Bigot Hall (4 page)

I told Billy Verlag I intended to explore the island at the centre of the lake and that I’d need him for ballast. Of all the territory bought with my Father’s forged money the lake was the strangest. It was rumoured to contain jet-propelled herring and trout which could imitate your facial expressions. But the island was a mystery.

‘Don’t ask me to take you there,’ said Father. ‘You’ll only start looking at the sky in a funny way and beg to go for a drive.’

Mutinous with curiosity, I peered through the telescope in Adrienne’s attic but could make out only a few shrubs. ‘You don’t want to go there,’ said Adrienne, lazily swinging one long leg from her sleeping-hammock. ‘Especially with little Verlag. I went, and may never understand what I saw.’

That was enough for me. One afternoon when everyone was off burying Nan, Billy hurtled over the perimeter wall and we went immediately to the lake, pushing out on a wooden palette. ‘Charon the ferryman did this,’ I said, pushing at the raft-pole. ‘Demanded hard cash though he was clearly nothing more than a skeleton. Must have been
some
tissue clung in that skull of his.’

There was a scraping sound under the raft, which Billy instantly attributed to a sawfish dragging its nose across the hull. ‘Nonsense,’ I said, and peered into the water. The lake was infested with boss-eyed cartoon characters which ghosted up, stared like lost souls and dipped away again. Inbetween were swirling volume levels and swarms of seahorses with tiny training wheels.

‘What is it then?’ asked Billy fearfully.

‘You’re right,’ I said, punting again. ‘It
is
a sawfish.’

Our dodgy vessel was tipping alarmingly and we were only halfway across. ‘Slow down,’ sobbed Billy.

‘Don’t worry,’ I said. ‘There’s no prejudice against fat little blighters out here. I reckon these strange fish will take to you like pigs to garbage.’

Billy released acoustically garish screams and I was soon vaulting through hoops to comfort him.

‘Think of the pirates,’ I said, kicking an errant moray into the depths. ‘They used to drag out eachother’s innards and set them alight.’

Billy calmed down, wiping his eyes. ‘Why?’ he croaked, sniffing.

I shrugged. ‘To make everyone’s existence a living hell.’

Billy bawled in horror and misery as we pitched through a frothing maelstrom of disquieting critters. The water was now too deep for the staff and we had to paddle our hands in the water. I had begun to wish I had gone with the others to sling some turf over Nanny Jack - then the water shallowed out and Billy’s screams began to echo from the bank of the island. Reaching shore, we dragged the raft onto the mud and gazed around.

The island was about sixty foot square and covered in the dullest bushes I had ever seen. ‘So what?’ said Billy, breaking a branch and tossing it away impatiently.

I tripped over and swore in a temple language known only to Adrienne and myself - I had scattered pieces of a kid’s fort built from lollipop sticks. Looking closer I realised it was a tiny wooden fence, extending parallel with the shore. ‘Is this yours, Verlag?’ I demanded, pointing. Billy looked at the little broken wall, waiting for a thought as for the second coming. We followed the structure a way - it seemed to encircle the island - and Billy started gibbering with an unaccountable fear. I tried to calm him by talking about the great explorers but he saw only the danger in the enterprise. ‘Verlag,’ I said, ‘yours is a narrow range of experience and in the age of exploration that’s the spice. The American Indians discovered America every time they glanced up. The Chinese found the environment too abrasive for homes of gum and wafer, which as you know were the farcical materials they favoured at the time. The Icelanders liked the place so much they never told anyone about it. But somehow everyone stumbled into it at one time or another. When Columbus finally got there he was mistaken for a god because he was the only person on Earth the natives hadn’t met. No wonder he became obsessed with spuds and –’

‘Sh-sh-shut
up
, laughing boy,’ stammered Billy plaintively, and pointed at the undergrowth.

In the centre of the island, hidden amid greenery, was a miniature house.

It was the Hall, surrounded by bonsai trees, next to an inland pool representing the lake. Billy and me spent ages exploring this tiny landscape, which seemed perfect in every detail - the little structure I had kicked through was the perimeter wall.

The pool even had an imitation island in the middle. Splashing over and crouching down, I was not a little amazed to see that this small island, too, bore a model reproduction of the Hall and grounds. This Hall was the size of a matchbox, next to a lake the size of a plate. At this lake’s centre was an even smaller island.

I stood, looking around, and underwent a sensation of telescoping vertigo - the Hall stood in the distance, tiny as a matchbox. I was trembling like a leaf. Billy was at my side, frowning down at the island with unusual concentration - his expression grew strained as the idea ripened. We looked up at the sky as one, to see if giant boys were frowning down at us.

I asked for the magnifying glass which Billy used to start fires, and focused on the plate-sized lake, the thumb-sized island. I heard Billy snuffling as the fish-eye blur zoomed into focus on a satellite-picture of a mini-house, a droplet-lake and a dot-island. We stood up from this diabolical micro-circuit. I had arrived ready for anything but the inconceivable. At what scale were we? Was the Hall a model ending at the perimeter fence? Where was the real me? ‘What
level
is this?’ I demanded, my voice cracking, and we began the sort of synchronised scream which children can do with such ease. My skull shrieked through my skin, like the Munch painting of that idiot screaming on Hastings pier.

Bats out of hell, we paddled away from the island, casting fearful looks at the sky.

When Father found us huddling in a ditch under a tarpaulin sheet he was instantly apprised.

‘Oho,’ he said. ‘So you went to the island.’

‘Take us to the village, Father,’ I begged. ‘Is there anything outside the fence?’

He laughed amiably and said he’d just been in the village.

‘How did you know we went to the island?’ asked Billy, blowing his nose.

‘It’s obvious,’ he said, and I thought he was referring to our shuddering fright. But he said he knew it as soon as he got back and saw a huge hole in the perimeter wall, and a log which appeared to have been snapped in half and tossed aside by a giant.

Uncle Burst was no uncle but a tin-eared buffoon who quietly considered our table and food a sacrament to his grandeur. His presence was permanent and no one recalled how it had begun.

God alone knows what slobbering fiends inhabited the unexplored planet of his head - long silences obscured this aspect of his personality. But on occasion he would look up, his face displaying a wily and distorted power. With the best will in the world we could not ignore Burst’s remarks at these times. His notions were as inconspicuous as underpants on a bayonet.

‘This chops of mine,’ he said one day as we were sat in the garden. He rubbed his chin as though considering a shave. ‘Jowls, forehead, eyes - the whole dismal jamboree. Made of pasta, all of it.’

We sat absolutely still. Even Snapper, who was wont to go bonkers at the sigh of an ant, froze in the act of polishing his gun. There was a pause during which the summer hum approached a deafening pitch.

‘Isn’t it a free world?’ Burst shouted suddenly, as if we had spoken. ‘Aren’t I entitled like everyone else?’

‘It’s not quite a matter of entitlement,’ said Father carefully. ‘Pasta, you say?’

‘Flour and water, yes,’ said Burst curtly.

Struggling, Father attempted a judicial expression. ‘I’m sure there must be a precedent for this business, Burst,’ he said. ‘What does history teach us –’

‘That I’m the cat’s pyjamas,’ stated Burst, and stared at him with a wall-eyed, brutal face.

‘He’s due for the laughing academy,
that’s
what we all know!’ yelled Uncle Snapper, and ran as Burst stood.

Burst tackled him by the legs, spilling him onto the lawn and yapping like a dog in a cyclone cellar. ‘Shoot him,’ Snapper shrieked, pointing at the rifle.

‘No good, Snapper,’ said Father mildly, pouring another scotch. ‘Can’t kill a man who isn’t flesh and blood.’

That evening Snapper sneaked into Burst’s bedroom with a fork. ‘We’ll soon see who’s made of pasta and who isn’t,’ he said, and woke Burst with his laughter.

The next morning Snapper was lying tense and motionless in a hammock which I now know to have been an enormous sling, and passing the study I heard Father’s wise voice through the thick oak door. ‘There are certain places, Burst, where pasta is neither needed nor desired, such as in an otherwise authentic salad. Take my good advice sir, and put aside this facial obsession - you are scaring my son and daughter.’

I did not linger to hear Burst’s response, but he remained bashful and withdrawn for several weeks.

It was my misfortune to be alone with Burst when he perked up at the dinner table and announced he was beyond analysis. The others were in the hills trying to bury Nan and, seeming to have no choice in the matter, I listened in silence. He stated the opinion that there was a front part of him and a back part, and that this rendered him intangible to the common man. ‘No observation of me from any one angle,’ he muttered gruffly, spooning gravy into his gob, ‘can provide a complete picture. Only over time, after viewing me from many bearings, can a full mental image be generated.’

He sopped the gravy dregs with a crust.

‘And even that idea of my appearance,’ he continued, ‘leaves so much to be desired.’

To illustrate the point he instructed me to make four sketches of him standing by the lake. On rifling through the results and finding that front, back, left and right were correct in every detail, he bellowed with annoyance and tore them to pieces.

‘Boy,’ he said later, still flustered, ‘do not tell your father or anyone about that experiment. Nobody would care or understand.’

Weeks after the household’s despondent return from the hills with Nan, we were striving to eat the evening meal. All was silent save for the clink of cutlery and an occasional, frantic prayer - until Burst nailed his colours to the mast.

‘My skeleton,’ he announced, with meaning, ‘is all it should be.’ Then he looked sharply at all present as though daring us to challenge him.

It became clear that Burst considered his skeleton the eighth wonder. He spoke of it until we could barely see, boasting that it was fantastic. With the arrogance of a monarch he claimed that it formed the Japanese pictogram for ‘public telephone’ when exposed to X-ray.

This cavalier attitude to endostructure was the last straw as far as Father was concerned and he hissed chapter and verse to Burst as we crept into the hospital. It has occurred to me since that the X-ray machine in the storeroom may not have been in working order but at the time we were bewildered to find that Burst’s chest contained nothing in the way of dense tissue or anything else - the image was as blank as a winter sky.

‘Stand aside,’ shouted Father, shoving Burst away and standing at the exposure plate. To his complete dismay the result showed a priceless Penny Black at the juncture of his sternum. Startled, the Verger punched him aside. His own chest seemed to bear the landplan of a flyover which would obliterate the natural and historic beauty of the local area. Professor Leap could detect an ongoing Napoleonic sea confrontation in his image, and disturbingly visible in Nanny Jack’s was the shadow of a giant praying mantis. Adrienne’s entire torso housed a daguerreotype of Ezra Pound being forcibly restrained by psychiatric nurses. Examining my own X-ray I could discern only a church steeple, a Hinton hypercube and a convulsing apache. We had to wrestle Uncle Snapper against the plate and the combined effect of the entire group struggling within the frame produced a kaleidoscopic montage of the 50,000 American GIs who went AWOL in Second World War Europe.

Leaning in a corner with smugly folded arms, Burst asked us rhetorically whether these were the musculoskeletal systems appropriate to civilized men.

Gathering our wits with litter-spikes, we went home and resolved never to think about our skeletons again - naively forgetting that our skeletons would make their presence felt whether we liked it or not.