King Arthur must have felt this way too one day, thinking, OK, that’s enough knights, no more knights! King Arthur was very welcoming, and anyone brave and fine with good works in mind could come along and be a knight at his Table, and then the other knights would squish up to make room, while, of course, there were a few casualty knights making room for unhappy reasons (demise), but I do not see this accounting for all that many free places. There cannot have been endless space at the Round Table. In Arthur’s heyday, perhaps there was standing room also, but a great king ought to keep track of his knights, otherwise things will get slapdash and he might mix up everyone’s names, simply too tired to pay attention to each knight as is befitting, due to overcrowding of knights, with some of the more complicated ones, the softy knights, growing offended consequently, kind of hurt and dithery and likely to slip up on the job, I don’t know. It could happen so quickly.

      I have borrowed Ben’s King Arthur book and it is the real thing, written nearly five hundred years ago and it has a French title, which is quite unusual, as the book is in English. I have read a few versions