The Pagan House. David Flusfeder

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      ‘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 СКАЧАТЬ