Ostrich: A Novel (16 page)

Mum looked surprised in a good way when I asked if I could come with her to the supermarket. She let me get eight out of the fourteen items on the list (which I had memorized and then destroyed), which Chloe and I agree is inconclusive. Every night for the past week I have smuggled a selection of fresh fruit into my bedroom to eat in secret and requested one of Chloe’s approved meals for dinner. On two out of five occasions my demands were met in full, on another two the meal was served in a healthier form (extra mushrooms on top of the stuffed-crust microwavable pepperoni pizza, the Rustlers quarter pounder presented minus the bun on a bed of rice with peas and carrots), and the grilled chocolate sandwich was refused outright. Moreover, on Tuesday evening, as per Chloe’s instructions, I asked for a try of Dad’s beer. Dad (as we expected) said okay, but Mum, who is never normally clumsy, accidentally knocked the can over before she could pass it to me. This is the detail that Chloe fixated on the most when I met her yesterday outside the newsagent with the
A
missing so the sign says
NEWS GENT
.

“Huh,” she said, when I was finished briefing her, and then again when I asked why we were meeting there. “So she didn’t actually say no?”

“What?”

“Your mum. If she didn’t want you drinking, she could of said so, right? Said no, I mean.”

I explained that there wasn’t really time to say anything, what with the accident, because the kitchen table is unwaxed (and corrected her grammar).

“Freud says accidents are just unconsciously motivated designs,” said Chloe.

“Who?” I asked.

“He’s my dad’s analyst. Dad’s always on about him. Says there’s no such thing as accidents.”

“What about Chernobyl?” I asked, but Chloe didn’t answer. Instead, she told me how Mum had most likely spilled the beer on purpose, and that the only reason she hadn’t forbade me from trying some was so I didn’t resent her, and because she wants to prove that she can be fun, too.

“Mum’s not fun,” I told her. “She calls bumper cars dodgems. And that’s two reasons. And if you’re saying it wasn’t an accident and that she doesn’t want me drinking alcohol, then that’s good news, anyway, isn’t it?”

However, before Chloe could reply we were interrupted by the homeless man who came out of the shop and handed Chloe a small yellow box and asked if he could keep the change and then blessed her when she said yes he could. The box said
CAMEL SINCE 1913
on it and then, in a much less elaborate font,
SMOKERS DIE YOUNGER
.

“What the eff?” I asked Chloe, who didn’t respond because she was busy gnawing at the box’s corner like a squirrel with a nut. “If you need to smoke to impress people, then those people aren’t your friends.”

“They’re not for me,” she said eventually, spitting out a fleck of cellophane and tearing the wrapping off the packet so when she passed it to me it felt like being gifted an unpinned grenade. And then, by way of explanation, all she added was, “Phase III.”

So here’s what I told her: that this was where I drew the line, that each cigarette shortens your life expectancy by five minutes, that I now intended to live to a ripe old age thank you very much, that it was amazing what you could get done in three hundred seconds and anyway that in my experience when people said five minutes they usually meant anything up to half an hour, which means that every three cigarettes you smoke is potentially one must-see film you never get to see, and (in conclusion) that she could stick Phase III up her
arschloch
.

Chloe lets me say all of this with a grin on her face. Only once I’ve clarified that
arschloch
is German for a-hole does she explain further. She does this by emptying the cigarettes into a bin that’s just for dog waste and crumpling the packet in her fist because actions speak louder than words. Phase III is all about taboos, says Chloe, which is why my parents have to discover the empty cigarette box among my possessions. This, she says, is the only way we’ll find out for sure. If all their recent spoiling is just standard (post-) operating procedure and not the Coolest Parent Custody Pageant we suspect it to be, then (like I did) they’ll draw the line at smoking (the Camel’s pack will be the straw that breaks the camel’s back (my joke, not Chloe’s)). However, if Mum and Dad really are getting a divorce, then they’ll each be so desperate to stay on my good side that neither
will have it in them to administer the punishment I so clearly deserve. My sentence will lie there undelivered like a ringing phone it’s someone else’s turn to answer. The worst I’ll probably get, says Chloe, is some vague theoretical lecture about the dangers of peer pressure and/or the evils of addiction, constructed from general terms and falsified personal anecdotes, and performed in such a nonaccusatory a-pro-po-nothing kind of manner that it may as well be an advert for Imodium Plus.

Before I went to bed last night I stuffed the cigarette packet in the back pocket of my good jeans. Then I put my good jeans in the dirty laundry basket.

Now I am playing the waiting game.

(There is no Phase IV.))

Instead of eating, Mum scrutinizes the Open Day itinerary which has the Tallow Chandlers’ School crest in the top right-hand corner (it’s a heavily militarized lamb silhouetted against a yellow sun like a partial ovine eclipse) and which I have already memorized. I know what she’s thinking, so I decide to save us both some time.

“Debating society or the Audio Visual club?”

“Hmm?”

“The two o’clock clash. Do you want to go to the debating chamber or the media center for the Thirty-Six-Hour Short Film screening.”

“Sorry, sweetheart. What?”

“They’ve got Thirty-Six Hours to make them,” I explain. “They’re not thirty-six hours long.”

“I don’t know,” says Mum, laying down her knife and fork.

“Me neither,” I admit. “I’d like to see the editing suite, but I also want to find out if drugs should be legalized.”

“I don’t know,” Mum repeats. This time, though, I can see the equations. I can tell something is up, because her brow has underlined her hairline like it’s a spelling mistake. “It’s not the clash. It’s the whole … Are you sure this place is right for you?”

“What’s wrong with it?”

“Nothing. There’s nothing
wrong
with it. Why, do
you
think something’s wrong with it?”

“No.”

“So you don’t think it’s a bit …” She looks around the room for the end of the sentence, as if it’s written on flashcards. “White Bread No Crusts?”

“I don’t even know what that means.”

“I just mean …”

I give her a minute to collect her thoughts. When it’s up, she takes my hand across the table, but I withdraw it because there’s a time and a place (the place is In Private and the time is 1991–1999).

“Your father and I have been talking, and we don’t want you blowing these exams out of proportion.”

“I’m not.”

“I know they probably seem very important at the present moment, but you’ve had a big year. We all have. And right
now the thing to be concentrating on is enjoying yourself, and spending time doing the things that you want to be doing. And we just both feel that the scholarship might … It’s too much pressure for you right now.”

I think about the ice stretched across Letchmore Pond. “I mastered pressure in Year 6,” I say, cracking an asterisk into the scalp of my Chocolate Crème Brûlée.

“We don’t want you spreading yourself too thin.”

“Actually, if you’re worried about pressure, that’s exactly what you want,” I retort (felling pretty much a whole forest). This should win the argument. However, I know what we’re really talking about. I lean across the table so no one else can hear. “You don’t have to worry about the money.”

“This has nothing to do with money.”

“Well, good, because there won’t be any involved. In a few weeks I’ll be concentrating better because I can stop taking the anticonvuls—”

“You mustn’t do that. Not until Mr. Fitzpatrick says it’s okay.”

“I know. That’s what I meant. But it doesn’t matter anyway, because the point is I’ve already decided to get the scholarship.”

“You can’t always decide these things.”

“Why not?”

“Because there are forces beyond our control.”

“I don’t believe in Fate,” I lie, looking quickly down at my palms, where the skin has grown back thin and pink. “It’s a four-letter word. And I don’t understand what it means anyway.”

“It doesn’t always matter what you believe,” says Mum.

On the train home a pregnant woman offers me her seat. I tell her thanks but no thanks, but she insists and tells me that she’s getting off at the next stop anyway. At the next stop she does indeed alight, which means get off, but I can see her get back on again in the next carriage and sit down again for a further fifteen minutes. Mum stands over me for the whole journey, hanging off the overhead rail like a shower curtain, which is really unhygienic, because there are companies that make signs to remind people to wash their hands that are kept in business only by people who forget to wash their hands. If I furrow my brow down over my eyes then she exists only from below the waist,
like the woman in the
Tom and Jerry
cartoons. I do this for a few stops without looking up. Because it is rush hour, this means I get a whole parade of crotches in front of my face, which a few weeks ago probably wouldn’t have set my mind racing.

Ever since Dad made such a big deal about disabling the parental controls on my Internet, I have been looking at porn pretty much every day. This is not for the purposes of masturbating (which Pete Sloss calls
master-bating
(as though it’s something you have to perfect (which Pete swears it is))), because I am still waiting to have my first wet dream. (Pete is the reason I know about wet dreams. He claimed to have had one before we even started measuring our penises. The trick, he says, is to Sellotape a picture of a girl you like over your eyes before you fall asleep, so when your eyelids flutter (which is automatic for the people during REM sleep) she seeps into your subconscious and wanks you off.) Rather, my interest in pornography is purely educational, which is why I have been able to incorporate my daily viewings into my preexisting revision timetable without causing disruption. I have found pornography helpful for the following subjects:

Moreover, pornography has taught me some miscellaneous lessons, which are arguably more relevant to my current situation. The most important of these lessons is about Human Relationships and The Power of Interpretation. I have (over)heard before (from Mum and Aunt Julie) many times about how pornography objectifies women, which means makes them into objects. However, I do not believe this to be the case. For example, consider these typical video titles:

In all of these examples and many, many more the women are obviously not being made into objects. Rather, they are clearly the subjects (which you can easily see because they come before the verb), and it is in fact the men who are being objectified. This is also true from an artistic standpoint, because in the majority of scenes the only part of a man you can see is his penis. Sometimes this effect is achieved through camera angles and other times the man is literally hidden from view behind something physical (like a toilet wall or a cheese-and-tomato pizza), his penis poking through a hole in the middle of it like some exotic, floating vegetable. This is not to say that you don’t sometimes get close-up shots of the women’s genitals, too (usually it’s a penis going into a vagina loads of times over, with that shallow echoey sound you get if you clap with cupped hands), but even then the camera will always eventually pull back to establish a wider context for the orifice,
which you pretty much never get with the cocks. Moreover, in one scene that I saw in which a woman was giving a tug job (which is American for hand job), there was this disembodied male voice that kept saying, “Put me in your mouth.” What the voice meant by this was “Perform inflatio on me,” which (if you think about it) is basically the male performer admitting out loud that he’s only a penis. (It was weird, almost like the man was proud of the fact that his entire existence had just tapered down to a single point.)

(I do not like this view of humanity. To me it says that we are simply crashing tides of genitals, just points and holes, two great armies of pluses and minuses coming together and amounting to nothing. However, this is not the lesson.)

The videos in the library on the site that I have been using (whose address I got from Pete Sloss in exchange for the promise of a photo of my mum) are sortable by several categories, such as Date Added, Duration, Top-Rated, and Most Popular. The difference between Most Popular and Top-Rated is that a video’s popularity is determined by its total amount of views, while its critical standing is decided by aggregating its star ratings. Just like with normal films, the relationship between these two things is more complicated than direct proportionality: The Most Popular videos tend to be glossy and American, with name stars, familiar storylines, and high production values, while the Top-Rated are usually European and feel more real and upsetting. There are exceptions that prove these rules (I don’t know how many exceptions it takes to
dis
prove a rule
(or whether or not an exception that
did
disprove a rule would just be the exception that proved the rule that exceptions always prove rules)), the best example being a critically acclaimed series that has also found mainstream success called
Gloryhole Confessions. Gloryhole Confessions
(which has an average rating of 4.88 out of 5 (same as
Schindler’s List
on IMDb)) follows the adventures of an unnamed Czech woman as she goes around a pretty European city that I think is Prague and alights with men in public toilets. The way this happens is that she enters a cubicle and sits down on the toilet and starts to masturbate herself off. This always occurs for between two and four minutes, at which point the woman pauses to survey her surroundings and notices something everyone else has already seen: an ominous circular ellipsis in the plywood wall about a meter from the floor and approximately fifteen centimeters in diameter. This is the “gloryhole,” and no sooner has the woman noticed it than an erect penis sprouts through in such a way that suggests that the cubicle itself has grown the thing. (I have been watching
Gloryhole Confessions
on French revision nights because it helps remind me that inanimate objects can be masculine or feminine.) Then she performs inflatio on the penis, then takes off her pants and backs onto it until it sperms on her bum. However, this is not the weirdest thing about
Gloryhole Confessions
. The weirdest thing is how every time, just before she starts performing inflatio, the woman tells the penis (in subtitles) that she’s never done anything like this before.