With ballooning apprehension, I surveyed the poster of the Desiderata which Snap used for target 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 lead sharpener. One flight of stairs twisted upside-down and fed out of a window, to sort the men from the bugs.
The Hall was carelessly furnished. Tangled mountains of chairs were draped in bladderwrack and bladed with plate fungus. In the sitting room was a piano — I once lifted the big lid and underneath was a whale-size ribcage and a lattice of muscles stretched like bubblegum. The keyboard lid was nailed permanently closed. The dining room was dominated by a large and luridly precise painting of a clown before a firing squad. As the years passed it was to echo the desolation of a burgeoning family at mealtime, as we stared at the erstwhile food set out for us. I remember one day as we were inspecting some soup which had the shape and resilience of a demolition ball, Father seemed worried. The omen of Snap’s denial was the Hall’s foundation-stone but the building was proving a beacon for mothfaced resenters and Snap had yet to say the magic words. Father feared the place was due to fall about his ears. We were oblivious to his concerns, having become deaf even to the gargoyles’ mindboggling profanities.
What I alone didn’t know as I grew up was that the Hall was a transcendence machine. Under tremendous pressure, Father finally held a demonstration for Snap who, his sparse hair wilding in the wind, pointed at the house. ‘You can’t do that!’ he gasped. Father heaved a sigh of relief — he was onto a winner.
SHADOW
I had an imaginary playmate who bullied me constantly until I shoved him into the lake and held his head under. When the bubbles stopped I felt immensely relieved. The bastard had been making my life hell for years.
But I was appalled when Snapper reeled it out of the depths a week later. ‘Nothing all day,’ he said, packing up his gear in disgust. He slammed the tackle box closed on the kid’s ear and conveyed the weightless, balloonlike body to the back porch, crashing it down. The body lay mauve and bloated amid the carp rods, its slitted eyes accusing. The last few days I’d been as happy as a spider in a firebucket and wasn’t about to let this rotting phantom ruin my ease. When Snapper caught me opening the tackle box he barged me into Father’s study. ‘Raiding the gear!’ he bellowed, causing a crack to jag across the ceiling.
‘Wanted to catch some funny fish from the lake,’ I said. ‘Perhaps a relative. You’ve always said that when I was born Mother thought I was a Coelacanth.’
‘So she did,’ said Father, nodding. ‘It was a shock for us all. Put the boy down, Snapper, and there’s no call for the knife. The boy and I are going to the lake.’
By the light of a storm lamp I hooked the swollen kid onto the line with a mind to pitch it at the deeper waters. A strong wind was blowing. Father’s line went into a tree, becoming tangled. As I tried to cast, the wind came up and gusted my imaginary playmate backwards into the night, breaking the line.
The next morning I discovered that the rotting kid was tagged on the roof like a stray piece of laundry. Rain was tumbling over it. I was out of Adrienne’s window in a moment, crawling toward the black and splitting corpse. I had just tied its belt to mine when Snapper appeared at the window of his treehouse, transfigured with rage. ‘It’ll be a sad day for the devil when you see the light, laughing boy. Everything’s in ruins because of your arrogance. So help me I’ll come over there and smash your head like a snail!’