‘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 lower shelves of her trolley, her legs together, her spine perfectly straight. And the touch on his arm from the back of her skirt when she bent to ask the burly man whether he would prefer chicken or beef ranked as number four in the most erotic moments of Edgar’s life.
‘Imagine,’ he said to his mother, after he had finished his lunch and eaten some of hers and was waiting for the film cycle to begin again, ‘if the plane caught fire, or the engines fell off. How long do you think it would take until we hit the sea?’
‘I don’t know,’ Mon said, looking away into the perfect blueness of sky.
‘You could guess. It wouldn’t happen straight away would it? Do you think it would be A, two minutes, B, four minutes, C, eight minutes, or D, none of the above?’
‘I really don’t know Eddie.’
‘Then your answer must be D, none of the above.’
She didn’t answer. She was looking queasy. It would be good for her to be away from Jeffrey, if only for a few days. The horrific idea that she might already be missing him was too grotesque to consider.
‘Which is in fact the right answer by definition because we’re over the ocean, not the sea. It was a trick question,’ he added apologetically. ‘But I think the real answer’s eight minutes, actually. Do you think they would know?’
His mother was performing her foot and ankle exercises. She extended her toes and revolved each ankle in turn and ignored him. Edgar leaned his chair back more abruptly than he should have, because it cracked against something, the knees he thought, of the divinity student sitting behind him, who yelled out a curse, and Edgar quickly said, ‘Sorry’, and pulled his seat forward and climbed over his mother and into the aisle.
He would have liked to go into a toilet to further test the void inside him, but the toilets were all full and he didn’t want to queue just to prove, again, his incapacity, and anyway the plane had started to bounce and dip, which he enjoyed, standing by the emergency-exit door, a surfer on the waves of turbulence, until a woman’s voice came over the intercom asking all passengers to return to their seats. He walked backwards along the aisle up to his row, past passengers who had blue blankets pulled up to cover their faces, as if when they slept all air passengers aspired to be female Muslims.
‘Old people get into a routine,’ his mother said to him on his return as if he had never been away and they had been having this conversation throughout, and Edgar wondered if maybe they had, if, thoughtfully or deceitfully, he had learned to leave part of himself, his boyish unsexual part, in this seat while the rest, the future part of him, had gone into the world to explore.
‘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