The Pagan House. David Flusfeder

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СКАЧАТЬ boy. You know, it’s very nice to have you here.’

      ‘It’s very nice to be here,’ Edgar said promptly.

      All the same, there was an awful silence in the house, as if it was complicit in Fay’s fall and was now planning its next assault upon her. Edgar wondered if he should feel afraid of this house, but that was contrary to the instant congeniality he had felt for its spirit and a way of making excuses for himself, and then he realized that the silence was due to the absence of the cat’s snores that had supplied a rumbling rhythm to the soundworld of the Pagan House. The cat basket was empty, apart from a faded purple cushion, a moss of lost ginger hair.

      ‘Where’s the cat?’ he asked, and Fay didn’t quite answer.

      ‘Cats often go somewhere private to do their, when they’re ready to, you know.’

      ‘Yes, I know,’ said Edgar, who didn’t.

      When Warren returned, Fay whispered to Edgar, ‘You should go now. I don’t want you to take the blame. I know what you’re like.’

      She knew him better than his mother did, better then than he knew himself.

      ‘I think I’ll take a walk around,’ he said loudly, attempting a wink.

      Edgar left behind the sounds of Warren chiding and Fay’s birdlike voice making its apologies. Edgar had been left in charge of Fay and had failed.

      The boredom of this town, through which Edgar strolled with a look of quiet dignity on his face. He had never felt so lonely. Trees, timbered houses, sports fields, parks, the video store, the bookshop that never opened, all these things felt entirely indifferent to him. He asserted himself by imagining how a cat might get lost in any of them—stuck snoring in a storage cupboard in the Company administration building or too fat to escape from the hole it had found into the Company Community Center, dreaming of plump mice or the kitten it had used to be, but he had never seen the cat awake so adventurousness was an unlikely quality for it to possess. That suggested malice, then, a human agency at work, the sinister hand of the cat-napper. Why should anyone steal a cat? Perhaps it was the secret historical ingredient that went into the glaze coating of the china produced at the Company factory in Creek. The Indians had been cannibals once, or so Company Bob had said. Maybe they had taken the cat for dark ceremony, old practices that required warm flesh, pulsing blood—but the only Indians he had seen were the stolid men outside the bingo hall, and one of the young men in glasses who worked in the video store, but he didn’t know which one, and none of them had looked like a blood drinker to Edgar.

      Still, he should not rule anyone out. The cat was missing, everywhere in peril, and everyone was a suspect.

      Edgar walked across the bridge down to Creek. He looked for signs of the cat—tell-tale ginger hair, a lonesome mew—outside the supermarket and the gas station, the Silver City Diner, the Campanile Family Restaurant and Pizzeria, a dance studio, nail parlour (Luscious Nails), tanning salon (Tan Your Can!) and another pizza parlour, Dino’s. He would not have thought a town the size of Creek could support two pizza parlours. He had walked lingeringly past Dino’s twice already, attracted by the pinball machine, deterred by the youths who hung out there, who looked just like the two he had seen outside the supermarket, wild-looking, in cut-off jeans and check shirts, who had squeezed themselves into shopping carts, their legs dangling off the front, and were slowly racing each other down the incline of the car-park. Twice he had resolved to go in and his nerve had failed him each time.

      But now he would be strong: a cat investigator required recreation, and he would be protected by the jangle of his father’s quarters, the secret music of his Walkman. He would just pretend they weren’t there, the two shaven-headed hulking boys with little sprouts of beard below their lower lips, lighting matches and flicking them at a third, smaller boy, who wore the same uniform of cut-off shorts and baggy check shirt, but whose face was narrower, more weaselly, acne-pitted and fingernail-picked. Another, the largest one, who was crouched hammering at the rusted corpse of a motorcycle, wore blond hair and a Dino’s paper hat and a grey T-shirt with cut-off sleeves that had the home-made slogan Indian Fighters! scrawled across the back.

      Edgar walked past them as if undeterred, and went to the pinball machine. He put in one of his father’s quarters, frowned, slapped the machine with the heel of his hand to let it know who was in charge, pressed the start button, nodded at the display of lights, turned down his music, acknowledged the chorus of beeps and whistles and bells, checked the action of the flippers, pulled the plunger and let it go, and away he played.

      Under the glass was a list of instructions, but Edgar liked to learn how these machines worked by playing them, by their responses to him, and his to them. His first ball was a good one, staying under control, keeping in the lanes, until it hit the left bank at an awkward angle, spun back on to his flippers; he tried to catch it, but the flipper was too clumsy, or he was: the ball hopped and fell between the ends of the two flippers and down the middle and was lost. It’s okay, Edgar nodded, this was a decent machine, a worthy opponent. You treat me with respect and I’ll treat you with respect. It was hard to find these machines any more. Everything was computer and video.

      The lounging youths were walking slowly through, and now he could feel the attention of their unfriendly scrutiny. One of them jostled against his shoulder as they passed into a back room, where they drowned the friendly noises of the machine with loud lurching music, guitars and drums, clattering, angry, incompetent sounds that made the back of his neck vulnerable with their bad intent.

      The second ball built up his score, and he was unlucky to lose it, just before he was about to hit the drop-down targets again to claim a free ball, but the pressure was on him, the music had stopped as abruptly and pointlessly as it had begun, and the hoodlums were back jostling behind him, so before he plunged the third ball into play he put another quarter on the glass top to reserve his next turn. The third ball was a disaster, swooping through the gate, down the alley, it took an awkward carom off his left flipper, bounced against the grinning monster face in the middle, which he had learned must be avoided, and fell through the impotent rise of his flippers.

      Edgar felt sick. He had confirmed whatever low opinion of him these dangerous thugs might have. He had performed badly under pressure, like a boy, and the largest one, the Indian Fighter with the blond hair and the paper cap, reached for Edgar’s next quarter and said, ‘Unlucky, kid,’ and slotted it into the machine and pushed him aside.

      ‘Let’s see the master at work.’

      ‘But that’s—’ said Edgar.

      ‘I need some room here.’

      A hard elbow cracked into Edgar’s ribs.

      ‘Tough luck, kid,’ said the weasel, unsympathetically. ‘You gonna order something?’

      ‘No,’ said Edgar.

      ‘We’ll see you later, kid.’

      Edgar stood disconsolate. They were gathered by the machine with their backs to him. The player used his whole body, flicking the flippers double-fast, hips pushing the path of the ball into the desired lane, his hands slapping the sides of the machine. ‘Sky is so good,’ he said, supplying his own commentary. ‘He’s got all the moves.’

      Stubborn Edgar, alarmed at his own impulses, pushed towards the machine. ‘I want my quarter back,’ he said.

      Ignoring him, Sky flipped and shoved and jerked his head to tell the ball where to go, and miraculously it did, and miraculously his paper hat stayed on his head.

      ‘You’re СКАЧАТЬ