Bigot Hall

by Steve Aylett

  The meandering trail led toward the village, the entire household following the thoughtful Snapper through a wake of smashed lobsters. Father pointed to a stile. ‘Ring any bells?’

  ‘I remember standing here and shouting “Watch it!” to a passing merchant before punching his teeth out.’

  ‘Good, good. Anything else?’

  ‘Over the hill there, I seem to recall delivering a flying roundhouse kick to the head of a docile gran.’

  ‘Is that all?’ Father fumed.

  ‘Attached a slow-worm to my ear and entered the village. Bought a corduroy otter in the corner shop.’

  ‘And what were you thinking about?’

  ‘Same as ever. Elves and ash.’

  ‘Elves and?’

  ‘Ash,’ repeated Snapper.

  The finch of perplexity perched on Father’s sill.

  In the village Snapper showed us where he had loaded up a diecast crossbow pistol. It was all coming back to him, he said. ‘Sprang out pronouncing a scream. Shouts of alarm. Pell mell. Clueless. Knife. Gore. And that’s when the fighting started.’ He pointed to a frazzled strand of kelp, laughing uncontrollably. ‘I stood there bellowing like a Harryhausen cyclops. Had the presence of mind to keep my arms parallel with Mercury’s declination in the sky and …’

  The signs were not good. Every stupid thing he did involved physical violence and yelling. We were prejudiced enough to think this could not result in wisdom even when initiated by the individual. And the prejudice was bang on target - the only real impact was caused by a complicated accident we could scarcely believe, involving an angry swan, a first league reserve team and an exploding main. Snapper ended up running through the village with his hair on fire.

  ‘Knew from books that I should try to extinguish the blaze,’ he said with a muscular pride. ‘And it wasn’t difficult. Dipped my head in somebody’s sink, and asked them to fill the basin with water. That was that, you see?’

  ‘But you’ve hardly got any hair, you demented old sod,’ Adrienne remarked with an uncharacteristic vehemence.

  Watching Snapper, I could see a realisation stir like a waking mummy. ‘That’s what I was thinking,’ Snapper gasped, and dashed into a barn. ‘In there,’ he said, pointing at a haystack. It seemed his baptism of fire had borne something by which we could profit after all.

  Three hours later, haggard and covered in straw, we found a ragged note which a startled graphologist would subsequently verify as the work of a pig with a snout like a railway buffer. Upon initial examination we could only frown.

  ‘Is this it??!’ shrieked Leap, appalled, and threw it down so that he was free to grip his own face and weep at deafening volume.

  ‘It’s as I thought,’ muttered Father. ‘You can be sure you’ve won an argument when the idiot you’re arguing with announces he has.’ He showed me the note:

  Life is a chessboard with one piece and one square. I was born bald and bald I’ll be again. That’s me. Snapper.

  FATHER SON

  Father looked up from the paper. ‘Thank your lucky stars you weren’t born a manatee, laughing boy. Every one of those blighters has been torn to shreds by a boat propeller. Nobody cares over there. Doped to the eyewhites, driving boats, laughing. Damn them all.’

  ‘Weren’t manatee mistaken for freshwater mermaids in the old days, Father?’

  ‘Yes. By explorers so desperate for company they’d lob it into a moray.’

  ‘I suppose what with flubbery lips, desperate sailors and lacerating outboards, the manatee are the most unfortunate mammals on this dry-run-for-hell you call the Earth.’

  ‘Not by a mile, child. Because there was once a gentleman entitled August Strindberg whose works were deemed the fuel of the future. “Print another book, Strindberg,” his friends would snigger, “the fire’s going down.” Subtle wits struck him in the face when they realised what he had to say. But this was as nothing to the fact that wherever he went and whatever he did, he was forever being attacked by dogs. The events of his life were indelibly interwoven with the snarling and unaccountable umbrage of hounds.’

  I had unwittingly put Father in a storytelling mood and nothing short of a hard shake from a lion would stop him now. My eye wandered glassily to the drawingboard, on which the Hall plans were spread like an Escher vortex.

  ‘As a time-saving measure he was born in a state of severe depression. No sooner was he an adult than he found himself backing out of halted parties brandishing a scatter-gun. Social embarrassments of every stamp. And the dogs, by god they had it in for him. Ferocious? You don’t know the half of it. Some stood on their hind legs and boxed his eyes. Five of them tied his ankle to a piano which they threw into the sea. He once yelled his problems to a monk, who was first offended, then regal, then pointedly absent. Strindberg went home hanging off the back of a speeding tram, kicking at galloping hounds with his free leg. You’re old enough to know these things, boy.’

  ‘So when did he get time to scrawl A Dream Play?’

  ‘Locked himself in a cellar. Heard the skittering of hounds above him and that’s what drove him on. Emerged a year later to his cost. Rammed by a sudden vehicle.’

  ‘Unceremonious?’

  ‘What do you think? One of the first motorised hit-and-runs on record. Car hit him so fast he was knocked momentarily to a standing position before passing out. Bumper’d be worth a bob or two today. So he was barely out of hospital when a bison hurtled into him on a salt flat. Tried to use it as an alibi.’

  ‘Alibi?’

  ‘Done for murder. Just a knifing, nothing grand, but enough to put the childproof on his career. Growing old and free, he contracted a changed nature. Surged straining against one of those stretch-brace back exercisers which he’d tied to the doorhandles of a church - propelled backwards down the aisle during a ceremony, killing a priest and a pious old hag who remains resolutely dead to this day. Went on like that his last three years. Dog statue on his tomb, looking proud.’

  ‘He died?’

  ‘Not often enough.’

  ‘But Father, that’s not a story, it’s a mess.’

  ‘It’s a life. You want order in this world – here’s the closest you’ll get.’ He pointed to the Hall blueprint. ‘Nice plan eh, laughing boy? Starts and ends with the reading room. Fractured or a jigsaw - which do you think?’

  ‘It depends how you approach it?’

  ‘Good answer.’

  FACE VALUE

  In the first three minutes of the universe, a hyperconcentrated dot of matter and energy exploded, space unfurled to accommodate the supercondensing gasses, and Uncle Burst’s ego broke away from the body of creation, expanding at an unimaginable rate. This much has been verified, but after months of gloomy silence at the dinner table, Burst tore off his bib and roared in no uncertain terms that he devoted every ounce of his strength to keeping ‘these features of mine’ on the front of his head. He stated that his face was the first thing to have emerged from Earths primordial soup, and said he would reproduce the event in a giant flask. This comprehensive outburst halted the meal, Snapper’s jaws frozen in the act of closing upon a wren. As we had always predicted, Burst had flipped from his rocker.

  Snap surged to his feet. ‘You’re meddling with nature you bloody fool - look what can happen!’ And he pointed at the Verger.

  I think Snap was eager to divert attention from himself at this time as everyone had started joking about his spring-loaded ribcage. We all knew he spent whole days laying in the woodland undergrowth, malevolent anticipation flushing his face as he waited for someone to step on him. The sarcasm started when a hedgehog blundered across Snapper’s belly and Snapper returned to the Hall complaining warily of a sudden gallstone. Leap had once had a gallstone like a meteorite and recognised Snap’s reluctance to compare notes for the shame it was. ‘I think you’ll find there’s one less hedgehog snouting through the bracken tonight,’ he announced, looking sharply at Snapper.

  So when Burst began build
ing a Urey reaction vessel, Snap was scornful and relieved. The vessel contained hydrogen, ammonia, methane, water and hydrogen sulphide - the stuff of life awaiting a spark of electricity. This spark was arced through the vessel at one-second intervals and Burst set up a time-lapse camera to shoot at the same rate. The atmosphere in the flask reproduced that of pre-biological Earth and when the lightning-wire flashed the entire mistake would be recreated in miniature.

  We should have known it would be a turbulent event when Burst started muttering ‘Stand clear’ over and again from dawn till night. The day of the experiment we stood on the landing outside of Burst’s room, our features illuminated by the strobing light. The ticking electrode was the only sound until a blazing explosion blew Burst through the door in a litter of fragments.

  ‘Is he alright?’ asked Father.

  ‘Only by the broadest definition,’ frowned Leap.

  Burst was in shock, his eyes locked upward in their sockets, eyelids flickering. The room was filled with smoke and the gas flask was utterly annihilated. ‘What did he see?’ gasped Leap, convinced that Burst’s stupor was the result of having witnessed an image which would have stunned a hardy bull. He salvaged the dented camera with a strangled cry.

  The next day we gathered to watch the time-lapse footage. Burst was propped among us like a length of timber. Leap portrayed concern and stated that a second viewing of the horrors in the flask would release Burst from his catatonic state. We were all curious, knowing that Burst’s facial claim was a real possibility. He had long since established that the lines on his right palm precisely reproduced the impact patterns on the lunar surface. But why should confirmation of his latest theory blaze him into shock? Was it the first time he had seen his own face?

  On the screen we saw a flickering downview of the flask, in which steam appeared to swirl and mass. It soon became dense and brown, streaking the flask walls with nucleic acid tar. A dark protein sludge bloomed at the base of the vessel, changing colour rapidly. The rich mud congealed, heaving, and unfurled from the centre. A face emerged like a plastercast from a vat. It was Snapper’s. The film ended abruptly.

  As the lights went up, Snapper was triumphant. ‘Ha, ha, ha - there you go, Burst. It takes a real man to be the first carbon-based life form out of the primal matrix.’

  The rest of us were stunned and, to my knowledge, Burst never spoke or moved again.

  Unable to leave well enough alone, Leap raided Burst’s notes. The only related items he found were a drawing of the flask setup, a belligerent account of Burst’s emergence from the primordial stew and a scrawled speculation that the carbonised freeze-impression of that event could be found on the crust of a solar satellite. This was years before I saw the Viking Probe photographs of what appeared to be a giant face on the surface of Mars. This face, too, was unmistakably Snapper’s.

  BRAINFOLD

  ‘We all have a cage of bone around our heart,’ said Adrienne. ‘But you take the biscuit. Anyone with enough sense to fill a bird’s ear would tell you this is the spice.’ She was referring to the enfolded sunny glade of pollen and opening century flowers, surrounded by hedge-doors and a vale of entrances and dripping gardens which riddled into mazes so distant in all directions that the landscape streaked into mist. The pearl-blue sky showed no sign of abating. The ground sat still, covered in grass. Blown-out watches lay around like shells of snails. Adrienne was drowsing, gold mothdust in her hair - scratch her surface and you’d glimpse heaven.

  As we lay in the blurcolour and the shade of leaves, I thought of mossy graveyards and forgotten patients. ‘You’re not angry at me are you?’

  ‘Ofcourse not - what an idea. You worry too much.’

  ‘I worry subject to requirements,’ I said. ‘This world’s about to spring like a steel trap.’

  ‘No it isn’t,’ she said sleepily. ‘I’ll keep it open …’

  She was drifting off. I felt cheated - we had set up a shared dream to be together and now she was falling asleep inside it. Could she have another lucid dream inside this one? How much dreamtime could she cram in this way, like the layers of a Russian doll? I felt excluded, and stood, storming off through an arched topiary door.

  Slowing away down a hedgepath of crimson litterleaves, I thought about the moon and how any emotion there had to be imported. I watched corrosive gushes furnacing in the sky and thought of skulls tumbling like popcorn. I thought of unsuccessfully killed fence wood growing again. I thought of the skeletons of angels. I thought of giant bonsai. And that people should dream in many ways or one dream would sterilise the world.

  Around a corner was a marble bench with an inscription on the backrest: ‘We live in an infinitely untidy universe.’ I sat down and, finding the seat refreshingly cool in the close heat, I recalled a poem of Adrienne’s:

  A beggar sat on a marble bench

  And bit off the head of a dead, raw tench;

  A bigot sat on a marble bench

  And bit off the head of a whippet.

  The trees hushed in a breeze. Chuckling fondly, I remembered when I was younger and me and Billy Verlag played with marbles golden as the molecules of lions.

  I awoke with a start. I was in the hothouse, on a chair. The glass was blurred with condensation. Infuriated that I’d popped out of the dream - and was now two dream layers away from Adrienne - I bounded up and stormed out. ‘Living myself down to their level,’ I snarled aloud as I crossed the empty courtyard. ‘Hello?’

  The house seemed deserted. Some of the windows were open. Everything seemed real enough. The detailing on the walls remained the same when I looked away and back again. I flipped through a book, reading and rereading certain sentences. They never altered, but what did this prove? For some time now I had been accurately transcribing reams of phantom text.

  In tutoring me in the lucid arts Adrienne had surprised me by stating that in the last ditch a practitioner may indeed pinch himself to determine whether he is dreaming or awake. I had thought it amusing that we gauge our presence in the world by the ability to suffer. Toying with the idea of using other people’s pain as a gauge I had kneed Snapper in the face during a particularly nightmarish conversation, accomplishing nothing but my own entertainment.

  Now here I was in the Hall without even an uncle to strike. I pinched myself on the arm. Felt a twinge which may have been a mere recollection. Sat in the quiet kitchen, I punched myself in the face. Terrible face-ache, some blood, but it seemed such a strange, dreamlike thing to do. I hammered a nail through my hand. I smashed my head through a sheet of glass. I slashed my wrists with a bolt cutter. I smiled my throat with a circular saw. I painted the wall behind me with a level action shotgun. I unravelled my intestines like a bog roll. Sheer agony all of it, but I wasn’t convinced. I sat listlessly sorting a duodenum which gleamed like porcelain. Clearly I should be dead by now, or at least unconscious. Everything was reversed. Emotional pain is the stuff of real life as there’s no blackout point. This was surely a dream. The kitchen resembled an abattoir.

  Then Adrienne entered, stared in utter shock, walked unsteadily to the table and sat down as though medicated. ‘Laughing boy,’ she said. ‘Why such a loss of blood?’

  A loud explosion went off in what was left of my ears. ‘Are you saying this is real?’ I demanded aghast, shaking a ribbon of gut.

  ‘Oh, laugher,’ she said mournfully.

  ‘It’s a shrieking nightmare,’ I gasped, surveying the gore.

  ‘Yes,’ said Adrienne. ‘You haven’t woken up. You fell asleep inside the dream, like I did - you followed me. This is a replica of the Hall where I go to be alone.’

  I saw the full horror of what I’d done. ‘I’m really sorry, Adrienne,’ I said, replacing my spaghetti-like innards. ‘I didn’t mean to intrude. You’re not angry at me are you?’

  Adrienne stood, reached over, and slapped me so hard I woke up on the marble bench, the heavy purr of bumble bees thrumming the air. I stood and walked down the hedgelined path to the su
nny clearing, where Adrienne stood waiting. She tenderly pushed the fringe from my eyes, then slapped me so hard I awoke in bed.

  It was dark, rain was hammering the windows amid low grumbling thunder.

  The door opened quietly and Adrienne padded in, squirming in under the covers. ‘It’s cold,’ she said and softly stroked my cheek. ‘Your poor face.’

  ‘Are we awake now?’

  She made the same tilted, listening expression she made when cutting her own hair. ‘Yes,’ she concluded. ‘Let’s not fight again, laughing boy. Look how much time we’ve wasted.’ She showed me the bedside clock. We had been asleep nearly two minutes.

  MANDIBLE

  New arrivals at the Hall were a cause of excitement and concern and this was never more apparent than the day we were joined by Mr Mandible, who sat in Father’s study like a principled man.

  ‘You were referred to me by Roger Lang,’ said Father. ‘What can you say to redeem yourself?’

  ‘I would like a room here.’

  ‘You and a million others. How old are you Mr Mandible?’

  ‘Thirty-four.’

  ‘Correct. Do you heal quickly?’

  ‘In a flash. Unless the wound is open, as with a triangular chunk-blade.’

  ‘Or a tubular coral injury,’ suggested Father, ‘sustained off the Hawaiian islands.’

  ‘Precisely.’

  ‘I should tell you that the meals here are acutely poisonous.’

  ‘I intend to grow cress on the mantelpiece and pretend to be happier than I am.’

  ‘Excellent. This all seems to be in order.’ Father regarded an action shot of Mr Mandible booting a terrier off a cliff. ‘You understand that the ground floor of the west wing is crawling with nuns?’

  ‘This won’t be a problem.’