I’m not very hungry, sorry, because I know she does not approve of waste, though she is not a bad case like nuns are, nowhere near. I do think she is likely to finish my toast, however, so I pretend I cannot finish the toast, or have a big urge to share, or, for variety, I act like I am in a terrible hurry. I am simply trying to save this woman from starvation, that’s all.
‘Want a bite, Mum? I’m late!’ I say, waving my toast in the air.
‘I’m LATE! I’m LATE, for a very important DATE!’ she sings, whereupon Harriet leaps out of her chair to do some accompaniment, singing along, and dancing a jig. ‘My fuzzy hair and whiskers took me MUCH TOO LONG TO SHAVE!’
Jiminy Cricket.
I take the problem to Ben and he puts me straight on this question of embryos and not being fully formed, and early stages of life, etc., hauling out an encyclopaedia and splaying it open on the floor. Embryo. Various vertebrate embryos.
‘What’s vertebrate?’
‘Having backs and spines. For locomotion, right?’
‘OK’ I say, reading on. ‘The different species are hard to distinguish in the early stages of development; later they develop individual characteristics.’
Above the words are two rows of drawings in a large box with three up-and-down lines, making eight compartments, with the top row for early embryos of a fish, chicken, pig, man and the bottom row for late embryos of a fish, chicken, pig, man, reminding me of Harriet’s bedside cabinet with her display of little animals within, little chicks and lambs, each one in a box, no man in any box. I stare at this drawing and feel a bit woozy. All the early embryos LOOK THE SAME. Kind of like fishhooks or seahorses. Yuck. Below, there is a second drawing of a late embryo with lots of pointing arrows and detailed information such as: ‘A few weeks before birth this foetus is practically fully formed.’ A few weeks. The embryo has a head and squeezed-up eyes, and feet, ears, all the accoutrements. A mouth and a stomach. Hands for wielding cutlery. I close up the book.
‘Ben?’
‘Yup.’
‘Does Mum look OK to you? Thin?’
‘She’s fine, Jem. She’s always thin.’
‘Right,’ I say, flipping on to my back to stare at the ceiling, like Jude, my brother who does a lot of lying down and staring at ceilings. ‘Ben? Is Jude a vertebrate? Ha ha. Joke.’
‘Let’s go ask him,’ he says. ‘Ambush time.’
‘Weapons?’
‘Pillows,’ commands Ben.
I salute him and we gather up pillows, and on the way to Jude, I wonder if there is a moment in the womb when the embryo is aware he is fully formed, I wonder do growing pains start then, and is it the same for everyone, every embryo of mankind? I make a note to quiz Mum on these points as she must know the ropes by now. Some day I’ll ask her, but not today, I’m not in the mood.
‘Raisins?’ I ask Harriet who is still quivering from shock and so on.
‘No! Explain!’
Whoa. ‘Harriet. I’m going to explain, but we have to move along at the same time, OK? Now don’t look back, it’s a mess, I know it, but listen to this. NO ONE GOT HURT BACK THERE. It’s a blood-no pain situation, I mean it. OK, come on, let’s make tracks.’
I take my sister’s hand and I don’t have to stretch for it or anything due to being just about the same size as Harriet. We are different but the same, i.e. if I comb my hair out of a tangly state into a fluffy flying around state and put on a big smile, a stranger might confuse the two of us, though I’d also have to be in motion, Harriet is almost always in motion, usually of the dancing and skipping kind. Harriet is a deep thinker but she does not show the marks so much, or maybe her thoughts come out better than mine, I don’t know, but anyway, that is the chief difference between us and pretty plain it is too, so there ought not to be the mix-up there is for some nuns and non-nuns at our school. It’s annoying. The mixed-up type will say Harriet-Jem and Jem-Harriet and this is the same type who will say, Girls! to a whole classroom, looking somewhere over our heads, like she simply can’t do it any more, pick out the differences between us, and no doubt she goes home and looks at a plate of food and says, Supper! instead of checking out all the different items and taking them in separately for a moment, chicken and broccoli and potatoes, it’s just the way she sees it now, everything in groups, a pair of sisters, a gaggle of girls, a plate of food. Things could get worse. Pretty soon, this lady is wandering around in her own street at night, key in hand, not even recognising which house is the right house. Where is her house? Her husband has dark hair and a close beard. One day, all men with dark hair and close beards are her husband. Hello, dear. Hello dear, hello dear. She has a problem with me maybe, and my sister, two girls about the same size with a last name she cannot pronounce. Now she has a problem with all girls bearing last names she cannot pronounce. It’s depressing.
Sister Martha always gets it right. Harriet collapses into me in the dining room or in the playground, nestling her head against me because she is a small beast fed up with running around in too much company and if Sister Martha comes our way, she makes no mistake, looking us straight in the eye, saying the right name to the right Weiss. When she is put in charge of a body count, a practice nuns go in for at regular intervals, unfolding that list of names tucked away in each nun pocket, reading them out in a feverish manner like we are prisoners of war just waiting to dash for the wire, Sister Martha is calm, hand on hip, speaking soft, eyeing us one by one, with a kind of amused expression. Harriet, she says. Jem. She always gets it right.
Harriet is not supposed to collapse into me in the dining room. She is supposed to stay at her table with the other little kids and Sister Martha is the only nun who does not freak out about this, the only one who can lead Harriet away, my sister sliding off my bench and slipping her hand into Sister Martha’s, quite happy, like she is off to a garden party. If you do not understand Harriet, you will not be her friend and the main thing is not to boss her, which is what I bear in mind the day of the broken eggs with blood spilling out. The carnage.
‘It was an accident. Here’s what I think happened. Are you listening? The parent birds made many eggs, they had to keep flying off for supplies and they picked the wrong tree. Too wobbly. They were tired and not thinking straight. Big breeze, skinny tree, accident. Nobody was pushed, got that?’
This is hard for my sister. She has a special relationship with animals, I’ve seen it, animals coming right up to her and taking food from her, from an open window, say, and they don’t just pinch the food and bash off, no, they hang out with her a while, and for Harriet, this is nothing strange, which is the best thing for me about her special relationship with animals, how it is nothing strange to Harriet.
‘Now. I need to tell you about the blood part. Ready?’
‘Ready.’
‘You know when Mum breaks an egg in a bowl, she looks out for a tiny red speck, a blood spot? OK. That speck MIGHT have become bird but it never happened because the egg was taken away before the mother could warm it through all the stages, early embryo, late embryo, bird. See? The blood is left over from then, but it’s not a sign of pain or death or anything because it was never alive. That’s why it’s better to be a mammal, you know about mammals, humans are mammals. Eggs INSIDE, not rolling about on the ground for someone to step on, or going cold in a nest on a busy day for the parents. No. You stay warm through all the right stages and it’s convenient for the mother. Wherever she goes, you go, no
