LITMIR.BIZ

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      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

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