It was with a sense of keen anticipation, yet not, I recognised, unmixed with dread, that I approached Pugin Towers, the home of my old companion Sirob. What was the nature of the horror which had befallen him? What shadow had been cast over the sunlit uplands of his life? Into what pit of darkness had he fallen? His letter had revealed little of detail, but the single word betrayal was enough to make me alarmed, and to hasten my visit. The afternoon light, never bright, had now declined into a languid, tenebrous half-light, a light in which it appeared that dreadful actions might safely be performed, unseen by human eye. As the soaring pinnacles and battlements hove into clearer focus, the pallid silence was broken as overhead the ravens flocked; to calm my nerves I attempted to recall the ornithological collective, but upon realising that it was a treachery, a word I was aware best avoided in the company of Sirob, I hastily put the thought from my mind, drawing over it the mental equivalent of a lavishly braided and ornate Eastern rug. From certain dissolute experiences in my youth, some of which I had shared with Sirob, in our youthful days at Oxford, of what one might call wein, weib und gesang, I had developed this trick as a way of concealing or shrouding the harmful, or traumatic, and now I allowed my mind to dwell upon the warp and weft of the rug as distraction; on this occasion I settled upon an Afghan rug- such plundered booty of empire adorns the innermost chambers of my own home. Heavy and thick, it bestowed upon the most raw cicatrice the carapace of anaesthetic; and, by good fortune, in an age before psychoanalysis, offered no hostage to the horrors perpetrated upon good Anglo Saxon repression by Herr Freud and his continental brethren.
The entrance to Pugin Towers, so sadly indebted to Frenchified Gothick fashion, was richly carved and ornamented, sporting griffins, demons, and one, vertiginously high in the façade, of something suspiciously like a cockerel, which gave me the distinct impression that it lived, its iris locking onto mine with a disturbing ferocity. Hardly propitious, thought I, yet no more than one would expect from the shifty Gauls and their overly fanciful architecture; what can one expect, after all, from a nation so fatally addicted to cheese? The very roofline appeared to crouch menacingly, like a beast of ill omen, and indeed it appeared to twitch, as though preparing to spring, leading me to ponder the reliability of its supporting trusses. I was, however, rudely awakened from my reverie by the barked challenge of the doorkeeper, a solemn figure clad all in black, brandishing in my direction a rod, with which he rapped importunately upon the flagstones.
Who art thou? Friend or foe?
A friend, I replied, unnerved by the fellow’s asperity, and his apparent indifference to my stature. Did he not recognise a member of the redoubtable Bollinger?
Well that’s a rare thing, the sable figure muttered, apparently to himself, before continuing in an almost unintelligible undertone, but perhaps he is the one, the remaining one, he of whom it is writ… and then, to me, as though suddenly again aware of my presence, he talks much of an old legend, to do with a Breck hill, and a lost bird, a tit, I believe. The tale goes that he who returns the bird to its nest on the breck, will be guaranteed eternal power…sir, I asked him, where is this Breck? Breckshire? Or dost thou mean Berkshire, home of thy friends?
Vexed by his tardiness, his alarming readiness to descend into cabbalistic cacophony, wretched Celtic folklore, and his disturbing tendency to adopt seventeenth century pronouns, I proceeded to penetrate further into the labyrinthine corridors, the arteries conducting the visitor to the most fundamentally visceral organs of Pugin Towers, where I knew I would find Sirob. It was entirely typical of him not to be found amongst the rooms of state, but rather in a confined closet, accessed only by the narrowest of dimly lit rear passageways.
Forcing ingress to this locked and secured chamber, I found my friend sprawled upon a divan, and seemingly in a somnolent state, offering me the opportunity to appraise him. The room itself was in some disarray, garments of an intimate and feminine nature and periodicals of a gaudy and pulchritudinous nature lay tossed or abandoned over the floor and furniture, whilst from the bureau stared the blank eyes of a pig’s head momentarily, in the half light, alive. Sirob’s corpulent bulk had become more pronounced, his hair, though still the straw like shock which had, in its owner’s livelier years, stood like the fretful porpentine, now appeared downcast, the ghost of its former self, as though in mourning; his face, in repose, wore a frown, suggestive of troubled sleep, and as I gazed, his pulpy, porcine lip sneered in cold command, whilst from his mouth came a strange tapestry of words and phrases evidently uncontrolled by the rational mind, the monsters liberated from reason by Sirob’s sleep.
Much of the speech was incoherent, but I reproduce it here verbatim, as offering the most faithful account of the sufferings of my poor friend:
...‘twas the bus that lied, not I…Breck, Breck, the tit…I did it, I, Sirob…but, oh, the beasts…ingratitude, sharper than a serpent’s tooth…and as for serpents, the Voge monster, St Dominic of Durham… the whole pack of them, vulpine, corvid…The fillies, that sometime did me seek, with their peachy behinds, callipygously charming…they flee from me, and know me no more, even Carrie Caroline, baby at her breast, ah breast, breasts indeed… even she, my fiendlike queen, perfidy thy name is woman, the sofa, the wine, and get off me, get off me… Audentes fortuna iuvat…and my fair bird of the East, Sue, Sue Nac, even she, even she…and I did, deliver the tit to Breck, I did…
At this point he was foaming liberally at the mouth, and writhing, whether in the excess of desire, or of despair I am unaware, but to one who had known him since the faraway days of the Bollinger Club, when wine and women were consumed with a relish that was Gargantuan in character, such physical excesses, perhaps frightening of others, were not a cause of alarm to me. Although as his monologue drifted, it became more subdued, acquiring a melancholy, groaning quality, and become increasingly incoherent, the old myth of Breck increasingly dominant in his thoughts.
It was at this point that his eyes opened, and they were full of tears, such that he barely registered my presence; and yet he gazed at me, and declared, in a sepulchral voice Breck and her tit…I did it…I delivered Breck’s tit…and I should have reigned for ever more…but Breck’s tit… is dead… and in a moment of horror which will haunt me to the rest of my days, he unclenched one pudgy fist, to reveal the corpse of a tiny blue bird, mangled beyond recognition. Breck’s tit is dead, he repeated slowly...all is over...
But before I could respond, or he rise from his recumbent position to greet me, we were both rendered speechless by a clap of thunder, a deep groan from within the very bowels of the earth; and then a crack, extending in a jagged streak in the shape of a bolt of lightning from ceiling to floor, and then through the floorboards themselves, such that we distinctly felt the foundations shift beneath our feet. Sirob had only time to cry ’tis the truss, the rotten roof truss has given way and failed...” My earlier apprehension of a rotten truss was fulfilled, and the same time, water sluiced through the gap. The chamber was flooding, and rent in two, acquiring the proportions and perspective of what I imagined might be fashionable art in a hundred years’ time; Sirob on his divan was stranded on one side of the divide, like a desperate man teetering on the vertiginous, chalky cliffs of Dover, with no freedom of movement; and yet it was abundantly clear that in a very short moment he would be discharged into the vortex beneath, the fundament, and washed away to who knew where. Sirob had just time to ejaculate:
Crikey and cripes! What a lot of bozzer! Bang goes the new wallpaper- who will I be able to con into paying…?
But before he could finish, he was flushed away into the darkness, and the rest was silence.
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