Ark Baby (8 page)

But in a community as small as ours, I was still the foundling boy, the outsider. People stared at me and jeered when I ventured into town. (They said redheads smell different, but if you’re one yourself, how can you tell? And even then, what can you do about it?) The villagers accused me of frightening the sheep and the cows in particular, and I was banned from Harcourt’s farm because of the havoc I once wreaked in his paddock when I accompanied my mother to buy eggs. The whole flock of poultry refused to lay for another two weeks. I was also the cause, according to the farmer, of his favourite horse throwing
a nervous fit. Dogs growled at me, too. My unfortunate effect on the animal population of Thunder Spit soon earned me a bad name, and some villagers began to mutter biliously about an ‘evil eye’.

This enraged my father. I was the Lord’s own chosen child, and my love of God and the Scriptures was proof of it; how could anyone who had heard my readings in the church – to a packed and admiring gathering of Christian brethren – think otherwise? How could a boy who sang hymns so eagerly and with such a clear and angelic voice be anything other than special to the Lord? But after the epileptic-horse incident, I avoided Harcourt’s farm, and walked a lonely path to school, where the creatures would catch no whiff of me. My trips to the cobbler were the source of deep shame, and I always kept my socks on to hide the unnatural shape of my feet. Mr Hewitt’s shop was poky and dank, and it stank of badly cured leather, a smell I have come to associate with death and fear. Here he made me special shoes, with leather and bark soles. They looked like fishing boats. Over the years, perhaps to counteract my natural inclination to crawl somewhat crab-wise rather than to walk, and to disguise the oddity of my gait, I began to tread slightly on tiptoe.

In the village, they called me Tobias Trotter.

At every school, there is an unattractive boy who lurks in a corner of the playground, fiddle-faddling with a stick or a stone, who is unruly, who sometimes reverts to scrambling on all fours, who has no great talent to compensate for his oddity. In Thunder Spit, that boy was me.

And yet do not pity me, gentle reader, for I was not unhappy; far from it. My parents loved me, and my memories of those early childhood days are golden, because I had the sea, and its astonishing contents. It was a huge toy-box to me, and every day it spewed forth a new miracle. See me there, on the grey beach, a speck of humanity beneath the great unrolled carpets of sky and ocean, sitting on a sand-dune with my bare toes dug in deep and my soul unlocked, watching the sky turn
from coral pink to pale gold, the clouds flattened against the sea, the pearl waves rolling into green. The rocks grey, cold, shimmering with sea-salt like sacred dust. There, alone, I would stare into rockpools; for hours, I gazed in deep, watching the vague clutchings of sea anemones and the swirl of jellyfish and the little light-explosions made by shoals of baby herring. Plunging my arm in deep, I captured crabs, miniature lobsters, crayfish, shrimps, mussels, cockles, quillsnappers, aquatic and semi-aquatic feats of engineering that wear their skeleton on the outside like armour. Searching tenaciously, I found bigger and better rockpools, bigger and better crabs; picking them apart, I found inside a maze of inter-connecting meat-chambers, like Parson Phelps’ church organ decked with knuckles of calcium, yet the divisions as smooth and papery as the internal walls of a Japanese samurai’s abode. ‘God’s doodlings’, my father called them, inspecting what I brought home in my tin bucket. His belief was that molluscs and other sea-creatures were drawn from the margins of the Lord’s great sketchbook, in which the masterpiece was man.

He certainly broke His nib the day he drew me, I thought, as I looked wistfully at my reflection in the rockpool. The squashed-up face, too crammed with features for its size, with thin lips and round, dark eyes like two raisins shoved deep into a burnt cake.

But, ‘Beauty is in the eye of the beholder,’ my mother always said, and I came to believe her.

To most Thunder Spitters there were two types of Nature: the Nature man could vanquish, and the Nature that vanquished him. The Nature we conquered had long been domesticated for us, by previous generations of Thunder Spitters: our famous cats, that were black-and-red-patched like cows, with a distinctive stripe down the nose, and always fled when I entered the room. Or the skinny sheep who scattered at my approach, or the cows whose milk I was alleged to curdle, or the dogs that so loathed me: mostly sheepdogs, collies and whippets which inter-bred like the families here, the Peat-Hoves, the Balls, the Cleggses:
long lines of intermarriage and gravestones to match. But the other Nature always remained: wild Nature, the Nature we couldn’t guard against; the Nature that was always erupting and rattling around us. The swarms of stinging jellyfish, the Portuguese men-o’-war that could kill you or, as in the case of Robbie Tobash, lose you the use of an arm; the floods and the winds that knocked over our boats like paper hats, the giant octopuses that grabbed men overboard in the night, the potato blight and the centipedes and lice and silverfish in the sacks of corn, and the fleas that attacked us, and the parasites we bore within.

My mother had a theory that I was inhabited by a particularly tenacious tapeworm, which had been my lodger since babyhood. She claimed this sordid stowaway was the cause of my sphincter trouble, and she spent much of her time thinking up new ways to purge me of it.

‘This’ll do for you, you evil creature,’ mother would murmur, her plain potato features wincing in concentration as she forced the foul concoctions down my gullet. She christened my tapeworm Mildred. The name was also – ‘By pure coincidence,’ she said – that of a woman my father had once been sweet on in his bachelor days. But try as she might, my mother could never abolish my invisible passenger. Or the fleas, or the bats, or the toe-fungus that haunted us all.

Yes, Nature infested us, and we fought it off. But it came back. We fought it off again and it came back again. It was like the fizzing waves on the shoreline, leaving a lacework of foam and history that clung to our lives.

‘Father, how exactly, how
exactly
, did God make this?’ I remember asking Parson Phelps one day. I was brandishing a mermaid’s purse at him, a black dogfish egg with twirling strands protruding extravagantly from its four corners.

‘By His holy craftsmanship,’ the Parson explained patiently. I pictured God in a sort of workshop, like that of Mr Hewitt the cobbler, puzzling over the engineering. ‘And what is more, he created all this, and more, in a mere day. The fourth day.
Remember, Tobias? Remember your scriptures? What did God do, Tobias, on the fourth day, that is so apt to your question? God said let
what
bring forth
what?
’

I had scriptures coming out of my ears.

‘God said, “
Let the waters bring forth abundantly the moving creature that hath life, and let fowl fly above the earth in the open firmament of Heaven,
” Father.’

‘Well remembered, Tobias. A sound memory is a blessing.’

‘But, Father, did he really make it all out of nothing?’

It just didn’t make sense.

‘He made it out of the void, Tobias. “
For the earth was waste and void
–” ’

‘ “
And darkness was upon on the face of the deep
,” ’ I finished. I was mesmerised by the beauty of it.

Like him – like all of us – I believed the words of the Bible implicitly, just as I believed Herman’s
Crustacea.
Neither book had ever given me any cause for doubt. God was as real to me as my tapeworm, Mildred. Both were invisible, but housed within. Both made their presence felt in a hundred small ways.

‘ “
And the spirit of God moved upon the waters. And God said let there be light,
” ’ intoned the Parson. I loved his big voice. It boomed with righteousness.

‘ “
And there was light
,” ’ I replied.

When you live near the sea, all this is obvious. As I discovered later, it’s in towns and cities that your soul is caught unawares.

‘And,’ continued the Parson, but in his other voice, his less appealing, thinner, somewhat nagging voice, ‘returning to your dogfish detritus, not to mention your crab collection and your cuttlefish and your sea-beetle and your dead cormorant, which your mother spied on Wednesday in your chest of drawers and threw out, Tobias, because it was smelling foul, what else did God do on the fourth day? He created the great sea-monsters, Tobias, and every living creature that moveth, which the waters brought forth abundantly, after their kinds, and every winged fowl after its kind – and what did God see, Tobias? What did he then see, son?’

‘He saw that it was good, Father,’ I replied, picking at a sea-urchin spine that had lodged painfully beneath my thumbnail.

‘Precisely. Which is more than can be said of your smashed limpets, and also your lobster shell, which I found lurking in the vestry, when tracking down the source of a vile odour. I saw then, and smelt, that it was
not
good. Not good at all. No more carcasses in our house, son, or in God’s.’

‘No, Father. I promise.’

‘Good boy.’

‘Father.’

‘Yes?’

‘What is this?’ I thrust my stone at him. There were many such stones on the beach, and I had never understood them. This was a wonderful specimen, its dark whorl with radial stripes reminiscent of a shell.

‘That,’ said Parson Phelps, stopping in his tracks, ‘is one of God’s jokes.’

‘God makes jokes?’ I questioned, aghast.

‘Yes. Some big, and some small. On scientists.’ My Father hated scientists. They were responsible, he often claimed in his sermons, for much of the world’s confusion. They were a scourge, and ranked as low in his estimation as rude children and fallen women. ‘Your stone is called a fossil,’ he continued, ‘and God planted them in the earth to muddle a certain breed of scientist known as a geologist. He knew exactly what He was doing.’

‘A geologist? What is he?’

‘A man who dares to question the truth of Genesis,’ my father replied. ‘These fossils are red herrings, planted by God, to trick geologists into believing they are right. And thereby wasting their time on a grand scale.’ He laughed, sharing God’s joke. ‘Do not forget, son, that he is a
jealous
God!’

My father seemed to find this most mightily amusing, and chuckled at God’s holy sense of humour, but I was merely confused. I believed passionately in the Lord, but His fossil joke and other holy eccentricities led me to question His
divine purpose on more than one occasion. Another question vexed me, too.

‘Father.’

‘Yes, son?’

‘Who made God?’

Well? Is that such a foolish question? What
were
his origins?

My father had the answer, though. ‘God is self-made,’ he said finally. ‘Like a self-made man. But God.’

‘I see, Father,’ I said. But I lied, for I did not, and it remains to me a puzzle.

After I dun the SPLITS for Him
, the woman wrote,
Trapp claps his hands, cals me to His tabel to drink WINE.

He was hansom enuf. Big MUSTARSH, with wax tips, keeps TWURLIN and TWURLIN away at it. Sumthin about Him. Dont no wot till later.

I likes you, He sez. You hav nacherel GRASE, animal GRASE.

I has wot? I arsks.

Exept wen you speeks, He sez. So I kept my mouth shut mostly arfter that remarke. HE was in business, He says, but He doesnt say wot.

He takes me home. I dont object to THAT, wot with my lodgings at Mrs Peersons, the BICH. The hous is big and shabby but posh, no mistake. Grand PIANNA in the drorin room, big chairs, big PIKCHERS on the worls. Pikcher of him, Trapp, standing on top of NELSONS COLUM in TRAFALGA SKWER. He sez its Him, anyway, THE FACT IZ the man is too smorl to see and He is SPITTIN on the crowds below. Thats wot E sez, but thats too smorl to see as wel.

I enjoyed that IMENSELY, He sez. An EXELENT evenin that wuz. See that PIANNA, He sez. I wonts you to stand on top of it an DARNS for me.

So He plays the PIANNA, and I darnsis, and He has teers in his eys after, I SWER IT. That was a good nite, that furst nite with Trapp, but it didnt stay good.

UNFORCHENATLY FOR ME.

My next mistake woz to moov in with Him as a servant, but to liv with Him as a wyfe, and thus to lern all about SLAVERIE.

As Tobias Phelps pursues his lonely childhood in Thunder Spit, let us now catapult ourselves back in time to observe the beginnings of a parallel childhood: that of Miss Violet Scrapie. The normal gestation period for
Homo sapiens
is nine months, and it is now November 1845, forty weeks to the day since we bore voyeuristic witness to the scene of marital union enacted by Dr Ivanhoe and Mrs Scrapie behind the chintz curtains of Madagascar Street, Belgravia.

Time for some screaming!

‘AAAGH!’

That is the Laudanum Empress, in the early stages of childbirth.

And some cursing!

‘Buggeration and damnation!’

That is Dr Ivanhoe Scrapie, reacting to this piece of ill-considered timing on his wife’s part; he is battling with an awkwardly lopsided yak which refuses to conform to the structural requirements demanded by the armature. He is loath to leave his workshop to hang around outside the bedroom door; he will stay here, he decides, and fiddle with the armature, and smoke a cigar, as is traditional. Damn the whole business, he thinks, surveying the yak. He has approximately seven other children, if his memory serves him. Aren’t they all more or less grown-up by now? He thinks so. Many have surely departed abroad, or have married, or both. And now – just as the Queen’s Animal Kingdom Collection is weighing him down
with work (eighty-one animals completed; fifteen thousand-ish to go) another wretched child!

The screams are getting louder. Scrapie hears the midwife calling for more water. He hears Cabillaud shouting
merde.
He puffs at his cigar.

‘AAAGH!’