The Pagan House

‘That’s right, I think it was. He used to drive this beat-up tractor really super slow around the grounds. And I remember Mac saying to me, “There’s progress for you, look at Ronald, a hundred years ago his ancestors were eating each other and here he is now, master of the internal combustion engine.” You got to laugh.’

Company Bob and Coach were the only ones laughing. Janice and Mon and Marilou watched them with dissimilar looks of distaste. Warren was carrying things through to the kitchen, stopping to offer Guthrie something for her cough, which she haughtily declined. Fay had closed her eyes and might have been sleeping. Jerome already was.

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Mon took flight with regretful hugs and repeated sighs of ‘Oh Eddie!’ She tousled his hair and he had to pull it straight again. She kissed him for the thousandth time and climbed, as if reluctantly, into the station-wagon.

‘Okay Eddie, you’ll be in charge,’ Warren said, patting out a double toot on the horn as the car pulled away.

Edgar stood with Fay on the porch to wave the car off. Maybe because she’d noticed the bereft feeling he was manfully trying to suppress, she gave him a handful of notes and coins. ‘Your father asked me to give you these. It’s for spending money until he gets here.’

Edgar didn’t trust his voice, so he nodded his appreciation.

Fay rubbed the red patch on her throat. ‘I need to pick up my John Mills movie from the video store,’ she said, as if this was a matter of great delicacy that she might nonetheless trust him with. ‘You might want to come with me, if that’s not too boring a project.’

On the way down to the store, Edgar adjusting his walk to the slowness of Fay’s, sometimes holding out a steadying hand when she seemed about to stumble or stall, Fay told him about someone called Mary, of whom she spoke with such fondness that he assumed she was her dearest friend, now sadly moved away. The way she spoke about Mary made Edgar like her too.

‘Her impetuosity sometimes gets her into trouble, but if you don’t get into trouble then how can you say you’ve lived? Don’t you agree?’

‘Yes, I think I do,’ Edgar said.

‘Oh look, we’re here already. The boys are very nice to me here.’

The boys at the video store wore tight black polo-neck jumpers and old-fashioned glasses and had short hair that was badly dyed yellow. One of them was an Onyataka and the others from long-time families of Creek. Edgar knew this because Fay had told him so but they were indistinguishable to him. The video-store boys liked Fay. They liked the obscure rigour of her choices. As a special favour, they let her take the picture boxes of the movies she rented home with her, instead of the pink and blue store boxes that the customers were usually given.

‘We got you your Rocking Horse Winner,’ one of them said.

‘That’s terrific,’ Fay said. ‘I’m very grateful.’

Fay hardly talked on the way home. She was concentrating on the efforts of her walk. When they had reached the Pagan House she exhaled loudly and smiled, in comradeship. ‘What would you like to do now? You could watch my movie with me or maybe you’d like to see something more of the neighbourhood? The Mansion House runs some very interesting tours. I know Jerry would love to show you around.’

She raised an arm towards the Mansion House across the rise and the movement ruined her balance; her foot grasped for the porch step but it was crooked there and the foot slipped and she fell, in slow motion, looking surprised and cross. Edgar, frozen in guilty consternation, watched her go down, crumpling against the screen door.

Fay made little movements of her fingers and looked up at him, baffled, until the sun hurt her eyes so she covered them with her arm. Her legs were splayed wide, and her dress had ridden up over her knees. Edgar’s first act was to tug down the dress to restore his grandmother’s modesty. He squatted beside her and laid a comforting hand on her elbow.

‘I’m so sorry. That was ridiculous,’ she said.

‘I should have caught you.’

‘I’m such a fool. If you could just help me to sit up? Warren’s going to be very angry with me.’

Edgar managed to manoeuvre Fay to the kitchen. She was much lighter than he expected and he should have been able to catch her, even one-handed, with his free arm held nonchalantly behind his back.

‘I’m going to be black and blue tomorrow. Whenever will I learn not to do that kind of thing?’

He fetched a stool for her to rest her feet on. ‘Should I call a doctor?’

‘I make it a rule never to trouble the doctor three days in a row. I think I’ll just regather and then watch my movie. I’m so sorry for causing such a fuss. What do you think you’d like to do?’

‘I thought I might just take a walk around. If that’s all right?’

‘Of course it is, my dear.’

‘But I think I’ll wait until Warren gets back. Just in case.’

‘There’s really no need.’

‘I know, but I want to,’ Edgar said firmly. ‘If you don’t mind?’

‘Of course I don’t mind. You’re a very sweet 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.’