Bigot Hall (2 page)

Chairman Mao said ‘My enemy’s enemy is my friend.’ The friends he made this way were inevitably lost by the corresponding principle that ‘My friend’s friend is my enemy.’ The fractal shifts generated by the two principles kept Mao’s relationships in a swirl-state of constant and luridly violent flux. I could draw parallels between this and the environment of my youth which would make your nostrils flare.

The Hall was a fertile chaos of bellowing sociopaths, arc-welding nuns and sudden combat. Rarely was anything done without a scream. My earliest memory is of Snap throwing a lobster into a bonfire and cursing as the creature exploded. I’m the first to admit the violence lacked texture but it was leavened with a quality of ferocious disregard. Ask to use the phone and you’d be met with a dead stare. We once detained a postman for eight months by locking him in the cellar and telling him he knew why. I live in amazement that I did not mature to stagger bearded in the streets, baying evangelically at strangers. Childhood was a losing battle to remain ignorant in the face of pulse-browed maniacs, shrieking chimps, arrogant liars, knife-fights, angry swans, a grandmother you’d swerve to hit and a spaniel whom everyone mysteriously asserted was ‘more than a mere dog’. I once dredged an old, streaming skull from the lake and figured a thing of that size and shape would effortlessly plug the fossil gap. I cut it in half with a hacksaw and found there was no brain cavity - only recurring skulls, one inside another like the layers of an onion. But it just turned out to be some aunt or other.

I had always been troubled that my ancestors did not go back in sequence – a family tree hung in the boiler room seemed to represent the ricochet path of a bullet. I took this to Professor Leap, who was bashing a guppy against a drystone wall. ‘Not in sequence, you say?’ He frowned at the diagram. ‘You’re at the top,’ he said. ‘It’s simply drawn upside down.’ But Adrienne, who was only four years my senior, was near the middle, Father was at the base, Nan was near the top and Professor Leap himself - a lodger unrelated to the family - appeared to be the mother of them all.

Billy Verlag, a barrel-like boy from the village, said the chart was an origami sheet with fold-guides, and twisted it into the shape of a piece of trash. He looked up at me with a ruddy face, a nose which contained his brain and a smile which contained my fist.

‘An astronomical starmap, perhaps?’ stated Father, raising his eyebrows.

‘What kind of simple-minded lout of an astronomer would name a star
Leap
for god’s sake, or
Jack
?’

‘Your great grandfather was just such a man - the telescope in your sister’s sanctuary belonged to him.’ And he pointed at the wall. ‘There is a daguerreotype of that venerable gentleman strangling what I can only describe as a hen.’

The wall was, in fact, bare.

I showed Adrienne the document. ‘Text and line,’ she said. ‘Quite clearly it’s a work of conceptual art.’

‘What does that mean?’

‘That you can throw it away.’

‘Take a butchers at this, Verger,’ I said to the Verger, who was busy walloping a village dog about the muzzle.

‘What is it, boy?’ he roared, straightening up. ‘By god you’ve arrogance to burn!’

‘Found this in the steam room,’ I said, giving him the chart.

Viewing it, his eyes opened wide, then seemed to seal over with disdain. He regarded me through a visor of disapproval. ‘Oh what a tangled web we weave,’ he rumbled.

‘But you say that even if I’m just mowing the lawn,’ I complained. ‘What does it
represent
, Verger?’

‘What does it represent he says. Without a doubt and despite all I have tried to teach you, this here is a chart of who owes who money.’

‘Money?’ I said, frowning. ‘So I can afford a caulking hammer at long bloody last.’

‘The debt proceeds downward. You are at the top.’ He fixed me with a baleful eye. ‘And always will be.’

Poor Mr Cannon the lodger regarded the paper with a lively interest. ‘This is a floorplan, laughing boy, showing the relative positioning of our dungeons in the scorching deeps of hell. You and I will be able to yell abominations at eachother across the skull-littered hallway, our faces tear-rashed and demented. One thing at least to look forward to,’ he grinned.

I was getting desperate. In two rare moments of lucidity Uncle Burst stared at the paper and whispered the word ‘hex’ and then, late the following day, ‘evil spirits’.

Nanny Jack was propped like a dummy in the kitchen.

‘What do you make of this, old woman?’ I said, slapping the sheet onto the table before her.

Nanny Jack was unresponsive.

‘The paper, Nan!’ I shouted, stabbing a finger at the chart. ‘What does it say to you?’ Nan’s disquieting immobility continued unabated. ‘For god’s sake, Nan, give me some good news!’ I bellowed into her ear. ‘Am I talking to my
self
?’ And I collapsed into wracking sobs, hiding my face and ears against the tabletop.

It was during one of the household’s attempts to bury Nan - a tradition in which Uncle Snapper played a leading role while I was considered too young to participate - that I sat poring over the chart again. By now the document had taken on the enigmatic monumentalism of ancient scripture. It occurred to me that the only name missing was Snapper’s, and with time to spare before his return, I climbed into the creaking treehouse. Adjusting to the rocking of the floor and the ebb and flow of clattering furniture, I plucked a little book from a passing table. It was Snapper’s diary, a marker at the latest entry:

Today, laughing boy taunts me. But I do not give up! There I am in the living room when in he comes, parping on a bugle. Strutting like a feudal lord and talking about vertebrae as if they were the main event. Is this the behaviour of a respectful child? Or that of a glad and devious boy? You could lay track on his insolence. But the day will come when everyone will know me as I am. They’ll be stamping my features onto coins the size of manhole covers. God grant me the strength to do what’s necessary.

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.

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.

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 with 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