Ostrich: A Novel (10 page)

“Oh, I don’t know,” she mused. “I think it makes a whole lot of sense, imagining The Future’s something you can hold in your hands. It’s quite reassuring, don’t you think? Gives you a lovely false sense of control. And it certainly beats believing in Fate, if you ask me. Which is precisely what you did. And now that I’ve answered, if you’ll excuse me …”

But I had one more question before I could excuse her, and I promised to keep it quick.

If the whole point of having a language was so we could
describe the world that we lived in, then how was it that we didn’t have a Future tense?

Miss Farthingdale looked from me to the classroom clock (which was five minutes fast, because David Driscoll had wound it on during form period) and then back again.

“I would have thought that was fairly obvious.” She shrugged. “I think a capable boy like you can figure that one out for himself.”

I sometimes wonder if it was a coincidence that that was the weekend I had my first seizure, or whether Fate, which at that time I didn’t believe in, had something to do with it. Like all of the seizures since, I don’t remember anything about it except for two things:

I was riding my bike into the Harlequin Centre because it was almost my parents’ anniversary and I needed some final materials to make them the card that I’d been planning. (I had decided to make my own card, having browsed the selection
available in WHSmith the week before and found it to be unsatisfactory. Five of their cards featured birds touching wings, which I found particularly offensive. Of these five avian couples, two were penguins, two swans, and one mallards, all of whom are famous for mating for life, which is supposed to be romantic somehow, except it isn’t because it’s not difficult for birds to be mahoganous because they don’t have the capability to imagine being happier with another partner. (This is what Miss Farthingdale had meant when she said English had two moods. We have the Indicative Mood, which is for things as they are, and the Subjunctive Mood, which is for things as they aren’t, which is what lets us do Conditional Thinking, which is what separates us from animals.) Moreover, mallards are rapists. (I did, however, see one thing in WHSmith I’d liked, which was a quote from someone I’d never heard of called Anon that I decided to weave into the theme of my own card.)) I had done most of the work already, and all I needed now was some good quality white paper so I could print out the pictures of the dung beetle and the dung heap, and a new Pritt stick so I could mount them on the card under the quote I’d stenciled: “Love isn’t about being perfect. It’s about being perfect for each other.”

The way I know I’m about to have déjà vu is the taste I get in the back of my mouth. I spent most of that weekend thinking about what Miss Farthingdale had said, especially what she’d meant by the last bit, and the stuff about being able to hold the future in your hands, which I think I’d understood most out of
everything because whenever I get that taste at the back of my mouth it feels like I’m Tasting The Future. It tastes metallic, and I got it that day while I was pedaling up Granville Road.

As I turned right into King Street with pennies in my saliva, I noticed the wind had painted a crisp packet against the fork of my bike, right at the axis of the front wheel. It was red (which means danger (and Ready Salted)), and as my wheel raced around it, it plucked furiously at the spokes, letting out a motorized howl that for a second made me imagine I was a Hell’s Angel blazing down an open highway. The sun glinted off its foil innards and danced on my retinae (which is the correct plural of retina), and as I leaned forward to free the bag from its accidental roulette my vision lifted and I saw exactly what was about to happen.

I remember foreseeing it (in what was a sun-bleached, almost nostalgic haze). But I don’t remember it happening.

As I lay on the pavement I could still taste copper on my tongue, but as I dribbled a rope of pink saliva into the gutter and felt the tear in my cheek I realized it wasn’t the future. It was blood. At first I didn’t understand. I had used my super power. I had foreseen all of this (that my finger would get caught in the spokes, that I would catapult myself over the handlebars, that I would land hard and bruise my mouth). I had looked into the future and perceived the hazard, which should have made me invincible, but instead I was somehow powerless to avoid it. (It was like I’d lifted my vision and seen the cliff, only someone had cut my brake cords.) I looked down at my grazed palms, at the raw runways of pink skin, and
considered the other times I’d had déjà vu. Now that I thought about it, it always seemed to come halfway through something (like a sentence or a fish-finger sandwich) and never at the start, and moreover, I always seemed to finish what I was doing before stopping to remark that I’d just had déjà vu. Even though I knew while it was happening that I was in the middle of a prophecy and (by knowing) I surely had the power to prove it wrong, I never did. Instead, I always played it out exactly how it was in the script, even though the words in the sentence no longer felt like my own and the fish-finger sandwich tasted of air.

It was as though the future I had glimpsed into had already happened.

And that’s when I understood what Miss Farthingdale had meant. (She was right: It was obvious.) We don’t have a future in English because there’s no such thing. It was just like she’d said. We liked to imagine we could reach out and touch it, hold it in our hands (and taste it in our spit), because that’s what let us believe we were in control, but we never could be, because that could never happen. Because the future dies at our touch. Which would explain why I couldn’t not fall off my bike that day. Because when I lifted my vision and saw myself flying improbably through the air, it wasn’t the future I was looking at.

“I am noticing the Asian woman at the wheel of the Vauxhall Cortina,” says Dad, flicking on the indicator (back in car (on
road on the way to hospital (in the present tense))). “And I am preparing for the worst.”

But he can’t commentate on the future any more than a dog can catch raindrops.

He is predicting the present.

The indicator ticks like a metronome, which makes me think of David Driscoll and Mum’s fictional piano lessons as Dad slides across the broken line and slots in behind the Cortina. The time is 4:21:48, which means two things:

“We’re going to be late for my appointment with Mr. Fitzpatrick,” I tell Dad, extending my arm to show him my Casio SGW100 (which is the exact one the deep-sea divers use).

The two lanes of traffic merge into one like a deck of cards being shuffled.

“Coast,” replies Dad, without looking at me.

I answer (correctly) without thinking (because I don’t have to), “Concentration Observation Anticipation Space Time.” Then I repeat myself, making sure to change the wording because if you repeat something furbatim (which means the exact same way), it means you’re lying. “We are running behind schedule for my consultation with Señor Fitzpatrick.”

“Don’t you worry about Mr. Fitzpatrick,” says Dad, straightening up the wheel. “Ever asked an American when World War Two started? They’re not so hot on timekeeping.” The indicator clicks off. “Poor Old Walter,” he adds, thoughtfully. “Dies Every Ruddy Year.”

I turn to look out the window and mindlessly list all the things you should check before a long drive: “Petrol Oil Water Damage Electrics Rubber You.”

(It turns out I knew exactly what Mnemonics were all along, even before I googled them. I just didn’t know they had a name. (To help me remember it, I have invented one of my own: Memory Never Escapes Me Officer Now I Construct Sentences.))

“Correct,” says Dad. “But
you
should come first.”

From our new position, my view of the roadside is unobstructed. Frost-glazed sports fields stretch out to our left, the markings vague and sort of implied, trampled underfoot by another ruddy year of touchline dribbles and parents’ pride. The goals are naked. Stripped of their nets, they have no backs or fronts, which robs them of their purpose. We pass sixteen of these sad arches (which makes a total of eight pitches (which is roughly the surface area of four small intestines)) and each one of them seems somehow more listless (which is when you have nothing left To Do). All the while Dad concentrates on the road ahead, being careful to leave a gap of exactly two chevrons between us and the Asian woman in front, which makes me think of Mum again (because now we are much greater than the Cortina (just like Mum’s ears are much greater than her eyes)).

I asked Dad once why they didn’t make the distance between two chevrons twice as long, because that way you’d have to keep only one chevron apart.

“They were like that when we found them,” he said, and laughed.

(I sometimes wonder if civilization had to start again from scratch how much stuff we’d reinvent. I realize that the odds of life existing in the first place are about 1 in a googolplex squared (which is a number so big you couldn’t write it in your entire lifetime), but I just can’t imagine that wax fruit could happen twice.)

The blanket of frost on the fields reminds me I’m cold, so I tug my sleeves down over my knuckles, clamp my hands between
my thighs, and watch my breath cloud in front of my mouth like a wandering thought bubble. To my surprise, there’s a question in it:
Can my soul be given away?

I don’t know who’s asking, but my best guess is the goalposts. I watch them slide away in the vanity mirror and say the question over to myself.
Can my soul be given away?
I’m sure I’ve heard it somewhere before. The words are familiar yet strange. (I both recognize them and don’t at the same time, like the taste of toothpaste in the afternoon.) The harder I look and the farther away the goalposts fall the more sense it makes. Maybe a soul is like a net. It’s the thing that stops other things from passing straight through you without you noticing them.

The Asian brake lights blush two chevrons toward tomorrow, which brings me out of my daydream. Dad shifts down through the gears and repeats himself: “Can My Soul Be Given Away?”

Forthwith I know where I’ve heard it before. I respond automatically. “Course Mirror Signal Brake Gear Accelerate.”

“Okay, then,” says Dad, flicking the indicator back on with a smile. “I think you’re ready.”

And the next thing I know we’re in car off-road.

“What about my appointment?” I protest, as we rumble down the footpath at a perfect right angle to where we’re supposed to be going.

“There are more important things in life than perfect attendance,”
says Dad (and then immediately lists none) as the foliage forms a Guard of Honor above our heads. At first the wind rustling through the leaves reminds me of applause, as though we’re a visiting sports team being clapped on to the pitch, but with the end of the tunnel just a pinprick in the leaves, the lane tapers and the roof starts to collapse. Dad grinds down on the accelerator, and I breathe in deep as though me and the car are one. “Hold on tight!” he exclaims, as branches drum on the windscreen and the hedgerow pins back the wing mirrors like a plastic surgeon performing an Otterplasty (which is the proper name for cosmetic ear surgery (which is what Beckie Frogley had after David Driscoll invented the term Blowjob Handles)). We speed ahead through the raking thorns and the canopy falls like dusk, dressing the entire car in black (except for my watch, which is glow-in-the-dark). Dad karate chops on the headlights. They peer forward into the dark, peeling back the night until they trip on something ahead in the path. It’s a fallen log. Half sunk into the mulch of mud and fallen leaves, it lies in wait like a Sleeping Policeman.