Back at the Hall, Father explained his plans to Snapper — a large, groaning treehouse rigged into the tallest garden oak. It was understood that Snapper would not only live there but become a figure of fear and superstition to the village children. This could easily be arranged — it had happened to Nanny Jack without any arrangements being necessary.
‘But that child attempted every trick in the book,’ Snapper complained, sobbing like a bullring clown, ‘to stop me killing one of them bushy vermin.’
‘Silence, brother. Did I, too, not make every effort when we were the boy’s age. Don’t you need ammo and medication from the village.’ Father fixed him with a stern look. ‘And wasn’t he the one made it possible for you to shoot something at long last?’
Snapper went before the cops and confessed to everything, including several genuine and horrific crimes of which none of us had been previously aware. He became a marked man, and we finally found him digging up fossil spuds in a rain-ripped field, barely human for the mud and darkness.
At breakfast it was decided that we could not harbour Snapper at the Hall. Father built the treehouse and Snapper moved in with his armoury, descending only for meals and an occasional whirling, snorting rampage of destruction.
As we buried Camille, Adrienne sang mournfully and dark-eyed in the rain:
Tortoises are vacuum-sealed
And breaking down is sickly,
But your bones are all internal
So you’ll rot more quickly.
The darkness was eating at her like a vacuum at a matchflame. The rain fell like Hiroshima dust. She kissed a rose and lay it on the burial mound. I wanted to remove her skulltop and slather my tongue through her brainfolds. Even in grief there is diversity.
DOCUMENT
Chairman Mao said ‘My enemy’s enemy is my friend.’ The friends he made this way were inevitably lost by the corresponding principle that ‘My friend’s friend is my enemy.’ The fractal shifts generated by the two principles kept Mao’s relationships in a swirl-state of constant and luridly violent flux. I could draw parallels between this and the environment of my youth which would make your nostrils flare.
The Hall was a fertile chaos of bellowing sociopaths, arc-welding nuns and sudden combat. Rarely was anything done without a scream. My earliest memory is of Snap throwing a lobster into a bonfire and cursing as the creature exploded. I’m the first to admit the violence lacked texture but it was leavened with a quality of ferocious disregard. Ask to use the phone and you’d be met with a dead stare. We once detained a postman for eight months by locking him in the cellar and telling him he knew why. I live in amazement that I did not mature to stagger bearded in the streets, baying evangelically at strangers. Childhood was a losing battle to remain ignorant in the face of pulse-browed maniacs, shrieking chimps, arrogant liars, knife-fights, angry swans, a grandmother you’d swerve to hit and a spaniel whom everyone mysteriously asserted was ‘more than a mere dog’. I once dredged an old, streaming skull from the lake and figured a thing of that size and shape would effortlessly plug the fossil gap. I cut it in half with a hacksaw and found there was no brain cavity — only recurring skulls, one inside another like the layers of an onion. But it just turned out to be some aunt or other.
I had always been troubled that my ancestors did not go back in sequence — a family tree hung in the boiler room seemed to represent the ricochet path of a bullet. I took this to Professor Leap, who was bashing a guppy against a drystone wall. ‘Not in sequence, you say?’ He frowned at the diagram. ‘You’re at the top,’ he said. ‘It’s simply drawn upside down.’ But Adrienne, who was only four years my senior, was near the middle, Father was at the base, Nan was near the top and Professor Leap himself — a lodger unrelated to the family — appeared to be the mother of them all.
Billy Verlag, a barrel-like boy from the village, said the chart was an origami sheet with fold-guides, and twisted it into the shape of a piece of trash. He looked up at me with a ruddy face, a nose which contained his brain and a smile which contained my fist.
‘An astronomical starmap, perhaps?’ stated Father, raising his eyebrows.
‘What kind of simple-minded lout of an astronomer would name a star Leap for god’s sake, or Jack?’
‘Your great grandfather was just such a man — the telescope in your sister’s sanctuary belonged to him.’ And he pointed at the wall. ‘There is a daguerreotype of that venerable gentleman strangling what I can only describe as a hen.’
The wall was, in fact, bare.
I showed Adrienne the document. ‘Text and line,’ she said. ‘Quite clearly it’s a work of conceptual art.’
‘What does that mean?’
‘That you can throw it away.’
‘Take a butchers at this, Verger,’ I said to the Verger, who was busy walloping a village dog about the muzzle.
‘What is it, boy?’ he roared, straightening up. ‘By god you’ve arrogance to burn!’
‘Found this in the steam room,’ I said, giving him the chart.
Viewing it, his eyes opened wide, then seemed to seal over with disdain. He regarded me through a visor of disapproval. ‘Oh what a tangled web we weave,’ he rumbled.
‘But you say that even if I’m just mowing the lawn,’ I complained. ‘What does it represent, Verger?’
‘What does it represent he says. Without a doubt and despite all I have tried to teach you, this here is a chart of who owes who money.’
‘Money?’ I said, frowning. ‘So I can afford a caulking hammer at long bloody last.’
‘The debt proceeds downward. You are at the top.’ He fixed me with a baleful eye. ‘And always will be.’
Poor Mr Cannon the lodger regarded the paper with a lively interest. ‘This is a floorplan, laughing boy, showing the relative positioning of our dungeons in the scorching deeps of hell. You and I will be able to yell abominations at eachother across the skull-littered hallway, our faces tear-rashed and demented. One thing at least to look forward to,’ he grinned.
I was getting desperate. In two rare moments of lucidity Uncle Burst stared at the paper and whispered the word ‘hex’ and then, late the following day, ‘evil spirits’.
Nanny Jack was propped like a dummy in the kitchen.
‘What do you make of this, old woman?’ I said, slapping the sheet onto the table before her.
Nanny Jack was unresponsive.
‘The paper, Nan!’ I shouted, stabbing a finger at the chart. ‘What does it say to you?’ Nan’s disquieting immobility continued unabated. ‘For god’s sake, Nan, give me some good news!’ I bellowed into her ear. ‘Am I talking to myself?’ And I collapsed into wracking sobs, hiding my face and ears against the tabletop.
It was during one of the household’s attempts to bury Nan — a tradition in which Uncle Snapper played a leading role while I was considered too young to participate — that I sat poring over the chart again. By now the document had taken on the enigmatic monumentalism of ancient scripture. It occurred to me that the only name missing was Snapper’s, and with time to spare before his return, I climbed into the creaking treehouse. Adjusting to the rocking of the floor and the ebb and flow of clattering furniture, I plucked a little book from a passing table. It was Snapper’s diary, a marker at the latest entry:
Today, laughing boy taunts me. But I do not give up! There I am in the living room when in he comes, parping on a bugle. Strutting like a feudal lord and talking about vertebrae as if they were the main event. Is this the behaviour of a respectful child? Or that of a glad and devious boy? You could lay track on his insolence. But the day will come when everyone will know me as I am. They’ll be stamping my features onto coins the size of manhole covers. God grant me the strength to do what’s necessary.