Bigot Hall Read Free

practice. A corner was bent over showing the flap of something underneath. I yanked out a pin and the Desiderata scrolled upward like a rollerblind, revealing a giant version of the famous name chart. A hit-list, and a thorough one. Next to my name were the words ‘gun, bomb or poison’. The others, too, had been assigned a method: ‘Leap - knife; Burst - ligature; Jack - axe; the Verger - harpoon bolt’ and so on. My world turned inside-out like an umbrella. Where would I be safe? I had run away to the circus once but was deemed ‘too rough with the lions’.
    As I clambered down the rope-ladder the crew were arriving back at the Hall. Snapper tramped through the chill air, the whole household trailing after. Sad faces all around - the funeral had not succeeded.
    ‘Run for cover you morons,’ I yelled, ‘Snapper’s a homicidal maniac. We’re headed full-tilt for a bloodbath!’ Everyone stopped, staring at me as though at a mildly irritating street performer. ‘Look out,’ I said, ‘he’ll murder the bloody lot of you - and me most of all! Mercy, Snapper - the devil is boring and I’m scared to die! Could you harm a little boy?’ Blowing my nose on a crow, I shed tears which I would later defensively dismiss as auxiliary pieces of brain.
    It was an entire month of sniggers and gibes before I tore the Christmas wrapping from a gun, a bomb and a bottle of arsenic. ‘Couldn’t decide,’ said Snapper, ‘so I got all three.’
    ‘Thanks for the knife, Snapper,’ said Professor Leap, flushed as punch.

DENIAL
     
     
    Unable to regard the planning office with alarm or respect, Father had once designed a tower block which, during the official opening, shed a series of false walls to reveal a building which was quite pleasing to the eye. The embarassed authorities finally faked a terrorist attack to remove the anomaly. Reluctant to give him any real remuneration, they loudly dismissed him as a genius. Father quit the scene, glutted with punishment.
    He built the Hall on the site of an old country church, not in dedication but to prevent the church from happening again. The land was acquired with money he had printed himself when naively concerned about the national debt - in a brief and violent spasm of sagacity, Snapper had assured him it was none of his business. Father had been a tax-paying youth, yet to fully acknowledge his worth. ‘I wish I had a fiver,’ he would later laugh, ‘for every time I earnt a fiver.’
    He had long been curious at leaders’ intermittent calls for a return to past values and had tested the notion by trying to build a house from the sky downwards. For the Hall he adopted a more successful form of reverse engineering. In a profound meditative state he saw a vision of Snapper pointing away and gasping ‘You can’t do that !’ He was used to being told what he couldn’t do after he had done it and recognised the vision as a glimpse of the future, boding success. If architecture was frozen music it was time it came out of the fridge. The Hall roofs were like open books, face-down and full of secrets. Rainwater was spluttered off by gargoyles who constantly yelled they were scared of heights. A tower rose like a chimney for the release of surplus rage. The north wall was encrusted with three hundred individually-crafted barnacles, the rest disguised with ivy and granite. Father had weathered and aged each and every stone by smuggling it into a poetry recital.
    Under the roofs were convolutive stairwells, vaulted chambers and walls deep enough to conceal more. There was a sharp turn for every ten yards and at each turn a novel effect. At one bend was a suit of armour containing a rotting granddad. Off a second a pedestal bore a vinyl world globe, fat with emergency plasma. Around a third was an umbrella rack scabbarding a scrolled geneology which proved Hitler was a Jew. Central to the structure was the reading room, which topped a vortical drum like the whorl of a mechanical