Ark Baby (36 page)

I pictured the creature’s skin being removed from its body,
and filled with sawdust, then dressed in human clothes, like the creatures I had seen at the Museum.

‘And the – carcass?’ I mustered finally, following the ghastly thought through to its conclusion.

‘You’d rather not know about that, young man,’ said Scrapie, looking suddenly tired and slightly throttled. ‘Suffice it to say that it was highly toxic. It contained poison.’

‘Poison?’

‘So it would appear. Not something I discovered till – later,’ said Scrapie. ‘When I had cause to investigate the creature’s remains.’

‘You mean the monkey was poisonous by nature, or it had
been
poisoned?’

‘It had been poisoned,’ he said slowly. ‘With praxin.’

‘But why? Where? Who did it?’ I felt my sanity slipping away as I spoke.

‘Nobody knows,’ sighed Scrapie. ‘But I have my suspicions.’

The last of this species of ape, according to the interactive CD ROM display, had been purchased by the entrepreneur Horace Trapp from a Moroccan menagerie for Queen Victoria’s collection and shipped over to Britain, but it had died in mysterious circumstances on the voyage back to London, following a mutiny on board Trapp’s vessel, the
Ark
. The creature had later been stuffed by the Taxidermist Royal, Dr Ivanhoe Scrapie, as part of Queen Victoria’s Animal Kingdom Collection, most of which was housed in the Museum. But the Queen had so taken a liking to the primates that she decreed they should grace the rooms of Buckingham Palace, which was where the ape was dispatched, once stuffed, sometime in the 1850s. But in 1864, to the dismay of later generations of evolutionary scientists specialising in primates, the stuffed creature was stolen from Buckingham Palace. And never traced.

It was there, as I flicked through the interactive zoology encyclopaedia, that I realised. The Gentleman Monkey in my
bathroom was the only known specimen in the whole world of this breed of extinct primate. The only remaining evidence that such a creature had ever existed. There was no mention of its having been stolen in Scrapie’s treatise. Could he perhaps have written it before the creature had disappeared from the Palace? And if he had not been lying about the rarity and the final extinction of the species – was it (I got all choked up at the thought), was it possible that the rest of his extraordinary document was also true?

That word ‘polygamous’ kept haunting me.

Yes: I’d definitely have to think about this.

‘We found the Gentleman Monkey dead on the
Ark
,’ said Scrapie, after he had finished telling me what he knew about Horace Trapp’s career, first as a slave-trader, then as an animal-collector for the Queen. ‘Along with all the other creatures. Over a thousand of them. Most of them half torn to bits. Nature’s cruel, you know, young man,’ he said, eyeing me in a strange way. ‘But there wasn’t a mark on the monkey. It was the praxin that killed him. It must have been injected.’

I winced.

‘We found Trapp’s head, too,’ Scrapie continued, going slightly pale. He paused for a moment and re-filled his pen with ink. He did it slowly, applying great concentration to the task. ‘Not a pretty sight,’ he said finally.

‘When was this?’ I asked. ‘When did Trapp’s
Ark
arrive in London?’

‘1845, the same year Violet was born,’ said Scrapie. ‘It was found floating on the Channel, and hauled in.’

‘Violet?’

‘My youngest daughter.’ I remembered the face of a woman in the window. So this was Violet Scrapie. I felt my heart shift, and desolation sweep through me like a cold wind. ‘It was a bloody nuisance,’ Scrapie was saying. ‘Had to ship an iceberg over to deal with it. Trapp’s
Ark
kept me busy for fifteen years.’

I gulped.

‘1845 was the year of my birth,’ I told him. ‘As far as it is known.’

Scrapie picked up his notebook again, and began to scribble furiously.

I had dismissed the assertions in Scrapie’s treatise as nonsense; the ravings of a demented man.

But –

Hope gobbled at my innards, and my brain raced. I found myself actually having to grab hold of a fibreglass gibbon to keep my balance. The kids had moved off, but their voices wafted up from the hall below, a faint echo buzzing in my head.

What I was thinking was that, by a quirk of fate – that chance meeting in the pub with Norman Ball? Or was it even earlier, when the threatened litigation over Giselle catapulted me north? Or did it date back to my childhood wish to work with animals? In any case, by some quirk of fate, some kind of extraordinary missing link had fallen into my lap.

The de Savile Theory of Evolution, they would rename it. I would insist on it. I’d hold the Gentleman Monkey hostage, if necessary, until it was official. You try stopping me.

I’d be given a Euro Award.

Then I started thinking about the other stuff in the document, and my stomach heaved. There were implications. Phelps, the man was called. Tobias Phelps. I didn’t recognise the name from the twins’ family tree. But they hadn’t finished it.

I was hallucinating now, surely. I had never seen their feet. They didn’t have tails, that was for sure. But it was still possible – was it not? That –

No. I was going mad. It was impossible.

‘Impossible!’ I said.

Scrapie said, ‘So you know, since you have become aware of
Mr Darwin’s theories, that we are all descended from the humble primate?’ He spoke slowly, as if I were suddenly a child, or a creature not too quick on the uptake. Perhaps he was right. ‘
All
of us,’ he said. ‘Even Her Majesty Queen Victoria.’

No, I thought. It wasn’t like that.
The earth was without form and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep.

‘Human beings stand at the top of Darwin’s ladder of nature, you know, Mr Phelps. Of all the species of primate, we are the most evolved.’

Blasphemy!

‘Have you ever seen a fossil, Mr Phelps?’

‘I have. My father used to say that they were God’s jokes,’ I told him. My voice sounded weak and thin.

‘Jokes?’

‘God moves in a mysterious way,’ I said, scraping about in my memory for the comfort of my fledgling sermon on God and the fossils. ‘Fossils are clearly the Lord’s doing, and evidence of His grand design.’

But my heart wouldn’t stop pounding; I felt that I might explode and scatter, like a distraught firework.

‘Well, according to Darwin and others,’ said Scrapie, ‘they are evidence of a distant past, of which we are the biological inheritors. Have you heard of natural selection, young man?’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘It is Darwin’s theory. I have studied his book, and his profane ideas.’

‘Natural selection,’ said Scrapie, brushing my remarks aside, ‘is Nature’s way of making advancements. From simple to complex, from complex to even more complex, until you reach man. Darwin says that we must not, however, forget the principle of correlation, by which many strange deviations of structure are tied together, so that a change in one part often leads to other changes of a
quite unexpected nature.
’

Scrapie stopped in his tracks and steered me towards a
chaise-longue.

‘Sit down here,’ he said. Obeying him, I found myself face
to face with the male object and related accountrements of a stuffed horse.

‘A fine specimen, your horse,’ I mustered politely. Miss Mosh mashes some mish-mash. The creature looked nothing like the horses back in Thunder Spit.

‘Well, it would be an odd specimen, if it were a horse,’ says Scrapie. ‘Actually, it’s a mule. An ass. A hybrid.’

‘A hybrid? A sort of cross?’

Mildred doesn’t like this idea one little bit, and wrenches violently at my long-suffering sphincter.

‘Exactly. Father a stallion, mother a donkey. Or occasionally vice versa. They are always sterile,’ continued Dr Scrapie slowly, keeping his eyes levelled on my face. ‘They are sterile,’ he said, ‘because Nature doesn’t like breeding across species. Yet –
paradoxically
– it has always happened. In the case of the mule, it has been virtually an institution. Most examples occur in the world of botany, but there are plenty of zoological examples as well. More than you’d think. Wallabies and kangaroos. Crocodiles and alligators. Lions and tigers, even. And then there are historical cases, or should I say mythological ones, though where mythology ends and history begins we can only guess at.’

‘Cases such as, sir?’ I falter faintly.

‘Such as the Minotaur, the Centaur, the mermaid; Pegasus, the winged horse. Medusa, the snake-headed woman. The Devil is half goat, is he not? And then of course there’s the Angel.’

Blasphemy and more blasphemy!

‘I cannot agree with that, sir,’ I retort, my cheeks burning. ‘The Angel is a creature of Heaven.’ But then I feel my face slacken, and I reach for my whelk. For I know, suddenly, and with a force that sets Mildred attacking my innards, that if a creature of Heaven is possible, then so is a beast from Hell.

‘So how –? What –?’ I stammered.

‘Darwin,’ said Scrapie, ‘asked the following question: “
If the cross offspring of any two races of birds or animals be interbred, will the progeny keep as constant, as that of any established
breed; or will it tend to return in appearance to either parent?
” I’ll say this much for Darwin: he’s asked some sensible questions. But he doesn’t have all the answers. Not by a long chalk.’

I am perched stiffly now on the edge of the
chaise-longue.

‘And – do you have answers, sir?’

‘I think your existence upon this earth is beginning to provide me with some,’ he replied. He sat still for a while, lost in thought. ‘A form of natural selection,’ he finally murmured to himself. ‘An evolutionary tangent. A new branch of the family. Or an old one.’ Then he jumped up and began to pace the room. I could see his mind was tumbling in all directions. ‘Yes; very possibly an old one. Humans are evolved from other primates. Apes. Monkeys, too, but further back. But what if –?’ He paused, then began to drum his fingers on a table.

‘Hypothesis,’ he said, his eyes dancing with excitement. ‘Hypothesis. A human mates with another species of primate. On board Trapp’s
Ark
, let’s say. Mates, let us speculate, for the purposes of argument, with
the Gentleman Monkey.
And creates a new breed of human-like primate. You, Mr Phelps!’

I was winded by the very absurdity of the suggestion, but there was no stopping Scrapie by now. He was leaping up and down.

‘Yes, you!’ he yelled, slapping me hard on the back. ‘Raising the intriguing scientific question: Can the unaccountable leaps and bounds of our evolutionary path be explained by the occasional injection of the blood of other species into the veins of some creatures? Could the mouse have emerged from the elephant, or vice versa, by an incredible act of sexual union? Which occasionally bore fruit?’

I gulped.

Scrapie said that a man called Mendel had bred peas that told such a story. The botanical examples were all about us. I thought of the gourd plant on my mother’s grave. Had it been trying to tell me something, after all?

‘Yes!’ Scrapie was almost shouting. ‘There’s not enough time, you see, for everything to have happened! To get from a fish to
an amphibian to a man takes longer than it should. It doesn’t work on paper. So there have to be sudden changes, not just gradual ones. And you are the answer!’

My head was thudding, and the air about me seemed suddenly strangely dappled, as though my vision were disintegrating. ‘I still don’t understand.’

‘Two different species, breeding, Mr Phelps! Imagine such a thing! Not possible now, to create a new species, out of two. But
was once
, maybe. Why on earth not? So imagine this, as the answer to Darwin’s time-paradox: that man didn’t evolve slowly from a gorilla or a chimpanzee. He appeared suddenly, like Adam and Eve in the Bible. Just one. A freak cross-breed. From two completely different – and perhaps incompatible – species. Two species that would perhaps otherwise not have
survived
! That would have
died out
! Two wrongs, therefore, Mr Phelps, making a right! You are living proof that it’s possible.’

One of the briefest, but also the most potentially historic conversations on the theory of evolutionary science, had just taken place.

‘
I’m all shook up!
’ I sang. ‘
Oooh!
’

Pedal to the metal. Go, cats, go.

This was the biz.

And I was the King.

So, I thought miserably, Genesis
was
a lie. And evolution
was
a fact. But its mechanics – its mechanics were not quite as Mr Darwin thought. It had progressed at times in great magical leaps. And I was proof of it. A mutant, an aberration, a misbegot. One year a green and stippled gourd. The next a yellow, blotchy one. The following year an orange fruit, with warts. The year after that, a mauve one with stripes. The year after that, a green one again, but with warts, or stripes, or mottled patches. A bit of this, a bit of that. Fling it in the primordial soup pot and await
God knows what! The world looked different, all of a sudden. It had transformed itself, before my eyes, from an ordered place, a hierarchy created by God, into a floating Darwinian whorehouse. There reigned a new, chaotic higgledy-piggledyness that defied belief and astonished the heavens. And I, Tobias Phelps, was part of this crazy hotchpotch of nature called evolution, a dangerous and wild and virtually unexplored new territory of understanding. But was I a victim or a pioneer?

Was I one of God’s jokes, or the butt of it?

I hung my head in an unfathomable mixture of pride and shame.

Scrapie was fingering a syringe now, and giving me a strange look.

‘Have you ever had laudanum?’ he asked.

‘Yes. Kinnon gave me some before I left Hunchburgh. To calm my nerves.’

‘He did well. I would now like to give you some more. I shall administer it by injection; it’ll act faster and more effectively that way. Now roll up your sleeve for me.’

Betty Botter bought some butter, I murmured to myself as the needle entered my vein and he squeezed. But, she said, this butter’s bitter. Scrapie had been right; I began to feel both relaxed and dizzy immediately.