Ostrich: A Novel (22 page)

Now she is outside my door. I can hear the phlegmy stabs of breath. She knows better than to try the handle. She knocks. Six times, because it’s a perfect number. Then time passes. Then she speaks.

She tells me she loves me.

She tells me she’s sorry.

She tells me I am the most important person in her life.

That I am the best thing that ever happened to her.

I am her world.

If she could, she would die to protect me.

There are no rooms behind these doors.

Her conclusion is especially meaningless:

“Loving someone means being prepared to do anything to protect them. Even if the only thing you can protect them from is the truth.”

She doesn’t expect me to forgive her.

The next day my French Oral exam goes something like this:

(Translation provided)

(Madame Berger hugs me inappropriately. Her
hair smells of smoke and cinnamon.)

(I nod)

Before David Driscoll’s party, Dad helps me bury Jaws 2 in the back garden in a shoebox he insulates with cotton wool for “no reason that comes to mind” when I ask him. The service is intimate, which means that no one comes. The broken kitchen window is patched shut with a quilt of cereal boxes. Besides Dad and me, the only mourners present are Tony the Tiger, Snap, Crackle, and Pop, the Honeymonster, and the monkey from the Coco Pops box (whose name I don’t know). Mum knows better than to show her face. She is giving wide birth to me. I am not a religious man, so instead of saying a prayer over the body, I read a formula that I got from the Internet:

“Triangle x triangle p is greater than or equal to h with a line through it over two.”

I don’t understand how exactly, but this has something to do with the Uncertainty Principle, which I find comforting, especially when I secure the lid on the box. However, when I toss the first handful of dirt down into the open grave, it plays a mini-drumroll on the roof of the coffin. Drums are hollow, which suggests that Jaws 2’s soul has left his body for good.

While I am dressing for the party, Mum asks me whether I would like breakfast for dinner. She does this (sensibly) by sending Dad in her place, because I’ve made it known that I have nothing to say to her. He lurches into my bedroom with an overly jolly fence. It is all shoulders and knees, and it makes him look like the puppet that we both know he is. When I don’t answer, he slumps down in the beanbag like his strings have been cut and tells me to give it here, meaning my tie. I watch him wrestle the snake of fabric around his thick, collarless neck and loop and tug and jimmy like a retired magician trying to remember a trick he hasn’t performed in twenty years. When finally he’s done he looks overly pleased with himself (and a bit like Fred Flintstone (and, moreover, ridiculous)). However, when he wriggles his head down under it and makes me bow in front of him to receive the medal, the knot slips and the whole thing falls through his fingers like sand. “Oh, well,” he says with a shrug. “Maybe best we give them a sporting chance, anyway.” He means the girls at the party. “After all,” he adds, approving of my outfit with pursed lips,
“they’re not painted on.” He means their eyes. “Is your friend Chloe going to be there?”

“Are you having an affair?” I ask in response.

“What?” asks Dad, even though my enunciation was perfect.

“Answer the question,” I imperate. “Are you cheating on Mum?”

“Why would you think that?”

“I don’t. Should I?”

Dad hauls himself out of the beanbag and puts his hands on my shoulders, makes an
h
of us. He looks deep into my eyes in which he presumably sees the reflection of his own in which he sees the reflection of mine and so on, which is called Infinite Regression. This goes on forever.

“I don’t need to cheat,” he says eventually. “I got Mum to marry me, didn’t I?”

I nod. (Factually, this is uncontentious, if not obviously relevant.)

“So I’ve already won.”

On the way to the party, I riffle through Dad’s radio stations, partly to check for any changes and partly to try and get a rise out of him, which is getting harder to do every day. The presets have not changed. On AM1 and AM5 a serious-sounding man is chairing a phone-in debate about the England cricket team and whether or not it has a balanced batting lineup (“They ought to be balanced,” says Dad. “Their tail’s long enough”), while on AM2 and AM3 a slightly less serious-sounding man is reporting on the rising suicide rate amongst Scandinavian teens. On AM4 a third man is singing a song
about jumping (“Might as well jump! Jump! Go ahead and jump! Jump!”). I toggle back and forth between AM4 and AM3 until the two things start to seem connected and Dad suggests we listen to something a bit more “you know.”

Then he flicks over to FM. Something between a viola and a double bass saws through the space between us. The dial is preset to Classic FM. Dad doesn’t like songs without words, because it’s harder to tell if they’re happy or sad. (I agree with him.)

“I didn’t know you liked classical music,” I say casually but not really, turning to look out my window.

“Neither did I,” replies Dad.

It’s been raining. Drops of water wriggle their way across the pane. They look like the sperm in the Biology video that changed everything.

“You’re going to have to forgive your mother,” says Dad, like he’s reading the news.

I don’t ask why.

“Because …” says Dad. “She’s in your corner. You know that, don’t you, kid?”

I turn away from the window and look across at my father. He takes his eyes off the road to look back, which I’ve heard him tell people never to do. He smiles. I smile back, marveling at how little he knows me to think I could be won round with a meaningless sporting cliché.

We drive past David Driscoll’s door so Dad can drop me off at the end of the street outside a house with a broken washing
machine and a chair with three legs in its front garden, except the washing machine isn’t a machine anymore because it no longer changes the size or direction of an applied force, and the chair isn’t a chair because you can’t sit on it (now they are the same thing (i.e., rubbish)). This is Dad’s idea. So as not to cramp my style. We agree that this is where he will pick me up from at twenty-three hundred hours, which means eleven o’clock.

I don’t realize how nervous I am until I reach to undo my seatbelt and notice that my hand is out of focus because it’s shaking so much. Dad must notice, too, because he immediately cuts the engine. For a moment, no one speaks. Then he says, “There, there.”