Ostrich: A Novel Page 6

  “But I still might get them for a bit, they think. The fits, I mean. They call them Wind-Down Seizures.”

  “So when are you coming back to school?”

  “Don’t know. They said I’d probably be too tired for a couple of weeks. Probably after they take my stitches out. Why? Am I missing much?”

  “Dunno. Not really. Rock formations. A bit.”

  “Rock formations?”

  “Yeah, you know. Batholiths and that.”

  “What’s a batholith?”

  “Dunno … But whenever Mr. Rose says it I get drenched,” says Chloe. And then she does a really good impersonation of Mr. Rose’s lisp, which officially breaks the ice.

  (Breaking the ice is a weird metaphor, because figuratively it’s a good thing, but to do it literally is really dangerous. (In the cold snap of 1999 that claimed the life of Jaws 1, Letchmore Pond froze over and a boy in the year below drowned when he went to retrieve a football because he didn’t know that you’re supposed to spread your body weight over the largest possible surface area, because in Science you don’t do Pressure until Year 6.))

  “What’s your hamster called?” asks Chloe, once we’ve sat down on the mattress.

  “Jaws 2.”

  “After the film?”

  “No,” I tell her. “After the shark. I haven’t seen Jaws 2.”

  “Me either. Have you seen Dawn of the Dead?”

  “No. Can you watch 18s?”

  “Pretty much, since my parents got divorced. Dad lets me do whatever I want, and Mum lets me do whatever I tell her Dad lets me do. He’s going to buy my sister a sports car when she passes her test.”

  “I know. My dad’s teaching her.”

  “I know. Can I touch him?”

  “What?”

  “Jaws 2.”

  “Oh. Yeah, okay.”

  I get the cage and explain the correct way to pick up a hamster. You’ve got to pretend you’re scooping up water. Then I open the door on top of the cage and Chloe reaches in.

  “Cocksucker!” she exclaims. “He bit me!”

  (I wonder if she knows what she’s saying, especially the cocksucker part.)

  “Are you sure?”

  She shows me her thumb. Sure enough, there’s a bead of red.

  “You probably just caught it on something. His name’s ironic. He’s a pacifist, which is like being a coward but idea-logical.”

  I reach in to show her, and a beam of pain breaks through my medicine fug. I pull my arm free and bolt shut the cage door. My contents finger is bleeding and my feelings are hurt.

  Chloe sucks the sauce from her own wound and says “cocksucker” again.

  “That’s so weird,” I say. “He never … Are you wearing perfume?”

  “Shut up!” Chloe ripostes. “Why would I be wearing perfume? I only came to give you your homework.”

  “It’s just … Ever since I got back he’s been acting really …” I try and think of another word for weird, because in Composition you should avoid repeating yourself. “Queer.”

  “Queer? Like effeminate?”

  “No, like …”

  I have an idea. I go to the cupboard and collect the LEGO maze that I made by splicing DNA from the Death Star and Cloud City. Then I set it down beside the cage and take out a box of tissues from my bedside cabinet. I can feel Chloe watching me as I open it from the side. In cross section you can see that the box is hollow. A dozen or so tissues lie on top of four variety-size cereal packets (two of which you can see from this side), the top tissue sprouting out through the box’s slit like a weed through concrete. As I slide out the Frosties pack and remove a block of Parmesan I can sense from behind Chloe’s surprise.

  “It’s his favorite,” I offer by way of explanation, snagging off a piece and placing it down under Lord Vader’s supervision at the heart of the Death Star. Then I reach back into the cage, pinch Jaws 2 at the scruff of his neck, and lift him free like an arcade crane.

  At the gates to the gas refinery Jaws 2 strikes. Instead of embarking fearlessly on the heroic trench run that hundreds of times before has seen him lead the Rebels to victory in the Battle of Yavin and free the galaxy from the evil clasp of the Empire, he sits down hard and tries to eat Lando Calrissian.

  “Weird,” I say.

  “Very,” Chloe agrees.

  “He never does that,” I say, rescuing Lando and drying him on the carpet. “He hasn’t been himself lately.”

  Then it’s Chloe’s turn to have an idea. “Jaws 2,” she calls in a singsong. “Jaws 2.” He doesn’t react, but this only seems to encourage her. “I think I know what’s happened,” she says carefully, giving each word space to stretch out like they’re in First Class. “He’s in a fugue state.”

  And then, for half an hour, Chloe tells me all about fugue states, which apparently is what happened to Richey from the Manics (which is what she calls the Manic Street Preachers). What happened was this: On the first of February 1995, Richey Edwards (who is also Richey James (who is also probably one of if not the greatest lyricist that ever lived)) was supposed to be flying to America with James Dean Bradfield (who is the lead singer of the Manics) to promote the Manics’ new album The Holy Bible, but instead he checked out of room 516 of the Embassy Hotel in London at 7 a.m. and drove to Cardiff. (When James Dean Bradfield got the porter to open up room 516 (which he could do because he was the front man (but not the one with the actual talent)), all he found was a packed suitcase full of Richey’s clothes and a note that said I Love You, which probably wasn’t intended for him, because Richey definitely isn’t gay.) He was reported missing the next day. On Valentine’s Day 1995 his car, which was a Vauxhall Cavalier, got a parking ticket at the Severn View petrol station, which is right next to the Severn Bridge, and because the Severn Bridge is a notorious suicide hotspot (which means lots of people have jumped off it (which proves that even in death everyone just wants to conform)) and because Richey was twenty-seven years old (which is the age that all good musicians die), everyone just assumed that he’d committed suicide. But that’s not what happened, because Richey would never do a thing like that, because he was too strong a person. (It’s like he said in “Motorcycle Emptiness”: survival’s natural as sorrow (sorrow (sorrow)).) Which is why they’ve never found his body.

  What actually happened is the fugue state. You know how if you put a magnet on top of a floppy disk you can wipe it? Well, apparently, that can happen to people, too, only the magnet is a kind of psychiatric or physical trauma (which in Richey’s case was success), and the floppy disk is our entire identity, which is pretty terrifying. But that’s not even the weirdest thing about fugue states, because not only do they make you forget who you are (which would be queer enough), but also when you’re in one you invent a whole new life for yourself. (I guess if you forget your name you need to invent a new one (because you know that if you don’t have one you can’t be a real thing) and then, once you’ve got a name, you must know that you need a history to go with it, otherwise your name wouldn’t mean anything (like another door without a room behind it).) Fugue states usually last for only a few days, but technically there’s no reason they couldn’t go on indefinitely, which is what happened to Richey, which explains why he’s been spotted all over the world since he disappeared but he’s never answered to the name Richey Edwards (or Richey James). Even though some people who didn’t really understand him reckon that he faked his own death to escape his burgeoning fame (which he would never do to the fans who he loved and got), the only explanation that makes any real sense (if you actually think about it (which Chloe has)) is that he’s been stuck in a fugue state since 1995. One day hopefully he’ll snap out of it and start writing songs again, but until then he’s trapped in somebody else’s life, which must be like being stuck in Madame Berger’s French class for a decade.

  And that, Chloe concludes, must be what’s happened to Jaws 2.

  “So what’s the magnet?” I ask.

  “Dunno,”
says Chloe (whose French name is Agnes) with a Gallic shrug. “Could be anything. Maybe a near-death experience. Who was looking after him when you were in the hospital?”

  “My mum.”

  With a smile that I can tell she fondly imagines is enigmatic, Chloe rests her case. Then, to make sure I know what she’s insinuating, she says, “Well, there you go.”

  By the time I sneak Chloe downstairs to show her out, the extractor fan is roaring in the kitchen, which means that Mum’s home from work, and Dad is getting ready for a lesson. He is by door, putting on jacket in preparation for going out in car. (You might think from this that he’s the kind of man that would walk up an escalator, but actually, if it’s an option, he prefers to take the adjacent staircase and race against the gliders. I think he thinks he’s proving a point somehow, taking a stand instead of just standing still, but personally I think walking parallel to an escalator is like using an abacus in the IT Lab (i.e., Stupid).)

  “M’lud,” he says when he sees me, doffing an imaginary hat with one hand and twiddling an air mustache with the other. “Does the lady require a carriage?”

  I hate that he’s showing off for Chloe, so I decide to play chicken and not say anything until he talks properly. Chloe seems to know the rules of the game herself. She averts her eyes and picks at a scab of varnish on the banister, and sure enough, after a quick dose of silence, Dad dusts down his pretend cap, returns it to his real bald patch, and tries again:

  “Seriously, you’re Ella’s sister, right? She so happens to be a patient of mine. I’m passing your place now.” He turns his back on us and starts shaking the hat stand like he’s scrumping for apples. “Did you have a coat?”

  Chloe doesn’t rush her answer. First she finishes liberating the flap of laminate, which gives me just long enough to do a quick calculation in my head: (MUM + CHLOE) ÷ ME > DAD + CHLOE. Only once she’s peeled the strip all the way down to the banister’s knuckle (revealing a runway of raw, pink skin underneath) does she let out a sound. But before her lips can shape it into words, I cut her off.

  “Do you think it would be okay if Chloe stayed for dinner?”

  Chapter Eight

  (Another thing you need to do to get top marks in Composition is paint a picture with words. There are no guidelines for how much space you should dedicate in your Composition to description, but the rule of thumb I subscribe to is that a thousand words is equal to one picture. (Once we had to write five hundred words about the street we grew up in, and David Driscoll handed in a doodle he’d drawn of Miss Farthingdale performing inflatio on a wall of dicks (it looked a bit like a climbing wall). When Miss Farthingdale handed back our exercise books she told David that she couldn’t mark his because he had massively exceeded the word count. (And then he had to see the school counselor.)))

  Mum’s face is characterful, which means it has lots of lines on it, especially by her eyes and across her forehead. If Mum were an algebraic equation, then you could make the following deductions from the symbols on her face:

  1) Mum’s right ear is much greater than (>>) her right eye.

  2) Mum’s left eye is much lesser than (<<) her left ear.

  3) Mum’s left temple is roughly equivalent to (≈) her right temple.

  The good thing is, though, you can see these sums only in a very particular light and at a very particular angle, because the trenches on Mum’s face are so shallow. (They remind me of when you take a message at the kitchen table and the pen imprint shows up in the wood grain when you’ve taken the pad away, which is why you’re not supposed to take messages at the kitchen table.) In fact, it’s almost like she’s a hologram sticker, because in the same light and at the same angle as you can read the messages on Mum’s face you can also see the red tint in her hair (which is called Toasted Auburn (and which Dad never notices)).

  Another place that Mum has character is around her mouth. These are called nasolabial folds, but most people call them laughter lines, but since Mum hasn’t laughed since Monetary Unification, I prefer to think of them as nasolabial. The funny thing about Mum’s nasolabial folds is they have the effect of making her mouth seem less important than the rest of her face by putting it in parentheses (which is a better word for brackets). This is ironic, because Mum doesn’t like to waste words like Dad does. When Mum was my age she had a really bad stutter, which she told me about once when I was nervous about a presentation I had to give on the Vikings. Sometimes, she said, she’d get stranded all the way out in the middle of a sentence, too far into it to retreat to the beginning (because by now people were listening) and not far enough through that she could pretend to be done. Every second that passed before she could get out what she wanted to say would ratchet up the suspense, and as she would stall and splutter and trip on consonants (like the alphabet was the 110-meter hurdles (my analogy, not hers)) she could actually see her audience’s expectations rising. She told me it was like their hopes had grown feathers, and as she watched them float off impossibly toward the horizon she would begin to realize that whatever form her conclusion took, it would inevitably be a disappointment. This realization would only make matters worse because now Mum wouldn’t just be worrying about the sounds of the sentence but the whole point of it in the first place. Her mind would start racing, frantically searching for other exits (clever puns, surprise twists, anything to justify the wait), and eventually she’d get so caught up thinking about the ending that she’d forget where it was the sentence had even begun. Finally, when she got the next word out it would be in the wrong tense, or the wrong number (or just the wrong part of speech altogether), and the whole thing would come crashing down around her in a cloud of gibberish. Which is what taught Mum to think carefully about what it is she wants to say before she opens her mouth. And about whether it needs saying in the first place. (I sometimes think this must be the thing that Mum resents most about Dad, that he can make her talk pointlessly just by being more comfortable in silence than she is.)

  Pete Sloss was the first person at school to say that my mum was fit, which is partly why I called him a cocksucker. I hadn’t really ever thought about whether or not Mum was attractive before he told me about making a deposit in his wank bank on the way to the cinema, but in fairness to Pete I suppose Mum does possess many of the qualities that men have traditionally found sexually alluring. For example, people of various cultures have always been attracted to symmetrical faces, and Mum’s is perfectly symmetrical (except for the mole above her lip on the right-hand side as I’m looking at it (which only makes the Roughly Equals sign on her brow more appropriate)). According to the Internet, a symmetrical face is a good way of telling that someone is genetically healthy (because your face gets shaped while you’re an embryo), and this is why we find it attractive. Because subconsciously when people choose a mate what they’re looking for is someone they can make healthy babies with.

  Mum’s best feature (besides her general symmetry (and her slender fingers (which are like a piano player’s (ironically)))) is her eyes, which is why she sometimes allows herself to wear eyeliner to work (because it lets you put your eyes in bold). As a rule, though, she won’t wear makeup. This is because makeup is deceitful, and Mum believes in candor, which is a better word for honesty. Mum has always been really honest with me, even when I was young and naïve and used to ask her things like why the sky was blue (which it isn’t (it just reflects blue light)). The one time she did lie to me was because she didn’t want me experimenting with alcohol (which I never would’ve done anyway), so she told me my grandpa drank himself to death. I found out a few weeks later from Dad that actually he’d had an aneurysm in the fast lane of the Finchley Lido and had drowned before the lifeguard could fish him out. When I confronted Mum with this, she apologized and explained that she had only been trying to keep me from harm and that she wouldn’t lie to me ever again. (In this instance I forgave her because eventually I recognized that she had been trying to protect me, and also because technically she hadn’
t actually lied, because drowning is the same as drinking yourself to death, only quicker.) Today is obviously one of the days she’s applied eyeliner. I can tell this because onion tears have dribbled three streaks of black ink down each of her cheeks, so she looks like she’s sponsored by Adidas.

  “My mum says that if you put the onions in the freezer for a bit before you chop them they won’t make you cry,” says Chloe, pushing Bolognese around her bowl like she’s trying to prove the second law of thermodynamics (which is that Entropy always increases (which is just a clever way of saying that nothing lasts forever)).

  At first Mum doesn’t seem to have heard her. Then, as if to confirm this impression, she says, “Pardon.” However, before Chloe can repeat herself, Mum runs back the tape and catches up on what she’s missed. “Oh,” she continues, wiping at the eyeliner tracks with the back of a hand (and, like a disloyal athlete, turning the Adidas logo into a Nike tick). “Thank you. I’ll have to remember that.”

  Meanwhile, I arrange my pills at the corner of the kitchen table and pretend they are points on a graph. There are six of them in total (three sorts of painkiller, two anticonvulsants (which I need to keep taking in case I get Withdrawal Symptoms (which is what Dad calls babies)) and a laxative (because one of the painkillers is also a cure for diarrhea (and because I’m not supposed to strain on the toilet because I could reopen my surgery scar))).

  “And what does your mother do, Chloe?” asks Mum.

  “Dunno,” says Chloe. And then, after considering the question some more, “Sleeps mostly. She’s got depression.”