Ostrich: A Novel

by Matt Greene

  It is Thursday night, and I have just finished a dinner of fish fingers and alphabetti spaghetti on white toast, through which Mum managed to communicate the message GOOD LUCK TOMORROW x, which must have required her to open more than one tin, because of the number of O’s in it. These are the first words we have exchanged since her dubious definition of devotion, and just like then, inside me now they mean nothing. While my digestive tract makes nonsense anagrams (DOCK TUX MORROW LOGO, OX MOGUL WORK DOCTOR, COD GUT LOX WORKROOM), I wonder whether she knows about the deception I am about to uncover—whether it’s just another secret she’s kept from me in the name of protection, or whether Dad shares her conviction that truth is a grenade and love is a helmet. I triple-knot the laces of my trainers and quadruple-check the time. It is 18:45, which on any other day of the week would signal the crack and sigh of Dad’s first beer can (it sounds like someone saying poofta, which is late nineties for knob jockey) and Mum’s subsequent darkroom hibernation. However, Thursday nights aren’t for drinking beer.

  I find Dad, as expected, in front of his beloved FD Trinitron wide-screen TV (flat CRT to reduce glare, three separate screen aspects, about seven stiffies and a semi-on). He is muttering at a quiz show and shouting a running tally of his score to no one in particular. When I arrive he is on fourteen, although I happen to know that he awards himself the point every time he gets the same wrong answer as one of the contestants, as a reward for sounding plausible. For several moments longer than I have budgeted for, I watch him watching the show from the doorway (me, not him). Perhaps it is the constant, noncommittal murmur of his voice as he cycles inaudibly through the conceivable responses to questions he can’t answer, or perhaps it is his bald patch, which tonight is particularly monktastic, but for whatever reason it almost looks like he’s praying. Then he gets one he’s sure of. “Lake Titicaca,” he announces proudly.

  “Lake Titicaca,” agrees the contestant, a bookish man with yellow skin and a creased spine.

  “Fifteen!” shouts Dad.

  “I’m sorry,” laments the host. “I was looking for Lake Maracaibo.”

  “Hi,” I say.

  “Hi!” He spins around and knocks over a bowl of peanut shells. “I thought they meant volume, not surface area. What are you doing out of your room? Is it Spring already?”

  “Do you want to play chess?” I ask.

  We set up the board on the coffee table that has never had coffee on it with Dad as whites and me, on the floor, as blacks. Just like I expect him to, Dad starts with an aggressive King’s Pawn opening and a joke about a vacancy for royal sperm donors (a king spawn opening), and from there we disappear quickly into improbability. (The number of possible board configurations in chess after each player’s first move is four hundred. After their second move this increases to 72,084, then 9-million-plus after their third and 288-billion-plus after their fourth. My all-time favorite fact is that after each player has made forty moves the number of possible patterns on a chess board is greater than the sum of every grain of sand from all of the beaches in the whole world. (My favorite thing about this fact is that a chess board is only sixty-four squares large. If you consider the size of the earth’s surface, not to mention how many more than forty moves you have made, then you start to get some idea of how many different patterns you could have made of your life. (And yet here we are.))) I beat Dad in seven moves, two more than I planned on. Then I start to reset the board. Dad checks his watch and sucks air through his teeth. “I don’t know if I can,” he says, and then calls me “big man,” which has never been my nickname.

  “Please,” I say, credibly. “I’ll play left-handed.”

  Dad laughs. “Careful,” he says. “I’ll hold you to that. But it’ll have to be another time, I’m afraid. Duty calls.”

  “Do you have to?” I ask. This time I’m so convincing I convince myself. It’s the opposite of what the plan calls for, but, forthwith, more than anything I want him to say no. All of a sudden and with all my skin, which is the largest organ, I want the whole thing to be a harmless misunderstanding, no matter how unlikely or narratively unsatisfying. I make a deal in my head: I’ll even forgive Mum, accept her explanation, that she was acting out of some mutated sense of parental loyalty, however misguided and weird, just so long as the three of us can go back to how we were (a unit, a solid, a family), if we could only ride the bumper cars on Brighton Pier together one (first and) last time.

  Dad considers the question. Then he gets to his feet. “Son …” he says. “No score and thirteen years ago I swore a solemn oath”—he puts hand on heart—“to the road users of this great nation, to ensure their safe passage, free from the menace of P-plated teenagers who think undertaking’s what funeral directors put on their CVs and ten and two means twelve.” He takes a breath. I don’t have a clue what he’s talking about. But I’m ready to swallow whole whatever comes next. “And shall I tell you something?”

  Anything.

  He plants a foot on the coffee table. “Eleanor Gower, sister though she may be to that exceedingly charming young friend of yours, represents not only the biggest threat to the Great British motorist since someone Photoshopped a picture of a polar-bear cub bobbing up and down on an ice cube in the middle of the Artic Sea, but furthermore, the single greatest challenge to the solemnity of that promise.” He leans over and laces his trainer. My heart rides all the way down to the basement. I didn’t even know it could go that low. It must have been in the service elevator all this time. “Admittedly, there are probably safer ways to get my kicks. Base-jumping and heroin come to mind. But until that girl is fully proficient in the ancient art of road safety I would be remiss in my duty, were I not to attend myself to her education first and above all.”

  By the front door he shrugs on his jacket and pats it down for his car keys, which we won’t find there, because I have hidden them to buy myself time. “If I’m not back in two hours,” he says, “tell my son I love him.”

  “Will do,” I say, and go back upstairs.

  First I trip then reset the alarm. Then I secure my boxing helmet. Then I pocket my keys, my Maglite, and my Swiss Army Knife. Then I throw a pillow out the window. Then I slither down the drainpipe.

  Rather than reverse into the drive, Dad has pulled in lazily, front first, which means I can crouch at the exhaust out of sight from the house. From this position, my job is simple. I fan out the dial of instruments and set to work with the Swiss Army saw, which exhaustive empirical trials have told me is the best tool for cutting through the particular type of shoelace with which the lip of the boot is sewn to the car’s cocksix, which is Medicine for tailbone. As the saw’s teeth gnaw away at the cord I see, as expected, a light come on in Mum and Dad’s room, which is where the keys are hidden, reasonably enough (so as not to arouse suspicion) at the bottom of the dirty washing basket. This is the fifth most logical place to check, but Dad must not know this, because seconds later he cries out in triumph: “God’m!” My stomach lurches (X-CORD GLOOM WORKOUT, DOOM GROWL TOOK CRUX, COLD GOOK TUMOR ROW X). But then, just as the bedroom light goes out, my sawing arm jerks through fresh air. The boot twangs open. Now it’s a matter of climbing in, threading through the replacement lace (which I’ve tanned in cold tea so it doesn’t look too new), and stitching shut the wound from the inside before the front door opens and I hear footsteps on gravel. Which I manage with just a handful of rivers to spare.

  Then there’s some percussion.

  Then some harmonizing: humming (Dad), coughing (the exhaust), humming (the engine), coughing (me).

  And then we’re on road.

  Through the gormless crack in the darkness that provides my oxygen, I can track the first few turnings. First it’s left onto Willow Walk, then right onto Lodge Hill Road and right again down Elm Park Lane, where I used to race milk floats, to Rutherford Road and across the high street to Eastheath Avenue where Simon Nagel lives (we slow down, and for a moment I picture Dad and Simon’s mum doing it through a sheet (
even though that’s a myth and it’s for Acidic Jews, not Alkaline ones, anyway)) and right once more onto Brockley Close. This continues for a while, familiar streets swinging into and then out of view as Dad picks his way across friendly terrain, until suddenly he spins a hard left onto a faster, noisier road and I have no choice but to give up my view and wedge myself lengthways between the walls with my toes flexed to keep from ricocheting off them.

  (It is in this position, ensconced in what is starting to feel more and more like the belly of a whale, that I start to consider the wisdom of the phrase Curiosity killed the cat, which my whole life up until this moment I have harbored doubts about. But maybe the Danes were right all along. And maybe if something is both alive and dead until the second you lift the lid to sneak a peek, then the absolute best thing you can do is leave that lid the eff alone.)

  After ten something (seconds/minutes/hours), the pace slackens and we start again to weave as the street names get longer (the length of a street is always indirectly proportional to the length of its name) but no more recognizable. Now we are in somebody else’s neighborhood, remarkable only for how similar it is to our own, except here I have to empathize hard to understand the special meaning behind pavements and pathways: Here’s where someone else first rode without stabilizers, or mercy-killed a sparrow, or water-bombed a car. Soon I get into it, and after a while it’s easy to imagine that in every house on every street is another me, which is when it occurs to me for the first time that it might not be just the one family I’m about to break up. However, it’s too late for second thoughts, because the street names are getting longer and longer, and the gaps between turns shorter and shorter, and the next thing I know I hear what sounds like underwater rain.

  Dad cuts the engine, and I stop breathing. My eyes are shut. I’m all ears as his door creaks open and his feet touch down on gravel. His seat sighs and then so does he and then he’s off, his footsteps receding into the distance. I listen out for a knock or a buzzer, but I don’t hear either. I count to ninety-seven. Then take a look. Through the slit I can make out a windowless double door without a handle, like the sort we have in the sports hall. It is cobalt blue with white letters stenciled onto it. They say:

  THIS IS NOT A DOOR

  The knot is the type that comes loose with one tug if you’ve tied it properly, which I have. I climb out of the boot and into the thin shadow of a squat, gray bunker of a building with a steep slate roof and a neat herbaceous trim. We are parked round back, where the only windows are squares in the ceiling, in a car park along with six other cars (four of them with Jesus fish on). From here I can see that the un-door refracts at its base into a gentle, concrete disability ramp. In fact, there is a dour wholesomeness to the entire architecture that almost smells of minibus appeals. It does not scream love nest. However, from the glow of the skylights it’s clear there’s someone inside.

  I do a broken circuit of the building, stopping before I get to the entrance, where the light spill from the open doorway makes the risk of exposure too great, and doubling back on myself until I’ve traced a horseshoe around its rectangular base. Above the front door, patterned into the brick, is a stumpy t that looks more like the net of a cube than what it’s supposed to (a crucifix). Nowhere are there windows at eye level, which is a problem I return to the car park to ponder. My original plan was simply to walk up to the front door of whoever’s house I found myself outside and knock. I haven’t prepared for this eventuality, that I’d be standing outside the address my dad has worked so hard to keep secret and still be in need of the decisive piece of evidence against him. It seems unlikely that anything too illicit could possibly take place inside a building this dull, but more unlikely still that the reason Dad’s been lying to me for weeks is to cover up the fact he’s plotting a Bring and Buy Sale.

  Moreover, I decide, I haven’t come all this way to leave open-minded.

  Which means I need to see inside.

  Just then an expensive car blinks and I hear footsteps wading toward me. I duck for cover and watch as a fat man with thin legs topples past and opens the passenger-side door. He leans over and his suit jacket rides up his back like the tide going out. When it comes back in, he’s holding something. One of those fluffy green indoor footballs that wouldn’t look out of place in a giant’s tennis bag. He tucks it in the crook of an elbow, shuts the door, and waddles back toward the entrance, locking the car with a remote without looking back. However, just as I’m about to emerge from my hiding place, he stops dead in his tracks. For a full half-minute I hold my breath as he stands motionless at the edge of the car park, looking out into the empty road. There’s no way he could have seen me. And sure enough, after thirty seconds he continues along his original vector and disappears behind the building. I suck in a lungful of foul-smelling air and realize I’ve been hiding behind a wheelie bin.

  With the bags removed the bin is light enough to carry to the building’s edge without making a racket, and with the bags gently lowered back in it is anchored sufficiently to support my weight. Using the disability handrail for a leg up, I am able (with great difficulty) to clamber onto its lid, from where my fingers just about curl round the margin of the skylight. Then (appropriately enough) it’s a leap of faith to wedge my right foot into the guttering and pull myself up the roof until I can see inside.

  Inside the hall are ten people sat in a perfect circle. Directly beneath me, so I can’t see his face, is Dad. He is holding the giant’s tennis ball, and his shoulders are heaving in a manner that would look like uncontrollable laughter if it weren’t for the way the others are watching him. Their expressions have no regard for the laws of geometry: They clearly identify Dad as the corner of the circle. For some time, we all just watch. (He looks how I’ve always imagined The Loneliest Monk, who is a famous jazz musician.) Then the fat man, who is sitting next to him, reaches over a chubby hand and squeezes Dad’s knee. He relieves him of the ball and says a few words of his own, but everyone still looks at Dad. Then he (the fat man) heaves himself up and bisects the circle to hand the globe to a man and a woman sitting opposite. They accept it together like a trophy they’re being jointly awarded and smile up at the fat man. But there’s something off about the smile. At the same time it looks proud and regretful. It’s almost as though the ball really is a prize, only everyone knows it’s got nothing to do with them, that they’re just accepting it on somebody’s behalf. It feels like a smile I’ve seen somewhere before, like déjà vu almost. Except I really have. I know this couple. They’re the parents of the boy who drowned.

  Then the gutter cracks.

  With an orchestra of noise I scrape down the roof, bounce off the bin, and land hard on my ankle. The pain is sharp and loud, but I have it rather than the other way round, and if anything it focuses my mind. Dad can’t see me here. I scramble to my foot as chair legs graze wood, and, as voices approach, hop down a verge and away onto the street. I don’t look back or stop, not until the only sound is the thumping of my heart. Then I collapse on the pavement and try to think.

  Is everything all right?

  Chapter Thirty

  “Here, lad!” says the voice, and then, with the stress in all the wrong places, so I know it must be repeating itself, and probably not for the first time, either: “Is everything all right?”

  At the side of the road, backed onto the pavement in front of me with a hind wheel cocked in the air, is a dirty white van. The passenger window is wound down and the engine still running, but there’s no driver in sight. Moreover, several beads of heavy liquid clinging to the tip of the quivering exhaust pipe do much to further the impression that the van is an independent being and has just finished marking his territory. And now he speaks again, this time to ask me what I’m on the lang from, which is a word I don’t recognize.

  “I don’t know,” I say in general reply, addressing the answer approximately to the wing mirrors as the vehicle’s exhaust shakes loose a stubborn droplet, which, in the moment befor
e the speaker heaves into view, bursts on the pavement under electric moonlight into a palette of colors. At first I don’t recognize the man. He’s as tall as a (short) tree. His face is gray and his hair, emerging first from behind the van, the fiery orange of a setting sun.

  “Gis your paw,” says the giant, sending down an enormous hand that takes forever to arrive. I reach up obediently toward it, half expecting from its size to feel foam beneath my fingers, and end up braceleted round a wrist, my fingers barely long enough to make a C, let alone an O or even a G. In turn the man takes hold of my arm (it’s all his fingers can do not to lap themselves) and pulls me to my feet, which is when I remember the pain in my ankle. “Woah there, big fella,” he says, taking my weight with the casual flex of a tricep as I collapse back down toward the pavement. We hold this pose for a moment longer than necessary, me suspended mid-fall, sitting squat on an invisible toilet, with the humongulus standing over me, enjoying his own strength, his pulse booming in the palm of my hand.

  His eyes are two blue un-doors.

  When I speak my voice is tiny and unauthorized. “I want to go home,” it says.

  The man considers this thoughtfully, like it’s a joke he’s heard before but never really thought about because he was too busy laughing the first time. Finally, he nods, as if in grave idea-logical agreement, which makes him seem even more like a homesick ginger Gulliver. “Ah sure. This is it like.” He sighs and then yanks me back up with a scary ease. “So snap out yer buzz and get in the van.”