Ostrich: A Novel (6 page)

The carpet feels like sand between my toes. When I look down I am in only my Y-fronts. But this isn’t an anxiety dream, because no one else is in school uniform. David is stripped to the waist. The sores on his back spell out a constellation. He is singing.

(This carpet will bear witness to what happens here today. With bare feet we will trample in mud from the front garden and dirt from the back like we’re signing a treaty between two separate planets. (For one day only, David Driscoll’s house is a portal between worlds, and as we run shuttles from slide door to porch we are in both simultaneously. (This is Greenwich to the power of infinity. (We are at the center of the Universe. (Today we can win any argument because the Earth
does
revolve around us.)))))

A duckbilled platypus lays eggs and has a beak, but it is a mammal and not a bird. I do not know where Bolognese stops and Ragú begins. Once I was riding up an escalator when it stopped working, and then I was walking up a staircase. (Mood swings are one of the symptoms of my illness. Last year when Mum refused to write me an Off Games note I told her that I wished she was dead and I didn’t get into trouble. “It’s not you saying it,” she told me. Which scared me, because I don’t always know what is me and what is the illness. (I really do think I wanted her dead.))

There are so many things I don’t understand.

But me and David Driscoll know where the rain starts. And for now, at least, that means we understand everything.

For the first time in my life I know I will remember something until the day I die.

(Which I have.)

It’s funny how time works in hospital. When you come in the front door they put you in the waiting room, where time goes backward, but the farther in you get, the more of a rush everyone seems to be in. I’m as far in as you can go and still come back. They call it the ICU. In here I’m hooked up to an ICP (through a hole in my skull), an EKG, and two IVs (which makes eight in Roman Numerals). Everything in the ICU has an abbreviation, which proves how much of a hurry everyone’s in (except me). (If the ICU were a person, it would be the sort who walks up escalators, which would make it a walking tautology.)

In the other wards I’ve been in, the nurses do things ASAP, but here in the ICU they do them asap. The fact that asap is two syllables shorter than ASAP means that it conveys a deeper shade of urgency. (The extra two syllables it would take the nurses to say ASAP would eat unacceptably into time that could be better spent starting to do whatever it is that needs doing.) While the nurses and doctors buzz around like flies I have a lot of time to think (which hurts less than I thought it would). One of the things I’ve been wondering about a lot is the first time someone used the abbreviation ASAP.

Although we probably won’t ever know the exact circumstances that this happened in, I have decided that it’s reasonable to assume two things:

Therefore, it is also reasonable to assume that the conversation probably went something like this:

If you think about it (which I have (a lot)), this represents a net loss of
264
syllables, when all Man 1 was trying to do was save himself two in the first place. In conclusion, this means that in
this situation saying ASAP was exactly
44
times less efficient than it would have been to say As Soon As Possible.

(All this is really unlucky for Man 1 and Man 2 (because by the time Man 1 was through explaining, their house would most probably have burned down), but for me, it’s great news. I don’t know how many hours it took me to figure this out because I fell asleep and had to start again quite a few times, but the fact that I can still do mental arithmetic means I don’t have major brain damage.)

This time when I wake up, Mum and Dad are Siamese at the foot of my bed. Mum faces away from me, her hair lank and shapeless and her head bowed into Dad’s clavicle, which is another word for collarbone. Dad is looking right at me. Stubble hangs like fog over his mouth, and his eyes are set back in his head like two marbles in a pocket. I see him before he sees me.

Dad?

He continues to stare as though he hasn’t heard me. (I wonder if this is what an absence seizure looks like, but it can’t be, because they’re not genetic.) I count eleven Mississippis before he notices me.

“He’s awake. Lou, Lou, he’s awake. Son, can you hear me?”

Yes
.

“Son? Can he hear us?
Excuse me, nurse!
Can he hear us?”

I can hear you
.

“Nurse!”

Am I okay?

Mum and Dad detach. A string of snot links them still, from Mum’s nostril to Dad’s shoulder. (It’s like he’s her ventilator.)

Mum?

“He can hear you. Talk to him. He might not have the strength to talk back.”

Mum turns to face me, and the mucus tube snaps free from her nose. She looks blurry, like someone has turned down the contrast on her face. I can’t tell the difference between her skin and her lips.

Am I okay?

“Okay, son, do you want the good news or the bad news?”

Am I okay?

“Good news is girls love scars.”

Am I okay?

“Bad news, me and your mum have been talking and we’ve decided you’ve been getting a little too clever for your own good, so while they were at it we got them to go ahead and take a little bit off the top. Nothing too drastic, just a trim, just enough to give me a chance at Boggle.”

He trails off.

“Dot dot dot,” says the heart rate monitor.

“But you might want to familiarize yourself with that noise right there, cos chances are you’ll be hearing it a lot in a few years when Tesco’s put you on the tills.”

The nurse laughs, which only encourages him. (Mum hasn’t moved a muscle since he started talking. (She is starting to scare me.))

“What is that, anyway?”

“It’s monitoring his heartbeat, which is perfectly normal. It’s called a cardiogram.”

“I thought that was a type of stripper. You know, the type that comes dressed in knitwear.”

“You’re okay,” says Mum.

And then I fall asleep again. I don’t know how much later I wake up, but when I do, it’s like a Spot the Difference puzzle. (I can spot only the following differences:

Otherwise everything is identical. (Neither Mum nor Dad have moved.))

I don’t know why exactly, but I shut my eyes again before Mum or Dad notice I’m awake. After a while I hear a sound like a fart being squeezed between clenched cheeks. However, no one laughs (and I can’t smell anything), and I realize it’s a chair scraping against the lino floor. Then Dad’s voice:

“Well, I don’t know about you, but I need a coffee like he needs a hole in the head. Nurse?”

“Mi kyan help yuh wid someting?”

“The cafeteria?”

“Goo a dar an galang de kyarridar.”

“Do you want anything, Mum?”

No response.

I listen for Dad’s footsteps to drown in the ventilator tides and imagine he’s striding out to sea King Canute style. For a while it’s silent (relatively, at least), and then it’s Mum’s turn to talk. However, when she tries to, her voice stalls like Dad’s car after he hasn’t used it for a while. She coughs and tries again, and this time it takes.

“I was born in this hospital,” she says. And then, after quite a bit more time, “You don’t remember your grandmother, do you?”

The question doesn’t sound rhetorical, but it must be, because I’m doing an excellent impression of sleeping. Either way, though, I decide to think about the answer to check for memory loss. (Another analogy a doctor used once to help me understand my brain was that a seizure was like blowing a fuse. (He told me to imagine I’d had a power cut and I was sitting in the dark, and after fumbling around for a bit I manage to reset the fuse. The lights and the TV come back on, and my computer (which I was using) starts to reboot. However, the homework I was doing in Word has to be rescued from the last saved version, which means some of the data might be missing. (Since he told me this, I always do my homework by hand.)))

“You came to her funeral. Do you remember?”

I open my last saved version and Ctrl F
funeral
.

(I do remember Grandma’s funeral. Actually, I don’t know if that’s true. Maybe it would be best to call it a half-truth (or maybe just a lie (because being truthful is like being naked
(because if you’re halfway there, you’re still pretty much the opposite))). What I mean is I know I was at my grandma’s funeral because people have told me all my life about what I said when I saw her there in the open casket in her summer dress (“Won’t she be cold?”). The fact is I’ve been told this story so many times (mainly by Dad, because he’s still proud of his response (“Not where she’s going”)) that I’ve started thinking of it as my own memory. But actually, when I look back on it, I can see myself in it, which means it’s not from my point of view, so it must be someone else’s. (I think everyone has some memories like this that don’t belong to them. They’re the ones made from other people’s memories of you, which means you’re taken far enough out of the moment to look back at yourself in the middle of it. (I think maybe this is what people mean by having a Photographic Memory, which would also explain why in my memory of Grandma’s funeral my mum’s eyes are red.) The weird thing though is that even if it isn’t exclusively mine, this is still one of my most vivid recollections.))

The floor farts again, and a second later I feel Mum’s breath on my cheek. At first it’s annoying (it smells really stale), but after a while, once I’ve managed to align our exhalations, I forget she’s even there. Until, that is, she starts telling a not particularly interesting story about the time she told Grandma she was pregnant, which goes like this:

She (Grandma) was baking her signature dish, which was her famous Victoria Sponge (it wasn’t really famous, Mum explains,
that’s just what Grandma always called it (i.e., My Famous Victoria Sponge (which is an oxymoron, because if you have to tell everyone that something’s famous, then by definition it isn’t))). The cake was meant to be a celebration, because Mum had just passed some exams and when Mum told Grandma she had something to discuss, she (Mum) remembers that she (Grandma) had just started beating the eggs … Here Mum fades out. Her voice is uneven, and the way she’s talking reminds me somehow of the stairs up to the assembly hall. They’re the sort that are too far apart to be taken in one stride and too close together to be taken naturally in two, so instead you have to choose between a series of dainty ballet steps or these ridiculous trouser-splitting lunges like you’re a football referee pacing out a free kick. (Neither of which I’m very comfortable with. (Hence, I think, the sudden association.))

When Mum starts up again, she’s skipped a few steps:

“She didn’t say a word. The whole time I was talking, she just kept whisking, faster and faster. And when I was through talking, when I couldn’t think of any more words that I knew … I don’t remember what I’d said. I think I told her you were the same size as a lychee.”

(I think about the only other thing I know of that is measured in fruit, which is the reason I’m lying here in the first place. (However, I don’t have to worry about that anymore.))

“But I remember exactly what she said,” Mum continues. “You will always be my daughter, and whatever you decide to do, you will have my support.” Here Mum breaks off again and pauses too long for it to be dramatic, especially considering I can easily deduce the end of the story (the fact I’m here listening
to it is pretty much the ultimate spoiler). “So that night I told her I was moving out. Because there wasn’t a decision to make. Because I already loved you more than I knew I’d ever love anything again.”

Her lips are scratchy against my forehead. They linger there for a second after the air’s gone out of the kiss and the suction’s worn off. (I am so glad she thinks I’m asleep. This would’ve been a gadzillion times worse than the time she explained blowjobs. (And a gadzillion isn’t even a real number, because it’s too huge for anyone to actually imagine.))