Feed My Dear Dogs. Emma Richler

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ

       FOUR

      I am on a mission.

      I am going to the convent today and it is not a school day and this is down to a decision I made, though all the thinking on this matter was done by Mum. She has this way of throwing out an idea in a breezy manner which is really a solution to all your deep troubles, and you do not even realise it at the time. I am sitting at the kitchen table with a glum expression clutching a Tintin book it is impossible to concentrate on even though it is The Castafiore Emerald, a favourite.

      ‘Maybe you should go to school today and say goodbye to Sister Martha,’ Mum says, pausing in her activities to gaze out the big kitchen window, like she is talking to herself and not to me at all.

      I didn’t know a kid could do such a thing, go to school on a not-school day, and the goodbye business definitely did not occur to me. Whoa. I sit up straight, same as when Ben showed me the other day how to unhook the straps on my satchel and carry it around by the handle in a grown-up fashion. I spent a whole four years of my life wondering why the satchel men sewed a handle smack in the middle of my satchel flap, feeling pretty sure they made a mistake due to sitting up too late sewing satchels. I check out everyone else’s satchel to see if theirs have a handle plus straps. Mostly they have a handle OR straps, meaning I have a downright strange satchel, a thought I had until recently, when Ben showed me how mine is a two-way satchel: an on the back kind which is fine when you are an Antarctic explorer or Coldstream Guard but a bit babyish when you are a mere person, and a carrying around by one hand kind, the man in a suit with urgent plans kind. Grown-up.

      ‘Now? Today? Shall I go now? I’m going to get my jacket!’ I tell Mum, jumping up from the table while she rings Sister Martha to warn her, I guess, that I am on my way, and that is another thing I never knew, that nuns can speak on the telephone just like non-nuns though it must be a bit hard for them with only a little part of the ear poking free of the headdress. Not headdress, Jem. There’s a proper word for it. What is the name of the nun hat? What is the name for the sit-up-straight whoa! feeling? Word questions go in the Words section. Write it down later. My Daniel Mendoza book is filling up fast.

      Whoa. Sit up straight. Not Awe … a longer word. It’s the word for when the shepherds have recovered from shock and are listening carefully to Gabriel who has just introduced himself very politely the same way he does with Mary. Fear not! he says, etc. This is so they know he is on the same side as them, and not an enemy and now he can get on with Annunciations. Whereupon they all have a feeling denoted by a long word starting with a capital letter, as are most big feelings and situations in the Bible, written at a time people were not so used to words as nowadays, and might not know what’s important without capitals to make the words stand out.

      Not Awe. Something else. Awe is the Adoration thing, different, what you have to act when you look at the baby, a feeling I will never get right because all I see in the word Awe is a plastic doll in swaddling with flippy horror-film eyelids, a doll held in the arms of a friend who is not a mother and has only been on this earth eight or so years herself, and then I see my sister in a sparkly halo and wings, dancing around with too much enthusiasm. Awe is all mixed up for me now. But what is that long word? Never mind. Anyway, I am not sure it is OK to take words out of religion straight into life in a non-religion situation, so I might as well forget about it. Maybe if you take out the capital letter it is OK, I don’t know.

      ‘I’ll get Harriet,’ I tell Mum. ‘She is a close friend of Sister Martha’s. Harriet and me could go together, Mum.’

      ‘Harriet and I,’ she says gently.

      ‘You’ll come too? Great!’

      ‘No, Jem. Harriet and I – not Harriet and me, remember?’

      ‘Oh, right,’ I say. I always get this wrong. There is so much to learn, bloody.

      Going to the convent on a Saturday morning and wearing Saturday clothes instead of a uniform is a bit weird. I wonder if I will run into Mean Nun who will freak out even though she is not in charge of me on Saturdays, unless, of course, there are special rules about convent grounds and trespassing upon them in civvies. Maybe she is in charge at all times if I am on convent grounds. Oh well. I am not changing my shoes when I get there and she will just have to face the facts. It is the end of term and I am going on a ship, goodbye.

      I think Sister Martha will like my clothes. They are pretty cool. I have my suede desert boots on plus my favourite jeans plus my BRITAIN IS GREAT T-shirt, all white except for those three words in black and the Union Jack below it which is our flag, depicting the union of crosses of saints, of St George (red) and St Patrick (red) and St Andrew (white). Nuns are quite keen to teach the flag story due to the saints part. The Union Jack has a blue background and this also has to do with St Andrew. I cannot remember why. Andrew was the big brother of Simon Peter, meaning the apostle skills and fishing skills clearly ran in the family. Andrew died by crucifixion, so maybe blue is for sky, the background against which he died, and for blue waters, because he was a fisherman and because he was a witness when Jesus was baptised in the river. Andrew did some good works in Russia, met his bad end in Greece and his bones are in Scotland. St Andrew is patron saint of Russia and Greece and Scotland. Saints have very busy lives and often do a lot of travelling.

      I am wearing my best jacket, my General Custer jacket for special occasions. I love it, I mean it’s lovely or whatever. It is coloured light brown suede, almost gold, a lot like Gus’s hair. It has snaps for doing up and fringy suede on the underside of my sleeves and another nice row of fringes at the back across my shoulder blades. There is a silky lining, same as the borders of Harriet’s ex-pink blanket. There are two problems with this jacket. 1) I once fell into a bog while wearing this jacket and it bears a small dark stain of bog on one cuff no one will notice except upon close inspection or else if Jude sees me in the jacket and reminds me how I fell into a bog while wearing this jacket. In a showy voice.

      ‘Hey, Jem. Remember when you fell in the bog?’

      ‘Yeh-yeh,’ I usually reply, like who cares.

      I do remember though. I remember trying not to cry, not because I hurt myself and was going in for bravery or anything, but because this is my favourite item of clothing and I didn’t want it wrecked, and I wanted to hide it, my grief over stains and possible rips in the fabric, because I know things are not important, that’s what they tell you. People are important, not things, you don’t cry over things. Still, when you own a suede jacket like General Custer’s, it can feel quite important.

      Everyone had quite a good time when I fell in the bog. I did not incur injury so it was permissible to crease up like this was the best comedy moment in my family’s lifetime so far, especially in the case of my dad who loves this type of event, a person tripping himself up on the cuffs of his very own trousers or walking slam into a lamp-post while reading a book or losing a battle with a trayload of tippy objects, crash! Ha ha ha ha! This is quite an interesting reaction in my dad, seeing as he is the singlemost unsteady person I have ever met. It is possible he is just happy not to be the only one crashing into things. Now there is me to keep him 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 СКАЧАТЬ