by Steve Aylett
It was the longest afternoon of my life.
HOSPITALITY
Colour in reverse, Lord Brakes and Lady Marjoram were like something grown in an ashtray. Next to them Roger Lang resembled a fascinating individual. Algernon Brakes pressed his eyebrows nightly in a copy of The Pickwick Papers. Even his aura was made of tweed. Lady Marjoram seemed unaware that her gloves were removable, and appeared to be wearing a marquee. As welcome as a vase on a butcher’s slab, their very shadow inspired in us all a valiant disgust.
They insisted on visiting us as though they were neighbours and perhaps they were. With admirable restraint we responded to their knock by ducking under the windows and if they entered we hid as best we could. Brakes and Marjoram would wait for hours in the kitchen under the deep ticking of the clock, or staring blankly up at Ramone the moosehead, over whom we had long since pushed a bucket of cement which had dried to form a permanent nosebag. Trudging subdued through the silent house, the pair would peer through doorways and then give eachother vacant looks. A visit to the storage attic was spent tearing through giant webs, crashing into disconcertingly lifelike marionettes and so on.
On one regrettable occasion, however, they abruptly opened the cupboard in which Father and I were silently standing. ‘Er - Brakes old fellow,’ said Father briskly, ‘you’ve met the lad. Laughing boy - you know Algie.’
‘I have had the pleasure of scraping some from a bucket.’
‘You’ll be forgiven for thinking my son here is a disciple of Satan. He’s just a small boy adjusting to the mayhem and corruption of circumstance. Shall we adjourn to the sitting room?’
As the guests started off in that direction Father ran the other way, his face a carnival of luck and mischief.
After several moments Brakes and Marjoram re-emerged from the sitting room to find me stood in the hallway alone. ‘Father finds you drab,’ I stated, ‘and has run away. It falls to me to entertain you. Come here.’
The guests hesitated, looking fretfully at eachother.
‘Do not be concerned,’ I said, any pretence at interest cold and dead. ‘We are composed largely of water. This way.’
Leading them into the kitchen, I motioned for them to sit down and stood near the progressive wall markings which, on days of family togetherness, Father would pencil up to record my pain threshold. ‘I spy,’ I muttered, ‘with my little eye. Something beginning with death.’
Brakes and Marjoram fired startled glances at eachother and their surroundings.
‘Death-mask,’ I intoned, opening the larder to reveal that of Lenin. I went to the door. ‘Consider this your home. There’s the kettle. Tip out the scorpion. Goodnight.’
Crowded into the boiler room, everyone sat around on bales of Father’s funny money. Overlit by a bare lightbulb, Snapper resembled a bottlenose dolphin. ‘Well laughing boy?’ he whispered fiercely. ‘Are they gone?’
‘No,’ I hissed. ‘They’re in the kitchen, trying to decide.’
‘This is ridiculous,’ said Snapper. ‘Hiding underground to avoid the dullards.’
‘Study history,’ muttered Leap.
‘Go and talk to them, boy,’ frowned Father. ‘Make them understand this isn’t the time or the place.’
I entered the kitchen with a strangled cry - Brakes and Marjoram awoke in alarm, blinking. They had been resting their heads on the table. ‘The sleep of the innocent,’ I sneered. ‘You do not perceive the anguish you are causing here. The mean trick you are playing. Don’t look at me that way. I wouldn’t give a pinch of dust what you think of me, but there is far more at stake.’
Lord Brakes and Lady Marjoram gaped blearily in the stark light as I explained morphic resonance. ‘Theoretically if I throttle a mime on one side of the world, people on the other side will spontaneously get the same idea. Mime-strangling is not the best example, being by no means a new or original impulse.’ I discussed the hundredth monkey principle. ‘When I strangle that monkey,’ I said emphatically, ‘it stays dead.’
Brakes opened his mouth, closed it without having said anything, and cleared his throat.
‘Well?’ Snapper scowled as I entered the basement. ‘Have they pushed off at last?’
‘They are still in the kitchen,’ I stated mournfully.
Snapper was agitated. ‘By god, brother,’ he rumbled to Father. ‘The boy should be fed his own jaw.’
‘Pay no attention,’ Father soothed me. ‘Your uncle’s pills are in the treehouse. Nobody’s going to feed you a jaw.’
‘We must frighten them away,’ said Leap, nodding. ‘It is the only way to be rid of these soporific guests.’
I floated into the kitchen dressed as the Grim Reaper. For this I had borrowed Nan’s scythe and robe. In fact to all intents and purposes I floated into the kitchen dressed as Nan but I thought this would be enough. Lord Brakes and Lady Marjoram appeared to have prepared a small meal and they looked up from this as I shouted a few remarks on the subject of doom. ‘Decay,’ I suggested. ‘Decay - and don’t contradict me.’
Brakes and Marjoram crunched toast, spectating my performance with a mild curiosity.
‘It’s no good,’ I said in the steam room, throwing down the scythe. ‘They’re morons – don’t even grasp the concept of peril.’
‘What we need,’ said Leap, ‘is something that’ll have adrenalin spurting out of their ears. A first-class haunting. Aren’t we directly below the kitchen?’
Within minutes we had set up a fiendish choir of wailing cries which would echo upward through the floor and cause Brakes and Marjoram to consider phantoms a distinct possibility. Amid the ululating shrieks of Father, Snapper, Leap and myself, the Verger drummed on a variety of kegs and recited creepy Latin in a low gurgle. Adrienne screamed as though beautifully deranged. In his element, poor Mr Cannon shuddered to beat the band, releasing strained belches and punching himself in the face. Uncle Burst repeatedly whooped some sort of nonsense about having spiderwebs for nerve tissue. Under the swinging lightbulb, Nanny Jack sat silent as the grave. We hurled forged notes, choking eachother and yelping oddly amid fluttering cash. One of the kegs exploded, flooding the basement with blue ink. Snapper began to howl at the ceiling, his face stretched and demented. Others took up the cry, tearing at their garments.
The turbulent display had an audience of two. Unnoticed in a corner, Lord Brakes and Lady Marjoram looked on, the very souls of patience.
HA BLOODY HA
Poor Mr Cannon strained under the tyranny of an oafish, misplaced merriment. He was everything I wanted to be - consistent, Japanese, heavy-set as a Bassett hound. His clothing spoke of chance and chaos. A marble-eyed wreck, snorting creosote and swaying like a metronome, he would arrive at the doorstep wearing a boiled shirt and the crooked smile of a snowman. For a few bob he’d explain his truncated morality, which consisted of his whispering ‘You are free to go’ repeatedly into your ear.
Having awoken in one too many fountains, Cannon boasted that when it came to being harmless he was a Triton among the minnows and, vowing to prove it for once and all, embarked upon a campaign of insensibility and disquiet in the village. In a mainburst of sarcasm and open mimicry he stood in the square reciting a litany of unsettling dogma and punching his ears with a staple gun. He tipped a mess of eels from a diplomatic bag, headbutted parked cars, and conspicuously fainted. Concerned citizens approached his prone form and his eyes sprang open, staring like those of a new corpse. He slammed his face unexpectedly against nocturnal windows and stayed there, as sinister and inconvenient as a fiend. Walking as carefully as a rod puppet to the sound of a moody snare drum, he talked about trolls with a studied nonchalance until he was swept from the scene by a flying wedge of cops in riot gear.
Five years later he stood before an undead judge. He could barely recall the events in question and neither could anyone else. But the judge was proud of his pea-green grasp of history. His heart had dried and rattled inside him like a blown yolk.
I can only work from other
s’ reports as at the time I was making a study of different kinds of fern and taking them back to my room at the Hall, where I pasted them onto a tin effigy of a snarling midget. Those were the days when a man could really accomplish something, if he had a will to.
But by all accounts everyone rallied in this rare instance of our mindful community meeting the monotone. Cannon kept annoying the judge by pleading ‘gilly’ and the character witnesses, far from being a balm, poured oil on the bonfire of Cannon’s ordeal. His troubles brought out the best in everyone.
Professor Leap was a smart one, having asked the nuns to make him a tie of hammered steel. Standing stern and mannered in the dock, he ignored everyone. The judge was forced to address him directly. ‘Mr Leap, is it? In your experience is the defendant a violent man?’
‘God, no. Never fitted in. Recall a time he entered gingerly with a gun at the waist. Pitiful as a wasp in a coffin. His scorn terrifies me more than any assault. Every day we are brushed by the damaged wing of his sanity. Caught him in the hothouse once, snogging a badger. Questioned him. His eyes filmed over with a membrane. Even I know that’s not where a membrane’s meant to be. I was appalled and fascinated. Climbed a hill. Had to think. The air smelt of distance. A morning of fog and cobwebs. Then, silence was shattered. Cannon - that snail-stamping bastard over there - seeing fit to answer my enquiries through twelve Marshall amplifiers. Feedback like you wouldn’t believe. And not a proper answer - not from archangel Cannon here. Flaying torrent of abuse, m’lud, from start to finish. Stuff I couldn’t repeat in this hellhole you call a court.’
The judge’s dry lips had just begun to unseal when Leap continued, to his stunned consternation.
‘Ofcourse a man like me could effortlessly write it down for your appraisal, m’ud. I’m sure you’ll understand before too long as to why I felt it important to crush the bones of his throat.’ Leap inscribed something on a scrap of paper, moving his mouth and frowning with fierce concentration. Then he looked up brightly, admired his work and handed the note to the usher. ‘Keep it under your hat.’
The judge put on his glasses, examined the note and instantly tore his glasses off again, gazing slack-faced at Leap. The note contained the following information:
Eddie was a salesman
He’d soon saw off your legs
Then charge you twenty smackers
For wasting his time.
‘Is this,’ said the judge, brandishing the note, ‘all you can provide as a character reference for that man?’
‘Yes,’ said Leap. ‘Though elementary prudence would demand you drop it like a spider.’
At this point Snapper bounded up and blurted ‘I’ve never met this razor-eating moron in my life! And if I had I’d spill gut jelly to conceal the fact!’
The judge registered surprise at Snapper’s outburst, and this was enough to break the dam of Snap’s resistance. He was carried sobbing from the room with an unnecessary show of turbulence. The rake-marks on the doorframe were caused not by Snapper’s hands but his ribcage, which had the tendency to spring closed like a beartrap. ‘It’s curtains for veracity, lads!’ he cried like a bosun announcing a killer storm, and disappeared.
‘So what do you say, m’ud, shall we get married or what?’ Leap demanded. ‘I’m a busy man – d’you think I’ve a life to live in this sandblasted nipple-ranch?’
The judge was appalled.
‘I’m a strong one,’ bellowed Leap, ‘with a morality as superfluous and cherished as a healthy appendix. I’ve known my destiny since I grew a fist and became a man.’
‘Are you sick?’ asked the judge, squinting through a blizzard of incredulity.
Leap gave a carefree laugh, then stopped short. ‘I’ve had it up to’ - and he vaulted from the stand, shoving through dullards across the chamber to reach the far wall, where he prodded a stubby finger into the eye of a bust of Samuel Johnson – ‘here with your questions! You and your forbidding radiance can’t stop me now!’ Leap began to prance with a kind of flamboyant scorn, and several startled officials bolted up and tackled him from all sides. Outside in the hallway, Snapper lit a fart of historic magnitude and blew a door into the courtroom in a hail of splinters - a fireball roared across the room and banged open in midair, searing the eyebrows from the front row of the viewers’ gallery. Fire extinguishers were discharged, blasting the flames and filling the room with a dense roiling snow.
The surprise witness was Roger Lang, the surprise being that they let him in.
‘Cannon,’ he said, sipping port. ‘Cannon. Name rings a bell. Um. Ah - snogged a badger. That the one? Yes, Cannon. Boon colleague. Salad days. Man of strong views, dignity, and breeding - breeding fast. Bristling egomania and inhuman cries in a slithery vault. Knelt down and punched the soft face of a cat as if he’d been doing it all his life. I confess I’m baffled by my own reactions to the bastard.’
To everyone’s horror, Roger would not leave the stand. His jocular reminiscence drifted on as the usher tugged at his arm. He was oblivious to time or indifference. A prospective lifetime of this rubbish crackled before the onlookers like a lake of fire. The port Roger raised was the blood of the lamb. Soon he was clutching the sill as fifteen people tried to pull him away by the legs - stretched horizontal in midair, he was laughing uncontrollably and relating an anecdote. His trousers were dragged off without effect. Someone grabbed the cigar from Roger’s mouth and threw it away in impotent rage. ‘This trouserless belligerence is putting the frighteners on everyone!’ yelled the judge. ‘Get out of here, get out!’
‘Get out, Roger,’ shouted Snap, and took up an identical sill-clutching, tug-legged position beside him. Soon there were seven people holding onto the stand and the usher resorted to smashing their hands with a gavel. A court sketch of that instant was later dismissed as a madman’s dream.
When the Verger was summoned to the stand he rose out of the floor like a rashly invoked phantom. Particles of light were being sucked into the folds of his cloak and extinguished. ‘It must be a dark responsibility,’ he boomed at the judge. ‘Being the first link in the mighty food chain.’ A tension filled the room like black molasses. ‘Do my eyes deceive me or is this the husk of a useless past. No need to trawl for brazen loudmouths here. The brain is a morsel for medieval crows. The facts are trampled by a blithe torquemada. The venue’s crippling banality disgusts me even as I feed upon its evil heart. And to think I hesitated. I envy poor Mr Cannon, this coldly brilliant man in whom sheer implausibility has supplanted emotion. Centre stage. Inverse pandemonium. We are meat puppets, lacking only a script and purpose.’
The Verger’s shape rippled ominously, swirling inward at the centre. Reports differ wildly as to what happened next. Some say he imploded, taking half the furniture with him as he reversed out of existence. Some say he became a black smoke which creeped over the walls and ceiling, dropping dead ants upon the assembly. Others report that he simply crawled away on his hands and knees, snickering like an evil barber. A point of accord is that everyone gasped and sucked air when he was gone, realising that they had involuntarily ceased breathing in his presence.
Father took the stand and caught the judge’s eye as though with a freshwater rod. ‘Truth to the slaughter, eh m’ud?’ he smirked, and winked conspiratorially.
‘I beg your pardon,’ stated the judge, but Father only chuckled as though sharing the oldest and naughtiest joke in the world.
Father was the bigot in a bigot’s nightmare - assured, unreachable, unharmed and unharmful. He had many good things to say about Cannon, not least concerning his ‘downright, unabashed inertia’. ‘Cannon’s cheek-by-flapping-jowl with the newly dead,’ chortled Father. ‘Pathologically recumbent. No telling where he’ll faint next. Paint isn’t dry on him. Idiot glee. Blathering simpleton. Salt of the Earth - not counting the stuff you can make in a lab. His integrity can be doubted only by a sodomite in exile, m’ud. Even the rooks stop cawing when Cannon here steps out of the house. Roof-rolling high performa
nce cars. Strangling teddybears with piano wire in a room lit like an aquarium. Tripping obnoxious brats. Laughing up other people’s sleeves. Spawning havoc. Head crowded with ambivalence. Slaver when I see him approaching. Drag my leg. Anything to frighten that aberration back into the shadows. Locked in an empty aircraft hangar he’d find a mistake to make. Yet I don’t pretend to be filled with hay. The folds of my brain are jostling like a crowd viewed from above, m’ud. But I can’t think of a time when Cannon hasn’t sat whimpering with regret at the results of his bloodyminded mischief. I like to think I’m in reasonable control of my faculties. Let’s see you make a joke out of that.’
Father was wearing a rubber mask of his own face beneath which was a rubber mask of poor Mr Cannon. The idea was to whip off the outer mask and pretend to be Cannon to save Cannon the embarrassment of addressing the crowd. But when Father went to tear off the outer mask, he grabbed both in one handful and whipped them away to reveal his own face again. This pointless act went mostly unremarked among the onlookers, who seemed to have become numb to everything. ‘Serves us all well,’ pronounced Father, standing down, ‘for living in a land where it’s the same time everywhere and you can’t take a step in any direction without kicking into the sea.’
Sporting the herbal trousers he would later champion, Cannon stood in the dock, regarding his surroundings as though from a lost pet poster. He had a surgical torch in his mouth so that every time he spoke the room strobed like a foundry. ‘Blood was up,’ he said, explaining his forgotten behaviour.
‘So was the sun but it has never entered this courtroom,’ said the judge, attempting a kind of pre-emptive control over the docile Cannon. ‘How did you become such a lethal asset to the forces of slobbering deviance?’
‘Not overnight,’ said Cannon without guile.
The lifelike brevity of his reply sent the judge scrabbling for paperwork. ‘According to this your hobbies are prowling, weeping, casting a sudden reflection upon placid water and exhibiting a cool, calculated cheek. And you once saw fit to drop a snake upon a passing shepherd.’
