Ostrich: A Novel (2 page)

“You’re right, I will, I’m sorry. However, before you do, let
me
first just say this …” He takes off his glasses and pinches the bridge of his nose between his thumb and forefinger, like I do when I get a nosebleed. “It does him no good to see you like this. It doesn’t do any of us—” He spots me over Mum’s shoulder. He stops mid-sentence so I know
him
is me. A smile cracks open his face. “Bloody hell, if it isn’t Titus Oates! D’you get lost? We were about to send a search party. Don’t forget to change your watch back.”

I sit down, adding Titus Oates to my mental To Google list. (I don’t ask Dad about these things anymore, not since I embarrassed myself in English by telling everyone that a Palindrome is where they race Michael Palins.) The plates have been cleared. I hadn’t finished. Mum has something in her eye, which is a little red. Dad tops up my Pepsi and throws an arm round my shoulders.

“Well, now you’re here, Alex, you can settle a debate.”

Mum lowers the napkin that she’s been using on her eye and shoots him a look.

“Who’s tighter, your uncle Phil or your uncle Tony? Because Phil serves soup on plates, but your uncle Tony buys time secondhand.”

And then the lights go out.

The room inhales. The walls contract.

I see the flash before I hear the clap because light travels faster than sound.

If you count the seconds between seeing and hearing and divide it by five then you can calculate how far away the storm is. But there’s no time for that, because it’s already upon us.

“I don’t know what I’ve been told, no I don’t know what I’ve been told, but someone here is getting old, oh someone here is getting old.”

The waiters march out from the kitchen in procession. Ours is in the middle, holding aloft an ice-cream sundae, sprouting sparklers (the sundae, not her). By the way she’s carrying it you’d think it were the Olympic torch. She leads the chorus, singing the song against its will.

“I don’t know but it’s been said, no I don’t know but it’s been said, someone’s face is turning red, yeah someone’s face is turning red.”

Dad starts clapping along and Mum spills a laugh down her shoulder as she cranes round to see what’s going on. I appear to do nothing, but actually I’m busy empathizing (which is like sympathizing but better, because you actually put yourself in the other person’s shoes). I want whoever the storm is headed for to know I feel their pain. I try to implant this thought in their mind, but I don’t believe in telepathy, so it proves difficult. I want them to know I won’t laugh at their discomfort. I’ll do the opposite. Maybe if they’re really embarrassed I’ll even act. I’ll stand up.

“It’s
my
birthday!”

Maybe it will catch on. Maybe everyone will want a free dessert. It will be like the end of that film.

“It’s
my
birthday!”

“It’s
my
berfday!”

“It’s
moy
boithday!”

The sundae lands in front of me.

“The good news is we sing for free, the bad news is we sing off-key.”

Blood races up toward my head so quickly for a second I think I might black out. My face turns red and my eyes turn green with envy for everyone else in the whole world in this exact moment right now. (I’m an effing traffic light.) The waiters form a semicircle round our table. Everyone is watching. It’s nothing like the end of that film. I look to Mum for help, but she’s laughing tears. I look at Dad.

“Don’t look at me.”

“Happy birthday, happy birthday to you!”

It is not my birthday.

Finally, Mum steps in.

“I think you may have the wrong table.”

Our waitress beckons Mum toward her and whispers conspiratorially.

“It’s the only way they’ll let us comp desserts.” She nods toward me. “We didn’t want to draw any, you know,
attention
.”

Then she says this to me: “But we want you to know how brave we all think you are.”

We don’t tip.

In Assembly last year we learned about Rosa Parks, who was the black woman who sparked the Civil Rights Movement in America because she refused to move to the back of a bus. I think it’s great that black people are equal now and we don’t have racism anymore, but I honestly don’t get why she was complaining in the first place. On our bus, sitting at the back is a privilege that is afforded to only the most senior pupils. It has taken me nearly four years to earn this position (during which time I have matured from the bright-eyed nine-year-old who arrived at Grove End with a song in his heart and raisins in his lunchbox to the worldly and cynical almost-thirteen-year-old I am today). Middle school was meant to be only a
stopgap. The bus thing is pretty much the only advantage of still being here after all this time. So when I see a Year 5 stumbling hesitantly down the aisle toward me, I know exactly what’s going on. A mix of Fear and Excitement struggles to articulate itself on his face. He chews the inside of a cheek with a set of primary teeth and looks up at me, his eyes round with hope. (He knows who I am, but I don’t know who he is. That’s the way it works. School years are Semi-Permeable Membranes. (Moreover, everyone at school knows who I am.)) I decide to help him along.

“Yes?”

He rehearses one last time in his head and then asks what he’s meant to ask. “How are your mum’s piano lessons going?”

For a second I feel sorry for him. He’s so small. (It’s hard to believe I was once that young, even if it was three whole years ago.) He has no idea that he’s about to learn a lesson he’ll never forget, a lesson that will strip him of a faith in humanity he’s so far never had to question. However, it’s a lesson we’ve all learned in our time. I know my lines. I tear up a little, which I can do on demand. “My mum hasn’t got any arms.”

A breath dies in his throat. It’s my second cue.

“Why would you ask me something like that?”

Now his face has no trouble with ambiguity. Terror sweeps across it, freezing his features in place and pricking his tear ducts. At the front of the bus, David Driscoll pops up like a Whac-A-Mole and blasts him with a “Waaaaah!” I knew he’d have had something to do with this.

Your Mum’s Piano Lessons is a simple game that requires three players, Older Boy 1 (the instigator), Older Boy 2 (the
accomplice), and New Boy (the mark). It works like this. Older Boy 1 sidles up to New Boy on a bus trip or on the playground and asks him if he wants to be part of a really brilliant joke. New Boy, eager to please and slightly star-struck by Older Boy 1, who he instantly recognizes and reveres on account of his seniority, discerning a valuable opportunity to associate with a social superior (and perhaps recalling from a nature documentary he’s seen the levels of protection afforded to those tiny birds that clean crocodiles’ teeth), gratefully accepts. Older Boy 1 then points out Older Boy 2 (who may or may not have been previously briefed, depending on his familiarity with the game) and tells New Boy that if he goes over and asks him how his mum’s piano lessons are going, Older Boy 2 will break into hysterical laughter and everyone will live happily ever after. Then what just happened happens (the crocodile snaps his jaws) and New Boy scurries back to his seat or his corner of the playground, and when anyone asks why he’s crying blubbers something about the high pollen count.

Except this one doesn’t. He couldn’t move if he tried. He’s staring at my head, transfixed.

“What happened to your hair?”

I’m the only one in school who’s allowed to wear nonreligious headgear (there are four turbans in our year, and Simon Nagel wears a skullcap in the colors of Watford Football Club) because some of the younger kids don’t understand why I’m bald and sometimes it’s easier to hide things than explain them. I get a lot of looks, but it’s okay. Once in Year 6 I forgot to wear my
own clothes on Own Clothes Day and for the whole day I was the only kid at school in uniform, so I already know what it’s like to feel ostrichized, which is a better word for excluded (because ostriches can’t fly, so they often feel left out). I took my sweater off and undid my top button, but that still didn’t stop people from staring at me. It’s weird how you can wake up one day exactly the same person as you were the day before except the world has changed around you and now you’re the odd one out.

Being ill is a bit like forgetting Own Clothes Day.

(Analogies are also important in Composition because they help people relate things they don’t understand to their own experiences (and to tell a good story, you need to write about things that not many people have experienced). Metaphors are just one type of analogy, but there are loads more you can use. Sometimes people don’t even realize they’re using a metaphor because they’ve heard it so often that they’ve forgotten that they’re trying to relate to something they don’t understand. These are called dead metaphors, and there are some examples below:

Dead metaphors prove that we can understand the world around us only by pretending that it’s human and it behaves
like us (which it isn’t and it doesn’t). That’s why we pretend that chairs have arms and woods have necks and we’re so used to doing it that we’ve forgotten that that’s even a slightly weird thing to say (which is why you don’t get extra marks for using dead metaphors in Composition).

When my doctor, Mr. Fitzpatrick, explained about my treatment he used an analogy. He told me to imagine that a suicide bomber had taken a group of innocent people hostage in Gamestation and that if we didn’t stop him he was going to blow up the whole of the Harlequin Centre, which is the biggest shopping center in all of Hertfordshire. And then he told me that if we sent in a Specially Trained Armed Response Unit they would be able to “neutralize” the terrorist threat, however, they couldn’t necessarily guarantee the safety of the hostages (who might accidentally get shot), but if we did nothing the terrorist would kill them all anyway, as well as everyone else in a 10-kilometer radius.

“And that’s why we’re sending in the SWAT team,” he said. “That’s why we’re telling them Shoot to Kill.”

And when I asked him why we didn’t try negotiating with the suicide bomber first, he shook his head slowly like a cricket umpire and said, “It is our country’s policy never to negotiate with terrorists.”

(So I asked him what were the bomber’s demands and he told me he didn’t have any, which I told him was bullspit because the whole point of taking people hostage is getting your demands met, and if you didn’t have any demands there would be no reason to take hostages in the first place. So then he told me that the terrorists hated our freedom and that actually the
suicide bomber did have some demands after all, and did I want to hear what they were, because all they were was the systematic destruction of Western culture and the entire American way of life (because Mr. Fitzpatrick is American).

“And besides, even if we could negotiate with him—
which we will not do
—it wouldn’t do us any good anyway, because let me tell you something about the terrorist mentality, let me school you here a second, son. The terrorist believes he has God on his side. The terrorist
actually believes
that when he gets up to heaven-knows-where there’s seventy-two virgins waiting for him, and every last one of them, they’re big-time murder fans—and do you know whose side they’re on, cos it sure as bacon ain’t Team Infidel.”

(And then I asked what a virgin was, because this was two years ago and I was young and naïve (and Mr. Fitzpatrick told me that a virgin was a really good friend with a PlayStation 2). (Being a virgin is like growing up Caucasian in Hertfordshire. You are one long before you know there’s a word for it.))

So then I asked Mr. Fitzpatrick why they had to shoot to kill and why they couldn’t use rubber bullets and shoot to disarm, which would ensure the safety of the hostages, and he told me that the terrorist has a thick hide like a rhinoceros and that the rubber bullets would just bounce off him. (Which I took to be an insult to my intelligence, so I asked him where exactly he thought the terrorist was from, because if he was threatening everyone in a 10-kilometer radius that would suggest he had nuclear capabilities, which was extremely unlikely, unless maybe he came from North Korea, in which case he’d
most likely be a Buddhist and not believe in heaven. And Mr. Fitzpatrick just said, “Exactly.”)

But even then I didn’t understand why we couldn’t just try talking to him, because, after all, even if the suicide bomber did believe some weird stuff and even if he did have Weapons of Mass Destruction (which I sincerely doubted), at the end of the day he was still a person. And that’s when the analogy stopped working, because my tumor is not a person.)

The Year 5 is still there. I tell him to get to fuck, which is not in the script.

Normally I try not to swear. I learned to swear when I was seven in Wales when we went to stay with Uncle Tony and he dropped a frozen leg of lamb on his foot. A few weeks later I was watching football with Dad and his team conceded, so to empathize I said “Shit!” Dad washed my mouth out with soap (because it was “dirty” (which suggests he doesn’t understand metaphors)). But that wasn’t half as bad as the time Mum heard me call Pete Sloss a cocksucker on the way to the cinema. She didn’t get angry with me, but that night when she was tucking me in she asked if I knew what one was. And when I said no, she said she didn’t have a problem with me using rude words if I felt they were necessary to express myself, but she’d prefer I didn’t use words I didn’t understand. So she explained it to me. She told me about oral sex and foreplay and lubrication and even flavored condoms (I had previously thought vaginas had taste buds), and finally when she was finished she made me
repeat it back to her. After that she kissed me good night, which made me feel queasy.