Ostrich: A Novel (4 page)

I don’t think my dad has made my mum laugh since the introduction of the Single European Currency. (I sometimes think all it would take for them to find what they’ve lost is if we all took a trip to Switzerland. (However, there’s only one reason sick people go to Switzerland.))

“Why don’t you get yourself a paper?” suggests Mum.

“From where?” asks Dad.

“From Smiths.”

“Where’s that?”

“You know where it is.”

“So humor me.”

“It’s where you went last time to buy a pack of gum.”

“Great. I’ll just ask for the blue plaque.”

When Dad’s gone, Mum sits down on the edge of my bed and tells me I have nothing to be afraid of. Sometimes I think she’s in denial. (It’s the way she ruffles my scalp.)

For a long while we say nothing, which is the same as not saying anything only when you look at it from the outside in. Finally, Mum asks what I want to eat when I get home. I pretend to think about the question so as not to hurt her feelings.

Spaghetti Bolognese is my favorite meal, which is lucky, because it’s the only meal Mum cooks. She doesn’t follow a recipe, I think because she doesn’t like being told what to do and recipe books are always full of imperatives. If you want Mum to finely chop two onions, then the worst thing you could do
is tell her to
Finely chop two onions
. (Instead, you should follow these instructions:

Spaghetti Bolognese

Preparation time: 5 minutes, Cooking time: 1 hour

Serves 3

(If Jamie Oliver ever wrote a storybook about a kid who nicks an artery making a red-wine reduction, then Mum would be a Michelin-starred chef inside a year.))

Because Mum has never read a recipe in her life, her Spaghetti Bolognese isn’t like any other Spaghetti Bolognese. She calls it her signature dish, which I suppose is appropriate, because it looks nothing like the thing it’s supposed to represent and it’s never the same twice in a row. (I think what she means, though, is that it’s unique to her, which is definitely true.) Dad says Mum’s Bolognese is the culinary equivalent of a black hole because everything gets sucked into it, which is true. Sometimes it’s made of beef, other times lamb, sometimes it’s got bits of broccoli in, or sometimes peppers, and once even frozen peas. He says we shouldn’t even call it Bolognese, and that if we do we might as well throw a pillow out the window and call it a bird of prey.

I don’t know what the rules are for what is and isn’t a Bolognese (or for where one thing ends and another thing begins in general), but I don’t think we ever could call what Mum makes something else, because for something to be a word at least two people have to have tried it separately. Otherwise, there’d be no point in naming it in the first place, because you wouldn’t have anyone to discuss it with. (I try and remember this whenever David Driscoll tells me about rusty trombones or space-docking or munging. I know it’s bullspit, because there’s no way two people would ever have tried those things independently. So even if you were sick enough to give it a go,
you wouldn’t bother giving it a name, because you wouldn’t assume it was a thing. (Which means someone’s just made up the word without doing the thing (which is like having a door without a room behind it).))

I suppose Dad does have a point, though. If you think about it (which I have), it is a bit weird we call Mum’s sauce Bolognese, because if you asked anyone else in the world to make a Bolognese, theirs wouldn’t even be close. However (thinking about it), that’s probably why it’s my favorite. It’s like a really bad private joke that’s funny only because no one else gets it. It makes me feel like we’ve got our own secret language, because only our family has that picture in our head when we hear the word
Bolognese
. (So even if it does always taste better in restaurants, my mum’s Spaghetti Bolognese is my favorite meal because it makes me feel safe.)

I realize I haven’t answered the question out loud.

“Spaghetti Bolognese,” I intone.

Mum smiles. “You mean my signature dish.”

“Why do you call it that?” I ask.

Mum considers the question.

“Because by now I’m stuck with it.”

And then we finish the crossword.

“I bet you know your five times table, don’t you?” asks the anesthetic nurse, apparently without irony, after I’ve been wheeled out of my room and down a long white corridor past at least a dozen hand-washing checkpoints and into and then subsequently out of a lift that requires a PIN number to operate, which is a tautology (because PIN stands for Personal Identification
Number
), and which Mum and Dad weren’t allowed into, and then down another three much quieter corridors and into the room I’m in now, which is called the Anesthesia
Station
, which implies I’m going on a trip somewhere, which is the opposite of reassuring.

Having people talk down to you is the absolute worst part
about being a kid. I hate when someone tries to talk to me
on my level
(especially when it’s someone whose job a drug addict would probably be overqualified for). Instead of answering, I concentrate on remembering my calming techniques.

“How about counting? You can count to ten, can’t you?”

“I’m doing it right now,” I say.

(Another tree falls in the woods.)

“Okay, well, when I say so, here’s what I want you to do. I want you to try and count all the way up to ten. Will you give that a go for me?”

“In what language?”

“Say what now,” says the nurse, so it sounds like she’s reading stage directions off an autocue. She is Specials Board pretty (which probably means no one’s ever told her how annoying she is). My surgical gown is membrane thin. Suddenly I’m worried about erections, but, luckily, when I remember that my bum’s on show all the blood in my body gets diverted to my face.

“In what language would you like me to
try
and count to ten?”

“Well, how about just in numbers for now.”

(I didn’t know it was possible to feel superior and a breeze between your bum cheeks at the same time. (I thought they were mutually exclusive sensations. (If I’d had to draw a Venn diagram it would have been two separate circles. (Like a pair of breasts.)))) The blood reroutes back toward my penis. I manage to suck some of it back up to my cheeks by remembering the time I called Miss Farthingdale Mum. (It’s like one of those Test Your Strength games you get at fairs. (The hammer is my
history of embarrassment.)) At this rate, she’ll never be able to find a vein.

(Sex is one of the things I know least about, and every day it gets worse. You know how they say the universe is expanding? That’s how it is with sex at our school. Every day there’s something new that I didn’t even know I didn’t know about. It all started last year in Biology, when they split up the girls and boys to show us videos about puberty and the presenter told us (like he was reading the news) how perfectly natural it was for us to be worrying about the size of our penises.

From that moment on, even if we’d never thought about it before (which I hadn’t), penis size was all we had on our minds. Whispers spread round the school (like head lice used to) about averages and anomalies and acceptable methods for measuring. Everyone had a figure (me included). The first weird thing I noticed was how everyone else somehow knew without being told to use inches. Everything else in our lives up to this point had been measured in meters and centimeters (graph axes, sports day events), but now all of a sudden our genitals were mini–metric martyrs. The only other time I’d heard inches as a unit of measurement was when Dad was showing off his new wide-screen TV, and I couldn’t escape the feeling that there was a connection between the two things. It was almost like Sony wanted to encourage us to make the association, as if they realized it was mainly men who bought wide-screen TVs and they knew what impressed us most. But whether it was a coincidence or not, I knew from the moment I started calculating
the size of electrical appliances as a factor of my own penis that something fundamental had changed.

For an entire week after they showed us the video, debate raged in the playground about what made for admissible data. We all recognized the need for standardization, but we weren’t all agreed about what it was we were actually measuring. Some of us argued that the penis was just what you could see with your own eyes (and hold in your own hands (which some of us had started to do, apparently)), while others maintained that the shaft actually began before the balls. (One or two even measured from their bum holes forward, which reminded me for some reason of an argument my mum had once had with Aunt Julie about abortion. (Aunt Julie thought it was okay, but Mum just kept saying that
Life began at the moment of conception
.)) Eventually, we reached an agreement that the penis was the protuberance alone, and for a week or so this looked set to be our Magna Carta, until someone with an older brother raised the subject of
girth
. Then it was back to the measuring tapes. In seven days we’d gone from blissful ignorance to this. There wasn’t a man among us who (with a little application and a Casio FX-83) couldn’t have calculated his volume to twelve decimal points.

For a few days we were as happy with our new knowledge as Mr. Carson was with our sudden interest in π. However, slowly it began to dawn on us that a penis in isolation, whatever size (large, medium, or travel), didn’t actually mean all that much in real terms. It was only when correlated against the depth of our classmates’ vaginas that the data became useful. And that’s when the boys started talking to the girls.

That was the term that Susie Beckman spoke to me. Susie Beckman was the first girl in our year to get breasts, which means she’s even more of a celebrity than I am now (which means I don’t know anything about her). She didn’t need to say hello, because I had tracked her approach all the way across the playground (which she must have either seen or assumed). Instead, when she arrived, she announced that she had made a bet about me.

“It’s about the clitoris,” she explained, unwrapping a stick of bubble gum and sliding it between her lips until it squashed against her teeth and folded up like a sound wave.

I had no idea what the clitoris was. (I’m still not sure I do entirely.) My guess was it was something sexual, because we were living through the second great Age of Discovery. The clitoris must be some new Newfoundland, I figured. Maybe Susie Beckman had discovered it accidentally while looking for India.

“The clitoris?” I asked, casually tossing off the word with false familiarity.

“Yeah, it’s whether or not you know what it is.”

Eff-word
. I examined my options and realized quickly I didn’t have any. (One thing I could have done was just own up to my ignorance (
own my ignorance
), but technically if you’ve got only one option, then it isn’t an option at all.) I could feel the sweat starting to gather in the small of my back. (In that moment, my Hydroelectric energy potential was vast enough
to power a small Peruvian village.) To buy myself time, I asked how much was riding on my answer.

“Pound tuck,” retorted Susie Beckman, in a double-berry-flavored speech bubble.

“And what did you bet?”

“I said you didn’t know, but Chloe Gower reckoned you would and I should leave you alone.”

Here I looked up and spotted Chloe fifty meters away in the tuckshop queue, oblivious to its flow, like a pebble in a stream, a stethoscopic Y of headphone cord disappearing at her throat into a dark swathe of anti-uniform. Her eyes were pointed our way, and when she saw me notice she pivoted gracelessly, flicking up the hood of her non-regulation sweatshirt and dislodging an earpiece as she did so. Suddenly, I saw a chink of light. Maybe there was a way Chloe Gower could be the loser here and not me. After all, it would serve her right for believing in me.

“So if I don’t know, you get a pound?”

“Oh my God, you know how a bet works!”

(Judging by how early Susie Beckman discovered it, Sarcasm is an island just off the coast of Portugal. (But I didn’t mind, because now I had a plan.))

“Well, in that case”—I tapped my nose—“how about I don’t know and you owe me fifty-p tuck.”

Susie Beckman’s face scrunched into a frown. She looked down her nose at my stomach, because we were roughly the same height.