Ark Baby (12 page)

Tommy and I became firm friends. When it rained, or during
the winter months when only a crazed fool would step on to the frozen beach, choked with salt and ice and lashed by a screeching wind, I used to visit Tommy and we would play together at the back of Mr Boggs’ forge, where the furnace kept us warm. We’d spit on the dirt floor, full of iron filings, and rake the resulting grey-flecked mess about, while watching Tommy’s huge muscular father bashing at red-hot steel as if it had done him some terrible wrong.

‘That’ll be me one day,’ said Tommy, with that careless certainty of his, that was as part of him as his shadow.

Later, it was Tommy who taught me how to spill my seed, and I soon became expert at it, though I knew it to be wrong, because the Lord had said so, and my father had reinforced this message with another, more immediate threat; that the profane activity would blind me. Every time I indulged in my foul habit, I pictured my vision blurring until all I could see were little pinpricks of light in the firmament, but this never happened. In fact, the opposite; I always had the impression that my eyesight was clearer afterwards, as though a blockage had been removed.

Looking back, I can try to see myself as they saw me.

A boy with a need to ask questions.

A boy with a low-slung walk, a love of cliff-climbing, and a coarse thatch of red hair, always in his eyes.

A boy always small for his age, but surprisingly strong and agile, and with a natural love, said Parson Phelps, of the blessings of the physical world. (Also a natural love of throwing tantrums and playing practical jokes, such as placing a dead hedgehog on the seat of the Parson’s chair at Sunday school. For this misdemeanour he was forced to administer three blows of the cane, to set an example to the other children.)

A boy who puzzles and infuriates his adoring parents with his need to show off by climbing dangerous rocks.

A boy who has become a little unruly.

And then, suddenly, a boy whose mother has developed an alarming cough.

A boy who, terrified by this cough, and hoping to take some of God’s punishment on to himself, has now, at the age of thirteen, taken to extreme naughtiness.

The ship was a whaler
en route
to Hunchburgh, dragging an entire whale skeleton destined for Queen Victoria’s wardrobe. I can still see it: the huge vessel lolling slowly out on the ebb tide, dragging the great bobbing stinking creature behind her as she drifts with the tide. And I can still recall the scene the next morning, and the ensuing cries and screams when the whole village realised what had happened: that Tommy Boggs and I, having stolen a file from Mr Boggs’ forge, had cut the vessel loose from its moorings. By the time the sailors aboard ship worked out what had happened, and scolded the night watch for falling asleep, they were a league out at sea. It took a whole day to manoeuvre the ship back.

When you grab something, such as the attention of a whole village, you pay for it later. They put us in the village stocks and pelted us with wodges of goose-dung. And then, when the sun went down and we were released, our fathers came to collect us; Mr Boggs angry, and brandishing the metal bottom-whisk, Parson Phelps sorrowful, ashamed, and preoccupied with distressing events at home concerning the cough.

And now it is his turn to punish. I have been called a naughty jackanapes, and sent to my room, and locked in, but I feel safe, my world condensed to the span of this one room. And now I am here, eating stale bread and with only a drop of water left in my pottery bowl, unsure of why it came upon me to perform this act of naughtiness, and wondering whether the recent upheavals in the house – upheavals I have done my best to ignore – could have provoked me into an odd kind of madness.

For the sound of the cough has been getting worse.

If I close my ears and my eyes, time will stand still, and I will be safe.

My room is an attic they have arranged for me at the top of the Parsonage. There’s a criss-cross of low beams, ideal for gymnastics, a writing desk, bed, a chair, and a simple rag rug,
woven by Mrs Phelps in my favourite colours, mauve and green. And on the wall a picture I love: of Noah and his animals of the Ark. Noah stands on the deck, with his three sons and his nagging wife, and below him is spread the hierarchy of creatures, from mighty elephant down to humble ant. Looking down on them all from the top right-hand corner is the face of an elderly gent whose white beard dissolves into the grey storm-clouds of the Great Flood. Behind his head, a silver Heaven gleams. This is God, who has made us all. I am snuggled into my goose-down quilt, looking at the picture. A sea-beetle has crawled across its canvas surface, and is making its way inexorably towards God’s Roman nose.

At last, I hear the rattle of the key in the door, and my father enters, pale-faced. Silently, I pray that he has simply come to punish me some more. But I know in my heart as I look at his drawn features and the set of his eyes that, next to what lurks downstairs, my misdemeanour with Tommy will pale into insignificance.

If I shut my ears and my eyes.

‘Your mother is unwell,’ he blurts out. ‘I should have told you before, but I could not. I hoped that if I ignored it –’

I say nothing.

‘Tobias! Did you hear me?’

Then I speak. ‘So according to this picture, man’s place is between God and the animals.’ What I am thinking is that I would like to bring some warmth to his cold face. I notice on the Ark picture that the sea-beetle is now attempting to tunnel its way up God’s left nostril, but to no avail. ‘Why is that?’

‘Why is a big question,’ says the Parson, smiling stiffly. ‘And it has a big answer. It’s because we have souls, and the animals do not.’

‘What does a soul look like, Father?’ (Downstairs: cough, cough.)

‘Well, some are bright and shining, if they are righteous, and others are blackened and shrivelled, if their owners have committed foul acts.’ (Cough, cough.)

‘If you cut up a man’s body, would you see his soul?’

‘Yes, son, you most assuredly would. It is situated above his heart, where it forms a translucent canopy.’

Later in life, when I had cause to reflect upon the nature of the human soul, I would wonder how Parson Phelps, who was not a stupid man, came to dream up such lunatic twaddle.

Then, from the floor below, the terrible sound comes again. I will remember it for ever. This time it is too loud to ignore. Loud and brutal.

‘That is nothing like her usual cough,’ I venture.

And he takes me to his breast and holds me tight.

That night I dreamed I was aboard a vessel that was like a whale inside. I was Jonah but a son of Noah, too. My job was to feed the caged beasts that surrounded me – tigers and hippopotami and giant wingless birds – but I could not for I too was caged, and manacled like a slave.

My foster-mother was always good to me. I remember her bent over the stone sink, scaling fish, the plainness of her face, the redness of her hands, rough from heavy work. Or forcing down my throat a new purgative she’d invented to oust our mutual enemy, Mildred. Or standing by the stove, frying barley flip-cakes for my tea. Or at the scrubbed-pine table stripping the perfumed seeds off sprigs of lavender, to stuff into little bags and put in my underwear drawer. The trouble she took to make a fine man of me, knowing how much harder I would have to struggle in life than my contemporaries! She must have known, deep in her soul, as she watched me clambering up the huge oak tree outside the door, my crazy shoes slipping on the bark, that I would one day have dire need of those little civilising touches that make a God-fearing gentleman.

I suspected it myself, too.

My mother’s cough could no longer be hidden; we lived with it every day. We saw it doubling her up. Tearfully, one day, she informed me that she had become possessed by a Thing.

‘If only I could cough the Thing out,’ she said, ‘I feel I should recover, Tobias. It is crushing me from within.’

But the Thing stayed put, and grew; every day her breathing became shallower, and her suffering racked the whole house.

At night, I lay in bed watching the sea-salt twinkling on my collection of shells, listening to the cawing of sea-birds above my attic room, and my mother’s wild cough coming up from below. It mocked us all. It was like a demon’s laugh. I prayed, but a little pang at the base of my spine told me that prayers were no use.

Mother took a whole summer to die; I measured out her wasting in the progress of the vegetable plot which grew lusher and more abundant every day, as though it were a parasite siphoning off her vitality and growing fat on it. And I was a conspirator in this process: for two months I tended the vegetable patch with a fury and an intensity that startled me. I was surely searching for something other than earth, but I never did discover exactly what. We moved my mother’s bed to the window, so that she could see me working. The sight of it pleased her, but I felt she was watching me digging her grave.

I was thirteen, that age of reckless physical sprouting and transcendental uncertainty, which provided me with a new cross to bear: a permanent uncouth urge in my loins, which I did my utmost to quell. I worked harder and harder, hoping to exhaust myself thus. As Mrs Phelps drank thin soup, and spluttered into a handkerchief, I planted potatoes, and grew crimson radishes whose furious sting punished the mouth, bulging Cinderella pumpkins, skinny haricot beans, and purple-veined, crinkle-leafed cabbages. While her mind wandered back repeatedly to the goose farm of her girlhood, and to the incompetence of the Parson’s male object (it was from her delirious ravings that I caught my first inkling of the human mating process), I killed slugs with sea-salt collected from rockpools, and planted garlic to keep the snails at bay. Autumn came, and as Mrs Phelps lay skeletally dying in her bed, I harvested a bumper crop of sprouts, and carrots as thick as a bull’s horn, and
an ornamental gourd, knobbled and useless, stippled pale and dark green.

One day she waved her hand at me, summoning me to her bedside. When she spoke, her words were wheezed out like air from a stiff pair of bellows, and her inhalations were winded gasps of pain. I put my ear close to her mouth.

‘I love that gourd,’ she croaked. ‘It is a freakish vegetable, without obvious purpose, but it has its place in our garden. God knew what he was doing when he made the gourd.’

There was a pause, as she breathed in and out a few more times, raspingly. I wished I could breathe for her. But all I could do was watch.

‘That gourd, in its oddity, and freakishness, reminds me of you,’ she said finally. If this was supposed to be a compliment, it was sadly misjudged, I thought. Oddity? Purposelessness? Freakishness? A gourd? I’d have preferred her to use her precious breath on something a little kinder.

She fell asleep again. It was midnight when she woke up, or seemed to, and sat rigid and suddenly attentive. Then she said, ‘Listen to me carefully, Tobias. I have some requests I must make of you before I go to Heaven.’

‘Yes, Mother,’ I whispered. ‘Tell me what you want. And I will do it.’

‘Firstly,’ she breathed, ‘I want you to plant that gourd upon my grave so that I can take the memory of you with me where I go.’

‘I will, Mother.’ I would have agreed to anything, at any level of absurdity, to make her happy.

‘And Tobias,’ she croaked. I put my ear to her lips again, to hear. ‘I would have liked to purge Mildred,’ she mustered. ‘Perhaps I tried too hard. When I am gone, do all you can to coax her out, Tobias.’

‘I will, Mother. I swear.’

‘And Tobias.’

‘Yes, Mother?’

‘Remember that God does not like a man to be naked.
Keep your body covered at all times, son. For the sake of modesty.’

‘Yes, Mother. It goes without saying.’ It had always been an unspoken rule in the Parsonage that one should always keep as much clothing on as possible, even when washing. I had never so much as glimpsed myself naked, and would not think of doing so.

‘And there is something else,’ my mother croaked. ‘We do not know where you came from,’ she whispered. ‘But promise me that you will never visit the Travelling Fair of Danger and Delight.’

The Fair came once a year, and though I had always been forbidden to go, I had longed one day to taste its illicit pleasures. My mother’s mention of the Fair – and of my unknown origins – puzzled me. Had my parents not always told me that, unlike other children, who were brought by storks or found beneath gooseberry bushes, I had been left at the altar of St Nicholas’s Church by none other than God himself? This was the first time I had thought otherwise, and then and there, a seed of curiosity was planted deep within me.

‘Promise me,’ my mother repeated.

‘I promise,’ I told her.
We do not know where you came from.

‘Good boy,’ she said, and fell back into a painful twitching doze.

‘She wants to be buried beneath a gourd,’ I reported to my father the next morning. He had been cleaning his shoes at the kitchen table, waxing them with great care with black wax polish, and buffing them, bashing the brush against the leather in the same particular motion and rhythm that he always used. Now it was his turn to look surprised and pained. I remember him standing there, a buckled shoe in one hand, the little black brush in the other, the smell of black shoe-polish, vinegary and burnt.

‘And holding the Bible, of course,’ I added quickly. The lie seemed to help.

The next day my mother coughed suddenly, and very hard, and the Thing that had been tormenting her shot out of her mouth and on to the white sheet. We stared. My father groaned.

‘What is this?’ she mouthed faintly, picking up between thumb and forefinger a purple-black object, leather-like and riddled with holes. She held it aloft. ‘Look, dear Edward, dear Tobias, I have coughed up my own soul and it is all shrivelled with sin, and as black as night! Forgive me, O Lord!’

Two minutes later she was dead.

The Parson and I did not believe the Thing could be her soul. It was too solid, and it stank. So when the doctor told us it was a cruelly diseased lung, we were enormously relieved.