Ark Baby (16 page)

Then he told me, not for the first time, that no man was an island. It was a favourite theme of his.

‘ “No man is an island, entire of itself!” ’ he thundered.

‘– self, elf, elf, elf!’ his voice echoed in the dark rafters.
(Ironically enough, during this evocation of Donne’s topological conceit, we were now actually marooned on the very geographical feature in question. Though we did not know it, the peninsula had been cut off from the mainland, turning our speck of land into a small and threatened oval, like the back of an engulfed spoon.)

‘Every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main!’

‘– main-ain-ain-ain!’ the church replied.

It was at that moment that the pulpit broke, and we fell into the water.

I recall little of what immediately preceded my holy vision: only that I saw a jellyfish wobble past me, its trailing skirt a-jingle with tiny bubbles. That a herring collided with my nose. That a crab pinched my finger. That for a moment my floundering sent me bobbing up to the surface, where my father floated serenely, turning slowly in a whirlpool, his cassock expanded around him like a big bubble of faith.

That he announced, ‘Have courage! The Lord has seen fit to challenge us, Tobias, and we shall rise to His command!’ And that then, instead of rising, I sank like a stone beneath the surface.

And here, deep in the freezing waters of the flood, I met an Angel.

It is said that a dying man sees his life pass before him in the form of a small morality play, so that when he reaches St Peter’s Gate, he may humbly accept whatever direction the saint commands him to follow. This thought only came to me much later, as an explanation for what I experienced while I drowned.

The Angel before me is beautiful, and I love her instantly.

She is dressed like a ballerina, in a white garment with a skirt of stiff fabric sticking out horizontally from her waist, and white stockings on her small legs. Her wings must be folded behind her, or perhaps they are transparent as gossamer, for I do not see them. Her face is pale, and in her dark hair she
wears a band of gold. A stream of silver bubbles pours from her mouth.

Sunlight is streaming in on us from somewhere high above. The Angel smiles at me. In the background, I hear people laughing and cheering. I am in a golden cot, with bars. A huge bristle-haired animal is on the other side. Its snout is soft, its eyes are ochre-orange, the irises vertical slits. I hear a high, grating song in my head, like a distant echo of something long gone.

‘O Lord do not take him from me, I beg you!’ a man’s voice is crying. It is far away, as distant as the moon. ‘Hold on!’ yells Parson Phelps, louder this time. My Angel trembles, like a reflection in a pool. Then something grabs me and yanks me upwards with a wrenching pain. I break the surface and scream, and the water takes me again, this time to Hell, where I see –

Other things. A cage. Teeth. Blood. The Angel, screaming. Broken glass.

And worse.

My father was slapping my face, hard. The water sloshed about us.

‘Now wake, Tobias! Wake up!’ And he slapped me again. ‘Wake-up-up-up-up!’ echoed the church. The vision of Hell disappeared in a flash, and only the swirling waters remained.

‘You are delirious with hunger and exhaustion,’ my father said at last.

‘I saw a vision of a Holy Angel,’ I spluttered.

But I had seen Hell, too.

When the Flood finally drew back, and the sea was calm, the church was strewn with seaweed and oysters and clams, I was weak from too much knowledge on an empty stomach,
and shaken by my visions. Parson Phelps had lost his voice completely by now. He could only croak his praises and his heartfelt thanks to the Lord in a ragged manner. We staggered up the aisle, gathering fish in the collection bucket, fighting off the gulls that swarmed in, and headed for the Parsonage.

We were met with a shock. The whole exterior of the house, from top to bottom, was covered in giant barnacles, which clung on with an awesome force. (I had never seen such huge specimens; later Tommy and I would lever them off with crowbars.)

My father laughed shakily. ‘God has cracked a joke,’ he explained. ‘For his own almighty pleasure!’

And God had more pranks up His sleeve, because when my father opened the Parsonage door, a huge wall of sea-water came hurtling out, knocking him sideways. He lay there as it flooded over him and spent itself in the sodden earth. Then he stood up, and laughed, and said, ‘Praise be, for the Lord is in good humour!’

Ever the optimist. Personally, I did not think much of God’s sense of humour. Then or later.

That morning, as the villagers came rowing and sailing back, there was a sky as capricious as oil, conjuring itself back and forth from light to dark under a wedge of lemon sun. The heavy salt-bearing wind still racketed in from the east, and in the harbour, the masts and sails of the returned fishing boats danced and glimmered in a chaotic mirage. That’s how I remembered Thunder Spit, after I left it. Strewn about in pieces like a smashed glass bowl, after the storm. Later, in the city, when I was lost, if I put my whelk to my ear, I could hear it, smell it, taste it. Wind and fish, fish and wind, salt and spike-grass and gulls.

Home sweet home!

Sweet, but sour, too. The Parsonage never fully recovered from the Flood, and the first of the jokes that God was to play on us. Most of the house was ravaged, and was to remain so for several years; from then on, when we needed to salt our food, we just scraped a kitchen flag-stone with a penknife. In
the meantime, sea-life rotted in corners, and for months the larder was a rockpool, containing a variety of living creatures, including a blue starfish, an array of clams, and four lobsters. We spent the rest of the year trying to repair the damage, and every fine day we would haul out our furniture and belongings in an attempt to dry them out.

Look: there’s the sofa steaming in the warmth of a spring morning.

And listen: crrrkkk! That’s the sound of the mahogany dresser splitting suddenly, and gaping soggily apart to reveal a lumpy mass of disintegrating jellyfish on its floor.

Don’t inhale: hold your nose! Pffffwah!

‘God moves in a mysterious way,’ boomed my father, the eternal looker-on-the-bright-side, as he chopped up the useless furniture wood, ‘His wonders to perform!’

If my father was distraught at the damage the sea had inflicted upon my mother’s grave (the blanket he had bade me lay upon it had been carried off by the waters), he hid it well. The waves had churned up the earth, and all the shrubs and plants we had so carefully tended were destroyed. Or so we thought, until the following autumn, when the gourd plant appeared.

‘Praise be, for the life that sprouteth from Thine earth!’ he shouted, when I told him that I had identified a gourd shoot among the nettles and sand-grass.

He must have felt vindicated after all for his meek acceptance of the damage at the time. We cared for the plant as I will warrant you no plant has ever been cared for before or since, including those in Her Majesty’s own greenhouses. My father would collect horse-dung from Harcourt’s farm, a mile away, every day, including Marble Friday, and drip pure spring-water into its roots from a glass pipette he received by courier from a medical supply shop in Hunchburgh, to mimic God’s rain falling drop by drop. And I must confess that there were some startling results to be had from this method. It’s a well-known fact that gourds hate a salty climate, and do not normally thrive north of London. They are a Mediterranean quasi-fruit, quasi-vegetable,
and they crave the sun, which was always in short supply in Thunder Spit, but the plant, nourished by manure and goodwill, thrived in an almost obscene way, and when its yellow flowers fell, ten fruits began to swell. And what gourds they turned out to be.

It was only years later that I heard about the monk Gregor Mendel, and his experiments with peas. By selective breeding, Mendel could create green peas from yellow, and tall from short. Within a mere two generations, he showed that a species of plant can abandon the inheritance of its forefathers, and create a new legacy all its own. Our gourds must have decided to take such a step – alone. For on inspection, it could be seen that they bore little or no relation to the original green-striped gourd my mother had so admired. They were whorled in orange and yellow, with bulbous protuberances and a distinctly hairy leaf.

–
this big emptie CAGE.

Get in there, He sez.

Wot for, I sez, steppin in. Ther is a BUKKIT on the floor, and a sort of bed, like a litel shelfe. There is a bole of WATER, that is all.

To see if it is the rite SIZE, He sez.

The rite size for WOT, I sez.

The rite size for you and SUMWUN ELS.

He loks the door and puts the kee in His pockit.

Good gerl, He sez. We will be leevin next week, so get acustomd, ay.

I forls to the flor and I crys and crys and crys.

Wot a stupid cow, ay? Wot a stupid
–

‘Phew! Oomph! Whuuur! Huh!’

The primate carcass now chopped and its flesh marinating gently in the coriander-and-lemon preparation, Violet Scrapie is huffing and puffing her way up the stairs to the workshop, where her father is smoking a cigar.

‘You need to get some exercise,’ he tells her as she flops in, panting. The child is bearing far too much weight. Completely overloaded. Her skin will overstretch itself. Her internal organs will be squashed. Her armature will give way. ‘A bit of walking. That’ll do the trick.’

‘Yes, Father,’ says Violet dutifully, peering through the fug of cigar-smoke at a small, humanoid creature perched on the table. ‘Is that the Monkey?’

‘Most of him, yes. One arm and a pair of buttocks missing for now. Made a mistake with the cutting. Bloody annoying. Had to re-do it. And the tail’s a bugger. Take a look.’

Violet manoeuvres her bulk around the table, and surveys the half-finished creature, some of whose skin hangs loose, falling away from the sawdust-sprinkled wire of the armature. The animal is bigger than she expected from the bits of carcass Cabillaud had chopped earlier. There hadn’t been much in the way of meat, once you’d eliminated the bones and gristle. Its tail rises behind it like a question mark.

‘A handsome beast,’ she comments. ‘There’s something very
noble
about him, considering he’s just an animal. You can actually begin to see why he’s called a Gentleman.’

‘Yes,’ agrees Scrapie. ‘Intelligent, too, by all accounts. Shame they’re extinct. They were a very under-researched species, unfortunately. A type of ape, according to some, but the tail sets them apart. And then they died out, so there’s bugger all way of finding out more.’

‘Definitely handsome,’ repeats Violet, musingly, stroking the creature’s hairy arm.

‘He will be, when he’s finished. Such a waste. Not a mark on him, though. Still haven’t fathomed how he died.’

This was true. Of all the creatures Scrapie had chosen from the remains of the
Ark
menagerie that day, the Gentleman Monkey had been the only one without any traces of violence on his body. Odd, that. As though he’d died of something else altogether.

Violet glances down and sees a pair of blue glass eyes on the table.

‘The Hippo still wants them all to have blue eyes?’

‘She does indeed, God blast her.’

‘And the –?’ Violet blushes; the subject is rather intimate.

‘Yes. That, too. No genitalia of any kind. And then the pantaloons on top, to discourage the curious. Bloody woman.’

Every time he thinks about the Monarch, Scrapie becomes enraged. He twiddles with the glass eyes, doing his best to calm himself, and then observes his youngest child once more. She really is enormously fat. Almost a young woman, and as distressed a spinster as you could ever wish to meet! Will he be stuck with her for life?

‘What you need,’ Scrapie tells Violet with sudden inspiration, ‘is a dog.’

Later that afternoon, his mind still preoccupied with the distressed-spinster issue, Scrapie left the house and returned with a corgi pup, spared from a vivisector’s laboratory by his charm.

‘Here,’ he says now, shoving a wooden box at his daughter, with a snuffling thing inside.

‘Thank you, Father,’ she replies dutifully, wiping her hands on her bloody apron and peering down into the wooden box.
She has no interest in pets. A small puppy looks back up at her with large brown swelling eyes.

‘Hello, dog,’ she says doubtfully, calculating the creature’s weight with a practised eye.

‘What are you going to call him?’ enquires Scrapie. There is an edge of annoyance in his voice. As far as he can recall, the creature is the only gift he has ever presented to his daughter. She might at least attempt a little gratitude.

‘Suet,’ she replies vaguely. What is actually on her mind is a recipe for Alsatian, of which suet is a major ingredient.

Scrapie sighs in exasperation, and returns to his workshop to do battle with the monkey towel-holder.

The newly christened Suet whimpers in his box.

‘We’ll need to fatten you up a bit, eh?’ murmurs Violet, lifting the creature out. There is even less of him than she had thought; he can’t weigh more than two pounds. She and Cabillaud have developed a marvellous canine repertoire. Dog (in case you have not partaken of it, gentle reader) tastes similar to fox, which is in turn not unlike rat, though with more of a venison twang.

And nothing at all like Gentleman Monkey, as the Scrapie family discovers that night when they take their first taste of the extinct, de-frosted primate. The flavour is strong and slightly musky – though by no means offensively so. The flesh, they agree, is tender, almost veal-like in consistency. Of the parts of the carcass Cabillaud and Violet have removed from the ice house and chopped, the thigh and rump were certainly the best cuts, followed closely by the ribs.

‘Excellent!’ pronounced Dr Scrapie.