Bigot Hall (7 page)

I couldn’t believe how long it took everyone to realise Adrienne and me were fucking eachother senseless. We’d read about it and now we were doing it, full of mad humour and high spirits. I thought of her anxiously and often, while outwardly appearing to stand idle. I loved her to the very bones in her hair. Talking in glances like identical twins, we drew the scowling attention of Uncle Snapper, who bellowed the observation that Adrienne was ‘a wayward, gamine bitch, smiling with her mouth open and clearly up to no bloody good’. Father remarked that a bit of conspiratorial grinning was only to be expected, but Snapper could only repeat that we’d enough casual insolence to choke a pig. ‘You’re not the first to be bohemian,’ Snapper snarled at Adrienne. ‘I once played a cello on a deserted beach.’

‘I’m sure it was deserted. Instantly.’

Striding this Freudian minefield - a refreshing change from that of my own philosophy - I felt like a Wonderland explorer. Adrienne’s blurred face, sick with solemn beauty, floated through large daydreams. At night we were going at it like knives and enjoying long, fluorescent conversations about our migraine experiences. In her company I found myself uniquely awake, my mouth as dry as a biro. The excruciating bliss of her blotting kisses and sensurround legs left me feeling grand and disorderly. At our occasional resolutions to stay away the gods looked down and laughed. ‘Did you know a semi-permeable membrane can sometimes be only one molecule thick?’ she once asked as we watched a nectar sunset.

‘Nothing surprises me anymore.’

Adrienne was writing a book about irony fractals and what drew out the process was her resolve to sample the text from dreams. I had occasional lucid dreams myself but the skill seemed embroidered into Adrienne’s DNA. She could stop a dream in its tracks and alter its course simply by acknowledging that she was in fact asleep. Within her dreamworld she frequented a bookshop which was full of works that had never been written in the real world. I told her that if she could transcribe one of these volumes the copyright would belong to her - but she could only keep the shop’s image solid for minutes at a time and make a note of a few odd sentences. These she would haul back like interplanetary trophies.

Adrienne’s dreaming practice occurred in a hammock strung across a corner of her attic sanctuary. This half of the attic was furthest from the nuns’ foundry and thus the quietest part of the Hall. I would lay on the bed watching her drift offworld, floating until the stars disappeared. One evening I gave her a spiral slave-bracelet which the nuns had hammered and engraved for me:

If the sun which lights your eyes

Were thirty-seven times its size

Then you, and I, and all the world

Would start to twitch and fry.

‘Laughing boy,’ she said, twisting it onto her arm like a screw-thread. ‘Underneath that curt exterior is a bony latticework brimming with gore.’

She was the first to have said it, and my heart opened like a century flower. I wanted to do more. Adrienne had described her lucid bookshop to me and one night while asleep I found myself there. The proprietor was exactly as she had described him - a moron. I scanned the spine-titles, none of which named an author:
Western Edible Elephants, Don’t Prophesy in the Corner, Exhaustion and the Breast, My Pet Git
. The last one seemed to be about some charmer who goes around blowing his nose on other people’s shoulders, then says ‘You know what this represents? Migration.’

I found a copy of the book from which Adrienne cribbed. It was called
He murdered because he’s a murderer because he murdered because he’s a murderer because he murdered because he’s a murderer because he murdered...

Rather than memorise anything I scribbled on the title page, ‘We are all god’s children, whether he likes it or not.’ I’ve since learned that schoolkids often pass secret notes to eachother in class, so maybe I wasn’t so unusual after all.

Meanwhile our experiments continued. My sinuses drained spontaneously when I considered the options available. I daresay we were more noisy than efficient - one night we were surprised in the act and froze like burglars in an arc light. Almost everyone stood in the doorway.

‘Bare-faced lust,’ Snapper gasped, pop-eyed.

Adrienne grabbed at her trousers, pulling them on. The sanctuary was so thoroughly hexed that nobody could pass the threshold but this didn’t keep out the yelling. ‘Your depravity confuses the senses and boggles the mind!’ yelled the Verger.

‘Hang about,’ I blurted. ‘I mean don’t vault to conclusions – it’s clear you believe we’ve no other motive than the spinal joys of effrontery.’

‘The sheer, staggering verve of the boy! Gormless and bewildered at the failure of his translucent fibs!’

‘The sulphurous swamp of his lust.’

‘In for a penny.’

‘Did you hear that? I’m bowled over by this I must say.’

‘Bedclothes puffing like a grounded parachute.’

‘The girl’s using him to practise on.’

‘I knew it since you were three,’ said Snapper. ‘Whipping dolls with a jump lead. And you, Adrienne - why can’t you snog horses like a normal girl?’

‘For fear of catching your germs,’ said Adrienne, her voice devoid of all emphasis.

Snapper made to storm into the room and found himself on the landing going the other way.

‘I assure you,’ said Adrienne, tucking in her T-shirt. ‘We’ll laugh about this later - with the appropriate medication.’ She crossed the room with her lithe, swinging stride, and slammed the door on them.

‘Well,’ I muttered at the window, gazing up at the murky sky, ‘said.’

The inquisition followed breakfast. We had seasoned the meal with a sparky fatalism, meeting eachother’s glances with a solemn and flirtatious remorse. When the family surrounded us our hearts were less than usually disarmed by the powerful emotions which the Hall’s erstwhile fare bestirred.

‘Born with an iron spoon in your gob, both of you,’ said Father reluctantly, Snapper standing sternly by. ‘And you select this as the fine way.’

‘We’d do the same again,’ said I.

‘But quieter,’ said Adrienne.

‘So that’s the song is it?’ shouted Snapper, unable to hold back. ‘I ought to feed you legfirst to the bloody piano! Take a diamond-drill to your windpipe!’

‘So should I,’ said Leap. ‘How do you like
them
apples?’

‘I find them strangely familiar,’ I said. ‘Like a stainless steel doughnut.’

‘Is that the best your beestung brain can come up with?’ yelled Snapper. ‘Why didn’t you drown him at the pump, brother?’

‘Changelings,’ the Verger bellowed. ‘Spooky as hell. The boy there, drooping around like a Shelleyan orphan. Beckoned me into the hothouse. Showed me a skull. I was out of there as fast as my arms and legs could take me.’

‘Changelings?’ said Adrienne, standing. ‘Then we’re not your responsibility. Come on, laughing boy, we don’t belong here.’

‘Time enough to grin when you’re coffin-bound and skinless!’ shrieked the Verger at our retreating backs. ‘Lust is flesh-deep! You can’t cheat death - it must be done fair and square!’

‘We’re all god’s children,’ whispered Adrienne, nudging me with a hip. ‘Whether he likes it or not.’  

I ascended the narrow stairwell to the tower where the Verger lurked in a kind of chaotic apothecary. He was writing at a rolltop desk and facing away from me when I entered with a doorcreak. Lambent sunlight played through dust and glass vessels.

‘Hello Verger. Weather’s brightened up.’

‘I’ll be the judge of that, laughing boy,’ he said without taking his eyes from his work

I scuffed aimlessly.

‘What are you doing?’

‘Nothing of interest to the lustful.’

I pottered around the room, trailing a finger through shelfdust and scrutinising murky jars. ‘I say, Verger - is this a dove you’ve preserved?’

The Verger turned, raised his eyebrows and stood enraged, storming over. ‘No business of yours, hell-child,’ he thundered, yanking at the jar with such force that it flew over his shoulder and exploded against a wall.

The Verger roared me down the stairs to Father’s study. ‘Bottomless arrogance,’ he told him. ‘Uncontrollable urges. Smirking evil.’

‘In English, Verger.’

‘Well there was I in the precious sanctuary of the tower when laughing boy here pranced in and made a remark. A remark which left nothing to the imagination.’

‘Listen to me, Verger,’ I said, ‘the amount of bullshit I take from you is unbelievable. You and your bland assumptions can balk awkwardly into the lake. If there’s one thing I deplore, Father, it’s a bigot on the high ground.’

‘Have you two fellows ever heard of conciliation?’

The Verger and me began to laugh simultaneously, and halted glowering at eachother.

‘My point is this,’ Father stated mildly. ‘Man stands alone in sickness unto death. You could save alot of time, emotion and money by cultivating your own amusement - tying snakes in a knot, pronging your nose with a hoof spike and so on.’

All this was completely alien to the Verger, who regarded Father with tortured amazement. ‘Did I hear correctly?’

Father gave me a helpless look. ‘I’ve done what I can.’

‘This beggars belief,’ said the Verger in astonishment. ‘Your son rides roughshod over my life and you sit there like a barrel.’

‘What precisely did he do, Verger? Answer without lying if you can.’

‘He picked up a jar,’ stated the Verger with an effort of self-control, ‘and threw it.’

‘Threw it?’

‘Further than was either pleasant or necessary.’

‘Father, do you think I’ve no more pressing business than to play volleyball with this moron’s jars of snot?’

‘Is this true, Verger?’

‘Why should I put snot of all things in a jar?’

‘Postponement of a more permanent decision?’

‘A reluctance to accept the natural order,’ I suggested. ‘After all, Father, you and I try to escape our snot as fast as we can. This gentleman surrounds himself with the stuff.’

‘The boy’s reasoning is sound, Verger, though I say it with tears in my eyes.’

‘I see no tears.’

‘All in good time,’ said Father. ‘You may anticipate a veritable flood.’

‘I’ve better things to do than stand here anticipating
your
secretions!’ yelled the Verger, and slammed from the room.

‘Did you hear
that
?’ I said to Father, with meaning. Ofcourse I hadn’t the faintest idea what was in the Verger’s jars but I was damned if I’d let him steal the show with lies inferior to my own.

One night when the household was performing a ritual in the reading room, I snuck into the tower with a torch. I swept the beam along the shelves and selected a good-sized jar labelled V5, taking it down and unscrewing the lid. Shining the torch inside, all I could see was a murky green sludge. I rocked the jar a little. A pale object emerged through the surface and disappeared again. Impatient, I took down a larger jar. V9. I found a pair of tongs and dipped for the contents, bringing out something which looked like a severed tap root, covered in slime. As the slime drooled away I discerned rudimentary features carved into the mould, incredibly ghoulish in the torchlight. I took this as confirmation that the Verger was a member of the clergy.

A creepy feeling was crawling over my shoulders as I shifted a container the size of a larder keg and removed the lid. A soft doll rested inside, half-submerged in liquid. Flashing the torch around, I could see traces of the Verger’s sombre expression in its face. I dropped the torch, and daren’t reach in to fish it out.

Stumbling in the darkness I crashed through something, grabbing out for a handhold - the surface in front of me gave onto an unknown space. The Hall was wormholed with hidden anterooms, the blueprints resembling a Mandelbrot fractal. This one was narrow and carpeted with warm earth. Something glinted in the darkness.

This was not a horror movie - I reached aside and switched on the light. A large glass vat stood before me. Emerging from a fog of sediment was a fish-eyed Verger, frilled with drifting, ragged mycelium. The cowl had begun to emerge from its head, darkening and hooding over. Here was the last in a series of experimental, trial-run Vergers, each more complete and distinct than the last.

‘You’ve done it now, laughing boy,’ boomed a voice behind me.

‘Verger,’ I stammered, spinning to face him. ‘Why aren’t you with the others?’

The Verger cast a wily eye at the pupa floating in the tank. ‘
That’s
why. Don’t worry, boy, I won’t bite.’

I hadn’t even known this was among the options.

‘Seat yourself on this pile of rats, boy, and I’ll explain everything – we’ve a very limited time.’

I sat down and glanced at the glass vat - the contents moved a slow arm and I heard a faint clink.

‘Well it’s the old, old story,’ the Verger began. ‘As you know, people generally delegate any real achievement to their offspring and so little is achieved in any one generation. Add to this the contamination of a million opinions it’s a wonder anyone does anything by their own impulse. Me and the line were devised to speed up the process unaffected by human concerns. All this cloak and scowl nonsense is just a bit of pretending, the simplest camouflage. We’re grown out of spores.’

‘I must say Verger you seem remarkably light-hearted about all this.’

‘D’you take a dim view?’

‘Well I don’t know. I don’t know, Verger, it’s alot to absorb - I mean you tell me you’re grown in a jar and then expect me to chuckle or something? Yes I suppose I do take a dim view. I won’t sleep soundly for weeks after this.’

‘It’s a shame, it really is.’

‘So when did this nightmare kick off? Who grew those jammy monsters out there?’

‘The prototypes? The real Verger - a hundred and fourteen years ago. Keen gardener. Here’s one of his botanical sketches, if you’re interested.’

He unrolled a scroll which portrayed the Verger’s head emerging from the gilled stipe of a bark fungus.

‘What sort of life span are we discussing?’ I asked, scrutinising the sketch.

‘Three months. Enough to outlive human curiosity but being inconspicuous isn’t all. The entire three months are spent seeding and growing the next Verger. Delegation again, you see - postponement. We all record and write instructions but it seems personal wisdom can only be learnt in the physical, not passively from a book. Each generation is as moronic as the last, a clean slate. Almost no cumulative knowledge.’ He smiled. His face imploded like a blown egg, releasing a little puff of dust. ‘Sorry you had to see this, laughing boy,’ he said through the mess of his face, then with a loud snap he collapsed like an articulated skeleton.

I prodded the still mass at my feet - it rustled like a sack of leaves. Enjoy your childhood, I thought, while you can.

The vat began to bubble and bump like an eggboiler. The new Verger was shifting its limbs in the swirling suspension, slow and blind. The plasma roiled as the creature reached a glistening hand over the edge of the tank. There was no lid. The new head arose from behind the glass. The film across its milky eyes broke, and it blinked at me. The caul over its mouth tore as the new Verger tried to speak. ‘Oh,’ it said.

‘Eh, Verger?’ I asked, unwrapping a new stick of gum.

The Verger squinted like a newborn. ‘Oh,’ he said, ‘what a tangled web we weave.’