Ostrich: A Novel (27 page)

I do a broken circuit of the building, stopping before I get to the entrance, where the light spill from the open doorway makes the risk of exposure too great, and doubling back on myself until I’ve traced a horseshoe around its rectangular base. Above the front door, patterned into the brick, is a stumpy
t
that looks more like the net of a cube than what it’s supposed to (a crucifix). Nowhere are there windows at eye level, which is a problem I return to the car park to ponder. My original plan was simply to walk up to the front door of whoever’s house I found myself outside and knock. I haven’t prepared for this eventuality, that I’d be standing outside the address my dad has worked so hard to keep secret and still be in need of the decisive piece of evidence against him. It seems unlikely that anything too illicit could possibly take place inside a building this dull, but more unlikely still that the reason Dad’s been
lying to me for weeks is to cover up the fact he’s plotting a Bring and Buy Sale.

Moreover, I decide, I haven’t come all this way to leave open-minded.

Which means I need to see inside.

Just then an expensive car blinks and I hear footsteps wading toward me. I duck for cover and watch as a fat man with thin legs topples past and opens the passenger-side door. He leans over and his suit jacket rides up his back like the tide going out. When it comes back in, he’s holding something. One of those fluffy green indoor footballs that wouldn’t look out of place in a giant’s tennis bag. He tucks it in the crook of an elbow, shuts the door, and waddles back toward the entrance, locking the car with a remote without looking back. However, just as I’m about to emerge from my hiding place, he stops dead in his tracks. For a full half-minute I hold my breath as he stands motionless at the edge of the car park, looking out into the empty road. There’s no way he could have seen me. And sure enough, after thirty seconds he continues along his original vector and disappears behind the building. I suck in a lungful of foul-smelling air and realize I’ve been hiding behind a wheelie bin.

With the bags removed the bin is light enough to carry to the building’s edge without making a racket, and with the bags gently lowered back in it is anchored sufficiently to support my weight. Using the disability handrail for a leg up, I am able (with great difficulty) to clamber onto its lid, from where my fingers just about curl round the margin of the skylight. Then (appropriately enough) it’s a leap of faith to wedge my right
foot into the guttering and pull myself up the roof until I can see inside.

Inside the hall are ten people sat in a perfect circle. Directly beneath me, so I can’t see his face, is Dad. He is holding the giant’s tennis ball, and his shoulders are heaving in a manner that would look like uncontrollable laughter if it weren’t for the way the others are watching him. Their expressions have no regard for the laws of geometry: They clearly identify Dad as the corner of the circle. For some time, we all just watch. (He looks how I’ve always imagined The Loneliest Monk, who is a famous jazz musician.) Then the fat man, who is sitting next to him, reaches over a chubby hand and squeezes Dad’s knee. He relieves him of the ball and says a few words of his own, but everyone still looks at Dad. Then he (the fat man) heaves himself up and bisects the circle to hand the globe to a man and a woman sitting opposite. They accept it together like a trophy they’re being jointly awarded and smile up at the fat man. But there’s something off about the smile. At the same time it looks proud and regretful. It’s almost as though the ball really is a prize, only everyone knows it’s got nothing to do with them, that they’re just accepting it on somebody’s behalf. It feels like a smile I’ve seen somewhere before, like déjà vu almost. Except I really have. I know this couple. They’re the parents of the boy who drowned.

Then the gutter cracks.

With an orchestra of noise I scrape down the roof, bounce off the bin, and land hard on my ankle. The pain is sharp and
loud, but I have it rather than the other way round, and if anything it focuses my mind.
Dad can’t see me here
. I scramble to my foot as chair legs graze wood, and, as voices approach, hop down a verge and away onto the street. I don’t look back or stop, not until the only sound is the thumping of my heart. Then I collapse on the pavement and try to think.

Is everything all right?

“Here, lad!” says the voice, and then, with the stress in all the wrong places, so I know it must be repeating itself, and probably not for the first time, either: “Is everything all right?”

At the side of the road, backed onto the pavement in front of me with a hind wheel cocked in the air, is a dirty white van. The passenger window is wound down and the engine still running, but there’s no driver in sight. Moreover, several beads of heavy liquid clinging to the tip of the quivering exhaust pipe do much to further the impression that the van is an independent being and has just finished marking his territory. And now he speaks again, this time to ask me what I’m on the
lang
from, which is a word I don’t recognize.

“I don’t know,” I say in general reply, addressing the answer approximately to the wing mirrors as the vehicle’s exhaust shakes loose a stubborn droplet, which, in the moment before the speaker heaves into view, bursts on the pavement under electric moonlight into a palette of colors. At first I don’t recognize the man. He’s as tall as a (short) tree. His face is gray and his hair, emerging first from behind the van, the fiery orange of a setting sun.

“Gis your paw,” says the giant, sending down an enormous hand that takes forever to arrive. I reach up obediently toward it, half expecting from its size to feel foam beneath my fingers, and end up braceleted round a wrist, my fingers barely long enough to make a
C
, let alone an
O
or even a
G
. In turn the man takes hold of my arm (it’s all his fingers can do not to lap themselves) and pulls me to my feet, which is when I remember the pain in my ankle. “Woah there, big fella,” he says, taking my weight with the casual flex of a tricep as I collapse back down toward the pavement. We hold this pose for a moment longer than necessary, me suspended mid-fall, sitting squat on an invisible toilet, with the humongulus standing over me, enjoying his own strength, his pulse booming in the palm of my hand.

His eyes are two blue un-doors.

When I speak my voice is tiny and unauthorized. “I want to go home,” it says.

The man considers this thoughtfully, like it’s a joke he’s heard before but never really thought about because he was too busy laughing the first time. Finally, he nods, as if in grave idea-logical agreement, which makes him seem even more like
a homesick ginger Gulliver. “Ah sure. This is it like.” He sighs and then yanks me back up with a scary ease. “So snap out yer buzz and get in the van.”

I try to walk, but it hurts too much, like stepping into a bath that’s so hot it feels cold. Even if I did know where I was, I realize, I couldn’t make it back without accepting a lift from someone. And besides, there’s something about this particular stranger, something distantly familiar, that makes me feel safer than I have any right to feel. Still, for reassurance I trace the shape of the Swiss Army Knife in my pocket and repeat over to myself the instructions for use: “Plunge and Twist, Plunge and Twist, Plunge and Twist.”

The passenger-side door swings open like a question.

I answer in the affirmative by taking a hop toward the van. Which is when I notice the slogan stenciled across its side:

The smell inside the cabin is of singed eyebrows and misused Bunsen burners, and the dashboard is flecked with the same dull, gray dandruff of scratch-card refuse that sometimes patterns David’s school clothes. In the seat next to me, Mr. Driscoll steers with his knees. With his free hands he clamps a cigarette between cracked lips and sparks a match at the fourth attempt.

“So, like,” he says, sucking in hard so his cheeks hollow and I can see the bones in his face. “What’s the story?”

The question stumps me absolutely. In light of where I’ve just come from and what I’ve just seen (and only one day away from my Composition exam), I can’t honestly say I know anymore. I think back over everything that’s happened these past ten weeks and try to connect the dots, or, failing that, at least plot a line of best fit, because, as Miss Farthingdale always says, there’s nothing worse than a narrator who doesn’t know what kind of story he’s in. However, right now I’m lost. I can’t make sense of anything. Looking around, as if for some clue, I catch a glimpse in the rearview mirror. Behind us, in the back of the van, is a portable woodland. At a glance the foliage is thick and alive, and for a moment I’m transfixed by the secret skyline. It’s only when I trace down the stems that I notice the plants are in captivity.

“I don’t know.”

Mr. Driscoll’s laugh is grit and a phlegmy rattle. “
Jay
zus,” he says. “What
do
you know?” And with this he snakes a jab toward my chin. I jerk left, but he stops short and follows through in a slo-mo replay, as though reliving some faraway glory. “You a cruiser or a heavyweight like?” he asks, which is when I remember I’m still wearing my boxing helmet.

“Neither,” I say, thankful for a question I know the answer to. I peel off the helmet and rake back my hair to show off my scar. But before I can explain further, Mr. Driscoll’s eyes light up.

“Ah,” he says, wagging the cigarette between courgette fingers, and asks if I know
his Davy
.

In the rearview mirror our gazes triangulate. (I think back
four years to a Saturday afternoon and then forward again a week or so to a Monday morning, the jaundiced skin of David’s cheek, his eyebrow a swollen potato tuber, and the burst blood vessels that made ordnance survey maps of his left eyeball.) I can tell Mr. Driscoll is trying to place me by the way his forehead rolls down and pinches a ridge at the top of his nose. (My a-hole dilates because I am the boy who ruined his carpet, the one he found with his son dancing naked in the rain. (The one who never did catch chickenpox but got pneumonia instead.))

“Who?” I ask, steadily, glancing down at the row of knuckles that now prong the steering wheel like battlements, and in my pocket slip a fingernail into the furrow of the biggest blade.

However, before he can identify me, Mr. Driscoll looks away. “Never mind, lad,” he says, leaking smoke from the corners of his mouth. “Davy’s me young one. His best friend like.” He takes a hand off the wheel again, reaches over and tussles the hair around my scar. “He’s got a matching one of dem.”

I get Mr. Driscoll to drop me off a street over from ours because I don’t want Mum to know I’ve been gone. Before I get out I say thank you and then take another look at the private forest in the back of the van. I don’t know why, but something about the sight of these plants, their feet encased solitarily in clay penitentiaries with limbs stretching skyward and their
leaves touching, is like listening to classical music: I can’t tell if it’s happy or sad. When Mr. Driscoll asks what I’m crying for, which I didn’t know I was, I blubber something about the high pollen count. However, the real reason is the sudden pang of what feels an awful lot like gratitude for everyone I know and all the hands I’ve ever held.

Shimmying up the drainpipe one-legged is not an option, even with all the synonyms in the world, so instead I go in the front door. I am halfway up the stairs when I realize that I can’t get into my bedroom without setting off my alarm, which will arouse suspicion unless I pretend I’m leaving as opposed to entering, so I decide to empty my pockets and dump my helmet and then go to the kitchen for a glass of milk to help me think, which with Mum in the utility room will be like hiding in plain sight. However, Mum isn’t in the utility room. She is asleep at the kitchen table, her cheek on her forearm, which is next to an empty glass and a bottle of wine that could split optimists from pessimists at fifty meters. Depending on which one you are, either Mum or the bottle is half drunk. Which is weird because, except for water and fruit juice, Mum is tea total.

I pour myself a glass of milk (in case she wakes up (which seems unlikely)) and sit down opposite her. Then I tilt my head until she’s the right way up and really look at her. For some reason this reminds me of a riddle I heard once, that I haven’t thought about in years:
A grandmother, a mother, and two daughters
go fishing. Between them, they catch three fish. Each of them goes home with one whole fish. How is this possible?

At the time I remember I didn’t get the answer. It was the last day of term and there was a whole tray of Creme Eggs for the person who got it right first. (I don’t remember who asked it or who got the Creme Eggs.) Now, though, it seems obvious:
The mother is a daughter, too
.

Then I notice the key in her hand. It is easy enough to release without waking her, so I do. I don’t recognize it straightaway (because all keys look pretty much the same (which is ironic)), but when I unlatch the key box it’s obvious which one it is because there’s only one missing. I place the key quietly back on the hook, but then I change my mind because, I decide, I could really do with a new Photographic Memory.

First I turn off all the lights in the hallway and the kitchen, and then I navigate back to the darkroom door by the glow of my watch. Once I’m inside, I feel around the surfaces for a UV lamp, which, according to Google, is a must for every amateur photographer, and which I find on the cabinet above the washing machine. However, when I turn it on all the darkness leaks out of the room. This is because it isn’t a UV lamp at all, just a regular one. Straightaway I turn it back off, but I know already it’s too late. The damage is done. The negatives are destroyed.

Which means there’s no further harm in taking a look around.

When I turn the light back on I’m not in a darkroom anymore, but not in an Uncertainty Principle way—rather, in the way that there is no photography equipment in the utility room. Apart from Mum’s camera and a couple of used film canisters, the only difference I can spot is the logbook.