Bigot Hall

WHITE SPACE

Despite everything it never entered my head that I should brace myself. ‘Laughing boy,’ Father once said in the garden. ‘Something I’ve meant to say since you were no more than a comma. See this blade of grass?’ I thought he was going to reveal that this was my real father. ‘I agree with it absolutely. Man accepts diversity at every level of nature but his own mind. A million emotions; only two hundred words. This is becoming no place for us.’

He was perfectly placid. It made me think of a dream I had had one morning. ‘Listen to me,’ Adrienne had said while untying me. ‘One day you may have the Hall to yourself. It’s time to show you everything.’ And she pushed at a false wall, revealing a reflection of the Hall without people. I awoke and was still bound to the bed, Adrienne asleep on top of me.

Then there was a conversation I witnessed through a crack after Snap had thoughtlessly stapled my ear to the floor over Father’s study. ‘Leap was in the reading room,’ Father was saying. ‘Wrong time of night. Took two books, back to back. Scrambled the text by shaking them like an unopened Christmas present. Alice in Wonderland and Pilgrim’s Progress. Look at this mess: “As I was beginning to get very tired of this world, I lighted on a certain place, and as I slept I dreamed I saw a White Rabbit clothed with rags, and saw him reading a book with a lamentable cry, saying “What shall I do without pictures or conversations?”’

‘What’s the rest like?’ asked Uncle Snapper, smoking a cigar.

‘Pure hell.’ Father threw aside a thick, messy book of jumbled design. ‘And it couldn’t have happened before. House is losing form. As a folly it’s not entirely controlled.’

‘That explains the skull bulging out of the kitchen door. Started off as a bubble in the paint, remember?’

‘One of the upper rooms has gone — and so has the space it used to occupy. Electric snow. Lucky no one was in there.’

‘Everything’s going to seed,’ said Snapper. ‘Including our brains.’

‘Only one way to restore the structure. Go through and lock it — those of us who are ready.’

‘The boy’s not ripe.’

‘Hieronymus will provide a warning.’

‘And poor Mr Cannon?’

‘Pray they find an empty cell.’

Snapper was more relaxed than I’d ever seen him. ‘I can’t believe I allowed myself to get mixed up in all this.’ He gestured with the cigar at his family, home and country of origin.

It should have been obvious. For years Father had been relating his theory of literary transcendence. He said when a person was written into a book that person existed partly in the world and partly in the book, like a body lying halfway through a door. Surely it was possible to pull the body all the way through? He had been saying this since I was young enough to believe there were angels in the fridge. On the reading room shelf was a book with blank pages.

So one afternoon I was sweeping viscera from the orchard when I looked up to see Mister Hieronymus standing in the landscape. ‘Who rises from prayer a better man,’ it rumbled, ‘has forgotten something.’

‘What was that?’ I shouted, but the figure was gone. I put it down to lurking, pure and simple.

Then I was struck by the weather above the Hall. A bright land under dark sky. A sundial stood at the orchard edge with the inscription ‘I count only the hours that are serene’. The dial shadow was bobbing and rippling like a flame. Clouds began to funnel over the Hall. Magisterial distortions warped the air as I approached the building. Little green keys were turning on bushes as growing leaves squirmed. The gargoyles were silent. At the instant I reached the door, the Hall held its breath like an ejecting pilot.

I opened the door onto a maelstrom. Furniture was tumbling through the air and colliding amid white flaying winds. The clawfoot tub in the hallway cracked, releasing coilpiles of garter snakes — each of whom I knew by name — across the floor. Ramone the moosehead was a leer-jawed skull, beyond feeding. I waded through snakes to the staircase, wondering for the first and last time if there might be advantages to city life. As I passed them the banisters grew into the ceiling like needles into flesh. I could hear the building’s central mechanism thrumming like an elevator. Behind the glass door of the grandmother clock the pendulum swung through slow liquid. The glass shattered outwards, spuming seawater. Every door on the landing was rattling — I surged past them toward the Hall’s heart. Wood splinters and hectic rain spiralled in the air. Curtains flogged at the walls like the capes of sorcerers. Corners of the house were overlapping with a kind of heaven.

The reading room door was flying open and closed. With each flap the light poured out, streaking through my head with the speed of an idea. The room was like the inside of a daylight bulb. Slamming inside, I stood in an atmosphere torrid with human sparks. Books and paper blurflapped across the circular room, rushing up the chimney. Whole shelves lit up like neon and faded to ash, blowing away. Fluxes of intertextuality pinned me to the wall. There was one shelf left and finally a single book. Swirling fireflies came to a point and fired a ribbon of lightning into the empty volume.

The storm immediately abated. I hadn’t any skin. Even my DNA was bruised. I felt as heavy as kerosene. In a shadowy corner lay a book, like an overripe apple. I went slowly over and picked it up. The blank volume had been filled with words. The tone was toxic and casual. The title was Bigot Hall.

The Hall was empty. I checked out the foundry, finding the furnace full of clinkers and white powder. An abandoned ignition drill leaned against the battery press. You never know what you’ve got till it’s gone — even the headache I had suffered unknowingly since the moment of my birth now abruptly disappeared.

It wasn’t the same without the sudden shots and incoherent yelling. I sat for hours waiting. I sat at Father’s drawingboard waiting for someone to rebuke me. I lay in Adrienne’s bed clutching a manacle, shackling myself accidentally and cursing in the quiet house. I leafed through the book, reading about the others and becoming obsessed with the white spaces. I felt certain I should fill them. My every move and thought was precarious. I was halfway there, like a body lying halfway through a door. They were calling like sanity.

There ended the happiest and most conventional phase of my life.