Ostrich: A Novel (21 page)

“It’s okay.” Jessica laughs. “You don’t have to be embarrassed on my account. I was Chloe’s age when I had my first proper boyfriend. Of course, he wasn’t half as handsome as—”

“I have to lie down,” I interrupt.

Jessica puts me in Wilf’s room, which has black walls. Wilf is Chloe’s brother that I didn’t know about, and Susie R. is his fiancée. Thanks to the Monkey Method, I have just enough time to give Jessica my phone before I can’t talk.

“Mum’s under ice,” I say.

“Under
ice
?” she repeats.

I hand Jessica my front door key, which is attached to my USB stick, which explains everything. “In Case of Emergency.”

However, in my sleep Mum really is under ice.

(I am spread thin across the pond, my nose pressed against the surface. My breath fogs the glass, and when I wipe it clear, we are face-to-face. The look on hers is one of terror, and with
her hands she is gesticulating wildly like there’s something behind me. I feel nothing, though, because through the ice she looks like something on TV.)

I wake up with a headache and Jessica biting her nails.

“Mummy’s on her way,” she says, which normally I would find annoying because she is not my sister. Now, though, I see it for what it is (i.e., Empathy). “How are you feeling?”

I tell her, and she fetches my pills. Then she asks me whether I knew that the body runs along meridians, which I didn’t. According to the Chinese, who have known about meridians for fifteen hundred years, the body is governed through twenty channels, each one responsible for supplying a vital organ with Life Energy. This energy is called Qi, which I did know about, but only, I admit, from the Scrabble dictionary. This is the problem, says Jessica. Western medicine doesn’t divide the body along the same lines as Traditional Eastern Philosophy, so it has no equivalency for the terms involved, which is why Acupuncture is so often dismissed as Alternative Therap–

Here I stop her. “Acupuncture?”

“It’s the easiest way to stimulate the flow of Qi along the meridians. It’s just another way to say making sure everything gets where it’s going.”

“With needles?”

“That’s what most people probably think of, yes.” Jessica sighs. “But really it’s no different to damming a river.”

At this point, Jessica keeps talking while I stop listening. I am busy formulating a theory. When I zone back in, she is
talking about her training with a man she describes as one thousand and ten percent bonerfied.

“Does Chloe know about this?” I ask. Jessica smiles ruefully. “I’ve talked to her about it, if that’s what you mean. But it’s hard to know whether she’s paying attention.” She shakes her head. “Sometimes I think she’d rather I …” But she doesn’t finish the thought. Instead, she tells me how often Chloe talks about me (often) and how high in her esteem she holds me (high). In conclusion, she says this:

“She really does like you, you know.”

I think back to Chloe’s bedroom, to the explanation I never let her give, the cratered skin of the rubber homunculus (which means little man).

“I know,” I say.

The doorbell rings.

“She likes you, too.”

If you think about it (which I have), Silence isn’t the opposite of Conversation, because in a conversation you take turns, which makes two distinctions, which means that Silence and Conversation are too different to be opposites. If you think about it further (which I also have), there are two contrasting kinds of silence. Silence
₁
is the good kind, because it is the opposite of Harmonizing, and Silence
₂
is the bad kind, because it is the opposite of an Argument. (If you think about it even further (which I am only now starting to), it’s weird that we have only one word for it.)

In the back of the minicab, me and Mum are completely silent
₂
. (Once, before Dad could turn off the TV, I heard a football commentator say about a penalty shoot-out that you could cut the atmosphere with a knife. This struck me as being especially meaningless, even by the standards of football commentary, because you can cut most things with a knife.) Right now you could cut the atmosphere with a spork. Mum is annoyed because I didn’t tell her I was going to Chloe’s, which caused her to worry about where I was. The fact that I am safe means that this Worry is now redundant, so her body has converted it to Anger, because that way it’s easier to vent.

Turning to stare out the window, I consider the implications of my latest discovery. In theory, which is theoretically the same as in practice, Chloe’s unswerving loyalty throws the spotlight of suspicion back on Mum and Dad. Next to me, as if to confirm this, Mum sneezes.

“Gesundheit,”
I deliberately do not say.

The music of tires on gravel distracts me from my deep thought by reminding me of what rain sounds like underwater and that we’re home. Mum pays the driver with a single note and opens her door. But instead of getting out, she turns back toward me and fixes me in her gaze.

“I need for you to promise not to do that again,” she says steadily, leaning heavily on
that
, like it’s a concrete noun, which it isn’t.

“Do what?” I ask, abstractly.

“Disappear,” says Mum.

“Fine,” I promise with fingers crossed.

“I need to hear you say it.”

Instead, I say, “I need to know you trust me.”

“Okay,” she replies eventually. Then she shuts her door and gives the driver another note and asks for Woodside Leisure Park.

The minicab pulls up outside the Hollywood Bowl, where an ooze of older boys have gathered to spit, but to my relief Mum tells the driver to keep going until we’re in the overflow car park around the back of the shop fronts. We get out by a wheelie bin, and I stoop down to untie and retie a shoelace to give Mum a head start because I am embarrassed to be seen with her. However, the second the minicab peels away from the empty curb, she strides off in the direction we’ve just come from and orders me to wait there.

For a while I count her absence in mountain ranges (Himalayas/Karakoram = 1 second, Atlas/Andes = 0.5, Alps = 0.25, Appalachians = 1.25) but then I get distracted thinking about the Karakoram range, which is the home of K2. Some people believe that K2 is the tallest mountain in the world, even taller than Mount Everest. However, this is true only if you measure from its base, which is thousands of feet underwater, which is exactly like measuring your penis from your bum hole forward. I think about what Mum said to Aunt Julie about life starting at the point of conception and try to imagine the circumstances of my beginnings. I zoom in to a biological level so as not to make myself nauseated and find myself in what
looks like the Super Mario Land submarine level (Game Boy edition). The egg is the end of level boss, and every torpedo that her armor repels is another me that never existed, until eventually one pierces her shell and then I am. (Born into a bonus round.)

I am sitting down on the pavement with my knees hunched around my ears in a(n appropriately) fetal position, when twenty meters to my right a fire door explodes open. The noise is summer blockbusters and gratuitous violence, and the smell is oversalted popcorn and molten cheese. A face pokes out and a hand beckons.

They are both Mum’s.

We take our seats in the front row just in time to see that the British Board of Film Classification has passed the following feature 18, only for persons of eighteen and over. Mum sinks into her seat and hands me a vat of pick-and-mix, which is the opposite of flossing. I look to her for an explanation, but her eyes are set on the blank screen, which looms infinitely above us like a starless night. Before I can calculate the marital/martial implications of what’s going on, the titles punch through the dark with such force that I immediately forget myself. I plunge a hand into the sweets and smile because I know that the next two hours of my life will be perfect.

Which they are.

The film is about a troubled Russian mystic who is tricked at the end of World War Two by Adolf Hitler’s top assassin into opening a portal to another dimension in order to recruit its
most dangerous criminals for the fight against the encroaching Allied forces, and on the way out Mum and I agree that it’s the best we’ve ever seen. Outside, it is still daytime, which surprises me, and the gaggle of boys have gone. On the ground where they were standing is a puddle of mucus that could just as easily be ectoplasm. My teeth feel furry like candyfloss, and I haven’t got a care in the world, so when Mum offers me her hand on the way to the bus stop I don’t think twice about taking it.

“I love you,” she remarks quietly on the top deck of the bus.

I look around to check if anyone is in earshot, which they aren’t. “And vice versa,” I say.

When we get back home, I head straight to my room to practice hesitating in French in front of the mirror as last-minute revision for my Oral (French for
errrm
is
ooooh
). However, I have barely had time to adjust my jaw when I’m interrupted by a sound through the floorboards. In the kitchen, someone is playing the cutlery drawer, badly, in 5/4 time. It’s Thursday night, which usually means takeaway, because Dad’s out teaching Ella, but when I go downstairs to investigate I find two onions on the chopping board. From the living room, I can hear the printer hiccupping. It wheezes to a stop, and Mum enters clutching a piece of paper, which she slaps down on the counter in front of me. It is a recipe for Nigel Slater’s Perfect Bolognese.

“Lord knows what I’ve been making.” She laughs, pulling
on her jacket. Then she tells me that she won’t be gone a minute and ruffles my hair.

Then she leaves.

Mum is true to her word. She is not gone a minute. Neither is she gone two minutes, three minutes, four minutes, or five minutes. After six minutes, I decide to start without her. The recipe calls for me to
dice
the onions, which sounds needlessly risky, so instead I opt to chop them. I am just about to make my first incision, the knife pointed away from me like an inverted moral compass, when I remember Chloe’s mum’s advice about how to stop yourself from crying, which I decide to take, even though it’s ironic coming from someone with depression.

There is no room in the freezer. The top shelf is completely full of lasagnas and casseroles. Inside their frosted Tupperware, sealed away like classic action figures, these homemade ready-meals are busy not aging. Neighbors and friends of Mum and Dad’s brought them round while I was in the hospital before they knew I was going to get better, and now that I am the cold has unionized them in a single block of ice. (They are striking against Time.) The other shelves are no more accommodating, so in order to make room for the onions I employ the knife and saucepan as a hammer and chisel (respectively (obviously)). However, this proves hazardous, and after a couple of near misses (which should really be called near hits), I retire upstairs to look for Mum’s hairdryer. While I do this I
wonder why people are always comparing onions to people. I consider all the ways in which they are similar:

By the time I get back downstairs with the hairdryer in hand, the first bead of sweat has forced its way through the brow of the ice block. With the even application of warm air, it is soon followed by a deluge, which is a better word for flood. When the donations to the charity of me are free from their bonds, I can do what I want with them, which is what is meant by having liquid assets. First I stack them on the floor in towers depending on their size and shape, and then I do some Tetris with them to determine their optimum grouping, using my spatial awareness, which everyone says is excellent. Quickly, though, it becomes obvious that to make room for the onions I will have to reorganize the whole shelf, so I return to the freezer armed with my air gun. The space behind the ready-meals is partitioned off with a wall of inefficiently stacked hamburger packets, which date back as far as 2001 (before Dad developed diverticulosis). I tilt the hairdryer sideways, which is much cooler, and squeeze the trigger. After two or three minutes they immediately drop dead.

Behind the meat curtain there is loads of space, all of it
going to waste. The only thing in it is a white plastic bag, which I remove. The cold has contorted the bag into an irregular shape that gives no clues to its contents, so I open it. Inside is another irregular shape, which I pick up. The package inside the plastic bag is about the size of a fist and mummified beneath swathes of cling film. It seems to be leftovers of some kind (leftovers that never became washing up, on account of their suspension in time). Moreover, it intrigues me.

I unwrap it at the kitchen table, where we do Christmas.

By the time Mum returns I am barracuded in my room with the mattress pushed up against the door, feet first. She calls my name from the front door and again from the corridor, but once the kitchen door opens she doesn’t make a sound. Not while she surveys the rubble of ready-meals strewn across the lino or while she identifies the broken fragments of her hairdryer or sees the saucepan asleep on the back lawn on a bed of shattered glass. And especially not when she notices in the middle of the kitchen table a paw poking out from a cling-film chrysalis.