The Pagan House

‘The young man takes what he gets,’ said Mon, severely but playfully, as if she was enjoying the possibility of being a different kind of mother. ‘We’d like to sit next to an exit door.’

‘I’ll see what I can find,’ said the check-in woman, whose search could only fail because she had already, Edgar noticed, printed out their boarding passes. Her search ended, predictably, in briskly acted disappointment and Edgar, who did indeed want a window seat, was allocated one.

Waiting to board, they played their favourite game.

‘You know, I’ve been thinking about the hall,’ Edgar said, quietly drumming with pen and pencil on holiday puzzle book.

Mon shook her head. There was probably a Valium inside her to take the edge off her fear, slow it down to a sluggish thing, but still enormous and impossible to evade.

‘You know, the fireplace?’ Edgar asked.

She tapped her chin lightly with a lipstick case, smiled bravely, and was ready to join in.

‘What colour are Dutch tiles? Blue, or blue and white?’

‘Blue and white,’ she said. ‘But we don’t have to have them.’

She had failed to interest him in tiles before, which was why he had brought them up now.

‘No it’s fine,’ he grandly said.

The departure lounge was full. There were families here and couples, and babies that screamed, and a boy with a computer game whom Mon had tried to get Edgar to introduce himself to.

‘Inlaid into the floor and around the fireplace itself. They’re very expensive, though, so we might have to leave that kind of thing to last. I’d like to get the library in order first. What’s the matter?’

She had caught him frowning. Edgar was not sure about the library. He had alternative plans, a snooker room, where he and his father, in matching black waistcoats, should solemnly apply chalk to the tips of their cues and with all the emphatic restraint of beloved comrades congratulate each other on their shots.

‘I thought we might have a snooker room.’

‘We’ve got a games room already.’

‘Yes but it needs to be separate. You can’t have pinball machines and noise and things in a snooker room. It’s not, you know …’

‘Appropriate?’

‘Yes.’

Even if she was laughing at him he didn’t care. He had lifted her mind away from their flight and he enjoyed this sort of conversation hardly less than she did, their When-We-Move-To-A-Big-House game.

‘I’ve decided to wood-panel my bedroom,’ she said. ‘You can have your bedroom panelled if you like.’

‘No thank you.’

‘Too proud?’

It has never been discussed where his father might sleep—start him off discreetly perhaps in one of the guest rooms, let things develop from there. Edgar’s father could watch his sports through the night on the Sensurround TV set. He was, no doubt, not above playing computer games. He could make his telephone calls, to Nice and Los Angeles and New York and Las Vegas and Accra and Nairobi and Casablanca. Swim by moonlight in the pool. Edgar had wanted to telephone his father before they left the flat but the understanding was that he waited for his father to call. If Edgar ever did try to telephone his father, it was to numbers that no longer existed, or else a woman answered, who would call Edgar by the wrong name and tell him that his father was on the road.

‘The pool.’

‘What about the pool?’

‘Can it be P-shaped?’

She smiled with indulgence and permitted it to be so. He wanted to be able to see it from the sky, the initial of his surname, a blue suburban monogram.

‘I need a proper garden,’ she said.

‘I know.’

‘A walled garden, with places to sit, stone benches, maybe a fountain, and a vegetable garden and a herb garden, and you’ll need somewhere to play football.’

This was one of Mon’s fantasies that sometimes he benevolently allowed her, that Edgar was a typical boy who enjoyed the usual pleasures. He pictured the garden, its straggly long grass that would be his responsibility to cut, where he would go and lounge with his friends, if he had any. Edgar wondered when he would take up smoking. Soon, perhaps. That was the sort of activity that takes place in long grass. He sometimes saw Jeffrey smoking, standing on a chair, blowing smoke out of the top frame of Mon’s bedroom window.

He had to learn how to hide his thoughts better. He must have been wearing a Jeffrey face, because Mon was inspecting him and saying, ‘You’re going to have to let Jeffrey in.’

‘In? Where? I thought he had a key.’

‘You know what I mean.’

‘Do I?’

‘You know how much he likes you.’

She often said this, as if it were both true and argument enough. He did not believe it to be true. Even if Jeffrey was on record as saying this (which Edgar doubted) it would only have been to curry favour with Mon.

‘He always says such nice things about you, he really likes you, he does, it’s like a brotherly thing, but while we’re on the subject it might be just as well if.’

She looked away, squinted nervously at a suavely tanned, gold-braided pilot pulling his hand-luggage through the departure hall on shiny wheels. Edgar was fascinated. There was no coyness or played intrigue in Mon’s manner. She was actually finding it difficult to finish her sentence and Edgar was curious to know where it would resolve.

‘Might be just as well if what?’

‘If. If you don’t talk about Jeffrey, there. When you’re in America. At your grandma’s. Or with your father.’

‘Why?’

‘It just wouldn’t be appropriate.’

‘Appropriate?’

‘Please Eddie. Just indulge me. Trust me on this. It would be better if, people, over there, didn’t know about Jeffrey. That’s all.’

‘That’s all?’

‘I really would appreciate it if you’d stop repeating everything I say.’

‘Everything I say.’

‘Eddie!’

There were times when Edgar knew not to push his mother, even in fun. He relented. ‘Okay,’ he said. ‘Sorry.’

‘And about this Jeffrey thing.’

‘You want me to lie for you.’

‘It’s not lying. No one’s going to ask you if there’s someone I know called Jeffrey. I’m just asking you not to bring the subject up, that’s all.’

‘O-kay,’ Edgar said, more warily than he felt. He was happy to put Jeffrey behind them. He liked the idea of being on a continent where Jeffrey did not exist, where the fact of Jeffrey was strictly to be denied, where the very condition of Jeffreyness, of being Jeffrey, of knowing a Jeffrey, were causes for secrecy and shame. He admired America all the better for it.

‘And I promise you a P-shaped pool, and there’ll be lots of trees,’ she said, reaching for him in an old familiar way, cradling him so his head rested on her shoulder. ‘You used to love to climb trees when you were little.’

‘Did I?’ Edgar had no memory of tree-climbing and was sceptical.

‘An apple orchard. I’ll make you apple sauce every week and I won’t forget the cinnamon.’

‘You always forget the cinnamon.’

‘I won’t forget the cinnamon. What’s the matter?’

‘It’s fine. I’m fine, Mummy,’ he said, reverting at this moment when he felt at his most adult to an honorific long abandoned. The woman from the check-in desk, who was, frankly, hideous, had just gone by and the merry wave she gave him had lifted his penis hard. He closed his eyes, primly averted his head from his mother’s shoulder as he tried to find an unerotic image to hide her behind, and cupped his hands over his groin.

‘I know something’s going to go wrong with the arrangements. You can never depend on him,’ Mon said.

‘I’m going to listen to some music now,’ Edgar said. He put on his earphones and, with his Walkman protecting his lap, pretended to slumber.

‘What,’ Edgar asked his mother, ‘did you think you were going to be?’

The airplane was taxiing across the runway, delighting Edgar with the prospect of its speed. His mother gripped the armrest and asked him to keep still. Perhaps brutally, he had passed on the first of his two most interesting airplane facts: that for the first thirty-two seconds after take-off the pilot had no control over the plane and if anything should go wrong …—and here, Edgar maybe oversold the idea by crossing his eyes and cutting his index finger across his throat. But now he felt contrite and had decided to spare her the other of his interesting airplane facts and was trying to take his mother’s mind off things in a way that would be satisfactory to them both.

‘Or maybe what you wanted to be. When you were young, a child I mean.’

Mon made an attempt at a smile that showed the newish lines at the corners of her eyes that Edgar thought of as her Jeffrey lines. She had kicked off her shoes. Her toes wriggled in discomfort. Their cracked nail polish was a lighter shade of red than her hair.

‘I don’t know, Ed. A fashion model, a doctor, the usual kinds of things. I don’t know.’

She closed her eyes, the better to remember or invent herself as young, or just to hide, from Edgar’s questioning, from the impending fact of flight.

‘You know that if anything’s wrong you can call me at Hen’s.’

Edgar was flicking through the channels. He felt himself to be too old for the children’s TV and the children’s films. He didn’t care for action movies.

‘Nothing to go wrong,’ said Edgar, who believed this.

‘I’ll be with her a couple of days. They’re bringing the lunch trays around.’

Edgar turned his head to look at the stewardesses. Edgar liked the stewardesses. In fact, he liked everything about this flight. He liked the metal clasp of the seat-belt, the flaps that opened and closed on the wing, the heavy thrum of the engines, the blue tartan of the carpet, the overhead lockers, especially the one across the aisle that had been poorly secured and had emptied itself after take-off on to the head of a burly man in a business suit. And he liked the food they brought. He inspected it upon arrival partly in appreciation and partly because he knew that otherwise he would stare too much at the shape the stewardess made when she retrieved the meal trays from the lower shelves of her trolley, her legs together, her spine perfectly straight. And the touch on his arm from the back of her skirt when she bent to ask the burly man whether he would prefer chicken or beef ranked as number four in the most erotic moments of Edgar’s life.

‘Imagine,’ he said to his mother, after he had finished his lunch and eaten some of hers and was waiting for the film cycle to begin again, ‘if the plane caught fire, or the engines fell off. How long do you think it would take until we hit the sea?’

‘I don’t know,’ Mon said, looking away into the perfect blueness of sky.

‘You could guess. It wouldn’t happen straight away would it? Do you think it would be A, two minutes, B, four minutes, C, eight minutes, or D, none of the above?’

‘I really don’t know Eddie.’

‘Then your answer must be D, none of the above.’

She didn’t answer. She was looking queasy. It would be good for her to be away from Jeffrey, if only for a few days. The horrific idea that she might already be missing him was too grotesque to consider.

‘Which is in fact the right answer by definition because we’re over the ocean, not the sea. It was a trick question,’ he added apologetically. ‘But I think the real answer’s eight minutes, actually. Do you think they would know?’

His mother was performing her foot and ankle exercises. She extended her toes and revolved each ankle in turn and ignored him. Edgar leaned his chair back more abruptly than he should have, because it cracked against something, the knees he thought, of the divinity student sitting behind him, who yelled out a curse, and Edgar quickly said, ‘Sorry’, and pulled his seat forward and climbed over his mother and into the aisle.

He would have liked to go into a toilet to further test the void inside him, but the toilets were all full and he didn’t want to queue just to prove, again, his incapacity, and anyway the plane had started to bounce and dip, which he enjoyed, standing by the emergency-exit door, a surfer on the waves of turbulence, until a woman’s voice came over the intercom asking all passengers to return to their seats. He walked backwards along the aisle up to his row, past passengers who had blue blankets pulled up to cover their faces, as if when they slept all air passengers aspired to be female Muslims.

‘Old people get into a routine,’ his mother said to him on his return as if he had never been away and they had been having this conversation throughout, and Edgar wondered if maybe they had, if, thoughtfully or deceitfully, he had learned to leave part of himself, his boyish unsexual part, in this seat while the rest, the future part of him, had gone into the world to explore.

‘Older people I should say, because your grandmother, I don’t know, has always seemed so very much alive. She does a lot of volunteer work and charity and things like that. She always had very enlightened political views, which is rare in that part of America. Your father was a big disappointment to her.’

Edgar frowned. He did not like to hear either of his parents being criticized by the other, especially not his father by his mother because she found it so easy to do and because she was so obviously right. It seemed to Edgar that the easier and more obvious it was to do something, the better it was not to succumb to the pleasure of doing it.

‘But what I mean to say—you are listening to me aren’t you? What I mean to say is that you’re going to have to be thoughtful, considerate. Staying in someone else’s house requires adjustments. And the younger you are the more considerate you have to be. We have responsibilities as guests.’

Edgar supposed his mother was right, but he resented it all the same. She took for granted all the adjustments that he was required to make, and did make, without announcing the whole fuss of it. He would not allude to any of that now, because he didn’t wish to compromise his own nobility of nature, but the gruesome sights of Jeffrey stretching on the sofa and the hair on Jeffrey’s feet and his silver toe ring were all in his head now and he didn’t know how to get rid of them.

‘Stop shaking your head like that. I’m right. And close your mouth. It makes you look stupid.’

Tears of outrage were not far away now. Thankfully, his mother responded to the heightening of his mood with a softening of hers.

‘Oh Eddie, I’m sorry. Let’s not be bad friends. I’m a nervous flyer at the best of times and going there, you know, when I used to, your father.’

She opened her arms for him to wriggle through and even though he was bigger now than when they used to perform this kind of manoeuvre, and both of them were wearing seat-belts, they managed it, and the smell of her reminded him of Sunday mornings before Jeffrey.

‘I wish I still smoked,’ she said, and before Edgar could point out that even if she did she still wouldn’t be able to do so on board the plane, she had yawned, promised him a snooker room, stretched, and announced her intention to sleep.

Edgar, whee! He was loving it, in this plane, sipping a Virgin Mary, chewing peanuts, looking out of the porthole to see his own reflection bounced back with clouds. The noise that had been surrounding them throughout abruptly cut out—and the effect of the silence on Mon was to wake her up, startled: she gripped the armrest and Edgar watched with what he would call an investigator’s dispassion the tightening of her fingers, the whitening of her knuckles, the wrinkling of her skin.

‘It’s okay,’ she said, hoping to reassure him and therefore herself.

‘I know,’ he said.

He knew too that she wanted him to hold on to her hand, to give her the power to protect him, and usually he would allow her this, but not this time, even if it caused him a pang of pity and self-reproach: he was not above punishing her for her transgressions.

The cabin lights flickered off and weakly on and off and on again, and each movement from light to dark to light was accompanied by a collective cabin-gasp of all the passengers, ahhh! and O!, and Mon gripped the armrest tighter and merciful Edgar relented: he held on to her hand and settled into the contact as she pulled his fingers tight. Her eyes were closed and her head was back and a vein pulsed in her eyelid and blue lines stood out in her throat, and the plane dipped and lurched and Edgar was enjoying himself. People all around them made rearrangements with blankets and headrests, and the stewardess reminded them again that the captain had requested that all seats should be in the upright position and infants strapped to a parent or caregiver, and now there was rising the sound of babies crying, nothing too startling, just the discontent of children baffled at being woken from sleep and fussed over, and the burly man from across the way loudly shouted, ‘Miss? Miss?! What IS going on?!’ and it took a while for Edgar to realize that the high keening note in the theological student’s voice behind him signified anguish, and that the ache in his ears meant that the plane was no longer bouncing but had been losing height, perhaps drastically, and that was why everything was tilted, and glasses and miniature bottles of wine were rolling down the slope towards business class; the mood in the cabin was changed and something very bad seemed to be happening.

‘Miss! Miss!!!! MISS!!!’

The stewardess was sitting below them braced in her chair, talking into a mouthpiece, her hands stroking each other.

‘Would everyone please return to their seats.’

Edgar straining heard her pleasant voice. Mon hadn’t moved or opened her eyes. Her hand gripped his more tightly. He tried to pull his hand away because it was hurting, but she had it and was not letting go. He tugged harder and all he achieved was a tiny choking moan from his mother. The ache in his ears was hardening into pain. The lights were lost again, and in the dark Edgar heard incompetently stowed tables clatter open, the thuds of surprised flesh, petulance now in the sobbing group-noise around him.

The lights came on just as an overhead locker opened, spewing out ribbons of clothes, bottles of duty-free liquor in corrugated-cardboard jackets that clattered off seat-backs and rolled clumsily down the aisle. The divinity student started to pray but lost the thread of his words until all he was saying was, ‘Oh oh oh oh, oh God, oh God, God, oh God, oh oh oh, oh God, oh God, oh …’

Edgar viciously pushed his chair back against the student’s knees but the litany continued unaffected. ‘Oh God oh God oh God oh God, oh oh …’

‘Oh my God,’ Mon said. ‘The plane’s going down.’

It was as if she had just realized it, and maybe she had. Edgar had been imagining the moment of impact: would the airplane bisect the water?—cutting through to the depths, past startled schools of fish, coral reefs, sunken galleons, mermaids’ treasure, dead men’s bones, down into darkness, bumping blind to a final stop on the ocean bed, the portholes bend with the enormous pressure and then burst, an insane hydraulic gush, the divinity student’s dull features washed away with the power of the water that somehow, miraculously, a benevolent corkscrew, picks up Edgar and twirls him up, pops him out into the air, the climax of a fountain —or would the plane somehow glide to the surface, bob along there on the waves—why else would they have been talking about life-jackets and life-boats and whistles and take your shoes off before you get on the slide? Was there an allowable moment of escape before the 747’s weight took it slurping beneath the water, the frightened pilot saluting behind the glass because, nobly, he has stayed at his controls till the last …?

Mon’s eyes were open. She stared at the awfulness of her end and his, their end, he supposed; he had heard her say it often enough, that a mother mayn’t think of herself any more as a free agent separate from her son, and the fat-legged stewardess was fixed to her seat and to her smile, despite the pleading of an Arab woman who was inexplicably showing the stewardess the naked chest of her infant; and several generations of orthodox Jews had taken a place up high at the rear of the cabin where the seat-backs held them in position, angled swaying with eyes closed, chanting through their beards, and Edgar wondered whether they were pleading with God to intercede here or just smoothing their own paths to Paradise; and the burly man across the way was busy removing his clothes—his business suit was off now and his shirt and his underpants, and he sat there in his tie as if he needed to meet his end almost as naked as when he had experienced his beginning; and others were making their own accommodations and most of these involved screaming or tears, but Edgar, entirely calm, knew exactly what he had to do and what he now might be able to do but he couldn’t do it with his mother beside him.

‘I need to go to the toilet,’ he said.

Mon nodded, plaintively hopeful eyes—this will save us, yes? This toilet, this going-to-the-toilet of yours? But she clearly didn’t understand what the words meant: she was waiting for his or anyone’s magic trick of slipping the future back into their lives.

‘I have to go to the toilet,’ he said.

He clambered over his mother, clasped her shoulder as he went past, and climbed up the slope to the toilet.

Oxygen masks swung in the air. Supper trays slid past, slapping chicken and beef curry against the sides of seats. The burly man was reading the in-flight magazine, resting it on the hairy rise of his belly. The couple who had kept banging into Edgar at the duty-free shop, pushing bulky hand luggage into his shins, swinging plastic baskets against his ribs, were kissing, breathing heavily, her legs folded beneath her; Edgar could trace the blue lines of veins below her khaki shorts, the red blood-holes left behind by shaving. The ginger-haired man who had kept going to the galley for more cans of beer was sobbing. An elderly couple demurely held hands. The game-playing boy from the departures lounge was watching a horror film on his screen. Edgar briefly watched beside him—wolfman transformations, cracks of lightning, high-breasted girls running up and down stairs—until the boy, annoyed at his privacy being invaded or maybe his technology being shared, curtly leaned in front of the screen, blocking Edgar’s view.

These were the last moments and it was surprising to Edgar that so many chose to spend them weeping. It surprised him too, as he continued to labour up towards the toilet—if anything, the angle had got steeper, each step harder to make—that he was so bent on privacy. He did not want to intrude on anyone else’s end, but neither should an unnecessary, outmoded now, sense of propriety keep him from what he needed to do. The rise of panic all around him transferred somehow to a feeling of well-being close to exhilaration and the minutes left to him were few and he did not want to spend the rest of his life climbing.

Edgar ducked into a bank of seats that was tenanted only by a woman sleeping, untouched by the clamour, her knees drawn up under a blanket, her mouth lightly open, her eyes hidden beneath a sleeping mask.

‘Purr-fect,’ Edgar said, in his best whispery movie-villain voice, just as a trolley broke free of its moorings and lurched rattling past down the aisle. He heard a thud, a cry, and that would have been him, but he’d made it, he unzipped his trousers and settled down to his task.

There was no reason for modesty. Privacy was finished here. In the last moments there can be no rules. Edgar, masturbating, felt finally free.

He shut his eyes. High-breasted girls rush up and down stairs. The check-in woman lasciviously unbuttons her shirt, but that image was replaced by an imperishable one from his first trip to this country: a woman at a motel door, who sleepily pushes hair away from her face. She’s wearing a man’s shirt, his father’s, unbuttoned. Quickly he pulled in an image from a magazine of Jeffrey’s: two Japanese women naked below the waist, one in a white T-shirt, the other in black, sit on a hospital floor, boxes of medical supplies behind them.