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Feed My Dear Dogs
Emma Richler
A warm, dark novel of family, distance and time from the author of the much-loved, highly-praised, prize-nominated Sister Crazy.Feed My Dear Dogs begins in outright observational comedy and slides into ever darker regions, while never losing its sharp tongue and wicked wit. Jem Weiss is the middle child of five and experiences childhood more acutely, more joyously and more entertainingly than most. The five Weiss siblings crackle with intelligence, camaraderie, competitiveness and individuality; they have their own running gags, jargon, skits and power struggles; they share a bearlike but adored father and an unflappable and omnicompetent mother.Jem's life hums with Shackleton and supernovas, boxing and cowboys, binocular doughnuts and naval underwear and at the centre of this galaxy of delights is her shining family. As Jem runs her childhood memories through her fingers, she entrances the reader with sharp observations, casual wisdom and tender wit. However, there's always something else looming, and now and again it sneaks up with some pressing tidings to impart – a child's terror at the prospect of moving on, growing up, leaving home.
EMMA RICHLER
Feed My Dear Dogs
Dedication (#ulink_a8543f47-d865-5aec-9f91-b4da85c196a4)
For Daniel, Noah, Martha & Jacob, and for my mother, my muse, and in memory of my father, with love.
Epigraph (#ulink_27e15f45-69ea-59d5-bb53-18031a36e513)
Every Space that a Man views around his dwelling place,
Standing on his own roof, or in his garden on a mount,
such Space is his Universe.
And on the verge the Sun rises and sets,
the Starry Heavens reach no further;
And if he moves his dwelling-place, his heavens also move
Wher’er he goes.
WILLIAM BLAKE
Tamar Rahmani,
for many things
Contents
Cover (#ucc7eba0c-bbff-5297-9e21-fbac601dc6b9)
Title Page (#uafbee0c1-cd3d-5c1e-891a-4e624730c6a9)
Dedication (#u3c41effc-a057-5c7e-a476-3608bb34b5aa)
Epigraph (#u1ebee4de-bd76-5fe8-a4f1-d0730a3ad832)
One (#uca211b9d-2c4a-52bd-a147-d150296fcc53)
Two (#ueffca195-1d0c-57b1-aeac-f28a05d63e44)
Three (#uf28e1fad-9645-5bf3-9014-1d5337183aea)
Four (#u0f05cada-fadf-592a-805e-4d05ea4acc12)
Five (#litres_trial_promo)
Six (#litres_trial_promo)
Seven (#litres_trial_promo)
Eight (#litres_trial_promo)
Nine (#litres_trial_promo)
Ten (#litres_trial_promo)
Eleven (#litres_trial_promo)
P.S. Ideas, Interviews & Features … (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)
Q and A with Emma Richler
Life at a Glance (#litres_trial_promo)
A Writing Life (#litres_trial_promo)
Top Ten Books (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Book (#litres_trial_promo)
On the Novelist in His Cavern, His Vision and Blindness
Read On (#litres_trial_promo)
Have You Read?
If You Loved This, You Might Like … (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)
Keep Reading (#litres_trial_promo)
Praise (#litres_trial_promo)
Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
ONE (#ulink_485d7b59-8bfc-592a-a2e7-1e961eb07d9a)
Jude always said a kid is supposed to get acclimatised to the great world and society and so on, and just as soon as he can bash around on his own two pins, but the feeling of dread and disquiet I experienced on leaving home in my earliest days was justified for me again and again on journeys out, beginning with the time Zachariah Levinthal bashed me on the head for no clear-cut reason with the wooden mallet he had borrowed from his mother’s kitchen. It did not hurt much, as I was wearing my Sherlock Holmes deerstalker hat with both ear flaps tied up neatly in a bow on top, providing extra protection from onslaught, but I must say it struck me that Zach, who was nearly a whole year and a half older than me, same age as my brother Jude in fact, Zach was the one in need of a few pointers regarding recommended behaviour in the great world and society at large. Never mind. The way I saw it, he was just testing out his enthusiasm for tools and surfaces, and, possibly, exploring a passing fancy for a future in architecture or construction work, and in my household, enthusiasms were encouraged, which is why I regularly went to and fro with a handful of 54mm World War I and World War II soldiers in my pocket for recreation purposes, with no one to stop me, although I am a girl and expected, in some circles, to have more seemly pursuits. You have to allow for enthusiasms, you never know where they may lead, so I knew to keep my composure the day Zach hit me on the head with a meat pulveriser. No. Tenderiser. So there you are, that is what I mean, it depends on how you look at things, how bashing away at a piece of beefsteak with a wooden hammer can induce a quality of tenderness in meat is just as surprising, perhaps, as my not protesting the risk of brain damage I incurred at the age of eight or so, instead, forgiving Zach on account of his enthusiasms and general spirit of endeavour.
I think all stories are like this, about looking out for a way to be in life without messing up in the end, a way to be that feels like home, and if you bear this in mind, it’s easy to see some situations as OK which might strike you otherwise as downright odd, and that story about Francis of Assisi and the crow is just one example of many. At the latter end of his life, Francis befriends a crow who is fiercely devoted, sitting right next to Francis at mealtimes, and traipsing after him on visits to the sick and leprous, and following his coffin when he died, whereupon the crow lost heart and simply fell apart, refusing to eat and so on, until he died also. Now, if you nip along the street or go about the shopping with a crow at your heels, you are not likely to make friends in a hurry, because it is odd behaviour, and not recommended. Unless you are a saint, in which case it is OK. So that’s one thing. The other OK-not-OK thing in this story is how that crow did not choose to make life easy and fall in love with his or her own kind, another crow with whom that bird might have a bright future and bring up little crows and so on. No. For the crow, Francis was home, that’s all there is to it, it is OK.
This is also how it goes for le petit prince in the book of that name by M. Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, a story about a small boy in a single suit of fine princely haberdashery, living on an asteroid with a volcano, a baobab tree and a rose, and having nothing much to do but watch the sunset. In the scheme of things, it is not so odd that he falls in love with the rose, and leaves his tiny planet in a fit of lovesickness, taking advantage of a migration of wild birds for his journey, hanging on to them, as it shows in the watercolour, by way of special reins. The prince finally lands on Earth wherein he has a shady encounter with a snake who has murder in mind, albeit concealed in a promise to this small lovestruck and visionary boy, a promise of return, a single ticket home by way of the eternal worlds.
Upon landing, the prince asks, Where did I fall, what planet is this?
I remember everything.
Everything and nothing is strange. It depends how you look at it.
Zach, now, is something in law, Jude says, although I keep forgetting the details, because all I can think is how Zach found a place where everything ought to come out right, and where even hammers crash down upon suitable surfaces for the tenderising of felony and injustice, and I hope he is happy, I hope so, though I don’t know, as I do not go in for telephones and letters these days, not now I have fallen out with society and the great world, but still I have enthusiasms, ones I pursue in low-lit rooms, with my handful of soldiers here, entering my world in unlikely ways, it might seem, to strangers.
October 1935. Joseph Goebbels issues a decree forbidding the inscription of names of fallen Jewish soldiers on war memorials, men who fell for the sake of younger men who are now getting busy scratching out offensive Jewish names from tablets of stone with what you might call corrupt and frenzied enthusiasm.
Me, I turn away and weep.
Where did I fall, what planet is this?
I hear it, I see it, and I was not there, it’s a vision. I remember everything.
Under the influence of gravity, stars in orbit in an elliptical galaxy such as ours are always falling, always falling without colliding, and the greater the mass, the greater the attraction, and the faster a thing falls, the faster it moves in orbit, so the Moon, for one, is always falling towards Earth, but never hits it, and I like to think William Blake, b.1757, d.1827, would appreciate this, as he was very interested in fallen man, and for William, memory is merely part of time, an aspect of the fall, and the visionary worlds are the true regions of reminiscence, a realm wherein every man is uncrowned king for eternity and there is no need for memorials because, so he wrote, Man the Imagination liveth for Ever.
I hate to say it, but William sounds like a man talking himself out of reality and hard knocks and brushes with dark times, a place where, for him, memory and vision meet in the most colourful manner, though not without violence, no, and the glorious thing is what he knew, from maybe the age of eight or so when he had his first visions, that as long as he was bound by time, and striding across London in an impecunious state and an ailing body, in a world that largely considered him crazy, he was OK, he had found it, the means of escape, a kind of resurrection in the eternal worlds, this was his country. William dies singing and when he is gone, a close friend reaches out and brushes William’s eyes closed, a drop of a curtain, a small gesture of infinite grace in one touch of the fingertips. To keep the vision in, that’s what he says. Blake was always falling, never colliding, it’s a trick of gravity. Everyone has a home.
—What country, friend, is this? William Shakespeare, b.1564, d.1616! Do I have an obsession with numbers? Ben says I do. Said. Ages ago.
—What do you think?
—I asked you first!
—Mmm.
—Holmes: I get down in the dumps at times, and don’t open my mouth for days on end. Just let me alone, and I’ll soon be right! A Study in Scarlet, 1887!
—I don’t think that is what you want, for me to leave you. And if I leave, you won’t have to talk to me about your bandages today.
—A tiny accident! I am always falling.
I tell you a brief story about Eadweard Muybridge, b.1830, d.1904, and his obsession with speed and motion, and most of all, with photography, how he set up a row of cameras in a great field, cameras with tripwires attached so the galloping horse in his experiment would race by and take self-portraits in rapid succession, enabling Eadweard to capture this one moment he craved, the picture of a horse with all four feet off the ground, a moment passing too quickly for the naked eye, and proof that a horse at speed is so close to flight, achieving lift-off ever so briefly, in joyous defiance of gravity. What I cannot tell you yet, and I think you know, is how my tiny accident is also an experiment in speed and motion and photography, in my mind’s eye, how for a moment, in a desire for return, I find a means of escape, rising, not quite falling, a dangerous trick of gravity, I know it, I said I was sorry three times.
I do tell you, though, about a postcard I received from my mother, a card postmarked in another country, depicting two cherubim either side of a woman holding a chalice with an egg aloft, they are heavenly escorts. Triptych. The three figures are all white, statuary, and the cherubs are saucy and graceful, and the woman is draped in elegant folds with an expression on her face of surprise and fatigue, as if she has just packed off all the kids to school and now it is time, finally, Breakfast! Except that the title of this painting by Raphael is Faith, and in Christian art, of course, the egg is symbolic of Resurrection. It depends how you look at it.
From the very day my little sister Harriet and I thrashed out this business of fallen man on our way home from the convent one afternoon in extreme youth, clearing up a small matter of catechism arising from morning assembly we are forced to attend as civilians, not Catholics, just for the headcount so to speak, a morning I saw Harriet twist around on her class bench to gaze at me wide-eyed in a mix of alarm and mirth it is not always easy to tell apart, from that very day, she took to these two words, fallen man, with great glee, and particular delight. She has an ear for sayings and will not let go of them, so any time now that she sees Gus tip over, a regular occurrence around our place as Gus is a baby still and only recently up on his feet and moving around under his own steam, Harriet will say it, in grave and knowing tones.
‘Fallen man,’ she pronounces, soon giving in to the wheezy snuffly sounds of Harriet laughing.
On the day we first discussed it, she was not so breezy.
‘I don’t get the snake part.’
‘Forget the snake, Harriet, it’s a symbol, OK? It’s not important.’
‘Is important. She said, snake, snake, snake. Sister Lucy did.’
‘We are not Catholics. It doesn’t count, so don’t worry.’
‘Is it in the Bible?’
‘Yeh. Look, um, try Mum, OK? I’m not sure I get it either.’
I remember it, this morning, the sudden picture I had in my head, of soldiers flying out of trenches into gunfire, falling men, and of people ambling along all casual and keeling over, hurling themselves to the ground, they can’t help it, and there were cartoon images too, of people falling down wells, or off clifftops, or through holes in a frozen lake, hovering in mid-air for a full horror moment of realisation, unless, of course, the character is a hero, in which case he will be saved by a skinny branch on the way down, or land softly in a passing boat, and this is what is so depressing about the snake part in Sister Lucy’s story, and what I do not want Harriet to know, that somehow, due to the events in the Garden, according to nuns, not even an all-out hero can count on a passing boat, which accounts for that story from Mum’s childhood, about the very nice boy at her school who fell down a lift shaft by mistake. In my opinion, telling the fallen man story first thing in the morning at assembly is dodgy behaviour on the part of nuns, kicking off everyone’s day with this terrible news, and giving kids like my sister a doomy outlook on life when they are barely seven years old and have yet to face the facts. Furthermore, I am now deeply worried about lifts, especially as I forget, each time I step into one, to check first off that it is there. I give myself a very hard time about it so I will not step through the doors unawares again, but it is hopeless. I have been lucky so far, but I am only nine and have a long way to go. It is very weird, if you are not a forgetful type, to carry on forgetting the same bitty thing every time. Bloody.
‘So why is everyone falling, then?’ says Harriet, kind of cross.
‘Fallen.’
‘It’s silly.’
‘Right. So let’s drop it.’
‘BARKIS is willin’,’ says Harriet in a growly voice, using her new favourite saying from David Copperfield, a book by Mr Charles Dickens Mum is reading to us at present, which is great, because she does all the voices in a very realistic manner, the posh ones going, my dear, my dear, all the time, and the rough ones, such as Barkis. Harriet is very keen on Barkis. It is possible he reminds her of our dad, who is also a man of few words with a growly voice that is not scary once you get to know him.
‘Harriet Weiss!’ my sister adds. ‘Where are your shoes, put on your shoes! BARKIS is willin’.’
‘Did you say that to nuns today? Barkis is willin’?’
‘Tired of shoes.’
‘Harriet. Don’t say the Barkis thing to them, they won’t understand. They’ll think you’re being rude. Save it for home, OK? And try to keep your shoes on at school. Please.’
‘Why?’
‘It’s rules, Harriet. They have to have rules.’
‘Why?’
‘Because they need to keep control of things. Like in wartime, in the army. You know.’
‘Is this the army?’
‘No. Forget that. I mean – they don’t want us to run wild, that’s all.’
‘Like golliwogs,’ Harriet says, her lower lip all trembly.
Oh-oh. It’s a Golliwog Day. I look at my sister who is only 3ft 4
/
