Ark Baby (15 page)

A side-product of this madness, Bugrov predicted, was that there would suddenly be millions of gullible Americans wanting to trace their roots, before those roots completely shrivelled. Enter the twins.

‘You could set up a service,’ Dr Bugrov advised them. ‘Once
you have your diploma. You offer to trace their families. You produce a brochure. Three hundred Euros per generation for the first three generations, then four hundred Euros per generation after that. Anything they don’t like, history of madness, criminality, sex changes – you offer to doctor it for a surcharge.’

They had liked the idea of a weekly ‘grant packet’ from Dr Bugrov, who was indeed connected, in some tangential way, to Hunchburgh University’s Department of Human Sciences. He was fifty, and he always smoked a pipe of Three Nuns after sex. Like many of the men captivated by Rose and Blanche, he was excited by the idea of two women catering to his sexual whims simultaneously. And intrigued by the way that when one of them climaxed, the other would, too, as though by proxy. It was telepathy, they explained. Everything was interchangeable, with them. Plus they had a strong natural urge. ‘We’re animals,’ they purred sexily. And then spoilt it by sniggering. But Dr Bugrov wasn’t complaining. Like many before him, he would lie back and close his eyes and feel their hands creeping over him – Rose’s right, Blanche’s left – and imagine it was just one woman doing all this to him, an octopus-woman who could kiss him on the mouth and suck him off at the same time. Sometimes he didn’t even want to do it, but just lie there and stroke their four bored tits and reminisce about academic politics, departmental meetings he had attended, and witty ripostes he claimed he had made to deans of this or that institute of higher learning in Britain or America – ripostes so heavily overwrought that it was clear even to Rose and Blanche that they were only remarks he wished he had made, dreamed up years later when nursing the ancient wounds of missed opportunity.

They’d wash the Three Nuns out of their hair afterwards, and spend the grant money on the usual things: depilatory creams, leg-waxes, or electrolysis.

Heigh ho. They knew all about unwanted heredity, thank you very much. Witness the hair problem that they battled with on a daily basis, and the toe thing they had. Thank God for those
new elasticated trainers that were all the rage for pets. Shoes had been quite a headache, till then.

‘More Liebfraumilch, my dears?’ offers Bugrov. He pronounces it elaborately, stressing the
ch
ending.

‘We wouldn’t say no,’ says Rose.

‘In fact we’d say yes,’ asserts Blanche.

They are twenty years old, and they have the world at their slightly deformed feet, and they know it. Nobody can take that away from them.

‘And some soya balls,’ adds Rose.

‘Here’s a pink one,’ the obstetric surgeon had said when the girls were born, holding up a screaming female baby by the ankle with his left hand. At which point, according to family legend, Abbie murmured in French, ‘Rose.’

‘And here,’ announced the surgeon, wielding a second baby in his right hand, ‘is a white one.’

‘Blanche,’ croaked Abbie, and fainted, thinking the baby was dead, because she was so pale and uttered no sound. And from that day, it was always Rose who spoke first of the two.

Blanche didn’t stay white and Rose didn’t stay pink: the colours melded until they were both equal parts peaches and cream beneath a down of coarse body hair that was to be the cross they bore through life, requiring leg-waxes once a week and extensive electrolysis. Blanche and Rose, beloved twin daughters of Abbie and Norman Ball, citizens of Thunder Spit, England and the world. Marital status: single, but looking! Blanche and Rose, who grew from rock-climbing tomboys into nubile teenagers, who were attractive in a wild, buck-toothed, unclassical sort of way, who had, after leaving school and maturing physically, been to secretarial college and who now worked Saturdays on adjoining checkout tills in the hypermart in Judlow, who kept their socks on during sex so that no one should see their embarrassing feet, who were identical except that Rose always spoke first and was right-handed, while Blanche always spoke second and was left-handed; and
who now, in the Pig and Whistle, are watching the elderly Dr Bugrov ordering more Liebfraumilch and soya balls from the bar.

‘Oh, and some calorie-free peanuts, please!’ Rose yells across.

‘Boring old fart,’ mutters Rose, as Bugrov returns bearing brimming glasses of spinster virgins’ breast-milk, and crackling half a dozen packets of nuts, and plonks himself between the girls. He is basking in pleasure. And who wouldn’t be, with beauty to the right, more beauty to the left, a morning of sexual gratification behind him, and more just like it ahead if he can only get to the cash machine?

‘Here, look, there’s going to be a reward,’ says Rose. She has chosen her CD track from the juke-box terminal at their table and is now flicking through the Internet news pages. ‘Five million Euros for the first British pregnancy!’

‘What?’ says Blanche, grabbing the mouse. ‘That’ll get things moving again,’ she predicts, scanning through.

‘How d’you prove it’s British, and not foreign?’ asks Rose.

Blanche reads some more. ‘Cos it has to be born in Britain. Look, read the details,’ she says, handing over the mouse. ‘Nothing’s born in this country any more. Look at Harcourt’s Filipina. He paid a fortune to have her sent over, and she hasn’t produced doodly squat.’

‘It’s a blasted heath, this nation,’ muses Dr Bugrov, pulling out his reading glasses and peering at the news on the screen. ‘Your culture has died and now you are dying, too. Money is not going to fix it.’

Rose darts him a sharp look. ‘It fixes some things, though, doesn’t it, Dr Bugrov?’

A pause, as Dr Bugrov pretends to be more deaf than he is, and fights to open a packet of peanuts.

‘We need a new bloke,’ murmurs Blanche, reading her sister’s mind. Dr Bugrov looks up. There is no disguising the pained look on his face.

‘Some young blood,’ agrees Rose pointedly, just loud enough for him to hear.

‘Now, Tobias. What can a squid do?’

‘Shoot ink to a trajectory of fifteen feet, Father.’

‘Describe an isosceles triangle.’

‘Two sides the same length, one not.’

It is a December evening, and I am studying at home, at the kitchen table, with my father. My education had been haphazard since the age of ten, at which age the local school washed its hands of children. The other boys began work on the fishing boats then, or on their fathers’ farms, or in Tommy’s case, at the forge, but I remained at home, at the mercy of my Father’s well-intentioned but scatter-gun pedagogical techniques. We would do mathematical puzzles, and he would order me to memorise maps of the world and parts of the Bible, and I read daily from Hanker’s
World History
, which ended in 1666 with the Great Fire of London.

‘Has the mystery of the
Marie Celeste
ever been solved?’

‘No, Father.’ I look out of the window: the sky is suddenly turning black.

‘Pay attention, Tobias. Can you name the parts of a flower?’

‘Petals-fruit-stamen-pollen-stalk.’

‘What did Donne say?’

‘ “No man is an island.” ’

‘Good boy,’ said my father, himself now glancing worriedly out at the yellow pall which hung over the sea. ‘That colour bodes ill,’ he announced. ‘Now clean your quill and put away the ink. Class dismissed.’

An hour later the River Flid gurgled ominously, there was a restlessness among the cows, and Farmer Harcourt found the milk had curdled to cheese in their udders. The goats, bleating in their panicky way, and craving shelter, made lunatic compasses of their tethering-posts. The sheep huddled in groups, scattered across the land like fallen clouds. The women herded the beasts off the promontory, and into fields in Judlow belonging to relatives of the Peat-Hoves and the Morpitons.

‘Close all the windows,’ commanded my father. ‘And then go and spread a horse-rug on your mother’s grave.’

I went about this and other duties; by mid-afternoon, a threatening mass of foggy air, gun-grey, had congealed on the horizon, the wind had grown heavy and dank, and the herring gulls became self-destructive and reckless and infanticidal, tearing their own nests from the cliff-face and sending the eggs hurtling down to smash on the grey rocks below, streaking them with yellow. After the gulls’ display of panic-induced violence, it was apparent that this year, God’s wrath was going to be mighty indeed. The sky stayed black. When the clocks said it was night – though no stars appeared and only a thin rind of moon hung in the blackness – the villagers loaded themselves and their belongings on to boats, and sailed to Judlow.

But Parson Phelps and I stayed, along with a scattering of men – Bark men, Hayter men, Balls and Tobashes – who were determined to defend their homes, come what may.

‘We are remaining here,’ Parson Phelps said, ‘because it is God’s will.’

And the Lord’s word, as usual, was final.

‘But –’ I faltered.

‘God objects to the word
but
, with a great intensity,’ Parson Phelps warned. He was intimate with God’s opinions about vocabulary, as they were uncannily congruent with his own. ‘We shall not abandon the church!’ He thundered this at me as though I were Satan trying to drag him bodily away. The wind was banging at the windowpanes of the Parsonage, like the Devil himself knocking.

‘But God can surely fend for himself,’ I argued. ‘He is omnipresent and omnipotent, and everlasting, Father – but we are mortal! We cannot even swim! The church is just a building! It’s
people
that matter!’ My tapeworm Mildred appeared to agree with me on this issue, for she was giving me holy hell as I spoke and turning my bowels to water.

‘There are other people staying, too,’ my father replied. ‘They are my parishioners. My flock. How can I leave them?’

‘Because they all own boats, and we do not!’ I answered. But he turned his deaf ear on me, and when I pursued it further, he cast me aside and pointed in the direction of the harbour, where the fishing boats were being loaded with passengers anxious to leave.

‘So go, then!’ he shouted, so that my ears hurt. ‘Leave your father to the mercy of God, and to the flood-water that riseth!’ But I couldn’t leave him, mutinous sphincter or no.

Outside, the lightning cracked and the thunder rolled in a sky of a dingy and malicious purple hue. But it was only when the rising sea-water began to insinuate itself beneath the oak door of the Parsonage that we wrapped ourselves in oilskins and left our home; I with a sinking feeling of dread, my father swept along by the frightening tidal wave of his own faith. Carrying an ember from the dying fire with us in a puffball, we stumbled past the wind-whipped trees and through the flattened bracken to the church. Here we made our camp; first by the altar, where fourteen years earlier the Parson had mistaken me for a piglet, and then, as the water rose, to the pulpit. We watched as the waves sloshed beneath the door and swished up the aisle. I remember the sight of Parson Phelps, as he stood in the pulpit like Canute, his hand willing the flood to abate. But despite the force of his will and his character, it did not, and the level of the water continued to creep ever upward. We stayed there all day and all night, drinking from a hip-flask of rum and eating raw the stray sardines that slapped on to the pulpit. At first, my father would only allow us to burn two candles at a time.

‘One for light, and one for heat,’ he explained solemnly.

On the second day, it was just one. By evening, the last candle guttered and died, and we just had a thin impression of daylight though the stained-glass window by day, and by night, the ghostly, fungal phosphorescence of plankton in the nave.

It was here, over the course of those three days and three nights that my father chose to tell me about the world. Sometimes I would ask a question. But mostly, he just talked. It was cold enough to freeze a toad, and mostly dark, and looking back, I realise that it was his passion for life, combined with the rum, that kept both our hearts from stopping. Every article that he had read in
The Times
over the past quarter of a century was now being hauled up from the vast archive of his memory and filtered through the prism of his faith until it formed clear shafts of light by which I might see God’s truth; I remember that I listened gratefully and attentively, and that for the three days that we were to live in the besieged church, my father kept us both alive with alcohol and with the earnest and fortifying bagpipes of his informed discourse, while I made paper boats from the pages of a collapsed hymn-book and sent them bobbing across the water in search of land and safety.

As the waves slapped at our ankles in the pulpit, he told me about the Monarchy and the hierarchies of the Kingdom in which we lived, starting at the top with Her Majesty and working down the ladder through dukes and archdeacons and Sir Thises and Sir Thats, as laid down through the ages, down to humble us, Parson Phelps and Master Phelps his son. As we heard the wind screaming around the church spire, and the rusty weather-vane spinning wildly on its axis, he spoke about a man, Cromwell, who in history had once attempted to overthrow the Monarchy. An ugly man with warts on his face, and a wart for a heart, said my father. He told me, too, as we rescued an exhausted cormorant, about the heinous slave trade in America, and the slave-traders who had pillaged Africa for its manhood and shipped the poor savages half-dying to labour in the sugar plantations so that vainglorious trollops in London
could sweeten their cakes, as if honest honey from the noble bee wasn’t good enough for them. And as dawn broke on the second day, about happier things: the invention of the hot-air balloon by a Frenchman, Montgolfier, and about the conquest of the Empire, and the conversion of millions of native savages who, were it not for Queen Victoria, would still be hopping around worshipping baboons and practising cannibalism. That night he told me about Galileo and his charting of the planetary system, which had once been seen as heretical, but was now an accepted truth. He named the Planets for me, and though we couldn’t see the stars through the stained-glass window, he described them to me, and even now, when I look at the constellations, I remember his words. (‘Three fingers to the right of the Plough … a little southerly from the North Star … draw a diagonal line directly left of the Milky Way and you will discover …’) He waited till dark to inform me, in a vigorous but incomprehensible way, with many praise-thees and therefores, about the reproductive process, as enacted by a type of Highland cattle not seen in this part of the world. He made no mention of the human equivalent, and I dared not ask. Nor did he mention the adder in his knickerbockers which had prevented him from pleasuring his wife – but he reminded me, in the anonymity of darkness, of the brimstone and hellfire that would come raining down on me and strike me blind if I were to practise the deadly vice of onanism. On the third dawn he told me the history of the sea-storm in 1822 in which three boats capsized, killing fifteen fishermen from two families in one fell swoop, and of how Mrs Firth’s idiot cousin Joan came to live with her, having been hounded out of Judlow accused of being a witch, after she had vomited on the floor and the regurgitated stew created a puddle in the shape of a five-legged sea-monster, complete with horns.