Ostrich: A Novel by Matt Greene

out, Chloe tries her enigmatic smile again. However, this time I decide if she has anything to say on the matter she should say it out loud.
    “What are you smiling about?” I ask, Bad Cop–ly.
    “You heard.”
    “Heard what?”
    “How she avoided the question.”
    I lower my voice to a whisper, which means sacrificing some of my natural authority. “Mum would never do anything to harm Jaws 2.”
    “What?”
    “You heard,” I say (cleverly) in quotation marks.
    “No, I didn’t,” says Chloe. “You were whispering. Try speaking up.”
    “She wouldn’t. She’d never hurt him. And if anything happened to him, she’d tell me. We have an open relationship.”
    “That doesn’t mean what you think it means.”
    “Yes, it does. It means neither of my parents would let my hamster come to harm. That’s just a fact,” I say in conclusion,pretending my finger’s a sparkler and dotting the air with a full stop.
    “So what happened to Jaws 1?” asks Chloe rhetorically, ignoring my finger punctuation and adding three air full stops of her own (which doesn’t even work, because it actually makes things less final (it’s not like a triple exclamation mark)).
    “And by the way,” she adds. “You know you owe me a pound.”
    “How come?”
    “Cos you didn’t know what a clitoris was.”
    “But I really didn’t know,” I protest. “I was only pretending to. I was bluffing.”
    Chloe sighs, like I’ve been missing the point all afternoon.
    “I know you didn’t know,” she says. “That’s why you owe me.”

Chapter Nine
    On the way to the hospital to have my stitches taken out we pass the lamppost that Dad calls Morrissey. It always has a bunch of flowers tied to it, which means that someone’s died and someone else is trying to remember them. Flowers symbolize this, because smell is the most important sense for memories.
    Whenever someone tells Dad about a car crash that they’ve been in, they always use phrases like
all of a sudden
and verbs like
appear
. For example:
    1)  The car in front braked suddenly .
    2)  A badger materialized in the road.
    3)  We came to the junction forthwith .
    This is Dad’s Number One Pet Hate. He says that nothing on road happens suddenly. The problem is, he says, people don’t look ahead. And if you don’t look ahead, then you end up reacting to hazards instead of anticipating them.
    Commentary Driving is a lesson Dad gives his students when he thinks they think they know how to drive. What they have to do is imagine there’s a blind man sitting in the back of the car (although not literally, because his weight would affect the stopping distances) and describe to him exactly what they’re doing at every step. The point of Commentary Driving is to focus the mind on the act of driving a car, to ensure that no part of the process becomes automatic, and at the same time, to allow the driver to reach a higher plane of awareness and perception. Dad calls this last part Lifting Your Vision.
    What Dad finds with Commentary Driving is that when they first try it his students see it as two separate activities: 1) The Driving, and 2) The Commentary. They begin by driving the car just as they normally would, except maybe a little slower, to give them extra time to fit the words in, and then they start talking Dad through what they’ve just done like they’re trying to justify their actions. For example:
    1)  I just changed down to second gear because I saw the traffic lights change.
    2)  I checked the mirror before indicating.
    3)  I reversed back over the badger because he was suffering.
    This is what Dad calls Two Different Strudels, which means that they have given him two separate things when what he asked for was both of these things combined. It is only when Dad bans his students from using the past tense that they start to get it right. Eventually, the words catch up to the action, i.e., the lag disappears (or where once there was Apple Strudel and Wild