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ONE

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 4²/₈in high since last measured, with her fluffy fair hair mashed down flat, that is, for top accuracy, my little sister with big blue eyes and, I happen to know, one or two tiny soft woollen chicks with plastic feet and beads for eyes in her pocket, I look at her and I wonder how it is nuns can foretell trouble, and suppose she will run wild, as if chaos begins with Harriet taking off her shoes in a classroom, like the first step on the way to the Fall of the Roman Empire and barbarian invasions and so on. Nuns are not very hopeful regarding Humanity.

‘Harriet. Remember what Mum said on that subject?’

‘Golliwogs are made up.’

‘Yup. And what else?’

‘Rude. It’s a rude word. It starts wars.’

‘Yes. No. That’s prejudice. Prejudice starts wars. Got that?’

‘Think so.’ Harriet is not happy, I can tell, because she does a little soft-shoe shuffle and then grins at me, meaning she is trying to forget something bad.

My sister is going through a golliwog phase and it will soon be over, I hope, but I do see her problem. We are five kids in the Weiss family with me bang in the middle and Ben the eldest, and very tallest, and the only one with a taste for jam and other stuff from jars, of the sweet kind, i.e. not peanut butter, aside from Mum who eats honey, though not on toast like a regular person, but mixed into plain yogurt. She has special ways, but that is another matter. OK. When Harriet first saw it, the golliwog leaping around on the label of a strawberry jam jar, she was downright spooked and refused henceforth to sit at the same table with golliwog jam upon it. Preparations had to be made. Everyone needs protection from something.

After my dad finished up laughing and teasing and leaping around with mussed hair, there was a discussion, beginning with Mum explaining about prejudice and African slavery and made-up words, and even my dad getting serious and telling us about yellow turbans on Jews in ancient times leading to yellow badges in later times and cartoons of pigs, until I had a sudden confused and stupid feeling going back to the golliwog, because I had no idea a golliwog was meant to be a person at all. I thought it was a grizzly bear. What an eejit, as Jude would say. The golliwog is deepest black with shaggy spiky hair and wild eyes and I always thought the artist drew stripy colourful clothing on it so it would be less scary for people like Harriet, the way stuffed bears in shops have little bow ties and other accoutrements so that a kid will think it is not an animal, it is a person, and therefore very friendly. No one is thinking straight. A plastic baby doll is a person, and just about the most gruesome thing a kid will ever clap eyes on, and no amount of stripy clothing can take away the spook element from a golliwog. Harriet’s fear of golliwogs has made me see the light on a few subjects of pressing importance, and I am now quite interested in prejudice, whereas Harriet has taken to slavery, and is now very inquisitive regarding slaves and slavery BC and AD, which is fine with me, as it means she is likely to find rescue in her big thing for slaves any time she is rattled by golliwogs, on a day when a golliwog is a monster chasing her straight off a label of a jam jar.

We do not buy this jam any more, but there was worse horror to come for Harriet the time she crossed paths with Mary Reade in the playground, Mary and her golliwog doll tucked under one arm, a sight so bad, my sister was a jibbering wreck and I was called for to restore sanity and peace. Harriet held my hand and would not let go, like she was right inside a nightmare and needed my company until she could remember that a made-up thing is a made-up thing and ought not to have lasting spook power, it does not exist. On that day, I tried to distract her courtesy of intellectual matters, raising fond issues of war and prejudice and slavery and so on, and today, I am wondering whether she has had another brush with Mary’s golliwog.

‘Anything else you want to tell me, Harriet?’

‘We are all God’s creatures.’

‘What? Was that Mean Nun? Did she give you the creatures speech?’

‘Yes. Mean Nun.’

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

‘Tell me what happened.’

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

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

‘Tired.’

‘I know it. Come on, let’s go.’

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

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

‘Is Daddy one?’

‘Yup. Definitely. Feeling better now?’

‘Yes, my dear. I am going to sing.’

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

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

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

‘A creature.’

‘Yup. Dilly.’

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

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

‘You never do.’

‘Right. But if I did.’

‘Why? Why would you?’

‘Harriet. Is this the Why game?’

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

‘I am not really in the mood.’

‘Why?’

‘HARRIET!’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘As soon as there is a passenger ship to the Moon, Jem, I will be at the head of the queue for tickets! How divine!’

This idea of being first in the queue has me worried, my insides feeling all hot and empty at the same time, like when I arrive at school and realise I have left something very important at home, such as homework and money for tuck. Oh no. Does she want to leave us? Would she rather be up there where the Moon is? I hope the passenger ships do not start up any time soon and I am going to have to look in my dad’s newspapers for news. Which part of the paper will that be in? I will ask Ben, who is well up on weird stuff most people are not yet apprised of. Right now, though, I try to forget this worry about passenger ships.

‘Maybe I’d like to go too,’ I say. ‘And, Mum? Tintin went on the Moon way before the Apollo, Apollo, what number?’

‘Apollo 11,’ Mum says, no thinking required, no pausing and eyes lifted skywards in reflection or anything.

‘Right! 11, and they landed in, um …’

‘1969, the 20th of July. They stepped out at 9.56 p.m.,’ she says in a gentle voice, chopping things with a big knife and stirring up stuff.

‘Yes? Well, Tintin was there in 1953. So there.’

Here’s how it goes playing the Why game with Mum.

We are going to Zetland’s in town and this is a favourite bakery of the Weiss family’s. OK.

‘Mum?’ I say. ‘Where are we going?’

‘Well now, that’s quite a philosophical question. I’ll have to think about it. Is that all right with you?’

End of game.

We ride a bus and if I lean forward too far as I gaze at things out of the window, Mum lays her hand on the metal bar of the seats in front of me, she wraps her long fingers right around the spot where if the bus stops suddenly, I would go crashing into it and smash my chin or bite my lip and get into a casualty situation, the way a lot of kids do if someone like Mum is not looking out for them. Mum has long arms so she can do this without making a big thing of it, lifting her arm slowly and resting her hand there like it is nothing to do with you, and this way you do not end up feeling pathetic and helpless. Also, she never says, Be careful! or, Don’t do that! or, Lean back! or anything because I think she wants us to be free and move around and gaze at things in a spirit of investigation, so that even if you do something kind of crazy like test out the sharpness of a knife by running your finger over the edge, she won’t yell at you which can be downright spooky for a kid, no, she will open up a discussion about that knife and pretty soon you find something a little less crazy to do, as well as having a few new thoughts on that particular experiment, and how to go about it if you feel the urge again, to test the sharpness of knives. Mum is a very cool person, and has special ways.

I am pretty keen to get to Zetland’s and Jude is going to be happy when we bring binoculars home, it is a favourite comestible of Jude’s and mine. A stranger might not be able to tell Jude is happy, watching him open up a paper bag with Zetland’s written across it and containing binoculars, a stranger thinks you ought to crease up in a big smile and say how happy you are, etc., but you do not, not always, not if you are Jude who will go ‘hmmm’ in a slow and quiet manner, and raise one, maybe two eyebrows, and push out his lower lip, that is to say, he is happy about the binoculars, even though he may not want one straight off. When you know a really fine thing is around, such as a binocular in a bag, you don’t need it straight off, sometimes it is better saving it for later, and just knowing it is there.