Feed My Dear Dogs. Emma Richler

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СКАЧАТЬ speech. We are all God’s creatures, she says, not sounding too happy about it, and then she runs through a list of beasts of the field, usually selecting the less fetching type of animal such as aardvark and hippo, and then she numbers up the categories, colours, religions and countries, rich and poor, one-armed, blind, and those various nations of the wider world in need of missionary work. It’s a sorry list, if you ask me, and quite depressing, so one time, I just had to correct her, the urge came upon me to remind her that Jewish is not like Indian and African, it is not really a country-type situation, not really, and Mean Nun was not at all pleased with this news, probably because I did not ask special permission to pipe up, which is definitely against the rules and a very bad move on my part. Mean Nun hates me now and I am anxious she will declare war on Harriet also, although I doubt it, as my sister has a fine temperament and is very pleasant company compared to me, so everyone likes her even if they do not understand her all the time. If you have an unusual personality and a fine temperament to go with it, you will be OK in the world, I can see that.

      ‘Tell me what happened.’

      ‘Mary had her – I said, it’s a slave! It’s rude, it starts wars! We are ALL God’s creatures.’

      ‘I see. Look, Harriet. You are right about the golliwog thing but you can’t just do the headlines, like in a telegram, you have to fill in the gaps a bit, or people will get it all wrong. Do what Mum does, right? Slavery is a sad thing, golliwog is a stupid word, prejudice … rah-rah, etc. At home, no worries, we get you, but outside, you have to explain more. OK?’

      ‘Tired.’

      ‘I know it. Come on, let’s go.’

      ‘Creatures,’ my sister says in a mournful voice.

      ‘Creature sounds like monster, but it doesn’t mean monster. Got that? It’s just a word for all things, you know, everything breathing.’

      ‘Is Daddy one?’

      ‘Yup. Definitely. Feeling better now?’

      ‘Yes, my dear. I am going to sing.’

      Great. If Harriet is plain happy, or has had a fright and is on the road to recovery, she sings. She skips ahead of me now, and sings that song Gus listens to over and over on his kid-sized private record player he got for his birthday, a small red player with a crank and a tiny speaker he sits huddled up against, hearing out this song with an expression of concentration and dreaminess, because it is a tune regarding flowers, and Gus is keen on flowers and is likely reminiscing, I believe, about trips around the garden in Mum’s arms, with Mum dipping him into flower beds, saying, Breathe, Gus, breathe in! which goes to show how even a three-year-old can look back on life, and even a three-year-old can have specialist subjects and a specialist vocabulary. Gus knows the names of flowers and he speaks them. Peony, clematis, lavender. Rose.

      ‘Lavender’s blue, dilly-dilly, lavender’s blue!’ sings my sister, suddenly stopping in her tracks and turning to frown at me. ‘What’s dilly-dilly?’

      ‘Um. Name of a person, I think. The one the person who is singing about lavender, is singing to. Yeh. It’s a person.’

      ‘A creature.’

      ‘Yup. Dilly.’

      ‘No,’ goes Harriet, correcting me. ‘Dilly-Dilly.’

      ‘It’s just Dilly. It’s a song thing. Poetic. Like if I said, Harriet, Harriet.’

      ‘You never do.’

      ‘Right. But if I did.’

      ‘Why? Why would you?’

      ‘Harriet. Is this the Why game?’

      The Why game involves asking a lot of pesky useless questions, largely to blow off steam and get some attention, and it is a game to play when you are tired from kid-type pressures and want to hang up your gloves for a while and take a rest, which is the case with my sister who is clapped out just now due to catechism and rules and golliwogs. The Why game is best played on a grown-up who will rattle easily and fall apart where a kid will not, a kid knows the ropes. Usually I can handle it just fine, except I am not in the mood today, which is what I tell Harriet.

      ‘I am not really in the mood.’

      ‘Why?’

      ‘HARRIET!’

      ‘OK my dear. Amen. BARKIS is willin’.’

      I hardly ever play this game myself because there are two chief grown-ups in my house and I do not want them to crack up and fall apart, and I know also they will not play it according to the rules. They are too smart. Here is my dad.

      ‘Dad, why are you reading that newspaper? Why are there three newspapers on the floor, why? Why do you always lie down on the sofa to read them? Why can’t you read sitting up? Why are your eyes brown when every single other Weiss has blue ones? Why?’

      My dad ruffles some pages and pays me no attention at all. ‘Jem, have you done your homework?’ he says.

      ‘Why should I do my homework? What is homework? Why?’ I am losing heart and getting flustered. This is not working at all.

      ‘Jem. Go and get me a tomato. A big, firm red one. Ripe. A tomato and a knife on a plate.’

      ‘OK Dad.’ End of game. And remember, Jem. Do not cut up the tomato, he likes to do it himself. Don’t ask why.

      The other chief grown-up in my house not to play the Why game with is Mum. Here are a few things to know about her first off. 1) She is very beautiful and was a mannequin. This word had me very confused at first because I know mannequins are plastic life-sized dolls who stand in shop windows and have pointy fingers and zombie looks. Mum is just being shy and using a poor word in place of the posh one. Model. Mum was a model, and quite famous. OK. 2) She is pretty weird in a spooky but friendly way. 3) She is of unknown origins. I have a few theories about these unknown origins, however, they are only in the development stages and still require all-out investigation. I am on the case. Mum explained to me once, how she was a foundling, definitely a new word to my ears, and a pretty one, it seems to me, for something it is not very good to be. When Mum said, I was a foundling!, she said it in a voice that gave me a suspicious feeling, because it was sad and lively at the same time, like when you fall down and cut your body someplace and need to communicate the blood situation you are in without freaking anyone out, or being sissy. OK. I knew it was not the time to ask a lot of questions, this is what you learn if you listen hard to people and watch them carefully, that you have to pick the right time for questions. My first one would have been, What is a foundling exactly? But it was not the time to ask that question, so I just said, Oh, in a momentous way, the way you speak in the cinema when someone passes you a liquorice toffee and you do not want to disturb anyone in the audience but you want to say thank you for the liquorice toffee.

      Here is one thing I am pretty sure of. When you are a foundling, your ideas about countries are more free and loose than most people’s, and you do not suppose, for instance, that your country is the best just because you were born in it, meaning a foundling can grow up being always on the lookout for a better place, the top place, and in some cases, maybe even the sky is no limit. I believe Mum is such a case. I definitely have my suspicions and she is aware of my suspicions and tries to throw me off the scent. Here is an example. I am sitting at the kitchen table messing with homework and my Tintin book is right nearby, a reward for when I finish СКАЧАТЬ