SISTER CRAZY
Emma Richler

Copyright

Fourth Estate

An Imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd

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Flamingo is a registered trademark of HarperCollinsPublishers Limited

Published by Flamingo 2002

First published in Great Britain by Flamingo 2001

Copyright © Emma Richler 2001

Emma Richler asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

Source ISBN: 9780007118298

Ebook Edition © MAY 2019 ISBN: 9780007476978

Version: 2019-05-17

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Praise

From the reviews:

‘A joy to read’

ALICE MUNRO

‘A deeply moving book. Richler’s language is so electric, her formal poise astonishing, her observations of the world of children, of the terror of madness, riveting. And she is bold and witty and will make you laugh out loud. A stunning novel.’

LISA APPIGNANESI, Jewish Chronicle

‘A little masterpiece of imagination. A lovely book.’

Irish Independent

‘Sister Crazy shows us with unflinching intensity what happens when a sweet family romance is never displaced. Richler’s great achievement is that she has fashioned for Jem a voice that sounds right in the mouth of a smiley eight-year-old and that of a suicidal thirty-five-year-old.’

Guardian

‘An utterly exhilarating ride into the heart of childhood and family, as unexpected as it is invigorating. It is very, very funny indeed. It is also very affecting. Emma Richler’s evocations of the depth of the bond between the siblings catch the breath with their intensity, their exactitude, their unsentimentality. It is a work of radiance.’

Ottawa Citizen

‘Extraordinary. The narrative voice is, by turns, grave, funny, ironic, poetic and wary. It went straight to my soul and will not leave.’

Globe and Mail (Canada)

‘Richler’s authorial voice is at once entertaining and serious. Her writing is superb: crisp and sure, infused with a sly humour. Richler abandoned an acting career to write this book. Her choice was no mistake.’

Toronto Star (Canada)

‘Wonderful. Richler’s voice is true and intimate as she reveals a family of compelling characters in a way that is utterly unique. Moving deftly among the humorous and the serious, this quirky, forthright narrator takes us on an immensely readable ride.’

ELIZABETH STROUT, author of Amy and Isabelle

‘Sister Crazy, with its easy prose, piercing insights and sly wit, is a fine debut. Its depiction of a golden childhood is enlivened with amusing meditations on all sorts of things – French films and malt whisky, commandos and cowboys, St Francis of Assisi and the Knights of the Round Table. The brief glimpses of Jem as a tormented adult sting like thorns in a rose bush.’

National Post (Canada)

‘Luminescent’

LA Times

Dedication

For my Mother and my Father

and for Bob Gottlieb

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Note to Readers

Praise

Dedication

Talking Man

Angels’ Share

Party Spirit

Running Time

Sister Crazy

Perilous Boy

No Time

About the Author

About the Publisher

Talking Man

In the elaborate Action Man games I played with my brother Jude, games sometimes lasting for days, interrupted only for school, mealtimes, and homework, and involving complex missions, actual trenches, and tiny fireworks, there would be the occasional real casualty. A casualty might suffer a scary burn and get earth in its joints. At the end of a raid, he would be found in a heap with his foot some distance from his body, yes, dead with his boots on. This was always Talking Man. He was the brilliant Nazi officer, foiled again, the blithe stormtrooper just following orders or the double agent committing his final betrayal.

I was nine years old, and I had a sneaking admiration for the German uniform. I liked the tunic nipped in at the waist, the slim lapels, the rakish jodhpurs, the high boots, and the helmet which was a tidy compromise between the austerity of the Russian one and the sheer blowsiness of the American. And yet, we shuddered to dress our top men in this uniform; we only had it for the sake of verisimilitude. It gave us an over the shoulder feeling – is anybody watching? – to put a man in it. We only did so when we had pretty hard knocks in mind for the wearer. Talking Man wore it a lot.

In the days before soft boots with delicate laces that you could actually thread through eyelets, Talking Man had a pair of hard tight boots and changing them one day, I pulled his foot off too. With one of my favourite guys, this would have induced tears in me, and a desperate oh no feeling, but when it happened to Talking Man, I felt a shady satisfaction.

What did I have against him? Of all my men, I remember him most clearly, perhaps for the wilful neglect I inflicted on his person as well as for a certain poignancy he represents for me to this day and which I am only now beginning to grasp.

I had acquired him through the Action Man reward system. With each purchase of an item from the Action Man directory, you were awarded stars in proportion to its value. For instance, a complete uniform – British Army Officer, German Stormtrooper, Alpine Commando, etc. – earned you maybe five stars. Whereas something from the Quartermaster’s stores – a flare gun and radio unit; a detonator, coil of wire, and dynamite; a mess kit; a map case and binoculars – only afforded you one or two. When you had collected twenty-one stars you won a free Action Man. A free Action Man! I chose Talking Man, who was an innovation at the time. My heart sank when I saw him. On the box, things looked good. There was an actual-size painting of a soldier on it, dressed in an RAF officer’s uniform, his mouth ajar in mid-speech; he was clearly caught up in some grave moment and the words would be jaunty and ironic. I could tell he was a man used to self-sacrifice – ferociously brave, romantic at home, amusing and generous in the mess. In my memory, he resembled Sean Connery. It was not seemly to open the box in the shop, and I was too excited, having actually exchanged twenty-one cardboard stars for a whole man, to expect deception. But they really ought to have shown Talking Man naked on the packaging. A small picture of his torso would have been enough. I was simply not prepared for the facts. His chest was a mess of perforations, like grotesquely enlarged pores. I have ever since been disgusted by displays of regular perforations such as honeycombs or Band-Aids, the raised papillae of a burnt tongue, a pig’s snout, moon craters, the magnified hair follicles in a razor ad, subway grates, cheese graters, the graininess of a blown-up photograph, aeration holes in a new lawn, the skin of a plucked chicken, the little holes on the surface of perfectly cooked rice. A plastic ring dangled from the middle of his back, below the shoulder blades, and attached to the ring was a long flesh-coloured string that coiled within the hollow of his perforated chest, an intestinal rope, a terrible worm. Otherwise, Talking Man’s features were regular, identical to all other Action Men, ones without stigmata, ones with minds of their own and no ready-made speech. And Talking Man’s speech was simply insulting. How could his two or three uninspired phrases suit all occasions? I don’t actually remember the few sentences in his repertoire, but they were of this ilk: ‘ATTENTION! FIRE DOWN BELOW! COVER ME! ALL HANDS ON DECK! ENEMY AIRCRAFT!’ That sort of thing. And if any of these phrases came in handy, how would you know you’d hit on the right one? Even worse, this burst of speech was preceded by the noise of the cord uncoiling, followed by a shuffle and crackle of interference like announcements in a train station. Why couldn’t he sound just a bit like Richard Burton in The Desert Rats or Jack Hawkins in The Cruel Sea? Instead, Talking Man might have been on drugs, or merely a simpleton. He never paused for thought. He did not experience doubt or pain or emotional stumbles of any kind. He just blurted out commands like a madman, all out delirium was a shot away. Then the military hospital – Northfield perhaps, near Birmingham – where he is deemed LMF. Lacking Moral Fibre. There he hides under beds and calls out in sleep to dead men, friends and enemies.

I expressed my contempt for Talking Man in small ways, quite apart from having him careen headlong into ambushes and walk over landmines. When we went on our family summer holiday in Connemara, I left him behind. When Jude and I made undies and little vests out of old socks for our men, Talking Man had only bare skin next to his scratchy uniform. Action Man™ designed lovely long socks as part of their new sports line, and Jude and I saved them for our best men. Jude even made little garters out of black elastic. Not for Talking Man, however, the comfort of a warm knee sock. His feet were always bare, in hard boots. Or rather, his foot was always bare, in a hard boot.

I found the new sports line irksome. A booklet was available in the toy shops, and in it were coloured illustrations of Action Man dribbling the ball, mid scissors kick, tackling, making a save, and kitted out in the colours of the most famous English clubs of the day: Arsenal, Liverpool, West Ham, Spurs. I could not reconcile the figure of my fighting World War II man and this frivolous sporting type. If at least they had been big shorts, like those of the thirties and forties, then I could work with the idea: our men are taking time out, on an RAF base, say, dispelling tension between raids, playing football with real yearning and abandon, expressing their comradeship in war, and nostalgia for their curtailed youth. They are very deft at the game, in an unfussy, self-effacing way. They are unselfish, laying off passes for men recovering from disfigurement, or men whose wives had perished in air raids or who were unfaithful to them, unable to live in fear of the awful telegram.

‘What is it, Alice? Bad news?’

For my men, praise in the course of a match would be generously deflected by jovial cracks at their own expense. Talking Man, of course, never played in these matches, even before his crippling accident, when he was sidelined due to craziness. I had seen some old footage taken by psychiatrists in one of the military hospitals, the Royal Victoria or Craiglockhart, set up during the ’14–’18 scrap, a film showing the funny walks of shell-shocked men. Names were given to all the funny walks, dancing gait, slippery footing on ice gait, fighting the wind gait, climbing up a mountain gait. Talking Man had dancing gait. He was a bad case and beyond rescue.

On the rare occasions when Jude and I allowed a guest player, one not to be trusted with our finest men, he would get Talking Man. Like our brother Ben, who was keen to steer our games into bizarre realms.

‘You know that many Nazi officers belonged to occult societies?’

Stony looks from Jude and me.

‘Well let’s say they stumble on these caves where satanic rituals are taking place and …’

Usually we just let Ben handle the fireworks for the true to life trench warfare, until, that is, he managed to melt the neck of one of Jude’s leading men.

‘Well done,’ Jude said aggressively.

‘Yeah,’ I added, ‘well done.’

‘But it’s so realistic!’ said Ben, eyes flashing. ‘What if all the men had some kind of injury and …’

Although Ben was our big brother, and in general we flocked to him for entertainment, he was terrible at Action Man. So we fell on a plan. If he were passing, Jude and I would act so engrossed in our game we didn’t notice him; it would be a faux pas on his part to ask to join in. This rankled with me a little and I felt hot in the pit of my stomach and would have an urge to leap up and chase after him, offering up my best man, the one with dark hair and an excellent physique, by which I mean, since all Action Men have the same build, that his joints were neither unyielding nor loose. He could wield a machine gun one-handed; he could crouch in a stealthy manner for any length of time without slipping, no worries. I saved up and bought him the beautiful uniform of the Royal Horse Guards, a ceremonial kit intended for dress occasions such as bashing off on parade or receiving honours, etc. Because our men were mostly engaged in missions of serious strategic complexity requiring them to slither through undergrowth, duck into abandoned cellars, scale dizzying heights and examine maps in hellish conditions, the Guards uniform was largely unworn. Until the time, that is, when Jude found pursuits that did not involve me so much anymore.

When Jude went off with his boyfriends, it was harder and harder for him to argue for my presence without calling a lot of attention to himself. He had a laconic demeanour and a fiercely protective nature and he needed all parties to be at ease, so the best solution for him at the time was to leave me out.

Once, I was allowed to play with Jude and his friend Michael, who was lean and silent and glamorous with ruffled fair hair. But during this game we were all a little stifled. It was an experiment doomed to failure, a one-off occasion. At home the next day, after school, Jude mumbled a message to me.

‘Michael says he enjoyed your presence,’ he said, passing me on the stairs.

‘My what?’

‘YOUR PRESENCE!’ Jude repeated crossly.

‘Oh. Great.’ I didn’t know what Michael meant about presents (what presents?) but I was aroused by this communication from him and I felt shifty, too, as if I had betrayed Jude somehow. In my mind, I thought I saw Jude take one more step away from me. The curtain was dropping on this episode of our oneness and so I let him go. But I refused to see it as desertion. No. We are SOE (Special Operations Executive). As natural leaders, we had to be split up. In Occupied France, two separate targets, and for our own protection, two secret routes. Would we survive? Will we meet again?

‘See you at the Ritz in springtime. Make mine a champagne cocktail.’

More and more, then, I took the white breeches and the scarlet coat of the Royal Horse Guards off the little coat hangers that Jude and I had fashioned from copper wire and I dressed my man in it. I dressed him by degrees and with languorous gestures I can only think of now as intimations of sensuality.

My man liked to read whenever he was not engaged on the field of battle. Jude and I made books for our men by cutting up the spines of comics. You could get about eighteen books from the spine of one single Victor comic, for example. A good haul. Then you designed a cover and stuck it on. The Last Enemy, All Quiet on the Western Front. Maybe even Wuthering Heights. My man always had a book in his rucksack. He reminded me of my parents’ friend Rex, a famous cinematographer who dressed in jeans and white T-shirts and blue cashmere sweaters. He had very elegant features and a band of flowing white hair around his otherwise bald head. He had a reckless streak and a languid demeanour. He answered yes or no to most queries in a languid fashion. He was not expansive. Jude and I spotted a German Luger in his house. The real thing. We were in awe. We asked Rex about it in hopeful and timid voices. He was elusive, which was downright glamorous to us, he came to me and held my long fair hair in his gentle grasp and asked airily, to no one visible, ‘Does anyone have a pair of scissors?’

Playing alone, I liked to sit my man on the edge of his khaki bunk, a book splayed and held open by the hand with the pointing index finger and thumb. ‘Death,’ he reads in The Last Enemy, his favourite, ‘should be given the setting it deserves; it should never be a pettiness; and for the fighter pilot it never can be.’ My man would be half-dressed in this moment of repose, wearing only his tall black Horse Guards boots with the silver spurs and his close-fitting white breeches with the lovely braces. I angled his head so he seemed to glance thoughtfully somewhere in the middle distance, which is an expression I had caught in my mother when she was reading. I tried to read this way myself, but lost a lot of time being distracted by other things out there in the middle distance and then trying to find my place on the page again. Never mind. It was out of duress that I played alone, but I was suddenly able to observe my man’s physiognomy at leisure and to allow him those moments when he could assume off-guard qualities, quite literally. The sight of him with the delicate white braces criss-crossing his slim, muscular, hairless chest gave me a distinct pleasure. The contrast of extreme formality with the undress of reverie lent him an air of vulnerability. Vanity was a foreign thing to my man. If pressed, he might own up to gratitude for his good looks, but he never traded them for favours, oh no.

Something thrown up in the drift of Jude’s wake, in his flow toward other people, was a new game we tried out together once or twice, a game involving my sister’s Barbie, a game that held him for a little while longer.

Barbie could not go far with us without overstretching the boundaries of truth. She could be a sort of Mary Ure in The Guns of Navarone, a commando with useful feminine wiles and a gift for disguise and languages. Or a nurse maybe, caught up in a daring mission and proving invaluable, Sylvia Syms in Ice Cold in Alex. An obvious choice was Barbie as French Resistance fighter, headstrong and relentless, going boldly where no French woman has gone before. There was also the aristocratic English girl, a master code-breaker for MI6. Women with no spare time on their hands, no time for dates, which is what I suspected Jude craved above all. And so most often, Barbie was a glamorous double agent, passing secrets to her man as he breezed through Occupied Paris, always an occasion for champagne and smuggled Russian caviar. Silk stockings and Virginia tobacco, rare as golddust, were regular features.

Something happened. I became tongue-tied and short of breath. My dramatic abilities failed me. My temples hurt. Later in life, in cases of sudden awareness on dates (Oh, I thought I liked you), when the urge to escape the sexual showdown is sharp as a fire alarm and you want to flee in cartoon time – in the first frame, one arm in a sleeve and coattails flapping; in the next, home in bed, reading a Tintin book – I would remember this atmosphere of disquiet and asphyxiation that came upon me with Jude and my sister’s Barbie. All I could do was stall.

‘Just a minute here! How did your man enter Paris? Subterfuge? Fake passport? Is my man with him? Shouldn’t he be? What mission is this? Shouldn’t he be in a hurry?’

Even episodes with the French Resistance girl of the one-track mind (Vive la France!) degenerated into dates. Crawling through darkened forests, sabotaging power lines, setting booby traps and gathering secret munitions drops, Jude’s man still managed to suggest dinner and dancing. So I revolted. I started to get silly as the walls of illusion came tumbling down, exposing the scene for what it was – sex – and Jude either got slaphappy along with me or stalked off in a fury. End of game. The second thing I would do was dry up, a startled and exhausted actor. I dithered and looked spacey and we would have to pause for peanut butter sandwiches. The third ploy was to say quietly, in a fit of uncommon generosity, ‘We should invite Harriet to play, you know. We shouldn’t take her Barbie and not ask her to play.’ End of game. Harriet was only six and extremely hopeless at serious games; even Gus could do better, and he was a baby still, two years old and not ready for war. So finally, in the absence of Jude, it was my fate to learn to play with her.

Explaining any new discipline to Harriet, you had to tether her to reality by introducing minor rules and practicalities, although never too many at once or she was liable to break off in the middle of things and start dancing to an unidentifiable tune of her own. Looking for Harriet, calling her to supper, say, or for school, you were likely to find her skipping around in the garden, a fairy on a happy day out in the ether. Harriet’s fierce whim was for collecting stuffed animals of all sizes, chiefly lambs and bird life, especially chicks, as well as a few bears and rabbits.

I gave her the lowdown on World War II. She needed to know the rugged truth in order to play, although she would dwell on the least vital points.

‘Yes but …’ Then the dancing around began, inducing wide-eyed exasperation in me. If I gave up, she wailed.

‘I want to play! I want to!’

Oh God.

I rehearsed her, but it was no good; before too long, there would be Barbie with her deranged look, handing out minute teacups containing drops of water to my Action Men, surrounded by the beasts of the field.

This was not like playing with Jude. Harriet didn’t really need me at all. I even left her with Talking Man, making out that this was something of a sacrifice, as if he were my favourite man. I watched her for a short while as I edged my way out. She was squeezing Talking Man into some of Barbie’s more loose-fitting garments – Transvestite Man now – and submitting him to minor indignities such as talking to animals, dancing and singing in his flounces, and preparing refreshments for a lot of chicks and little lambs. Meanwhile Barbie preened quietly, looking on from the sidelines, happy in a sort of maniacal way, grateful for the company. My sister even pulled Talking Man’s ring, suffering a jolt of alarm at the blurt of officious speech that issued forth. Harriet was simply not used to gruff commands except in fun, in our dad’s voice, say, the monster one he used when chasing her, stomping around the house with his hair all mussed. She did not like Talking Man’s voice at all. I saw her give him a startled look, then a cold one, as she went about wiping the event from her memory. She was really good at that, breezing on by things she didn’t like.

Jude and I had discovered one use for Talking Man’s urgent monotone. It was easy to induce dementia in him by making incomplete jerks of varying lengths on his vocal cord so that he’d only speak fragments of his stock phrases, which you could interrupt at random until he sounded ready for the white jacket with the long sleeves tied up at the back. This game had limited amusement value and Jude and I indulged in it only when flagging and war-weary and vulnerable to hilarity. I yanked Talking Man’s ring pull in jerks. ‘ATT-’ … ‘-DOWN BE-’ … ‘-HANDS ON-’ etc. We started yelling at each other.

‘Make me a peanut butter sandwich now!’

‘Have you done your homework!’

‘No!’

‘What’s for supper!’

‘Ask Mummy!’

‘Ask her yourself!’

‘Dismissed!’

‘Okay!’

‘Shut up!’

Jude and I are only fifteen months apart, and in spite of ourselves, I guess, we have a twin mentality, which time and distance cannot take away. Those are the facts. Jude likes to say from time to time, ‘You were a mistake. You were not supposed to happen.’

Considering I am not my parents’ last born, I do not take this seriously. I came too soon, okay, I can deal with that. I let him have his fun, though. I let him think I am slightly alarmed, but I am not. I have doubts about many things but I am absolutely sure that I was born out of love, despite my affinity for wartime.

Jude and I were steeped in World War II, although we were born some fifteen years after it ended. Knowing about the war gave me a sense of distinction, as if I, too, had suffered and overcome, emerging with my own badge of courage. I knew it as a black-and-white time, a place of shadows and relentless drizzle and austerity, of necessary violence and amazing resilience, a world in bold focus. I was there and Jude was with me.

Now I am in the room full of clocks where the voice calls out, WAKE UP! MOVE ALONG! HONEY, IT’S TIME!

I look at Action Man in 1999 and connect only with the name; everything else is strange to me. The packaging screams its gaudy colours of fire and blood and tropical locations, having all to do with fantasy and nothing to do with the high stakes and redemption that we played for. Even the man looks different, rubbery and matte-finished, with a sunbed tint and the vain five-o’clock shadow of the gigolo, not of the man suffering sleep deprivation and high anxiety. The men are marketed now under different names, clamorous titles of hollow intensity: ‘THE BOWMAN!’ ‘ROLLER EXTREME!’ ‘AGENT 2000!’ ‘SKY DIVER!’ ‘CRIMEBUSTER!’ ‘OPERATION JUNGLE!’ ‘SURF RESCUE!’ They have special vehicles: GYRO COPTER, and POLAR MISSION TURBO 4x4 fires as you drive! Mission cards are included and a disclaimer is written on the boxes, in more demure print: ‘Action Man™ does not identify with any known living person.’

Picking up these packages in the toy department, pretending to be shopping for a son or nephew, I feel a little scornful and superior. But what do I know about war? I crave the old me. Now I miss things like decision and certainty, beginnings and endings. In grown-up life, there are few demarcations. It is a great battlefield with constantly shifting fronts, that’s how I see it. Where, for instance, do I end and Jude begin? When does childhood end? No one ever said anything.

We were all corralled by our parents into watching a Steinbeck dramatization one evening in extreme youth, probably The Grapes of Wrath, and we lay on the floor in front of the TV stunned, literally, by the Great Depression. Everyone in the drama wandered about wearing skimpy, threadbare clothing and droopy expressions, speaking in defeated monotones, going to sleep on hard floors after a meal of one bulbous parsnip. The mother woke up the children at five in the morning, nudging them into readiness for another cotton-picking day. ‘Honey,’ she said to each one of them, followed by a gloomy pause, ‘it’s time.’ This scene happened at least eight times in the drama. My sister and I were sniggering wrecks by bedtime, hardly able to negotiate the stairs for hilarity. Waking up for school from then on we would say to each other, ‘Honey.’ BIG PAUSE. ‘It’s time.’

1914–1918. 1939–1945. I marvelled at a world at war and I could not fathom anything but conflict, beginning and ending with shocking decisiveness. I could not imagine the home front. I could not picture any casual activity at all. Surely shops were empty and gardens overgrown and any person without a gun in foreign fields could only stand on a rooftop with a helmet and torch or sit fretting by a window in a darkened house, straggly-haired and wide-eyed with grief and worry but steeled by virtue. Films, therefore, that showed the truth – that is, some semblance of normality going on at home while battles raged – were downright distracting to me.

‘I don’t understand, Jude. Why are they in a restaurant? Jude, why is she laughing? Jude, when is this happening? What is going on?’

Jude did not always answer me, at least not right away. Sometimes he would answer me several hours from the time I asked a question, or even the next day. I was used to this. That time, for instance, Jude came back from one of his Robin Hood sorties to the sweetshop. Jude stole sweets with his friends and shared them out at home. I found this diligent generosity poignant. So Jude said to me suddenly, passing me a red fruit gum, my favourite, ‘He is on leave. He is home recovering from a wound. She is hysterical due to war. It is not really a happy laugh.’

‘Oh,’ I said. ‘Okay, thanks.’

I always knew which conversation he was resurrecting. I just did.

We were leaving home, where we were born, and moving to my dad’s country, where he was born, and we were sailing there on the SS Pushkin. We packed. Action Man packed. Jude decided we had to be a bit ruthless and thin out the equipment and the wardrobe. We could not take everything with us, so we made packages to sell to Jude’s friends. I did not know any girls in my convent school who played with Action Man; it was not a suitable marketplace. Besides, a convent does not encourage the entrepreneur.

Jude and I took shirt cardboard from Dad’s drawer and sewed on items of uniform, ironing the clothing first of all. The tunic would be displayed just so, one arm flung out and the other laid across the chest at an angle. The trousers we attached by two stitches and set in profile, the waistband tucked under the skirting of the jacket. Jude had stronger fingers and he stitched the shoes below the trousers and attached the hat or helmet above the jacket collar, where the head would be. The accessories were arrayed to one side, under the outstretched arm: gun, belt, pouch, water bottle, etc. There might be extras of our own design such as a book, a hanger, real braces with snaps, undies, or a vest. This gave the package real distinction. Jude then wrote out prices – £1.10, £1.70, etc. – and some slogan in eye-catching lettering: ‘MAKE YOUR MAN THE SMARTEST IN THE NEIGHBOURHOOD!’ for instance. He even supplied stars at the bottom of the cardboard display sheet which you could collect and redeem against further purchases.

‘But Jude,’ I said, ‘what will we give away? We are taking the rest of the stuff with us. And we won’t even be here.’ I had visions of irate schoolboys clutching stars and yelling our names accusingly, forcing their way through a crowded quayside where the SS Pushkin was docked. But Jude waved all objections aside simply by looking at me with his slow gaze and not answering. In a finishing touch, we covered each cardboard sheet with cellophane and Jude took the packages with him to school.

I had an idea we could sell Talking Man. He could be marketed as a sort of special business extra – Casualty Man. Because mostly you would not want to sacrifice your best men in a scene with a lot of extras, and it was realistic to have strewn bodies, it would be a bonus to have a Casualty Man just for the sake of verisimilitude. I said we could advertise Talking Man right away as the FREE GIFT with stars, which would solve that little deception in one stroke. People would know what they were aiming for and it might even quicken sales.

Jude said, ‘I’ll think about it.’ This meant no.

What should I do with Talking Man? He was too pathetic to take with us and to me he suggested unmarked graves and dead men in transport ships, only recognizable thanks to identity bracelets. I thought of dockside welcoming committees, wailing women and stoical fathers with bleeding hearts and stone-cold corpses under shrouds on stretchers. And so I left Talking Man behind, accidentally on purpose. Forgive me, Talking Man, Ugly Man, One Foot, Enemy, Traitor, LMF Man, Shell-Shock Man, Missing in Action Man, Transvestite Man, Misfit Man – over and out. Au revoir, old thing; cheerio, farewell, goodbyee.

Jude is a foreign correspondent now.

I had a dream recently that I was on assignment with him. Real Action Men now. We are running in a crouched position in the water, along the edge of a river. We have automatic rifles. I am thrilled and I feel safe. My brother is a war correspondent and he cannot be killed. He fires at snipers while we scamper along but misses intentionally, signalling to them merrily. I am charged with pride. I glance back at the snipers and see in their faces a calculated pretence of gratitude. They do not care that Jude spared them and suddenly I know they will shoot him. I need to warn him but it is too late. They shoot me. My face is falling into the water, I fall slowly. Oh-oh. My back feels hot.

‘Jude, am I hit? Jude, am I?’

Jude says, ‘No. No.’

‘Oh, I think so,’ I say, smiling a little. ‘Yes, I think so, Jude.’

I am aware of the coming oblivion, the terrible loneliness of death, and I see this reflected in Jude’s eyes as I fall into his arms. I know we are too far from help. His look is grave, wary; he is speechless with impending loss, although his actions are careful and practical, plugging the exit wounds with his fingers, supporting my drooping head, as if in not recognizing death rushing toward me, he can prevent even this.

Jude has a knack of choosing to investigate a place that is about to be torn apart by hostilities, a place rife with fanatics and con men. He has a tendency to stand up in press conferences and ask provocative questions in the most unassuming way, with gravity and charm. He is probing and brave and he rallies people to him. I hope his charm will protect him. I hope his charm is bulletproof.

I watch him walk away from me after sharing a drink on the eve of an assignment and I note the loping strides he takes, even though he is not a tall man. I note his head tilted to one side slightly, tilted in thought, and that he moves away at a pace never faster than ambling, although I know his bags are not packed and he leaves in less than three hours. To my surprise, I think of Talking Man. I imagine I hold the ring pull of his speech cord and the farther Jude walks from me, the longer and tauter the cord becomes. I must hold tight because if I let go, Jude will find himself, I envisage, rooted to the spot, and with the release of the tension he will feel real fear for once, and there will come from his mouth a vulnerable rush of speech, a babble of strange words, and he will be lost.

Wherever he is, and no matter what, even flying gunfire and so on, Jude calls me on the telephone when he is reporting from a war-torn place. Wherever he is. He might ask me a sporting question. How is my team doing? Who scored? He might send me on an errand. Please water my plants. Please call my office. Please prune the peony bush. He might describe the meal he just ate, his room, or some arresting vision he has seen in the strange place he is in. This time, though, I have not heard from him in twenty-three days. I wake up sometimes in the middle of the night. I am wide awake, my heart is hammering, my throat parched, my teeth aching from clamping my jaw shut in fitful sleep. I call out his name and I ask, ‘Where are you?’ I say it a second time, more quietly, ‘Where are you?’

I am in the room full of clocks and now there is no voice, just ticking. It’s okay. I’m holding tight, I won’t let go.

Angels’ Share

My dad is really grumpy now. It happened somewhere back on the road, sometime between his slouching into the driver’s seat and the end of this fifteen-minute journey from our summer cottage to the next village. I don’t know. Maybe he spotted Indians in the hills. Maybe he felt our little wagon train was under threat and we are far, far from any army outpost. Rescue is not likely. He won’t say a thing about it, though, to my mother or to me, his sole passengers. He is a tight-lipped man. Being provider and protector is one devil of a job in a big country, I can see that.

It’s a fine afternoon and the sky is a slaphappy blue but I wish there were a slight breeze, just enough to ruffle the leaves a little, enough to break up the menace of a still, hot day. I want to open the window but my dad would not like this, so I don’t. If you open the window, the air conditioning in the car, one of the few features he knows how to operate without having to ask anyone, will not work properly. I would rather have real air play over my face, but I try not to think about it. I try not to feel tyrannized by air conditioning. We are nearly there. I hope I will not be sick. I feel hot and cold and somewhat nauseous and the tension level in the car is high, pressing on my temples, making my heart race. My mother is looking out of her window and she says something in febrile, purposeful tones. She is always ready to dispel gloom.

‘I just saw the most beautiful bird!’ she says, or something like that. We are nearly there. The Indians are on the warpath and this last stretch of road seems endless to me, fraught with danger. I am unarmed. Dad won’t teach me how to use a gun because I am a girl and it is unseemly and he thinks I won’t need it. He will protect me. I hope so.

I wish he’d say something. I wish I were a boy. Then maybe we would not be taking this sissy journey to the chemist for a herbal remedy for depression and my dad would not be so mad at me.

I could be Doc Holliday. That would be very good. I have a deadly disease and I deal with it in a manly way. I have no time for it. It does not diminish me. There will be no gauzy visions of angels, no lingering goodbyes. I retch and splutter grudgingly into squares of white linen. Goddamnit, there goes another hanky. Pitch it into the fireplace. Good shot.

My woman gives me that boring look, her eyes sparkling with fear and pity.

‘Stop that! Get out! Leave me alone!’

I reach for the whisky and I don’t bother with a glass. It is possible I drink too much. Never mind. As long as I can shoot straight. As long as I can stand up for my friends and walk an unswerving line to the O. K. Corral. On that day, I’ll be wearing my finest, no fraying cuffs.

There’s a knock on the door. Here comes Wyatt. He leans against the door and walks over to the bedside table and picks up my whisky bottle, meaning, this much already? It’s only eleven A.M. We don’t speak, though. Don’t worry, Wyatt. I’ll be there. He knows that. I cough.

‘See a doctor.’

‘No doctors.’

‘Get some rest,’ he says, heading for the door.

Dad just spoke.

‘What?’ I say. ‘Sorry, what?’

‘We are not going to any other shops. Just the chemist. I’ll stay in the car. You have ten minutes.’

I start singing in my head, the tune from the Sturges film Gunfight at the O.K. Corral. O-KAAAY … co – RAAL! O-KAAAY … co – RAAAAL! I almost sing it aloud. I want to, because it might make my dad laugh, but I worry that for once it won’t, that he won’t join in and I’ll feel bad, worse than I do already. The song rises, then dies in my chest and I miss my chance and that’s the hell of this thing, this sissy, crackpot, sneaky disease which is not okay, like consumption with its angry, show-off blood on wads of linen.

‘Jem?’

‘Yes?’

‘Did you hear what I said?’

I can see Dad’s eyes looking at me in the rearview mirror. He has wild brows and his eyes are narrowed, weather-beaten lines running from the corners toward his temples. He is a handsome man in an unruly way and he has a gunslinger’s gaze. This comes from years of squinting into a high sun and into duststorms and sharp night winds. It comes from a perpetual state of wariness and the need to see around things and be ready at all times. Anything can happen but you must stay cool. You have to master the distant look and know how to forage the horizon for looming dangers such as wild beasts, Apaches, and other gunslingers with sharp, squinty vision who might be on your trail.

When my dad talks to me, the little muscles around his eyes bunch up, giving him that gunslinger look. I have the distinct sensation he is not having a good time having to make words, having to speak at all. It’s the way he is and you have to get used to it. His vision is acute, he is the only one in the family who doesn’t need glasses.

‘We are not going to any other shops – just the chemist.’

‘Right.’ My dad looks at the road now.

I practise a gunslinger squint. I can see my reflection in the window, which I keep closed due to air conditioning, and my face is dappled with tree leaves and other passing things, but I can see my eyes. I look silly, because a gunfighter cannot wear glasses and look cool. A good cowboy does not wear specs. I think about those crazy glasses you have to look through at the optician’s, your chin resting in a cup. They are like the periscope sights that a U-boat commander needs to spot enemy vessels. The optician slips different lenses into the apparatus with maddening speed and he keeps saying in bored tones, ‘Better or worse? Better or worse?’ until I want to scream and I am so confused and pressured by him, I stumble out with eyeglasses of magnifying strength. I can spot spiders several paving stones away, but people look spooky. No one should have to see in such gory detail.

Better or worse? I asked myself each time I was put on a new medication. New medications and higher and higher doses. Better or worse? I asked myself, my heart thudding, hallucinating kaleidoscopic visions, sweating through the chic French pyjamas I wore because I felt so cold, soaking my white linen sheets, bringing towels back to bed, scared and ashamed after vomiting into the toilet on the hour through the night. This is a good medication. In small doses it is not always therapeutic. It is definitely helping you and I think you should not keep going on and off it, says the doctor. It is working.

Okay. Cool.

Dad is looking at me again in the mirror. Now what? Nothing. He looks at me this way because he is not all that wild about me right now, the crazy, drugged-up daughter, and also because he is a cowboy and that is the way they look at people. I used to be a cowboy, too. Dad and me in the Wild West, stalking the main street, bringing home the vittles for Maw, not before sliding onto bar stools, our packages falling around our feet.

‘What’ll it be?’

‘Mâcon-Villages,’ I say.

My dad nods and gestures with his eyes for me to repeat this to the barman. My dad does not like to speak French unless it is strictly called for.

‘A glass of Mâcon blanc, please,’ I say.

My dad drinks single malt. Doubles with a splash on the side. He hunkers down over his drink and lights a thin cigar. Thin but not skinny. His eyes slide slowly to one side or upward as he checks out the crowd, but his head hardly moves except for a slight raising of the chin, the better to draw on his cigar. We do not say much.

I know some things my dad does not know. Or care about. For instance, all Scotch malt whisky is produced in a pot still, a distillation of barley. Starch in barley is converted to sugar by virtue of a controlled germination, a process arrested in a peat kiln. Now you have malt. Malt is ground into grist and mixed with hot water in a mash tun, and the sweet liquid, the wort, is drawn off into a fermenting vat. This is now the wash. The wash is distilled into low wines and these are redistilled into raw whisky, the middle distillate with the foreshots and feints removed. It becomes Scotch when it has aged in oak for a minimum of three years. Unblended and the product of a single distillery, it is a single malt. These are the basics.

My dad favours Highland malt although he wouldn’t care to say why. He could not even tell you he specifically likes Speyside whisky. He would not want to discuss it much less hear about why it is different from Islay malt. Okay.

Something else I want to tell my dad. When the whisky is maturing for eight, twelve, fifteen, seventeen, twenty-one years, what this really means is the liquid is concentrating, breathing in the sea and the river and the heather and iodine and breathing out water, esters and alcohol into the atmosphere. In Cognac, the French call this evaporation la part des anges. The angels’ share. I love this idea. I also think it is only fair, because they must have to share a lot of worse things in the thinning ozone and I hope there are a lot of angels gathering over the Highlands, especially Speyside, over Islay and the Orkney Islands and Campbeltown and the Lowlands. I know they have cousins hovering over Cognac and Ténarèze in Armagnac and the Vallée d’Auge, where calvados is made, even wherever the marc is distilled in the wine regions, Champagne and Burgundy. In Cognac, the wine warehouse where old cognac is stored is called le paradis. A lot of angels lurk there and I wish them well.

My dad tips back the last sip of malt. He is ready to go, although I have not finished my drink. That’s okay. I have all my life to drink at my leisure and right now I am with my dad and these are good times and I want to stick with him, go when he goes, go where he goes. At heart, I am not the Doc at all, I am Joey and he is Shane and he is definitely the man to follow.

‘Let’s go. Finished?’

No. ‘Yup,’ I say, rising quickly. We saunter out.

I remember another time, another bar. Dad has Mum on one arm and me on the other. It is late and we are having a nightcap at the Ritz. I like this word ‘nightcap’, putting a cap on the night, tipping your brim at the daytime. There goes another day. Let’s call it a day.

Dad is a bit sloshed and it makes him merry and a bit unpredictable. I sense high jinks. A couple is leaving the Ritz bar as we approach it and they want to greet my dad but he has no time for them, he does not like these people. They begin to say something and there is a look that comes over them. Appeasement, ingratiation. My dad barks at them, ‘Ruff!’ Just like a dog. His hair musses even more. Mum and I fight to quell hilarity. What my dad has done is the equivalent of reaching for his six-shooter, of fluttering his trigger fingers over the holster at his hip. He is a cowboy, don’t they know that? We leave them in our wake, frozen with their mouths agape.

It is great being with my dad. These are good times I am looking back on. I wonder if they will come again soon. Some days, I doubt it. I just don’t see it. Like today, on the way to find a herbal remedy for depression with my dad looking at me suspiciously in the mirror and me fighting the silverfish in my veins and the ferocious urge to throw up all over his posh new car, which is littered, nevertheless, with Visa slips and tomato stalks and empty envelopes. The man can’t help it, he marks his territory out and I, today, these days, am the intruder. Get off my land. Come back when you are well, when you are a cowboy again and can roam with me. I don’t know you now.

Do not cry, Jem, I say to myself. Come on now, do not be a baby. Do not be a girl.

Besides looking back on good times and trying to fathom them, I write my book in my head. It is a survival book, a book of rules. It won’t be long but it will be very useful. Here is rule number one.

1. NEVER LEAVE YOUR GLASSES ON THE FLOOR.

I have discovered there is no loophole to this rule. Even if you say to yourself, okay, I have just set my specs on the floor. I see myself do it, I etch it on my memory. No way I’ll step on them or kick them across the floor. Then it happens. The phone rings and you jump right on top of them or you nap for a minute and shake awake suddenly and swivel your body off the sofa, landing your feet back on the floor. Right onto the specs, goddamnit. So that’s rule number one. Never leave your glasses on the floor. Thank you.

2. NEVER LEAVE YOUR WINEGLASS ON THE FLOOR.

Same potential disasters as above.

When we left the bar that day with our shopping bags, my dad said, ‘Let’s call home. Just in case. We don’t want to have to go out again.’

My dad has seen enough of the world and he has one vision in his mind. It is of a big sofa with a tomato snack by his side and a mess of newspapers all around him. Soon Mum will call out to him, Darling! Supper. Ah, the best moment of the day.

Right now, though, what my dad really wants to do is to chuckle over the fact we could not find truffle butter. When Mum wrote this down on our list he was gleeful. He thought this was hilarious and he was pretty determined to be right about this item not existing out there in the western world as he knows it. In the two places we tried, he made me ask for it, truffle butter being two words too girly for him to utter. At the first shop, he even waited outside, only coming in after it was clear my request had not been met. We laughed.

Before we get to lord it over Mum, my dad has to tackle the public-telephone situation.

‘Jem,’ he says, serious now, ‘we’ll try this one.’

I sigh with anticipation. This will be fun.

He pushes on the door of the nearest booth, meeting resistance.

‘Hey!’ he says. There is a lot of resistance to my dad out there in the physical world. He figures the door business out and drops a coin in after scanning all the instructions wildly and deciding to ignore them. The phone machine swallows the coin and that’s it, no joy. He thumps the machine about three times.

‘Goddamnit!’

I reach in and press coin return and check the slot. ‘Let’s try another one, Dad.’

In the next booth, I can see through the window that he is doing a lot of crazy thumping and is prepared to jump ship. I open the door and reach through the mayhem to press the button under the coin slot, right near the instruction that reads, Press after each coin entered.

‘Oh,’ he says and dials home. He looks back at me in exhilaration. He is about to reveal to Mum the sheer folly of her shopping mission. He can’t wait.

3. GIVE INSTRUCTIONS A CHANCE.

Instructions are sometimes written for those with below expected mental capacity. For instance, on a package of plasters, I read in step two, ‘Apply plaster.’ On a tube of skin salve, ‘Apply a little cream.’ Well, why not? But some instructions are useful. On page one of my video-machine booklet, it says, ‘To reduce the risk of fire or shock hazard, do not expose this equipment to rain.’ I do not know who would watch their TV and video out in a field when it is raining but never mind, this is important information for those people who are tempted. ‘Do not exceed the stated dose.’ This, I find, is important news. I remember a time, in dark days, when I was not Joey or the Doc and I was riding in cars on the way to health shops in search of herbal remedies for depression, yes, I remember a time when this was a vital instruction that I intended to ignore. I wanted very much to largely exceed the stated dose. This was exactly my plan before I decided that I did not want anyone else to wear my agnès b. clothes and that I wanted to finish the novel I was reading but mostly the look I imagined on Mum’s face at the sight of my grim and excessively dosed self on the carpet was too unbearable to contemplate. So I put off my date with death. It was a postponement I had in mind, that is all.

Strange though, I thought, my dad will be okay. He’ll get over it. When you are a cowboy, you see all kinds of things, sudden death and gruesome moments of all varieties, and you just have to endure it all. People depend on you to do this.

‘I’ll be darned,’ a cowboy might say over some gory reality, pulling a fresh cheroot from a shirt pocket, maybe tipping his hat back for a second, swiping the heat from his brow. ‘I’ll be darned. Lookee here.’

When my dad finished his gleeful phone call that day, we chuckled for some time. He bought flowers, white ones which Mum especially likes, on the way home.

‘This’ll keep her busy,’ he cracks, in that Wild West fashion. The fact is, he is crazy about her.

He walks with me. I call it a saunter. My dad has a steadfast, ruminative walk. He takes command of his space. I only ever saw him hurry once, when Mum broke her wrist badly, gardening on a slope, when she was in a state of turmoil over his moodiness. It was a terrible break and he had to drive a long way to a good hospital and I was there too, sitting in the back of the car with my broken-up mother who was making cheery comments to keep us calm, despite a lower arm that looked like bits of snapped kindling. My dad’s back, I could see, was dark with sweat and he was leaning into the steering wheel as if he could impel the vehicle onward this way, or maybe speed us into a happier time zone, a place without injury.

4. NEVER GARDEN ON A SLOPE WHEN IN A STATE OF TURMOIL.

My dad walks with me. He is gripping my neck, loosely he thinks, in a manner suggesting fellowship and affection. It feels good although his grip is a little like those sinks in the hair salon, designed to hold your head in place but actually inviting disaster, such as permanent spinal injury and wholesale numbing of the nervous system. But I like walking with my dad this way. The world is ours. No one would dare pull a gun on us, nor even call out a careless remark. Everyone wants to be us, I can tell.

But who is this man, I cannot help asking myself, who believes that a thump will make a thing function? My dad is a pummeller of dashboards, a boxer of boilers, a rattler of fax machines, telephones, turnstiles and parking meters, a walloper of drinks dispensers, a slapper of remote controls. He is the man you see stabbing a lift button eight or nine times. He is also the one kicking the lawn mower, and pulling and pushing on locked doors, wildly enough to loosen the foundations of a house. It is possible this man had children in order to operate machinery for him. Yes, I think so.

My dad is a sportswriter. He also writes children’s fiction under a pseudonym. In these books, he writes about small children organizing the world around them despite themselves, a world full of human failures, cranks and despots, some with endearing and poignant flaws, others with thunderous bad taste and hilariously inflated egos. He finds these types, these faltering embarrassing types, really funny. These are his people.

To relax, my sportswriting dad watches sports on TV. He would like to be watching TV right now and he hears my little sister’s dancing step close by.

‘Harriet!’

My sister dances in. She is five years old and taking ballet classes. She has the right build but lacks discipline. She is a little too exuberant and has no time for the formality of steps.

‘Yeee-ess?’

‘Will you pass the remote.’

‘Oh Daddy, no! There are bad gamma rays, Jem told me. And soon you will fall asleep, snore-snore-noisy! Just like at the zoo, Ben said. No, Daddy, no, no! Hello! Goodbye!’

My sister is merry and exits with pirouettes and fouettés.

‘Goddamnit!’

Ben races past, a flurry of long limbs. He is usually in a hurry and my dad is not quick enough to catch him. Nor does he always know what to say, how to get his attention. Ben is complicated. I am crazy about him and this is not a problem for me. You have to know how to get through, that’s all.

‘Hey, Jude,’ my dad calls from his prone sofa position.

Jude, who was only passing, backtracks and stands in the doorway of the living room. My brother Jude is a man of few words. He doesn’t see much point in talking a lot. He has a bagel in one hand and a book in the other.

‘Pass me the remote. Did you mow the lawn yet?’

‘Not yet,’ Jude says, unruffled, moving very slowly in the vague direction of the remote control. He picks up a magazine on the way and bites his bagel. He is easily distracted and never in a hurry.

‘JUDE!’

I am looking for Jude. There he is.

‘Ahh! Jem! Who’s my favourite child?’

‘What do you want, Dad?’

I wish I had not come in, but I want Jude. Being bossed around and doing silly tasks for your dad when wearing a holster and cowboy hat is seriously disrupting.

‘Stick ’em up!’ he says, laughing.

I would quite like to shoot him now but I can’t. Never shoot an unarmed man.

This is how it was when we were small kids. It is still a bit like this when we come home to visit, even today. We all have our own machines now and we know how to use them. We don’t ask anyone else. We laugh now mostly about my dad when he is thumping machinery with the full expectation that this will be effective. We smile and try to help out. I think he likes that. Once, though, I saw him try to light a faulty boiler with a match. I wanted to yell at him but could not. I took over the situation but I could not yell at him. He is not a kid, he is my dad.

5. ALWAYS GO TO THE LOO IF YOU THINK YOU MAY NEED TO PEE.

Here are the times when passing up on rule number five is a bad idea. (1) Settling into a cinema or theatre seat and the show is about to begin. Too late. (2) Sitting at your table in a posh restaurant and ordering wine and food. The entrée arrives. Too late. (3) Turning off the lights at night when in bed in foetal position and already half-asleep. Too late. Now you will have tortured dreams featuring gruesome toilet-bowl situations. (4) Car rides with grumpy drivers.

I want to blame my dad for this but that is not the way things work just now. In the world today, all things dark and tumultuous are down to me. My dad’s mood is definitely my fault and I cannot bear to hold up the terrible car journey, the fifteen-minute ride which my dad conveys to me with a look will be as gruelling as a forced march across all the central provinces of Canada. No, I cannot hold up the journey by asking to dash to the loo first. My dad says we are going NOW. Some people rub their hands in glee and say, Now! Others, like my dad, mean only one thing by ‘now’. Now is full of terror.

O-KAAAY … co-RAAAALL! O-KAAAAY … co-RAAALLL! I think of this, too, that my dad must believe if he thumps me, if he takes me by the shoulders and rattles my little bones, gives me a shake momentous enough to reorganize all my vital organs and charge up my circulation and spark up all the neurons and synaptic impulses in my cerebellum, that I, too, will function again. It’s a simple operation. Come back, Jem. Howdy, partner. Long time no see.

We’re there now. Parking, my dad nearly mows down two dumpy ladies wearing stretchy trousers in appalling colours, but it doesn’t even raise a chuckle in our wagon. In good times this would be a great game, using our car like a cowcatcher. Not today, though.

‘Okay. I’m waiting here. Five minutes,’ he announces, not even looking at us, reaching behind the seat for a newspaper and snapping it open at the sports pages.

Mum and I see right away that the chemist/health shop is closed. Oh-oh. Clearly they knew I was coming.

‘Let’s get ice cream,’ my mother says recklessly, not glancing back at the car.

This feels pretty dangerous. I am prickly all over.

I get a tub of coffee ice cream and my mother, almost uniquely refined in her tastes and a really great cook, opts for something truly disgusting with caramel and scary little bits all over the top. For her, this is a throwback to a happy childhood she never actually had. She looks rebellious and gleeful which is cool to behold.

Walking back to the car, I note two things. I don’t need to pee anymore. And my dad is storming toward us, his hands flapping angrily like someone has stolen the car from right under him or maybe a war has begun and we are behind enemy lines. Spotting the tubs of ice cream takes him to a point beyond fury, a place Mum and I do not want to be. I look at her. I am scared now but she smiles beautifully and makes for the car, getting in the back with me. My dad returns to the driver’s seat and tugs the door closed, but he can’t slam it because his car is posh and new and he has to be a bit careful.

‘Aren’t you sitting in front?’ he asks crossly.

‘No,’ she says, and then, more quietly, ‘Home, James.’

I feel a great whirl of hilarity in my stomach now and I look at my mother with shock and delight. I whisper, ‘Home, James’ too. I keep saying it in my head and glancing at her. We eat our ice creams all the way home. I did not get my remedy for depression, but then of course, maybe I did, for a minute or two at least, which is perhaps all a person should rightly expect, I don’t know.

6. HAVE A CATALOGUE OF JOKES OR JOKEY SITUATIONS YOU CAN HAUL UP FROM MEMORY IN DARK TIMES.

You have to work pretty hard at rule number six. Sometimes, not very grown-up jokes are the best. For instance, my brother Gus and I often look at each other across a room and thrust out our lower mandibles, curling the mouth up at the corners, adopting a crazed, wide-eyed expression. Pretty soon we are spluttering into our drinks. It only takes a second. It is not grown-up but it is very reliable for a laugh, whereas jokes about German philosophers are not.

My dad tells one or two jokes I have never understood. One of them involves fishing and gefilte fish. It goes something like this. What happened to all the herring fished out of the X sea? Well! Ha ha ha! It ends up as gefilte fish in Chicago! My dad chokes up and all the sophisticates around him quake with mirth, shoulders akimbo and so on. The second joke is about an Eskimo. My dad went up to the Arctic once to cover some sledging championships or something for Sports Illustrated and he came back with some bizarre souvenirs, such as a sealskin doll for Harriet which smelled so bad she wouldn’t touch it and I buried it in the garden for her, plus some pretty bad jokes. It seems that when Eskimos had to choose English names for themselves for legal reasons or something, they picked whatever favourite activity they had or whatever object they were close to at the time. One lady was a fan of American football and so she called herself Sophie Football. Absolutely hilarious.

Here is another joke my dad finds very funny indeed. One afternoon in late August when I was fourteen or so, I cross the kitchen of our summer cottage on my way outside and see my dad finishing a snack involving bread and tomatoes and spring onions.

‘Hey, Jem.’

I stop. Oh-oh. ‘Yup?’ Will this take long? What does he want? I am aiming to go swimming.

‘Come here.’ He crooks his finger at me. This drives me wild. Having to get closer and closer just to be sent far off to get something for him.

‘I’m here.’ I take one step closer, that’s it.

‘How much pocket money do I owe you?’

‘June July-August.’

‘I’ll flip you double or nothing.’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Come on, Jem.’ Be a man.

‘Okay then.’

I lose. My dad is so happy, he is just delirious with mirth. He goes looking for some more of his kids right away. He tries it out on Harriet and Gus and wins both times. This is one of the funniest things that has happened in the whole of my dad’s life, it seems. He tells the story for years and years. This is the kind of thing that keeps him going.

It is possible, when my dad is stuck in a queue at the supermarket or in a traffic jam, he calls up these jokes, and things improve for him right then, he feels better. You have to find your own thing. My mother saying ‘Home, James’ in a very quiet blithe voice the day we came back from our abortive trip to the chemist that summer, on a quest for some stupid herbal remedy for depression, that makes me smile, it really does, anytime I think of it.

Here is a joke. Can you be a cowboy if you are Jewish? I do not know the punchline. One day I’ll ask my dad, who is Jewish and a cowboy, maybe the only one that ever lived.

7. ALWAYS CARRY A BOOK WITH YOU.

This is a very important rule and easy to slip up on. Here is how. You say to yourself, I have carried that book with me every single day this week and never once have I had time to pull it out and read it. It is making a big fat unseemly bulge in my pocket, it is bumping up against my hip when I walk, it is weighing me down. Today I am not taking it, goddamnit. That is the day your friend is forty minutes late and you are left at the restaurant with the foot of your crossed leg swinging loose and you have studied every face and every painting in the place. That is the day your bus gets caught in a traffic jam or you end up having to take someone to the emergency room and wait four hours for the person to emerge. Always carry a book with you.

Here, though, are two times I had a book with me and it was of no use.

This was the first time. It is my turn for the emergency room. I am there because I cut my hand pretty badly and sometime between diving onto the floor of my flat in a petrified faint and getting into a cab to the hospital, I grab a novel and slip it into my coat pocket. I have paid attention to rule number seven, yes I have. I choose Le Père Goriot by Honoré de Balzac, which I am reading for the second time. But when I am in Casualty, I am too sick to read. I am too sick and too scared. The nurse tries to speed me through. He asks, ‘Why are you so cold? How did this happen?’

I don’t know, I answer. I don’t feel well. I was cutting a bagel. I say this about the bagel because I have just read in a leaflet from a bagel shop that bagel-cutting injuries are a really common occurrence. I remember the bagel legend, too. How a Jewish baker invented the bagel in 1683 to commemorate the good deed performed by King Jan III of Poland. His good deed was this: he saved Vienna from a Turkish invasion. The bread was in the shape of a stirrup due to Jan’s love of equestrianism. In Austria the word for stirrup is Buegel. The name of the shop where I found the leaflet is Angel Bagel. Where was my angel tonight? Drunk somewhere, high on single malt. Nowhere for me. The thing is, I am lying about the bagel-cutting injury.

‘What are all those other cuts?’ the nurse asks.

‘I was reaching into a cupboard and I grazed my wrist on a cheese grater, how stupid can you get?’ I say in a rush.

If my dad saw me now with my cut-up wrists, he would be really really mad at me, although he would not say a thing. He would unstrap my holster and take away my gun. He would unpin my tin star. You are not fit to ride with me, that is what he would mean to tell me. You are no longer my right-hand man.

This brings me to rule number eight.

8. WHEN YOU ARE GOING THROUGH DARK TIMES, PACK UP YOUR KNIVES AND GIVE THEM TO A FRIEND.

I mean all of them, all your knives. If you are at all inclined to slice yourself up in dark times, to pretend you are a tomato, which is an ideal fruit for testing the sharpness of filleting knives, carpet cutters, cleavers, X-acto blades, Stanley knives and safety razor blades, to watch with fascination as the blood rises to the surface in particularly sensitive zones of your body such as wrists and ankles, then rule number eight is one for you. It will mean an expensive period of shopping at Marks & Spencer for ready meals, ones with bite-sized pieces of prawn or chicken in chilli tomato sauce, for instance. Or you can buy pricey pots of tomato sauce or roasted aubergines to put on pasta. Italian clam sauces are available in small jars from the best Italian delis. Or you can just eat a lot of yogurt and nuts and mashed banana. Buy bread in small shapes, i.e., bagels, or baguette de tradition you can break off bits from. It will be all right. If you feel like eating during dark times, you will not go hungry in a house empty of knives.

The second time I paid attention to rule number seven (ALWAYS CARRY A BOOK WITH YOU) and it was of no use to me was when my dad said goodbye to me before I took a coach to the airport on my way back home after my summer holiday, the one which featured the car ride and the quest for a herbal remedy for depression.

I have already waved to my mother. I asked her not to come with me because parting between us is a wrenching business, even for five minutes or so, even if we separate on a shopping expedition or something. I know I cannot go through the airport thing with her, no.

My dad lays his big hands on my little shoulders at the coach station, my two small cases at my feet. I am pretty sure my mother will have slipped some treat into my carry-on bag and I am looking forward to finding it as soon as my dad goes. Something about his two big hands on my shoulders just now has me worried. It feels ominous, like just before Joey warns Shane in the final shoot-out about the man aiming at him from the balcony. You know Shane cannot die, but he could. He could. He comes so close.

‘Jem,’ says my dad in a lower voice than usual.

I glance at his face and then stare at his chest. ‘We have done everything we can. We love you. We don’t know what else to do anymore. You have to look after yourself now. Got your ticket, passport, enough cash?’

‘Yuh.’

‘We’ll see you in a few months. We love you.’

As I watch him walk away from me, a slightly lurching walk, heels making their mark on the ground, arms swinging a little and the hands hovering loose but ready at holster height, I think, One shot. One shot is all it would take.

No, Jem, no. Never shoot a man in the back. Don’t you remember anything?

I want to scream after him, too. I want to scream, ‘Do you love me right now, though? Do you even like me now? Do you?’ But I just get on the coach and stare out of the window into the evening through a veil of tears, and at the airport I cannot read or eat the nice treats my mother stashed for me, I am good for nothing. My dad does not love me and I am on my own, I have to look out for myself, okay. These are my first steps in that direction and all I can do is pace up and down the airport lounge and cry quietly. There are no prizes for behaviour like mine and even rule number seven is of no use to me, goddamnit. I am thinking of making a pyre of my rule book or ripping it up in tight angry irretrievable pieces to flutter over the ocean. Tomorrow maybe. And I will never watch a western again. I hate westerns now.

9. ALWAYS HAVE SOME SPORTS NEWS AT HAND FOR WHEN YOUR DAD IS IN HOSPITAL AFTER A SCARY OPERATION TO DO WITH A FATAL DISEASE.

I’ve got my sports news ready in case my dad can talk to me, even for a few seconds. There was a tumour in him, they cut it out. My dad could have done this himself. Take a shot of cognac, stuff a hanky in your mouth, polish the knife on a rock, cut it out. Like snakebite, no problem. Today I might get to speak to him. Everyone is there with my mother – Ben, Jude, Harriet and Gus, even Ben’s wife and Gus’s girlfriend, who is pregnant. They have all flocked to him from wherever they live and are running and fetching and worrying and trying to joke with Mum and making calls to the outside world. I am the only one not there. Does he know it? Does he know I am not there? I am in the outside world. I just can’t go. I cannot be there. I am on the outside, waiting for calls. Sometimes the boys explain things to me about the operation, but I do not take it in. I have the same feeling when someone is explaining an abstruse political news item to me. It is a nightmare of information. I listen and nod and hope the person will shut up soon. I do not take it in. I tell myself, I’ll work it out later, I’ll find out for myself what this all means.

I have not washed properly in five days, I only splash at the sink. I eat bread and cheese and stay up watching videos of westerns, way into the night, when it is only afternoon for my dad and the family. I watch The Gunfighter, Gunfight at the O.K. Corral, My Darling Clementine, and Shane. Shane is my favourite of all time.

‘He’d never have been able to shoot you if you’d seen him!’

‘Bye, little Joe.’

‘He’d never even have cleared the holster, would he, Shane? … Shane? Shane! Come back! … Bye, Shane!’

Finally, Mum puts my dad on the phone.

‘Hey, Dad.’

‘You are going to be fine,’ he says.

What?

‘YOU-are-going-to-be JUST-FINE.’

‘You mean you are going to be just fine, right? You. How are you, Dad?’

‘Everything is going to be all right, you are going to be fine, we are going to be—’

He does mean me.

‘Dad?’

‘Jem, you are—’

‘Dad? Are you okay?’

‘I am okay! I am o-KKKAAY—’

I clasp the receiver even tighter and jump up from a sitting position. I join in. ‘O-KKAAAY … co-RRAAAL, o—’ but my mother has taken the phone from him and I don’t know now. I do not know if he was really singing the tune from Gunfight at the O.K. Corral or not.

Mum stays on the line for only a second or two, enough time to say she’ll call back later or tomorrow and I hang up and sit in the dark room and feel cut off and panicky and manacled by this question. I want to know if my dad was doing the tune from the western with Burt Lancaster and Kirk Douglas playing Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday. I need to know. And I wonder if the whisky-soaked angels are still hanging out with my dad, if they are hovering over the hospital, getting all confused, some of them keeling over suddenly and looking surprised and silly. What is going on here? That must be morphine! Some of them want to go, but the big-cheese angel says, Hang in there, this man is a gunfighter and he will get up to pour single malt another day. That’s right, guys, I think. Hang in there.

That is rule number ten. HANG IN THERE.

I practise it, the gunslinger squint.

Hang in there.

Party Spirit

I am eight years old and I am home from school. I’m at my first convent, the one where the nuns are Irish. Harriet comes with me now, she is five. I have to look out for her because she is a little wild and gets scuffy knees and her fair hair flies about in an unruly fashion. It’s like angel hair. Despite her likeness to an angel, the nuns prefer her to be neat and not run around like a wild thing. They like neat angels at my convent. So I look out for Harriet at my school, I keep my eye on her, in the playground, in the echoing corridors and hallways and in the high-ceilinged dining room, places where there are dangers for Harriet, things such as stones and puddles, sharp bits of moulding and hard tiled floors. I saw her fly right into a French window once, as if she could dance right through it into the courtyard. Harriet feels that if you can see through glass, you can skip right through it to the other side, why not. I have quite a lot of tolerance for this behaviour in my sister because I know how she thinks. She is high-spirited. The nuns say this, ‘Your sister is high-spirited,’ meaning can’t you stop her from running all over the place, especially out of bounds. The grounds at my convent are pretty extensive and you can easily stray into out-of-bounds areas, especially if you are Harriet and pay no attention to instructions regarding out-of-bounds areas. Never mind. We are home now, we got here safely and she is out of my hands for a while. Harriet dashes off to find Mum, who is probably with Gus. She drops things on the way, hat, gloves, satchel. Even in summer we wear gloves at school, white ones. Harriet does not like a lot of extra haberdashery. Angels are not keen on heavy clothes, I guess.

I need a snack. Oh great, binoculars. Mum has been to Zetland’s. This is a bakery and they make fantastic rolls that resemble pairs of binoculars. When Jude and I are World War II British commandos, we use them as binoculars until we get tired and need a snack, whereupon we eat them.

I take half a binocular. Ben is standing near the kitchen table, his feet crossed, one of them bent at the ankle and splayed out to the side. I like the way he tangles up. He has one hand in the nut and raisin bowl which Mum always puts out for him as he is crazy for nuts and raisins and likes something you can eat steadily but is already in small pieces.

He is looking at me expectantly.

‘Hey,’ I say. ‘Hey, Ben.’

‘Hey,’ he answers, with staring eyes.

Ben is not ready to tell me what he wants to tell me. Okay. I am patient. I decide on the other binocular half and sit down at the long white oak table, on the chair I learned to make bows on, so I could tie my own shoes. We all did this. We sat on the floor while Mum cooked and she’d tie a shoelace on the strut of a chair back and we’d tie and untie until we got it right. She’d feed us little slivers of vegetable or something while we practised.

Eating my binocular and waiting for Ben to come out with it, I think about finishing up my homework in time to watch The Wizard of Oz with everyone tonight. This film is free, in other words, we do not have to pull out time from the bank to watch it. We are only allowed one hour of television a day and have to save up for things, except free things such as The Wizard of Oz or To Kill a Mockingbird or The Grapes of Wrath. The Grapes of Wrath is an old film and pretty depressing. I didn’t really want to watch the whole thing. It featured scrawny types at campsites surrounded by horrible dilapidated vehicles spilling rickety belongings and little kids in flimsy clothing. They huddled around fires and ate sloppy food out of tin saucers and kept driving to different sites, working all day and getting more and more depressed and saying brave things in short gloomy sentences. I had to stay and watch though, because Dad was sitting up on the sofa, instead of lying down, meaning, this is an important viewing experience, Jem. You stay.

Other free programmes are documentaries about Nazis. Now I cannot look at anyone wearing up and down stripy pyjamas. Clearly they have not watched as many documentaries about Nazis as I have.

Here is one thing my dad always asks me whenever we watch documentaries about Nazis.

‘Jem?’

I break out of my reverie, which has to do with wanting to play Action Man with Jude right now and not watching a gruesome documentary featuring death.

‘Yes?’

‘You’re not making the sign of the cross or anything like that at school, are you?’

He gives me a stern look, his dark brown irises fixing me from the corners of his eyelids, the skin bunching up there for emphasis. How can I say yes to a look like that, daring me to say yes but expecting no? My dad has brown eyes and all the rest of us are various shades of blue. At school, they said in biology that women carry the dominant genes for eye colour. Mum has blue eyes. My dad is Jewish. My mum is Protestant. I am wondering who carries the dominant genes for religion.

‘No, Dad.’

I do, though.

Sometimes, when no one is looking, I make the sign of the cross. In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Ghost, ah-men. Then we learned to say Holy Spirit, not Ghost, due to modernism. I liked Ghost better. Never mind. I watch the girls do this at assembly and I never join in. I am Jewish, can’t they see that? It’s cool, being different. On my own though, sometimes I try it out, this cross in the air, touching forehead and shoulders and heart, just to see, and it feels spooky, like lying or stealing, neither of which I am good at, betraying myself with blushes and a racing heart and a stark look in my eyes. My mum is a Protestant but I am pretty sure she does not do any of that stuff, signs of the cross and genuflection and so on. I don’t think she needs to because she may not come from Earth like we do, she may come from elsewhere, where they do things their own way. I’ve been watching her closely and I am on the case. I am gathering clues all the time.

‘Ben?’ Come on, Ben.

‘Yeh?’

‘Do you think they’ll let me stay up to see the whole thing? Do you?’

‘Oh yes,’ says Ben. ‘It’s a classic. You know.’

Oh. I am beginning to worry there may be Nazis in this film because besides being a free film, I will not, it seems, have to go to bed in the middle of it. This is the other impediment to sheer viewing pleasure in our house. Bedtime. I have huddled on the sofa with Jude, watching some war film not classic enough, such as The Great Escape, not even able to concentrate, knowing bedtime was a few paces away, listening out for the gentle swish of my mother and those two words from the doorway, ‘Jem. Bedtime.’

Once, when my dad was watching with us, I tried to argue, to fight for my rights. Most kids I knew stayed up all hours and there was no TV rationing. They did not have to smuggle sweets into their homes, either, no, and they could even read Enid Blyton books, forbidden in our house due to prejudiced views expressed in dodgy writing.

‘Please can I stay up?’

‘“May I,” do you mean? Anyone can stay up,’ my mother says gently.

‘Yes. May I? Please.’

‘Oh, darling. It will come round again.’ I hate this. Promises to do with days and times beyond contemplation. You’ll feel better soon. It’ll be over before you know it. We can buy another one. I’ll be back. All these assurances without places and dates are no good to me.

‘When though? What if I go blind? What if I do not have a TV later in life and the film has come round again?’

‘Jem,’ my dad says, sensing hysteria.

‘What if I just don’t notice it is on? What if I don’t even want to watch it then? What if I’m too busy or I have a TV and it is broken? What if—’

‘JEM!’

Then my mother speaks. She is standing in the doorway, she is leaning into the frame, her head tilted to one side, her hands clasped loosely in front. ‘Jem. Bedtime.’ And suddenly all the noise goes out of the world and bed seems like the best place to go and I don’t get this movie anyway. Where does all the fresh dark earth go when they are digging out the tunnels, where does all that wood come from, and the material for the uniforms? The guy going blind and the one with claustrophobia are a bit depressing and I am tired and I am going to bed. Jude, who is lying on his side, getting his usual sideways view of the TV, will explain it all to me tomorrow. He will tell me the good bits I missed, if he is in the mood. Mum holds out a hand for me, but I can’t take it right away due to a cross feeling within. I am cross with my dad who is pretending to shoot a machine gun.

‘Quick! Run for it! I’ll cover you!’ He is creased up with mirth but I ignore him, I do my best. Bloody.

I take Mum’s hand at the foot of the stairs and it’s the best grip in the world. It’s loose, not too loose, firm not tight. She has long fingers and incredibly silky skin and the temperature is just right, cool not cold, and the feel is dry not rough, never rough. I take in all these details about her hand and the way she holds mine because I am not crazy for holding hands; I get squirmy and bad-tempered, I feel my fingers getting squashed or my elbow twisted and wrenched in the grip of most people. But I could hold my mum’s hand and never let go, and stay happy, I know it. I may not believe in angels, I find the whole subject confusing. At the convent, for instance, I remember when my friend Christina’s little brother died, having fallen out of a window playing hide and seek, the mother superior said at assembly, ‘Now let us all pray for Julian who is with the saints and angels in heaven.’ Then Christina cried, the first time I saw her do so, and I was mad at the nuns, all of them. No. No. He is not with the saints and angels in heaven.

Holding my mother’s hand, I wonder if angels can sneak inside people, because I think this is what it must feel like to hold hands with one. It’s a weird thought, but as I said, I have these suspicions about my mother.

‘Jem,’ Ben says, ready to make an announcement.

I look at him, showing him I am ready too.

‘I dreamed about Mummy and in the dream she was a witch and she looked like Cruella De Vil in 101 Dalmatians. You know.’ His eyes have a spooked look.

‘Whoa,’ I say.

‘Yeah.’

‘Bloody!’

‘Yeah.’

I try to look spooked and nervous too, because I do not want to disappoint Ben. I know that a big part of having a gothic imagination like Ben’s is making other people nervous about your gothic view of things, and I do not want to let my brother down, especially since it cost him so much to tell me this news. I even take in and let out a big breath and gaze at the floor and hold off finishing my binocular, which I’d really like to be eating. But I do not want to hear any more from Ben. Our mother does look like Cruella De Vil, if Cruella suddenly became a lovely character, and she even has that shock of white at her forehead, a zap of lightning almost, in a black sky. I like it. It’s cool. So this Cruella business does not strike me as at all gothic, but the witch part is a bit worrying and if my mother does strange witch type things in this dream, I do not want the details, no thank you.

‘Whoa. Bloody,’ I repeat. ‘Ben, I am going to do my homework so I can see the film with you, okay?’

‘Sure,’ he says, still giving me a spooky look. ‘Okay.’

I need to change out of my uniform and as I push open the door of the room I share with my sister, I get ready for Harriet to leap out at me from somewhere, from the cupboard or behind the door. This is something she really enjoys doing and I always act really scared so she can have a good time. Today Harriet does not fly at me. She must have grown bored waiting for me as I was so long downstairs with Ben.

I put on jeans and one of Jude’s old rugby tops. I like to wear Jude’s old clothes. I plan to do my homework outside at the wrought-iron table on the terrace with all the cherub statues standing all around. Statuary, Mum calls it. Some of the statues are not cherubs but naked grown-ups carrying sheaves of wheat and scythes and things or carrying nothing at all but looking wistful, leaning their weight on one leg. I like doing my homework there.

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