Ostrich: A Novel

by Matt Greene

  “We don’t play tennis,” said Chloe.

  “I know that,” said her dad. “It would be an investment. Charlotte’s nice, isn’t she?”

  “Who?” said Chloe.

  “Charlotte,” said her dad again, as though Chloe hadn’t heard him the first time, which she had. “The estate agent,” he added eventually.

  “How do you know her?” asked Chloe.

  “I make a lot of investments,” said her dad.

  At the end of the tour, once she’d kissed Chloe’s dad on both cheeks again and told him that they should talk on Monday, Charlotte told Chloe what a pleasure it was to finally meet her. On the way home Chloe had a lot of questions she wanted to ask, but her dad put the roof down even though it was October, which meant they couldn’t talk. As he explained, “You only live once.”

  In the three weeks that followed, Chloe twice found her dad sleeping on the sofa in the living room. (He must have fallen asleep reading, he said the first time, and he must have fallen asleep reading again, he said the second, although both times Chloe observed that the only reading material in arm’s reach was an old copy of AutoTrader magazine, which she doubted possessed the requisite rereadability to trigger two separate instances of falling asleep on the sofa.) In these three weeks Chloe’s dad took her CD shopping on five separate occasions, each time returning with a bounty of no fewer than four albums, each of which he insisted she copy for him. After she had done so, he would wait a day or two to tell her how much he’d enjoyed it, usually saying how much it reminded him of someone he used to listen to himself (most often someone called Colin Bluntstone, who Chloe and I agree sounds more like a Cluedo guess than a musician). The last dozen CDs she “burned” for him were blank.

  It was at the end of this three weeks that Chloe’s mum found she couldn’t get out of bed one morning so her dad had to drive her to school. He was waiting in the driveway with the engine running when she opened the passenger-side door into a blast of saxophone. “Careless Whisper” by George Michael was playing on the retuned radio, and the car seat had been pushed back as far as it would go. It was when she reached underneath it to pull the slide lever that she found the button. She got the bus home from school that day (from the exact spot we’re at now (well, actually, from about two hundred meters down the road, because this one’s a temporary stop)), and when she got home and opened the front door she saw the luggage on the porch.

  Charlotte moved in with Chloe’s dad for a while after the separation, but soon she gave way for Nadine, who was replaced by Anya, who abdicated (after Chloe’s sister pissed in her bubble bath) and was succeeded by Nicola. It wasn’t until a long time afterward that Chloe realized that her dad’s first four post-divorce girlfriends had all been named after potatoes.

  “And mark my words,” she concludes (in the nick of time) as her bus exhales and its doors flap open, “that’s what’s happening to you. He’s waited till you’re better, and now he’s going to start Taking an Interest.”

  That night it’s just me and Mum for dinner because Dad’s got a lesson with Chloe’s sister. Later in bed I have my first Wind-Down Seizure. It’s so intense that the sweat soaks all the way through the mattress and the carpet and drips through the boards onto the kitchen floor.

  Part Three

  Small Things Grow

  Chapter Fifteen

  At Tallow Chandlers’ School for Boys, which is the institution I have decided to attend, all of the football goals have nets. There are three pitches in total, one each for the First XI, Second XI, and Third XI. The Roman Numerals are no coincidence. They match the Latin motto on the breast of the blazer, underneath the school crest: Concordia Parvae Res Crescunt.

  “Which means what, exactly?” asks the headmaster Mr. Sinclair from behind his heavy oak desk, which might be the oldest thing I’ve seen in my whole life. There are five of us stood in front of it, all of us scholarship candidates. The magazines fanned across it, whose names I can read upside down, are all called things like Quarterly and Review. They have thick pages. They look like the kind you take, as opposed to the kind you read (AutoTrader). Moreover, the volumes in the bookcase are leather-bound, like expensive menus.

  None of the other boys in the office know the answer. Mr. Sinclair blinks. He has a small mole on his lower-right eyelid that jumps when he does so. It looks like a fly resettling on a piece of meat. I feel my arm lighten by my side.

  “No need to put your hand up.” Mr. Sinclair laughs. And then, probably because he thinks he’s seen me admiring the football pitches, “You’re not appealing for offside.”

  “It means In Harmony Small Things Grow,” I say.

  “Indeed it does.” He beams.

  (At Grove End, our school motto is “Pride In Achievement,” but with no one’s name outside the quotation marks, so it just seems sort of sarcastic.)

  “And what do you suppose we mean by harmony?”

  “Music?” offers a fat boy who’s after a choral scholarship, his face laminated in a film of sweat so he looks like he’s been vacuum-packed.

  “No, that’s good,” says Mr. Sinclair. “Music’s a part of it, certainly. And so is Sport. And Geography. And Politics and Theater. Well done. It’s about having the correct arrangement, isn’t it? Try and imagine your brain is an orchestra.”

  (I try, but it’s difficult, because my brain is already a circuit board, a dog kennel, a water park, and a hostage negotiation.)

  “It’s made up of all these different sections, which are all entirely distinct and perfectly pleasant in isolation and all completely essential in their own right, but the whole thing only really comes to life when all of the sections are working together in perfect harmony. That’s what gets the hairs on your neck standing to attention, isn’t it? Is that what you meant to say?”

  The fat boy secretes another sweat layer and nods too hard.

  “So, as a school, or perhaps as a conductor, as our friend …”

  “Philip,” says the fat boy, this time 80% sure he’s right (rising to 85% when Mr. Sinclair smiles at him).

  “As our friend Philip might say, it’s our job to cultivate The Whole You. And, of course, when I say ‘job,’ what I mean actually is raison d’être—”

  “Reason for being!” I interrupt, banging the desk like I’m buzzing in on a quiz show.

  “Quite,” says Mr. Sinclair. “Quite so. Thank you …”

  “You’re welcome,” I say, graciously.

  “A footie fan and a Francophile,” he purrs. “I suppose you know what a Francophile is?”

  “Like Eva Braun.”

  “Okay,” says Mr. Sinclair. “I didn’t know that. Is that definitely right?”

  “Yes,” I reply. “She was sexually attracted to fascist dictators.”

  I like the way Mr. Sinclair laughs. The way it crackles reminds me of an open fire (especially since it makes Philip perspire even more). However, I have no idea why he’s doing it.

  “I hope to see you in September,” he says when we’re leaving. Although in English the second-person pronoun doesn’t inflect for number (which is why the singular and plural forms look identical (i.e., you vs. you)), I’m pretty sure he’s talking only to me.

  Outside the study, Mum, who’s taken time off work for the open day, asks how it went.

  “Swimmingly,” I tell her, which is subtly ambiguous, because I’m not allowed to swim. “I think he was impressed by my advanced lexicon,” I elaborate. “Which means vocabulary.”

  “I’m sure he was,” says Mum. “But what did you think?”

  “I could see myself working under him,” I say nonchalantly, reparting my hair with my fingertips because it’s finally long enough again and I’m making up for lost time.

  For lunch there is a choice between fish (plaice), pasta bar (carbonara, arrabiata, or pomodoro), and two types of meat (lamb or eggplant, which is American for chicken), which is a world apart from lunch at Grove End. (Once I forgot my lunchbox and I was stood behind Si
mon Nagel in the queue when he asked the lunch lady what sort of meat they were serving.

  “Roast,” she said.

  “Roast what?” he said.

  “Roast meat,” she said. “You’re holding up the line.”

  (In the end he had the VegeMince, which he claimed to find bones in. (The next time they were serving VegeMince, I made sure to get my hands on some, but when I dusted it down with the paintbrush I’d borrowed from Art, the only item of archeological interest I discovered was a tightly coiled gray hair.))) The food is just one of the reasons I’ve decided to come here. I got to try it the last time I visited, when I was applying for scholarship at 11+, but then I couldn’t sit the entrance exams and I had to resign myself to another two years of packed lunches, so I can really empathize with those blind people you read about who regain their sight and then lose it again and wish they’d never bothered.

  Mum has barely touched her Moroccan tagine. She looks old. (On average, people sleep for eight hours a night, which amounts to twenty-six years if you live to seventy-eight, which is the average life expectancy for someone living in the United Kingdom. This means that the typical British citizen is conscious for a grand total of fifty-two years. However, lately Mum has not been sleeping. This means she is aging at 133% the rate of the typical British citizen. If she continues to age at this rate, then she will have exhausted her allotted fifty-two years of consciousness by the time she’s sixty-three years and three months old. (In contrast, I have been sleeping more and more recently. (At my current rate, I will live until I’m one hundred and eight.))

  There are several telltale signs that Mum has not been sleeping lately, the two most obvious ones being the sharp drop-off in her sentence-completion rate (in other words, she is starting far more sentences than she is finishing), and that she has started wearing makeup to cover up the American Football–style stripes under her eyes. Moreover, ever since I dismantled my intruder alarm for Jaws 2’s EEG, I have been noticing on waking faint imprints in my beanbag. These imprints have been appearing at a frequency of three a week for the past seven weeks, which has prompted me to carry out some experiments on the beanbag to determine its memory span. My findings suggest a direct correlation between the length of time someone sits in the beanbag and the length of time the beanbag remembers them. Judging from the fact that the beanbag is often still inhaling when I wake up, I can conclude that Mum sits in it for a long time.

  I attribute Mum’s insomnia to her concerns about The State of Her Marriage. It can be helpful to use the word state when describing a marriage because it makes you think of the people involved as particles. Right now Mum and Dad’s marriage is a gas.

  In addition to monitoring the beanbag, I have moreover been reviewing the position of Dad’s car seats and his radio presets. So far this has not returned any useful data. (Dad’s presets remain: AM1 Talk Sport, AM2 Five Live (909), AM3 Five Live (693), AM4 Classic Gold, AM5 Talk Sport. (He does not have any FM presets.)) However, two Wednesday nights ago Dad turned off the TV in the middle of a Chelsea match and challenged me to a game of chess. When I reminded him that he didn’t play chess, he asked me to teach him.

  “So,” he said, once I had explained how all of the pieces moved (having decided to indulge him), “the king’s kind of like a stay-at-home dad.” Then he asked me how I would feel about him “scaling back” his “work responsibilities” so we could spend more time together “as a family.”

  (The fact that I have not yet uncovered any concrete evidence of Dad’s infidelity is proof that I may have been wrong about The Act of Observation. Since his chess tutorial, he has canceled all his evening lessons except for Chloe’s sister’s on Thursday nights so he can spend more time trying to pretend he cares about us.)

  Chloe agrees that all of this is suspicious. She is fast becoming the Watson to my Holmes, except a girl. This is why we have been spending so much time together. We have mostly been meeting up in the Harlequin Centre, taking it in turns to arrange secret rendezvous on MSN Messenger by typing the details in Wingdings and decoding them in unsaved Microsoft Word documents. Usually we meet in the Country Music aisle in Virgin Megastore or the Classic Literature section of Water-stones, because these are the places we are least likely to be disturbed by people we know, but on two occasions we have shared Oreo milkshakes in the food court. Chloe says that we know much more than we think we know, but not quite enough yet to act. She says the worst thing we could do at this stage is confront my dad about his shady dealings, because all this would do is let him know we’re on to him, which would just mean a barrage of plausibly heartfelt reassurances and that we might never find out what’s really going on. However, Chloe says, there are ways we can be certain. Having parents on the brink of divorce, she says, is like playing Doom 3 on God Mode. Here though I had to stop her. I didn’t understand the analogy. Mum doesn’t believe in the trivialization of violence, which means I’m not allowed to play shoot-’em-ups.

  “Oh, aren’t you?” asked Chloe, rhetorically.

  “No,” I answered anyway.

  And then she explained what she’d meant. When you’re in God Mode in Doom 3, your life is automatically set to 100% and can’t ever drop below that level because you are immune from all harm. This is the perfect analogy, says Chloe, because when you have parents on the brink of divorce, it is impossible for you to get into trouble. Then she told me to wait where I was (which was in the babywear department of Marks & Spencer). Ten minutes later, she returned with something under her hoodie, which turned out to be a copy of Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas. The instructions she gave were to install the game on my PC with my bedroom door open and play it on full volume, being sure to ignore the missions and concentrate instead on maximizing the death toll, until the song of the (police) sirens drew one or both of my parents to the scene. When he/she/they asked what I was doing, I was to reply that I was washing the scum from the streets. (For added effect Chloe suggested I limit my killing spree to a single race.) I was then to note the reaction and report back to Chloe at the next secret rendezvous.

  The next weekend I reported back to Chloe the following tableau: my driving instructor father standing over my left shoulder like a bad conscience, breathlessly goading me into executing first a handbrake turn across a central reservation into two lanes of counterflow traffic to escape the attentions of the impromptu police cavalcade of which I was the head, and second, the blissfully unaware Hispanic prostitute who’d had the misfortune to innocently wander into the sight of my sniper rifle on her (probable) way home to relieve a friendly neighborhood babysitter. Not that I considered her family situation at the time, as I lazily lined up and snapped a bullet into her jugular, because by this stage in my hate-crime spree I was firmly in the thrall of the Desensitizing Effect of Artificial Brutality, which is tied with Skin Cancer in third place in Mum’s All-Time Top Five Countdown of Biggest Parental Concerns 2004. When I mentioned this to Dad, who was busy applauding the distance the shot had put between the woman’s head and her torso, he shrugged and said I was old enough now to make up my own mind. And speaking of which, wasn’t it about time we took a look at my computer’s online parental control settings …

  Chloe nodded sagely while I relayed this information, and when I was through agreed it was ominous. Then, pretending to cross-reference the track listings of two Willie Nelson best-ofs, she outlined Phase II, which concerned diet and was designed to specifically target the matriarch, which is a better word for Mum. The purpose of Phase II (you could just tell by the way Chloe said it that that’s how she was spelling it) was to test the matriarch’s boundaries in order to establish how much, if anything, she knew about the imminent collapse of her marriage. The way to do this, Chloe had decided, was with a list she had compiled of the world’s least nutritious foods.

  (I am pretty sure by now that Chloe is my first girl friend, which is not the same as girlfriend. The gap is the same as the space between our faces when we’re sharing Oreo milkshakes
. It is less than a foot, but it is the longest foot on earth.)

  Mum looked surprised in a good way when I asked if I could come with her to the supermarket. She let me get eight out of the fourteen items on the list (which I had memorized and then destroyed), which Chloe and I agree is inconclusive. Every night for the past week I have smuggled a selection of fresh fruit into my bedroom to eat in secret and requested one of Chloe’s approved meals for dinner. On two out of five occasions my demands were met in full, on another two the meal was served in a healthier form (extra mushrooms on top of the stuffed-crust microwavable pepperoni pizza, the Rustlers quarter pounder presented minus the bun on a bed of rice with peas and carrots), and the grilled chocolate sandwich was refused outright. Moreover, on Tuesday evening, as per Chloe’s instructions, I asked for a try of Dad’s beer. Dad (as we expected) said okay, but Mum, who is never normally clumsy, accidentally knocked the can over before she could pass it to me. This is the detail that Chloe fixated on the most when I met her yesterday outside the newsagent with the A missing so the sign says NEWS GENT.

  “Huh,” she said, when I was finished briefing her, and then again when I asked why we were meeting there. “So she didn’t actually say no?”

  “What?”

  “Your mum. If she didn’t want you drinking, she could of said so, right? Said no, I mean.”

  I explained that there wasn’t really time to say anything, what with the accident, because the kitchen table is unwaxed (and corrected her grammar).

  “Freud says accidents are just unconsciously motivated designs,” said Chloe.

  “Who?” I asked.

  “He’s my dad’s analyst. Dad’s always on about him. Says there’s no such thing as accidents.”

  “What about Chernobyl?” I asked, but Chloe didn’t answer. Instead, she told me how Mum had most likely spilled the beer on purpose, and that the only reason she hadn’t forbade me from trying some was so I didn’t resent her, and because she wants to prove that she can be fun, too.