Ostrich: A Novel (9 page)

At first Mum doesn’t seem to have heard her. Then, as if to confirm this impression, she says, “Pardon.” However, before Chloe can repeat herself, Mum runs back the tape and catches up on what she’s missed. “Oh,” she continues, wiping at the
eyeliner tracks with the back of a hand (and, like a disloyal athlete, turning the Adidas logo into a Nike tick). “Thank you. I’ll have to remember that.”

Meanwhile, I arrange my pills at the corner of the kitchen table and pretend they are points on a graph. There are six of them in total (three sorts of painkiller, two anticonvulsants (which I need to keep taking in case I get Withdrawal Symptoms (which is what Dad calls babies)) and a laxative (because one of the painkillers is also a cure for diarrhea (and because I’m not supposed to strain on the toilet because I could reopen my surgery scar))).

“And what does your mother do, Chloe?” asks Mum.

“Dunno,” says Chloe. And then, after considering the question some more, “Sleeps mostly. She’s got depression.”

I look back down at the table and trace a line of best fit between the pills. The graph displays a relationship of Direct Proportionality, but the anticonvulsants are both anomalies. I extrapolate the line out beyond the laxative and toward the salad bowl. In between them, something is scratched into the grain:

Aunt Julie called

It’s a message I took years ago, before I’d learned to write joined-up (certainly before I’d passed my fountain-pen test). In this light it’s invisible, but if you know where it is (which I do) you can read it like Braille. As my finger rides the
U
in
Julie
I have a really morbid thought. If I had died in the hospital, these letters would be my fossilized remains. In centuries to
come, this is how I would have been remembered. An interesting fact I know is that Julius Caesar has two months of the year named after him: July and August (which is why
Oct
ober, which comes from the Latin meaning eighth, is the tenth month and
Nov
ember and
Dec
ember are the eleventh and twelfth, respectively). I don’t really understand how they found space for the extra two months (although I suspect it’s got something to do with the universe expanding), but that’s not the point. The point is
Aunt Julie called
isn’t much of a legacy, especially when you consider that Julius Caesar has a sixth of all time named after him (not to mention my aunt Julie).

Chloe kicks my shin under the table, which I take as my cue to begin the interrogation.

“How was Jaws 2 while I was away?” I ask Mum, looking down at my food so as to appear uninterested, because the key to a good interrogation is that the person being interrogated shouldn’t know that they’re under suspicion, which in this case should be easy enough because I don’t suspect Mum of any wrongdoing.

“Well, I think he missed you,” she answers, spearing a brussels sprout and then thinking better of it.

I’m not quite sure how to proceed, but it’s not something I need worry about, because by now Chloe has picked up the scent. She clamps it between her teeth to free her hands, and with them takes the reins. “How would you know that?” she snaps (with the manner of someone who’s obviously watched enough films to know about the Good Cop Bad Cop dynamic). “Unless you mean he was acting differently?”

Even though it’s Chloe who’s addressed her, Mum directs
her answer to me. But before she does so, she takes a moment. She looks at me like I’m a Magic Eye puzzle and someone’s told her if she stares hard enough and relaxes her eyes there’s a dolphin on a motorbike. It’s a weird sensation, like she’s looking straight through me and out the other side. (It’s almost as if I’m not here. Like she’s looking at me in the third person.) “We all did, sweetheart,” she says eventually. “We all missed you.”

At the front door when I’m showing her out, Chloe tries her enigmatic smile again. However, this time I decide if she has anything to say on the matter she should say it out loud.

“What are you smiling about?” I ask, Bad Cop–ly.

“You heard.”

“Heard what?”

“How she avoided the question.”

I lower my voice to a whisper, which means sacrificing some of my natural authority. “Mum would never do anything to harm Jaws 2.”

“What?”

“You heard,” I say (cleverly) in quotation marks.

“No, I didn’t,” says Chloe. “You were whispering. Try speaking up.”

“She wouldn’t. She’d never hurt him. And if anything happened to him, she’d tell me. We have an open relationship.”

“That doesn’t mean what you think it means.”

“Yes, it does. It means neither of my parents would let my hamster come to harm. That’s just a fact,” I say in conclusion,
pretending my finger’s a sparkler and dotting the air with a full stop.

“So what happened to Jaws 1?” asks Chloe rhetorically, ignoring my finger punctuation and adding three air full stops of her own (which doesn’t even work, because it actually makes things less final (it’s not like a triple exclamation mark)).

“And by the way,” she adds. “You know you owe me a pound.”

“How come?”

“Cos you didn’t know what a clitoris was.”

“But I really didn’t know,” I protest. “I was only pretending to. I was bluffing.”

Chloe sighs, like I’ve been missing the point all afternoon.

“I know you didn’t know,” she says. “That’s why you owe me.”

On the way to the hospital to have my stitches taken out we pass the lamppost that Dad calls Morrissey. It always has a bunch of flowers tied to it, which means that someone’s died and someone else is trying to remember them. Flowers symbolize this, because smell is the most important sense for memories.

Whenever someone tells Dad about a car crash that they’ve been in, they always use phrases like
all of a sudden
and verbs like
appear
. For example:

This is Dad’s Number One Pet Hate. He says that nothing on road happens suddenly. The problem is, he says, people don’t look ahead. And if you don’t look ahead, then you end up reacting to hazards instead of anticipating them.

Commentary Driving is a lesson Dad gives his students when he thinks they think they know how to drive. What they have to do is imagine there’s a blind man sitting in the back of the car (although not literally, because his weight would affect the stopping distances) and describe to him exactly what they’re doing at every step. The point of Commentary Driving is to focus the mind on the act of driving a car, to ensure that no part of the process becomes automatic, and at the same time, to allow the driver to reach a higher plane of awareness and perception. Dad calls this last part Lifting Your Vision.

What Dad finds with Commentary Driving is that when they first try it his students see it as two separate activities: 1) The Driving, and 2) The Commentary. They begin by driving the car just as they normally would, except maybe a little slower, to give them extra time to fit the words in, and then they start talking Dad through what they’ve just done like they’re trying to justify their actions. For example:

This is what Dad calls Two Different Strudels, which means that they have given him two separate things when what he asked for was both of these things combined. It is only when Dad bans his students from using the past tense that they start to get it right. Eventually, the words catch up to the action, i.e., the lag disappears (or where once there was Apple Strudel and Wild Berry Strudel, there is now Fruits of the Forest). This is a big improvement, because now, instead of having applied the brakes because they saw a light go red, the students are applying the brakes because the lights are changing, which means they are living in the moment.

However, seizing the moment is not the same as anticipating the next one. The magical thing about Commentary Driving is when the words overtake the actions and you start talking about what you’re planning to do, stuff that hasn’t even happened yet. The second Dad hears a student talking about what’s going to happen at the end of the street he knows they’re going to pass their test. This is because now they are commentating on The Future, which is exactly what Dad means by Lifting Your Vision.

When I first used to get déjà vu I thought it meant I had lifted my vision. I don’t think I’ll ever forget how powerful that made me feel. (It made me think I could live forever.)

The Christmas after Miss Farthingdale wrote in my report that I had No Future like the English Language I spent a lot of time
trying to figure out what she’d meant, which is why on our first Friday back at school in the new year I missed my bus home. When the bell rang at the end of her lesson and the rest of the class bottlenecked at the classroom door, I remained seated.

“Why did you say I had no future like the English language?” I asked, once my classmates had decanted themselves, giggling, into the weekend. Miss Farthingdale was at her desk, packing a briefcase full of Days in the Lives. When she looked up, she didn’t seem at all surprised to see me.

“Because,” she replied, “you’re an extremely capable young man, but if you can’t get your daydreaming under control you’ll never come close to realizing your potential. I’m sorry if you felt I was being unfair, but if I didn’t hold you to a higher standard than some of your classmates, then I’d be doing you a grave disservice. Do you understand?”

I did, but that wasn’t what I’d meant. I meant why did the English Language have no future. “Is it to do with China?” I asked.

This made Miss Farthingdale laugh and call me a curious boy (which is a double entendre).

Then she took out some chalk and wrote the words
I’M THERE
on the blackboard.

“Does that make sense to you?” she asked.

“Yes,” I replied.

“Why?”

“Because I’ve heard people say it.”

“Because you’ve heard people say it,” said Miss Farthingdale, swilling my answer around her mouth like she was taking
the Pepsi Challenge. “In other words, it makes sense because it’s familiar?”

“Right.”

“But it shouldn’t make sense, though, should it? Not if you think about it. Are you thinking about it?”

“Yes,” I said. And then I started to think about it.

“What tense is the verb?” asked Miss Farthingdale.

“Present.”

“And what does the present tense mean?”

“Now.”

“Exactly.” She smiled. “And how could I be
there
now?”

I thought about the question for a minute. When I spoke, it was because I knew I hadn’t for too long. “Is that a rhetorical question?”

“Are all unanswerable questions rhetorical?” asked Miss Farthingdale.

“Yes.”

“Then yes, it was,” she said. “Where was I?”

“There.”

“Exactly right,” said Miss Farthingdale. “But that was then and this is now. And there’s only one place I could possibly be now, isn’t there? And, I’ll give you a clue, it isn’t
there
.”

“Could you say that again?” I asked, because I needed some time to catch up.

“Did anyone ever tell you the world doesn’t revolve around you?” said Miss Farthingdale.

“Sorry,” I mumbled. “I’ve got waxy ears.”

“Don’t be sorry. Answer the question. Did anyone ever tell you that?”

“Yes. My mum.”

“Well, guess what. She was wrong. It’s precisely
because
the world revolves around you that I can promise, without fear of contradiction, that at no point in your life will you ever actually
be there
. Because no matter how far away
there
is to begin with, the second you arrive it won’t be
there
anymore.”

“It won’t be there?”

“Well, that’s really more of a Geopolitical question. But whether it is or isn’t isn’t important. The important thing is it won’t be
there
. Because by the time you get there—by virtue of your presence—it’ll be
here
instead. Do you see what I’m saying?”

I thought so. “That I am here?”

“Exactly right! In fact, I’d go one further. I
is
here. And always remember, wherever that happens to be is neither here nor there. Now”—she grinned, rapping the board with the chalk stub—“does that still make sense to you?”

I looked at the board again. As if on cue, the letters scrambled before my eyes and the words they spelled (if indeed they ever were words in the first place) stopped making sense.

“So how come people say it?” I asked.

“Well,” said Miss Farthingdale, hushing her voice and beckoning me closer, “that one’s easy. It’s because they’re not talking about now. They don’t mean I am there in the present. They mean I am there
in the future
. Tell me, what are you doing this weekend?”

“I’m playing football with my brother,” I answered automatically.

“You are playing football with your brother?” asked Miss Farthingdale.

“Why wouldn’t I be? He’s called Serge.”

“I see. And when you
are
playing football with Serge, what tense is the verb?”

The question swung open like a trapdoor.

“Present?” I ventured carefully (a bit like Indiana Jones in
The Last Crusade
, when he has to spell
Jehovah
to get across the tiles in the Temple of the Sun without falling through to his death and old James Bond reminds him with telepathy that in Latin it starts with an
I
).

“Exactly right!” said Miss Farthingdale. The teeth of her briefcase snapped into place. “Because in English we don’t have a Future. So if we want to talk about it we have to use the Present. Because so far that’s the best idea anyone’s come up with.”

“But that doesn’t make any sense,” I protested, when Miss Farthingdale was already half out the door, which made her stop with one foot in the weekend.