Ostrich: A Novel (5 page)

“You what?”

“Let’s just say what
I don’t know
can’t hurt you.”

I held her gaze. (I was all in on a pair of Dinosaur Top Trumps. I was playing a man’s game with kids’ cards.)

“So you’re saying you
do
know?”

“I’m saying for a can of Lilt, I can forget.”

Susie Beckman never did give me my fifty pence (in fact, that was the last contact we’ve had), but if she did suspect I was bluffing, she never called me on it. And if she wanted to now, I’d be ready for her, because that night clitoris fast-tracked itself right to the top of my To Google list.)

I start thinking about all the items on my current To Google list. All of the names I’ve heard for things I’ve never got round to looking up. All of the doors I’ve never opened: Walter Cronkite, Cassius Clay, Capsicum, Sir Vantess, Tess of The D’Urbervilles, John Cougar Mellencamp, The Dow Jones Index, The Duckworth-Lewis Method, The Rhythm Method, The Footsie 500, The Daytona 500, The Birmingham 6, The Aurora Borealis, The Cuban Missile Crisis, Christian Guru Murphy, The Bay of Pigs, Pig Latin, Jerry Mander, Mandy Patinkin, Monica Seles, Mnemonics, New Radicals, Free Radicals, Flea Markets, Fixed-Rate Mortgages, Double Penetration, The Corridor of Uncertainty, Squeaky Bum Time, Tennis Elbow, The Ottoman Empire, The Six-Day War, The Hundred Years’ War, Hamid Karzai, Prince Naseem Hamed, Prince Albert, Albert Pierrepoint, Pierre van Hooijdonk, Donkey Oaty, Titus Oates. (It’s like browsing the index to a book I haven’t read.) And that’s when it hits me.

For the first time, I feel myself starting to panic.

“Where’s the other one?”

“What other one?”

“The other one. The anesthetic practitioner. What happened to the other one?”

“Oh, honey, he’s not a doctor. Don’t worry, there’s nothing to be afraid about.”

“Why does everyone keep saying that?”

“Because it’s true.”

“If it’s true, they wouldn’t keep saying it,” I hear myself say.

I try to breathe normally, but my heart is beating in my throat. I feel like I could cough it up right into her lap. The nurse flicks a dewdrop off the end of a syringe. “Look, this really doesn’t hurt, I promise, just so long as you can keep calm. Will you do that for me?”

I think of things to reassure myself:

The nurse is rubbing cream into the back of my left hand and talking about nerve endings. The veins run blue like motorways on a roadmap. They are the quickest possible way to my heart. (We are not interested in taking the scenic route.) I look away and think of all the must-see films I’ve never seen.

She taps on the skin to bring up the vein. My blood is hiding from the syringe, running scared. It’s in the last place she would think to look.

“All you’ll feel is a tinsy prick, like a wasp sting.”

People use analogies when they’re trying to explain something you don’t understand
.

“I’m allergic to wasps.”

“Then a small electric shock.”

I’ve never been electrocuted. We have plastic socket covers.

I am totally unprepared for this. I have a Personal Best stiffy.

“Now, remember what I said about counting to ten …”

I refuse to give her the satisfaction. If this is to be my last act, let it be one of defiance.

I decide to do a Fibonacci sequence.

Ice shoots up my arm.

“1 … 1 … 2 … 3 … 5 …”

And then I die.

(Question: Bungee Jump is to Suicide as General Anesthetic is to ________?

Answer:
Lethal injection
.

(You know the difference only on the way back up.

(Which is why right now I think I’m dead.)))

Death is a bit like being in screensaver mode, except the mouse is unplugged.

That your life flashes in front of your eyes before you die is such a cliché (and Miss Farthingdale says that in Composition you should avoid clichés like the plague. (Dad says clichés are
clichés because they’re true, but this is also a cliché.)). I never thought my death would be so mosaic, which is a better word for dull.

I always imagined a blooper reel.

I am walking hand in hand with my father along unfamiliar streets. There are no signs or numbers on the doors, and the houses and the driveways feel unimagined somehow, unrealized, like the outskirts of a computer game level (as though no one ever expected us to venture this far). We stop outside one such house. The gravel under our feet makes no sound. The door is without detail. I don’t believe there is a thing behind it, but Dad presses the buzzer anyway. It makes the noise of a circular saw. After a moment or quadrillion a gigantic man answers. Beneath a tangerine beard, his face is slate. Hair licks his forehead like fire. A lock darts down his face and bursts into flame in his fierce blue eyes. (They are the hottest part. (As he looks down at me, I think I might melt.)) Dad talks to him in an adult language I don’t understand. It’s a series of clicks and fellas and laughs and curses, and before long they are old friends and we’re expected. Dad squats down weightlifter-style, and for a minute I think (hope (pray)) he’s going to hoist me up, carry me away from here. But instead he tells me he’ll be back to collect me after his lessons and I’m to behave for Mr. Driscoll.

Mr. Driscoll shuts the door with me on the other side of it, and the room starts to load around me. For the first time in my life I realize that we are well off. Sunlight from a broken shade
bushwhacks through the murk and slices a cross section of the living area. The air is heavy with dust. Breathing is like the last half-bowl from a packet of Rice Krispies. (The world record for holding your breath is nineteen minutes and two seconds. (Dad’s lessons are an hour each, and Saturday is his busy day. (He spends all day Saturday “on road” or “in car.” (His weekends are so busy he doesn’t have time for determiners.))))

David is on the sofa in front of a small-screen TV, an N64 controller at his feet. A mushroom cloud of dead cells rises around him, so I know he has sat down recently, but he is pretending to be asleep. His snoring is stagy. I sit down next to him on a newspaper front page (Illegal immigrants have been lashing themselves to the underside of freight trains. (Something must be done.)). Even in the near dark I can see that his skin is angry, his face pockmarked and raw.

Which is when I remember why I’m here.

David is the second-to-last one in our year to get chickenpox.

I am the last one.

I am here to contract his.

(Life is flashing very slowly. It’s all happening at half-speed but also kind of at once. Looking around the room smears. Time has lost its shape, like a rubber band stretched beyond its elastic limit, and now that they’re no longer tethered by tense, every action is a present participle. Moreover, even the nouns are starting to behave as verbs. It’s hard to explain, but it’s kind of like Antarctica, which most people think of as a continent but is really just sea. (
Everything
is an -ing word.))

Outside, through the missing slat, a neighbor is washing a
Ford Escort with a garden hose. The spray off the bonnet makes a bastard rainbow.

And then I remember why I’m back here.

Today is the day that it rained
.

I know what Mr. Driscoll is going to say before he says it. I hear it in my head before it’s out of his mouth, so it’s like he’s being badly dubbed.

“Money’s on the fridge like. Acting the maggot I’ll hear about.”

The door opens. Light yawns in, like air into a lung, and just as quickly it’s gone. I watch Mr. Driscoll climb into a van. There’s time enough to read the slogan on its side before it shivers awake and pulls out of view:
An office without plants is like the Amazon without a rainforest. Love plants. We do
. (The sickle of the question mark has peeled away. (Now it is an imperative. (
Love plants!
)))

On the TV, Mario starts snoring.

David stops.

“There’s only one control,” he says, riding the sofa cushion down onto the floor without looking at me. Mario backflips up a wall and eats a coin. “If you want, you can watch,” he adds, after what could be a minute or a decade. And then: “If you tell anyone you were here, I’ll kill your pets.”

(I never did tell anyone. I have taken it to my grave, David Driscoll. When you returned to school, your black eye a septic yellow, and told whoever asked that you fell down the stairs (which you must have learned from a thousand bad TV shows in which someone convinces no one that they haven’t been punched), I did not tell them that you live in a bungalow.)

For lunch we order pizza and eat on the floor from paper plates, which reminds me of birthdays. David eats first. When the grease has stained his lips orange and the light from the ceiling has seeped through his plate and into the carpet, he turns the box round to me. As I open the box its jaws split like a snake’s, and for a second I forget who’s eating who. A cheese-and-tomato tongue beckons me closer, and as I reach shakily through fangs of corrugated cardboard the smell is science experiments and swimming lessons. I’m overwhelmed by the feeling that at any moment this box could swallow me whole (that I would disappear completely), but before it has the chance, David swivels it back round and takes the last slice. I want to tell him that he’s saved my life, but he’s on his feet before I can shape the words.

The room gulps another breath as the front door opens and I remember the stray dog tied to the lamppost. David frisbees the empty pizza box into the Ford Escort owner’s front garden and sets the slice down where the flea market can catch its scent. He galumphs greedily toward it, his eyes wide with thanks, but when the meal is a half-foot from his mouth (when he can taste it in his nose), the tether snaps back his neck, and David laughs. As he wheezes and strains against his leash I can see the first tears of rain making Venn diagrams of the hosepipe puddle. (The first drop is
Butterflies
(hairless, diurnal, chrysalis), the second is
Moths
(furry, nocturnal, cocoon). They hit the surface in a photo finish and burst and sprawl and intersect
(antennae, six legs, Pterygota (which is a subclass for insects who are winged hexapods)). The third drop is
Bees
(hairy legs, feeds on pollen), the fourth is
Wasps
(smooth legs, feeds on parasites). They meet in the middle (stings, yellow, Hymenoptera (which is the biggest order of insects)) and then become indistinct. In seconds there is an ecosystem falling from the sky (set by set), and by now it’s impossible to spot the differences. (Everything intersects. (One thing becomes another.)))

Wet gel lacquers David’s brow.

His hair will dry in stalactites, which are the ones that point down.

He pushes past me and slams shut the door.

“Help me get the washing in!”

I don’t move. I know what’s coming, but right now I’m mesmerized by the dog. He’s trying furiously to catch the rain, which I don’t remember noticing on my first time round.

(“Oi! Gaybot! Washing!”)

He is good at it, but success brings him no satisfaction. Whenever he plucks a drop from midair it turns to water on his tongue, which is not what he wanted at all. He wanted to take them alive.

“What the …”

Now it’s David’s turn to be spellbound. When I turn round he’s stiller than a bowl of fruit (or a violin). The rest of the sentence has frozen on his lips. He’s standing in front of the open slide door, staring out at a washing line that sags across the back patio like a maths problem.

The sun is shining.

There’s not a cloud in the sky.

David speaks with double question marks. Wonder slackens his jaw.

“What the
fuck
 …”

Above our heads, the downpour plays arpeggios on the bungalow’s roof, and in front of our eyes the drought falls in sheets from an open sky. It takes a moment for us to realize what should not even need realizing (what is too obvious to even say). It is raining in the front garden and not in the back garden.