These were the last moments and it was surprising to Edgar that so many chose to spend them weeping. It surprised him too, as he continued to labour up towards the toilet—if anything, the angle had got steeper, each step harder to make—that he was so bent on privacy. He did not want to intrude on anyone else’s end, but neither should an unnecessary, outmoded now, sense of propriety keep him from what he needed to do. The rise of panic all around him transferred somehow to a feeling of well-being close to exhilaration and the minutes left to him were few and he did not want to spend the rest of his life climbing.
Edgar ducked into a bank of seats that was tenanted only by a woman sleeping, untouched by the clamour, her knees drawn up under a blanket, her mouth lightly open, her eyes hidden beneath a sleeping mask.
‘Purr-fect,’ Edgar said, in his best whispery movie-villain voice, just as a trolley broke free of its moorings and lurched rattling past down the aisle. He heard a thud, a cry, and that would have been him, but he’d made it, he unzipped his trousers and settled down to his task.
There was no reason for modesty. Privacy was finished here. In the last moments there can be no rules. Edgar, masturbating, felt finally free.
He shut his eyes. High-breasted girls rush up and down stairs. The check-in woman lasciviously unbuttons her shirt, but that image was replaced by an imperishable one from his first trip to this country: a woman at a motel door, who sleepily pushes hair away from her face. She’s wearing a man’s shirt, his father’s, unbuttoned. Quickly he pulled in an image from a magazine of Jeffrey’s: two Japanese women naked below the waist, one in a white T-shirt, the other in black, sit on a hospital floor, boxes of medical supplies behind them.
Edgar became reconciled to death—oblivion, obliteration, extinction—with each back-flick of his knuckles, each pull of his fist. In death there is life and, he supposed, vice versa. The plane was going down and his pleasure was rising and something was new. It announced itself with a roar, wild, mannish, beyond images real or imagined; the void was filled and he was ferocious, bursting, overflowing; the sound grew from deep in his throat and rolled out into the lamenting world of this doomed airplane; he squeezed tighter, and, despite all the tears and furies and beseechings of God and wretched inconsolation, it was the sound that he was making that stirred the sleeping woman beside him. She shifted in her seat. She lifted her sleeping mask. His eyes met hers, which were blue, and blank at first, sleepily unfocused, then surprise registered in them, climaxing in horror at his state.
‘It really doesn’t matter,’ he said, to reassure her. ‘We’re all going to die.’
He kept rubbing, long, quickening strokes leading to something inexorable, but he managed to smile sociably at her at the same time. He tightened his fist against the hardness inside, and yelp, something new, something novel, something glorious was happening, and it was happening right now.
His eyes were open but they couldn’t quite focus, because what was taking place was too grand for vision: his penis was the centre of it and it was almost too sensitive to touch but he couldn’t not touch it, couldn’t stop touching it, grabbing it, brutally rushing his hand up and down it, and he didn’t know if he could bear this any more but if he was going to disintegrate then so be it, and up and out it came, jerking, pulsing out of him, milking jerky fluid, spattering the seat in front of him, and this was a better feeling than anything. In his last act he has truly accomplished something. He has proved himself. He has discovered his capacity.
When the plane pulled out of its dive Edgar was still smiling, sitting legs apart, his trousers and underpants around his ankles, his elbows on the armrests. In front of him globs of jism slid down the TV screen, and the passenger beside him was holding her throat, which must have been hoarse by now as she continued to scream for cabin staff.
At the baggage carousel at Kennedy Airport he aimed to keep his mother between him and the screaming lady, who had been treated with the remaining sedatives and subsequently firmly and politely ignored.
‘What did you do to her Eddie?’ Mon asked, and Edgar looked innocent and said a shocked ‘Nothin’!’ and smiled, hoping to imply something of the infinite weirdness of the world, the bottomless peculiarity of other people. He tried to find a view out of the baggage hall but the only windows were mirrored, and he knew that there would be further to go before they were allowed into the arrivals hall, and he knew too that his father was unlikely to be there, arrangements and handovers were seldom straightforward where his father was involved, but that didn’t matter so much, the world has been changed—and when the screaming lady realized that or when the wreckage of her throat finally gave out, he might be able to hear his name being announced on an airport Tannoy or, maybe, through the next door or the next, he would see his name on a white card being held up by a benevolent chauffeur in uniform.
‘Eddie?’
‘Nuthin’!’
He felt a suspicion lingering in his mother’s mind and perhaps others’ that the fat-legged stewardess might have been a little too quick to push accusations away; but when the engines had come back into life and the plane lifted into cruising height again, there had been so much pressing upon her, reluctant doctors to gather to make repairs to bruises and breaks, tears to soothe, complimentary champagne to distribute along with a printed list of airline-approved stress counsellors through the crush of insistent lawyers intoning, ‘Compensation.’
Anyway, a compact had been silently made. Passengers who had been bandaged and patched leaned on trolleys, chewed gum noisily, laughed to show that they were ready for re-entry into their changed world. Something extraordinary had been shared and it was over and certain things were private and didn’t need to be talked about, and he was respectful of that and his mother ought to honour it too. The burly man was wearing his clothes again.
The conveyor-belt stuttered into motion, and Edgar, jaunty in his freedom, in his maleness, hiccuped the unpleasant sip of champagne back into his mouth and lifted one foot to rest on the metal lip of the carousel until a blue-uniformed airport woman shook her head and said, ‘Sir! Could you step back?’ And Edgar was so pleased to be called ‘sir’ that he did as he was told.
By the time that Edgar, the aficionado of flight, announced that the small, jittery plane that they had taken from New York to Syracuse was coming in to land, Mon’s skin had turned yellowish white with the exertions of the day, with the effort of keeping airplanes in the sky with the power of her will.
‘It would be nice if someone was there to meet us,’ Edgar said.
‘Fay won’t be up to that kind of thing. And your father always leaves everything to the last minute. We’ll have to make our own way.’
But they were met, by a self-possessed man in pressed white jeans and blue T-shirt, who was scanning the faces of the arriving passengers. To Edgar’s great pleasure and silent promise of friendship he held up their names, correctly spelled in neat capital letters on a white card.
‘I’m Warren,’ he said. Warren had short dark hair and a lightly tanned skin and the manner of someone who did things well. He shook their hands and steered their airport trolley out towards the car-park, while others from their flight stood hapless in the arrivals hall, opening and closing their fists; and Edgar, enjoying how important he and perhaps his mother must be seeming, endeavoured to look sternly businesslike.
Warren drove them out of Syracuse in a