Ark Baby (2 page)

As I went to the cupboard and selected the usual carbo-glycerate of praxin concoction, I wondered idly what his reasons were. She was a good specimen; probably about three or four years old. The Fertility Crisis dated back to the Millennium, so none was over five. When I turned back with the loaded
syringe, I saw that Giselle had now swung her feet back up on to the table, and rucked her dress up to expose her muscular tummy, which she was grooming busily. So much for instinct, I thought.

Holly was standing by with the paper towels and the self-sealing incinerator bag, trying to stop the tears. She liked animals. Primates especially. She was a temp.

‘Nope,’ said Mann. ‘No particular reason. Just, as I said, the wife’s away.’

‘You mean, if she were here you wouldn’t be asking me to do this?’

‘Got it in one, mate.’ He stood there, expecting me to join in the joke. He was smirking, as though betrayal were a clever new idea that he’d developed and patented, and he was just waiting for the dividends. He began to stroke Giselle clumsily on the head, and she paused from her grooming to look up at him with the surprise and gratitude that only females can muster in these situations. Then she handed him a flea.

‘I can’t do it,’ I said. ‘Not if you’re not legally the owner. Did you bring the licence?’

I should have asked him all this before, of course. As her name suggests, Holly can be a bit prickly. She gulped a bit, and I noticed her eyes hardening up in the way they’d taken to doing when she reckoned ‘human rights’ were involved, but she kept quiet, thank Christ. I didn’t want her thinking she had some kind of moral hold just because we’d crumpled her duvet together a few times. It had been a busy morning, and she knew it: there’d been a massive cat-fight in Sainsbury’s car-park the previous night and I’d already seen to six of the injured and had to deal with their owners, too. The waiting-room reeked of cat-spray. A cockatoo, an innocent psittacosis booster case, passed out in shock when the squalling started, and I’d had a dud batch of spider-monkey flu vaccine, and bugger me if the surgery wasn’t out of nitrate capsules. I put my head round the door; I was going to ask those with baskets to wait outside, but just then an obese, growling mastiff with testicular cysts
came in, which solved the caterwauling problem but gave rise to others, namely an IOU from the owner, and a pool of piss on the lino.

‘Licence?’ Mann was saying. ‘Didn’t know I had to bring it.’

‘New regulations,’ I told him. ‘Since the Fertility Crisis.’

‘Don’t know where she keeps it.’ He said this accusingly, as though I should have telepathically intercepted his thoughts and phoned to warn him about the paperwork before he left home.

‘Primates, dogs and horses have licences,’ I told him. There was a silence, during which he sucked in his cheeks and rocked to and fro on his heels a bit, so I elaborated. ‘Cats, no.’

Mann then said pointlessly, ‘Well, I don’t have a cat. I’ve got a monkey, though.’

‘So I see,’ I said, and winked at Holly. Giselle, crouched docilely on the operating table, emitted an odour. Holly blushed.

‘No,’ Mann was saying. ‘I mean I’ve got
another
monkey.
My
monkey. Used to belong to my sister but she –’

He stopped. He didn’t need to say it. The
post-fin-de-siècle malaise
, they called it. No babies, no future. Did she do it dramatically, I wondered, from a cliff-top? Or quietly at home, with chemicals?

‘We live in terrible times,’ I said, shaking my head. I wasn’t kidding; we did.

‘Ritchie’s a macaque, too,’ Mann was saying. ‘Not a pedigree, like Giselle here, but –’

I always practise faces in the mirror after I’ve brushed my teeth. So now I tried out quizzical on Mr Mann. Like I didn’t know what he was getting at.

‘Well, couldn’t I just bring
his
licence, instead? Wouldn’t that do?’ He was asking me like a boy asking his teacher. ‘They don’t get on, see.’ And now his tone was becoming dangerously confessional. ‘Her and him. Giselle and Ritchie. They fight, see. Ever since my sister – well, ever since Ritchie’s been living with us, he’s been disturbed. Bereaved, like. And he tries having a go at Giselle here – mounting her, sortathing, wanting sex, like – but she don’t want it. She’s neutered, see. So she’s like frigid.’

I remembered neutering her now. Mrs Mann had been insistent that Giselle had never been with a male, and that there was no risk of her already being impregnated.

‘She’s virgin territory, I assure you,’ she’d said smugly.

But of course when I operated, I’d found twin foetuses clinging to her uterus. I always charged extra for that.

‘Ritchie’s just a frisky lad,’ Mann was pleading. ‘What he needs is a playmate, not some stuck-up little thing that’s always going to spurn him.’

There was a desperate look in his doggy eyes: he needed a chocolate drop, a pat on the head, a rubber bone to chew on, a stamp of approval for the churning cauldron of petty emotions that functioned as his intellect.

I remembered Mrs Mann’s expression when she’d come to collect Giselle after the operation; the delicate little jaw set firm, the victorious smile nudging at her mouth as she wrote the cheque. I told her about the foetuses.

‘Not such virgin territory after all, you see,’ I’d said. ‘Your Giselle here isn’t as innocent as she looks.’

Mrs Mann adjusted her face.

‘Well, I came to you in the nick of time, then,’ she said finally, with a brisk smile. It struck me, her decisiveness, the cool way she took it. (The way the mastiff man had behaved over the cysts this morning, it was like his own bollock I was planning to cut open.)

‘She’s too young to be a mother,’ she’d added brightly. I’d heard that one before. It was a fairly standard remark, uttered by women who bought themselves a baby-substitute, then got jealous when little Miss Primate became a teenager and got knocked up. ‘Giselle couldn’t possibly cope,’ she said. ‘She comes from a very sensitive pedigree, you know.’

I remember snorting, and exchanging a glance with Holly. Someone out there – probably the same bloke who designed the elasticated trainers – was whacking up a fortune with this pedigree scam. But there was no point telling Mrs Mann that the monkey family-tree business was a load of shite;
she had that appalling look of conviction on her face that people have when they’ve been nourished from birth on pure gibberish.

Mr Mann was still looking at me expectantly. So was Giselle.

‘Well? Will you do it?’

I didn’t reply. I pretended I hadn’t heard.

‘I’ll pay you an extra five hundred Euros.’

Holly looked at me.

‘Cash,’ he said, interpreting my lack of response correctly. There was no shame in his voice, and no shame in mine when I answered.

‘A thousand, and I’ll do it.’ It seemed a risk worth taking. ‘But mind you find that licence and destroy it as soon as you get home. I won’t be answerable.’

I shook the clammy hand he offered me, and he gave me the Euros then and there. Giselle watched as he counted it out; she mimicked his hand movements, and moved her lips like he did, as though she were counting it, too.

It was all there.

‘Right, Giselle, I’d like you to roll up your sleeve now for me, will you, darling?’ I murmured. She complied obediently.

Mann turned his face away while I found the vein on her hairy little arm. It was his right, I suppose. After all, he’d just paid me a thousand yo-yos not to do the honours himself. Holly turned away, too.

Giselle didn’t. She watched closely, interested in the procedure.

‘See?’ I said, squeezing the syringe. ‘It doesn’t hurt. Night-night, then, baby.’

She nodded, as though she understood the transaction. She even flashed me a toothy smile. Then went out like a light, the little pink frock crumpling beneath her as she sagged, then horizontalised. Her tail twitched briefly, then hung limp.

Mann made a choking noise.

‘Too late for regrets, mate,’ I told him. His face had faded to a chalky white. He mumbled something I couldn’t make out, then
stumbled out of the surgery faster than you could say verbal contract.

Afterwards, Holly bagged up the stiffening but still-warm Giselle, and said she was handing in her notice.

‘What you did was wrong,’ she snivelled, ‘destroying that lovely little girl, and the guy wasn’t even the legal owner. What’ll you do when she comes in? The wife?’

I was annoyed. Holly didn’t normally question me. But she was new, I had to keep reminding myself.

‘Look, she wasn’t a
girl,
’ I said, nudging at the body-bag. ‘She was a sodding macaque monkey.’

This stuff was old, old hat to me. I explained to Holly how, having been in the veterinary business now for ten years, five of them since the Fertility Crisis and the quadrupling of domestic animal ownership that it had engendered, I was used to the charade-playing of pet-keepers.

‘The psychology of pet-ownership has undergone a sea-change, since the Fertility Crisis,’ I told her, quoting verbatim from an editorial I’d skimmed in
Pets Today.
Holly nodded impatiently; she’d clearly read the same article. ‘Certain animals have almost literally become children to certain people. Especially the primates.’

Anyone could have told you that.

‘Mr Mann was defending his nephew-substitute against his stepdaughter-substitute,’ I analysed for her. ‘He’s following his own human instinct to protect the nearest he’s got to his own genes. His sister’s offspring, or offspring substitute, is closer to him, genetically speaking, than his wife’s child-substitute that she bought before they met. It’s all imaginary, so it’s bollocks, but it means a lot to their subconsciouses.’

‘OK, Mr Super-Intelligent Psychologist,’ goaded Holly, still upset. ‘But how’s Mrs Mann – or should I say her
subconscious
– going to react?’

I outlined the forthcoming scenario to her simply: how in the next few days Mrs Mann would come in on a weekday morning surgery with her husband’s dead sister’s monkey, Ritchie, to
exact revenge. How she would instruct me to destroy him, and probably offer me some extra money to forget about the licence. How she’d of course be bitter with me over the Giselle thing, but would have the sense to bite her tongue if she wanted Ritchie to join Giselle up there in Great Bananaland.

‘And you’d murder Ritchie, too?’ Holly spat out the histrionic word ‘murder’ with the unaccustomed venom of the recently innocent. ‘You’d really do it?’

I took her by her plump little shoulders and kissed her very long and very hard, the way my temps always seemed to like it. Holly was a sweet thing. I found the puritanical taste of her toothpaste, combined with her naivety, arousing, and Sigmund stirred in my boxer shorts. It was the end of the day, and the last clients had shuffled out of the waiting-room. I was tempted to have Holly then and there, but she wrenched herself away. Her face was still half-angry, but half-admiring, too. I could see that she was as ready for sex as Sigmund and I were, but Ritchie and Giselle were preying on her mind.

‘You’d really do it, wouldn’t you?’ she repeated. Her brain seemed to have stuck in a groove.

‘There’s no point in lying,’ I said. A whopper in itself, of course. There’s
always
a point. ‘Yes, I would.’ But honesty wasn’t going to budge her. So I added, with sudden inspiration, ‘Don’t you see? I’m actually assisting in the mercy killing – the
euthanasia –
of something much bigger.’

That got her thinking.

‘Like what?’ she asked. She didn’t get it, but she wanted to. ‘Like what, exactly, Bobby?’

‘Like a failing marriage, Holly,’ I said. Sigmund was straining at the leash. ‘Like a marriage in the throes of death.’

She understood then, because she didn’t resist as I undressed her and laid her naked on the operating table. Very slowly, I parted her legs and began to lick between them. I felt the origami folds of her flesh thicken; she didn’t move.

But I was wrong about Mrs Mann. I was wrong about Holly, too.

The phone rang in the kitchen at home the next morning. I’d just finished defrosting half a dozen sausages in the microwave, and was opening a tin of sliced mushrooms. I picked up the phone, still clasping the tin by the tin-opener, and holding three eggs in my other hand. Not a good idea, because what the woman said made me drop one of them.

‘I’m lodging a formal complaint.’ Splat, on the lino. I sat down heavily on a chair, and nursed the mushroom-tin in my lap.

‘Who is this?’ I asked, to buy a bit of time, though of course I knew. I remembered those hard little eyes of hers: what I’d taken for sexual repression was clearly something more dangerous. ‘How did you get my private number?’ I wondered about my pulse-rate. It was probably way up around the hundred-and-forty mark.

‘From your assistant. Holly, isn’t it? Lovely girl. You don’t deserve her.’

‘No,’ I said.
Holly?
I felt my heart squeeze up and bang against my rib-cage, like a fist. ‘I
don’t
deserve her.’

‘What you don’t understand,’ said Mrs Mann, ‘is that Giselle –’

I knew what was coming. I was a killer. I had murdered her baby-substitute in cold blood.

‘Giselle was a
person,
’ she said. She’d been crying, I realised, and was now struggling to keep her voice level.

‘Mrs Mann –’ I began.

‘Yes?’

‘Mrs Mann, I –’ (This could develop into something absurd, I realised. It was also, at the same time, quite serious. So now I’m going to put down my remaining eggs, and my tin of mushrooms, very gently, on the floor, and put into action that phrase women hate. Here goes.) ‘
I can explain.
’

‘Go on, then,’ she challenged. Her voice still had that deranged crack in it, a fault-line that could suddenly become a chasm. ‘Explain.’

‘Your husband told me –’ I started. But she didn’t play by the rules: she butted in.

‘I know what happened. He paid you off. You’re – you’re just
a cheap contract killer!
A thousand Euros?
Is that all a child’s life is worth to you, Mr Sullivan?’

She used the word ‘child’ without a trace of irony.