Bigot Hall

by Steve Aylett

  Snapper nodded formally. I licked my lips and said thickly, ‘You have my sacred word for it.’

  ‘Your sacred word,’ said the Verger in disgust. He turned and walked away.

  ‘This monkey’s gone to heaven, laughing boy,’ whispered Snapper. ‘Time to snog god in the eye.’

  ‘I daresay.’

  I was quite prepared to lie expiring in a bloodpuddle the shape of the British Isles, slick with acceptance. Goodbye to a world of re-run conversation and louts who swear blind that sand is yellow.

  A way off, everyone stood blank-faced and shimmering in the rising heat. Adrienne was wearing the slave bracelet I had given her. Life rammed me between the eyes.

  The Verger raised a signal cloth. Snap and I stood back to back, and at the drop of the cloth we were off.

  It was just like a stroll in the garden, except that I was about to die. Details were blazing up pell mell. There were useless golden bees and other hilarious insects. Cornflower skies over burnt lawns, bleaching bones and the whiskers of flowers. Copper leaves surrounded trees like happy, fairy-tale blood. The fathomless lake floated like a mirage. The shed was a bronzed pagoda brimming with smug, infuriating sages. The sun was dripping like an ingot. I saw the sap sweating from a tree, heard the tickle of every leaf upon every other leaf.

  Preoccupied with these sensations, I collided with an ornamental concrete leper. Realising my situation, I wheeled about. Snap was in position with a raised gun. This was it. But my mind was still off the hook. I didn’t feel worried.

  He fired wide.

  Who was I trying to fool? I felt such a damburst of relief I started singing discordant gibberish and eating grass and soil, sobbing with hilarity as I strutted like an untried matador. I heard distant applause from the onlookers. The gun lay forgotten nearby, full of blanks. Father would explain that firing wide was part of the tradition - as was being scared shitless.

  I knelt on the lawn, peacefully chewing grass and earth. Immense fluxes of heat were rippling the air. The Hall was blurring and warping like a pious motive.

  The following day was chilly and damp. The Hall continued to warp.

  ONCE UPON A TIME

  Near the end I became more fractious about the family, and thought Mr Mandible would understand. ‘Most youngsters are provided with memories of fun and alienation, and what do I get - nuns drilling sheetmetal, a dead old woman, a squad of interchangeable uncles and a synthetic Verger. What will I be like when I reach my prime?’

  ‘A master chef?’

  ‘What? I’d rather be glimpsed in a wood now and again, running the other way.’

  ‘A feral enigma, you mean? Really laughing boy I’m surprised at you. This place seems to me a child’s garden of terror and experience, full of sinister flowers and gobbets of pulsating gas.’

  ‘Precisely.’

  Mandible began to describe his own life in polychrome terms. ‘Certain lack of family,’ he said. ‘Died all at once early on. At the theatre.’

  ‘How many were involved?’

  ‘Five in all. Large chandelier flattened them, ridden down upon the audience by an unclothed gentleman. I’m told they never knew a thing - though anyone who met them in life could hardly have failed to notice that.’

  ‘They felt no pain?’

  ‘Apparently not. In fact from what I hear of the play I suspect all five of them were dead before the incident occurred. So from then on I had to get by on charm alone, a course of action which culminated in my wrestling an enraged chimp on a rattling bobsled. My endeavours to enlist in the armed forces having been thwarted by my inability to be found, I took a series of blithely unsecured loans until my very eyelids were seized for nonpayment. I had always had a fondness for brains and offal - but particularly brains. Look at that,’ he said, gesturing at a murky fishtank and its bubbling cargo. ‘A mere four pounder but able to recall the Brandenburg Concertos before you can say Jack Robinson. And all this I owe to my upbringing. The point is, laughing boy, we all draw something from our environment, like soft flesh from bone.’

  I gazed around his room. On the mantel was a 22-calibre pocket gun which he claimed reminded him of ‘younger and happier days’. A variety of hen jaws were hung on a pegboard on the wall - I was momentarily disconcerted to see that some possessed incisors. ‘Do you mean to say this distorted household could serve as a nutrient-rich support matrix for my prowess in every worthy area?’

  ‘I mean simply that you shouldn’t blame the slobbering miscreants of this place for behaviour they were exhibiting when you were still bloodshot and unborn. Forgiveness, child, not exploitation.’

  There was a thought - and not before time. The Hall was a sanctuary from the fatal banality of a world unable to discern between a boy who’s boring and a boy who’s bored. My cup was overflowing - but with what?

  ‘So didn’t you and your family ever have disagreements, Mr Mandible?’

  ‘Certainly we did.’ He picked up a black and white portrait of his parents and peers, smiling fondly. ‘My father.’ He chuckled in remembrance. ‘I once picked him up by the ears and told him to stick his scholarly incomprehension up his arse. God I was unpleasant. Couldn’t have been more than three years old. He was angry as hell ofcourse, tied me to a metal cutting lathe. Escaped and snuck up behind him, announcing my liberty with a hydraulic jack.’ Mandible had begun to shudder, flecks of foam hailing from his mouth. ‘And I told him plainly, “Ha, ha, ha - I don’t give a damn!” And I struck him, and struck him - until he knew!’

  He grabbed an egg timer off a shelf and said it contained his parents’ ashes, turning it this way and that to watch the flow amid belting laughter. I became bored and left, but was thoughtful amid a germinating insight. That which must be grown out of may rarely be a way of life, and that which is a way of life may rarely be grown out of - both rarities are infinitely precious. Back there was a man with an appreciation of the finer things. I too would have a family portrait - it would be a way of confirming that I was grateful, that their memory was not to be discarded, that I knew there was more to my family than the use I could make of them and that we were sophisticated enough to hang other things on our wall besides haunted cow heads encrusted with cement.

  So I got everyone together near the hothouse, grouping them like normal people. Even the Verger threw back his hood. I ducked under the cloth of an old tripod box camera and hit the button. In the developing room, it all grew clear. Pointed skyward were the gormless gape, brittle sockets and marbled cartilage the careful philosopher would have expected. I recognised nobody - only the stance and clothing marked them out. On top of every neck was a cartoonish fish head, sucked of flesh and jelly as though in a single gulp.

  WHITE SPACE

  Despite everything it never entered my head that I should brace myself. ‘Laughing boy,’ Father once said in the garden. ‘Something I’ve meant to say since you were no more than a comma. See this blade of grass?’ I thought he was going to reveal that this was my real father. ‘I agree with it absolutely. Man accepts diversity at every level of nature but his own mind. A million emotions; only two hundred words. This is becoming no place for us.’

  He was perfectly placid. It made me think of a dream I had had one morning. ‘Listen to me,’ Adrienne had said while untying me. ‘One day you may have the Hall to yourself. It’s time to show you everything.’ And she pushed at a false wall, revealing a reflection of the Hall without people. I awoke and was still bound to the bed, Adrienne asleep on top of me.

  Then there was a conversation I witnessed through a crack after Snap had thoughtlessly stapled my ear to the floor over Father’s study. ‘Leap was in the reading room,’ Father was saying. ‘Wrong time of night. Took two books, back to back. Scrambled the text by shaking them like an unopened Christmas present. Alice in Wonderland and Pilgrim’s Progress. Look at this mess: “As I was beginning to get very tired of this world, I lighted on a certain place, and as I slept I dreamed I saw a White Rabbit clothed with rags,
and saw him reading a book with a lamentable cry, saying “What shall I do without pictures or conversations?”’

  ‘What’s the rest like?’ asked Uncle Snapper, smoking a cigar.

  ‘Pure hell.’ Father threw aside a thick, messy book of jumbled design. ‘And it couldn’t have happened before. House is losing form. As a folly it’s not entirely controlled.’

  ‘That explains the skull bulging out of the kitchen door. Started off as a bubble in the paint, remember?’

  ‘One of the upper rooms has gone - and so has the space it used to occupy. Electric snow. Lucky no one was in there.’

  ‘Everything’s going to seed,’ said Snapper. ‘Including our brains.’

  ‘Only one way to restore the structure. Go through and lock it - those of us who are ready.’

  ‘The boy’s not ripe.’

  ‘Hieronymus will provide a warning.’

  ‘And poor Mr Cannon?’

  ‘Pray they find an empty cell.’

  Snapper was more relaxed than I’d ever seen him. ‘I can’t believe I allowed myself to get mixed up in all this.’ He gestured with the cigar at his family, home and country of origin.

  It should have been obvious. For years Father had been relating his theory of literary transcendence. He said when a person was written into a book that person existed partly in the world and partly in the book, like a body lying halfway through a door. Surely it was possible to pull the body all the way through? He had been saying this since I was young enough to believe there were angels in the fridge. On the reading room shelf was a book with blank pages.

  So one afternoon I was sweeping viscera from the orchard when I looked up to see Mister Hieronymus standing in the landscape. ‘Who rises from prayer a better man,’ it rumbled, ‘has forgotten something.’

  ‘What was that?’ I shouted, but the figure was gone. I put it down to lurking, pure and simple.

  Then I was struck by the weather above the Hall. A bright land under dark sky. A sundial stood at the orchard edge with the inscription ‘I count only the hours that are serene’. The dial shadow was bobbing and rippling like a flame. Clouds began to funnel over the Hall. Magisterial distortions warped the air as I approached the building. Little green keys were turning on bushes as growing leaves squirmed. The gargoyles were silent. At the instant I reached the door, the Hall held its breath like an ejecting pilot.

  I opened the door onto a maelstrom. Furniture was tumbling through the air and colliding amid white flaying winds. The clawfoot tub in the hallway cracked, releasing coilpiles of garter snakes - each of whom I knew by name - across the floor. Ramone the moosehead was a leer-jawed skull, beyond feeding. I waded through snakes to the staircase, wondering for the first and last time if there might be advantages to city life. As I passed them the banisters grew into the ceiling like needles into flesh. I could hear the building’s central mechanism thrumming like an elevator. Behind the glass door of the grandmother clock the pendulum swung through slow liquid. The glass shattered outwards, spuming seawater. Every door on the landing was rattling - I surged past them toward the Hall’s heart. Wood splinters and hectic rain spiralled in the air. Curtains flogged at the walls like the capes of sorcerers. Corners of the house were overlapping with a kind of heaven.

  The reading room door was flying open and closed. With each flap the light poured out, streaking through my head with the speed of an idea. The room was like the inside of a daylight bulb. Slamming inside, I stood in an atmosphere torrid with human sparks. Books and paper blurflapped across the circular room, rushing up the chimney. Whole shelves lit up like neon and faded to ash, blowing away. Fluxes of intertextuality pinned me to the wall. There was one shelf left and finally a single book. Swirling fireflies came to a point and fired a ribbon of lightning into the empty volume.

  The storm immediately abated. I hadn’t any skin. Even my DNA was bruised. I felt as heavy as kerosene. In a shadowy corner lay a book, like an overripe apple. I went slowly over and picked it up. The blank volume had been filled with words. The tone was toxic and casual. The title was Bigot Hall.

  The Hall was empty. I checked out the foundry, finding the furnace full of clinkers and white powder. An abandoned ignition drill leaned against the battery press. You never know what you’ve got till it’s gone - even the headache I had suffered unknowingly since the moment of my birth now abruptly disappeared.

  It wasn’t the same without the sudden shots and incoherent yelling. I sat for hours waiting. I sat at Father’s drawingboard waiting for someone to rebuke me. I lay in Adrienne’s bed clutching a manacle, shackling myself accidentally and cursing in the quiet house. I leafed through the book, reading about the others and becoming obsessed with the white spaces. I felt certain I should fill them. My every move and thought was precarious. I was halfway there, like a body lying halfway through a door. They were calling like sanity.

  There ended the happiest and most conventional phase of my life.

  Steve Aylett is the author of Novahead, Slaughtermatic, The Crime Studio, Bigot Hall, The Inflatable Volunteer, Toxicology, Atom, Shamanspace, The Complete Accomplice, the Tao Te Jinx, Fain the Sorcerer, And Your Point Is?, Smithereens, Rebel at the End of Time and LINT. He also created the comics The Caterer, Get That Thing Away From Me and Johnny Viable, and LINT THE MOVIE.

  www.steveaylett.com

  Table of Contents

  BANISHMENT

  DOCUMENT

  DENIAL

  SHADOW

  SO WHAT

  NANNY JACK

  VIOLENT ACTING OUT

  ISLAND

  SKELETON CREW

  STAGE

  LIAR

  MISTER HIERONYMUS

  THUMPING DOUGH

  CORTEXKISS

  POD

  DEMOLITION

  HOSPITALITY

  HA BLOODY HA

  ENVY OF THE WORLD

  THE PICTURE OF UNCLE SNAP

  METAL BOX

  ITCHES IN THE SKY

  FATHER SON

  FACE VALUE

  BRAINFOLD

  MANDIBLE

  RISE

  HAZE

  ONCE UPON A TIME

  WHITE SPACE