Ostrich: A Novel Read Online Free PDF

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.

Chapter Four
    “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 partabout 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 myhistory 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