‘But what I mean to say—you are listening to me aren’t you? What I mean to say is that you’re going to have to be thoughtful, considerate. Staying in someone else’s house requires adjustments. And the younger you are the more considerate you have to be. We have responsibilities as guests.’
Edgar supposed his mother was right, but he resented it all the same. She took for granted all the adjustments that he was required to make, and did make, without announcing the whole fuss of it. He would not allude to any of that now, because he didn’t wish to compromise his own nobility of nature, but the gruesome sights of Jeffrey stretching on the sofa and the hair on Jeffrey’s feet and his silver toe ring were all in his head now and he didn’t know how to get rid of them.
‘Stop shaking your head like that. I’m right. And close your mouth. It makes you look stupid.’
Tears of outrage were not far away now. Thankfully, his mother responded to the heightening of his mood with a softening of hers.
‘Oh Eddie, I’m sorry. Let’s not be bad friends. I’m a nervous flyer at the best of times and going there, you know, when I used to, your father.’
She opened her arms for him to wriggle through and even though he was bigger now than when they used to perform this kind of manoeuvre, and both of them were wearing seat-belts, they managed it, and the smell of her reminded him of Sunday mornings before Jeffrey.
‘I wish I still smoked,’ she said, and before Edgar could point out that even if she did she still wouldn’t be able to do so on board the plane, she had yawned, promised him a snooker room, stretched, and announced her intention to sleep.
Edgar, whee! He was loving it, in this plane, sipping a Virgin Mary, chewing peanuts, looking out of the porthole to see his own reflection bounced back with clouds. The noise that had been surrounding them throughout abruptly cut out—and the effect of the silence on Mon was to wake her up, startled: she gripped the armrest and Edgar watched with what he would call an investigator’s dispassion the tightening of her fingers, the whitening of her knuckles, the wrinkling of her skin.
‘It’s okay,’ she said, hoping to reassure him and therefore herself.
‘I know,’ he said.
He knew too that she wanted him to hold on to her hand, to give her the power to protect him, and usually he would allow her this, but not this time, even if it caused him a pang of pity and self-reproach: he was not above punishing her for her transgressions.
The cabin lights flickered off and weakly on and off and on again, and each movement from light to dark to light was accompanied by a collective cabin-gasp of all the passengers, ahhh! and O!, and Mon gripped the armrest tighter and merciful Edgar relented: he held on to her hand and settled into the contact as she pulled his fingers tight. Her eyes were closed and her head was back and a vein pulsed in her eyelid and blue lines stood out in her throat, and the plane dipped and lurched and Edgar was enjoying himself. People all around them made rearrangements with blankets and headrests, and the stewardess reminded them again that the captain had requested that all seats should be in the upright position and infants strapped to a parent or caregiver, and now there was rising the sound of babies crying, nothing too startling, just the discontent of children baffled at being woken from sleep and fussed over, and the burly man from across the way loudly shouted, ‘Miss? Miss?! What IS going on?!’ and it took a while for Edgar to realize that the high keening note in the theological student’s voice behind him signified anguish, and that the ache in his ears meant that the plane was no longer bouncing but had been losing height, perhaps drastically, and that was why everything was tilted, and glasses and miniature bottles of wine were rolling down the slope towards business class; the mood in the cabin was changed and something very bad seemed to be happening.
‘Miss! Miss!!!! MISS!!!’
The stewardess was sitting below them braced in her chair, talking into a mouthpiece, her hands stroking each other.
‘Would everyone please return to their seats.’
Edgar straining heard her pleasant voice. Mon hadn’t moved or opened her eyes. Her hand gripped his more tightly. He tried to pull his hand away because it was hurting, but she had it and was not letting go. He tugged harder and all he achieved was a tiny choking moan from his mother. The ache in his ears was hardening into pain. The lights were lost again, and in the dark Edgar heard incompetently stowed tables clatter open, the thuds of surprised flesh, petulance now in the sobbing group-noise around him.
The lights came on just as an overhead locker opened, spewing out ribbons of clothes, bottles of duty-free liquor in corrugated-cardboard jackets that clattered off seat-backs and rolled clumsily down the aisle. The divinity student started to pray but lost the thread of his words until all he was saying was, ‘Oh oh oh oh, oh God, oh God, God, oh God, oh oh oh, oh God, oh God, oh …’
Edgar viciously pushed his chair back against the student’s knees but the litany continued unaffected. ‘Oh God oh God oh God oh God, oh oh …’
‘Oh my God,’ Mon said. ‘The plane’s going down.’
It was as if she had just realized it, and maybe she had. Edgar had been imagining the moment of impact: would the airplane bisect the water?—cutting through to the depths, past startled schools of fish, coral reefs, sunken galleons, mermaids’ treasure, dead men’s bones, down into darkness, bumping blind to a final stop on the ocean bed, the portholes bend with the enormous pressure and then burst, an insane hydraulic gush, the divinity student’s dull features washed away with the power of the water that somehow, miraculously, a benevolent corkscrew, picks up Edgar and twirls him up, pops him out into the air, the climax of a fountain —or would the plane somehow glide to the surface, bob along there on the waves—why else would they have been talking about life-jackets and life-boats and whistles and take your shoes off before you get on the slide? Was there an allowable moment of escape before the 747’s weight took it slurping beneath the water, the frightened pilot saluting behind the glass because, nobly, he has stayed at his controls till the last …?
Mon’s eyes were open. She stared at the awfulness of her end and his, their end, he supposed; he had heard her say it often enough, that a mother mayn’t think of herself any more as a free agent separate from her son, and the fat-legged stewardess was fixed to her seat and to her smile, despite the pleading of an Arab woman who was inexplicably showing the stewardess the naked chest of her infant; and several generations of orthodox Jews had taken a place up high at the rear of the cabin where the seat-backs held them in position, angled swaying with eyes closed, chanting through their beards, and Edgar wondered whether they were pleading with God to intercede here or just smoothing their own paths to Paradise; and the burly man across the way was busy removing his clothes—his business suit was off now and his shirt and his underpants, and he sat there in his tie as if he needed to meet his end almost as naked as when he had experienced his beginning; and others were making their own accommodations and most of these involved screaming or tears, but Edgar, entirely calm, knew exactly what he had to do and what he now might be able to do but he couldn’t do it with his mother beside him.
‘I need to go to the toilet,’ he said.
Mon nodded, plaintively hopeful eyes—this will save us, yes? This toilet, this going-to-the-toilet of yours? But she clearly didn’t understand what the words meant: she was waiting for his or anyone’s magic trick of slipping the future back into their lives.
‘I have to go to the toilet,’ he said.
He clambered over his mother, clasped her shoulder as he went past, and climbed up the slope to the toilet.
Oxygen masks swung in the air. Supper trays slid past, slapping chicken and beef curry against the sides of seats. The burly man was reading the in-flight magazine, resting it on the hairy rise of his belly. The couple who had kept banging into Edgar at the duty-free