Ark Baby (11 page)

That’s what the woman on the radio had said, too.

As a child, I used to try to imagine how the earth looked when it all began, those millions of years ago. The whole planet was just a wilderness of mares’ tails and dinosaurs and stagnant pools, back then. And the wind wasn’t so much wind, as a load of blue steam whirling about. I used to dream about earthquakes splitting the crust of the earth, like a failed soufflé of my mum’s, or eczema. I’d read those science-fiction comics. They’d show artists’ impressions of lower life-forms squabbling for supremacy. They were always bulbous, with little eyes on stalks, and they’d be submerged in a kind of churning primordial gloop. I had a vision of time speeded up, and dwarfy creatures with fins – not animals, but not plants either, a kind of horrible in-between thing – wriggling and twisting. Eating one another and being eaten.

‘I once watched a praying mantis eating a beetle,’ I told Norman. ‘Its jaws crunched from the side. They’re like mechanised clamps, an insect’s jaws.’ I demonstrated with my thumb and index finger, making pinching motions at Norman’s nose, and he shrank back in mock-fear, laughing. ‘The beetle put up quite a fight,’ I said. ‘It was still trying to defend itself when it only had one leg left, hanging by a thread.’ It had really impressed me. Things like that do, when you’re six. Then you forget about them, until suddenly they snap into your head one evening, years later, in a pub, after a few lagers. ‘Kicking and struggling to the very last. In the end, all that was left was a back foot, waving.’

Norman was looking at me sideways.

‘Well, that’s us, isn’t it?’ I continued, remembering why I’d thought about the mantis. ‘We’re that foot, waving. We’re being eaten alive. Swallowed up by time.’

He nodded slowly. ‘Point there, Buck. Bit of a philosopher, then, are you?’

To counteract this flattering but way-off-the-mark impression, I did him one of my brooding Elvis looks, and he guffawed.

It was my dad who told me about evolution, or rather his idea of it. I don’t suppose that either of us realised, then, how important it would become.

Even before the gizzard stone and, later, my Saturday job at Harper’s, I’d had a passion for skeletal biology, fuelled by the discoveries I made in the back garden, a long, narrow sliver of land subsiding towards the canal, black as Coke, which flowed sluggishly in a diagonal across the south of the borough. Both garden and canal were flanked by thin privet hedges and dust-filled urban weeds – bastard forms of dandelion, burdock, teasels, and rosebay willowherb which had mutated to outwit the weedkiller my father used to attack them. Every September, around the time the school term started, the cotton-wool tufts of willowherb drifted aimlessly on gusts of wind and settled on the lawn like lint, stirring up that strange feeling of melancholy that accompanies the changes of season in a city. At weekends, while my brothers helped our father fight weeds or prune hydrangeas or tackle rhubarb, I’d pick my way over the upturned earth, avoiding the lumps of half-buried cat-shit, to exhume the more ancient detritus of nature: snail-shells, cow’s teeth, old sparrow-skulls, a dog’s femur as drilled and pocked as a hard sponge. By the canal I found dried beetles, dead dragonflies, stiffened birds, and once, three-quarters of a fox. I became obsessed with this jetsam of calcium, and the audacity of its design.

‘Daddy, how did they make this?’ I ask, thrusting part of a shrew up at him.

My father’s spade is an extension of his foot, a submerged stilt. He’s digging a trench for beets. ‘Make what?’

‘This bone. Look, it’s teeny-weeny. Look, Dad.’

‘It made itself, Bobby. The shrew grew in its mummy’s tummy.’

‘But who made the mummy shrew?’

‘The mummy shrew’s mum and dad.’

‘So, Dad, who made the first ever shrew, then?’

‘Evolution. It developed from another type of creature.’ Dad heaves his weight down on the spade, makes an ‘
Eurkah
’ noise, wipes sweat from his upper lip, stands back, and looks love-hatingly on his tiny, fenced kingdom. The beet-trench has thrown up a negative of itself: a long bulbous spine of earth.

‘What kind of creature, Dad?’

‘The elephant, I believe. Now help me with this root.’

‘And the elephant?’

‘From the pig.’

‘And the pig?’ I’m enjoying this; it’s like that game where you keep asking
why
until they give you some money for sweets.

Dad sighs. ‘There were little fishy things. They crawled out of the water and lost their fins and learned to breathe and eventually became pigs.’

‘And the fishy things? Where did they come from?’

‘From the sea.’

‘But how did they get in the sea, Dad, in the first place?’

‘They grew from plants. Plants that –’ He looks uneasily about, checking that no neighbours are in earshot, perhaps sensing that he is on shaky ground. He lowers his voice slightly, just in case. ‘Plants that developed from tiny underwater mushrooms.’

‘And the mushrooms?’

Dad looks up at the sky and frowns. A pigeon whizzes past, as though on a mission. ‘There was a big bang in space, and they burst out of nowhere.’

Even at the age of seven, I suspected that this was bollocks.

Norman’s still talking about DNA. I haven’t really been listening.

‘Anyway, this documentary I saw, on BBC 2 – no, I tell a lie, it was Channel Four – there was a bloke saying the mystery of woman is actually just a mystery of DNA. And once we’ve unravelled the conundrum, the women’s eggie things’ll get back
to normal, and they’ll start getting pregnant again, and we’ll be laughing. But in the meantime –’

Here he threw up his hands and made a face, and I made a face, too, and laughed.

‘Crying, more like,’ I joked, picturing Holly and Mrs Mann huddled together over the complaint form, with a little urn containing Giselle’s ashes stood next to them on a plinth.

‘Anyway,
chez moi,
’ says Norman, ‘for mysterious, read infuriating. Take my Abbie: illogical is putting it mildly. She tries to set the video to record the Lottery, right, but she wants to watch something else while it’s on. So what does Madame do? I call her Madame sometimes, Buck,’ he confided, ‘cos she’s a French teacher. Well, French and home economics, actually,
pardonnez-moi, Monsieur.
Anyway, she records the thing she’s
watching
, then acts all surprised when she discovers she hasn’t recorded the
other
thing. And d’you know what she says to me? “Stupid machine,” she says, and I quote: “I thought it could record two programmes at once, but all I’ve got is a blank tape.” Woman’s the eighth wonder of the world, I reckon. Mind you, joking apart,’ says Norman (‘’Scuse I’) belching, ‘I’ll give credit where credit’s due. My two gals – Tweedles Dum and Dee, I call ’em, my daughters – they’ve never had any problems with technology. If there’s one thing they’ve learned from yours truly, it’s how to use an instruction manual.’

As I was to discover for myself, some weeks later, when they expertly demonstrated to me the workings of their vibrator.

I was in the middle of my Elvis impression – ‘Jailhouse Rock’, as I recall – when the barman shouted at me.

‘Hey, you! Shut up over there! Shut up!’

Norman and I whirled round on our stools; so fast, in my case, that I had to grab hold of the table to stop myself spiralling into lift-off. When I regained my bearings, I saw that everyone in the pub had suddenly congregated around the television above the bar, and was gawping intently at the screen.

‘Newsflash!’ mouthed the barman through cupped hands,
and turned up the volume so that the television was blaring at full pitch.

The whole screen was filled with a scene of devastation. Dust falling. Firemen at work with hoses, shooting water and foam at the twisted metal-and-concrete armature of a multi-storey building in flames. A reporter in a hard hat and gas-mask picking his way through the smoking debris.

‘This is all that remains of the National Egg Bank tonight, after it was blown up by a massive Semtex bomb,’ he said. Even through the gas-mask, you could tell he was almost in tears.

We all gawped at the screen.

The reporter couldn’t go on. After some more shots of fire-fighting and smoking detritus, all he could manage, through a muffled sob, was, ‘Back to the studio.’

Where a tougher news nut took over. ‘Britain’s hopes for the future were dashed tonight,’ the newscaster said, ‘when a huge explosion ripped through the National Egg Bank. The building – and its contents – were completely destroyed. No organisation has claimed responsibility for the attack, but religious fundamentalists are suspected of being behind tonight’s blast.’

The pub went completely silent as the news continued. There was now not a single British egg left in the world.

We watched, Superglued to our seats, to the very end of the extended news programme. Then the barman stood up and flicked off the TV. Still no one said anything. But the implications of what had happened must have sunk in to all of us at about the same time, because suddenly, as though choreographed, we all reached for our beers and downed the remains in one.

Then Norman spoke. ‘Looks like that’s the end of Albion, then, folks.’

Which was as good a cue as any to get rat-arsed.

I did the splits agen the next nite
, the woman wrote,
even tho sumthin about Him makes me scared enuf to piss. Him on the table an He kissis me an wen He stops I feel lik Im in luv but still scared.

Wot els can you do, He asks me.

Revers crab, I sez. Scorpion. Headstand. Handstand. Human notte.

Bed, He sez. You is cumin to bed wiv me now.

Only after that I find out Hes rich.

It was on the beach that I looked up from a rockpool one morning and saw a boy. He was a stocky little figure, standing on the shoreline in the distance. He was wearing a strange knobbled head-dress, which I was curious to inspect more closely. When I approached, holding a crab in one hand like a gift but also, just in case, like a weapon, I saw a tough, confident face, topped by a huge lump of seaweed. Sandhoppers were shooting out of it hysterically in all directions.

‘This is my warrior’s helmet,’ said the boy. He had a stone in his hand, which he threw and caught, threw and caught. I was frightened he might throw it at me: I was an easy target in the village. Only the week before, a four-year-old girl, Jessie Tobash, had called me Prune-face.

‘I can see a little wentletrap in it,’ I said, in a conciliatory way. Thanks to Herman’s
Crustacea
, I knew the name of everything, from abalone to Nilsson pipefish, from dog cockle to sand-smelt.

From this distance the boy’s helmet looked like the sort of hat Mrs Simpson wore to church, all precarious-looking and featuring cornucopias of foodstuffs and flowers made of felt: more a market scene than a piece of headgear. I recognised him now, from the playground at school. He was Tommy Boggs, the blacksmith’s son. The Boggses were a rough, threatening family. They had loud voices and they shouted unstintingly, as if it was their job, and the father, Matthew Boggs, was often drunk: not quiet-drunk, like the fishermen, or happy-drunk, like Farmer Harcourt, or even tipsy-tottery drunk like Mrs Sequin, but wild and angry drunk like no one else. The Boggses were heathens, too, according to my father. I never once saw them in church, not even at Christmas or Easter. Their aunt read the future in tea-leaves, a sure sign, my father said, of spiritual wantonness.

As Tommy approached, I dug my toes into the sand to hide them. But he was looking at me questioningly.

‘I collect Crustacea,’ I blurted, by way of conversation, hoping that words might defend me from him in case he saw fit to attack me. But the boy said nothing; he simply stood there in his seaweed get-up and stared, a human fortress. I felt the opposite – vulnerable without my shoes, like a hermit crab that’s left the shelter of its shell.

Still the boy said nothing. He neither threatened me, nor shrank away.

In fact, he smiled.

And then, because I must have felt, suddenly, that I could trust this boy, and because I was lonely enough, despite my self-sufficiency, to feel the need of a young friend my own age, I did a desperate and unprecedented and foolishly brave thing: without warning, I withdrew my toes from the sand, and showed him the sad deformity of my feet.

‘There,’ I said. My soul was at that moment laid barer than it had ever been, and inside I quailed at the risk I had taken with this boy whom I did not know, and partly feared. What had possessed me? To this day, I am not sure, though I like to believe it was an inner instinct that guided me.

Tommy gazed down at my feet. Sea-water was lapping at them, leaving little bubbles that popped and died. He noted my flat-footedness, and the way my hairy toes sat all wrong.

‘I can’t run fast,’ I told him. ‘But I can beat my mother in any race, because of her bunions.’ Still he said nothing, so I went on: ‘And on Fridays I can beat my father, too, because of the marbles in his shoes.’

Tommy looked puzzled, but interested. He was clearly unacquainted with the Parson’s weekly idiosyncrasy. He was still staring at my feet.

‘I like them,’ he said finally. ‘They don’t look too foolish to me. In fact, I would say they are magnificent.’

My heart somersaulted in joy, and I felt the tears sting in my eyes.

‘But please tell no one,’ I whispered.

‘Our secret, then,’ he said.

From that moment, Tommy and I were friends. Apart from the secret we now shared, we had other things in common: Tommy also had fleas, and an aggravating tapeworm, he told me. His was called Benedicta, but she mostly kept herself to herself.

My own tapeworm, Mildred, was a cruel mistress, however. Knowing her likes and dislikes to some extent, I did my best to appease her. Fortunately I shared her love of fruits, fungi and sweet berries – and it was Tommy who taught me where to find them. Sugar was unknown in Thunder Spit, though Tommy assured me that the streets of London were paved with hundreds of minuscule sugar-cubes like Roman mosaics, depicting the glories of Empire. But there were fruits aplenty. We went searching in the early mornings, before school, the cows staring at us as they always did with that resigned look they cast on humans, then trundling away, mucus trailing from their noses, when they caught a whiff of me. In summer, there were raspberries, and in autumn, we’d trawl the hedgerows and copses for hazelnuts or cram our mouths with wild strawberries.