Ostrich: A Novel (26 page)

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.

(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.)

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.

“
Fif
teen!” 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:

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.