Ostrich: A Novel

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Acknowledgments

About the Author

I
can tell my parents are unhappy by the way they smile at waiters. In that small act of ingratiation I can see the custody battle to come. It won’t be fought in the courtroom but in HMV and Game. Stocks in Nintendo will soar as my affections are auctioned off to the highest bidder. My teeth will rot.

I can already feel them starting to decay as my mum orders from the Specials Board. It’s obvious what she’s doing. She’s forming an alliance. She even does her French voice, singing along to the chalkboard like the accents are markers on a karaoke screen. (The hat accent on top of the
A
is called a circumflex. It indicates that something is missing. I think a hat always indicates this.) In History we are doing Entente Cordiale. If Mum is the United Kingdom and the waiter is France, then Dad must be Germany.

Dad will order from the Specials only when the waitress is pretty. She is not, so he gets a steak. “Rare.”

“How rare?”

“Cooked long enough that his family aren’t in denial but not so long that they’re at acceptance. Anywhere between bargaining and depression. Just so long as it’s seen the inside of a warm room.”

Rare meat aggravates my dad’s diverticulosis. He just really likes the joke. It’s the same impulse that makes him introduce Mum at parties as his first wife. He does it even though he knows it may cause irritation. (He takes “cow’s juice” in his coffee even though he’s lactose intolerant.)

I order number 28 because it is a perfect number and because I don’t like talking any more than is absolutely necessary.

When the food arrives, the only noise is the scrape of cutlery. The silence is familiar. It takes its place at the table like a second son. Then, when it realizes that only three places have been set, it goes on to take the floor. (This is a metaphor. I will probably use some more of them, because you have to in order to get top marks in Composition, which is what I’m practicing for, because it’s what you need to get a scholarship. You should also say however instead of but and moreover instead of also, and, whenever possible, make sure that people exclaim and remark things instead of saying them. Moreover, you should talk about past events in the present tense and use at least one semicolon even if you’re not completely sure how.)

Silence is a game of chicken. Mum always says it’s not the winning, it’s the taking part. (Dad says you can’t win unless you take part. (“Can’t win the lottery if you don’t buy a ticket.”)) So it’s not really a surprise when she cracks first.

“What did you learn at school today?”

In Science we are doing magnetic fields. It makes me think of divorce. I will be the iron filings and they will be the poles, taking it in turns to see if they will attract me or disperse me like a water cannon. What they don’t realize is that the experiment is flawed because they are both like poles. I can tell this because they repel each other.

“La Paz is the highest capital city in the world.”

“Is that right?” asks Mum rhetorically.

“Yes, it is,” I say (because I am my mother’s son). And then, to further fuel the conversation, “What does
precocity
mean?”

“Why?” Mum. Non-rhetorical.

“Because Miss Farthingdale asked if I knew what it meant, and I said I did.”

Dad throws back his head. At first I think he is laughing at me (which he does sometimes), but it’s the steak. He’s given up chewing, gulping it back in chunks, dolphin-style.

“
Ms
. Farthingdale,” corrects Mum.

This time he does laugh. Mum doesn’t. She does the opposite of laughing, which is like not laughing but more so.

“You’d prefer he grow up a misogynist like his father?”

She catches herself a second too late. The words slipped out by accident, like a glob of spit hitching a ride on a capital
P
. They drip down Dad’s cheek, and for the first time since we’ve
sat down she looks him straight in the eye, pretending not to see it, hoping he hasn’t noticed it.

Grow up
.

If he has noticed, he doesn’t show it.

“Don’t you mean
ms
ogynist?”

He gulps back another hunk of beef as a reward for his trick and leans across the table to plant a kiss on Mum’s cheek. She recoils at his touch, like the sea from the ugly pebble beach in Brighton where we used to go on holiday. (We don’t go on holiday anymore. (Mum says being on holiday is a state of mind.))

“Ah, come on, Lou, he’s not so bad!”

Sometimes my parents will talk about me like I’m not here. (This is called the third person. (I think that’s why they haven’t had any more children, because they’re used to me being the third person.)) Dad has been doing it more and more lately.

Is everything all right?

It’s the waitress. On closer inspection, she is almost pretty. If you were to describe a pretty girl to one of those police composite artists that they have on American TV shows she is what you might get. All of her features are correct, but somehow they don’t link up properly, like they don’t belong together. Her hair is fuzzy, as though it’s been drawn with a 2B pencil. She is frustrating to look at (like a wonky picture), so I don’t.

(I am starting to notice these things, which makes me think that perhaps I am my father’s son after all.)

My parents beam at her as though she’s the sun and they are solar-powered. I notice that Dad doesn’t look directly at her, either.

“Are you needing for anything?”

“Just the recipe!” says my mum, who doesn’t cook.

“And how’s that number 28?” She flashes me her teeth. They aren’t quite white. The French word for white is
blanc
, which is a better one for her teeth. They are blank and she is unfinished.

“Perfect,” I remark.

No one knows that I am being clever (and funny). Question: If a tree falls in the woods and no one is there to hear it, does it still make a sound? (Answer: Yes. (Obviously.))

I excuse myself.

The picture on the door of the Men’s has got no neck. His head just floats there above his shoulders, totally unconnected to the rest of his body. I decide to use the disabled loo instead, because the only thing strange about this man is that he’s sitting down, which I find more relatable than having been decapitated.

I open the door by taking my middle finger and pressing as hard as I can down on the part of the handle closest to the doorknob until the blood pools under my fingernail and my
palm starts to ache. Another thing we learned in Science is that a door handle is a First Class Lever and that levers are actually machines (even though we have them in our bodies) because a machine is just something that changes the size or direction of an applied force. (Levers are a way of lifting a heavy load over a small distance by applying a small force over a bigger distance. They work by using a fulcrum, which I like to think of as being a bit like an equals sign. (Imagine you’re reading a book out loud and you come across the number 1,​000,​000,​000,​000,​000,​000,​000,​000 and you don’t know how to pronounce it. This is when you might want to use a fulcrum. So instead of struggling with such a heavy load you could just call it a billion billion, which takes a bit longer to say but is easier than knowing the word quadrillion. This is exactly the same principle behind levers.)) By pressing down here, though, I’m basically doing a manual override. This is how I know that no one else has touched this part of the handle before, which makes it much more hygienic.

I use my elbow to lock the door behind me and turn on the tap, and then I stare at my reflection until it becomes unfamiliar. Usually I can make this happen with less than a minute of actual, concentrated looking (I need to repeat my name only twenty-two times before it sounds like someone else’s), but today it isn’t working. I try taking off my hat.

David Driscoll says I look like I lost a bet, which he should know about because his dad has a gambling problem and he’s had to wear the same trousers since Year 6 even though he’s
had a growth spurt and he claims he has to shave now. He calls my hat my gay-lid, by which he means it locks the gayness in rather than being gay itself. (It’s a white baseball cap, and white is gay only if you refract it through a prism.) I think he thinks homosexuality is like body heat and that you lose 80% of it through your head. (I saw an 18 once where the homophobic bully turns out to be gay, which is called Overcompensation, but David Driscoll isn’t gay, because he’s always talking about sex with girls. (I mean the sex is with girls, not the talking. (He never talks to girls.)))

It works. A stranger stares back at me from the mirror. I hold his gaze, being careful to keep perfectly still because I am in screensaver mode and the slightest movement could break the spell. We burrow into each other’s eyes. (There is no sign of recognition in his, either.) Then I notice something protruding from his head.

Someone has written something behind him in the space between the paper towel dispenser and the help cord:

It makes more sense when I turn around.

I was here

The message slides down the wall, starting at
I
and ending at
e
. (If the help cord is a y-axis and the top of the towel dispenser
is x, then it displays a relationship of Inverse Proportionality.) The letters are jagged and sharp. Some of them start off normal and end up in italics, and the
W
looks like an underwater shark. When I take a step toward them I can see that they aren’t written at all. Someone has carved them into the wall with a knife, which seems like a lot of effort to go to, especially if you know that
I was here
is a tautology. Whoever left this can’t know about tautologies, because if he did he’d have known that he was wasting his time. He might as well just have scratched
I
or
was
or
here
(or even just a full stop) because any one of them would have meant exactly as much. (A tautology is when you say the same thing twice, like
safe haven
, or
tuna fish
, or
I thought to myself
(because it’s impossible to think to anyone besides yourself (unless you believe in telepathy (which I don’t))). You can lose marks in Composition for tautologies, but people use them all the time in life because they like the sound of their own voices.)

Back at the table it’s obvious Mum and Dad are arguing, because that’s the only time they’re polite to each other. The way they fight is to see which of them can keep the calmest, because the calmer you are, the more rational you’re being. Even from a distance I can see that Dad is winning on points. He’s doing this thing where he measures out his words between his palms like he’s boasting about a fish he caught, which he thinks makes them sound precise and authoritative (but which I think makes it look like they’re in brackets). I edge closer until I can hear them.

“I appreciate that, I hear what you’re saying, Lou, I recognize its validity, and for the record here, no one’s actively disagreeing with you.”

“I wouldn’t suggest you were. I apologize if you got that impression. That said, if you’d let me finish—”