Bigot Hall

FATHER SON

Father looked up from the paper. ‘Thank your lucky stars you weren’t born a manatee, laughing boy. Every one of those blighters has been torn to shreds by a boat propeller. Nobody cares over there. Doped to the eyewhites, driving boats, laughing. Damn them all.’

‘Weren’t manatee mistaken for freshwater mermaids in the old days, Father?’

‘Yes. By explorers so desperate for company they’d lob it into a moray.’

‘I suppose what with flubbery lips, desperate sailors and lacerating outboards, the manatee are the most unfortunate mammals on this dry-run-for-hell you call the Earth.’

‘Not by a mile, child. Because there was once a gentleman entitled August Strindberg whose works were deemed the fuel of the future. “Print another book, Strindberg,” his friends would snigger, “the fire’s going down.” Subtle wits struck him in the face when they realised what he had to say. But this was as nothing to the fact that wherever he went and whatever he did, he was forever being attacked by dogs. The events of his life were indelibly interwoven with the snarling and unaccountable umbrage of hounds.’

I had unwittingly put Father in a storytelling mood and nothing short of a hard shake from a lion would stop him now. My eye wandered glassily to the drawingboard, on which the Hall plans were spread like an Escher vortex.

‘As a time-saving measure he was born in a state of severe depression. No sooner was he an adult than he found himself backing out of halted parties brandishing a scatter-gun. Social embarrassments of every stamp. And the dogs, by god they had it in for him. Ferocious? You don’t know the half of it. Some stood on their hind legs and boxed his eyes. Five of them tied his ankle to a piano which they threw into the sea. He once yelled his problems to a monk, who was first offended, then regal, then pointedly absent. Strindberg went home hanging off the back of a speeding tram, kicking at galloping hounds with his free leg. You’re old enough to know these things, boy.’

‘So when did he get time to scrawl A Dream Play?’

‘Locked himself in a cellar. Heard the skittering of hounds above him and that’s what drove him on. Emerged a year later to his cost. Rammed by a sudden vehicle.’

‘Unceremonious?’

‘What do you think? One of the first motorised hit-and-runs on record. Car hit him so fast he was knocked momentarily to a standing position before passing out. Bumper’d be worth a bob or two today. So he was barely out of hospital when a bison hurtled into him on a salt flat. Tried to use it as an alibi.’

‘Alibi?’

‘Done for murder. Just a knifing, nothing grand, but enough to put the childproof on his career. Growing old and free, he contracted a changed nature. Surged straining against one of those stretch-brace back exercisers which he’d tied to the doorhandles of a church — propelled backwards down the aisle during a ceremony, killing a priest and a pious old hag who remains resolutely dead to this day. Went on like that his last three years. Dog statue on his tomb, looking proud.’

‘He died?’

‘Not often enough.’

‘But Father, that’s not a story, it’s a mess.’

‘It’s a life. You want order in this world — here’s the closest you’ll get.’ He pointed to the Hall blueprint. ‘Nice plan eh, laughing boy? Starts and ends with the reading room. Fractured or a jigsaw — which do you think?’

‘It depends how you approach it?’

‘Good answer.’