aberrations, everything has to be right, the pressure in the aqueous solution determining the shape of an eye whose lens must be clear as glass, and curved just so, and placed at the correct distance to focus the light on to the retina with its photosensitive cells, able to screen and unscreen, and produce the purple pigment that will allow for seeing in low-lit rooms, call it visual purple.
I trap the light, I remember everything, nothing escapes me, and I see marvellous things, no ticket required, a great picture show, one night only, every night, a spectacular! Son et lumière, a starry cast, and I can see clearly, I’ve got visual purple.
The first time I saw you, Mummy, you wore a red dress. It was red velvet and very slim-fitting, and you smiled at me and reached out with long sensitive fingers, a small gesture of infinite grace. I remember, even though I was only eight days old. I saw you.
When Gus came home that first time, wrapped up in Harriet’s pink baby blanket, I had a thought regarding Mum and unknown origins, and how you might expect a foundling to be a bit edgy about babies of her own, worrying, perhaps, they will go astray like a gang of puppies in a park, to be scooped up later by a dog-catcher, unless they meet a bad end in the sweeping beams of onrushing cars, like sorry spies in wartime.
The dog-catcher delivers them to a dog home, a Salvation Army type place, but for dogs, and now they are puppies of unknown origin, each one hoping for a person to come along and choose him, and take him to a better place, but whatever happens, even if the new owner is one fine person, the dog will always be looking over his dog shoulder for the other puppies and his first home, and wondering what happened and was it his fault, etc., and maybe give in to a lifelong identity crisis, who knows.
Clearly, this dark matter of unknown origins is not a problem for Mum, because instead of looking over her shoulder and acting edgy, she has gone all out for babies, with Gus the latest, and between the day he first came to us up to now, I can only recall a single event which might be understood as an open display of nerves on her part, and that was the day of the Harness Affair, when Mum unwrapped a parcel before our very eyes, unfolding leaf after leaf of white tissue paper to reveal an arrangement of white suede straps resembling reins, reins most typically attached to sledge dogs in Antarctic regions.
‘For you, Gus!’
‘Mum,’ I say. ‘Um. He doesn’t have a dog. We don’t have a dog. Are we getting one?’
‘No, no!’ she says, laughing now, and tickling me in the neck so I don’t feel too much of an eejit. ‘It’s for holding Gus. In busy roads. Until he is older.’
Well, blow me down. I never knew they made leashes for kids. One time I strapped it on Gus myself and held on patiently, waggling the reins a little in an encouraging manner, waiting for him to go walkabout in the garden.
‘Walk on!’ I said, which is what coachmen say to coach horses in old films. ‘Walk on, Gus!’
And Gus just stands there, in contemplation of the flowers or something, not budging an inch.
‘Roses,’ he says.
‘Right. Roses.’
I am not worried that Gus’s vocabulary is limited at present to the names of flowers. He has a long life ahead of him and therefore it is not a cause for anxiety in me. Neither am I all that worried about accidents of the scurrying into traffic kind. This baby is simply not aiming to scoot off anywhere in a reckless manner, I don’t think so. He is not the type.
I unstrap the harness and have a go on Harriet. I ought to have foreseen the difficulties ahead. Harriet is very meek and polite as I wrangle with straps and buckles and then her eyes grow large and suddenly she is scampering all over the joint at gallop speed with me flying on behind, missing a step or two, until I realise I just do not have to be doing this, grappling on to my sister in a frenzy of determination like a charioteer in a chariot race, no. I drop the reins and decide to let her be a wild pony in a field all by herself, the harness flapping loose, and me going in for deep breaths on the sidelines. Bloody.
The thing is, Mum never used the harness on Gus. I believe there was just something about it she fell for, the soft white leather, the beautiful silver buckles, the idea of it, I don’t know, but I saw it, two years or so into Gus’s life, how Mum has her own way with this dark matter of unknown origins, how it is different for everyone maybe, one person ending up a one-man band, taking no chances on spreading out and having a family that might go astray, and another being Mum, fearless, filling a whole house with kids, no leashes required. It works the same in a bad-mood situation, my sister, for instance, turning to song and dance in moments of strife and confusion whereas I imagine even worse calamities, hoping my bad situation might seem rosy in the fearsome light of my imaginings, and now it’s just a habit, I can’t stop it, my bad mood opening a door on a whole roomful of bad-mood ideas, such as naval disasters and captains going down with ships, and firing squads, and amputations in wartime, no anaesthetic, and so on, and then I usually feel a lot worse. Clearly, my method is not a prize-winning method. I may need to review the situation.
Sometimes my dad helps out. If he happens to come along and catch me in a pathetic droop over some maths homework I am messing up, or a drawing of footballers that is an outright disaster because I have been so busy doing all the muscles in their legs, I have not noticed, until too late, there is no space left to draw heads and sky. It’s awful. This is when my dad will do a boxing count in a loud boxing referee voice, and a frantic sports commentator voice, while raising one arm in the air above me, to bang it down sharpish on each count, his pointy finger grazing the top of my drooping head.
One! Two! Three! … IS SHE OUT FOR THE COUNT? Six! Seven! …’
Etc. It is pretty annoying, except that I do perk up before he reaches the count of ten, braving this task of recovery with show-off vigour and a spirit of endeavour, whereupon my dad walks off beaming, because he has sorted me out again, and all it takes is to yell a boxing count over my head and waltz off to tell Mum the fine job he did. Jem is OK now. Well done, Dad.
My mother is the top person to seek out in perilous times, at any station from mystery grumps to head wounds. A head wound can bring on stark-eyed horror and a sense of being pretty close to the end of things, like dropping out of an aeroplane on to enemy territory, and at times like this, she can calm me straight down while patching me up, until suddenly I am interested in how the head bleeds (profusely), and I have a new word (profusely) and a new subject.
To begin. There are groups for blood. I never knew that. Anyway, the main idea is not to mingle the groups in emergency situations, when you might be running low on blood and need someone else’s for a top-up. You have to check first off about groups. Whoa! Hold on! What group are you? If you are too weak, you must hope for someone to ask on your behalf, so it might be best just to leave a note in some handy place upon your person, with the name of your group in neat writing. Or simply make sure never to be alone in a dangerous place, never to be without a member of your family who has the right blood, the same type, that’s how it goes, it’s a family thing. OK. Next. Blood is made of cells and platelets. Cells come in red and white. In red there is haemoglobin, meaning iron plus globin. What is globin? I don’t know. I could not pay attention, too busy wondering about this news there is iron in me, and having visions of blacksmiths in bare chests and leather aprons plunging bits of iron into boiling vats, and then bashing them into horseshoes and weapons, farm implements and household knives, red sparks flying everywhere, like drips of haemoglobin perhaps, so the blacksmith is in a state of wonder also, not about ironworks in him, but about blood in the ironworks. It’s
