Ostrich: A Novel by Matt Greene Page B

that at no point in your life will you ever actually
be there
. Because no matter how far away
there
is to begin with, the second you arrive it won’t be
there
anymore.”
    “It won’t be there?”
    “Well, that’s really more of a Geopolitical question. But whether it is or isn’t isn’t important. The important thing is it won’t be
there
. Because by the time you get there—by virtue of your presence—it’ll be
here
instead. Do you see what I’m saying?”
    I thought so. “That I am here?”
    “Exactly right! In fact, I’d go one further. I
is
here. And always remember, wherever that happens to be is neither here nor there. Now”—she grinned, rapping the board with the chalk stub—“does that still make sense to you?”
    I looked at the board again. As if on cue, the letters scrambled before my eyes and the words they spelled (if indeed they ever were words in the first place) stopped making sense.
    “So how come people say it?” I asked.
    “Well,” said Miss Farthingdale, hushing her voice and beckoning me closer, “that one’s easy. It’s because they’re not talking about now. They don’t mean I am there in the present. They mean I am there
in the future
. Tell me, what are you doing this weekend?”
    “I’m playing football with my brother,” I answered automatically.
    “You are playing football with your brother?” asked Miss Farthingdale.
    “Why wouldn’t I be? He’s called Serge.”
    “I see. And when you
are
playing football with Serge, what tense is the verb?”
    The question swung open like a trapdoor.
    “Present?” I ventured carefully (a bit like Indiana Jones in
The Last Crusade
, when he has to spell
Jehovah
to get across the tiles in the Temple of the Sun without falling through to his death and old James Bond reminds him with telepathy that in Latin it starts with an
I
).
    “Exactly right!” said Miss Farthingdale. The teeth of her briefcase snapped into place. “Because in English we don’t have a Future. So if we want to talk about it we have to use the Present. Because so far that’s the best idea anyone’s come up with.”
    “But that doesn’t make any sense,” I protested, when Miss Farthingdale was already half out the door, which made her stop with one foot in the weekend.
    “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 coulddescribe 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:
    1)  Waking up exhausted in a me-shaped sweat puddle on the floor of Paperchase (because one of my fits can take up more energy than running a marathon (“And it’s twice as hard to collect sponsorship for,” as Dad said when the pretty MacMillan nurse told us that fact last year)).
    2)  The déjà vu that came first.
    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