Ark Baby (23 page)

But fat chance of THAT.

I did my best to forget what had happened at the Travelling Fair of Danger and Delight, and I swore Tommy Boggs to secrecy. But the Contortionist began to haunt my dreams, and barely a night passed without some terrible visitation from her or the Man-Eating Wart-hog. In one dream, she was slitting open her belly to reveal writhing tadpoles. In another, Parson Phelps was nailed to the cross, and she and the Wart-hog were lapping up his blood. In another, she was an Angel again, but when she spread her wings, they were no more than dusty, battered old cobwebs.

It was perhaps in an effort to banish such dreams from my thoughts that I ventured to take part in the Thistle-Pulling
Contest for the first time. Perhaps I hoped that the experience would purge me. Or make me a man. After all, my fifteenth birthday having passed, I was now eligible for manhood – defined by Thunder Spit as showing the ability to skewer oneself alive on thistles without complaint.

‘Now you’re to start on a count of three!’ yells Farmer Harcourt. ‘You’re to grab ’em with your right hand, and pull ’em by the root, and may the best man win!’

The villagers cheer. Down by the gushing Flid, beneath the scraggy junipers, a little Boggs boy, Tommy’s youngest brother, takes a straw and blows a live frog into a balloon until it pops. The Thistle-Pulling Contest might easily be defined as a pagan ritual, but Parson Phelps has nevertheless always given it his blessing, for it tallies well with his ‘Marble Friday’ principles of self-denial and sought-after hardship. And as his sermon this morning reminded us, the thistle is part of the glorious function of Nature, designed by God to serve man in a myriad ways. ‘Just as birdsong is God’s way of making music for us, and the herring gull is there to serve us as a warning not to ill-treat our children, and sardines are there to remind us of the loaves and fishes, and the horse He provided for us to ride as transport, and the sheep for wool, so the thistle’ – here he gave one of his famous four-second pauses – ‘the thistle is there to remind us that there is pain in His glory as well as delight.’

Thunder Spit has been holding Thistle Day, in the same scrubby field by the Flid, ‘since the beginning of time’, according to Mr Clegg, who was eighty-three. His own great-grandfather was a champion, in the days when, according to nostalgic memory, the thorns were the size of bodkins, and the plants themselves grew to five feet.

Everybody is here; old Mr Clegg and his entire family – four generations, all with the same rolling seaman’s walk, the squint-eyed Lumpeys, Mrs Sequin with her hat made of felt and papier mâché, the silent Peat-Hoves, the literal-minded Balls, the crabby Bark twins, the stubborn Tobashes, and the exaggerating Morpitons, with their dancing eyes.

And I, the freak, the foundling, the cuckoo, whose sphincter is being cruelly tortured by Mildred at the very thought of grasping these brutal weeds that jut like threatening weapons before me. A pang of envy overcomes me as I spot Tommy on the far side of the field, rubbing his hands together as if they were a pair of tools.

‘One, two, three, GO!’ yells Farmer Harcourt, and the agony begins.

‘Get on with it, Tobias!’ yells Parson Phelps from the hawthorn hedge. ‘You owe it to your Saviour!’ As usual, it isn’t quite clear whether he is referring to himself or to the Lord. Dutifully, I flail about, praying that the world’s first thornless thistle will suddenly appear before me. Beside me, young Charlie Peat-Hove, bloodstained and tearful, has already pulled his first thistle. Parson Phelps’ voice is thundering at me now.

‘Shut your eyes, son, and God will be with you! He will preserve you from all pain if you only have faith!’

I shut my eyes, and think of the Lord, who resembles the portrait in my Noah’s Ark picture; a gentle-faced, Roman-nosed gent with a long white beard and a toga-like cassock flowing down. A man in the clouds. And close my fist around the thistle’s stalk.

‘OUCH!’ It was like being stapled through with steel bolts.

‘Go on!’ shouts Parson Phelps again. ‘Have courage! Think of Christ and His crown of thorns!’

‘AAAGH!’ I wail, and pull another one. Is it faith in the Lord, or the desire to please my father, that triumphs at this point? Either way, the thistle pulled, and my hand gushing bright blood, I can stand it no more, and withdraw from the game. Parson Phelps arrives and mops busily at my bleeding hand, applying camomile nipple-cream in silence. The words milksop, sissy and coward are not uttered, but they hang in the air between us as we witness Thunder Spit’s bravest toiling amid the whirling thistledown to prove their manhood.

‘Perhaps next year, I will be a man?’ I offer. But my father sighs; I have let him down.

Within half an hour, Farmer Harcourt’s thistle field was plucked clean as a chicken. The contest was won by Tommy, who had by now started as an apprentice to his father in the forge, and who had calluses on his hands as tough as bull-hide. He had become a hero; that night, the mountain of dead thistles was dragged down to the beach and set alight to cook the feast of clams and lobsters and sardines; as the great bonfire took light, illuminating the grey sand and grey bleached rock with an orange glow, I prayed that next year I, too, would pass the test of manhood.

That night I dreamed of her again – more vividly than ever. She was standing on top of a burning pyre of dead thistles, her face calm. Out of the smoke, she rose like a phoenix or an Angel. Her great wings flapped as she flew off into the night.

Despite my failure to become a man at the Thistle-Pulling Contest, I think of that time as my coming of age. It was also more, and worse. It was a fall from grace. I have always thought that it’s in the nature of childhood to misunderstand. To witness adult behaviour and, because there is no reference in the child-world, to invent a story around that thing which turns out to be a completely garbled and inaccurate concoction. But I was no longer a child. I was a fifteen-year-old who stared, and wondered, and made assumptions, and who signally failed to do the one thing he should have done, which would have possibly saved him so much grief. I did not insist on knowing.

In short, I was a coward. And I was a coward because I feared the truth. And this, as you will see, dear reader, has been my story. A fear, a lack of courage, because of a further fear, that the thing itself, the truth, will be so unacceptable that –

‘That what?’ she asked me, years later, as we stared into our favourite rockpool.

‘That I will be rejected. And that you will not love me. That no one will.’

My dream was prophetic. It was a windy Friday after the Thistle Contest. Tommy Boggs and I were returning from the harbour, where we’d been helping with the lobster pots. It was
my task to tie their claws together once we had heaved them from the pots, and then hurl them into the lobster bins to take to Judlow. I kept getting pinched. Tommy, being stronger, had the job of ripping the seaweed from the pots and flinging the pots into the boats. When we had finished, Mr Tobash handed me and Tommy each a bunch of sardines on a string, flipping and flashing in the sun. Clutching them like heavy jewellery, we headed home through the buffeting wind: I to the Parsonage, to cook the sardines for our tea, and Tommy to the forge, where his father was teaching him how to make fancy whorled doorknobs to sell in Judlow. St Nicholas’s Church had just come into view, and it was as we were rounding the corner by the gnarled chestnut tree, where Tommy’s path diverged from mine, that we saw Parson Phelps standing in the graveyard with a stranger.

Tommy and I stopped in our tracks and stared. The smell of fresh fish. The lash of the wind.

You couldn’t see her properly. She seemed to be a tiny woman – so small I thought at first that she was a child – wrapped in a hooded cloak that flapped wildly. They stood a foot or so apart from one another next to a thick tombstone, my father stooping slightly to catch her words, but clutching his hands behind his back in a nervous mannerism that I recognised. It was apparent immediately that they were engaged in an intense and heated discussion.

Tommy now gestured to me to creep towards the low hedge that separated us from the graveyard; we crouched against the briars, near a blackbird’s nest with four blue eggs in it. Suddenly Tommy grabbed my shoulder and pulled me down.

‘Shhhh!’ he said. ‘Listen!’

My father had begun shouting, and gesticulating furiously as he did so. As the words flew, I strained to catch them.

‘Foulness’. ‘Evil’. ‘Slander’. ‘Whore’. I recoiled. How could this unknown woman have so induced his wrath? ‘Devil himself. ‘Dare you’. ‘God’s name’. Then he shook his fist in her face. Surely he could not be about to attack her? I flinched.
Then suddenly, perhaps recognising how close he had come to violence, he stopped. His arms hung loose by his sides, and his shoulders slumped in a dismal triangle.

‘Look!’ said Tommy. ‘She’s reaching in her cloak!’

I squinted. ‘She’s giving him something.’

‘What is it?’ asked Tommy, peering, too.

‘Looks like a bottle. Or a jar of some sort.’

Whatever it was, it appeared to be heavy and unwieldy, and after lifting it to his face for inspection, she stood it on the tombstone. As he stared at it, his upper body still in the same sad posture of defeat, the woman reached in the folds of her cloak again, brought out a white rectangle of paper, and thrust it in his hand.

‘An envelope,’ breathed Tommy. ‘She’s giving him a letter.’

Without taking his eyes from the jar, my father took the envelope and shoved it deep into the pocket of his frock-coat.

We could see even from this distance that his face was unnaturally pale.

Then he said something to her, and lifted the jar from the tombstone. Holding it in outstretched hands, as though it might explode, he turned, and walked stiffly into the church. The woman stayed outside. She had her back to us now, a huddled figure amid the gravestones. She didn’t move, but just stood there as the daffodils bounced wildly about her feet. After a few minutes, my father emerged from the church. He no longer had the jar. He walked like a frail ghost. Mechanically, he pulled something from his waistcoat.

‘Money!’ exclaimed Tommy. ‘He’s counting out notes, look!’ And so he was. On and on, until a whole wad of money – where did this come from? From his own savings? From the church’s funds? – had passed from his left hand to his right. He said something to the woman, who held out her hand, and he gave her the wad.

Then, suddenly, my father had sparked back into life and was shouting once more. ‘Ever again’, I heard. ‘Wrath of the Almighty’. Then, ‘Forbid you, ever’. The other words were
indistinct but their despair and rage carried over to us, and we were afraid. Even Tommy looked suddenly smaller and quite white. The blackbird came back and hopped around her nest. Taking my eyes off my father, I stared at the perfect symmetry of her four blue eggs, and my tapeworm Mildred writhed within me. I do not know how long I stared at these eggs; a minute or an hour. When I lifted my eyes again, my father had turned on his heel, and was disappearing into the church. The woman was stuffing the wad of money into the folds of her cloak. Then turning suddenly, she was walking down the path towards the church gate.

It was then that Tommy and I saw her face and gasped.

I swear to this day, and Tommy swears, too, that it was the expression we recognised, rather than the face itself.

She swept past us and was gone.

We stayed there in silence for a while.

‘I’ll come and see you tomorrow,’ said Tommy finally. ‘I’m on my way to the forge, and Dad’ll beat me if I’m late. You be all right?’

‘I’ll be all right,’ I lied. I was half-crying by now. Somehow I managed to stagger home, and began to gut and fry the sardines. Father still didn’t return, so I put the fish aside and made my way to the church, to find him on his knees, sobbing before the altar.

‘Father –’

He swung round, his moon-face streaked with tears. ‘Go home!’ he shouted. ‘Go home now, and lock yourself in your bedroom! Read from Genesis, and do not come down until I return and call you!’

‘Father – who was that woman?’

‘You saw her?’ he whispered. His face was waxy pale.

‘I saw you argue with her.’

‘And what else?’ he mustered. The tears had suddenly dried, giving way to a hardness I had not seen before.

‘Nothing else,’ I lied. ‘I was just passing. I went home. Then I sat and waited for you, because I had prepared four sardines
for our supper, God’s own fish, but when you didn’t come, I came looking for you. The sardines are burnt now, father. They are now far from triumphant.’

‘The sardines be damned, Tobias!’ Parson Phelps was suddenly quivering all over. ‘Go home now and pray.’

I turned and left. I had no courage. My spine ached.

At home, I prayed more fervently than I had ever done. Life had changed shape. My hands shook. I opened my Bible at the Book of Genesis.

‘
The earth was without form, and void, and darkness was on the face of the deep,
’ I read. ‘
And God said let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters.
’ Yes. That is how it had been, in the Beginning. I could picture it happening quite clearly. Who could not, when they read these words? My eyes swam down the page. ‘
And the earth brought forth grass, herb yielding seed after its kind, and tree bearing fruit, wherein is the seed thereof, after its kind.
’ I looked at the gourds I had collected from the plant that grew on my mother’s grave. I kept them in my bedroom, in a wooden bowl. This year the fruits had not been green and stippled, as my mother’s original gourd had been, nor yellow and frilled, as last year’s had appeared; they were orange and warty, with little black flecks. I shivered.

‘
And God created the great sea-monsters, and every living creature that moveth, which the waters brought forth abundantly, after their kinds, and every winged fowl after its kind: and God saw that it was good
…
And the Lord formed man of the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul
…
And the Lord God caused a deep sleep to fall upon the man, and he slept; and He took one of his ribs, and closed up the flesh instead thereof; and the rib, which the Lord God had taken from the man, made He a woman, and brought her unto the man
…’