Bigot Hall

CORTEXKISS

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.’