Ostrich: A Novel

by Matt Greene

  d) The arbitrary application and use of nicknames. (Beckie farts in front of me one time and I immediately christen her Gaseous Clay.)

  e) The evolution in form/mutation of these nicknames. (Gaseous Clay → Mohammed Ali → Little Mo → Mo Mowlam → Ten Men Went to Mow → Tin Man → The Wizard of Oz → Ozzy Osbourne → The Bourne Identity → Harvey Dent → Dental Hygiene → Gene Pool → Paul Simon → Simon Schama → Simon Shawarma → Chicken Shawarma → Chicken Licken → Gangsta Trippin → Fat Boy Slim → The Real Slim Shady → The Real McCoy → Walker Texas Ranger → Sharleen Spiteri.)

  f) The eventual realization that we have forgotten the original reason behind the names with which we refer to each other.

  g) Full sex.

  h) A missing period (which (appropriately enough) is American for full stop).

  i) A timely inheritance. Beckie gets a house. I get diverticulosis.

  j) A fat girl in a white dress.

  k) A bundle of joy, which consequentially unravels, because of Entropy, into:

  (i) a pile of professional compromise.

  (ii) a heap of creeping resentment.

  (iii) a mass of silent2 martyrdom.

  l) Casual sex (with each other).

  m) A spontaneous pilgrimage to an ageless, tattooed oak. The discovery that this ageless oak has fallen foul to root rot and been chopped down.

  n) A sudden obsession with Family Traditions, a phrase applied to any activity that occurs four times or more, through accident or design, in a given timeframe (e.g., fried breakfasts on Sundays, roast beef at Christmas, saying “bless you” in foreign languages).

  o) Going on walks (as a family), which is not the same as walking.

  p) Telling Beckie I love her very much, instead of just “I love you,” as though love is not a binary thing (i.e., 1 or 0).

  q) Calling Beckie “your mother” in the presence of our child.

  r) Taking walks (alone).

  s) Calling Beckie “Mum” in the presence of our child.

  t) Casual sex (with other people).

  u) Accidentally calling Beckie “Mum” while alone with her. Her not even noticing.

  v) Serious sex with other people.

  w) The whole family in the local branch of a mid-price chain restaurant, sat at our “usual table.” Beckie and I smiling widely up at the teenage waitress as she takes our order and laughs professionally at a joke I’ve made a hundred times before.

  9) I realize it’s not even my life. It’s my parents’. And I am doomed to remake it scene for scene with Blowjob Frogley as my leading lady. All because I gave her my first kiss at David Driscoll’s thirteenth birthday party, because rather than at least trying to take responsibility for myself, I preferred to gamble my Fate on a horse (force) called Gravity.

  Except I don’t.

  Because instead I kiss Chloe.

  At first her mouth is small and stony. I can trace her teeth (like tiny tombstones) through her lips. But as I lap against her, I feel her starting to fall into me. Her fingers web my rib cage, and I stop hearing the audience’s laughter, the words of shock that stretch their faces back over their skulls like tight, gangrenous ponytails. The whole thing is over in a matter of seconds, which is true of everything. We disengage. The distance between our faces is not enough that I can see her edges. In profile, we might just as plausibly be a wineglass.

  “Fuck off,” she says, quietly.

  “Sorry,” I say. “Déjà vu.”

  “Excuse me,” says Beckie, and then scurries out of the room with something in her eye.

  “Do you want to see my Samurai sword?” says James to Susie.

  “Sure,” says Susie to James.

  “Do you want to see my Sarumai sword?” says Pete to Gemma.

  “Be gone,” says Gemma to Pete, and then goes herself.

  “Wait,” says Pete, following her. “It was a euphonium!”

  And then we’re alone together, just me and Chloe Gower at the center of the universe. Which in truth is a bit awkward.

  “You were the biggest dick to me,” says Chloe.

  “What do you mean?” I ask.

  “Jesus!”

  “No, I know. I don’t mean what did I do wrong. I mean, what you just said was ambiguous.”

  “It really wasn’t.”

  I explain how it was. It all depends what Chloe meant by were. It could either mean that I behaved like the biggest dick and therefore still have some explaining to do or that I used to be the biggest dick, the implication being that now we’ve shared our first kiss—

  “Shut up!” Chloe interrupts. “That’s not my first kiss.”

  “It’s not? I just assumed—”

  “Why? Are you saying it was bad?”

  “No. It was …” I try to think of a better word for nice, which you should never use in Composition. Then I hear myself start saying perfect, which is far too strong. “Perfunctory.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “It’s a better word for impersonal or workmanlike,” I explain, and then immediately wish I hadn’t. “Can we start again?”

  “From where?”

  “I didn’t say all the stuff I meant. I mean, I didn’t mean all the stuff I— Actually, either way. I don’t know. I don’t think I’m making myself clear. Jaws 2 is dead. You were pretty much right about everything. I’m sorry I said those things about you. You were only trying to help.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “I know about the voodoo acupuncture.”

  Chloe turns Japanese, which means to blush (because your cheeks look like their flag, which is especially true in Chloe’s case).

  “I should have let you explain. Sometimes I’m not really in control of what I’m feeling. It sort of overtakes me. You know when you put the wrong thing in the laundry and you want to get it out but you can’t open the washing machine when it’s on a cycle, so you just have to watch it through the window and wait for it to end, and you get all dizzy?”

  Chloe nods sort of. Maybe. (I think.)

  “It’s sort of a bit like that. And even when it’s finished you still have to wait for a bit, until it clicks, and by then it’s too late anyway, because all the colors have run—”

  “Was that your first kiss?”

  Now it’s my turn to blush. “No,” I say in two separate syllables so it sounds like the world’s first carpenter cum zoo-keeper. “I’ve kissed a multitude of girls.”

  “How many’s a multitude?”

  “Less than a plethora but more than my fair share.”

  “Between one and fifty?”

  “Up to fifty,” I say (technically not a lie).

  “Closer to one or fifty?”

  I tilt my eyes upward and try to study my lashes. I stay like this for as long as it would take to count to twenty-four. “One.”

  Chloe laughs. “You’re the biggest dick,” she says. However, this time it really does sound ambiguous. (Suddenly, alone together feels a lot less like an oxymoron.) Then she asks about Jaws 2, so I bring her up to speed and she says she’s sorry for my loss. Then I ask where she’s been all week.

  “I had some stuff to sort,” she says.

  “But these exams will determine the path you take in life,” I say in one-handed Scout’s Honor–style quotations.

  “I’m going away,” says Chloe, and then takes her hand off my ribs, where I now realize it’s been all along. This makes me aware of my breathing, which I notice requires concentration.

  “What do you mean?”

  “My dad got a job. I didn’t want to go. But my mum can’t really look after me anyway.” She looks around the room, like she’s tracking a fly. “And I’ve missed the exams now, so—” Her eyes land on the arm of the sofa, then a stack of old newspapers, then an ashtray, and (on the carpet between us) an old, orange grease stain. “There’s an international school … And it’s Hong Kong, so everyone speaks English. It’s only for a couple of years, max.”

  Mississi
ppis meander past. Their flow is glacial. There are only 31,556,926 of them in a year. “My name’s not Max,” I say, which, as we both know, isn’t remotely funny.

  I feel inverted.

  “What does your dad do?” eventually asks someone, who, by a process of deduction, is me.

  “He’s in futures,” says Chloe.

  I feel a flicker of mirth like a punch in my gut and suck in a roomful of air. The spark ignites, and I burp up a chuckle.

  “What?” asks Chloe. “What is it?” She wipes at her face like maybe there’s something on it. “What?” But it’s all just fuel for the fire, which is crackling in my throat.

  I roar with laughter.

  “What’re you laughing at?” demands Chloe, with a crick in her voice. A flame leaps the divide and catches on her sleeve. “What I say?” she giggles. “What?!”

  And then we’re both ablaze.

  By the time we’ve burned through all the oxygen in David Driscoll’s house (wheezing for breath on our sides, as low to the ground as possible, eyes streaming), it’s impossible to tell whose laughter is whose, which is when I realize that this is one of the moments that lasts, because it’s not mine alone to forget, and I look forward to looking back one day and seeing myself in the middle of it.

  “Y-ou w-ill m-iss me,” I tell Chloe, as best I can in the space between gasps.

  “What?” asks Chloe, serially.

  “It-s Fr-e-nch,” I say. “For I w-ill m-iss you.”

  Then someone must hit fast-forward, because the next thing I know time is whistling wordlessly through my hair like wind, like I’m orbiting too close to the surface of a collapsing star again.

  Then I’m sitting on cold, hard, forgetful plastic.

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  A tired nurse with an odd amount of eyebrows (either one or three) sits me down on the edge of a vinyl bed and squawks an instruction in a language I don’t speak. She has a swollen, red face that looks like it’s launched a thousand ships because someone was trying to save money on champagne. When I don’t answer, she exits into the corridor and swishes tracing paper across the entrance to the alcove. I am in pain, which is not the same as having pain, because it’s big enough to contain you. My legs hiss with carpet burns and my muscles ache like they’ve been marinated in acid, which they have, and every time I inhale a procession of fingers plays up and down my chest like a flutist practicing scales for Grade 3. I have to clamp my hands round the border of the bed to keep from falling off, because being in pain is like being in anything (i.e., when it moves, you move with it).

  Then a doctor comes in, his face held parallel to the clipboard that protrudes on a perpendicular from his stomach. He murmurs something I don’t hear that sounds like he has a cold and nods up to cross-reference me with his forms. Beneath the centimeter-thick lenses of his wire-rimmed glasses his eyes are shrunken and dry. They look how raisins must to grapes. Moreover, he has a bristly black goatee that makes his mouth look like a letterbox.

  “” he asks, straining the words through his lip hair until they’re completely uncucumbered by meaning (which is when something’s unburdened because you’ve scraped all the extras off, like gherkins from a burger).

  I ask him to come again, which comes out as “?”

  “ … ?” he repeats, turning his attention back to the clipboard and scribbling guardedly. “, ? ?” Then he produces a penlight from his breast pocket and takes a step toward me. “,” he instructs, before clicking on the torch and jacking open my eye with thumb and forefinger. The shot of light tickles, which makes me sneeze on his lapel, which inspires a hasty retreat and a whole paragraph of notes. I wipe my nose on the sleeve of my shirt, which now I notice is inside out. The flutist’s fingers are its buttons.

  “,” says the doctor from a safe distance, still writing. “ …” and so on until all of a sudden, like the old-style twisty radio in the kitchen, whose dial travels from station to station through a harsh white wilderness (like a Trans-Siberian Express train), he starts, out of nowhere, to make (a sort of) sense: “… not inconsistent with TLE, which, medical histories considered, in conjunction with what your girlfriend’s already … All things being not unequal … I don’t see as particular cause for … As for the removal of clothes and the hmmm release of … It’s not something I wouldn’t call not uncommon … In this instance, my suggestion, we chalk it up as a Road to Damascus-y type of … And try to look on the bright …” He glances up at me.

  With his lenses between us, I feel like a TV program.

  Then he smiles, stretching his lips humorlessly across his face and holding the pose for the count of ten, as though it’s nothing more than part of his warm-down routine, which it turns out it is. “After all, if Paul the Apostle hadn’t had a tonic clonic, we probably wouldn’t celebrate Christmas.”

  With every step on the way back to the waiting room I hear the sound of the sea combing over an ugly pebble beach, which for a minute I think is what people must mean by a wave of nostalgia, until I look down and realize that the noise is actually a Nike swoosh, caused by the legs of my tracksuit rubbing together. Which is when I first realize I’m wearing somebody else’s trousers.

  In the waiting room, Chloe jumps to her feet and asks what they said.

  A thick, syrupy confusion trickles through my mind, gluing my words together.

  “That​I​have​to​remember​to​take​my​pills​And​something​about​an​apostle​How​if​they​dhad​Keppra​when​Jesus​was​about​then​Bernard​Matthews​wouldbe​out​of​a​job.”

  “Saint Paul!” She nods. “He had what you have. That’s why he stopped persecuting the Christians, because he thought Jesus told him to, but really it was a grand mal and the blindness after, that was just post-ictal. You can see, can’t you?”

  I look at Chloe. And see her. (For the first time I notice she is perfectly symmetrical.) I nod.

  “That’s what you had, a complex partial seizure followed by a grand mal. It was over five minutes, so I made Gemma call an ambulance and I didn’t let anyone put anything in your mouth. David’s brother wanted to film it and put it online, but Susie told him he was a fucktard and David and Pete locked him in the garden. No one else thought it was funny.”

  “Whatsfunny?”

  “Exactly,” says Chloe. “That’s what we all said. David was really good, actually. He knew the recovery position and about making the ground soft and everything. And he’s the one that helped me and Ella get you in the car.”

  “What?”

  “I know. He wanted to come with, but Ella hates having passengers, so he made me promise to call him the second I heard anything. I didn’t know you were close.”

  Neither did I. But that’s not what I meant.

  “Oh,” says Chloe. “I called her right after the ambulance cos Dad doesn’t like me drinking spirits. I told her if she didn’t leave right now I’d tell Dad she was the one cutting up Jessica’s underwear, then she could explain why she let him sack the cleaner. She didn’t even put the roof up.”

  I can feel the syrup clogging my synapses. There are two distinct flavors.

  “Shedroveus?”

  “Yeah, she dropped us off. I canceled the ambulance cos she got there first”

  “Whendidshepasshertest?”

  “Like a month ago. I think she must’ve flirted with the examiner, though, cos, no offense, she’s pretty shit. Last week she was meant to take me to the Harlequin and there weren’t two parking spots next to each other so we just went home. She still had your dad’s number. I called him. He’s on his way.”

  I look at the ground, where the legs of my trousers spill over the toes of my shoes like it’s 2001 and I listen to Green Day, which it isn’t and I don’t. “Oh, yeah,” says Chloe, as though she’s just remembered something insignificant. “I spilled some drink on your jeans. I’m really sorry. We had to throw them out.”

  But she can’t fool me. Because I am a pedigree liar.

>   Chapter Twenty-Nine

  (According to Roget’s Thesaurus, there are ten synonyms for the verb to shimmy, as in he shimmied down the drainpipe to freedom, listed here: wriggle, clamber, scramble, lurch, wobble, careen, totter, falter, twitch, lollygag. Of these ten, three (falter, totter, and lollygag) can be discounted for being too hesitant and, therefore, too risky, two (careen and twitch) for being involuntary, one (lurch) for being too sudden and, therefore, too risky, and one (wobble) for being too much like something a dessert would do at a blustery picnic. Of the remaining synonyms, clamber can be ruled out, as it implies too great a degree of difficulty, which could prove demoralizing at a planning stage, and scramble is insufficiently illustrative. Which leaves wriggle, for which Roget has the following suggestions: wiggle, jiggle, flounder, flail, slither, crawl, slink, ooze, and shimmy. Of these, wriggle, wiggle, and jiggle (too easily confused), flounder and flail (too undignified), crawl (too horizontal), ooze (too metaphorical), and shimmy (insufficiently instructive (hence Roget in the first place)) can all be ruled out. Which leaves me with two options for descending the drainpipe (slink and slither), both of which, oddly enough, make me sound less like the hero and more like a baddie.)

  I spend the week following the latest betrayal of my trust alone in my bedroom, my time split evenly between revising for my final exam (English Composition, Friday p.m.), and plotting. In both of these activities I have found Roget to be a dexterous and amenable confederate, which are better words for able, willing, and accomplice respectively. To ensure the complete clandestinity (privacy) that my operation requires I have turned my Smithsonian Elements of Science Mini-Lab back into an intruder alarm and announced this fact to Mum and Dad in an email memorandum. Moreover, I have told Dad to tell Mum that I will be taking my meals at my desk until further notice. (Crucially, Dad doesn’t know I’m on to him yet. Before he arrived at A&E, I had just time enough to brief Chloe about the situation. The story we agreed on was technically not a lie: I had had a seizure and she had called an ambulance. This would avoid any immediate confrontation about the phantom driving lessons, which would be more likely to provoke denial than provide satisfactory answers. It would also give Dad ample opportunity to further incriminate himself and me the chance to catch him red-handed.) This means that for five days straight I have only had three things for company: 1) my spiraling suspicions, 2) my increasingly irregular sleeping patterns, and 3) a now nameless hamster. (Moreover, Chloe and I have MSNed.)