Bigot Hall

by Steve Aylett

  With ballooning apprehension, I surveyed the poster of the Desiderata which Snap used for target practice. A corner was bent over showing the flap of something underneath. I yanked out a pin and the Desiderata scrolled upward like a rollerblind, revealing a giant version of the famous name chart. A hit-list, and a thorough one. Next to my name were the words ‘gun, bomb or poison’. The others, too, had been assigned a method: ‘Leap - knife; Burst - ligature; Jack - axe; the Verger - harpoon bolt’ and so on. My world turned inside-out like an umbrella. Where would I be safe? I had run away to the circus once but was deemed ‘too rough with the lions’.

  As I clambered down the rope-ladder the crew were arriving back at the Hall. Snapper tramped through the chill air, the whole household trailing after. Sad faces all around - the funeral had not succeeded.

  ‘Run for cover you morons,’ I yelled, ‘Snapper’s a homicidal maniac. We’re headed full-tilt for a bloodbath!’ Everyone stopped, staring at me as though at a mildly irritating street performer. ‘Look out,’ I said, ‘he’ll murder the bloody lot of you - and me most of all! Mercy, Snapper - the devil is boring and I’m scared to die! Could you harm a little boy?’ Blowing my nose on a crow, I shed tears which I would later defensively dismiss as auxiliary pieces of brain.

  It was an entire month of sniggers and gibes before I tore the Christmas wrapping from a gun, a bomb and a bottle of arsenic. ‘Couldn’t decide,’ said Snapper, ‘so I got all three.’

  ‘Thanks for the knife, Snapper,’ said Professor Leap, flushed as punch.

  DENIAL

  Unable to regard the planning office with alarm or respect, Father had once designed a tower block which, during the official opening, shed a series of false walls to reveal a building which was quite pleasing to the eye. The embarassed authorities finally faked a terrorist attack to remove the anomaly. Reluctant to give him any real remuneration, they loudly dismissed him as a genius. Father quit the scene, glutted with punishment.

  He built the Hall on the site of an old country church, not in dedication but to prevent the church from happening again. The land was acquired with money he had printed himself when naively concerned about the national debt - in a brief and violent spasm of sagacity, Snapper had assured him it was none of his business. Father had been a tax-paying youth, yet to fully acknowledge his worth. ‘I wish I had a fiver,’ he would later laugh, ‘for every time I earnt a fiver.’

  He had long been curious at leaders’ intermittent calls for a return to past values and had tested the notion by trying to build a house from the sky downwards. For the Hall he adopted a more successful form of reverse engineering. In a profound meditative state he saw a vision of Snapper pointing away and gasping ‘You can’t do that!’ He was used to being told what he couldn’t do after he had done it and recognised the vision as a glimpse of the future, boding success. If architecture was frozen music it was time it came out of the fridge. The Hall roofs were like open books, face-down and full of secrets. Rainwater was spluttered off by gargoyles who constantly yelled they were scared of heights. A tower rose like a chimney for the release of surplus rage. The north wall was encrusted with three hundred individually-crafted barnacles, the rest disguised with ivy and granite. Father had weathered and aged each and every stone by smuggling it into a poetry recital.

  Under the roofs were convolutive stairwells, vaulted chambers and walls deep enough to conceal more. There was a sharp turn for every ten yards and at each turn a novel effect. At one bend was a suit of armour containing a rotting granddad. Off a second a pedestal bore a vinyl world globe, fat with emergency plasma. Around a third was an umbrella rack scabbarding a scrolled geneology which proved Hitler was a Jew. Central to the structure was the reading room, which topped a vortical drum like the whorl of a mechanical lead sharpener. One flight of stairs twisted upside-down and fed out of a window, to sort the men from the bugs.

  The Hall was carelessly furnished. Tangled mountains of chairs were draped in bladderwrack and bladed with plate fungus. In the sitting room was a piano - I once lifted the big lid and underneath was a whale-size ribcage and a lattice of muscles stretched like bubblegum. The keyboard lid was nailed permanently closed. The dining room was dominated by a large and luridly precise painting of a clown before a firing squad. As the years passed it was to echo the desolation of a burgeoning family at mealtime, as we stared at the erstwhile food set out for us. I remember one day as we were inspecting some soup which had the shape and resilience of a demolition ball, Father seemed worried. The omen of Snap’s denial was the Hall’s foundation-stone but the building was proving a beacon for mothfaced resenters and Snap had yet to say the magic words. Father feared the place was due to fall about his ears. We were oblivious to his concerns, having become deaf even to the gargoyles’ mindboggling profanities.

  What I alone didn’t know as I grew up was that the Hall was a transcendence machine. Under tremendous pressure, Father finally held a demonstration for Snap who, his sparse hair wilding in the wind, pointed at the house. ‘You can’t do that!’ he gasped. Father heaved a sigh of relief - he was onto a winner.

  SHADOW

  I had an imaginary playmate who bullied me constantly until I shoved him into the lake and held his head under. When the bubbles stopped I felt immensely relieved. The bastard had been making my life hell for years.

  But I was appalled when Snapper reeled it out of the depths a week later. ‘Nothing all day,’ he said, packing up his gear in disgust. He slammed the tackle box closed on the kid’s ear and conveyed the weightless, balloonlike body to the back porch, crashing it down. The body lay mauve and bloated amid the carp rods, its slitted eyes accusing. The last few days I’d been as happy as a spider in a firebucket and wasn’t about to let this rotting phantom ruin my ease. When Snapper caught me opening the tackle box he barged me into Father’s study. ‘Raiding the gear!’ he bellowed, causing a crack to jag across the ceiling.

  ‘Wanted to catch some funny fish from the lake,’ I said. ‘Perhaps a relative. You’ve always said that when I was born Mother thought I was a Coelacanth.’

  ‘So she did,’ said Father, nodding. ‘It was a shock for us all. Put the boy down, Snapper, and there’s no call for the knife. The boy and I are going to the lake.’

  By the light of a storm lamp I hooked the swollen kid onto the line with a mind to pitch it at the deeper waters. A strong wind was blowing. Father’s line went into a tree, becoming tangled. As I tried to cast, the wind came up and gusted my imaginary playmate backwards into the night, breaking the line.

  The next morning I discovered that the rotting kid was tagged on the roof like a stray piece of laundry. Rain was tumbling over it. I was out of Adrienne’s window in a moment, crawling toward the black and splitting corpse. I had just tied its belt to mine when Snapper appeared at the window of his treehouse, transfigured with rage. ‘It’ll be a sad day for the devil when you see the light, laughing boy. Everything’s in ruins because of your arrogance. So help me I’ll come over there and smash your head like a snail!’

  The granite jaws of a gargoyle closed on my ankle - I yanked myself free. ‘You bastard,’ it yelled. ‘Lemme down. Lemme down or I’ll be sick again.’

  Clambering down the east wall toward poor Mr Cannon’s window, I established a foothold which turned out to be the socket of poor Mr Cannon’s eye. Letting out a scream, he held his face like an objet d’art until assured it was intact.

  ‘An unprovoked attack,’ yelled Snapper, having roared me into Father’s study.

  ‘What do you say is wrong with that?’ I asked. ‘He enjoyed it, and it didn’t hurt me.’

  ‘How can you stand for this boy’s life?’ demanded Snap. ‘Clout him eighty-three times with a belt, brother.’

  ‘Or a hose,’ I suggested. But at this Snapper tore the belt from my waist, flipping the kid onto Father’s desk. To my dismay the corpse’s belly burst open, spewing maggots and slime onto architectural blueprints.

  ‘Pulverise him w
ith this,’ shrieked Snap, brandishing the belt at Father, and began to laugh uncontrollably, his face scarlet.

  ‘Are you alright, brother?’ asked Father, frowning.

  ‘Don’t answer for my sake, Snap,’ I said. ‘I wouldn’t slam an eyelid if you folded with a stroke.’

  ‘Just fall the other way,’ said Father, gesturing away from the desk.

  ‘The desperate acts of this demon child are more important than your imploding house!’ With a violent sweep of his arm Snapper sent everything flying from the desk - the body rocketed through an open window into a wheelbarrow trundled by Professor Leap.

  ‘Leap!’ I yelled through the window. ‘There’s an invisible corpse on the barrow!’

  ‘Now listen to me, laughing boy,’ he said, stopping and looking stormy. ‘Just because you’ve turned your back on logic’s province doesn’t mean it isn’t there.’

  ‘And just because I say there’s a rotting cadaver on the cart doesn’t mean - Wait!’ But he had given up and trundled on, shaking his head in dark disappointment.

  ‘This is a fine joke you’re playing on us all, eh boy?’ chortled Father. ‘A rotting child!’

  ‘Madness is climbing the ladder of the boy’s spine,’ Snap was saying as I slipped from the room, ‘and all you can do is sit there drumming like a clockwork chimp?’

  The barrow stood empty at the back door. In the kitchen, Mother was carving up vegetables and the remains of the murdered boy. The body had pulped as though beaten with a claw-hammer. ‘Mother,’ I stammered, shaking, ‘what’s for tea?’

  She turned to me, a shred of gut dangling from her knife. ‘Stew,’ she said, and to this day I don’t know whether she meant it as a noun or a verb.

  My stomach revolved like a ferry, dumping its cargo with a splash.

  ‘Laughing boy,’ said Father’s voice. My eyes opened upon my own room, its familiar chains and ring bolts. ‘Collapsed in the kitchen - first sign of maturity. How you feeling?’

  ‘As though I have been nailed to a rural door.’

  ‘That’s the spirit. Sit up, boy, and sip some of this. Hot broth.’

  I had swallowed three spoonfuls when I saw the broken rib in the bowl.

  But there was no sense in trying to speak to these people. So what if there was a rib? I took the bowl from Father and poured it away when he left. Thriving for two days on scraps of curtain, I soon felt ready for anything.

  Calling on the Verger, I gave him a spud. ‘Trying to bamboozle me again with votives?’ he rumbled.

  ‘And if I am?’ I said. ‘It’s no secret I think you’re useless. But seeing as you swan around in dark clobber and a hood I suppose you’re the man.’ I gave him a canvas bag containing all the remains I could salvage. ‘Blather a bit of ceremonial pap over this and I’ll stay out of your way for a year. Verger?’

  He had gone. Squinting out of the window, I could see him already digging a hole half a mile away and nattering over a book.

  The following winter I trudged to the burial site and lay some fishing weights on the grave. Brushing soft snow from the headstone, I read the simple epitaph.

  Here lies

  FREUD

  Rest in peace

  SO WHAT

  Adrienne found that deja vu could be induced by arranging to have a condescending moron tell her something she already knew. ‘What’s the use of that?’ I asked, threading small predators into my hat and snapping the line.

  She explained that the phantom events we recall during deja vu are enclosed in free-floating etheric bubbles squeezed off from the conscious timestream whenever our time is wasted by vapid louts. She stated that some people had almost an entire lifetime stored up in deja vu timespace to compensate for an existence of abuse and distraction at the hands of the complacent. This much I already understood, and underwent a peculiar feeling of deja vu. But when Adrienne began to describe the fun of accessing and exploiting these auxiliary time nodes, the notion began seeping through the pale foliations of my brain. If several hundred deja vu experiences were lined up in a row and experienced as a seamless stream it would be akin to a clusterbursting hallucination. Whole months of wasted time would be given back to us in a single hit.

  Me and Adrienne trooped off to Snapper’s tree and called up. ‘Can we come in, Uncle Snap?’

  A shutter opened and Snapper’s vermilion face appeared. ‘A man’s home is his castle, you bastards!’ he yelled. The statement was null and void because although true of Snapper’s home it was untrue of those without defensive artillery.

  ‘You’re a bundle of nerves, Uncle.’

  ‘So are we all when our muscle and bones are removed!’

  True and obvious, his remark roared us back to the moment at which it had first occurred to us. Adrienne had further to travel, being older, but we seemed to arrive almost instantly at a moment shortly before birth. The sensation lasted just a few seconds but it proved we were onto something.

  Ofcourse we couldn’t sit around provoking the drab from Snapper all day - we needed a means of drip-feeding retrogressive data at a steady and constant rate. I happened upon a Hemingway volume in the reading room and found it was perfect. At no point was there the risk of being jarred back into realtime by a new idea - the only problem was that once in deja vu timespace we would probably stop reading. So we asked Professor Leap to read the book into his tape recorder. Sitting in Adrienne’s sanctuary room, we prepared ourselves and switched on the machine.

  It was better than we expected. Some of the ideas went beyond the obvious into a kind of homicidal vacuum. I saw a riotous play of lights on my skullwall as the crucifying boredom ricocheted me out of the timestream. In what seemed like seconds I re-experienced the first few seconds of life and all of the author’s ideas, then I was accelerating through a starfield of polymesmeric beauty. Skimming blurseas of red gold and deep flaring gardens, we were thrown across a sky, our shadows darting over the architecture of clouds which were soon streaking into smears. Huge tidal blurs were gashing wounds in space. Half my short life hit me like a thump in the chest as I passed through the sky, making it blink. For an instant, white space was speckled with black stars. I was learning and forgetting at a blur. I lost my body like a broken fingernail. The sparking pattern of passing stars resolved into a white revolving web and then into a sun which was everywhere. The universe opened like a flower, and we were gone. A billion miles below, the self-evident scrapped and sizzled like incinerating trash.

  My eyes opened to the room and Adrienne’s dazed, moon-pale face as the tape crackled and ended.

  NANNY JACK

  ‘Death,’ my Father boomed, ‘cancels everything but truth, then buries us in uncomfortable trousers and no underwear.’ Nanny Jack kept death at bay by wielding her own scythe. She was a disquieting, chitin-hardened grandmother but she was all we had - I daresay on balance she was less spooky than a skeleton at a harpsichord.

  But I’d be kidding if I were to deny the legacy of spine-igniting frights and traumas she bequeathed to the sensitive among us. Garping like a lizard, wilfully rattling, falling monumentally from casually-opened cupboards - these were the ways Nanny Jack made it known that she loved us. ‘I wouldn’t like to bump into her while stumbling drunk in a cat cemetery,’ said Uncle Snapper on one occasion, unaware that Nanny Jack was standing behind him. That evening shrill screams echoed from the treehouse and in the morning a pasty Snapper denied unbidden that he had been ‘dreaming of a thousand spiders’.

  Nanny Jack said nothing at this or any other time - though on one occasion she gripped my arm, leant in close and made a sound like the hollow hiss in a conch shell. When Mother told bedtime tales of a bogeyman which gathered boys to heaven by means of a hatchet I merely yawned. ‘Well whatever it is,’ I said, stretching, ‘it can’t be any more scary than Nan.’ Mother tried to be angry but in truth Nanny Jack inspired in us all a kind of elemental terror. When she stood on the top stair, the shadow thrown on the landing wall was the spitting image of a pra
ying mantis.

  When Professor Leap the lodger laid eyes on this, he locked himself away and finally emerged with a disturbing theory. ‘Insects can camouflage themselves to look like leaves, branches and so forth,’ he whispered urgently in the kitchen. ‘Why not as an elderly relative?’

  And seeing Nanny Jack’s beaked face at the window, he shrieked hoarsely and ran.

  ‘Has anyone ever seen her walk from place to place?’ muttered Snapper at another time, having called a conference behind the locked cellar door. He stood pop-eyed, breathing through his mouth. ‘Doesn’t she just seem to be in one place or another?’

  Professor Leap leaned in under the bare lightbulb and expressed the view that she could flit about incredibly fast like a trapdoor spider. ‘Does she ever eat?’

  I spoke of the time I interrupted her eating coal out of the grate and how she had merely turned and snickered.

  ‘She’s dead,’ said Professor Leap, ‘petrified like a log. Including her behaviour.’

  ‘You’re talking about my mother-in-law,’ said Father, nodding thoughtfully.

  ‘Someone should ask her point-blank about it,’ stated Adrienne, and we all felt a cloying fear.

  ‘All she needs,’ said Snapper quietly, ‘is a priest to lock the grass over her head.’

  Before we could harpoon him to a stop, Snapper was leaning on a spade in the light of an electrical storm and admiring a gravestone surmounted by a winged skull. ‘If that doesn’t provoke a reaction,’ he said, ‘I’ll be a happy man.’