Ostrich: A Novel (14 page)

On the blackboard Mr. Carson marks the spot (x) and then slowly adds two parallel lines (=). He is about to write the answer (which is 7), when instead he whirls round with such force that he almost takes off like a helicopter (or maybe in this world, screws himself into the ground like a helicopter). This time the sight of David Driscoll behaving impeccably is too much for him to bear. His (good) eyebrow trembles, his (good) nostril flares, and his (whole) head jogs on his shoulders like a dashboard dog’s. I wonder if it would be of any consolation to him to know that in a parallel world he’s just caught David red-handed, his spotty Irish face lolling lopsidedly in its cruelest Conundrum Carson routine.

In the end though consolation takes a different form. His voice cracks like thunder:

“CHLOE GOWER!”

Everyone turns to look.

(In this reality, it turns out albinos can blush.)

Mr. Carson strides toward her, his confidence returning with every step. “Why, is that
for me
?” he asks, holding one hand to his heart in a mean parody of emotion and with the other plucking the note from her stiff fingers. “But you know I’ve got no secrets, Chloe. If you’ve got something to say to me, then you can say it to the whole class.”

The look that Chloe gives him is withering enough to make fruit think twice about ripening, but Mr. Carson stands his ground. After what seems like forever, she kicks back her chair, gets to her feet, and snatches back the note on her way to the blackboard. With her eyes still fixed on Mr. Carson, who shifts uncomfortably from foot to foot, she unfolds the note, takes a breath, and then recalibrates her gaze to the floor.

“We’re all atwitter,” says Mr. Carson.

“Meet—” starts Chloe.

“E-nun-c-iate,” interrupts Mr. Carson.

“Meet me—”

“Try to project,” interrupts Mr. Carson (which is ironic, because he’s the one Projecting. You can almost see him coloring Chloe’s hair orange and dotting her face with greasy Irish spots).

“Meet me after—”

“Breath from your stomach, not your throat. Try again.”

“Meet me after school—”

(“Oooooh,” says everyone.)

“Stand up straight,” says Mr. Carson. “Try and imagine there’s a string—”

“Fuck off,” interrupts Chloe Gower, and then storms out of the class.

“Well,” says Mr. Carson eventually, once the laughter and applause have died down sufficiently for him to be heard. “I’m sure I don’t need to tell whoever that message was intended for
that if they wish to meet Miss Gower after school they’ll be doing so after detention.”

When the clock is about to strike half past, I make the
Countdown
alarm sound under my breath, but loud enough to get a detention of my own.

Alternate Miss Farthingdale calls me the prodigal son outside detention, which I find embarrassing because it reminds me of the time I called her Mum. We are at the entrance to the sports hall, which is all set up for exams and which is where detention is taking place. She asks how I’m feeling, and I tell her fine thanks, and when I make to walk past her into the sports hall she looks confused.

“Are you on the list?” she asks, like she’s a bouncer in a film with a velvet rope in one hand and a clipboard in the other (as opposed to an English teacher in a school with what looks like a Pez dispenser in one hand and a clipboard in the other).

I tell her I am, and she asks what I’m in for, but before I can
tell her she says, “Actually, don’t tell me. That’s the first thing you learn in detention. Everyone’s innocent.” Then she smiles and beckons me close and asks if I’d like a Polo.

“No, thanks,” I say (shuddering almost imperceptibly). “They’re bad for your teeth.”

“What isn’t these days?” says Miss Farthingdale, and tells me to hold out my hand, which I do automatically. Then she double-clicks her Pez dispenser and two small round white pills appear in my palm. Their dimensions are identical to the gap in the middle of a Polo, like we’re living in a negative. I must look as confused as I feel, because Miss Farthingdale laughs and explains that they’re “Polo Holes.” And then (as though she knows I’m a visitor from a faraway place) she tells me not to worry because they taste exactly the same.

Inside the hall, Chloe and I sit one in front of the other in the shadow of the godivarous basketball hoops. Because we are far enough out of Miss Farthingdale’s earshot and because I’m the one sat behind in alphabetical order, we are able to converse effectively, me whispering and her holding up notes on an A4 pad. The first note she holds up is in pencil and too faint for me to read.

“E-nun-c-iate,” I whisper into the darkness of her hair.

“LOL,” she writes in biro, even though we both know she hasn’t. Then she traces over her original message with the pen.

“what did u find out?” it says.

“Bout what?”

“hampster.”

“I think you were right,” I mumble (partly to be quiet and partly because I don’t like admitting I’m wrong).

“project,” she scrawls.

“You’re right,” I say louder, disguised as a cough. “He’s not the same. And everyone’s acting really weird.”

“weird?”
she scribbles, although I don’t know if she intends the italics or if she’s just holding the pad at an angle.

So I tell her about my driving lesson and about how David smiled at me and how Mum keeps looking at me in the third person and a little bit about Quantum Mechanics. And then, as it occurs to me, I tell her about how my life flashed before my eyes in the hospital and, specifically, how it felt like Time had come loose from its moorings, and how (now that I think about it) this might have been a Relativity-type thing, which would suggest that I was traveling close to the speed of light, and maybe I had died under the knife after all or rather one of me had because maybe death is just another word for reaching The Limit of Infinity, which is the only place in the universe where parallel lines can meet, which maybe, just maybe, might explain how it was I was able to hop across to an alternate reality (!!!) and carry on my life like nothing had happened. (Maybe that’s why when someone dies you don’t say they’ve died, you say they’ve
passed
.) Finally, to illustrate the point, I tear the For and Against page out of my Maths exercise book and pass it off to Chloe as she rocks back on her chair. She studies it for no more than three and three-quarter seconds (three Mississippis and an Amazon) before scrunching it into a ball and starting to compose her reply. It’s only four words long (or five if you count the apostrophe (which I don’t)), but the way Chloe
writes it, turning the pad on its side and slotting the letters between the lines like she’s doing nothing more important than playing a game of Connect 4, it takes up a whole side of paper:

At the bus stop Chloe expounds her theory, which is another word for explain.

“He’s doing it so you choose him.”

“Choose him for what?” I ask. “Doing what?”

“Being ‘fun,’ ” she says, making the inverted commas in the air with only one hand so it looks more like Scout’s Honor. “So you choose him to live with.”

“What do you mean?” I ask, stupidly.

Chloe sighs. “He’s trying to be West Germany. He wants to make sure that when the wall goes up you want to be on his side of it.”

And then she tells me the story.

It all started one Saturday morning when Chloe’s dad suggested they went on one of their drives together, just the two of them. Already Chloe knew something was up, because they’d never before been on a drive together, neither as a pair or as part of a larger unit. (They had driven to places and then subsequently back from them, but that wasn’t the same thing at all.) When she got into the car Chloe had to adjust the seat, which recently she noticed had been set much farther back
than she was used to. She could tell this for certain that Saturday morning because when she first sat down she couldn’t reach the radio dial, which had been retuned to Heart 106.2. On the motorway her dad asked her lots of questions about her life (what sort of music she was listening to (good), whether or not she had a boyfriend (not), how everything was going at school (s’okay)), and then a few more about her mum (did she like her cooking (s’okay), whether or not she wanted to be like her when she was older (not), how would she rate their relationship on a scale of one to ten (good)). By the time he was done quizzing her, a sign had welcomed them to Surrey.

“Where are we going?” Chloe asked.

“There’s something I want to show you,” said her dad.

The something turned out to be a house. They were greeted at the entrance gate by a six-foot-tall blond estate agent with a button missing from her blouse, who kissed her dad on both cheeks and told her she must be Chloe. Then she gave them a tour, which took forever because the house had seven bedrooms and a tennis court.

“What do you think?” asked her dad halfway through, when the estate agent had slipped away to take a phone call.

“We don’t play tennis,” said Chloe.

“I know that,” said her dad. “It would be an investment. Charlotte’s nice, isn’t she?”

“Who?” said Chloe.

“Charlotte,” said her dad again, as though Chloe hadn’t heard him the first time, which she had. “The estate agent,” he added eventually.

“How do you know her?” asked Chloe.

“I make a lot of investments,” said her dad.

At the end of the tour, once she’d kissed Chloe’s dad on both cheeks again and told him that they should talk on Monday, Charlotte told Chloe what a pleasure it was to
finally
meet her. On the way home Chloe had a lot of questions she wanted to ask, but her dad put the roof down even though it was October, which meant they couldn’t talk. As he explained, “You only live once.”

In the three weeks that followed, Chloe twice found her dad sleeping on the sofa in the living room. (He must have fallen asleep reading, he said the first time, and he must have fallen asleep reading again, he said the second, although both times Chloe observed that the only reading material in arm’s reach was an old copy of
AutoTrader
magazine, which she doubted possessed the requisite rereadability to trigger two separate instances of falling asleep on the sofa.) In these three weeks Chloe’s dad took her CD shopping on five separate occasions, each time returning with a bounty of no fewer than four albums, each of which he insisted she copy for him. After she had done so, he would wait a day or two to tell her how much he’d enjoyed it, usually saying how much it reminded him of someone he used to listen to himself (most often someone called Colin Bluntstone, who Chloe and I agree sounds more like a Cluedo guess than a musician). The last dozen CDs she “burned” for him were blank.

It was at the end of this three weeks that Chloe’s mum found she couldn’t get out of bed one morning so her dad had to drive her to school. He was waiting in the driveway with the engine running when she opened the passenger-side door
into a blast of saxophone. “Careless Whisper” by George Michael was playing on the retuned radio, and the car seat had been pushed back as far as it would go. It was when she reached underneath it to pull the slide lever that she found the button. She got the bus home from school that day (from the exact spot we’re at now (well, actually, from about two hundred meters down the road, because this one’s a temporary stop)), and when she got home and opened the front door she saw the luggage on the porch.

Charlotte moved in with Chloe’s dad for a while after the separation, but soon she gave way for Nadine, who was replaced by Anya, who abdicated (after Chloe’s sister pissed in her bubble bath) and was succeeded by Nicola. It wasn’t until a long time afterward that Chloe realized that her dad’s first four post-divorce girlfriends had all been named after potatoes.

“And mark my words,” she concludes (in the nick of time) as her bus exhales and its doors flap open, “that’s what’s happening to you. He’s waited till you’re better, and now he’s going to start Taking an Interest.”

That night it’s just me and Mum for dinner because Dad’s got a lesson with Chloe’s sister. Later in bed I have my first Wind-Down Seizure. It’s so intense that the sweat soaks all the way through the mattress and the carpet and drips through the boards onto the kitchen floor.

At Tallow Chandlers’ School for Boys, which is the institution I have decided to attend, all of the football goals have nets. There are three pitches in total, one each for the First XI, Second XI, and Third XI. The Roman Numerals are no coincidence. They match the Latin motto on the breast of the blazer, underneath the school crest:
Concordia Parvae Res Crescunt
.

“Which means what, exactly?” asks the headmaster Mr. Sinclair from behind his heavy oak desk, which might be the oldest thing I’ve seen in my whole life. There are five of us stood in front of it, all of us scholarship candidates. The magazines fanned across it, whose names I can read upside down, are all called things like
Quarterly
and
Review
. They have thick
pages. They look like the kind you take, as opposed to the kind you read (
AutoTrader
). Moreover, the volumes in the bookcase are leather-bound, like expensive menus.