by Liz Jensen
1. Distant CUNTRIES were I wud be a QUEEN.
2. Fame and RICHIS.
3. A new kind of WURLD to be made, wer nobody haz to WURK.
He twurld his MUSTARSH, and I beleeved him.
She paused, and fingered the nib of her quill, then bent her head again, and continued her laborious scratching. Wel, He wuz gud to me wen we furst met, I was dansin at the Kings Arms, nites, then. E see me an He wont me, that’s wot E sed.
E sed, you do the SPLITS like that for me?
Posh talking. Munny in iz vois, I thinks. He stands me on the table.
Now do the SPLITS, E sez.
No, I sez. Cant. Legs gone. So SKARED I cud piss.
He just sits ther, twurls His Mustarsh. Waitin.
HORIS, wuz is furst name. Then comes the TRAPP.
CHAPTER 4
2005: IN WHICH THE ROGUE MALE EFFECTS METAMORPHOSIS
The Nuance was in her element on the motorway. She purred with oil like a randy lioness, and before I knew it, I’d covered a hundred and fifty kilometres, and had entered a transcendental travel limbo. There’s nothing like having A behind you, and B ahead.
Lovah me tender, lovah me trewah [I sang.]
All my dreams fulfiyul
For my darlin, I love yetvah …
Nah.
I turned on the radio. It was one of those programmes where grown-ups get paid for indulging in opinionated argy-bargy. They were talking about the Fertility Crisis again.
‘My feeling is that we reached an evolutionary cul-de-sac,’ pontificated an earnest woman. I imagined her: reading specs, dangly earrings, a Ph.D., halitosis, a brooch. ‘We’d gone as far as we possibly could, in terms of sophistication, civilisation, humanity –’
Then a bloke, a religious type, cut in. No-no-no-no-no. Sorry, sorry. Ha-ha. Lovely idea, Susan, blah-blah, he was saying, but with all due respect, the facts couldn’t be plainer. I pictured him, too: dog-collar, dentures, sensible Y-fronts, dumpy wife at home trying to tune in but not being able to find the right wavelength. The Crisis happened, he was saying, because the Lord had become angry with the world, just as He had done once before. He’d sent the Flood then – he quoted something here – bla-de-blah – and unleashed mighty waters, et cetera, so that only the meek should inherit, bah blah, and it was all our own doing.
‘If I could just cut in here –’ the Ph.D. brooch woman began, but he was on a roll.
‘– Not because we were so sophisticated, civilised, morally advanced, and humane as a species, but the very OPPOSITE. We didn’t honour what He had done for us. We, here in Britain. This once great nation.’
‘Susan? Would you like to come in here?’ said the radio man. He was just a voice.
‘Yes. Well, what we experienced was hardly a flood,’ the earnest woman remonstrated. ‘You can’t possibly call it a real flood! It was no more than a few inches!’
She was right there, I thought. The hallelujah types liked to call it a deluge, because of what happened after, but it was hardly what you’d call a big deal. New Year’s Eve, 1999 – very apocalyptic, of course. They all seized on that. But it was just a bad shower, maybe; no more. ‘A noxious squall,’ the Met Office called it at the time. The surgery got swamped, but it was nothing that a couple of Sunday Timeses couldn’t mop up, in the end.
‘Now come on. You can’t deny that it changed our lives,’ said the radio man. ‘Flood, heavy shower, call it what you will, things haven’t been the same since.’
‘Nobody’s claiming they have been,’ said another man. He had that reasoned, slightly chewing voice that scientists use when they’re on the radio. ‘I’d be the last person to say that the sudden infertility of the human egg in Britain isn’t a national catastrophe. As for whether the flooding on the night of the Millennium was the cause of it –’
‘But Professor Hawkins,’ butted in the woman. ‘I don’t frankly care about the cause of the problem. I care about the solution. We’ve got to remember that if it weren’t for the National Egg Bank, the British would already be headed for complete extinction. All I’m saying is –’
‘Should we really be that pessimistic?’ said the radio man. ‘After all, the Government’s telling us that in fact it’s only a matter of time till the fertility curve swings up again. And in the meantime, we’ve got the stored eggs to tide us over, so –’
‘But there are nowhere near enough pre-Millennial eggs in storage to deal with the queues!’ The woman was getting quite shrill. ‘Look at the evidence. There hasn’t been a single natural conception since New Year’s Day 2000! Five years of sterility! I say release ALL the eggs now, and get the girls pregnant as soon as possible, and –’
‘Big mistake,’ said the religious man. ‘Look, if God had wanted us to store human eggs, he’d have designed us to store them. It’s this very type of scientific intervention we were being punished for in the first place.’
‘Punished!’ squawked the woman. ‘You think –’
‘Yes, punished. You don’t like that word, do you. It’s not very liberal-friendly, I’m afraid.’
‘Well, you can’t deny it’s incredibly value-laden.’
‘I can’t, and I won’t. I say, What’s wrong with values? And if I may make another point, I don’t call two inches of rainfall ‘just a shower’. I call it a flood.’
‘So you’re saying God just wants us all to fizzle out, then, does he? You lot are quite happy to witness our decline? It’s all right for you. You’ve had your children, haven’t you? Boys, I’ll bet. If you had girls, you certainly wouldn’t be taking that line. When I see my daughter taking hormones so she can breast-feed an orang-utan, my heart breaks. If you take away the human eggs that were put in storage before the Millennium, you’re killing their only hope of becoming mothers. Not to mention the future of Britain as a nation.’
‘God knows what He is doing,’ the dog-collar man said complacently. ‘I’m confident that He’ll offer us some hope, if we show humility. Can’t you see it? This is a test! A challenge for us all! We will arise from the ashes of our impurity, as Christ arose on the third day!’
But it wasn’t going to be like that, and he knew it. Everyone knew it. I remembered the sequence of events, when the Fertility Blip officially became no longer a blip, but a crisis. First, when it became clear that male sperm were not affected, only female eggs, there’d been a whole spate of hastily arranged marriages to foreign imports. The women arrived here, fine, amid much domestic resentment, but within a couple of months, it became clear the new pregnancies weren’t going to materialise. Nature had played its wild card; their eggs seemed to have died as soon as they passed Customs. The whole country was an egg-killing zone. A nation of ovarian doom. The quickie divorces followed, and the Sperm Drain began. The tourist industry collapsed completely, and overnight, we became a third-world leper colony. Europe poured millions of Euros into fertility research, but was desperate to get shot of us.
‘How can anyone be resurrected, when half the men have left?’ snapped the woman. She was becoming quite strident. ‘Even the frozen eggs in the Egg Bank are only 50 per cent viable. I suspect it’s less. When did you last see a baby?’ she accused. They were getting rarer than hen’s teeth. It was like the Lottery used to be; anyone who benefited from the Egg Bank had to go into hiding. ‘Unless something’s done soon about the Sperm Drain,’ the woman was saying, ‘there’ll be no men left!’
True. A lot of blokes were leaving, now that it was clear the country was blighted. There was nothing wrong with British sperm, after all. Or foreign eggs. Emigration restrictions for men were on the cards; there was a rumour that, come next year, you wouldn’t be able to leave unless you could prove you’d fathered a genuine Homo Britannicus before the Crisis.
And that there’d be Loyalty Bonuses for men who stayed.
Was it the prospect of that, that stopped me going abroad? Not really. The fact was, I didn’t give a monkey’s about the future.
Carpe diem, I say. Seize the d
ay. Grab it by the throat and rattle its bollocks.
Before I left London, I phoned the Veterinary Society to inform them of my change of name by deed poll. I spoke to a Mr Jenks. I told him I needed confidentiality. Should anyone, such as a woman called Holly Noakes, or Mrs Patricia Mann, for example, try to contact me by the name Bobby Sullivan, he was to inform them that I was no longer on their books. I could hear the sound of a Jenks eyebrow being raised.
‘There was a sort of vendetta against me,’ I explained.
‘A vendetta?’ Jenks asked.
Oh Christ, I realised. He’s interested now. I’ve used a foreign word. He wants details.
‘A client with a grudge,’ I said, going for a spot of honesty. Busking it. I pictured Mrs Mann with a little silver revolver pointed at me over Giselle’s body-bag. ‘A dead-monkey scenario. Husband gets me to put the animal down, licence in order, all legal and above-board, wife comes along, threatens me. Bad marriage, baby-substitute, the old story. You feel more like a shrink sometimes.’
‘A common complaint,’ Jenks sympathised. When I assured him that I was completely in the clear, and (stroke of genius, this) that I was taking out a legal injunction against the deranged pet-owner concerned, he became even more understanding. ‘There’s a lot of it about,’ he confided. ‘We had a member shot with a crossbow last year, over a bushbaby. Claims and counter-claims, insurance hoo-ha and now the Court of Appeal. It’s the anthropomorphism,’ he mused. ‘Gets people carried away.’
There were several possibilities, Mr Jenks explained, clicking away at the vacancy file on his computer. A Saudi Arabian zoo, for instance, if I was interested in sunshine, but there was a strict no-women-no-booze clause which wasn’t everyone’s cup of tea, as it were. ‘Not many reproductive possibilities there, I’m afraid,’ he said. ‘Most men opt for Holland or the Far East.’
‘Anything closer to home?’ I asked. ‘I’m not bothered about reproduction, myself.’ This was true. Unlike Elvis, I’d never felt the urge to pass on my genes. No rock-a-hula baby for me.
‘Well, there’s a locum going up north,’ he said. ‘A suburb of Judlow called Thunder Spit. By the sea. Famous for a breed of sheep called the Lord Chief Justice.’
‘Sounds interesting,’ I lied. But the idea of the coast appealed. I thought of those camping holidays, with sun-cream and popcorn.
‘I’ll put in an application, then,’ I told him.
‘An excellent choice of name, if I may say so,’ said Jenks, when I spelled out my new identity for the records. I was pleased with his reaction.
‘You’ll be hearing from us soon, Mr de Savile,’ Jenks said. ‘Or may I be among the first to call you Buck?’
‘It’s a tragedy,’ the brooch woman was saying, as my windscreen wipers swished me past Axelhaunch, Fib’s Wash, Blaggerfield. Viking names. I’d heard a couple of blokes speaking Danish once; they sounded like clogged drains.
‘But to go back to the central point, as long as we have our stored eggs, then we have hope, surely?’ put in the radio man. He was paid to make sure people didn’t get too depressed. A difficult job. As the discussion took its usual apocalyptic course, the earring-and-brooch woman’s voice grew ever more quivery with emotion, and the hallelujah man with the Y-fronts and dentures became more and more triumphant, and the reasonable professor sounded more and more like a herbivore chewing old cud, and I thought: Desperate times. And desperate women. Hence the primates. No self-respecting woman over thirty could afford to be without her cute little companion. That’s what it said in an old copy of Cosmopolitan in the surgery waiting-room, anyway. I had a sudden clear picture of Giselle, the doomed macaque, handing Mr Mann a flea.
Desperate times, but a bonanza for vets.
My involvement with animals began with blood, meat, and a gizzard stone.
I am six. Unexpectedly, I visit the butcher’s shop with my mother.
‘Why not the supermarket, Mum?’ They had a popcorn machine, and photo booth where you could have your picture taken with the Terminator.
‘Because he’s organic’
She walks fast, dragging me by the wrist, to buy lamb cutlets for her actressy dinner party, at which she plans to call them ‘côtelettes d’agneau’. The year is 1983, and the shop is one of those expensive old-fashioned London butcher’s you rarely came across, even back then. (You see extinction everywhere, when you look for it.)
Meat hangs from hooks and languishes in little bloody trays; crimson sawdust confettis the floor. I gob in it and rake it about with my toe as I stand in the queue next to Mum. Then suddenly the butcher is heaving down towards me, holding something out in his palm. It’s a stone. I take it. It feels smooth and slightly oily.
‘From a chicken’s gizzard,’ says the butcher. ‘For you, mate. Freebie!’
I clasp it tight. In my innocence, I recognise I belong here.
‘When I grow up, I want to be organic,’ I say as we leave the shop.
‘Oh Bobsy-Wobsy, how horrible,’ says Mum, popping the plastic bag of bloody côtelettes into her shopping net. ‘Meat’s so grisly, darling.’
‘I like that. I like grisly.’
‘Well, be a surgeon, then,’ says Mum. ‘You can open up people’s bodies, and take out the bits with cancer and sew them up again.’
‘I don’t want to cut up people.’ I am fingering the gizzard stone in my pocket. And there, by the Norwich Union Building Society, the enormity of it stops me in my tracks.
‘I want to cut up animals.’
There’s nothing abnormal in this.
When I was twelve, I built a rat-trap, and then one for squirrels, because in those days the Council, which still deemed them urban vermin, gave you 50p for every tail you brought in. I dismantled the bodies the way my friends dismantled toy cars or aeroplanes. I kept a plastic box of animal bits in the far corner of the fridge, and another in the freezer. Mum never really noticed. As long as her ice and lemon were within reach, she paid no heed. Mum rested a lot, ‘Because actresses just bloody do,’ and because of her migraine sessions. It was left to Dad to see us boys through. He raised us efficiently, and he raised us to be men.
At fifteen, I was spotty and sweaty, with limbs that seemed roughly modelled out of plasticine and a penis likewise. All were embarrassing and unmanageable. It was this version of myself that began work as the organic butcher’s assistant. My mother hated the idea, and went off for one of her migraines. She was having them daily by this time. Dad was seeing another woman, Jilly, who wore tight-fitting jodhpurs and was married to a fox-faced man who skulked in the City all week. Fact: Jilly caused Mum’s migraines. Dad’s version: Jilly had ‘come into his life’ (he said it like she was Jesus) because Mum was always drunk.
But when I started work at Mr Harper’s, Mum made it clear that today’s migraine extravaganza was for me.
‘You’ll chop off a finger!’ she screeched through the door. ‘Or worse! You could lose a whole arm in those electric slicers!’
But this did nothing to put me off. In fact, the idea that I’d be working with lethal instruments increased the thrill. I pictured feeding my right index finger into the greedy blade, and saw it emerge in wafer-thin strips of pink flesh with a central spot of pellucid white bone. From behind the door, the familiar whiff of Amontillado sherry and the sound of heartbreak. Like all Mum’s noises, it had a thespian ring to it: Mrs Sullivan, stage left, falls to floor, clasps magnificent bosom, dies in sorrow. Exit spotty teenage son running, head in hands.
Things evolved from there, and before I knew it, I was at vet school.
The radio discussion had degenerated into a phone-in: a woman from Cleethorpes was wanting to know why it was Britain that had been affected by the Crisis.
‘It’s so unfair!’ she wailed. ‘Why not the whole of Europe? After all the kow-towing we’ve done to Brussels!’
The brooch-woman gave a piggy snort.
‘Well, the infertility is certainly very regionalised,’ said the radio man, coverin
g for her. ‘Do you have an explanation, Professor Hawkins?’
‘Well, if you look at it globally,’ he droned, ‘it’s perhaps unfortunate that it should have just hit our archipelago of islands, but in evolutionary terms, it’s not unusual for a disaster to be contained in this way.’ He paused, chewing on his words. ‘Islands are well known for housing species that aren’t found elsewhere in the world. But by the same token, their populations are also prone to be wiped out in accidents such as this. Be they caused by rainfall, triggering a genetic malfunction, or something else which we don’t yet understand. The end result, of course, being –’
I switched off the radio. Extinction. I’m fed up with that word, I thought. Let’s put on our blue suede shoes and dance like we did in the good old days, before I was born! I have twenty-nine virtual Elvis concerts on tape.
I peer through the windscreen: outside, the land is as flat and bare as a splat of emulsion, and the few trees seem to be cringing from something. As I drive past the hypermarkets, car-phone warehouses, carpet wholesalers, discount shoe shops, DIY stores and bungalows that herald the outskirts of town, a sign enlarges ahead of me. WELCOME TO THUNDER SPIT.
Which is the cue for the butterfly that is Buck de Savile, emerged from the caterpillar that was Bobby Sullivan, to press his foot harder on the accelerator and speed into town.
Yo! Homo Britannicus is dying, but the son of Elvis is going to live!
CHAPTER 5
FATHER OF THE MAN
Dr Baldicoot said I would die, but I lived. The Parson and his wife christened me Tobias, and I formally took their surname, Phelps. A solid name, evoking oakwood and rainy autumns and English brawn, passed down through many a generation in Thunder Spit.
But I was not as sturdy as the name I bore. Unlike the Phelpses who had gone before, whose graveyard epitaphs spoke of long, industrious and healthy lives, I was small and sickly; they said that all the energy of my babyhood seemed to be put into growing more hair. My head was a great thick tangled clot, and I had copious body hair from an early age, which promised great manliness, my father said wistfully.