‘Er… Mandible.’
Mandible strained his face around. ‘What now?’
‘You may not be suited to the Hall after all.’
‘You… you said I could stay. There are the legal aspects to consider. A spoken agreement is technically binding.’
‘I… I know it is, Mandible, but… I feel I’ve been misled. This brain business, it won’t do — not when it involves harpooning tortoises and so on.’
‘You didn’t tell me,’ shouted Mandible over his shoulder, slipping and clutching at the roof.
‘It’s a house rule, Mandible — one I felt didn’t need spelling out. My mistake old fellow, but there it is. No harpooning of anything smaller than a barn.’
‘And Mr Burst’s ego?’ said Mandible, his face pressed against the streaming tiles.
‘An exception — all egos an exception. Is it agreed?’
‘No turbot,’ shouted Mandible.
‘If you insist, old boy. Do we have an understanding?’
Mandible scrabbled for a handhold. ‘Very well,’ he said, and slipped, crashing through the roof of a horsebox — a gelding burst through the doors and galloped away with a confused Mandible on its back. A week later he was found convulsing in a disused sty and by that time Father had organised a course of tablets — the same medication, incidentally, that Uncle Snap took for his anger. In order to keep track of the Hall tortoises, Mr Mandible devised a pair of heat-sensitive goggles which he wore twenty-four hours a day. And since tortoises are cold-blooded and undetectable by these means, the device was a comfort to Mandible even when one was crawling across his face.
RISE
Glad of the company of a gormless tyke to whom he could feed outrageous bullshit, poor Mr Cannon would spin me the same yarn every time he had a break from maximum security.
‘You’re descended from werewolves,’ he said, going at his leg irons with a bandsaw. ‘Why d’you think Uncle Snap’s forever howling at the moon?’
‘Because he’s a throwback and barking mad.’
He eyed me with sharp good humour. ‘Why d’you say — “barking”?’
I explained that if the lifespan of the world were a twenty-four hour clock, humans would appear at two seconds to midnight and Snapper would appear at teatime.
‘Precisely,’ said Cannon. ‘And aren’t you always saying he’s only just learnt to walk on his hind legs?’
‘It’s a metaphor, Cannon — something a strumpet like you wouldn’t understand. Don’t drill here, you moron — take it to the foundry.’
‘Think carefully, laughing boy — haven’t you an appetite? If it so much as moves you pour milk on and eat it.’
‘Out of sheer bloody desperation!’
‘No smoke without fire.’
‘You know very well there is — get out you bastard and take your ribboned premise with you.’
‘Don’t say I didn’t warn you,’ he said, standing up with a smirk of mischief, ‘turn thirteen and you’ll know exactly what you are.’
But after three years of being dripped such effervescent nonsense I no longer bothered to reject it. Amid the unnameable abjections of the Hall it made a refreshing change from the truth and was quietly absorbed into the charcoal of my flash-fried personality. I had always known the others were keeping some grand secret from me — Mister Hieronymus had said as much. Clearly I would start roaring at some point and undergo an agonising change, my bones thickening and creaking like the plot of Uncle Silas. I’d howl at the murky window and so on. I was glad to have something to look forward to.
Fascinated by the idea, I lay at night believing that I sensed the onset of the transformation. Adrienne became worried that I no longer struggled against my chains. ‘It’s no fun when you’re like this, laughing boy. Won’t you pretend for me?’
‘These chains are the best idea you ever had, sis. Come my birthday, we’ll need them.’
Adrienne pouted so that her mouth, regrettably, resembled the suction pad of an octopus.
‘The werewolf,’ she later read from a monster encyclopaedia, ‘can be killed by a silver bullet through the heart.’
‘So can I.’
‘There’s more. It’s covered in hair, eats sheep, sees in black and white and is easily enraged.’
It became clear that we were dealing not with a mythical beast but a vapid adult male. I saw the slow-motion fire-bombing of my spirit. ‘Tighten the chains,’ I blurted. ‘It’s a bloke I’m turning into.’
‘That’s not terrible,’ said Adrienne scornfully.
I told her to take a gander at the precedents. Uncle Snapper — nought to sixty in five hours. Roger Lang — oblivious to anyone but himself. Father.
‘What about him?’
I slammed into Father’s study. ‘No hanging and shooting Uncle Snap this birthday, Father — I want answers. Why has poor Mr Cannon been telling me all these bloody years I’m due for the wolfhouse? I’ve been straining to endure an erupting musculoskeletal system because of his lies.’
‘He meant it kindly, lad — a distraction. Misguided ofcourse — you could park a ship in his madness. People make a meal out of a tedious transition. Truth of it is the meatheads you deplore were meatheads from the start. Snap, for instance, thundered antlered and snorting into his teens without a twang — just got louder, is all. Here’s a picture of him aged two.’ Father showed me a picture of a toddler at the handles of a Gatling gun. ‘Same goes for the ineffectual,’ he said, becoming balmy and philosophical. ‘Whatever the quality, it’s expressed to progressively exponential extremes. The power-hungry will inevitably run for leadership and the drab will support them — but you know this, laughing boy.’
‘I suppose so,’ I frowned, picking up a clock from the mantel. In five minutes I would be thirteen. ‘But what’ll happen to someone like me?’
Father’s face froze with fear, then seemed to crumple. ‘I could be wrong,’ he stammered. ‘Exceptions to everything under and over the sun…’
I couldn’t watch his uncertainty. Returning to Adrienne’s room, I lay on the bed. ‘Tie me down,’ I said.
HAZE
‘Remember a chap who played the petal-pulling game with the pin of a grenade. Got as far as “She loves me” and blew to pieces like a dandelion head. That’s the way to go, laughing boy.’
‘Yes, Father.’
There was a table set out under a tree in front of the house and some of us were examining a meal. The tree had thrown branches in all directions with a vigorous irregularity. Uncle Snap said he could shoot the cloth out from under the tableware. I had to stand up to laugh.
‘The Dodger there,’ muttered Snap to Father, nodding in my direction. ‘I can’t stand him.’
This veiled utterance signalled the start of the morning argument. ‘Rattling your chains,’ rumbled Snapper, ‘untroubled by the snares of reality and expecting it all. You and your infantile aggrandisement have buried the rest of us in steaming bullshit.’
‘Beg pardon, Uncle?’ I asked, turning to him. ‘Miles away.’ A vein in his temple bulged like an inner tube. ‘Don’t look at me that way, Uncle — not without pupils.’
Snap turned to Father. ‘The boy’s beyond everything,’ he said, voice shrill with incredulity. ‘Feed him poison and he’ll grow fat on it, laughing in your face!’
‘Fine words,’ I stated after a considered silence, ‘from a man who has a vestigial tail in the shape of a Cluedo character. Tell it to a court-appointed psychiatrist, Snapper. You contain enough hot air to fire a cob across a ten acre field.’
I knew I was punching him in the head, an activity I have never been able to control — but my thoughts were elsewhere. I pondered the way a manta ray will filter plankton and small fish from water passing over its gill arches. There’s efficiency for you.