Ostrich: A Novel (18 page)

“Gulp,” says the water, tugging at its collar a fourth time like it hopes no one’s seen. (And no one has. Except for me.)

From where I’m looking, only one of the four divers is distinguishable from the others. Three of them are dressed identically in black, with their faces framed tightly in rubber, but a yellow vine runs up the spine of the fourth’s wetsuit and blooms at the neck into a jungle of blond hair. I take this as a sign that he is in charge, a suspicion that is confirmed when the others congregate around him and he lectures them. Then he assumes the role of Baptist, plunging each of them through the water like he’s converting Muslims. Only once they’re all saved does he attach his own tank and join them underwater.

The bottom of the pool is checkered like a chess board, and for almost an hour, directed by the blond man (who stops them every other length to offer instructions), the divers comb it in straight lines rook-style. First they sweep horizontally, then vertically, and before they’re done no square is left unexamined. However, when the sun begins to rise and the hotel starts to stir the unit emerges from the water empty-handed. Which can mean one of only two things:

That day, we visit both the Maritime Museum and the Aquarium, and even though both are quite interesting (Mum buys
me books from both), I find myself unengaged. According to the plaque in the lobby, the La Rochelle Aquarium contains 3,000,000 liters of sea water, which is why 800,000 tourists flock to it each year to explore The Mysteries of the Deep. However, none of these mysteries can fully distract me from the one outside my hotel room window.

“So what’s the deal with you and the Gower girl?” asks Dad in the lift after dinner.

“We don’t have a deal,” I say, putting the clitoris bet to the back of my mind. “I just thought she’d want to look after Jaws 2 if we were away.”

“She’s very pretty,” says Mum.

“I tell you what”—Dad winks—“you must’ve learned a trick or two from your old man after all …”

Before bed I set my alarm for 06:28 (two perfect numbers). Of all of the mysteries in my life right now, this seems like the one I’m best equipped to solve.

I’m awake ten minutes before my alarm like I always am so I can turn it off before it wakes up Mum or Dad, which would spell the end of my mission before it’s even begun. The rain outside is hard enough to sound like a single note, which is also (it seems when I rip open the curtains) hard enough to discourage yesterday’s divers. With my whole body beating like
my heart is a one-man band, I pull the shower cap from under my pillow and stamp off my pajama bottoms. Beneath them, because I don’t own swimming trunks, is a pair of black boxers with a yellow trim. Swimming is not something I’m an expert at. However, I do not anticipate this being a problem, as the main skill required of me during this enterprise is sinking, something I expect to come naturally.

The rain falls on the pool as a million different species, cats and dogs just two among them. Sitting on the side with my feet dangling and the downpour driving my head into a bow, I set the stopwatch on my Casio SGW100 to fourteen minutes and two seconds (which is exactly five minutes less than the world record (because I am Erring on the Side of Caution)) and make myself brave by saying my name twenty-two times. When it no longer sounds like my own, I fall forward.

If the water swallows, I don’t hear because beneath it the whole world is on mute.

There are five stages to drowning. The first thing the boy in the year below who didn’t know about Pressure would have experienced is Surprise, which occurs when the victim recognizes that he is in danger and becomes afraid. In all likelihood, at this point the boy would not actually have been far below the surface. What is most probable, in fact, is that his head was tilted back and his face and arms were above water. He would not have cried out, which could have saved him, because all of his energy would have gone into the desperate clasping for handfuls of air that would have eventually driven him under. This is when stage two would have begun. Stage two is Involuntary Breath Holding, which is the body trying to go into
Safe Mode. This is when the boy’s epiglottis would have closed over his airway to prevent water from going down the wrong hole, which is what would have deprived him of oxygen. The lack of oxygen ushers in stage three, Unconsciousness or Respiratory Arrest, during which he would have sunk peacefully to the bottom of Letchmore Pond at a speed determined by the amount of air still trapped in his lungs. Once there the absence of oxygen from his brain would have triggered a violent seizure, which is called Hypoxic Convulsion and explains why when they found him the look cast across the swollen blue puppy fat of his face was one of blind terror. This is stage four.

Then he would have died, thus concluding The Five Stages of Drowning, which is when The Five Stages of Grieving would have begun. (When the boy’s parents attended the memorial assembly as guests of the school, I would estimate that they were still at Denial, because the way they smiled up at Mr. Clifford when they shook his hand made it look like they were accepting a sports-day prize on their son’s behalf.)

I am at stage two (Involuntary Breath Holding) when I feel myself lighten. I rise through the water like a bubble of oxygen but when I get to the surface I don’t pop. Instead, I keep on floating, weightless and dry, up into the air and through the rain, until I’m where I was yesterday, looking down on a figure suspended below the water. In every way he looks like me, except chlorine has painted his eyes red. From four stories high, where my parents are sleeping, I watch myself in the third person. Miss Farthingdale was wrong, because there I am, a Photographic Memory waiting to be taken. Beneath the
water, I look calm and at peace as though the fear has passed straight through me without me noticing it, which is how I know that my soul has left my body. In seconds I will fall unconscious and out of sight, but for now, with no one in the world awake to observe me, I am a subatomic particle in Copenhagen. I am in two places at once.

Across the courtyard from my room, a light comes on.

I return to myself in the flutter of involuntary leg spasms, which saves my life. My head punches through the water with a greedy gasp. Desperately, I flail my arms in the direction of land until my palm slaps against concrete, and only then do I recognize the sound of the rain drumming on my shower cap. It is the sound of the present. Which means I’m still here.

Slumped over the poolside, I spew a slug of spit down my chin and, waiting for the fire in my lungs to burn out, assess my options before realizing that I don’t have any, because if you have only one option, then it isn’t an option at all.

I need to know.

I reset my stopwatch for three minutes. Then I screw shut my eyes and breathe out until I feel myself empty.

This time I sink like a stone.

I open my eyes with my feet on a white square. Time feels stodgy, like in a dream (and my synaptic fluids nonconductive), but with the sun just moments from rising it is doubly of the essence, so as quickly as I can I decide on a bold Spanish Opening and stride ahead two squares as if to free the King’s Bishop. However, as I lunge forward I lose balance. My left foot starts
to drift away toward the surface, and turning to watch it go, I see that dawn has already broken. Overhead, the first beams of sunlight have broken through the clouds and flit across the uneven water like they’re skim-reading Braille, which means soon the whole world will stir, which means this might be the only chance I get. In which case there is no time for strategy. I scan the board frantically, hopping illegally this way and that. I don’t know what I’m looking for (only that I’ll know when I find it), but for a slow second there’s a part of me that believes all the answers I seek are hidden somewhere in this pool, from the mysteries of my parents’ marriage to the capital of Mongolia. The question is only what form they will take. However, when my alarm blinks and my throat screams for air they’ve yet to take any, and still nothing especially makes sense. I am just about to admit defeat when the sun makes its move. Darting through a hole in the storm, it strikes the water and lands on the floor in front of me in a perfect Caro-Kann defense. And there, illuminated at the border of the occupied square, is my sunken treasure. I reach out to clasp it with the white, wrinkled fingers of a suddenly old man (as though the sight of it alone has granted me wisdom beyond my years), but no sooner has my hand closed around the doubloon than a force beyond my control straps an arm around my chest, causing me to breathe in a lungful of water.

The next thing I know I’m on the side of the pool. I recognize my assailant from the dripping shards of blond mane that anoint my head. I am laid flat on my back, the lion man on top of me, pumping furiously at my chest like he’s trying to crush my ribs to dust.
“Qu’est-ce que tu fait?!”
he demands over and
over, and then for punctuation pinches my nose, because on his patch the punishment for trespassing is death by suffocation. His bearded jaw yawns open like the pizza box at David Driscoll’s house, and in it, for a second time, I see oblivion. But before he can plug shut my mouth, my torso erupts and a flume of watery sick darts down his open throat. Now it is his turn to retch, which gives me time to tighten my fist around the bounty. (If he wants it, he’ll have to prize it from my cold, dead hand.)

“Fire!” I shout, at the top of my voice, which is what you’re supposed to say if you’re being attacked, because people don’t run toward an assault. I fold up like a deck chair and trawl my mind for other survival tips, but the only one I can think of is about being buried in an avalanche and spitting so you know which way down is. “Fire!” I repeat, the rain lashing around us. “Fire! Fire! Fire!”

It works. By the time the lion man stops coughing, a confused receptionist has appeared by the poolside, which means now there are three of us, which officially makes a crowd. My bet is he won’t be stupid enough to try anything in a crowd. And I’m right.

“Fiyuh?”
he asks, scooping me into his arms, as though my well-being is his raison d’être. And then, to the receptionist:
“Allumez le feu!”

In the lobby, the receptionist swaddles me in a blanket and sits me down in front of the electric fire. The flames burn blue like the lion man’s eyes, which are trained on me like crosshairs from behind the desk, where he towels off his blond hair and tries to gauge what I know. As I return his gaze, it occurs to me
that he looks exactly like Hitler should have looked. For a second, I consider a mocking salute. However, it will take more than gloating sarcasm to unlock my right hand.

I don’t open it until I know I’m safe. Back on the fourth floor, in the bathroom with the door bolted behind me, standing shivering in front of the sink, I slowly uncurl my old-man fingers like I’m releasing a butterfly. Which is when I realize I’ve been holding my prize so tight that I’ve branded its shape into the heel of my palm. (The words are no less clear than if I’d pressed a key into a bar of soap.)

The next day at the airport when they ask me to empty my pockets, I tell them they’re already empty.

“I knew it!” Dad says to Mum, when the metal detector beeps. “I knew he was a robot! And to think you told me you and C-3PO were just good friends.”

The security guard takes one look at me and waves me on my way.

And on my way I go, secretly thumbing the object around my trouser pocket.

On the way back from the airport, once we’ve dropped Mum home because she’s not feeling so well, Dad drives me to Chloe’s to collect Jaws 2. As soon as her front door swings open, I understand what Dad meant when he said the conservatory wasn’t the only thing that needed planning permission (if I knew what he was talking about (which I didn’t)). Like the house whose entrance she bars, the breasts of the woman stood in front of me are the largest I have ever seen.

“Hello?” she says, her lips rounding out the
O
as if in homage to her best feature.

“You must be Maris,” I say.

“Maris?” she replies.

(
Maris Piper
, I think, cleverly.)

“Are you collecting?” she continues. “Hold on, I’ll get my purse. You poor thing.”

In the driveway, Dad honks and waves.

“Oh,” says Maris, “I’m so sorry. I didn’t know she had a lesson today. Ella!
Ella!
” And before I can explain why I’m here, Chloe’s sister, Ella, appears at the top of the staircase.

“Wait a second,” she says into a mobile phone. “New new Mum needs me … Dunno, probably just misplaced her sense of self-worth again.” And then, down the stairs to Maris: “Have you tried looking in your bra?”

“Actually, young lady,” Maris says, smiling hard, “I think there’s something you’ve forgotten.”

“Have you tried looking in your bra,
slut
?” asks Ella.

“No. Try again.” Maris laughs.

“Home-wrecker?”

“You’ve got a driving lesson.”

“Err, no I haven’t,” says Ella, hoisting her middle finger and leaving.

“I’m so sorry,” says Maris, turning back to me. “She’s under a lot of stress, what with A-levels and … the Bird Flu epidemic. I’ll be right back.”

But before she can disappear up the stairs, I explain I’m here to see Chloe and apologize for calling her Maris.

Jessica (Maris’s real name) shows me to Chloe’s room, which is in the attic. There’s no answer when we knock, and when Jessica opens the door we find Chloe sitting cross-legged on the
bed, playing with a stress doll, her back turned to us and her head pinched between a set of headphones. The stereo stack that she’s plugged in to is as big as a life support machine. It sits in the middle of the floor, next to Jaws 2 (who is asleep in his sphere), with its breezeblock-sized speakers at opposite ends of the room, laying facedown on the carpet like hostages in a bank robbery. Next to the sound system even the color-coded A0 revision timetable (which is pinned to the slanted ceiling (which makes me feel like we’re in the turret of a castle)) seems irrelevant, and when Jessica pulls the plug I half expect Chloe to drop dead. Instead, a depth charge of noise turns the ground beneath our feet to quicksand (causing Jaws 2 to bolt awake and run into a wall), and Chloe spins round, whipping the headphone cord through the air.