Sister Crazy. Emma Richler
with me a little and I felt hot in the pit of my stomach and would have an urge to leap up and chase after him, offering up my best man, the one with dark hair and an excellent physique, by which I mean, since all Action Men have the same build, that his joints were neither unyielding nor loose. He could wield a machine gun one-handed; he could crouch in a stealthy manner for any length of time without slipping, no worries. I saved up and bought him the beautiful uniform of the Royal Horse Guards, a ceremonial kit intended for dress occasions such as bashing off on parade or receiving honours, etc. Because our men were mostly engaged in missions of serious strategic complexity requiring them to slither through undergrowth, duck into abandoned cellars, scale dizzying heights and examine maps in hellish conditions, the Guards uniform was largely unworn. Until the time, that is, when Jude found pursuits that did not involve me so much anymore.
When Jude went off with his boyfriends, it was harder and harder for him to argue for my presence without calling a lot of attention to himself. He had a laconic demeanour and a fiercely protective nature and he needed all parties to be at ease, so the best solution for him at the time was to leave me out.
Once, I was allowed to play with Jude and his friend Michael, who was lean and silent and glamorous with ruffled fair hair. But during this game we were all a little stifled. It was an experiment doomed to failure, a one-off occasion. At home the next day, after school, Jude mumbled a message to me.
‘Michael says he enjoyed your presence,’ he said, passing me on the stairs.
‘My what?’
‘YOUR PRESENCE!’ Jude repeated crossly.
‘Oh. Great.’ I didn’t know what Michael meant about presents (what presents?) but I was aroused by this communication from him and I felt shifty, too, as if I had betrayed Jude somehow. In my mind, I thought I saw Jude take one more step away from me. The curtain was dropping on this episode of our oneness and so I let him go. But I refused to see it as desertion. No. We are SOE (Special Operations Executive). As natural leaders, we had to be split up. In Occupied France, two separate targets, and for our own protection, two secret routes. Would we survive? Will we meet again?
‘See you at the Ritz in springtime. Make mine a champagne cocktail.’
More and more, then, I took the white breeches and the scarlet coat of the Royal Horse Guards off the little coat hangers that Jude and I had fashioned from copper wire and I dressed my man in it. I dressed him by degrees and with languorous gestures I can only think of now as intimations of sensuality.
My man liked to read whenever he was not engaged on the field of battle. Jude and I made books for our men by cutting up the spines of comics. You could get about eighteen books from the spine of one single Victor comic, for example. A good haul. Then you designed a cover and stuck it on. The Last Enemy, All Quiet on the Western Front. Maybe even Wuthering Heights. My man always had a book in his rucksack. He reminded me of my parents’ friend Rex, a famous cinematographer who dressed in jeans and white T-shirts and blue cashmere sweaters. He had very elegant features and a band of flowing white hair around his otherwise bald head. He had a reckless streak and a languid demeanour. He answered yes or no to most queries in a languid fashion. He was not expansive. Jude and I spotted a German Luger in his house. The real thing. We were in awe. We asked Rex about it in hopeful and timid voices. He was elusive, which was downright glamorous to us, he came to me and held my long fair hair in his gentle grasp and asked airily, to no one visible, ‘Does anyone have a pair of scissors?’
Playing alone, I liked to sit my man on the edge of his khaki bunk, a book splayed and held open by the hand with the pointing index finger and thumb. ‘Death,’ he reads in The Last Enemy, his favourite, ‘should be given the setting it deserves; it should never be a pettiness; and for the fighter pilot it never can be.’ My man would be half-dressed in this moment of repose, wearing only his tall black Horse Guards boots with the silver spurs and his close-fitting white breeches with the lovely braces. I angled his head so he seemed to glance thoughtfully somewhere in the middle distance, which is an expression I had caught in my mother when she was reading. I tried to read this way myself, but lost a lot of time being distracted by other things out there in the middle distance and then trying to find my place on the page again. Never mind. It was out of duress that I played alone, but I was suddenly able to observe my man’s physiognomy at leisure and to allow him those moments when he could assume off-guard qualities, quite literally. The sight of him with the delicate white braces criss-crossing his slim, muscular, hairless chest gave me a distinct pleasure. The contrast of extreme formality with the undress of reverie lent him an air of vulnerability. Vanity was a foreign thing to my man. If pressed, he might own up to gratitude for his good looks, but he never traded them for favours, oh no.
Something thrown up in the drift of Jude’s wake, in his flow toward other people, was a new game we tried out together once or twice, a game involving my sister’s Barbie, a game that held him for a little while longer.
Barbie could not go far with us without overstretching the boundaries of truth. She could be a sort of Mary Ure in The Guns of Navarone, a commando with useful feminine wiles and a gift for disguise and languages. Or a nurse maybe, caught up in a daring mission and proving invaluable, Sylvia Syms in Ice Cold in Alex. An obvious choice was Barbie as French Resistance fighter, headstrong and relentless, going boldly where no French woman has gone before. There was also the aristocratic English girl, a master code-breaker for MI6. Women with no spare time on their hands, no time for dates, which is what I suspected Jude craved above all. And so most often, Barbie was a glamorous double agent, passing secrets to her man as he breezed through Occupied Paris, always an occasion for champagne and smuggled Russian caviar. Silk stockings and Virginia tobacco, rare as golddust, were regular features.
Something happened. I became tongue-tied and short of breath. My dramatic abilities failed me. My temples hurt. Later in life, in cases of sudden awareness on dates (Oh, I thought I liked you), when the urge to escape the sexual showdown is sharp as a fire alarm and you want to flee in cartoon time – in the first frame, one arm in a sleeve and coattails flapping; in the next, home in bed, reading a Tintin book – I would remember this atmosphere of disquiet and asphyxiation that came upon me with Jude and my sister’s Barbie. All I could do was stall.
‘Just a minute here! How did your man enter Paris? Subterfuge? Fake passport? Is my man with him? Shouldn’t he be? What mission is this? Shouldn’t he be in a hurry?’
Even episodes with the French Resistance girl of the one-track mind (Vive la France!) degenerated into dates. Crawling through darkened forests, sabotaging power lines, setting booby traps and gathering secret munitions drops, Jude’s man still managed to suggest dinner and dancing. So I revolted. I started to get silly as the walls of illusion came tumbling down, exposing the scene for what it was – sex – and Jude either got slaphappy along with me or stalked off in a fury. End of game. The second thing I would do was dry up, a startled and exhausted actor. I dithered and looked spacey and we would have to pause for peanut butter sandwiches. The third ploy was to say quietly, in a fit of uncommon generosity, ‘We should invite Harriet to play, you know. We shouldn’t take her Barbie and not ask her to play.’ End of game. Harriet was only six and extremely hopeless at serious games; even Gus could do better, and he was a baby still, two years old and not ready for war. So finally, in the absence of Jude, it was my fate to learn to play with her.
Explaining any new discipline to Harriet, you had to tether her to reality by introducing minor rules and practicalities, although never too many at once or she was liable to break off in the middle of things and start dancing to an unidentifiable tune of her own. Looking for Harriet, calling her to supper, say, or for school, you were likely to find her skipping around in the garden, a fairy on a happy day out in the ether. Harriet’s fierce whim was for collecting stuffed animals of all sizes, chiefly lambs and bird life, especially chicks, as well as a few bears and rabbits.
I gave her the lowdown on World War II. She needed to know the rugged truth in order to play, although she would dwell on the least vital points.
‘Yes