Ostrich: A Novel (19 page)

“GET OUT!” she screams at Jessica, and flings away the stress doll.

“She’s okay, really,” says Chloe, about Jessica once she’s gone. “But she won’t last. Ella’s decided. The speakers were her idea. Do you want a Dr Pepper?”

I nod, and Chloe opens her bedside cabinet, which is actually a mini-fridge. I must let my surprise show, because Chloe shrugs and says, “Divorce.”

“Don’t worry,” she adds, handing me the can and sliding a laptop out from under her bed. “It’s not all shit. And the bits that are you get used to. Do you want to watch
The Exorcist
?”

“Can’t,” I say. “My dad’s in the car.”

To confirm this, Chloe stands on her bed and pokes her
head through the window, then drops back down and draws the blind. Then she slides closer and tells me about a documentary she saw about a parrot who witnesses his owner’s murder and testifies in court by repeating over and over the name of her ex-husband, who’s the one that did it. The prosecutor, who’s trying to charge another man with the murder (just because he’s black), argues that the testimony should be discounted because the parrot can’t be cross-examined, and in the end the witness is discredited and his statement stricken from the records because the court artist can’t do feathers.

“And?” I ask, when it looks like she’s finished.

“And the black man gets the chair.”

“I meant why are you telling me? What’s this got to do with anything?”

“That’s what I’ve been trying to figure out,” says Chloe. “I think this might be how Jaws 2 fits in. I think maybe he knew something about the affair and someone got to him.”

“What do you mean?”

“What if he saw something he wasn’t supposed to see? I’ve looked into it. There’s this drug you can get, it’s called Simvastatin. It’s for fat people, to lower their cholesterol. You can get it over the counter. But guess what the side effect is. Guess!”

I ask for a clue.

“
You lose your memory!
Think about it. Didn’t you say he was thinner?”

“Yeah, but—”

“Well, there you go,” says Chloe, and stamps the enigmatic smile across her face like she’s approving a package. But this time, I’m not standing for it.

“So,” I say, in the language of a small island off the coast of Portugal called Sarcasm, “you’re saying my dad wiped my hamster’s memory with a weight-loss drug so he wouldn’t let on what he knew about his secret affairs?”

“No,” says Chloe. “Not necessarily. Could be your mum, too. I’ve decided. She knows all about it. Mine did. They probably just don’t want you finding out till after the exams. That’d explain why she keeps looking at you funny. I was thinking about it—”

“Why?” I interrupt.

“Because she’s feeling guilty,” says Chloe. “Cos no one knows the long-term effects yet, so Jaws 2 might never remember who he is, like Richey from the Manics.”

But that’s not what I meant. (I’ve heard enough. (Inside, something’s swung.))

“Why were you thinking about me?”

This stops Chloe in her tracks. Suddenly, she seems embarrassed. “Fuck off,” she says, “I wasn’t. I just—”

“You just what?” I ask, sensing an advantage. “You just couldn’t stand the thought that not everyone’s family’s all effed up like yours is.”

“What does that mean?” asks Chloe quietly.

“Fucked up!”
I shout, feeling the words start to overtake me. “It means fucked all up! And it’s how you’d swear, too, if your parents cared enough about you to pay attention!”

Chloe doesn’t say anything to this, so to avoid an awkward silence I keep going. I tell her that just because her mum and dad didn’t love her sufficiently doesn’t give her the right to make up lies about mine, that she’s just a jealous, home-wrecking
slut, and that she is not my friend. And then, because she still hasn’t said anything, I take a pound coin from my pocket and lay it on top of the stereo stack like a full stop.

“There,” I say. “Now I don’t owe you anything.”

I notice the stress doll while I’m putting Jaws 2 back in his cage. It is naked, white, bald, and almost blank, its face in inverted commas made up of three equal-sized black divots spaced out like holes in a bowling ball to represent two eyes and a mouth, and I probably wouldn’t think anything of it if not for the needle protruding from its right temple. When I pick it up to inspect it closer, I notice two things straightaway: first, that the whole head is dimpled like a golf ball, and second, that Chloe has scraped her initial into the rubber just above where its left ear should be. However, before I can speculate about the significance of this, Chloe is upon me.

“Don’t touch that!”
she screeches, flapping desperately at my arms and causing me to throttle the doll (which in turn makes her gasp (as though the figure has voodoo properties)).
“Give it back!”

For a while we struggle, Chloe grabbing because she wants the doll and me withholding it for the same reason (because she wants the doll), until, after a moment or two, something about the strength of her determination frightens me and I relinquish my grip, letting it fall to the ground. Chloe rushes to its aid and scoops it off the carpet in both hands (the same way I taught her to pick up Jaws 2), and calls me a fucking dickhole. Gently, she cradles the doll like it’s a wounded bird
and starts to cry. Which is when it occurs to me that the capital
C
etched into the side of its head isn’t her initial after all.

It’s a surgery scar.

While Chloe wipes a sleeve across her sad white face like a bad mime artist, I have time to reexamine the dimples. This time their significance is obvious. (A feeling of dread unravels my intestines.) Every one of them is a needle wound.

“It’s not what you think,” says Chloe in a hurry, when she sees me staring down in horror at the black magic in her palm. “I can explain.”

But before she can try I’m out the door.

That night in bed I reexamine the evidence against Mum and Dad in light of the new development that my coinvestigator is trying to destroy me. Then I think about my feelings, which is the bit that makes A Life in the Day so much harder than A Day in the Life. First come the obvious ones: Anger, Betrayal, and Confusion (easy as ABC). Anger at Chloe for trying to destroy me (and at myself for trusting her), Betrayal at Chloe for her betrayal (obviously), and Confusion at her motives. Next, though, is the weight pressing down on my solar plexus, which is harder to identify. At first, I assume this feeling is Relief, because without Chloe’s testimony the case against my parents is suddenly flimsy, which means that I can drop the charges against them. However (if you think about it (which I just have)), Relief isn’t a feeling. Rather, it is the release of waste emotions (like Shame or Anxiety or Fear), which is probably why urination is sometimes called
relieving yourself
. This means
that Relief is the opposite of Despair: They are both acts of substitution, and therefore cannot have mass (which means that Relief can’t be the thing pressing down on my solar plexus).

For a while I struggle to diagnose the emotion I am experiencing. It’s the hardest I’ve had to think about something like this since the special sort of Pride I felt when I won a Nobel Peace Prize in one of Mum’s dreams. However, pretty much the second I put my watch back an hour (because I’m back in England, where there’s still no future), I realize that it’s Guilt.

For a while, I think about the things I said to Chloe and start to wonder where they came from. (I think about what Mum said when I wished she was dead, that it wasn’t me wishing it, and for a moment I relax, until I remember that I can’t use that defense anymore, because whatever part of me it was that did the wishing then is now at the bottom of a bin bag.) However, the remorse that I feel over calling Chloe a home-wrecking slut is not the only reason for the pressure on my rib cage. The other reason I feel bad (the biggie) is that I do not feel better. In other words, I feel guilty for not being relieved. The reason this is so incriminating is it proves that all along I have secretly been hoping to find my parents guilty in order to justify the suspicions I have been harboring against them.

(I remember waiting for my test results, how afraid I was that the doctors would tell me there was nothing wrong with me, and how it felt instead when they told me what I had.)

For some time I toy with the idea of admitting Chloe’s testimony into evidence despite her obvious conflict of interests, but whichever way I look at it, I can’t ignore the fact that my findings are fatally compromised. After a while, though, as my body gets more tired, my mind gets heavier and starts to sink inevitably toward Jessica’s breasts (which are large enough to exert their own gravitational pull), and when I fall asleep I dream that I’m a satellite in orbit around a giant, pink planetary sphere. The dream is silent like a really old film, which means that the orb doesn’t have a name. To begin with, I find this unnerving and try hard to remember the names of the planets so I can identify the mass I’m revolving around. However, every mnemonic I remember just reminds me of another slightly weirder mnemonic, with each one in turn taking me a step further away from the answer until the whole thing loops back on itself and starts again from the beginning like a snake eating its own tail or someone performing inflatio on themselves (which Pete Sloss says you can do if you have your ribs removed). Each circuit of the mnemonics (from My Very Educated Mother Just Showed Us Nine Planets to My Very Economical Mother Just Saved Us Nine Pencils to My Very Elegant Mother Just Sewed Us Nine Purses to My Very Edible Mother Just Shat Us Nine Pizzas to My Very Elephant Mother Just Sawed Us Nine Porpoises to My Very Endless Mother Just Sank Us Nine Pygmies to My Very Enema Mother Just Sand Us Nine Problem to My Very Egg Mother Just Syphilis Us Nine Probably and back again) takes the exact same amount of time to complete, which I know for sure because they all coincide perfectly with one full revolution of the nameless planet,
and after a few round-trips I start to forget what it is I was trying to remember in the first place. Which is just as well, because it means that when it starts changing color I can just enjoy the show.

As the sphere reinvents itself again and again in front of my eyes I feel a great, wordless calm washing over me. All at once I’m in orbit around a gadzillion different colors. Some of them I recognize from places and faces and everyday objects, and some of them are so unfamiliar that I’m convinced no one’s ever seen them before, but the one thing they all have in common is that none of them has a name, which for now at least means that they have everything in common. Eventually, as I continue to spin, even the letters in the mnemonics evaporate, leaving behind just a residual melody that runs peacefully around my mind until I feel an enormous quiet, this great infinity with all things, like I’m on the verge of understanding something so basic it will change my understanding of everything. But before I can figure out what it is that I understand, I become aware of something violent. The melody is speeding up. Which can mean only one thing. That I’m orbiting closer and closer to the surface of the sphere, which now I realize was never a planet in the first place but actually a fiery star, which makes me the planet and every round-trip I make a year. And now the years are passing much too quickly as the melody plays faster and faster until I’m a pebble rattling around a basin toward a drain in ever smaller concentric circles and I realize the star has changed color again, but this time to black, which technically isn’t a color at all because it absorbs every sort of light, which means the star’s imploding, so I try to shout for
help, which is when I realize that the hole has absorbed that, too, all my language and with it my power to think, which has only made it bigger and blacker and its gravitational pull stronger, and now I’m too heavy to escape the lure of the collapsing star, and in the seconds before I disappear completely into the expanding nothing all I’m left with is the silent, shapeless hope that Chloe will pop me with her giant, glinting needle.

When I wake up I immediately conduct an inventory of all the words I know in no particular order, including proper nouns. However, I get distracted before I’m done because the covers are wet. At first I assume I’ve had another wind-down seizure but I don’t have a headache and the dark patch on the sheets isn’t me-shaped. Instead, it looks like one of the tests the school counselor gives you that doesn’t have wrong answers. Moreover, in my belly button I find a pool of liquid. It reminds me of the translucent moat that surrounds the yolk in a fried egg before it’s safe to eat.

(I remember the look on Pete’s face when he told us all about his wet dream, how proud he was, like he’d come first in
something. However, this doesn’t feel like a victory. Instead, it reminds me of another thing Pete told me once, which was that if ever I really wanted to treat myself, all I needed to do was sit on my hand until it fell asleep. I had no idea what he was talking about and I remember furbatim what he said when I asked. (It seems appropriate now, in light of what feels more than anything else like my body’s latest in a long line of mutinies. (Mutinies on board a ship that I’m not even sure I’m the captain of)):