On one regrettable occasion, however, they abruptly opened the cupboard in which Father and I were silently standing. ‘Er — Brakes old fellow,’ said Father briskly, ‘you’ve met the lad. Laughing boy — you know Algie.’
‘I have had the pleasure of scraping some from a bucket.’
‘You’ll be forgiven for thinking my son here is a disciple of Satan. He’s just a small boy adjusting to the mayhem and corruption of circumstance. Shall we adjourn to the sitting room?’
As the guests started off in that direction Father ran the other way, his face a carnival of luck and mischief.
After several moments Brakes and Marjoram re-emerged from the sitting room to find me stood in the hallway alone. ‘Father finds you drab,’ I stated, ‘and has run away. It falls to me to entertain you. Come here.’
The guests hesitated, looking fretfully at eachother.
‘Do not be concerned,’ I said, any pretence at interest cold and dead. ‘We are composed largely of water. This way.’
Leading them into the kitchen, I motioned for them to sit down and stood near the progressive wall markings which, on days of family togetherness, Father would pencil up to record my pain threshold. ‘I spy,’ I muttered, ‘with my little eye. Something beginning with death.’
Brakes and Marjoram fired startled glances at eachother and their surroundings.
‘Death-mask,’ I intoned, opening the larder to reveal that of Lenin. I went to the door. ‘Consider this your home. There’s the kettle. Tip out the scorpion. Goodnight.’
Crowded into the boiler room, everyone sat around on bales of Father’s funny money. Overlit by a bare lightbulb, Snapper resembled a bottlenose dolphin. ‘Well laughing boy?’ he whispered fiercely. ‘Are they gone?’
‘No,’ I hissed. ‘They’re in the kitchen, trying to decide.’
‘This is ridiculous,’ said Snapper. ‘Hiding underground to avoid the dullards.’
‘Study history,’ muttered Leap.
‘Go and talk to them, boy,’ frowned Father. ‘Make them understand this isn’t the time or the place.’
I entered the kitchen with a strangled cry — Brakes and Marjoram awoke in alarm, blinking. They had been resting their heads on the table. ‘The sleep of the innocent,’ I sneered. ‘You do not perceive the anguish you are causing here. The mean trick you are playing. Don’t look at me that way. I wouldn’t give a pinch of dust what you think of me, but there is far more at stake.’
Lord Brakes and Lady Marjoram gaped blearily in the stark light as I explained morphic resonance. ‘Theoretically if I throttle a mime on one side of the world, people on the other side will spontaneously get the same idea. Mime-strangling is not the best example, being by no means a new or original impulse.’ I discussed the hundredth monkey principle. ‘When I strangle that monkey,’ I said emphatically, ‘it stays dead.’
Brakes opened his mouth, closed it without having said anything, and cleared his throat.
‘Well?’ Snapper scowled as I entered the basement. ‘Have they pushed off at last?’
‘They are still in the kitchen,’ I stated mournfully.
Snapper was agitated. ‘By god, brother,’ he rumbled to Father. ‘The boy should be fed his own jaw.’
‘Pay no attention,’ Father soothed me. ‘Your uncle’s pills are in the treehouse. Nobody’s going to feed you a jaw.’
‘We must frighten them away,’ said Leap, nodding. ‘It is the only way to be rid of these soporific guests.’
I floated into the kitchen dressed as the Grim Reaper. For this I had borrowed Nan’s scythe and robe. In fact to all intents and purposes I floated into the kitchen dressed as Nan but I thought this would be enough. Lord Brakes and Lady Marjoram appeared to have prepared a small meal and they looked up from this as I shouted a few remarks on the subject of doom. ‘Decay,’ I suggested. ‘Decay — and don’t contradict me.’
Brakes and Marjoram crunched toast, spectating my performance with a mild curiosity.
‘It’s no good,’ I said in the steam room, throwing down the scythe. ‘They’re morons — don’t even grasp the concept of peril.’
‘What we need,’ said Leap, ‘is something that’ll have adrenalin spurting out of their ears. A first-class haunting. Aren’t we directly below the kitchen?’
Within minutes we had set up a fiendish choir of wailing cries which would echo upward through the floor and cause Brakes and Marjoram to consider phantoms a distinct possibility. Amid the ululating shrieks of Father, Snapper, Leap and myself, the Verger drummed on a variety of kegs and recited creepy Latin in a low gurgle. Adrienne screamed as though beautifully deranged. In his element, poor Mr Cannon shuddered to beat the band, releasing strained belches and punching himself in the face. Uncle Burst repeatedly whooped some sort of nonsense about having spiderwebs for nerve tissue. Under the swinging lightbulb, Nanny Jack sat silent as the grave. We hurled forged notes, choking eachother and yelping oddly amid fluttering cash. One of the kegs exploded, flooding the basement with blue ink. Snapper began to howl at the ceiling, his face stretched and demented. Others took up the cry, tearing at their garments.
The turbulent display had an audience of two. Unnoticed in a corner, Lord Brakes and Lady Marjoram looked on, the very souls of patience.
HA BLOODY HA
Poor Mr Cannon strained under the tyranny of an oafish, misplaced merriment. He was everything I wanted to be — consistent, Japanese, heavy-set as a Bassett hound. His clothing spoke of chance and chaos. A marble-eyed wreck, snorting creosote and swaying like a metronome, he would arrive at the doorstep wearing a boiled shirt and the crooked smile of a snowman. For a few bob he’d explain his truncated morality, which consisted of his whispering ‘You are free to go’ repeatedly into your ear.
Having awoken in one too many fountains, Cannon boasted that when it came to being harmless he was a Triton among the minnows and, vowing to prove it for once and all, embarked upon a campaign of insensibility and disquiet in the village. In a mainburst of sarcasm and open mimicry he stood in the square reciting a litany of unsettling dogma and punching his ears with a staple gun. He tipped a mess of eels from a diplomatic bag, headbutted parked cars, and conspicuously fainted. Concerned citizens approached his prone form and his eyes sprang open, staring like those of a new corpse. He slammed his face unexpectedly against nocturnal windows and stayed there, as sinister and inconvenient as a fiend. Walking as carefully as a rod puppet to the sound of a moody snare drum, he talked about trolls with a studied nonchalance until he was swept from the scene by a flying wedge of cops in riot gear.
Five years later he stood before an undead judge. He could barely recall the events in question and neither could anyone else. But the judge was proud of his pea-green grasp of history. His heart had dried and rattled inside him like a blown yolk.
I can only work from others’ reports as at the time I was making a study of different kinds of fern and taking them back to my room at the Hall, where I pasted them onto a tin effigy of a snarling midget. Those were the days when a man could really accomplish something, if he had a will to.
But by all accounts everyone rallied in this rare instance of our mindful community meeting the monotone. Cannon kept annoying the judge by pleading ‘gilly’ and the character witnesses, far from being a balm, poured oil on the bonfire of Cannon’s ordeal. His troubles brought out the best in everyone.
Professor Leap was a smart one, having asked the nuns to make him a tie of hammered steel. Standing stern and mannered in the dock, he ignored everyone. The judge was forced to address him directly. ‘Mr Leap, is it? In your experience is the defendant a violent man?’