The Pagan House

‘Let’s see his balls,’ said the weasel, trying to incite his more powerful friends.

‘You took my quarter. I want it back.’

They were about sixteen or seventeen years old and they had muscles that were streaked with motorcycle and pizza grease and they wore tufts of hair on the chins of their hard, unforgiving faces, and he was almost thirteen and lightweight and maybe they’d go easier on him because of that. He wasn’t reassured by the affectionate way they were sneering at him. He had seen enough playground massacres to know that the bully loves his victim.

‘Give him a quarter, Ray.’

‘Wha’? Why me?’ whined the weasel. ‘I don’t have a quarter.’

Sky cuffed Ray on the side of the head and kept hitting him until he pulled out a quarter.

‘Shit,’ said Ray, enviously. He flipped the quarter to Edgar, who predictably dropped it. He didn’t suffer the kicks to the head he was expecting as he retrieved it from the grease-spattered red lino floor.

His new name had proved itself, and this was a good transaction, his father’s coin exchanged for the currency of the community.

‘Okay,’ he said.

The pinball machine sparked back into life.

‘Goodbye,’ he said.

He was ignored. They clustered around the machine again. Sky pulled back the plunger to propel the ball, but was interrupted by the stranger saying, ‘Hi,’ and Edgar—shocked at his own malice and ignobility of nature—hoped to see the bad intentions going his way.

‘Hey Marvin.’

‘Husky! What’s up.’

‘Guys.’

Sky released the plunger and headed for the back room, with the others following, the ball jittering and pinging, it and the machine and Edgar ignored. He braved himself to leap in to play the rest of the game, as the band clattered back into action with the same mistimed vigour of delivery, but they had a vocalist now, Marvin, he guessed, who sang in a beautiful and reckless low voice that Edgar hated him for possessing.

When Edgar returned to the house, hoping to get to his bedroom, to collapse into solitary consolation, Warren called him into the kitchen, where he was emptying the dishwasher. Warren peeled off the black rubber gloves he wore for the performance of domestic tasks. His hands were, Edgar inconsequentially noticed, slightly paler than his arms.

‘You missed your dad.’

‘Sorry?’

‘Your dad called.’

On his way back to the house Edgar had slowed his heart, calmed the wild pumping of adrenaline by throwing sticks at a pine cone and then pine cones at a stick. He had triumphed in a staring contest with a glum red bird. He had paused on the bridge and tossed pine cones into the brown-stoned stream until a passing car slowed down and a bald man had snapped at him to stop what he was doing. He had killed time until it became a point of honour to kill more of it, to sicken himself back into boredom. And meanwhile his dad had phoned and he’d missed the call. Edgar scratched at the inside of his arm until he was alerted to the fact he was doing so by Warren’s curious, slightly concerned expression.

‘Does he want me to call him back?’

‘I don’t think so. I’m not sure where he is, actually. He says sorry and everything but he’s been delayed. Business to take care of. He’ll be arriving a bit later than he thought.’

‘Tomorrow evening?’

That was Edgar’s furthest projection: the morning was unachievable, the evening made sense, his father driving through the day, birthday gifts carelessly scattered in the back seat of his open-top car, to stay overnight in his mother’s house, his house—they were always saying how much time had passed since his last visit. Edgar and his father wouldn’t want to begin their own drive until the morning, after breakfast: it was a long journey they would be making together.

‘Not quite, Eddie.’

Warren was very good at breaking bad news. He should have had a job as one of those army men who stand at front doors and aren’t allowed to touch or hug the broken women who’ve just been told that their boys have died.

‘He’s been delayed. He won’t be able to make it tomorrow.’

‘The day after?’

‘Probably not till the end of the week. But I’m sure we can keep you entertained up till then. He says, sorry. So. I hope you’re hungry. Fay will be down just after she’s done her exercises.’

At supper, after Warren had checked that Fay had taken her evening medication, he asked Edgar about his walk.

‘It was fine,’ Edgar said, and Fay, seeing something sad in Edgar’s eyes, had the delicacy to prevent Warren enquiring further.

‘These mushrooms are delicious,’ Fay said. ‘Is there garlic in them?’

‘I just stir them around from time to time while they’re cooking, with a fork that has a clove of garlic on its, you know, prongs.’

‘Tines,’ said Fay.

‘Excuse me?’ said Warren.

‘The prongs of a fork. They’re called tines.’

‘Oh yes, that’s right, of course they are.’

Warren seemed to like being corrected by Fay, the passage of wisdom down the generations. Paintings hung on the white walls of the kitchen, most of them Fay’s own watercolours of riverside scenes executed when her sight was still largely intact.

‘Have you found the cat yet?’ Edgar asked.

‘How’s your ankle?’ Warren asked.

‘It’s a lot better. Edward was terrific looking after me. I didn’t miss you at all.’

She dazzled Edgar with her smile.

‘That’s good to hear,’ Warren said. ‘How’s the rash?’

‘I think it’s getting better,’ Fay said, covering her throat and chin with a hand.

‘We should get Newhouse to take a look at it.’

‘No more medication. If you shook me I’d rattle. Don’t worry, I’m sure I’ll make it through till the Festival.’

‘May I leave the table?’ Edgar said.

‘Of course you can, my dear. I love your manners.’

Edgar escaped to the Music Room, where he compiled a list of cat-napping suspects, which did not exclude his mother—was it accidental only that she had left on the day that Tom disappeared? And then he counted his money, which amounted to seven dollars and forty-nine cents, and went through the record albums, sorting them into separate piles according to likely interest. The interesting pile he further subdivided into those he thought belonged to his father and those to his uncle Frank. He imagined Frank to have a taste for flowery illustration and fanciful covers. His father he allowed all those simply designed albums with the group’s photograph glowering on the front. On the window-ledge, he arranged the ones with girls he wanted to look at on the covers, blocking out the shallow lights of the Mansion House opposite.