Bigot Hall

HOSPITALITY

Colour in reverse, Lord Brakes and Lady Marjoram were like something grown in an ashtray. Next to them Roger Lang resembled a fascinating individual. Algernon Brakes pressed his eyebrows nightly in a copy of The Pickwick Papers. Even his aura was made of tweed. Lady Marjoram seemed unaware that her gloves were removable, and appeared to be wearing a marquee. As welcome as a vase on a butcher’s slab, their very shadow inspired in us all a valiant disgust.

They insisted on visiting us as though they were neighbours and perhaps they were. With admirable restraint we responded to their knock by ducking under the windows and if they entered we hid as best we could. Brakes and Marjoram would wait for hours in the kitchen under the deep ticking of the clock, or staring blankly up at Ramone the moose-head, over whom we had long since pushed a bucket of cement which had dried to form a permanent nosebag. Trudging subdued through the silent house, the pair would peer through doorways and then give eachother vacant looks. A visit to the storage attic was spent tearing through giant webs, crashing into disconcertingly lifelike marionettes and so on.

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.