Bigot Hall (6 page)

In fact there was a real bogeyman which my family had been seeing for generations and which they called Mister Hieronymus. Supposedly it appeared at moments of dangerous portent, such as my own birth - everyone asserted Hieronymus had delivered me. Its blurred image appears in a murky sepia-tint of my great grandfather, who is sat blithe on a bicycle - behind him a gaunt figure stands like a human pterodactyl.

But the first encounter I recall was caused by Professor Leap. He was culturing a sample of his nerves and the result was a tangle of microthin wires like an industrial art exhibit. It almost became potbound and Leap removed it to the hothouse, where he had set up a nutrient vat. ‘No sense experimenting with nerves or anything else when they’re in my body,’ he explained, flushed with laughter. ‘But these beauties? Look at ’em!’

This was all fine and dandy until he decided to run a nerve bundle from the hothouse, across the yard and into his arm. ‘This way,’ he said, bedding down in the dining room, ‘I can feel things when I’m not even there.’ We told him he wouldn’t feel anything but the tickle of greenfly but he didn’t care - he liked the idea of having a conscious process occurring outside of his body.

The experiment was carried out at night to reduce the likelihood of someone kicking through the nerve lead. But it seemed the family phantom was never far from the Hall - it blundered into the hothouse and became entangled, making itself known like a chicken snagged on a barbed-wire fence. Professor Leap was shot through with horror vibes, his hair turning instantly white. Mister Hieronymus was wired into his system, filling him with visions of spinelight, subterranean scabgardens and yellow voltaic pain. Leap saw children lost spectacularly in nursery forges. Hieronymus thrashed in the nerve net, firing images of blown ghost and the unravelling dead. Leap yanked the suture-plug from his arm and lay trembling, veins hammering like fists.

In the morning the snow-haired Leap couldn’t stop shaking. He pointed at a window and said he saw tatters of devil flapping there. Snapper was unsympathetic and appalled. ‘This nerve farm of yours has served as a betsy lamp – we’ll have moaning glowheads converging on us from miles around.
God
almighty!’

‘Mind you,’ began Father.

‘Don’t
encourage
him!’ yelled Snapper, astonished and exasperated.

The dense mesh in the hothouse had been warped by the intrusion. ‘What if it’s still in there?’ whispered Leap, trembling. ‘I daren’t plug in again.’

‘This ganglia should be destroyed by fire,’ bellowed Snapper. ‘Verger, back me up on this -
nerves
?’

The Verger pulled up the hood of his robe, his face extinguishing in shadow.

‘Well I for one think it’s the spice,’ I said, barely registering Adrienne’s slow, stern, meaningful shake of the head. ‘And I’ll plug into this mess like the fierce one I am.’

‘There’s no guarantee my nerves won’t cause a rejection,’ said Leap eagerly.

‘Won’t be the first time, Leap,’ said Father amiably, and we all laughed.

All except Snapper, who couldn’t believe what I can only describe as his ears. ‘You can joke about this eh? You can stand and roar. Well by god you’ll know the full extent when the Artless Dodger here has a meeting of minds. He may have been delivered by the bastard but a special relationship? With that thing?’

I really didn’t know what I was doing - mainlining a spectre isn’t wise. But I’d been having end-of-the-world dreams since I was three - if anyone could take it, I could. Hooked into the nerve cable I lay awake in a sleeping bag. ‘Break a leg, laughing boy,’ said Father, going off to bed. ‘And take a gander at the marrow if you get a chance - looks like pepperoni.’

Hours passed like night clouds. I had become forgetful and sleepy. Then the atmosphere shifted. There was a gust of wind - a door slammed like a menu being returned to a waiter. I was approaching the jump ledge of Hieronymus’s sidelong world. The room exploded in my face. I suppose being young I was more tolerant of having my brain torn like a paper bag and after a few preliminary horrors I was sat on the shore of an electrocutive river, my body anchored to the land by a muscle web reminiscent of melted pizza string. Mister Hieronymus was beside me and believe me it was weird. Brows like shoulderblades. Sternum and ribspread like a crab’s underside. Soul flooded with poison. ‘That beak of yours,’ I said and, realising I had been whispering, bellowed as though at a foreigner. ‘That beak of yours. Iconoclastic. Max Ernst.
Mythological Woman
. I like it.’

‘Many have,’ it said, ‘and lived.’

‘Broken skin,’ I said. ‘Nice one.’

‘Laughing boy, we go back a long way - I delivered you. And I was worried when the Professor felt willing to use you for his experiment - he has a forehead like a dirigible and for a few bob he’d flog his aunt and shadow. But I know how stubborn you are so we may as well get this over with.’

‘What’s the deal?’

‘Things occurring behind the freakshow scenes of the Hall. Things in which you are not included.’

‘You mean Nan’s funerals? I’m going to the next one though I don’t care to – I’ve told them in every bloody language but improvisational mime.’

‘I know - but it’s not that. I daresay it’ll cause a rift but I’ll be judged by god and my peers - none of whose existence I have been able to verify. Fact is, laughing boy, the Hall is building a quantum of energy to be released subsequently in an audacious crescendo. Pulling out the stops as it were. Getting uncomfortable?’

Every atom of the landscape hurt - each man has his share of pain but searing agony smacks of decadence. ‘I want to hear it.’

‘So we have a transcendence operation,’ it continued. I realised that it was fishing - a thread trailed from the high-voltage river into Hieronymus’s mouth and it was hauling in the line by swallowing periodically. Whatever it had caught was nearing the surface. ‘Live and let live, laughing boy. Keep your head down if you have to dig a hole to do so. You sense your own importance far beyond the human range. Life’s a carousel with skeleton horses. And you’re aware the motivating force behind the universe is –’

A burst of static and I was back in the dining room - Snapper stood before me with a flaming torch in one hand and the pulled plug in the other. Behind him was a fiery glow. ‘If god wanted us to cultivate our nerves,’ he roared, ‘he would have told us not to.’

I pushed past him and he followed across the yard. The hothouse was a halloweenhead. Windows popped and the roof exploded, flames belching through. Inside, nerves curled and burnt like nettles.

Occasions of trial and forbearance for one and all were the visits from Father’s vexingly exuberant cousin, Roger Lang. Sometimes when speaking of him, Father would become uncharacteristically pop-eyed and begin strangling empty air. I remember one occasion when Roger turned up yelling like Santa and expecting us to respond. Me and Adrienne crept halfway down the stairs and saw him shouting toward Father in the hallway. ‘Good heavens old man, this place of yours is a gothic nightmare. A few ornamental fiends and Bob’s your uncle. Speaking of which.’ And he tore the wrapping from a huge mounted moose-head at which Father stared in appalled astonishment.

‘A cow.’

‘I prefer to think of it as a moose, old fellow - and the best of its type I’ve ever come across. Quite a find really. It’s been sat on a barrel in an unsuccessful fruiterers for the last six years and the shopkeeper was arrested the other week for going mad - said the blessed thing kept shouting at him and trying to run things. In fine condition though. Name’s Ramone. Eyes are quartz crystal, and those antlers are tough enough to swing on. I believe it even salivates.’

Father was doubtful. ‘Yes, well the benefits of having a dribbling wildebeest forever mournfully regarding one are dubious at the best of times.’

Lang looked at Father as though at a madman. ‘Dubious? Why the benefits my dear fellow are
legion
. I’ll hang it on the hook here, shall I?’

‘If you have strong feelings on the matter.’

Lang placed the bleak-featured head on the hallway wall. ‘Now - where are those brats of yours? There they are - Alice and the Little Prince!’

‘That animal head is rotting from the inside,’ I stated, walking solemnly down.

‘Like Roger’s principles,’ stated Adrienne, following after.

‘Antlers like radar,’ I muttered.

‘Perhaps it’ll whisper the racing results,’ muttered Adrienne.

‘Crack your face, you two,’ chortled Roger like a toytown mayor. ‘You’ve got to laugh otherwise you’ll cry.’

‘I see no impediment to doing both at once,’ said Adrienne, looking expressionlessly up at the moose-head. Then she turned, giving Roger a scornful glance, and walked back upstairs.

‘Did it relinquish its bonce by choice?’ I asked, regarding the head.

‘Ha, ha - nice one, Scooter,’ he laughed, fuzzing my hair.

‘Don’t
ever
,’ I emphasised murderously, ‘call me Scooter again.’ And I marched away.

Roger took a spare room and toured the house like a stranger. His routine rejection of the facts allowed him to be surprised by the same ones repeatedly. ‘Listen old man,’ he said to Father, pouring port, ‘I’ve just been in the west wing - entered a room back there and interrupted a nun in a welding mask. What’s the story?’

‘You know very well what the story is, Roger,’ said Father tiredly. ‘They bother no one.’

‘D’you mean to say you countenance these extraordinary practices?’

Father sighed, his eyes filming over.

The moose was beginning to salivate, forming a pool on the carpet like the slime of a snail. Snapper took Father aside and whispered urgently. ‘We can’t tolerate a gobbing mammal like this all day every day. It’ll start pursing its lips - expressing itself. It’ll come alive and terrorize the creatures which
belong
here.’

‘It’s a gift, brother.’

‘Roger’s a hound in all but name,’ said Snapper. He kicked at the slime. ‘Look at this. He’d harness a wren to pull a houseboat. Get rid of him, brother.’

‘Secret assignations?’ smiled Lang, appearing in the hallway, and Snapper made a brisk exit. Lang idled at the moose-head, admiring it as Father stood awkwardly by. ‘A curious point which you will scarcely believe is that this artefact requires occasional feeding.’

‘How,’ asked Father, ‘occasional?’

‘Only once an hour, old soak,’ beamed Roger. ‘With grain. Let’s take a turn round the grounds and I’ll state my plan.’

‘The whole front area,’ Lang announced as he and Father strolled in the twilight, ‘will be given over to crates of trash. The house itself will be coated in an industrial laminate, and will glint like a moonbathing slug. Below is the wood, full of frenzied wildlife - this area I shall burn to ashes, and pave over with a giant likeness of my own chin, viewable from this hill. Everything from the far shore to the perimeter will be used for sport.’

‘Sport?’ mumbled Father as if in a dream, seeing only moonlight and the fine trace of shadow trees.

‘Windsurfing old boy, sailing - anything where acrobatic youngsters wear bright clobber. This soil-infested mire just isn’t you.’

Normally the soul of patience, Father found his benevolent stability giving way to a contained rage.

In the hallway the next morning, Snapper was stuffing handfuls of grain into the moose’s mouth and sobbing with the stress of its demands.

‘Glad you told me to get into the architects’ lark, old man,’ said Roger gustily in the drawing room, helping himself to the contents of the drinks cabinet. Father had once remarked offhand that the day complacent, blinkered louts like Roger Lang got into the architects’ game, the human spirit would fade like an ember. Roger had taken this as an archaically-phrased nugget of advice. ‘Only last week I finished punching a hole in that gaff on the coast you designed - turned it into a hypermart and a bowling alley.’

‘The cottage?’

‘Took some doing,’ said Roger, swallowing port and gesturing at the wall. ‘You’ll want to knock this through. When do you want it done?’

‘When hell freezes over.’

‘I sense resistance.’

‘So did the Nazis.’

‘Ha, ha - calm down old boy - give us a smile.’

‘Drop dead and I’ll laugh.’

‘Ha, ha, ha - you slay me.’

‘I will.’

‘Ha, ha, ha.’

‘And here’s the knife I’ll do it with you bastard.’

‘Ha, ha, ha.’

But Roger’s blithe, intimidating jollity confounded our efforts at homicide. He even made vapid remarks in his sleep. One night Snapper sneaked in and pressed a pillow over Lang’s face, breaking his nose. Another time Mother caught him offguard and whapped him round the face with a trout. I myself interrupted a dismal coin trick by belting him in the belly with a crowbar. And all he could ever do was forgive us.

Father was knelt on the floor shaving his shadow when he heard a rumpus and went into the hallway. Uncle Burst had skidded in the phlegm, hit the ceiling and woken up - Snapper was having to keep him at bay with wild swings of a cargo hook. ‘I’ve every right to walk with your legs,’ Burst was shouting, and Snapper’s strained, tear-rashed face was a silent plea for release.

Father found he didn’t have to enter the drawing room to address his cousin - there was a hole in the wall through which Roger could be seen leaning cheerfully on a sledgehammer. ‘Spawn of
hell
!’ gasped Father.

‘So am I, if it’s any consolation.’

Father stepped swiftly back and forth through the gap. ‘Why, Roger,
why
?’

‘A bit of a joke, that’s all.’

‘The bit that isn’t funny,’ Father emphasised, and Roger laughed good-naturedly. Father’s eyes were red as stop signs. ‘Not only have you hung up a moose’s face for the purposes of being crammed with grain but you’ve enraged the nuns with your arrogance and flooded the hallway with bolus - get out Roger before I provide the last sensation you will ever know.’

Roger’s stance and expression altered not atall.

‘Get out, get
out
!’

‘Are you alright, old boy?’ asked Roger, pouring himself a drink.

‘Get out of here you bloodyminded, oblivious moron!’

‘You’ve lost me, old man,’ said Roger, bewildered and amicable.

‘I wish to Christ I could,’ grated Father, convulsively grasping at a piece of his own head. ‘How can I make you understand, Roger - I hate you. I hate you and I want you to go away.’

‘Hate me?’ Roger smirked. ‘Not old Roger Lang.’

‘Yes, Roger, hate - we
all
do. I’ll
kill
you, Roger - leave
now
.’ He started shoving him away, at which Roger was affably perplexed. Father was on the edge of sobbing. ‘Get
out
, Roger!’

‘Something up, old boy?’

‘Get out you bastard!’

Roger frowned and shrugged with a faintly amused incomprehension.

‘Get out, get
out
!’ choked Father, slugging Roger in the gut and feeling progressively feebler and less effective. Roger sipped his drink and raised his eyebrows.

Four hours later, Roger had been baited as far as the front doorway, in which he stood gazing mildly at the grounds. ‘Lawn could do with a burn, old fellow,’ he remarked, gesturing with his glass. Father was trying to wedge him out with a plank of wood. Roger stood like a rock as Father pushed at his back, legs treadling as though on an exercise bike. Father fired an Elizabethan cannonball which shuttle-gloved upward from the curvature of Roger’s arse-groove and paused momentarily in mid-air before dropping through the stairs like a meteorite. Finally Father, Snapper and poor Mr Cannon ran the length of the hallway with a battering ram the inner rings of which indicated an age of a hundred-and-twenty years.

Late in the afternoon, me and Adrienne heard the snarling of a tractor and peered out from her high sanctuary window. Father was perched stern and resolved as he trundled forward, bulldozing Roger across the lawn with a haystack-lift. As they disappeared through the gate Roger was chatting, sipping delicately from a port glass and hailing the heavens with inaudible laughter.