David Flusfeder - The Pagan House

He tried not to look at Jeffrey. Sometimes it was impossible: his attention would be drawn to the loathsome fascination that was his mother’s boyfriend. Jeffrey was wearing a baseball cap. He wore it ironically.

Jeffrey was in baggy blue jeans and black polo-neck jumper, heavy black-rimmed glasses that he often pushed to the top of his insubstantial nose; his head was shaved, but when he removed his cap the pattern of his baldness was still evident, like a join-the-dots puzzle of something horrible. His feet were bare and hairy and there was a dull metallic ring around the little toe of his left foot. Edgar had a particular distaste for the hair on Jeffrey’s body. One day, thought Edgar, mouthing the shape of the word ‘Edgar’ to the shiny creased top of Jeffrey’s bare head, this man and my mother will have an argument and I will never have to see him again. Edgar examined his heart for the possibility of any future good feeling or sentimental regret towards Jeffrey and failed to find any. He wondered what the terminal argument might be, perhaps a lapse of taste on Mon’s part that Jeffrey would find unforgivable; perhaps—and this was the least likely—she would, with the help of Edgar’s insights, finally see Jeffrey as he really was. Edgar concentrated on making the picture of Mon’s face in the aftermath of discovery, but the face kept melting away because the sounds that were coming from the CD player were particularly annoying, even for one of Jeffrey’s choices.

Jeffrey smiled his ironic smile at Edgar, who nodded, curtly, and Jeffrey stretched and his jumper rode up, so Edgar was shown the line of hair that poked up out of the waistband of his trousers.

Today Edgar was going to America, and that event was a big one, and not just because Jeffrey wouldn’t be there, and Edgar wished there was more to do to prepare for it—vaccinations, or some kind of training programme, or at least a stab at the learning of a foreign language. He had argued that a new suitcase was needed, but Mon had demonstrated to him that it wasn’t. And anyway, he now realized that Jeffrey would probably have muscled in on the expedition, because Jeffrey had very strong opinions about most things, including, no doubt, luggage.

Jeffrey had perfect taste. He knew the right music to listen to, the right book to be carrying, the right bobble hat to wear, the right toilet paper to put in the bathroom (Edgar had once heard Jeffrey in instruction of Mon: ‘ But never put the roll of paper on a holder ’). Jeffrey was always adamant, and ruthlessly correct, about his opinions and tastes, especially so as he changed them often. He loved them so much he wanted to keep them new.

Edgar went to the fridge and daringly drank some orange juice out of the carton and inadvertently caught Jeffrey’s eye.

‘Geeeezaah!’ said Jeffrey.

Edgar nodded. ‘Excuse me,’ he said, and went to the bathroom, which had a door with a lock on it, and which he had come to think of as a kind of adjunct to his own bedroom, a sort of windowless conservatory. In the bathroom he may relax.

Edgar didn’t like to be taken advantage of. Nor did he like to be surprised by things. Recently he had been alarmed by the reddening of the skin beneath his arms. He lifted an arm to inspect beneath and fancied he spied the pinprick crowns of the first crop of underarm hair. He would hate to be polluted like Jeffrey, the naked swirls of hair that surrounded pink nipples, the womanish rise of his breast. Edgar squeezed his chin to his shoulder the better to investigate the site and caught his reflection in the mirror. He twisted his face to make it look even more deformed and stuck out his tongue and gurgled.

‘Eddie? What are you doing in there? I need to use the loo.’

‘Nearly finished,’ he said to his mother, after a dignified silence.

He lowered his shoulders, flashed an urbane smile into the mirror and sprinkled some water on to his hair, which he finger-combed into spiky tufts. His face often disappointed him: it was too revealing, too boyish. Its onset of freckles had appalled him. He wanted the kind of face that hides mysteries.

‘Eddie!’

‘Coming, Mother.’

Now Monica was annoyed and so was Edgar. Jeffrey had the knack of making everyone annoyed around him. Edgar had often argued that when the loathsome urge to spend time with Jeffrey overcame her she should do whatever she had to do at Jeffrey’s flat rather than theirs. For one thing, Jeffrey’s flat was larger. Edgar’s mother had said that would mean leaving Edgar by himself, as if this was something bad, a curse rather than a blessing. What did Mon see in Jeffrey? Or was the answer to that to be found in one of those areas which it would be wise not to look into too deeply? Or did Jeffrey have some secret hold over her, a hypnotist’s snaky lure, mind control?—and Edgar, just through an excess of distaste for some of the acts that adults were compelled to perform with one another, had been doing nothing at all to protect his poor mother.

Edgar sat on the closed toilet seat. He instructed his face to be friendly. If there were dark secrets to uncover it was Edgar’s task, no, stronger than that: it was Edgar’s duty to do the digging. He was, as he was sometimes reminded, the man of the house. His father would tell him so, a routine pleasantry on one of their occasional telephone conversations. His mother would tell him so too, but never without some degree of wonder and humour. Edgar narrowed his eyes to shrink his field of vision to a movie frame. Then he quickly returned his face to a smile again.

What information did he require? The secrets of dark Jeffrey’s heart. The dark secrets of dark Jeffrey’s heart. The dark secrets of dark Jeffrey’s dark heart—the wailing madwoman beating on the locked attic door; the money swindled from the academy that had been intended for the needy purses of African students hungry for Jeffrey’s lectures on the secret signs of westerns, the critical theory of motorway service stations; the art treasures he had smuggled out of Russia; the heartbreaking sex-slave victims he had traded out of eastern Europe on one of his supposed ‘conferences’; or maybe it was the corrupt circle of friends he should find, Jeffrey’s intimates, the pin-striped politician, the loathsome friar, the toothless woman who flounces her skirts, whom Edgar had shipped over from an adjacent part of his imagination and whose image now caused the beginnings of a process that he couldn’t allow to continue towards its inevitably disappointing consummation because his mother was shouting his discarded name and beating on the bathroom door. Edgar buckled his shorts over his rebellious groin. He had been subject to much rising and lowering recently, an embarrassed boy popping up half bridges. It wouldn’t be so bad, but there was nothing that this led to. He was aware, at least in a textbook sort of way, of the stages of the process, and he knew that the climax should coincide with a release of fluid. But he released no fluid. And experienced no climax. Just a blind gasping at the head of his (roughened, rawed) penis of what he had not been able to decide should be designated an eye or a mouth.

‘ED-DIE!’

‘Just finishing up.’

Perhaps there was a void within him, an emptiness that corresponded to where others contained sluicing reservoirs of stuff, of fluid, life-force. While he, the pipe within him tapped down merely to some absence, not even an empty chamber, this was a void that was empty even of itself.

‘And about time too,’ his mother said, when he opened the door.

Carrying his fixed smile, he returned to the kitchen, where he aimed it at the wall, at Jeffrey, at the two narrow windows, at the deflated football that was a legacy of a failed Jeffrey attempt to bond , at a standard lamp, and quickly to his toast. He did not want to alert Jeffrey to his vigilance. The trick, he was sure, was to convince his enemies to underestimate him.