Ark Baby (3 page)

‘Mrs Mann,’ I said gently, thinking: Those yo-yos are going towards my spanking new Audi Nuance, missis, so don’t knock it! And then I said her name again, even more gently. ‘Mrs Mann. As far as I was concerned, it was a perfectly standard procedure. I put down at least five primates every working day.’

This was a wild exaggeration, I’ll admit. It was one a month, max. As I spoke, I was beginning to wonder if I could tell her that Giselle had been terminally ill. That when I’d inspected her, I’d found inoperable bowel disorder, of the kind monkeys are prone to when they’ve been fed the wrong diet. That Holly, being a temp, had misunderstood. It might get me off the hook. She might even be grateful. But too late: Mrs Mann’s crazed voice was veering up at me again.

‘I’m going to fight you all the way,’ she said.

Some instinct made me glance over at the doormat in the hallway. I peered at the single white rectangle that lay on it. The envelope was addressed to me in Holly’s schoolgirly handwriting. That did it. I’d been caught in a pincer movement.

‘Bugger off,’ I told the Mann woman, and slammed down the phone.

Holly’s letter was hand-delivered and brief. She was leaving ‘for ethical reasons’, and ‘would not hesitate’ to give evidence against me in an inquiry.

It was that phrase, ‘would not hesitate’ that pissed me off the most.

I lit the gas-ring and cleaned up the mess. As I stabbed away at the sausages sizzling gently in the frying pan, I thought about Giselle, and the excruciating Manns, and the silly Holly, and the statement that she would make on Mrs Mann’s complaint form. It was generally true, I realised, that, apart from the fleeting exoticism of a sick tarantula or a truly challenging road-accident case like the paralysed collie whose hind legs I’d replaced with little wheels the previous year, my life had become
a banal treadmill of feline vaccinations, mauled rabbits, cracked terrapin shells and primate psychiatry. But the Giselle incident was excitement of a kind I didn’t need.

And then, watching the little flecks of sausage-fat hitting the tiling behind the hob, where they congealed opaquely, a sudden, simple and quite mind-blowingly compelling thought came to me. Primates were a metropolitan thing, largely.

So quit the jungle.

Leave them all behind. Holly, and the Manns, and the apes and the monkeys. I could let the surgery to some starry-eyed newcomer, and be gone within the week. A change of scene. Some outdoor stuff. Cows, sheep, geese; the kind of animals that paid their keep, and were brutish, messy and unappealing enough to keep human sentimentality at bay. A place with farms, by the sea. Slurry lagoons. The seaside. Burying Dad in sand and fag-ends. Pissing into the waves. The smell of popcorn. Sex on the beach. Crabs.

I felt light-hearted and light-headed. As I turned the sausages in the frying pan, I noticed that I had begun to whistle a tune: ‘It’s Now or Never’. Telling, that. And I hadn’t whistled in weeks. Elation was whirling through me like a snort of ether. Then I prodded at the sausages. Yum, yum! My mouth waters just thinking about them. They were prime pork, flecked with dark-green spots of sage. I inhaled, and my heart soared. They smelt of freedom.

Boundless hope, and the bright motorway up ahead. As my car whooshed northwards to Thunder Spit, I was filled to giddiness with the knowledge that the future was mine.

They sed it wuz not POSSIBEL
, the Frozen Woman wrote years later, with her splattery peacock quill.
But IPROOVD it WUZ, tho I never SETTE OUT to do so, as I hav no lernin of SYENSE, and at that TYME I had not herd of Mister DARWYNNE’S beleefs.

The onion-skin parchment on which she laboriously penned her garbled testimony (in blood? In mud? In a hideous mixture of the two?) is now cracked and split with age, and the text itself is smeared with Parson Phelps’ snotty tears, which were to flow and flow in the Sanatorium, before dissolving into the sudden, insane laughter of pure joy.

All I REKOGNYZED
, she wrote,
wuz that I had ikkstreemlie BAD LUK in LUVVE.

She could say
that
again.

It is perhaps necessary to state, at a time when fiction is rife, that the account of my life that I deliver here is punctiliously reported, and scrupulously faithful to both truth and fact. That stated, shall I begin?

Picture first Thunder Spit: a peninsula in the shape of a herring, its tail nailed to the mainland, head straining out to sea. A God-fearing, wave-slapped place, an outcrop of harsh winds and cowering, gnarled trees and shrubs that hug the land like devilish suckers. Follow the promontory: follow the line of the herring’s back and find the dorsal fin, a beach of grey bleached sand and grey bleached rock. Look back across the
fish’s belly, past the flat shimmer of the River Flid, and see the grey slate roofs of the town like a mesh of scales. Further west, see the Church of St Nicholas, a spike its skull. The smell of salt, and thyme, and rock, and seaweed, and rotting fish. Sea-water washing and sloshing at you from north and south. There are floods each year, when the tide spills too far.

Thunder Spit; this was home, the home I still wear inside me like an extra ventricle, pounding away: Thunder Spit; a village famed for its annual bare-handed Thistle-Pulling Contest, for which a special field is set aside; a village where men have always been raised to seek out discomfort, and to thrive on it, striving to maintain the rigorous hair-shirt mentality of their forefathers. My foster-father, a moon-faced, passionate man who encouraged this approach to hardship, always used to say, ‘Coddle yourself, Tobias, and you slip away from God.’ On Fridays, he would stuff marbles into his shoes: he believed in paying penance whether you owed it or not. But my foster-mother, who suffered from bunions, and who would have liked to coddle herself and slip away from God once in a while, perhaps into a little brushed cotton, made a rigid horizontal of her lips and said nothing. That was her way.

Thunder Spit, home of the herring gull, the kittiwake, the storm petrel, the guillemot, the Lord Chief Justice sheep, the Hildamore cow, the famous Thunder Spit tortoiseshell cat, a variety of dogs, and three hundred and twenty-three of God’s human citizens.

Soon to be three hundred and twenty-four.

This is how the story goes: I heard it often enough. The white light, the piglet, the doctor, the infection, the gift-from-Heaven nonsense. The story changes, with the appearance of the umbilical cord, but that’s for later. The happy part first: my famous arrival in the Year of Our Lord 1845, as recounted by the God-fearing gent who was to become my father, for better and for worse, and despite himself.

Parson Phelps was well aware – sometimes most painfully so – that miracles did not often come to Northumberland, much less
to Thunder Spit. Quasi-occult dabblings involving tea-leaves and chicken-droppings, accusations of witchcraft against Mrs Boggs’ idiot cousin Joan, moral transgressions of the adulterous variety, calves with two heads, yes. But miracles, never, if he was honest with himself. (And when was he not?) The biggest excitement for months had been the Travelling Fair of Danger and Delight, which rolled out of Judlow yesterday, leaving the usual hot and silly mess of yearning in its wake. Parson Phelps had preached against it, as he did every year, and all the more fervently when he had heard that this year’s exhibits included a Man-Eating Wart-hog, a Ten-Foot Woman, and a Latvian hermaphrodite with a fan of ostrich plumes poking out of its exposed anus. The Fair, with its spangle-maned horses and Mechanical Millipede and dizzying bravura, always left the villagers goggle-eyed and addle-brained. Last year, a Judlow lad, drunk on exotic decadence, had sailed away on a Chinese skiff, and was now living among the heathens of Xiang, doing fancy basketwork and
tat chi.
The Fair always gave rise to a desire among the young to cast off their scratchy hessian, to popinjay themselves in silk and taffeta, to escape and see the world. Even though, as the Parson repeatedly told them, bellowing from his honest and unadorned wooden pulpit until he grew hoarse, all of God’s kingdom was before them, here beneath the vast flat open sky which is God’s window, and the salt ocean which is the residue of his tears, water which is both cruel and angry and beautiful and full of the triumphant sardine, the Lord’s own fish. Search no further than your own doorstep to find magic! It is already here, all about us, in God’s creation!

Slosh, slosh, went the grey North Sea as the Parson hell-fired and brimstoned his message to the fisherfolk.

Oh yes? thought the young men, their hands sore from thistle-pulling and scraping out lobster pots. Is that a fact? mused the young women, wiping their bloodied hands on rough aprons after a hard morning’s work, gutting fish and singing, cracked and tuneless, the rhythmic ballads of drudgery that were passed down from mother to daughter in these parts: ‘Hey-a-Minnie,’
‘Bobby Shafto’, ‘The Crab’s Lament’. Their lives were hard and thankless. No wonder they craved fairgrounds. Who in their right mind would say no to a toffee apple?

It was the day after the Travelling Fair of Danger and Delight left Judlow that I arrived in the church.

‘No coincidence,’ went the village whisper.

St Nicholas is the patron saint of fishermen, which is what most Thunder Spitters were. The Cleggs with their rolling seaman’s walk, the squint-eyed Lumpeys, the silent Peat-Hoves, the literal-minded Balls, the crabby Barks, the Morpitons with their tendency to exaggerate the size of every fish, the stubborn Tobashes: these were all net-heavers and lobster-pot-wielders down the generations, and proud to be so. The church that bears the saint’s name is constructed of sea-flint, with a black slate roof. Its darkness makes it a perpetual silhouette, even in bright sunshine, when the slates become a sheet of mirror and God’s home lurks beneath. Inside, as a rule, a somewhat gloomy darkness reigns within its thick stone walls, but today the rules are broken, for on this particular and momentous morning, as the Parson enters his cherished domain, he is suddenly aware of a cloud of glittering light, a ball of luminescence, an unaccustomed and dangerous brightness which comes whirling at him so hard that he feels his heart might be in spasm. In such a mischievous manner, he knows, does the great queller and provoker, God, sometimes see fit to manifest Himself.

It was this vision of white, Heavenly light, tinged with pink, he reported to his wife Mrs Phelps afterwards, that convinced him there was something special about me, even after I had bitten him and the whole episode had turned to vinegar.

At first he just saw the light (hallelujah!); then he saw the feathers. They gathered in a mighty white cloud, billowing in transcendental swirls, refracting the shafts of sunlight that came in through the wide-open door. Humbled by the glory, and afflicted by a weak left knee, Parson Phelps backed his be-cassocked rump cautiously into a pew and watched the feathers float down, recognising a message from God when he saw one.
As the import of what he was witnessing became embedded in his consciousness, the Parson, humbled and amazed, sank down from the pew to the lower level of the floor, where on his knees he now began to pray in a most fervent and passionate manner. And as he prayed, more feathers flew, and more and more and more,
like unto a whirlwind
, he thought, and although he knew that there was something miraculous going on, he now began to grow increasingly aware that there was also something plain odd, so he begged the Lord to forgive him for interrupting his own prayer, but might he just hurry over and inspect what kerfuffle was taking place in the vicinity of the altar? For he had begun to hear the strangest little grunts that came as though from a young swine.

And sure enough, through the flying feathers, the Parson could now make out something small and reddish-pink at the epicentre of the movement. Yes: a piglet, or perhaps a goat, attacking a goose-down pillow. So much for God-given messages. So much for miracles. He suddenly felt somewhat disappointed and not a little foolish for having wasted the Lord’s time, not to mention his own, with a prayer of thanks, when there was nothing to be thankful for, and he would now be better employed, God help him, summoning Mrs Phelps for a dustpan and brush, and Farmer Harcourt to catch the piglet, left there no doubt by some naughty village boys, pleasure-seeking pranksters for whose idle hands the Devil had found work.

But now the feathers were flying more wildly, and the noises becoming more acute, like a furious squealing snowstorm doing battle with its own self.

Alarmed and dismayed, Parson Phelps resolved to catch the creature with his bare hands. He had seen Farmer Harcourt do it, with a sudden grabbing movement, plunging down, and bagging the beast for market. He could then throw it out, and let it trot away. No; that lacked a sense of charity towards its owner. Tether it, then, from the birch tree, until Farmer Harcourt came to fetch it. Or, more Christian still, incapacitate it by swaddling it in the altar-cloth, and carry it over to the farm himself. Yes;
this, surely, was the option the Lord was most likely to favour, containing as it did elements of consideration to both man and beast, not to mention a level of inconvenience to himself that would elicit a merry glow of innocent satisfaction later.

‘So be it, young swine!’ he boomed aloud. ‘Parson Phelps is a-coming to get you!’

The piglet was still ripping at the pillow, so the Parson decided to take advantage of the creature’s violent preoccupation to swipe downwards with both hands, the feathers flying. Choking on them, he managed to grab the beast. Its flesh was hot. Parson Phelps, blinded by feathers, spat and choked. He breathed a scatter of fuzz-fringed plumes in through his nose and sneezed explosively, the hot little animal wedged against his knee and still squirming in his hands.

‘Ouch!’ A sharp pain ripped its way up the Parson’s leg. The creature had bitten him, suddenly and hard, on the shin. He dropped it and kicked at it; it landed on the devoured pillowcase with a noise that went
thwonk!
, and lay there twitching. And now the Parson felt a wetness on his cassock. He looked down, and saw blood.