Ostrich: A Novel (24 page)
Authors: Matt Greene
Next it’s David’s go, but he’s in the toilet, so it reverts to Gemma, except Beckie complains that it should go boy girl boy girl. Which means already it’s round to me. This is one of those times that I can easily identify my emotions.
I am scared.
My hand trembles as it floats out in front of me toward the bottle, but as soon as I feel the glass on my fingertips a deep sort of calmness descends. The feeling is rare but not without president. I feel like I did when I found out that I had a brain tumor, like a weight has been lifted. Only this time I know what it is: It is the burden of Fate being removed from my shoulders, the lightness that comes from no longer even pretending to be responsible. Now my Fate is over to Chance, which is governed not by My Own Free Will (as written into my DNA) but by the dual forces of Friction and Centripetal
Energy, who between them, without so much as consulting me, will determine the location of my first kiss.
Except they won’t. Because the second I set the bottle spinning I taste copper.
And then my vision lifts and I see what happens next.
Here’s what happens next:
1) The bottle points to Beckie Frogley.
2) Beckie smiles.
3) I smile back.
4) I shuffle forward on my hands and knees into the middle of the broken circle. The carpet is scratchy, but I don’t feel this. (I don’t feel anything.)
5) Beckie joins me.
6) I lay my hands on her thighs, which tense through her jeans, and lean toward her.
7) We lock heads, and with clumsy tongues probe the holes in each other’s faces.
8) My vision lifts again. I see further than I have ever seen before. My whole life is ahead of me. It is timetabled rigorously in various shades of highlighter. I see the following things:
a) Beckie and I passing notes in class. Her dotting the
i
’s with smiley faces. Me using exclamation marks to make clear when I’m being funny.
b) Abortive sexual exploration in the back row of cinemas showing political espionage thrillers that require complete concentration to understand the plot intricacies of.
c) Jagged, six-point hearts tattooed into the bark of ageless, nonconsenting oak trees. Initials and plus signs but no equals (like broken algebra). Adverbs spelled with numbers.
d) The arbitrary application and use of nicknames. (Beckie farts in front of me one time and I immediately christen her Gaseous Clay.)
e) The evolution in form/mutation of these nicknames. (Gaseous Clay → Mohammed Ali → Little Mo → Mo Mowlam → Ten Men Went to Mow → Tin Man → The Wizard of Oz → Ozzy Osbourne → The Bourne Identity → Harvey Dent → Dental Hygiene → Gene Pool → Paul Simon → Simon Schama → Simon Shawarma → Chicken Shawarma → Chicken Licken → Gangsta Trippin → Fat Boy Slim → The
Real Slim Shady → The Real McCoy → Walker Texas Ranger → Sharleen Spiteri.)
f) The eventual realization that we have forgotten the original reason behind the names with which we refer to each other.
g) Full sex.
h) A missing period (which (appropriately enough) is American for full stop).
i) A timely inheritance. Beckie gets a house. I get diverticulosis.
j) A fat girl in a white dress.
k) A bundle of joy, which consequentially unravels, because of Entropy, into:
(i) a pile of professional compromise.
(ii) a heap of creeping resentment.
(iii) a mass of silent
2
martyrdom.
l) Casual sex (with each other).
m) A spontaneous pilgrimage to an ageless, tattooed oak. The discovery that this ageless oak has fallen foul to root rot and been chopped down.
n) A sudden obsession with Family Traditions, a phrase applied to any activity that occurs four times or more, through accident or design, in a given timeframe (e.g., fried breakfasts on Sundays, roast beef at Christmas, saying “bless you” in foreign languages).
o) Going on walks (as a family), which is not the same as walking.
p) Telling Beckie I love her
very much
, instead of just “I love you,” as though love is not a binary thing (i.e., 1 or 0).
q) Calling Beckie “your mother” in the presence of our child.
r) Taking walks (alone).
s) Calling Beckie “Mum” in the presence of our child.
t) Casual sex (with other people).
u) Accidentally calling Beckie “Mum” while alone with her. Her not even noticing.
v) Serious sex with other people.
w) The whole family in the local branch of a mid-price chain restaurant, sat at our “usual table.” Beckie and I smiling widely up at the teenage waitress as she takes our order and laughs professionally at a joke I’ve made a hundred times before.
9) I realize it’s not even my life. It’s my parents’. And I am doomed to remake it scene for scene with Blowjob Frogley as my leading lady. All because I gave her my first kiss at David Driscoll’s thirteenth birthday party, because rather than at least trying to take responsibility for myself, I preferred to gamble my Fate on a horse (force) called Gravity.
Except I don’t.
Because instead I kiss Chloe.
At first her mouth is small and stony. I can trace her teeth (like tiny tombstones) through her lips. But as I lap against her, I feel her starting to fall into me. Her fingers web my rib cage, and I stop hearing the audience’s laughter, the words of shock that stretch their faces back over their skulls like tight, gangrenous ponytails. The whole thing is over in a matter of seconds, which is true of everything. We disengage. The distance between our faces is not enough that I can see her edges. In profile, we might just as plausibly be a wineglass.
“Fuck off,” she says, quietly.
“Sorry,” I say. “Déjà vu.”
“Excuse me,” says Beckie, and then scurries out of the room with something in her eye.
“Do you want to see my Samurai sword?” says James to Susie.
“Sure,” says Susie to James.
“Do you want to see my Sarumai sword?” says Pete to Gemma.
“Be gone,” says Gemma to Pete, and then goes herself.
“Wait,” says Pete, following her. “It was a euphonium!”
And then we’re alone together, just me and Chloe Gower at the center of the universe. Which in truth is a bit awkward.
“You were the biggest dick to me,” says Chloe.
“What do you mean?” I ask.
“Jesus!”
“No, I know. I don’t mean what did I do wrong. I mean, what you just said was ambiguous.”
“It really wasn’t.”
I explain how it was. It all depends what Chloe meant by
were
. It could either mean that I
behaved
like the biggest dick and therefore still have some explaining to do or that I
used to be
the biggest dick, the implication being that now we’ve shared our first kiss—
“Shut up!” Chloe interrupts. “That’s not my first kiss.”
“It’s not? I just assumed—”
“Why? Are you saying it was bad?”
“No. It was …” I try to think of a better word for nice, which you should never use in Composition. Then I hear myself start saying
perfect
, which is far too strong. “Perfunctory.”
“What does that mean?”
“It’s a better word for impersonal or workmanlike,” I explain, and then immediately wish I hadn’t. “Can we start again?”
“From where?”
“I didn’t say all the stuff I meant. I mean, I didn’t mean all the stuff I— Actually, either way. I don’t know. I don’t think I’m making myself clear. Jaws 2 is dead. You were pretty much right about everything. I’m sorry I said those things about you. You were only trying to help.”
“How do you know that?”
“I know about the voodoo acupuncture.”
Chloe turns Japanese, which means to blush (because your cheeks look like their flag, which is especially true in Chloe’s case).
“I should have let you explain. Sometimes I’m not really in
control of what I’m feeling. It sort of overtakes me. You know when you put the wrong thing in the laundry and you want to get it out but you can’t open the washing machine when it’s on a cycle, so you just have to watch it through the window and wait for it to end, and you get all dizzy?”
Chloe nods sort of. Maybe. (I think.)
“It’s sort of a bit like that. And even when it’s finished you still have to wait for a bit, until it clicks, and by then it’s too late anyway, because all the colors have run—”
“Was that your first kiss?”
Now it’s my turn to blush. “No,” I say in two separate syllables so it sounds like the world’s first carpenter cum zoo-keeper. “I’ve kissed a multitude of girls.”
“How many’s a multitude?”
“Less than a plethora but more than my fair share.”
“Between one and fifty?”
“Up to fifty,” I say (technically not a lie).
“Closer to one or fifty?”
I tilt my eyes upward and try to study my lashes. I stay like this for as long as it would take to count to twenty-four. “One.”
Chloe laughs. “You’re the biggest dick,” she says. However, this time it really does sound ambiguous. (Suddenly,
alone together
feels a lot less like an oxymoron.) Then she asks about Jaws 2, so I bring her up to speed and she says she’s sorry for my loss. Then I ask where she’s been all week.
“I had some stuff to sort,” she says.
“But these exams will determine the path you take in life,” I say in one-handed Scout’s Honor–style quotations.
“I’m going away,” says Chloe, and then takes her hand off my ribs, where I now realize it’s been all along. This makes me aware of my breathing, which I notice requires concentration.
“What do you mean?”
“My dad got a job. I didn’t want to go. But my mum can’t really look after me anyway.” She looks around the room, like she’s tracking a fly. “And I’ve missed the exams now, so—” Her eyes land on the arm of the sofa, then a stack of old newspapers, then an ashtray, and (on the carpet between us) an old, orange grease stain. “There’s an international school … And it’s Hong Kong, so everyone speaks English. It’s only for a couple of years, max.”
Mississippis meander past. Their flow is glacial. There are only 31,556,926 of them in a year. “My name’s not Max,” I say, which, as we both know, isn’t remotely funny.
I feel inverted.
“What does your dad do?” eventually asks someone, who, by a process of deduction, is me.
“He’s in futures,” says Chloe.
I feel a flicker of mirth like a punch in my gut and suck in a roomful of air. The spark ignites, and I burp up a chuckle.
“What?” asks Chloe. “What is it?” She wipes at her face like maybe there’s something on it. “What?” But it’s all just fuel for the fire, which is crackling in my throat.
I roar with laughter.
“What’re you laughing at?” demands Chloe, with a crick in her voice. A flame leaps the divide and catches on her sleeve. “What I say?” she giggles. “What?!”
And then we’re both ablaze.
By the time we’ve burned through all the oxygen in David Driscoll’s house (wheezing for breath on our sides, as low to the ground as possible, eyes streaming), it’s impossible to tell whose laughter is whose, which is when I realize that this is one of the moments that lasts, because it’s not mine alone to forget, and I look forward to looking back one day and seeing myself in the middle of it.
“Y-ou w-ill m-iss me,” I tell Chloe, as best I can in the space between gasps.
“What?” asks Chloe, serially.
“It-s Fr-e-nch,” I say. “For I w-ill m-iss you.”
Then someone must hit fast-forward, because the next thing I know time is whistling wordlessly through my hair like wind, like I’m orbiting too close to the surface of a collapsing star again.
Then I’m sitting on cold, hard, forgetful plastic.
A tired nurse with an odd amount of eyebrows (either one or three) sits me down on the edge of a vinyl bed and squawks an instruction in a language I don’t speak. She has a swollen, red face that looks like it’s launched a thousand ships because someone was trying to save money on champagne. When I don’t answer, she exits into the corridor and swishes tracing paper across the entrance to the alcove. I am in pain, which is not the same as having pain, because it’s big enough to contain you. My legs hiss with carpet burns and my muscles ache like they’ve been marinated in acid, which they have, and every time I inhale a procession of fingers plays up and down my chest like a flutist practicing scales for Grade 3. I have to clamp
my hands round the border of the bed to keep from falling off, because being in pain is like being in anything (i.e., when it moves, you move with it).
Then a doctor comes in, his face held parallel to the clipboard that protrudes on a perpendicular from his stomach. He murmurs something I don’t hear that sounds like he has a cold and nods up to cross-reference me with his forms. Beneath the centimeter-thick lenses of his wire-rimmed glasses his eyes are shrunken and dry. They look how raisins must to grapes. Moreover, he has a bristly black goatee that makes his mouth look like a letterbox.
“
” he asks, straining the words through his lip hair until they’re completely uncucumbered by meaning (which is when something’s unburdened because you’ve scraped all the extras off, like gherkins from a burger).