by Steve Aylett
But Nanny Jack did react. By morning there was a clean hole in the gravetop and Snapper could not be coaxed from his tree - a trail of roots and earth had been trodden through the Hall. Professor Leap was jubilant. ‘Tracks!’ He pointed like a vindicated explorer. ‘Unbroken! From here’ - the back door – ‘to here.’ The door of her room. Barely breathing, I put my ear to the oak panel and heard a rasping as of papery wings.
‘Dead indeed,’ said Father, uncertain and embarrassed.
‘We have proved that she doesn’t dart like a spider,’ said Leap, aglow. ‘And that’s a start.’
I almost spoke of the sound I had heard through Nan’s door but was prevented by the sudden entry of Uncle Snap with the keys to an industrial earthmover.
From then on we attempted to bury Nan pretty regularly - it was a family tradition. Needless to say we were unsuccessful and contracted a strange respect for our dormant elder. She would be gone the minute the hole was dug and be tracked down to the boisterous centre of a smoky saloon bar, or would begin to mime at the last moment, scaring us all. We could not conceal our admiration when a doctor who had called to sedate Snapper happened to seek a pulse in Nan’s wrist and declared her dead, only to collapse of a seizure when she started to cackle. Our warmest moments of togetherness were those of Nan’s return, when the entire household would gather nightshirted at the top of the stairs, watching the mantis shadow draw across the lower hall.
After one of these occasions, I listened again at her door and heard the scratchy flurring of paper. The following day, entering the room for the first time, I felt a paralysing anxiety. The furniture looked as if it could sting. What if I was discovered? Everything took on a demonic aspect. A giant book lay open on a table like a brooding moth. There was an inkwell and a quill. I frilled the pages - each bore the same, elegantly written words. ‘Terror and dread, the claws of the soul - hang on for dear life.’
VIOLENT ACTING OUT
‘Coming to the circus, laughing boy?’
‘Not while I live.’
Why was I so surly as a child? On this occasion I was in the hothouse watering the brain tumours. The moment Snapper said ‘circus’ I was propelled like a crash dummy to an earlier year when I had run away to that establishment like the kid I was. Always of a serious disposition, I was also possessed of a resentment at having to grow while the world was losing its flavour. What little I’d surmised of it from a bedroom full of meathooks had led me to believe the last bastion of colour and integrity was sheltered by the big top. So before anyone noticed my absence I was sat in the audience watching a parade of cages circle the ring.
Bernard the Living Merchant. Old Scaly Gorgon. Terry the Human Constable. These are the sights I saw. I didn’t know what other circuses were like but this one was teeming with psychotics. Gabbling men in makeup riding round and round on bicycles which were evidently too small for them. Git in a leotard, biffing along a high-tension wire. Bloke dressed as the Joker, telling us everything was dangerous and real. As if I of all people didn’t know. One fool struggled into a giant cannon - it was clear he had a deathwish and wasn’t waiting for the gods to deliver. Nevertheless he gave a yell of surprise as he flew through the air. Meanwhile someone stepped into a cage with a lion. For me a lion is like any other situation - if you’re going to whip it and push it away with a chair, why get involved in the first place? In my opinion the bloke was just doing it for show.
The true horrors, however, were the clowns. Ashen and demented, they shambled out of the wings like victims of an over-zealous bloodbank. Only the coldest of souls could watch their exploits without screaming. Car crashes, drownings, fires - you name it. Even the laughter was exaggerated. Some of them were carried off on stretchers which collapsed. The entire affair was meaningless, the stuff of nightmares. I had to get out.
So I was recovering outside when the tent sheet flapped like the blowing gown of an overworked surgeon and a strange, dilated clown lumbered out, hollering with laughter. It appeared that the fiend’s trousers were filled with liquid. ‘Hello, spuddling,’ he roared. I remember I sank my teeth into his belly and a damburst of water flooded out, shrivelling the clown as he tried to staunch the flow. And to think I had considered joining these people.
Within minutes I was legging it through a maze of trailers and cages, pursued by a caterwauling bedlam of circus freaks. A clown on stilts told the rest where I was. I opened a trailer door, bursting in on a naked clown and a seal. Backing out, I overturned a trunk which vomited an avalanche of Masonic regalia. I set off through the animal boxes, panting steam and flipping catches as I went, and hearing screams behind me. If I hadn’t the presence of mind to shove a juggler from a unicycle, would I be here today? Several clowns were injured by lions, a fact I have spent my life trying to regret. And arriving home, I found I had not been missed. I dismissed the episode as I would a slave.
Until Snapper entered the hothouse to tell me the circus was in town. I had no desire to get back on the horse and re-endure this particular trauma. If lightning doesn’t strike twice we can dance in a storm in iron underwear. But Adrienne said it would be therapeutic and I allowed her to influence me. Off we all went to the circus.
Part of the reason was to get rid of our dog, Nelson, whose peculiarities were causing distress and would yield more money than war as a circus attraction. So while the others were elsewhere accosting the manager, me and my friend Billy Verlag were watching caged freaks circle the ring and I knew something was very wrong. Bernard the Living Merchant. Terry the Human Constable. And the clowns - here they were to remind us life was quaint and temporary. Thanks.
Billy was the only village kid who ever ventured onto the Hall grounds, being the only boy small and spherical enough for the other kids to boot over the perimeter wall. I think he looked up to me because I had told him about Hume’s principle of unverified causality - that B follows A does not prove that A caused B. He had actually used this to get away with tripping an old woman. Now he regarded the book I was holding. ‘What’s that?’
‘Dostoevsky.’
‘Can I have a go?’
I handed him the book, my eyes on the cavorting clowns. They were looking horribly familiar - because they were the same ones as before. It was the same circus. And at that instant, they saw me. Miniature cars squealed to a halt. Painted faces stared out of a madman’s universe. The ringmaster’s whip wrapped around my neck and, in an explosion of popcorn, I was dragged like a cur into the ring. Elephants were circling and I had to roll to avoid being trampled as the ringmaster ordered the clowns to ‘terminate’ me - that was the word he used. I pushed a clown out of its miniature car and led the others a merry dance until I crashed into a barrel and they pounced, two clowns holding me by the arms while a third beat the bejesus out of me. The audience loved this. Maybe they thought I was a midget. The applause was deafening as I was loaded into the cannon, which stank of gunpowder. I don’t remember anything between then and the moment I awoke in an adjoining field. Everything was totally unreal - I felt like a statistic.
When the others got home with Nelson in tow they asked me where I’d disappeared to. It turns out Billy Verlag had been so absorbed in The Idiot he hadn’t noticed my ordeal - thought I’d gone for a slash or something. Even Adrienne was sceptical. What about the bruises?
A wound heals slower than a kiss. When I’m advised to cheer up because it may never happen I’m reminded that it has and may again. The most amusing thing about a pantomime horse is the necessity of having to shoot it twice. That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.
ISLAND
I told Billy Verlag I intended to explore the island at the centre of the lake and that I’d need him for ballast. Of all the territory bought with my Father’s forged money the lake was the strangest. It was rumoured to contain jet-propelled herring and trout which could imitate your facial expressions. But the island was a mystery.
‘Don’t ask me to take you there,’ said Father. ‘You’ll on
ly start looking at the sky in a funny way and beg to go for a drive.’
Mutinous with curiosity, I peered through the telescope in Adrienne’s attic but could make out only a few shrubs. ‘You don’t want to go there,’ said Adrienne, lazily swinging one long leg from her sleeping-hammock. ‘Especially with little Verlag. I went, and may never understand what I saw.’
That was enough for me. One afternoon when everyone was off burying Nan, Billy hurtled over the perimeter wall and we went immediately to the lake, pushing out on a wooden palette. ‘Charon the ferryman did this,’ I said, pushing at the raft-pole. ‘Demanded hard cash though he was clearly nothing more than a skeleton. Must have been some tissue clung in that skull of his.’
There was a scraping sound under the raft, which Billy instantly attributed to a sawfish dragging its nose across the hull. ‘Nonsense,’ I said, and peered into the water. The lake was infested with boss-eyed cartoon characters which ghosted up, stared like lost souls and dipped away again. Inbetween were swirling volume levels and swarms of seahorses with tiny training wheels.
‘What is it then?’ asked Billy fearfully.
‘You’re right,’ I said, punting again. ‘It is a sawfish.’
Our dodgy vessel was tipping alarmingly and we were only halfway across. ‘Slow down,’ sobbed Billy.
‘Don’t worry,’ I said. ‘There’s no prejudice against fat little blighters out here. I reckon these strange fish will take to you like pigs to garbage.’
Billy released acoustically garish screams and I was soon vaulting through hoops to comfort him.
‘Think of the pirates,’ I said, kicking an errant moray into the depths. ‘They used to drag out eachother’s innards and set them alight.’
Billy calmed down, wiping his eyes. ‘Why?’ he croaked, sniffing.
I shrugged. ‘To make everyone’s existence a living hell.’
Billy bawled in horror and misery as we pitched through a frothing maelstrom of disquieting critters. The water was now too deep for the staff and we had to paddle our hands in the water. I had begun to wish I had gone with the others to sling some turf over Nanny Jack - then the water shallowed out and Billy’s screams began to echo from the bank of the island. Reaching shore, we dragged the raft onto the mud and gazed around.
The island was about sixty foot square and covered in the dullest bushes I had ever seen. ‘So what?’ said Billy, breaking a branch and tossing it away impatiently.
I tripped over and swore in a temple language known only to Adrienne and myself - I had scattered pieces of a kid’s fort built from lollipop sticks. Looking closer I realised it was a tiny wooden fence, extending parallel with the shore. ‘Is this yours, Verlag?’ I demanded, pointing. Billy looked at the little broken wall, waiting for a thought as for the second coming. We followed the structure a way - it seemed to encircle the island - and Billy started gibbering with an unaccountable fear. I tried to calm him by talking about the great explorers but he saw only the danger in the enterprise. ‘Verlag,’ I said, ‘yours is a narrow range of experience and in the age of exploration that’s the spice. The American Indians discovered America every time they glanced up. The Chinese found the environment too abrasive for homes of gum and wafer, which as you know were the farcical materials they favoured at the time. The Icelanders liked the place so much they never told anyone about it. But somehow everyone stumbled into it at one time or another. When Columbus finally got there he was mistaken for a god because he was the only person on Earth the natives hadn’t met. No wonder he became obsessed with spuds and –’
‘Sh-sh-shut up, laughing boy,’ stammered Billy plaintively, and pointed at the undergrowth.
In the centre of the island, hidden amid greenery, was a miniature house.
It was the Hall, surrounded by bonsai trees, next to an inland pool representing the lake. Billy and me spent ages exploring this tiny landscape, which seemed perfect in every detail - the little structure I had kicked through was the perimeter wall.
The pool even had an imitation island in the middle. Splashing over and crouching down, I was not a little amazed to see that this small island, too, bore a model reproduction of the Hall and grounds. This Hall was the size of a matchbox, next to a lake the size of a plate. At this lake’s centre was an even smaller island.
I stood, looking around, and underwent a sensation of telescoping vertigo - the Hall stood in the distance, tiny as a matchbox. I was trembling like a leaf. Billy was at my side, frowning down at the island with unusual concentration - his expression grew strained as the idea ripened. We looked up at the sky as one, to see if giant boys were frowning down at us.
I asked for the magnifying glass which Billy used to start fires, and focused on the plate-sized lake, the thumb-sized island. I heard Billy snuffling as the fish-eye blur zoomed into focus on a satellite-picture of a mini-house, a droplet-lake and a dot-island. We stood up from this diabolical micro-circuit. I had arrived ready for anything but the inconceivable. At what scale were we? Was the Hall a model ending at the perimeter fence? Where was the real me? ‘What level is this?’ I demanded, my voice cracking, and we began the sort of synchronised scream which children can do with such ease. My skull shrieked through my skin, like the Munch painting of that idiot screaming on Hastings pier.
Bats out of hell, we paddled away from the island, casting fearful looks at the sky.
When Father found us huddling in a ditch under a tarpaulin sheet he was instantly apprised.
‘Oho,’ he said. ‘So you went to the island.’
‘Take us to the village, Father,’ I begged. ‘Is there anything outside the fence?’
He laughed amiably and said he’d just been in the village.
‘How did you know we went to the island?’ asked Billy, blowing his nose.
‘It’s obvious,’ he said, and I thought he was referring to our shuddering fright. But he said he knew it as soon as he got back and saw a huge hole in the perimeter wall, and a log which appeared to have been snapped in half and tossed aside by a giant.
SKELETON CREW
Uncle Burst was no uncle but a tin-eared buffoon who quietly considered our table and food a sacrament to his grandeur. His presence was permanent and no one recalled how it had begun.
God alone knows what slobbering fiends inhabited the unexplored planet of his head - long silences obscured this aspect of his personality. But on occasion he would look up, his face displaying a wily and distorted power. With the best will in the world we could not ignore Burst’s remarks at these times. His notions were as inconspicuous as underpants on a bayonet.
‘This chops of mine,’ he said one day as we were sat in the garden. He rubbed his chin as though considering a shave. ‘Jowls, forehead, eyes - the whole dismal jamboree. Made of pasta, all of it.’
We sat absolutely still. Even Snapper, who was wont to go bonkers at the sigh of an ant, froze in the act of polishing his gun. There was a pause during which the summer hum approached a deafening pitch.
‘Isn’t it a free world?’ Burst shouted suddenly, as if we had spoken. ‘Aren’t I entitled like everyone else?’
‘It’s not quite a matter of entitlement,’ said Father carefully. ‘Pasta, you say?’
‘Flour and water, yes,’ said Burst curtly.
Struggling, Father attempted a judicial expression. ‘I’m sure there must be a precedent for this business, Burst,’ he said. ‘What does history teach us –’
‘That I’m the cat’s pyjamas,’ stated Burst, and stared at him with a wall-eyed, brutal face.
‘He’s due for the laughing academy, that’s what we all know!’ yelled Uncle Snapper, and ran as Burst stood.
Burst tackled him by the legs, spilling him onto the lawn and yapping like a dog in a cyclone cellar. ‘Shoot him,’ Snapper shrieked, pointing at the rifle.
‘No good, Snapper,’ said Father mildly, pouring another scotch. ‘Can’t kill a man who isn’t flesh and blood.’
That evening Snapper sneak
ed into Burst’s bedroom with a fork. ‘We’ll soon see who’s made of pasta and who isn’t,’ he said, and woke Burst with his laughter.
The next morning Snapper was lying tense and motionless in a hammock which I now know to have been an enormous sling, and passing the study I heard Father’s wise voice through the thick oak door. ‘There are certain places, Burst, where pasta is neither needed nor desired, such as in an otherwise authentic salad. Take my good advice sir, and put aside this facial obsession - you are scaring my son and daughter.’
I did not linger to hear Burst’s response, but he remained bashful and withdrawn for several weeks.
It was my misfortune to be alone with Burst when he perked up at the dinner table and announced he was beyond analysis. The others were in the hills trying to bury Nan and, seeming to have no choice in the matter, I listened in silence. He stated the opinion that there was a front part of him and a back part, and that this rendered him intangible to the common man. ‘No observation of me from any one angle,’ he muttered gruffly, spooning gravy into his gob, ‘can provide a complete picture. Only over time, after viewing me from many bearings, can a full mental image be generated.’
He sopped the gravy dregs with a crust.
‘And even that idea of my appearance,’ he continued, ‘leaves so much to be desired.’
To illustrate the point he instructed me to make four sketches of him standing by the lake. On rifling through the results and finding that front, back, left and right were correct in every detail, he bellowed with annoyance and tore them to pieces.
‘Boy,’ he said later, still flustered, ‘do not tell your father or anyone about that experiment. Nobody would care or understand.’
Weeks after the household’s despondent return from the hills with Nan, we were striving to eat the evening meal. All was silent save for the clink of cutlery and an occasional, frantic prayer - until Burst nailed his colours to the mast.