Ostrich: A Novel (25 page)

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.”