The Pagan House Read online

  ‘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 hi
s 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.

  Edgar became reconciled to death—oblivion, obliteration, extinction—with each back-flick of his knuckles, each pull of his fist. In death there is life and, he supposed, vice versa. The plane was going down and his pleasure was rising and something was new. It announced itself with a roar, wild, mannish, beyond images real or imagined; the void was filled and he was ferocious, bursting, overflowing; the sound grew from deep in his throat and rolled out into the lamenting world of this doomed airplane; he squeezed tighter, and, despite all the tears and furies and beseechings of God and wretched inconsolation, it was the sound that he was making that stirred the sleeping woman beside him. She shifted in her seat. She lifted her sleeping mask. His eyes met hers, which were blue, and blank at first, sleepily unfocused, then surprise registered in them, climaxing in horror at his state.

  ‘It really doesn’t matter,’ he said, to reassure her. ‘We’re all going to die.’

  He kept rubbing, long, quickening strokes leading to something inexorable, but he managed to smile sociably at her at the same time. He tightened his fist against the hardness inside, and yelp, something new, something novel, something glorious was happening, and it was happening right now.

  His eyes were open but they couldn’t quite focus, because what was taking place was too grand for vision: his penis was the centre of it and it was almost too sensitive to touch but he couldn’t not touch it, couldn’t stop touching it, grabbing it, brutally rushing his hand up and down it, and he didn’t know if he could bear this any more but if he was going to disintegrate then so be it, and up and out it came, jerking, pulsing out of him, milking jerky fluid, spattering the seat in front of him, and this was a better feeling than anything. In his last act he has truly accomplished something. He has proved himself. He has discovered his capacity.

  When the plane pulled out of its dive Edgar was still smiling, sitting legs apart, his trousers and underpants around his ankles, his elbows on the armrests. In front of him globs of jism slid down the TV screen, and the passenger beside him was holding her throat, which must have been hoarse by now as she continued to scream for cabin staff.

  At the baggage carousel at Kennedy Airport he aimed to keep his mother between him and the screaming lady, who had been treated with the remaining sedatives and subsequently firmly and politely ignored.

  ‘What did you do to her Eddie?’ Mon asked, and Edgar looked innocent and said a shocked ‘Nothin’!’ and smiled, hoping to imply something of the infinite weirdness of the world, the bottomless peculiarity of other people. He tried to find a view out of the baggage hall but the only windows were mirrored, and he knew that there would be further to go before they were allowed into the arrivals hall, and he knew too that his father was unlikely to be there, arrangements and handovers were seldom straightforward where his father was involved, but that didn’t matter so much, the world has been changed—and when the screaming lady realized that or when the wreckage of her throat finally gave out, he might be able to hear his name being announced on an airport Tannoy or, maybe, through the next door or the next, he would see his name on a white card being held up by a benevolent chauffeur in uniform.

  ‘Eddie?’

  ‘Nuthin’!’

  He felt a suspicion lingering in his mother’s mind and perhaps others’ that the fat-legged stewardess might have been a little too quick to push accusations away; but when the engines had come back into life and the plane lifted into cruising height again, there had been so much pressing upon her, reluctant doctors to gather to make repairs to bruises and breaks, tears to soothe, complimentary champagne to distribute along with a printed list of airline-approved stress counsellors through the crush of insistent lawyers intoning, ‘Compensation.’

  Anyway, a compact had been silently made. Passengers who had been bandaged and patched leaned on trolleys, chewed gum noisily, laughed to show that they were ready for re-entry into their changed world. Something extraordinary had been shared and it was over and certain things were private and didn’t need to be talked about, and he was respectful of that and his mother ought to honour it too. The burly man was wearing his clothes again.

  The conveyor-belt stuttered into motion, and Edgar, jaunty in his freedom, in his maleness, hiccuped the unpleasant sip of champagne back into his mouth and lifted one foot to rest on the metal lip of the carousel until a blue-uniformed airport woman shook her head and said, ‘Sir! Could you step back?’ And Edgar was so pleased to be called ‘sir’ that he did as he was told.

  3

  By the time that Edgar, the aficionado of flight, announced that the small, jittery plane that they had taken from New York to Syracuse was coming in to land, Mon’s skin had turned yellowish white with the exertions of the day, with the effort of keeping airplanes in the sky with the power of her will.

  ‘It would be nice if someone was there to meet us,’ Edgar said.

  ‘Fay won’t be up to that kind of thing. And your father always leaves everything to the last minute. We’ll have to make our own way.’

  But they were met, by a self-possessed man in pressed white jeans and blue T-shirt, who was scanning the faces
of the arriving passengers. To Edgar’s great pleasure and silent promise of friendship he held up their names, correctly spelled in neat capital letters on a white card.

  ‘I’m Warren,’ he said. Warren had short dark hair and a lightly tanned skin and the manner of someone who did things well. He shook their hands and steered their airport trolley out towards the car-park, while others from their flight stood hapless in the arrivals hall, opening and closing their fists; and Edgar, enjoying how important he and perhaps his mother must be seeming, endeavoured to look sternly businesslike.

  Warren drove them out of Syracuse in a wood-panelled station-wagon. He was friendly and polite and informative, speaking in a not-quite-American accent. He neither ignored nor talked down to Edgar, who was allowed the privilege of the front passenger seat while Mon half dozed in the back. It was all very easy and adult and civilized, and Edgar turned to look at his mother from time to time just in case she had not noticed the disparity between this man and Jeffrey.

  Edgar, more tired than he would choose to be—but after all, he had experienced much and accomplished something truly grand this day—drifted in and out of Warren’s commentary. The heat made wavery lines out of everything, the financial towers and bridges and billboards and roads, the fields of corn, the toll-booths, distant blue hills, and it all looked bigger than he was used to, which was what he had expected, but he hadn’t expected to feel smaller too.

  Warren smelled of pine and lemon and cream. He looked straight ahead while he drove, both hands on the steering-wheel, the air-conditioning vent blowing the dark hairs on his arm to stand soldierly straight. Edgar cleared his throat. Warren glanced his way. Edgar had said nothing so far on this journey, just nodded every so often to show he was listening. He had to say something now, no matter how banal; he had to speak, push his voice into America.