Feed My Dear Dogs. Emma Richler

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СКАЧАТЬ I get busy thinking about my dad, and wondering what he is thinking, and other matters. Will there be an ice-cream cone at the end of this walk, or a packet of crisps? He doesn’t talk much at all. Has he forgotten I’m here? No. He gives me a big hand squeeze, a torture-type squeeze, and I yell out, and this creases him up with mirth. He knows I’m here, yes.

      Mum walks at kid pace, no matter which kid she is out with, and she does it without making you feel bad, like she has to make this big adjustment just for you. No. She acts as if this is the very pace she had her heart set on when she decided to go out strolling with you. Why, thanks, Mum! Also, I notice things I would not normally pay a lot of attention to. Let’s say there is woodland roundabout, I will notice what stage the buds and leaves are at, what type of tree it is, and whether or not it is healthy and so on. If there is birdlife, I will think about the birds hanging out in the trees, and muse on bird varieties and the ins and outs of general bird activity. In town, now, on our way to Zetland’s, walking past buildings I have seen many times before, Mum has me noticing nice gates and windows, carvings and decorations, angels and lions and mythic things, and I wonder how I missed them every time. I wonder if topography changes according to the person walking about in it, like in the theatre, especially in ballet, with scenery shifting in the blink of an eye almost, I love that, how you are in a whole new place suddenly, according to good swans or bad swans. When the nice swans are out, the scenery is pretty cheery. When the bad swans dance in, quick sticks there are big waves and stormy lighting and the music is noisy and makes my heart pound. In my opinion, they go a bit overboard in ballet, as if they cannot trust the audience to tell the difference between good and bad behaviour in a swan, which is why they dress them in two colours for extra emphasis, and the two colours, of course, are black (bad) and white (good). Heavens to Betsy. If one swan with stary eyes is casting evil spells and committing felonies right there in the spotlights, a person will not require all those big hints in scenery and costume to be sure that swan is on the wrong track and in sore need of reform. Never mind.

      I look up, I look down, I hold her hand. We walk, my Clarks Commandos just breezing alongside Mum’s fine and marvellous shoes. I do not know many people yet, but I do not expect to see finer or more marvellous shoes looking so natural on a human being, as if they were made just for her, one pair with little scales on it like a snake but not scary, and another pair of dusty-pink suede with a fine bow, and all of them long and narrow with heels of various heights and widths and pointy fronts, like sailing boats. We sail along.

      Hands. I think if you are an artist and want to go all out for Art, then you have to practise eyes and hands a lot. Eyes need to be seeing things and hands need to look as though they can feel. I take note of eyes in old paintings on gallery outings and most of them have a zombie look, which is quite disturbing, so I cannot concentrate on the rest of the painting. Statue eyes are the worst. All the details are nicely carved out, the lids and eyeball separate and everything, with sometimes even a tiny bump where the pupil and iris go, but it is still plain naked white stone, and worse than a blind person staring at you and making you feel terrible for having vision and not being able to help the blind person in the vision department. In the Tintin books, M. Hergé draws two black dots for Tintin. These are his eyes, and they are always seeing, which goes to show how an artist does not need a lot of detail to make a thing real. At times, hands are painted in so much detail, limbs and clothing are a bit boring, as if the artist knocked himself out doing the hand part and kind of gave up after that. Other times, hands resemble stumps of wood with little bits of kindling for fingers.

      I don’t like to see tons of paintings all at once, because I get them all mixed up, and that can be depressing, but here is my favourite so far. This is the name of the painting. The Annunciation, by Fra Filippo Lippi, b.1406?, d.1469. I am quite interested in dates, partly since the nuns told me how in olden times people had very short lives, and it made me a bit anxious, so I like to do some calculations of my own. B.1406? I don’t understand why they are not sure of Filippo’s birth year, did his parents forget to write it down? Mr and Mrs Lippi were so happy when Filippo came along, they just forget, and friends ask, how old is he now, when was he born? And the Lippis scratch their heads and look at each other in a merry distracted fashion and say, We don’t know! About 1406? Or maybe Filippo was a foundling. Of unknown origins. It’s possible. They knew when he died though, someone wrote that down all right.

      In the painting, the Angel Gabriel is giving the big news to Mary about the Immaculate Conception that is coming up for her. She is reading a book before calling it a night, and you can see her bedroom with the blanket neatly folded back at one corner like in a hotel. I have been to two hotels and I am most impressed by this foldy thing they do, some stranger worrying about you last thing at night, and just not wanting you to tussle with sheets and blankets at this difficult time in the day when you are all worn out from life. I do it to my own bed now and then, and pretend someone else did it. OK. Mary is listening to Gabriel and she is quite pleased about the news, even though she will not be able to get much reading done for a while, which was the only bad thing for Mum regarding the five babyhoods in our house, the loss of reading time, but she is catching up now that we are not so pathetic and helpless.

      In the painting, Gabriel’s right hand is doing something strange. His first and second fingers are in that two-finger position signifying, I happen to know from nuns who are well up on this sort of information, the dual nature of Christ, human and divine. For nuns, these are the facts. Gabriel’s third and fourth fingers are furled backwards, holding on to his red cloak, and I tried to do this myself, pointing with two fingers and gripping my jumper at the same time, and what I got was an almighty pain in the hand, meaning an angel maybe develops special muscles in his hands the way piano players do. Special-purposes muscles. Most of all, I want to touch Gabriel’s hand, I want it to touch me. I do not care if it is unrealistic.

      It’s autumn and Mum wears kid gloves, this is the kind she always wears. She wears kid gloves and has a kid on the end of her hand. Kid gloves are very soft and thin and made out of baby goats, a piece of news I aim to keep from my little sister as she has a very big thing for fauna, especially the lamb species to whom goats are closely related, and she does not need to be reminded that Mum’s gloves are made from goats who never had the chance to be grown-up goats and lead a full life, b.Monday, d.Friday, over and out, goodbye.

      I can sense Mum right through the gloves, the gentleness, the slender bones, the little changes in pressure she applies for fun, she knows I’m here. I imagine the blood flowing in her fingers, and the little pulses pulsing until I cannot tell the difference any more between the feelings in her hand and the feelings in mine, like we are only one hand now, and suddenly I am in panic stations about it, I start flipping my thumb wildly from inside her palm, to the back of her hand, and as we get closer and closer to Zetland’s, I have a superstition moment, involving having to count to eighteen before we reach the door and Mum lets go of my hand, or else. Or else there will be no binoculars left. Or else there will be only one, and all seven Weisses will have to share it out, tearing off seven miserable pieces and saying prayers over them, and eating very, very slowly with a poignant cheery expression on our faces, signifying courage in the face of asperity as in nice poor families in books by Dickens. It will be terrible.

      One, two, three … don’t let go … eighteen!

      ‘Here we are,’ says Mum, releasing my hand and maybe wondering why I am close to fainting and in need of stretcher-bearers.

      Mrs Zetland smiles an all-out smile at Mum, because Mum is the kind of person people smile at, no matter what, even if it is not their big thing in life, to show signs of merriment for no obvious reason, and I clip my thumbs into my jeans pockets, and waltz up real casual to the binocular basket in the front of the shop, worrying that even though I made it to eighteen, I had called upon disaster anyway, because I am a fallen type, and must stay on my toes and never count on soft landings in passing ships.

      The basket is brimfull of binoculars, and they strike me as the most rare and miraculous binoculars of all time, because fate did not mess with me, and also because of this new thing, how СКАЧАТЬ