David Flusfeder - 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.