Ostrich: A Novel Read online

  This time when I wake up, Mum and Dad are Siamese at the foot of my bed. Mum faces away from me, her hair lank and shapeless and her head bowed into Dad’s clavicle, which is another word for collarbone. Dad is looking right at me. Stubble hangs like fog over his mouth, and his eyes are set back in his head like two marbles in a pocket. I see him before he sees me.

  Dad?

  He continues to stare as though he hasn’t heard me. (I wonder if this is what an absence seizure looks like, but it can’t be, because they’re not genetic.) I count eleven Mississippis before he notices me.

  “He’s awake. Lou, Lou, he’s awake. Son, can you hear me?”

  Yes.

  “Son? Can he hear us? Excuse me, nurse! Can he hear us?”

  I can hear you.

  “Nurse!”

  Am I okay?

  Mum and Dad detach. A string of snot links them still, from Mum’s nostril to Dad’s shoulder. (It’s like he’s her ventilator.)

  Mum?

  “He can hear you. Talk to him. He might not have the strength to talk back.”

  Mum turns to face me, and the mucus tube snaps free from her nose. She looks blurry, like someone has turned down the contrast on her face. I can’t tell the difference between her skin and her lips.

  Am I okay?

  “Okay, son, do you want the good news or the bad news?”

  Am I okay?

  “Good news is girls love scars.”

  Am I okay?

  “Bad news, me and your mum have been talking and we’ve decided you’ve been getting a little too clever for your own good, so while they were at it we got them to go ahead and take a little bit off the top. Nothing too drastic, just a trim, just enough to give me a chance at Boggle.”

  He trails off.

  “Dot dot dot,” says the heart rate monitor.

  “But you might want to familiarize yourself with that noise right there, cos chances are you’ll be hearing it a lot in a few years when Tesco’s put you on the tills.”

  The nurse laughs, which only encourages him. (Mum hasn’t moved a muscle since he started talking. (She is starting to scare me.))

  “What is that, anyway?”

  “It’s monitoring his heartbeat, which is perfectly normal. It’s called a cardiogram.”

  “I thought that was a type of stripper. You know, the type that comes dressed in knitwear.”

  “You’re okay,” says Mum.

  And then I fall asleep again. I don’t know how much later I wake up, but when I do, it’s like a Spot the Difference puzzle. (I can spot only the following differences:

  1) Two silver trails (like a snail’s) run in parallel lines down the shoulder of Dad’s jumper.

  2) Mum’s nostrils are crusty.

  3) The nurse is black.

  Otherwise everything is identical. (Neither Mum nor Dad have moved.))

  I don’t know why exactly, but I shut my eyes again before Mum or Dad notice I’m awake. After a while I hear a sound like a fart being squeezed between clenched cheeks. However, no one laughs (and I can’t smell anything), and I realize it’s a chair scraping against the lino floor. Then Dad’s voice:

  “Well, I don’t know about you, but I need a coffee like he needs a hole in the head. Nurse?”

  “Mi kyan help yuh wid someting?”

  “The cafeteria?”

  “Goo a dar an galang de kyarridar.”

  “Do you want anything, Mum?”

  No response.

  I listen for Dad’s footsteps to drown in the ventilator tides and imagine he’s striding out to sea King Canute style. For a while it’s silent (relatively, at least), and then it’s Mum’s turn to talk. However, when she tries to, her voice stalls like Dad’s car after he hasn’t used it for a while. She coughs and tries again, and this time it takes.

  “I was born in this hospital,” she says. And then, after quite a bit more time, “You don’t remember your grandmother, do you?”

  The question doesn’t sound rhetorical, but it must be, because I’m doing an excellent impression of sleeping. Either way, though, I decide to think about the answer to check for memory loss. (Another analogy a doctor used once to help me understand my brain was that a seizure was like blowing a fuse. (He told me to imagine I’d had a power cut and I was sitting in the dark, and after fumbling around for a bit I manage to reset the fuse. The lights and the TV come back on, and my computer (which I was using) starts to reboot. However, the homework I was doing in Word has to be rescued from the last saved version, which means some of the data might be missing. (Since he told me this, I always do my homework by hand.)))

  “You came to her funeral. Do you remember?”

  I open my last saved version and Ctrl F funeral.

  (I do remember Grandma’s funeral. Actually, I don’t know if that’s true. Maybe it would be best to call it a half-truth (or maybe just a lie (because being truthful is like being naked (because if you’re halfway there, you’re still pretty much the opposite))). What I mean is I know I was at my grandma’s funeral because people have told me all my life about what I said when I saw her there in the open casket in her summer dress (“Won’t she be cold?”). The fact is I’ve been told this story so many times (mainly by Dad, because he’s still proud of his response (“Not where she’s going”)) that I’ve started thinking of it as my own memory. But actually, when I look back on it, I can see myself in it, which means it’s not from my point of view, so it must be someone else’s. (I think everyone has some memories like this that don’t belong to them. They’re the ones made from other people’s memories of you, which means you’re taken far enough out of the moment to look back at yourself in the middle of it. (I think maybe this is what people mean by having a Photographic Memory, which would also explain why in my memory of Grandma’s funeral my mum’s eyes are red.) The weird thing though is that even if it isn’t exclusively mine, this is still one of my most vivid recollections.))

  The floor farts again, and a second later I feel Mum’s breath on my cheek. At first it’s annoying (it smells really stale), but after a while, once I’ve managed to align our exhalations, I forget she’s even there. Until, that is, she starts telling a not particularly interesting story about the time she told Grandma she was pregnant, which goes like this:

  She (Grandma) was baking her signature dish, which was her famous Victoria Sponge (it wasn’t really famous, Mum explains, that’s just what Grandma always called it (i.e., My Famous Victoria Sponge (which is an oxymoron, because if you have to tell everyone that something’s famous, then by definition it isn’t))). The cake was meant to be a celebration, because Mum had just passed some exams and when Mum told Grandma she had something to discuss, she (Mum) remembers that she (Grandma) had just started beating the eggs … Here Mum fades out. Her voice is uneven, and the way she’s talking reminds me somehow of the stairs up to the assembly hall. They’re the sort that are too far apart to be taken in one stride and too close together to be taken naturally in two, so instead you have to choose between a series of dainty ballet steps or these ridiculous trouser-splitting lunges like you’re a football referee pacing out a free kick. (Neither of which I’m very comfortable with. (Hence, I think, the sudden association.))

  When Mum starts up again, she’s skipped a few steps:

  “She didn’t say a word. The whole time I was talking, she just kept whisking, faster and faster. And when I was through talking, when I couldn’t think of any more words that I knew … I don’t remember what I’d said. I think I told her you were the same size as a lychee.”

  (I think about the only other thing I know of that is measured in fruit, which is the reason I’m lying here in the first place. (However, I don’t have to worry about that anymore.))

  “But I remember exactly what she said,” Mum continues. “You will always be my daughter, and whatever you decide to do, you will have my support.” Here Mum breaks off again and pauses too long for it to be dramatic, especially considering I can easily de
duce the end of the story (the fact I’m here listening to it is pretty much the ultimate spoiler). “So that night I told her I was moving out. Because there wasn’t a decision to make. Because I already loved you more than I knew I’d ever love anything again.”

  Her lips are scratchy against my forehead. They linger there for a second after the air’s gone out of the kiss and the suction’s worn off. (I am so glad she thinks I’m asleep. This would’ve been a gadzillion times worse than the time she explained blowjobs. (And a gadzillion isn’t even a real number, because it’s too huge for anyone to actually imagine.))

  When I feel Mum’s body start to shake, I assume she’s crying about Grandma, which I’ve never seen her do. However, after a bit she lets out a stab of laughter.

  “And that,” she says, “was the fluffiest sponge she ever baked.”

  Chapter Seven

  I’m pretty much the best person I know at Spot the Difference, because I’ve trained myself to use it to recognize absences. Absences usually last for only about thirty seconds max, so you have to be very observant beforehand and afterward to know that you’ve had one. For example, two weeks ago in Maths class Mr. Carson turned round to write a problem up on the board and the next thing I knew Simon Nagel was bleeding. He had all these red blotches on the back of his white shirt, and at first I thought someone had stabbed him with a compass (because we were doing Geometry) but then I noticed that David Driscoll, who was sitting next to me, was writing down the problem with a red fountain pen. So I knew I’d had an absence and David Driscoll had been ink-flicking again (so I told Mr. Carson, and now he has to use a Bic biro).

  (Before we knew about the absences, a lot of the teachers used to think I was daydreaming or just being lazy (which is why Miss Farthingdale wrote in my end-of-year report that I was like the English Language because we both had two moods and no future). I’m doing much better at school now (especially in Maths and Science), and in a weird way I think my absences have helped me out because they’ve taught me to be more vigilant, which can be really useful for English Comprehension.)

  One of the things recently that I’ve been spotting differences in is the behavior of Jaws 2, my Russian Dwarf hamster, who is named after the film. (He isn’t named after the film Jaws 2, which I’ve never seen, but he is my second hamster and the first one was Jaws 1. (Although at the time I only called him Jaws, because I didn’t know he was going to die and be replaced (in History one time they gave us a newspaper cutting that was meant to be from 1916 and we had to figure out whether it was genuine or fake, and I knew it was fake straight away because they called it the First World War, which didn’t make sense because they wouldn’t have known that there’d be a Second World War (which is why at the time they called it The Great War)).)) Jaws 1 (as he’s now known) died on Christmas Eve 1999 when Dad batted him out the window with a slipper. Dad claims he thought Jaws was a rat and that he leapt at his throat, which I’ve never believed, because I called him Jaws to be ironic since he was actually the most docile hamster in the shop. On Christmas morning when Dad found The Great Jaws clinging to the drainpipe outside his bedroom window, frozen stiff, he realized his mistake. He wrapped him in cling film, like he was a present, but instead of putting him under the tree he put him in the freezer, where he remained until April, when we gave him a proper burial in the back garden. By the time the ground had thawed and we were able to dig him a grave I already thought of him as Jaws 1 because I’d had Jaws 2 for a month and was well on my way to forgetting what had happened. But that Christmas I was distraught. I refused to have dinner or open my presents, and it wasn’t until well into the next Millennium that I spoke a word to Dad again.

  In the February when I finally felt ready to move on, Mum took me to the pet shop. Having witnessed my response to the passing of Jaws 1, she tried to talk me out of getting a Russian Dwarf because of their average lifespan, which is only eighteen months (although no one can tell me whether that’s mean, median, or mode). The whole time we were at the pet shop she spent cooing over this dopey-looking Long-Haired Syrian, but the second I saw my Russian Dwarf I knew he was going to be Jaws 2. (I know what I said earlier about dead metaphors and realizing that not everything is human, but when we first saw each other I could have sworn we shared a moment. (This is going to sound stupid, but when he nibbled my little finger through the mesh it felt like we were shaking hands.)) Jaws 2 is like The Empire Strikes Back of pets because he’s a sequel that’s even better than the original.

  Even though Jaws 2 is coming up to his fifth birthday, which must be some kind of record for a Russian Dwarf hamster, until recently he was very energetic. Hamsters can run up to 4.8 miles a day on their exercise wheels, and sometimes Jaws 2 reminds me of a falsely imprisoned inmate in a prison film doing press-ups all day in his cell while plotting some terrible revenge against whoever it was that framed him. Which is why I like to make sure he gets an hour’s yard time, which means letting him explore the house in a see-through plastic sphere. On the day I got back from hospital, I decided he should have an extra-long session in his sphere to make up for all the ones he’d missed while I was gone, but when I took him out to the garden he just sat there in the middle of the patio, looking around like he didn’t know where he was.

  (According to Google, there is a thing called jamais vu when you don’t recognize something even though it’s really familiar to you, a bit like when I say my name twenty-two times until it doesn’t mean anything. Apparently, jamais vu is the opposite of déjà vu (which I know lots about), but really they don’t sound so different from each other, which is the weird thing about being opposites. If you think about it (which I have), for two things to be opposites they have to have quite a few things in common in the first place. So even though cold is the opposite of hot, it doesn’t mean they’re all that far apart, because they’re both to do with temperature and they can both be about days or food or how close you are to something in a game of Hide and Seek. I always used to think that being the opposite of something was being as far away as you could from that thing, but just off the top of my head I could name a dozen things that are further away from cold than hot:

  1) A Table

  2) The Internet

  3) Racism

  4) Family

  5) Nostrils

  6) Synesthesia (which is when you can smell colors)

  7) Medicine

  8) Banana-Flavored Condoms

  9) Horse Power

  10) An Oxbow Lake

  11) France

  12) The Clitoris

  Which means that being the opposite of something is actually just like being the same as it is, only with one thing different. So even though I’ve never had it, I think I must know how Jaws 2 feels, because both jamais vu and déjà vu are about memory and the past and confusion and feeling powerless.)

  When I mention this to Dad at tea he tells me that the excitement of having me back home has probably just worn Jaws 2 out a bit, and he’ll no doubt be back to usual in a day or two. And then he changes the subject by telling me that while I was napping I had a visitor.

  “Who?” I inquire.

  “A girl,” he says and smirks. “She didn’t leave a calling card. Said she had some homework for you. She’s coming back tomorrow.”

  “What did she look like?”

  Dad thinks for a minute. Then he says, “A Zebra Crossing.”

  The next day, when Chloe Gower rings the bell I’m expecting her. From my bedroom I can hear Dad answer the door and greet her as “M’lady.” Chloe asks if she should take anything off (which obviously means her shoes) and Dad says, “Steady on! Why don’t you wait till you’re alone first.” While he’s laughing at his own joke I have time to find my white baseball cap and wonder whether albinos can blush, and when he knocks on the door there’s just long enough to realize I’ve never had a girl in my room until now before I say “Come in.” The door swings open, and Dad announces Chloe’s arrival with a wink.

  “I’
m downstairs if you need anything. But don’t worry,” he says, “it’s a thick ceiling. I wouldn’t hear a thing.” And then, like a hit-and-run driver, he’s gone.

  Chloe rolls her ankle in the doorway and surveys the scene. She’s wearing her favorite thick black hoody, the sleeves pulled tight over fingerless gloves, even though, like usual, she smells of sun cream. (The dye from her hair has started to grow out. Where it parts across her scalp there’s a double yellow line, which means no parking at any time.) I realize she’s waiting for me to invite her in. I indicate a beanbag.

  “Do you want to sit down?” I ask.

  “S’cool,” she replies.

  “School?” I inquire.

  “It’s cool,” she responds.

  “School is?” I query.

  “What?” she retorts.

  “Is school cool?” I catechize.

  “S’okay,” she rejoins. And then I realize the nature of our misunderstanding.

  (Mum said once that girls are like spiders because they’re more scared of me than I am of them. (I’m sure I read somewhere that female spiders eat the male ones.)) I decide that under the circumstances the polite thing to do would be to stand up, too. I notice Chloe notice my bed, or rather the mattress on the floor that I sleep on. Her brow starts to curl up in a question mark and her mouth rounds out like the dot.

  “It’s so I can’t fall out of bed. You know, in case of fits,” I explain.

  Chloe nods. “But you’re better now?”

  “Yeah,” I say. And then, because sometimes I talk way too much when I’m nervous: “They took it out. The tumor, I mean. It’s pretty much the riskiest surgery you can have. There was this one woman who had it and they thought it had gone okay, but when she woke up she had a Chinese accent, which was really weird because she wasn’t Chinese. So now she can’t eat Chinese food because every time she goes to a Chinese restaurant all the waiters think she’s doing an impression of them so they probably spit in it or something, which was one of the main things I was scared about because I really like duck pancakes, but in the end it went fine, so I guess I’m not epileptic anymore.