Ark Baby (35 page)

That she was clad in nothing but a corset.

And that she was magnificent.

And that my heart shrieked within me, and that my tapeworm twisted my guts into a cruel knot of longing and delight and fear.

Yes, gentle reader: we met in the most particular of circumstances.

The cercumstancis woz most partikuler.

The nite of the storm
, she wrote,
wen he took me in his arms, I did not no WOT he wos, or WHO. It woz the next day, or the next, that Higgins came and litte a candel, and I saw the Creetcha for the furst tyme.

Meet a GENTLEMAN, sez Higgins. And larfs.

Remember, Parson PHELPS, I had no book lernin, and no understandin of SYENSE, and at that time I nowd nuthin of MISTER DARWIN’S BELEEFS.

All I nowd, woz that I had ikkstreemlie bad LUKKE in LUVVE.

I was still reeling from the sight of the magnificent corseted woman – reality or apparition of my crazed mental state, I knew not which – when the door of 14 Madagascar Street opened abruptly, and I found myself face to face with a thin, grey-bearded, grumpy-looking gent whose mouth appeared to be bristling with pins. In his right hand, he was wielding a hoof.

‘Dr Scrapie?’ I stammered.

‘Yes?’ With a gesture of disgust, he spat out his pins into his hand and settled his eyes on me, where they blazed uncomfortably. The shirt beneath his frock-coat was splattered with what might have been cochineal, or blood. A hole gaped in the sleeve of his jacket. ‘Well, young man? What is it?’

‘May I come in, sir?’

‘What for?’ he barked. ‘I’m busy. State the nature of your business, sir, or bugger off.’

My heart began to thump crazily under my ribs. I must persevere, I thought. I have come this far. What I have started, I will finish. Betty Botter bought some butter. Peter Piper picked a peck. Axelhaunch. Fib’s Wash. Blaggerfield.

‘Well?’

‘I would like to request you, sir –’ I begin, trying to effect an entry. But he blocks my path.

‘Yes?’

‘– And as a matter of fact require you –’ (Courage, Tobias!)

‘Yes?’ He was scowling at me now.

‘– And furthermore demand you, sir –’ (Yes!)

‘What, dammit?’

‘Humbly, sir, to –’

‘To what? Get on with it, fellow!’ His voice has growling thunder in it.

Three words left. Grasp those thistles, Tobias, and prove you are a man!

‘Examine my body. Sir.’

Silence. He’s looking at me as if I’m mad.

‘I’m not a bloody physician,’ he spits finally. ‘I am a taxidermist. I stuff and mount animals. Whoever directed you here is an imbecile. Now bugger off.’

‘Please, sir. Please!’ I am wedging my way in now, and reaching in my pocket. ‘There is something only you can answer.’

‘I said NO!’ he shouted. ‘Now bugger off! I’m in the middle of stuffing –’ He stops.

I’m pointing my revolver at him. My hand is shaking. Dr Scrapie freezes.

I can hear how thin and desperate my voice sounds. Like a tin whistle.

I say, ‘You will do it, sir, or I shall blow your head off, and then my own!’

Yes: a man at last!

None of the plastic replicas of primates or the hologram exhibits resembled my towel-holder in any way. There was an interactive CD ROM, though. I scrolled through, beginning to feel that my visit here was already a waste of time. I’d been through all my old veterinary books, and even rung a friend who specialised in primates. He’d never heard of the Gentleman Monkey, and when I described my towel-holder, he drew a blank. The CD ROM display repeated a lot of the stuff I’d already come across in the virtual library that I’d accessed from Thunder Spit: how the monkey differs from the ape in crucial ways such as DNA structure, teeth, skull size, and skeletally, in
particular with regard to the tail. There are only three living exceptions to this rule: Kitchener’s Ape, which has a cingulum on its molar teeth, more in keeping with the monkey family, the Yeoman Baboon, whose skull is closer to the fossilised humanoid Neanderthal than an ape as such, and the extinct Ape of Mogador.

Mogador rang a bell. Wasn’t Mogador mentioned in Scrapie’s treatise?

‘My God,’ says Dr Scrapie, a minute later when Tobias Phelps has bashfully undressed. A brief glimpse of Tobias Phelps’ anatomy would be enough to tell any zoologist that they had something remarkable on their hands. As Scrapie’s expert eyes take in the sight of the creature before him, he stifles a gasp.

‘Extraordinary,’ he murmurs.

The hand-like feet.

The abundance of orange body hair, peppered with animal fleas.

The mutilated coccyx.

‘And then there’s that,’ says Tobias Phelps, pointing to the jar.

Scrapie peers at its contents, and soon his pulse is racing furiously.

‘Am I the first to –?’ he asks Tobias Phelps in a haunted whisper.

‘Apart from Dr Baldicoot, when I was a baby. And my mother, but she is dead.’ Tobias Phelps is silent for a moment, and then confesses, ‘I rarely have occasion to be entirely naked, sir. Even when alone.’ Scrapie raises his eyebrows. ‘My upbringing, you know,’ Tobias Phelps whispers sadly. ‘My parents – discouraged nakedness.’

Scrapie’s heart does a complicated somersault.

‘Yes,’ he says, clearing his throat. ‘I quite understand. Now lie down, please,’ he instructs the young man. The phrase ‘on a plate’, keeps running through his head. Meanwhile Tobias
Phelps, for his part, cannot help noticing that the taxidermist’s manner has altogether altered, in the direction of sudden, extreme interest.

‘Now,’ announces Scrapie, forcing his mouth into a smile. ‘My dear young man. I need to investigate you further.’

I keyed in ‘Ape of Mogador’, and waited for further details. As the computer was running the search, I looked about: the schoolkids were flowing up the stairs like an anti-gravitational pancake mix. Everything echoed. I didn’t like this place. It gave me the creeps.

Just then there was a muted beep, and some text came up on the screen: in pink, on a yellow background, with an insistent techno-beat of music behind it. I began to read.

The Ape of Mogador: Also known – erroneously, because of its misleading tail – as the Gentleman Monkey.

Jesus Christ. And there was more.

As I read on, I began to feel sick with excitement.

Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled pepper, I said to myself as Dr Scrapie took out a small roll of measuring tape and encircled my skull with it. Miss Mosh mashes some mish-mash, I thought, as he shone a little torch into my eye. Minewort, lungwort, I thought, as he peered first into one ear, and then the other. Gudderwort. The arid Gudderwort. I can see his face. I can see his face and the distaste on it as he hands me the jar. And other faces, too: the Mulveys, the Cleggses and the Balls and the Tobashes. Tommy Boggs’ wife was a Tobash. Jessie, who had called me Prune-Face. Jessie’s belly, rounded with child.

The girl in my rooms, her hand down a student’s trousers, fishing about for his –

The woman I had glimpsed in the upper window, beneath whose corset –

The jar that contained my –

‘Now breathe in slowly,’ Scrapie is saying; he has a cold stethoscope to my chest. Can he hear how fast my heart is pounding?

From this angle, with his flowing white hair, grizzled beard, and authoritarian expression, Dr Scrapie resembles God; the same God whose beard dissolved into the white storm-clouds of the Great Flood in the Noah’s Ark picture on my bedroom wall at home. Have I not come to the expert of experts? The man who single-handedly peopled the Queen’s ghastly Animal Kingdom Collection with its human-eyed bestiary?

His eyes are all fired up with a strange gleam, and it dawns on me that I will have no more need of my revolver. I have his attention.

‘
Sir
Ivanhoe,’ I hear him murmur.

‘I beg your pardon?’

‘Nothing,’ he replies quickly. ‘I am just trying to think how I can –’ There is a long pause as he appears to search the recesses of his memory for the right word. ‘Help you,’ he says finally.

Now he is questioning me intensively, scribbling notes as he does so, and I am suddenly telling him everything. About being a foundling, discovered by the altar of St Nicholas’s Church in Thunder Spit, the day after the Travelling Fair of Danger and Delight left Judlow, with a ghastly mutilation to my lower spine which had nearly killed me. About the way the animals of Thunder Spit growled at me, and how I was rejected by humans, too. About the Contortionist at the Travelling Fair, who had handed my father the jar containing the –

‘The object in question,’ I falter. Scrapie’s eyebrows shoot up.

‘Aha,’ he says. ‘Now we are getting somewhere.’

But he does not say where. Instead, he questions me in detail about what he calls my ‘well-spokenness’. This prompts me to impress him further with a few tongue-twisters, and I recount how I used to read long passages from the Bible in church.

‘Speech came to me late,’ I tell him, ‘prompted by the sight
of a cake on my fifth birthday.’ This seems to stir even more excitement in him.

‘And before that? How did you communicate?’

‘In squeaks and grunts, as far as I am aware,’ I told him. ‘They said it was a miracle.’

‘A case of nurture overcoming nature, perhaps?’ mutters Scrapie, almost to himself. And then, addressing me: ‘In what manner were you raised?’

‘In a Christian manner, sir,’ I tell him. ‘Cleanliness, reading, self-improvement and piety were encouraged. Indulgences of the flesh, nakedness and childish play were not. A traditional English upbringing, sir.’

He questions me further, and I find myself telling him more: about how I believed the jar to contain an umbilical cord, until it had smashed, and about how Kinnon had put me right. About how, when I had told Kinnon my fears, he had assured me I was mad. About how I had insisted on knowing the truth. About how he had advised me to come to London, and search out an expert.

‘You could not have come to a better place, young man,’ murmurs Scrapie reassuringly, as he begins to carry out a series of quick sketches of me in his notebook. ‘You can trust me implicitly.’

This is a profound relief.

‘And you say your foster-father will not see you?’ Scrapie asked when I had finished telling him about Parson Phelps’ removal to the Fishforth Sanatorium for the Spiritually Disturbed.

‘That is so, sir.’ I hung my head.

‘I am – sorry to hear that,’ he said thoughtfully. ‘And nobody has any idea that you are here in this house? With me?’

‘No, sir. Why should they?’

‘No reason at all. Indeed not. My poor young man. No relatives? No friends? You are here completely – alone?’

It seemed important to him, though I could not see why.

‘Completely alone,’ I confirmed. Although I did not like
this lonely thought, Dr Scrapie seemed to find it particularly appealing; he started rubbing his hands as if I were a warm hearth.

Finally he blurted excitedly, ‘You looked familiar to me, young man, as soon as I saw you.’

I was surprised.

‘Are there others like me, then? I asked, filled with a sudden tremulous hope.

‘In a manner of speaking, yes,’ said Scrapie. ‘Or at least there were. What I mean is, I have seen a creature that resembles you. Resembles you so closely, and according to my records so accurately, anatomically speaking –’

He went over to his desk and pulled out a notebook full of measurements and sketches. Then he said, ‘Have you heard of a creature called the Gentleman Monkey? An extinct primate, from Morocco?’

‘No.’ I said. Why was my heart suddenly plummeting downwards like a leaden fishing weight?

‘That is the creature you resemble, young man.’

I pressed the key to call the picture up from the CD ROM, and watched the 3-D image emerge. It was an artist’s impression, and was accompanied by an etching of the creature, made in 1843 by a wildlife artist who had visited the last remaining specimen in the Jardin Zoologique in Mogador, Morocco. I gasped when I saw it. It showed the monkey standing with its hands on its hips, in a defiant and disconcertingly human posture, behind the bars of a large cage.

‘It’s him!’ I shouted. ‘It’s bloody-well him!’

‘
Language
!’ said the man in the mauve tracksuit. The pancake mixture had finished its progress up the stairs, and was now slurping Coke from cans and mock karate-kicking each other with feet clad in blocky trainers. ‘There’s kids about,’ the teacher went on. ‘If you can’t keep your mouth clean you shouldn’t be here in school hours.’

‘Sorry,’ I lied, desperate to get rid of him. He was glaring at me now like I was some kind of paedophile. When he finally shuffled off, trailing his charges behind him like a pedagogical jellyfish, I turned my attention to the text that accompanied the etching. The Gentleman Monkey was an unusual specimen, and had baffled naturalists at the time. Strikingly humanoid, with a larger brain than man’s, and a fun-loving temperament.

Polygamous by nature.

That word ‘polygamous’ got me thinking. It was then that some phrases from Dr Ivanhoe Scrapie’s eccentric treatise came floating back into my head, and my brain began to whirr.

‘So this – Gentleman Monkey,’ I croaked finally, gulping at air. ‘What is it, exactly?’

‘Was,’ Dr Scrapie corrected me. ‘It is no more. It was an interesting species of monkey; not so much a monkey, in fact, as a tailed ape. Anyway, highly intelligent, and strikingly human in appearance. Polygamous by nature, and a fructivore, but in other respects remarkably similar in many ways to the human. Child-like but courteous by nature; that’s why they called him the Gentleman, I suppose. And probably also why he became extinct,’ he added thoughtfully.

I was having trouble breathing by now. ‘And what happened to it?’

‘The last remaining member of its race is now housed in Buckingham Palace,’ said Scrapie. ‘I stuffed him and he became a towel-holder for the ladies’ powder room in the banqueting suite. That’s where he is now.’

If only I had heeded Kinnon’s advice, accepted his diagnosis of madness, and remained in Hunchburgh! I would be ordained by now! I would be Parson Phelps the Second, preaching my anti-Darwinian sermon loud and clear from the pulpit!