Bigot Hall (11 page)

Snapper missed his medication and started seeing itches in the sky. ‘Truth is as small as an itch,’ he had said that morning and we should have been alarmed. Now he was utterly incoherent, springing over hedges yelling gibberish which two years later he patiently explained as meaning ‘I’d give my weight in snails to know what’s going on around here.’ He entered the sitting room covered in ferns and wearing a chrome helmet. He was laughing like Lamb at Hazlitt’s wedding as he described the web-like constellations of truth and the inevitable collapse and infernal damnation of the universe.

‘Informal did he say?’ asked Leap.

‘Infernal,’ said Father, reading the paper.

‘I thought he said informal too,’ I said cheerfully, stroking a South European wolf spider.

‘Ofcourse it’ll be in
formal
!’ bellowed Snapper, transfigured with rage. He swiped up a chestnut pan and slammed it down on the spider, which now resembled a discarded glove.

‘You utter bastard,’ I said, staring. I had been training the spider to form part of an alarm-clock mechanism and everything had been just fine. ‘You did that deliberately.’

Snap was hooting with laughter.

‘I hope you’re proud of yourself,’ said Leap. ‘After all the boy’s work. Those of us who give a damn are of the opinion that you’re put together with glue. Ribcage like a mantrap. This resentful malice of yours. Perhaps I shouldn’t mention it at this point but when viewed through an obverse gravitational lens you appear to have the face of a king prawn.’

‘I know it but what about the droog?’ shouted Snapper, pointing at me. ‘His pockets are full of tiny bones!’

‘Nonsense,’ I said quickly.

‘Oh yes, brother,’ shouted Snap. ‘It’s incredibly obvious. And I’m disappointed you found it necessary to produce such truculent and abrasive offspring.’

‘Oh I don’t know,’ said Father with an air of judicious consideration. ‘Sheets stretch in transformation, a new creature brims a little amid its claws – doesn’t matter in the long run.’

‘Are you quite
sure
it doesn’t?’ asked Leap, tortuously aghast, and turned to look at me with a new and appalled understanding.

‘I’m completely informed about everything,’ Snapper was saying imperatively, ‘and the beauty of it is I’m reluctant to share.’ He went on at length about badgers and hope, concluding with the statement that he’d scribble down certain metaphysical truths and gloat over them privately till the cows came home. ‘Meanwhile the lot of you will fade and die,’ he said and, hollering with laughter, bounded from the room.

Two days later he sat up in bed and clutched his temples. ‘Have I been stroked with a bone saw?’ he asked.

‘Snap?’ said Father, looking in. ‘Up at last. Lost your marbles, brother. Been pointing at Caesar for three days. Talking about the facts.’

‘I remember now - or some of it. Thought I was ill and sat here idle for half a lifetime. Kicking through grapes to the lavatory. Even read
Five Weeks in a Balloon
.’

‘That was just yesterday, brother. Before that you were padlocking birds to branches. Sat naked playing a bassoon. Went to bat for the big issues.’

‘Doesn’t sound like me. Didn’t shoot anyone?’

‘Not a soul, brother - strangest part of the whole affair. How you feeling?’

‘Like a dog in amber,’ Snapper croaked. ‘And what’s all this about the facts?’

Father explained Snapper’s plan to record the cosmic truths and Snapper gave a snort of disbelief. ‘What else did I do? Flatten the boy’s spider with a chestnut pan?’ Failing to notice Father’s mournful look, he roared with hilarity.

When Snapper shot a peaceful dove from an awning we knew he had recovered, but each of us harboured a strange and secret concern. Snap’s brain was a wasteland shunned by its owner. Could such a hulking grotesque change fundamentally for even a moment? It’s said god blathers profundities to village idiots - Snap may have gained temporary access to these higher levels of incompetence during the fugue state. Though we rarely discussed it, we were all gung-ho for new information - the present circumstance was a lesson in that it first required us to confess we never got any. This took a rare courage.

Adrienne bit into a stick of celery. ‘I’m for knocking him senseless,’ she vouched, crunching, ‘till he has another fit and spills the beans. If he knows anything of use we’ll be sandboys - if not we’ll be as pig ignorant as before.’

Father climbed into the treehouse, where Snapper was inspecting the discarded skeleton of a fly. ‘I think I speak for us all when I say we’d like to know just what the hell you think you’ve been doing these last few days.’

‘I’ve told you brother,’ spat Snap, whacking the fly with a mallet. ‘Can’t remember.’

‘But brother,’ said Father, looking with distaste at a fossilised starfruit. ‘What happened to you was a once-in-a-lifetime experience, like being shot and falling from a wrought-iron balcony. Did you find nothing here? No note or message?’

‘All I found was a hopelessly blurred photograph of a sobbing clown.’

It seemed the truth had been lost like a poodle in a riptide. ‘So you’ve been amusing yourself at our expense,’ said Father. ‘To salvage anything of worth we’ll have to retrace your sinister footsteps from that moment to this. Now I’m getting out of here - these conversations have been fatal to sturdier men.’

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 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.’