Ostrich: A Novel (11 page)

“In for a penny, in for a pound!!” double-exclaims Dad. “Hold on to your ____”

But I don’t hear what I’m supposed to hold on to because I’m holding on to my head. My fingers lock behind the occipital bone, my elbows point to my toes, and my wrists plug my ears.

(My pulse sounds like the sea.)

(“There are lots of people in an operating theater,” explains Mr. Fitzpatrick before the operation. “But I am The Captain of the Ship.” (
So what does that make me?
I wonder.))

We hit the ramp at what must be at least 150 kilometers an hour, causing Dad to say a four-letter word, into which he manages to squeeze about twenty vowels. We are suspended in midair for five and a quarter seconds by my count (five Mississippis and a Yangtze (which, ironically, is longer)) during which time I can feel my sphincter tighten and the tunnel walls contract around us like a womb so that it sort of makes perfect sense that when the
T
explodes from Dad’s lips, the fart thumps into my seat, and the ground slaps open my eyes I find we’ve been birthed into a field.

“What the
eff
are you thinking?” I ask Dad in italics, once we’ve skidded to a halt (and I’ve checked my head like you’re supposed to check cartons of eggs in the supermarket before you buy them).

“Now,” he says, jerking up the handbrake, turning off the engine, and handing me the key, “I’m thinking that if you’re old enough to drive a car you’re old enough to swear like a fucking grown-up.” And then he makes us switch positions.

(If I were to describe what happens next in my French Oral exam the outcome would be one of the following:

“Well?” says Dad, gesturing out across the land from the passenger seat as though he owns everything our headlights can see and one day it will all be mine. The field is bordered on one side by a guard of assiduous black trees, silhouetted against the sinking sun, and on the other by the hum of distant traffic. Even in the rising dark I can see that winter, like old age, has flecked the grass white, which makes my dad look like a young man in comparison, which is appropriate, because he’s grinning childishly. (I wonder if this is his idea of a joke. (After all, a car crossing a field is almost the opposite of the chicken crossing the road which means they have nearly everything in common.))

“Charlie Blithely Accepted Handouts,” Dad continues, pointing out the clutch, brake, accelerator, and handbrake respectively, all of which I know already, but not from this angle. “Right. What are we waiting for?”

I select an answer from a brimming quiver. “My seventeenth birthday.”

“Why?” He sighs. “You know how to drive, don’t you?”

“Maybe in theory,” I concede. “But there’s a difference between theory and practice.”

“See,” says Dad, tapping his nose, “I have a theory that there isn’t.”

Turning the key in the ignition is (doubly) illegal because people with epilepsy aren’t allowed to drive cars unless they can prove that they’ve been seizure-free for a year (and children aren’t allowed to drive cars unless they can prove that they’re adults). The engine catching makes me a criminal, so I make a mental note of it in case I ever embark on a life of crime and I need to pinpoint the moment it all went wrong (for example, when I’m tattooing my autobiography on to the face of my screaming cell mate in maximum-security prison or if I ever have to give a careers talk as a criminal cum reformed criminal slash bestselling author).

My first three attempts at pulling away I fall short of the biting point, rushing up on the clutch and causing the car to stall violently, which means actually I have to turn the key in the ignition four times in total. (To make sure I don’t confuse any of these later turns with the decisive one that set me off on my path to delinquency, I do them with my eyes shut.) The fourth, fifth, sixth, and eighth time I overcompensate like the secretly gay homophobic bully in the 18, plunging too deep on the accelerator so the car squeals with impotent fury, and the seventh time I brake instead (which is a tautology, because we’re already stationary (which is already as slow as you can go)).

The ninth time is the charm. When he thinks I’m not looking, Dad sinks his foot into the passenger-side pedals and the clutch ghosts out from under me. In response I pump the accelerator and the car wheezes and strains against its leash. And
then when Dad takes my hand in his and presses my thumb to the handbrake (just like the policeman will when he takes my prints), we lurch forward, tearing free from an umbilical vine.

“Fuck,” I remark.

“Fuck,” he concurs.

“What if I have an accident?” I inquire.

“Then propose and get a job,” he opines. “But for now just remember to keep your hands on the outside of the steering wheel, because it’s significantly harder to hitchhike with two broken thumbs. Now, put your left foot down and your left hand on the gear stick.”

I put my left foot down and my left hand on the gear stick.

“Paper covers rock,” says Dad, putting his hand on top of mine and jiggling the stick back into second gear.

In second gear the car feels a lot less skittish, and after a few minutes learning how to steer (you must
never
cross your hands, which Dad explains by asking whether I’ve seen
Ghostbusters
(yes (sleepover)) and whether I know what happens if you cross the streams (yes (every molecule in your body explodes at the speed of light))) I’m almost starting to enjoy myself. Driving isn’t really so different from riding the bumper cars on Brighton Pier, which I used to do with Mum when I was a kid.

When I feel like I’ve got the hang of it, I ask where we’re going.

“Where do you want to go?” Dad answers, unhelpfully.

“Where do you want me to go?” I answer, less helpfully.

“Where do you want me to want you to go?” I expect him to say, taking the joke too far, like he always does. But instead he puts on his serious voice, which is his normal voice but
slower. “Seriously,” he starts (unnecessarily), “if you could go anywhere in the world, where would it be?”

However, before I can answer he tells me not to now but to think about it (which I really don’t have to, because it’s an easy question). So instead I ask him why he never took me on the bumper cars. At first he doesn’t answer, so I start to repeat myself in case he hasn’t heard, but before I’m through he interrupts me.

“I heard you,” he says. “I was thinking about it. I guess if I’m honest I probably thought it was a bit of a busman’s holiday. I’m sorry. That’s not a very good reason. Did you want me to go with you?”

I tell him I would probably have liked that, yes, because Mum never wanted to hit anything (which I knew would be the case before we even started, because she insisted I call them
dodgems
), and then, so he doesn’t think there’s any hard feelings, I ask where he wants me to want him to want me to go.

Again, though, Dad doesn’t answer for a really long time. Not until we bounce over a hump, the headlights lift, and the full beam strikes the base of a rusty protuberance sprouting through the frozen earth.

“I want you to score a goal,” he says slowly, pointing into the distance at the ghostly scaffold.

By my estimate we’re twenty meters from goal when all of a sudden Dad appears to lose his mind.

(“I don’t think we should tell your mother about this,” he says at forty meters.

“About what?” I ask at thirty.

“This,” he says, pinning me back against my seat with his right arm and with his left spinning the wheel toward him.)

The passenger-side door takes the brunt of the impact, so Dad has to climb across the gear stick to join me in the penalty box, where we survey the damage in silence. The boot has popped open and won’t close properly, but it’s definitely the goal that’s come off worse in the collision. At the point where the car thudded into its post, the soulless skeleton is painfully misshapen.

“Well,” says Dad proudly, tying the boot shut with his shoelace. “Now we’ve done bumper cars together.”

And then he gives me a stick of chewing gum, which I’m not allowed.

I open the door into a blinding flash of white.

“Smile!” says the voice behind the camera.

Both of them (the voice and the camera) belong to Mum, whose new hobby is photography. Ever since I got discharged from the hospital after the operation she takes my picture at least a dozen times a day. She’s even turned the utility room into a darkroom, in which she spends about two hours every night and from which I’m barred in case I accidentally overexpose any of her pictures (even though most of them are of me anyway).

I used to hate having my photo taken, which is why there
are no pictures of us all as a family from when I was a kid. Every time Mum tried to take my picture I would start crying, or, when I got a bit older, do something deliberate to sabotage the composition, like making my eyes racist. Which is why if you looked through the photo albums that Mum gave up keeping around the time I turned seven you wouldn’t even know I existed. (You’d just think that my parents were two grown-ups who enjoyed spending a disproportionately large amount of their free time at petting zoos.) The one good picture Mum and Dad do have of me from when I was young is a portrait taken against our front door on my first day of school, which now sits on top of the TV. The idea, apparently, was to document this milestone with a picture of me dressed from head to toe in my smart new uniform. At the time Mum’s ambitions apparently stretched to a whole series, one picture to be taken each year on the first day of Winter term, each one charting in stages my growing into (and eventually growing out of) this uniform, with the glass panels of our front door behind my head acting as a measuring stick. The pictures would then be lined up on the mantelpiece like a sort of human staircase, providing a convenient visual aid for any distant relatives who wanted to remark how much I’d grown since I’d last seen them (i.e., “Last time I saw you, you were only four panels tall!”). The reason, so the story goes, that the only remaining evidence of this project is the single mischievous mug shot on top of the TV is that I was so against the idea of having my photo taken every year on the first day of term that I poked my penis through the flies of my new school trousers.

Now that I’m grown up, though, I don’t mind Mum taking my picture so much. In fact, I have devised a game to amuse myself while she does so. As soon as she tells me to “Smile!” I pretend I’ve just heard a really hilarious joke or seen someone I don’t like getting hurt. This way, when she takes the picture, she catches me in what looks like a moment of wild hysteria. The point of the game is to trick my older self into thinking I was a deliriously happy twelve-year-old and remembering my childhood more fondly. This time, though, I don’t smile because I don’t want her to see the wad of gum pouched in my cheek.

“You didn’t smile,” says Mum, looking over my shoulder at Dad. “Is everything all right? Did everything go okay with Mr. Fitzpatrick?”

“Yes, thank you, Mother,” I say, which certainly isn’t the whole story, but isn’t a lie, either, because Mr. Fitzpatrick did see us in the end even though we were an hour late. (He removed my stitches without saying a word, but when he was finished he asked to see Dad alone for a moment. I waited in the corridor, and when Dad came out nearly fifteen minutes later he was grinning like a pupil who’s just been told off really badly and doesn’t know what else to do with his face. I asked him what Mr. Fitzpatrick wanted to talk about and he just told me to keep the dressing dry.) And then, to explain why I don’t want my picture taken, I tell Mum about the Aborigines in Australia who believe that having your picture taken is tantamount to having your soul stolen.