Bigot Hall

BRAINFOLD

‘We all have a cage of bone around our heart,’ said Adrienne. ‘But you take the biscuit. Anyone with enough sense to fill a bird’s ear would tell you this is the spice.’ She was referring to the enfolded sunny glade of pollen and opening century flowers, surrounded by hedge-doors and a vale of entrances and dripping gardens which riddled into mazes so distant in all directions that the landscape streaked into mist. The pearl-blue sky showed no sign of abating. The ground sat still, covered in grass. Blown-out watches lay around like shells of snails. Adrienne was drowsing, gold mothdust in her hair — scratch her surface and you’d glimpse heaven.

As we lay in the blurcolour and the shade of leaves, I thought of mossy graveyards and forgotten patients. ‘You’re not angry at me are you?’

‘Ofcourse not — what an idea. You worry too much.’

‘I worry subject to requirements,’ I said. ‘This world’s about to spring like a steel trap.’

‘No it isn’t,’ she said sleepily. ‘I’ll keep it open…’

She was drifting off. I felt cheated — we had set up a shared dream to be together and now she was falling asleep inside it. Could she have another lucid dream inside this one? How much dreamtime could she cram in this way, like the layers of a Russian doll? I felt excluded, and stood, storming off through an arched topiary door.

Slowing away down a hedgepath of crimson litterleaves, I thought about the moon and how any emotion there had to be imported. I watched corrosive gushes furnacing in the sky and thought of skulls tumbling like popcorn. I thought of unsuccessfully killed fence wood growing again. I thought of the skeletons of angels. I thought of giant bonsai. And that people should dream in many ways or one dream would sterilise the world.

Around a corner was a marble bench with an inscription on the backrest: ‘We live in an infinitely untidy universe.’ I sat down and, finding the seat refreshingly cool in the close heat, I recalled a poem of Adrienne’s:

A beggar sat on a marble bench

And bit off the head of a dead, raw tench;

A bigot sat on a marble bench

And bit off the head of a whippet.

The trees hushed in a breeze. Chuckling fondly, I remembered when I was younger and me and Billy Verlag played with marbles golden as the molecules of lions.

I awoke with a start. I was in the hothouse, on a chair. The glass was blurred with condensation. Infuriated that I’d popped out of the dream — and was now two dream layers away from Adrienne — I bounded up and stormed out. ‘Living myself down to their level,’ I snarled aloud as I crossed the empty courtyard. ‘Hello?’

The house seemed deserted. Some of the windows were open. Everything seemed real enough. The detailing on the walls remained the same when I looked away and back again. I flipped through a book, reading and rereading certain sentences. They never altered, but what did this prove? For some time now I had been accurately transcribing reams of phantom text.

In tutoring me in the lucid arts Adrienne had surprised me by stating that in the last ditch a practitioner may indeed pinch himself to determine whether he is dreaming or awake. I had thought it amusing that we gauge our presence in the world by the ability to suffer. Toying with the idea of using other people’s pain as a gauge I had kneed Snapper in the face during a particularly nightmarish conversation, accomplishing nothing but my own entertainment.

Now here I was in the Hall without even an uncle to strike. I pinched myself on the arm. Felt a twinge which may have been a mere recollection. Sat in the quiet kitchen, I punched myself in the face. Terrible face-ache, some blood, but it seemed such a strange, dreamlike thing to do. I hammered a nail through my hand. I smashed my head through a sheet of glass. I slashed my wrists with a bolt cutter. I smiled my throat with a circular saw. I painted the wall behind me with a level action shotgun. I unravelled my intestines like a bog roll. Sheer agony all of it, but I wasn’t convinced. I sat listlessly sorting a duodenum which gleamed like porcelain. Clearly I should be dead by now, or at least unconscious. Everything was reversed. Emotional pain is the stuff of real life as there’s no blackout point. This was surely a dream. The kitchen resembled an abattoir.

Then Adrienne entered, stared in utter shock, walked unsteadily to the table and sat down as though medicated. ‘Laughing boy,’ she said. ‘Why such a loss of blood?’

A loud explosion went off in what was left of my ears. ‘Are you saying this is real?’ I demanded aghast, shaking a ribbon of gut.

‘Oh, laugher,’ she said mournfully.

‘It’s a shrieking nightmare,’ I gasped, surveying the gore.

‘Yes,’ said Adrienne. ‘You haven’t woken up. You fell asleep inside the dream, like I did — you followed me. This is a replica of the Hall where I go to be alone.’

I saw the full horror of what I’d done. ‘I’m really sorry, Adrienne,’ I said, replacing my spaghetti-like innards. ‘I didn’t mean to intrude. You’re not angry at me are you?’

Adrienne stood, reached over, and slapped me so hard I woke up on the marble bench, the heavy purr of bumble bees thrumming the air. I stood and walked down the hedgelined path to the sunny clearing, where Adrienne stood waiting. She tenderly pushed the fringe from my eyes, then slapped me so hard I awoke in bed.

It was dark, rain was hammering the windows amid low grumbling thunder.

The door opened quietly and Adrienne padded in, squirming in under the covers. ‘It’s cold,’ she said and softly stroked my cheek. ‘Your poor face.’

‘Are we awake now?’

She made the same tilted, listening expression she made when cutting her own hair. ‘Yes,’ she concluded. ‘Let’s not fight again, laughing boy. Look how much time we’ve wasted.’ She showed me the bedside clock. We had been asleep nearly two minutes.