Ostrich: A Novel Read Online Free PDF Page A

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 dois tell her to
Finely chop two onions
. (Instead, you should follow these instructions:
    Spaghetti Bolognese
    1 Kitchen
    1  Chopping Board
    2  Onions
    1 Cutlery Drawer
    1 Saucepan Lid
    Preparation time: 5 minutes, Cooking time: 1 hour
    Serves 3
    1.  Enter the kitchen, loudly. If anyone is in earshot, announce your intentions to make a Bolognese sauce. If no one is in earshot, loudly announce your intentions to make a Bolognese sauce.
    2.  Take out the chopping board and place the onions on it, loudly.
    3.  Clatter around the kitchen, being sure to make as much noise as possible. Pretend the cutlery drawer is a percussion instrument and play it, badly, in 5/4 time.
    4.  Await arrival of Mum.
    5.  Answer the question “What on earth are you doing?” with “I am looking for a knife.”
    6.  Send subliminal message by playing F Sharp on the saucepan lid.
    7.  Leave for 1 hour and season to taste.
    (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