Ostrich: A Novel (7 page)

When I feel Mum’s body start to shake, I assume she’s crying about Grandma, which I’ve never seen her do. However, after a bit she lets out a stab of laughter.

“And that,” she says, “was the fluffiest sponge she ever baked.”

I’m pretty much the best person I know at Spot the Difference, because I’ve trained myself to use it to recognize absences. Absences usually last for only about thirty seconds max, so you have to be very observant beforehand and afterward to know that you’ve had one. For example, two weeks ago in Maths class Mr. Carson turned round to write a problem up on the board and the next thing I knew Simon Nagel was bleeding. He had all these red blotches on the back of his white shirt, and at first I thought someone had stabbed him with a compass (because we were doing Geometry) but then I noticed that David Driscoll, who was sitting next to me, was writing down the problem with a red fountain pen. So I knew I’d had an
absence and David Driscoll had been ink-flicking again (so I told Mr. Carson, and now he has to use a Bic biro).

(Before we knew about the absences, a lot of the teachers used to think I was daydreaming or just being lazy (which is why Miss Farthingdale wrote in my end-of-year report that I was like the English Language because we both had two moods and no future). I’m doing much better at school now (especially in Maths and Science), and in a weird way I think my absences have helped me out because they’ve taught me to be more vigilant, which can be really useful for English Comprehension.)

One of the things recently that I’ve been spotting differences in is the behavior of Jaws 2, my Russian Dwarf hamster, who is named after the film. (He isn’t named after the film
Jaws 2
, which I’ve never seen, but he is my second hamster and the first one was Jaws 1. (Although at the time I only called him Jaws, because I didn’t know he was going to die and be replaced (in History one time they gave us a newspaper cutting that was meant to be from 1916 and we had to figure out whether it was genuine or fake, and I knew it was fake straight away because they called it the First World War, which didn’t make sense because they wouldn’t have known that there’d be a Second World War (which is why at the time they called it The Great War)).)) Jaws 1 (as he’s now known) died on Christmas Eve 1999 when Dad batted him out the window with a slipper. Dad claims he thought Jaws was a rat and that he leapt at his throat, which I’ve never believed, because I called him
Jaws to be ironic since he was actually the most docile hamster in the shop. On Christmas morning when Dad found The Great Jaws clinging to the drainpipe outside his bedroom window, frozen stiff, he realized his mistake. He wrapped him in cling film, like he was a present, but instead of putting him under the tree he put him in the freezer, where he remained until April, when we gave him a proper burial in the back garden. By the time the ground had thawed and we were able to dig him a grave I already thought of him as Jaws 1 because I’d had Jaws 2 for a month and was well on my way to forgetting what had happened. But that Christmas I was distraught. I refused to have dinner or open my presents, and it wasn’t until well into the next Millennium that I spoke a word to Dad again.

In the February when I finally felt ready to move on, Mum took me to the pet shop. Having witnessed my response to the passing of Jaws 1, she tried to talk me out of getting a Russian Dwarf because of their average lifespan, which is only eighteen months (although no one can tell me whether that’s mean, median, or mode). The whole time we were at the pet shop she spent cooing over this dopey-looking Long-Haired Syrian, but the second I saw my Russian Dwarf I knew he was going to be Jaws 2. (I know what I said earlier about dead metaphors and realizing that not everything is human, but when we first saw each other I could have sworn we shared a moment. (This is going to sound stupid, but when he nibbled my little finger through the mesh it felt like we were shaking hands.)) Jaws 2 is
like
The Empire Strikes Back
of pets because he’s a sequel that’s even better than the original.

Even though Jaws 2 is coming up to his fifth birthday, which must be some kind of record for a Russian Dwarf hamster, until recently he was very energetic. Hamsters can run up to 4.8 miles a day on their exercise wheels, and sometimes Jaws 2 reminds me of a falsely imprisoned inmate in a prison film doing press-ups all day in his cell while plotting some terrible revenge against whoever it was that framed him. Which is why I like to make sure he gets an hour’s yard time, which means letting him explore the house in a see-through plastic sphere. On the day I got back from hospital, I decided he should have an extra-long session in his sphere to make up for all the ones he’d missed while I was gone, but when I took him out to the garden he just sat there in the middle of the patio, looking around like he didn’t know where he was.

(According to Google, there is a thing called jamais vu when you don’t recognize something even though it’s really familiar to you, a bit like when I say my name twenty-two times until it doesn’t mean anything. Apparently, jamais vu is the opposite of déjà vu (which I know lots about), but really they don’t sound so different from each other, which is the weird thing about being opposites. If you think about it (which I have), for two things to be opposites they have to have quite a few things in common in the first place. So even though cold is the opposite of hot, it doesn’t mean they’re all that far apart, because they’re both to do with temperature and they can both be
about days or food or how close you are to something in a game of Hide and Seek. I always used to think that being the opposite of something was being as far away as you could from that thing, but just off the top of my head I could name a dozen things that are further away from cold than hot:

Which means that being the opposite of something is actually just like being the same as it is, only with one thing different. So even though I’ve never had it, I think I must know how Jaws 2 feels, because both jamais vu and déjà vu are about memory and the past and confusion and feeling powerless.)

When I mention this to Dad at tea he tells me that the excitement of having me back home has probably just worn Jaws 2 out a bit, and he’ll no doubt be back to usual in a day or two.
And then he changes the subject by telling me that while I was napping I had a visitor.

“Who?” I inquire.

“A girl,” he says and smirks. “She didn’t leave a calling card. Said she had some homework for you. She’s coming back tomorrow.”

“What did she look like?”

Dad thinks for a minute. Then he says, “A Zebra Crossing.”

The next day, when Chloe Gower rings the bell I’m expecting her. From my bedroom I can hear Dad answer the door and greet her as “M’lady.” Chloe asks if she should take anything off (which obviously means her shoes) and Dad says, “Steady on! Why don’t you wait till you’re alone first.” While he’s laughing at his own joke I have time to find my white baseball cap and wonder whether albinos can blush, and when he knocks on the door there’s just long enough to realize I’ve never had a girl in my room until now before I say “Come in.” The door swings open, and Dad announces Chloe’s arrival with a wink.

“I’m downstairs if you need anything. But don’t worry,” he says, “it’s a thick ceiling. I wouldn’t hear a thing.” And then, like a hit-and-run driver, he’s gone.

Chloe rolls her ankle in the doorway and surveys the scene. She’s wearing her favorite thick black hoody, the sleeves pulled tight over fingerless gloves, even though, like usual, she smells of sun cream. (The dye from her hair has started to grow out. Where it parts across her scalp there’s a double yellow line,
which means no parking at any time.) I realize she’s waiting for me to invite her in. I indicate a beanbag.

“Do you want to sit down?” I ask.

“S’cool,” she replies.

“School?” I inquire.

“It’s cool,” she responds.

“School is?” I query.

“What?” she retorts.

“Is school cool?” I catechize.

“S’okay,” she rejoins. And then I realize the nature of our misunderstanding.

(Mum said once that girls are like spiders because they’re more scared of me than I am of them. (I’m sure I read somewhere that female spiders eat the male ones.)) I decide that under the circumstances the polite thing to do would be to stand up, too. I notice Chloe notice my bed, or rather the mattress on the floor that I sleep on. Her brow starts to curl up in a question mark and her mouth rounds out like the dot.

“It’s so I can’t fall out of bed. You know, in case of fits,” I explain.

Chloe nods. “But you’re better now?”

“Yeah,” I say. And then, because sometimes I talk way too much when I’m nervous: “They took it out. The tumor, I mean. It’s pretty much the riskiest surgery you can have. There was this one woman who had it and they thought it had gone okay, but when she woke up she had a Chinese accent, which was really weird because she wasn’t Chinese. So now she can’t eat Chinese food because every time she goes to a Chinese
restaurant all the waiters think she’s doing an impression of them so they probably spit in it or something, which was one of the main things I was scared about because I really like duck pancakes, but in the end it went fine, so I guess I’m not epileptic anymore.

“But I still might get them for a bit, they think. The fits, I mean. They call them Wind-Down Seizures.”

“So when are you coming back to school?”

“Don’t know. They said I’d probably be too tired for a couple of weeks. Probably after they take my stitches out. Why? Am I missing much?”

“Dunno. Not really. Rock formations. A bit.”

“Rock formations?”

“Yeah, you know. Batholiths and that.”

“What’s a batholith?”

“Dunno … But whenever Mr. Rose says it I get drenched,” says Chloe. And then she does a really good impersonation of Mr. Rose’s lisp, which officially breaks the ice.

(Breaking the ice is a weird metaphor, because figuratively it’s a good thing, but to do it literally is really dangerous. (In the cold snap of 1999 that claimed the life of Jaws 1, Letchmore Pond froze over and a boy in the year below drowned when he went to retrieve a football because he didn’t know that you’re supposed to spread your body weight over the largest possible surface area, because in Science you don’t do Pressure until Year 6.))

“What’s your hamster called?” asks Chloe, once we’ve sat down on the mattress.

“Jaws 2.”

“After the film?”

“No,” I tell her. “After the shark. I haven’t seen
Jaws 2
.”

“Me either. Have you seen
Dawn of the Dead
?”

“No. Can you watch 18s?”

“Pretty much, since my parents got divorced. Dad lets me do whatever I want, and Mum lets me do whatever I tell her Dad lets me do. He’s going to buy my sister a sports car when she passes her test.”

“I know. My dad’s teaching her.”

“I know. Can I touch him?”

“What?”

“Jaws 2.”

“Oh. Yeah, okay.”

I get the cage and explain the correct way to pick up a hamster. You’ve got to pretend you’re scooping up water. Then I open the door on top of the cage and Chloe reaches in.

“Cocksucker!” she exclaims. “He bit me!”

(I wonder if she knows what she’s saying, especially the cocksucker part.)

“Are you sure?”

She shows me her thumb. Sure enough, there’s a bead of red.

“You probably just caught it on something. His name’s
ironic. He’s a pacifist, which is like being a coward but idea-logical.”

I reach in to show her, and a beam of pain breaks through my medicine fug. I pull my arm free and bolt shut the cage door. My contents finger is bleeding and my feelings are hurt.

Chloe sucks the sauce from her own wound and says “cocksucker” again.

“That’s so weird,” I say. “He never … Are you wearing perfume?”

“Shut up!”
Chloe ripostes. “Why would I be wearing perfume? I only came to give you your homework.”

“It’s just … Ever since I got back he’s been acting really …” I try and think of another word for weird, because in Composition you should avoid repeating yourself. “Queer.”

“
Queer?
Like effeminate?”

“No, like …”

I have an idea. I go to the cupboard and collect the LEGO maze that I made by splicing DNA from the Death Star and Cloud City. Then I set it down beside the cage and take out a box of tissues from my bedside cabinet. I can feel Chloe watching me as I open it from the side. In cross section you can see that the box is hollow. A dozen or so tissues lie on top of four variety-size cereal packets (two of which you can see from this side), the top tissue sprouting out through the box’s slit like a weed through concrete. As I slide out the Frosties pack and remove a block of Parmesan I can sense from behind Chloe’s surprise.