Ostrich: A Novel (17 page)

I have thought about this a lot. At first I assumed that the woman was a liar. However, that was before last week’s Religious Studies class, when I found the clue in the videos’ title.
Once you’ve noticed it, the similarities in dimensions between a toilet cubicle and a Catholic confessional are too obvious to ignore, and that’s before you even start to consider the woman’s posture during the act of inflatio, which is exactly like someone receiving communion (which, moreover, is the only other time you can put a whole person in your mouth). This means that the woman is not necessarily a liar, because in Catholicism once you’ve confessed your sins it’s like they never happened in the first place.

This puts a completely different complexion on the matter. Back when I thought the woman was a liar I assumed that the penis in the wall belonged variously to different men in each installment of
Gloryhole Confessions
, because no one ever takes humbridge with her when she says she’s never done this before (which they surely would if they knew it was bullspit (which they’d know for certain if the penis belonged to them on more than one occasion)). This would mean that the sex was random, impersonal, and anonymous, and nothing at all to do with emotions, which would have been really depressing and makes me feel hopeless and sad (which I think is why porn is sometimes called
blue
movies). However, if the woman isn’t lying, but instead is preemptively confessing to the sin she’s about to commit (and if the penis understands this (which it must do, because it represents the priest)), then there is no longer any reason to assume this is the case.

One of the things you learn how to do after watching pornography every day for a fortnight is to identify the male performers
without being able to see their faces. Sometimes there’s something obvious that gives the game away (a visual signature, like a tattoo or a scar), however, in the case of
Gloryhole Confessions
, there is very little to go on. Since I figured out the religious allusions in the series I have rewatched every episode of
Gloryhole Confessions
at least three times, pausing strategically and using my insect magnifying glass to study the wall penises for unusual markings. So far I have observed the following commonalities:

After cross-referencing with more than two hundred other high-resolution images I am 98% confident in saying that the
reason for these striking commonalities is that all of the penises in
Gloryhole Confessions
belong to the same man. If I am correct in this conclusion, then
Gloryhole Confessions
is not the worst thing in the world (which I previously thought it might be) but instead the hopeful documentation of an enduring mahoganous relationship between two committed individuals who overcome significant obstacles (i.e., a wall) to be and stay together.

(This is the lesson: that sometimes something ugly is just something beautiful that I do not yet fully understand. Which is why whenever I think about
Gloryhole Confessions
, which I am doing right now, I get a warm rush of optimism.)

We are two and a half stops from home, and I am starting to anticipate the ambush that awaits me when we get there. Dad will open the door when we’re still in the driveway. He’ll have my good jeans in one hand, and in the other, held away from him between thumb and forefinger because what’s inside it disgusts him so much, a see-through sandwich bag. It’s Exhibit A, the cigarette packet, bagged and tagged, and taken down in damning evidence against me. At first, Mum won’t understand. It can’t be what it looks like. There must be an explanation, so she’ll look to me to provide one. Her eyes are wide and pleading. She wants to believe me. I look at Dad. He’s not saying anything. His face is a multiple choice with no right answers. I’ll be grounded indefinitely for my own good. No more bad influences. Solitary confinement until I’m old enough to leave home. Or, better yet, they’ll make me volunteer
at a hospice full of throat-cancer patients. I’ll spend my Saturdays playing Scrabble against old men with external voiceboxes, get cold sweats for the rest of my life any time I see someone using an electric razor. Or maybe they kick me out into the street. Disown me completely, like an adoption in reverse. I’ll have to sell my organs in backstreet clinics or learn to play “Wonderwall” on the guitar. One day they’ll pass me in a tube station stairwell. They’ll be dressed in all their finery, up in town for dinner and a show. It’s a special occasion. Their silver wedding anniversary. They won’t recognize the toothless, ageless husk in the soiled sleeping bag as their onetime son, but on their way past they have the good grace to pause their conversation. Dad’s hand disappears into a tuxedo pocket and emerges in a shower of dull, copper change, and then they walk on, their consciences clear, shivering for a second into each other, pulling the other tighter around them, and momentarily, unbeknownst even to themselves, mourning the memory of the child they’ve forgotten to remember.

At Burnt Oak, Mum asks me why I’m smiling.

I tell her it’s something I remembered. Then I smile some more, because I am the boy who thought he had impunity but never did, because his parents never were splitting up in the first place.

However, when we get home, there is luggage on the porch.

In profile, the fine white down on the waitress’s cheeks and nose makes her look like a cactus, which is appropriate because she gets prickly when Dad asks her if she
parlays onglay
. We are eating outside of a seafood restaurant in the Old Harbor. (In fact, we are eating outside of every seafood restaurant in the Old Harbor, it’s just that the chairs, the table, and the waitress belong to one of them in particular.) According to Google, La Rochelle has a moderate tourist trade and is used to welcoming guests of all nationalities. However, at this time of year it is Not in Season, which means that, like a pineapple, it is much tougher to get into. This is not a problem for me, though, because I am a native.

Je m’appelle Marcel
.

The sky is a clear, picture-book blue, and both the sun and I have got our hats on but the day is as cold as the dairy aisle. In French we have a phrase for days like today:
Le Fond De L’Air
, which literally means The Bottom of the Air. Above it, music from the market stalls drifts across the concourse and mingles with the strings twanging inside the café. Where we are seated is the exact point where two rivers of sound flow into an ocean of nonsense, which is precisely what Dad is making in his attempts to order a
carafe of low
. With his hands he carves an hourglass in the air and then with two fingers taps at his forearm like he’s trying to bring up a vein.

“War … Tur?” he asks louder, even though Mum and I both speak French.

The waitress regards him with a mixture of amusement and unease, cocking her head to one side like he’s a monkey in a zoo that’s just done something uncomfortably human.

“
Du l’eau
,” says Mum quietly.

“War tur,” repeats Dad, this time in a deep voice. But the joke, much like his request for The Carpe Diem, falls on a stony silence and fails to take root. In the end he orders with a stab of his finger from the Specials Board. Even though it is a gesture of defeat, the act of him ordering from the board at all forces me to Photoshop him and the waitress into a wild array of compromising positions. (It’s easy to do. It is like every Romantic Comedy I have ever seen. At first they hate each other, but an hour and a half later they’re together in the pushed-back passenger seat of Dad’s car, kissing and space-docking (which is the one where you freeze a turd inside a condom and use it as
a dildo).) The nausea rides up in me from my stomach to the penthouse. I swallow a burp and remember that I don’t trust him.

Here in France, I try to remind myself, we have a far more progressive attitude toward adultery. We also have a word for that feeling you get when you’re on a cliff and you think you might want to throw yourself off it:
L’Appel Du Vide
, which means The Call of the Empty. This suggests that the French know lots more about The Human Condition than the English, which is why when they say
Que Sera, Sera
it’s not because they’re going to Wembley. And if cheating
en Français
is an inevitable part of life (written into our DNA every bit as much as mahogany is written into the penguins’), then there is really no reason for me to think as little of my dad as I do right now. While he salts a slab of baguette and unfolds a map from A’s six to zero I observe him through my new rose-tinted
lunettes
. With a great effort, I summon up all my vocab, run through as many
subjonctif
conjugations as I can think of, and pretend we really do live
en Français
. For a moment, it works. I see myself on the cliff edge, pouring respect into the
vide
between us, a thick, lavalike substance that will set solid as cement in the afternoon
soleil
. Next to me is Maman and on the cliff opposite is Papa, his arm draped gracefully over the slender shoulders of his hairy-legged mistress, whose name is almost certainly but not necessarily Elise and who Maman views with no more suspicion than she does the dry cleaner. (Sex is simply another thing in their life together that is just as easily outsourced.) Papa and Elise, I see now, have a cement mixer of their own. Theirs is full of trampled touchlines and shared interests,
happy memories of Serge and I playing
au foot
. Across the soon-to-be-forgotten divide we wave to each other in a Gallic fashion.
Ensemble nous sommes une grande famille heureuse
.

But then Dad knocks over the vinegar and says Oopsie Daisy, which is not exactly meeting me halfway. If someone chokes, I will now have no option but to volunteer his services as a doctor.

(“Vite! Est-il un médecin dans le restaurant?!”

“Oui! Mon pere, l’adultère!”)

Otherwise, he could be lost to me forever.

“Le Rosh Hell?”
Dad had echoed when I’d told him the place I would hypothetically go if I could go anywhere I wanted. “Above anyplace else in the entire world? Above
Disney
?”

“Yes,” I had replied.

“What if it wasn’t hypothetical?” he’d continued, after a few more chevrons had disappeared beneath us.

“What if hypothetically it wasn’t hypothetical?”

“Right.”

So, sat in the passenger seat of my father’s dual-control mobile office on the way back from a hospital appointment that had it been an airplane we would’ve missed by the length of a film, I had tried to conjure up a hypothetical scenario in which I was being asked where I would go given the nonhypothetical situation that I could go anyplace in the world.

“La Rochelle,” I had repeated.

“Why Le Rosh Hell?” Dad had asked.

“Pourquoi pas?”
I had replied, enigmatically.

“Okay, then,” Dad had said eventually. And then, after another mile, “Where even is that?”

La Rochelle is a small city on the west coast of France with a population of about 75,000 people (which makes it France’s answer to Weston-super-Mare). After lunch I ask one of these people for directions to the library as revision for my French Oral, only to discover that there isn’t one (unless you count the one in the university (which neither of us do)). Although I’m too proud to admit this to Dad, La Rochelle is not exactly how I imagined it. For example, so far the only swimming pool I have encountered is the one outside my hotel room window. Along with the boulangerie and the discotheque I was expecting the bibliotheque and piscine to be La Rochelle’s central landmarks. If my textbooks are to be believed (which I’m starting to doubt they are), then these ought to be the North, South, East, and West on the townspeople’s mental maps. (In French classes, you need only take the second left after one or continue all straight past another to arrive at any known destination.)

In the end, it doesn’t matter so much what the town of La Rochelle does or doesn’t have to offer, because as soon as Dad finds our location on his map (which is of the whole Charente-Maritime region) I get tired and a headache and have to go back to the hotel. In my room I try to do some Geography revision, but the Central Asian capitals get stuck on the tip of
my tongue, and the East Asian ones further back still, so I put on my boxing helmet (because the room isn’t seizure-proof) and shut my eyes.

I wake up to a kind of gulping sound, the sort of noise an embarrassed cartoon character would make while tugging its collar. The room is dark, the hotel is quiet (except for Dad snoring through the wall (which means he’s been drinking)), and the clock reads 06:27, which has no special significance that I know of, apart from being at least fifteen hours after I shut my eyes. My headache is gone, but in its place is a surface of dust thick enough to leave footprints in. Moreover, my tongue is dry and furry, and when I try to swallow it clacks against my teeth like a typewriter, which is how I know that the second gulp isn’t from me, either. It’s not until the third one that I locate the source. They’re coming from outside my window. I get to it in time to see a mysterious figure standing at the side of the swimming pool. He is encased from head to toe in a Samurai-black wetsuit and stooped under the weight of a heavy-looking oxygen tank, the flippers on his feet pointing ahead of him like misshapen shadows. I press my nose against the window and my breath fogs the glass and by the time I’ve wiped it clear the man has lowered himself down onto the concrete, his legs dangling into the water, his palms clamped together and his head bowed over the pool. He stays like this awhile in what looks from four stories up like prayer. And then he falls forward.