Bigot Hall (3 page)

Adrienne found that deja vu could be induced by arranging to have a condescending moron tell her something she already knew. ‘What’s the use of that?’ I asked, threading small predators into my hat and snapping the line.

She explained that the phantom events we recall during deja vu are enclosed in free-floating etheric bubbles squeezed off from the conscious time-stream whenever our time is wasted by vapid louts. She stated that some people had almost an entire lifetime stored up in deja vu timespace to compensate for an existence of abuse and distraction at the hands of the complacent. This much I already understood, and underwent a peculiar feeling of deja vu. But when Adrienne began to describe the fun of accessing and exploiting these auxiliary time nodes, the notion began seeping through the pale foliations of my brain. If several hundred deja vu experiences were lined up in a row and experienced as a seamless stream it would be akin to a clusterbursting hallucination. Whole months of wasted time would be given back to us in a single hit.

Me and Adrienne trooped off to Snapper’s tree and called up. ‘Can we come in, Uncle Snap?’

A shutter opened and Snapper’s vermilion face appeared. ‘A man’s home is his castle, you bastards!’ he yelled. The statement was null and void because although true of Snapper’s home it was untrue of those without defensive artillery.

‘You’re a bundle of nerves, Uncle.’

‘So are we all when our muscle and bones are removed!’

True and obvious, his remark roared us back to the moment at which it had first occurred to us. Adrienne had further to travel, being older, but we seemed to arrive almost instantly at a moment shortly before birth. The sensation lasted just a few seconds but it proved we were onto something.

Ofcourse we couldn’t sit around provoking the drab from Snapper all day - we needed a means of drip-feeding retrogressive data at a steady and constant rate. I happened upon a Hemingway volume in the reading room and found it was perfect. At no point was there the risk of being jarred back into realtime by a new idea - the only problem was that once in deja vu timespace we would probably stop reading. So we asked Professor Leap to read the book into his tape recorder. Sitting in Adrienne’s sanctuary room, we prepared ourselves and switched on the machine.

It was better than we expected. Some of the ideas went beyond the obvious into a kind of homicidal vacuum. I saw a riotous play of lights on my skullwall as the crucifying boredom ricocheted me out of the timestream. In what seemed like seconds I re-experienced the first few seconds of life and all of the author’s ideas, then I was accelerating through a starfield of polymesmeric beauty. Skimming blurseas of red gold and deep flaring gardens, we were thrown across a sky, our shadows darting over the architecture of clouds which were soon streaking into smears. Huge tidal blurs were gashing wounds in space. Half my short life hit me like a thump in the chest as I passed through the sky, making it blink. For an instant, white space was speckled with black stars. I was learning and forgetting at a blur. I lost my body like a broken fingernail. The sparking pattern of passing stars resolved into a white revolving web and then into a sun which was everywhere. The universe opened like a flower, and we were gone. A billion miles below, the self-evident scrapped and sizzled like incinerating trash.

My eyes opened to the room and Adrienne’s dazed, moon-pale face as the tape crackled and ended.

‘Death,’ my Father boomed, ‘cancels everything but truth, then buries us in uncomfortable trousers and no underwear.’ Nanny Jack kept death at bay by wielding her own scythe. She was a disquieting, chitin-hardened grandmother but she was all we had - I daresay on balance she was less spooky than a skeleton at a harpsichord.

But I’d be kidding if I were to deny the legacy of spine-igniting frights and traumas she bequeathed to the sensitive among us. Garping like a lizard, wilfully rattling, falling monumentally from casually-opened cupboards - these were the ways Nanny Jack made it known that she loved us. ‘I wouldn’t like to bump into her while stumbling drunk in a cat cemetery,’ said Uncle Snapper on one occasion, unaware that Nanny Jack was standing behind him. That evening shrill screams echoed from the treehouse and in the morning a pasty Snapper denied unbidden that he had been ‘dreaming of a thousand spiders’.

Nanny Jack said nothing at this or any other time - though on one occasion she gripped my arm, leant in close and made a sound like the hollow hiss in a conch shell. When Mother told bedtime tales of a bogeyman which gathered boys to heaven by means of a hatchet I merely yawned. ‘Well whatever it is,’ I said, stretching, ‘it can’t be any more scary than Nan.’ Mother tried to be angry but in truth Nanny Jack inspired in us all a kind of elemental terror. When she stood on the top stair, the shadow thrown on the landing wall was the spitting image of a praying mantis.

When Professor Leap the lodger laid eyes on this, he locked himself away and finally emerged with a disturbing theory. ‘Insects can camouflage themselves to look like leaves, branches and so forth,’ he whispered urgently in the kitchen. ‘Why not as an elderly relative?’

And seeing Nanny Jack’s beaked face at the window, he shrieked hoarsely and ran.

‘Has anyone ever seen her walk from place to place?’ muttered Snapper at another time, having called a conference behind the locked cellar door. He stood pop-eyed, breathing through his mouth. ‘Doesn’t she just seem to
be
in one place or another?’

Professor Leap leaned in under the bare lightbulb and expressed the view that she could flit about incredibly fast like a trapdoor spider. ‘Does she ever eat?’

I spoke of the time I interrupted her eating coal out of the grate and how she had merely turned and snickered.

‘She’s dead,’ said Professor Leap, ‘petrified like a log. Including her behaviour.’

‘You’re talking about my mother-in-law,’ said Father, nodding thoughtfully.

‘Someone should ask her point-blank about it,’ stated Adrienne, and we all felt a cloying fear.

‘All she needs,’ said Snapper quietly, ‘is a priest to lock the grass over her head.’

Before we could harpoon him to a stop, Snapper was leaning on a spade in the light of an electrical storm and admiring a gravestone surmounted by a winged skull. ‘If that doesn’t provoke a reaction,’ he said, ‘I’ll be a happy man.’

But Nanny Jack did react. By morning there was a clean hole in the gravetop and Snapper could not be coaxed from his tree - a trail of roots and earth had been trodden through the Hall. Professor Leap was jubilant. ‘Tracks!’ He pointed like a vindicated explorer. ‘Unbroken! From here’ - the back door – ‘to here.’ The door of her room. Barely breathing, I put my ear to the oak panel and heard a rasping as of papery wings.

‘Dead indeed,’ said Father, uncertain and embarrassed.

‘We have proved that she doesn’t dart like a spider,’ said Leap, aglow. ‘And that’s a start.’

I almost spoke of the sound I had heard through Nan’s door but was prevented by the sudden entry of Uncle Snap with the keys to an industrial earthmover.

From then on we attempted to bury Nan pretty regularly - it was a family tradition. Needless to say we were unsuccessful and contracted a strange respect for our dormant elder. She would be gone the minute the hole was dug and be tracked down to the boisterous centre of a smoky saloon bar, or would begin to mime at the last moment, scaring us all. We could not conceal our admiration when a doctor who had called to sedate Snapper happened to seek a pulse in Nan’s wrist and declared her dead, only to collapse of a seizure when she started to cackle. Our warmest moments of togetherness were those of Nan’s return, when the entire household would gather nightshirted at the top of the stairs, watching the mantis shadow draw across the lower hall.

After one of these occasions, I listened again at her door and heard the scratchy flurring of paper. The following day, entering the room for the first time, I felt a paralysing anxiety. The furniture looked as if it could sting. What if I was discovered? Everything took on a demonic aspect. A giant book lay open on a table like a brooding moth. There was an inkwell and a quill. I frilled the pages - each bore the same, elegantly written words. ‘Terror and dread, the claws of the soul - hang on for dear life.’

‘Coming to the circus, laughing boy?’

‘Not while I live.’

Why was I so surly as a child? On this occasion I was in the hothouse watering the brain tumours. The moment Snapper said ‘circus’ I was propelled like a crash dummy to an earlier year when I had run away to that establishment like the kid I was. Always of a serious disposition, I was also possessed of a resentment at having to grow while the world was losing its flavour. What little I’d surmised of it from a bedroom full of meathooks had led me to believe the last bastion of colour and integrity was sheltered by the big top. So before anyone noticed my absence I was sat in the audience watching a parade of cages circle the ring.

Bernard the Living Merchant. Old Scaly Gorgon. Terry the Human Constable. These are the sights I saw. I didn’t know what other circuses were like but this one was teeming with psychotics. Gabbling men in makeup riding round and round on bicycles which were evidently too small for them. Git in a leotard, biffing along a high-tension wire. Bloke dressed as the Joker, telling us everything was dangerous and real. As if I of all people didn’t know. One fool struggled into a giant cannon - it was clear he had a deathwish and wasn’t waiting for the gods to deliver. Nevertheless he gave a yell of surprise as he flew through the air. Meanwhile someone stepped into a cage with a lion. For me a lion is like any other situation - if you’re going to whip it and push it away with a chair, why get involved in the first place? In my opinion the bloke was just doing it for show.

The true horrors, however, were the clowns. Ashen and demented, they shambled out of the wings like victims of an over-zealous bloodbank. Only the coldest of souls could watch their exploits without screaming. Car crashes, drownings, fires - you name it. Even the laughter was exaggerated. Some of them were carried off on stretchers which collapsed. The entire affair was meaningless, the stuff of nightmares. I had to get out.

So I was recovering outside when the tent sheet flapped like the blowing gown of an overworked surgeon and a strange, dilated clown lumbered out, hollering with laughter. It appeared that the fiend’s trousers were filled with liquid. ‘Hello, spuddling,’ he roared. I remember I sank my teeth into his belly and a damburst of water flooded out, shrivelling the clown as he tried to staunch the flow. And to think I had considered joining these people.

Within minutes I was legging it through a maze of trailers and cages, pursued by a caterwauling bedlam of circus freaks. A clown on stilts told the rest where I was. I opened a trailer door, bursting in on a naked clown and a seal. Backing out, I overturned a trunk which vomited an avalanche of Masonic regalia. I set off through the animal boxes, panting steam and flipping catches as I went, and hearing screams behind me. If I hadn’t the presence of mind to shove a juggler from a unicycle, would I be here today? Several clowns were injured by lions, a fact I have spent my life trying to regret. And arriving home, I found I had not been missed. I dismissed the episode as I would a slave.

Until Snapper entered the hothouse to tell me the circus was in town. I had no desire to get back on the horse and re-endure this particular trauma. If lightning doesn’t strike twice we can dance in a storm in iron underwear. But Adrienne said it would be therapeutic and I allowed her to influence me. Off we all went to the circus.

Part of the reason was to get rid of our dog, Nelson, whose peculiarities were causing distress and would yield more money than war as a circus attraction. So while the others were elsewhere accosting the manager, me and my friend Billy Verlag were watching caged freaks circle the ring and I knew something was very wrong. Bernard the Living Merchant. Terry the Human Constable. And the clowns - here they were to remind us life was quaint and temporary. Thanks.

Billy was the only village kid who ever ventured onto the Hall grounds, being the only boy small and spherical enough for the other kids to boot over the perimeter wall. I think he looked up to me because I had told him about Hume’s principle of unverified causality - that B follows A does not prove that A caused B. He had actually used this to get away with tripping an old woman. Now he regarded the book I was holding. ‘What’s that?’

‘Dostoevsky.’

‘Can I have a go?’

I handed him the book, my eyes on the cavorting clowns. They were looking horribly familiar - because they were the same ones as before. It was the same circus. And at that instant, they saw me. Miniature cars squealed to a halt. Painted faces stared out of a madman’s universe. The ringmaster’s whip wrapped around my neck and, in an explosion of popcorn, I was dragged like a cur into the ring. Elephants were circling and I had to roll to avoid being trampled as the ringmaster ordered the clowns to ‘terminate’ me - that was the word he used. I pushed a clown out of its miniature car and led the others a merry dance until I crashed into a barrel and they pounced, two clowns holding me by the arms while a third beat the bejesus out of me. The audience loved this. Maybe they thought I was a midget. The applause was deafening as I was loaded into the cannon, which stank of gunpowder. I don’t remember anything between then and the moment I awoke in an adjoining field. Everything was totally unreal - I felt like a statistic.

When the others got home with Nelson in tow they asked me where I’d disappeared to. It turns out Billy Verlag had been so absorbed in
The Idiot
he hadn’t noticed my ordeal - thought I’d gone for a slash or something. Even Adrienne was sceptical. What about the bruises?

A wound heals slower than a kiss. When I’m advised to cheer up because it may never happen I’m reminded that it has and may again. The most amusing thing about a pantomime horse is the necessity of having to shoot it twice. That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.