degree of wonder and humour. Edgar narrowed his eyes to shrink his field of vision to a movie frame. Then he quickly returned his face to a smile again.
What information did he require? The secrets of dark Jeffrey’s heart. The dark secrets of dark Jeffrey’s heart. The dark secrets of dark Jeffrey’s dark heart—the wailing madwoman beating on the locked attic door; the money swindled from the academy that had been intended for the needy purses of African students hungry for Jeffrey’s lectures on the secret signs of westerns, the critical theory of motorway service stations; the art treasures he had smuggled out of Russia; the heartbreaking sex-slave victims he had traded out of eastern Europe on one of his supposed ‘conferences’; or maybe it was the corrupt circle of friends he should find, Jeffrey’s intimates, the pin-striped politician, the loathsome friar, the toothless woman who flounces her skirts, whom Edgar had shipped over from an adjacent part of his imagination and whose image now caused the beginnings of a process that he couldn’t allow to continue towards its inevitably disappointing consummation because his mother was shouting his discarded name and beating on the bathroom door. Edgar buckled his shorts over his rebellious groin. He had been subject to much rising and lowering recently, an embarrassed boy popping up half bridges. It wouldn’t be so bad, but there was nothing that this led to. He was aware, at least in a textbook sort of way, of the stages of the process, and he knew that the climax should coincide with a release of fluid. But he released no fluid. And experienced no climax. Just a blind gasping at the head of his (roughened, rawed) penis of what he had not been able to decide should be designated an eye or a mouth.
‘ED-DIE!’
‘Just finishing up.’
Perhaps there was a void within him, an emptiness that corresponded to where others contained sluicing reservoirs of stuff, of fluid, life-force. While he, the pipe within him tapped down merely to some absence, not even an empty chamber, this was a void that was empty even of itself.
‘And about time too,’ his mother said, when he opened the door.
Carrying his fixed smile, he returned to the kitchen, where he aimed it at the wall, at Jeffrey, at the two narrow windows, at the deflated football that was a legacy of a failed Jeffrey attempt to bond, at a standard lamp, and quickly to his toast. He did not want to alert Jeffrey to his vigilance. The trick, he was sure, was to convince his enemies to underestimate him.
‘What’s up, geezer?’
‘Nothing,’ he quickly said but then realized he had spoken defensive-aggressively, his customary tone, Shut-Out-Jeffrey, and anyway he could afford to be expansive today, because today he was flying to America, and his mother would be with him and his father was waiting for him and Jeffrey would be left three thousand miles away.
Edgar looked at the itinerary, which his mother had remembered to print out on her office computer. Friday: fly to New York. Change planes. Syracuse airport. Saturday & Sunday: time with grandmother Fay. Monday: Mon to New York; Edgar and father on the road. Tuesday—
‘Oh,’ said his mother. ‘Toast.’
‘I made it, actually,’ said Edgar, who wrote himself a mental note not to speak always so precipitously, better to allow loathsome Jeffrey to take the credit for his mother’s breakfast and then watch it rebound or be snatched away afterwards. Silence and cunning would be his watchwords.
‘Thank you, darling,’ said Mon, who was sitting at the counter in her ironic pink 1950s housecoat that she never bothered to wear unless Jeffrey was staying over. She chewed complacently on a triangle of toast and reached over to the refrigerator to pour herself a glass of orange juice and unwary Edgar failed to avoid the complicit wink that Jeffrey sent his way. Mon ate her toast and flicked through a magazine, one that Jeffrey had brought into the flat and which Edgar, when he was sure he was alone, did not find it beneath him to inspect.
‘Here’s a piece about that Japanese photographer you like so much.’
Jeffrey sniffed. He did not like that Japanese photographer any more. Mention of that Japanese photographer would elicit only scorn from Jeffrey. This had happened before, it would happen again; Jeffrey was slippery and quick to change in all his enthusiasms. When Mon naively said, ‘Oh there’s a piece here about that Japanese photographer/ Australian performance masochist/Canadian poet/ American lesbian you like so much,’ Jeffrey would already have, contemptuously and self-congratulatingly, moved on.
Edgar smiled to outface the world. Defiantly he mouthed the shape of his new name. Edgar was twelve, soon to be thirteen, and his name was not in fact Edgar, but Edward. Edgar was a preferment he had recently awarded himself, so far secretly. Edward and all its variants and diminutives (Ed, Eddie, Steady Eddie, The Edster) had long been unsatisfactory or loathed by him. Edgar he took as a graceful-sounding name, gently archaic, hinting at past glories, shadowy marble buildings behind vines. The creator of Tarzan was called Edgar; so was the writer of The Tell-Tale Heart.
‘The private-eye genre,’ said Jeffrey, ‘what is it about?’
They were sitting in the living room. Soon the minicab would be arriving to take mother and son to Heathrow. Edgar’s earphones were on his head and he drummed along to the music on the coffee-table even though both adults had asked him not to. Surreptitiously he lowered the volume. Here, in this temporary victory, he did not want to lose any advantage by relaxing his vigilance. He continued to drum as if he were still listening to his music but instead he listened to Jeffrey rehearse tomorrow night’s lecture. Mon, once his student, wanted to please her teacher. She offered suggestions. ‘It’s about truth,’ she said, ‘it’s about justice, the American Way; the private eye is a bruised Galahad in disguise, Christian myth transubstantiated, the good man in a godless world.’
Jeffrey looked bored throughout. He examined his hands and picked away dirt from beneath his thumbnails. The only time Jeffrey was interested sufficiently to look at his audience was when she said bruised.
‘Bruised? More than that,’ said Jeffrey. ‘Damaged. Impotence is what it’s about. Who’s the precursor of the private eye? Of course the cowboy heroes of the western, but mixed in with some Hemingway. Fiesta, the narrator who’s been damaged in the war, who can’t get it up, who will never be able to consummate anything.’
‘Jeffrey!’ warned Mon, who could get oddly prudish sometimes in the company of her son.
‘Please,’ said Jeffrey with pained expression.
‘Sorry,’ said Mon.
She pushed back her hair, which was red. She was wearing a leather jacket that creaked and which Edgar had suggested would be uncomfortable and hot to wear on the airplane, a black T-shirt and a long black skirt. Edgar was wearing what, after some very long time, and for which he had even consulted Jeffrey, he had settled on as his appropriate American outfit of long shorts, stripy short-sleeved shirt, sneakers and baseball cap worn backwards. He winced at his mother’s determination to please Jeffrey and Jeffrey caught the expression so Edgar turned it into the music-lover’s appreciation and drummed harder.
‘Hemingway,’ prompted Mon. ‘The narrator who’s been damaged in the war.’
Jeffrey glanced at his notes and consented to continue. ‘He can’t get it up. He’ll never be able to consummate anything. That’s where the private eye comes from. The mood of melancholy, yearning, frustration. He can’t please a woman, can’t satisfy any of them, not the blowsy blonde overripe tramps, not the rich men’s daughters who are driven by his disregard into lesbianism. So he’s got to walk in shadows. He’s got to drink to quieten some of the self-pity inside of him. Being beaten on the head by the buttside of a revolver brings him some kind of temporary release. But he’s lost, finding a dark path to get revenge on some of the whole men in his pathetic universe. If he can restore some of the order in the universe, maybe he can repair some of the disorder inside himself. But of course not, it’s a doomed quest. Some men have died, some women have suffered. The law is temporarily satisfied, but not our damaged hero. He’s alone, because he has to be, drinking himself stupid in his melancholy office.’
…