Ark Baby

by Liz Jensen

  Others took a different view.

  ‘His real parents must’ve been infidels,’ I heard Mrs Tobash say once, as she and Mrs Fletcher gutted fish at the harbour market. ‘There’s nothing Christian about body hair.’

  My hair was rust-red.

  ‘Another sign of evil,’ asserted Mrs Fletcher, throwing some mackerel innards down for the tortoiseshell cats to gobble. ‘He’s crawling with fleas, too, they say.’ This much was true. ‘I reckon he’s witches’ spawn.’

  ‘And I reckon he’s from the Fair,’ said Mrs Tobash. ‘He’s a misbegot. One of them freaks. He’ll never be a man.’

  I ran and hid in my mother’s skirts.

  I will be frank with you, reader: I grew up with a distinct sense that all was not well.

  Proud though I am now of my eloquence and literacy (if you will forgive me a moment of self-praise), it may come as a surprise to you that in childhood my lack of speech was the cause of great anxiety to my foster-parents. It was clear to them that I was not unintelligent (indeed, I was quite the opposite, although it is perhaps immodest to mention it) but it was evident that some inexplicable blockage was preventing me from uttering a single sound other than a squeak or a grunt, which bore no relation to the human language. In the opinion of the good Dr Baldicoot, the matter was related to my general sickliness at birth, and the trauma caused by my unfortunate mutilation.

  ‘For who knows,’ he argued, puffing on his vile-smelling pipe, ‘what effect such an attack may have had upon the psyche?’

  My father had a more theological explanation for my silence.

  ‘“I speak in the tongues of men and of angels,”’ he would quote from the Bible, comforting his worried wife. ‘He is an angel. These grunts are angelic discourse.’

  My foster-mother, who had the task of dressing me every morning and knew with intimacy the extent of my physical oddities, including my singularly un-angelic hairiness, was not so sure.

  ‘Speak to me, Tobias,’ she would wail. ‘In God’s own English, I pray!’

  It was not, in fact, until my fifth year that words finally emerged from my mouth. I remember the occasion well, for it was my official birthday. My true date of birth being unknown (a common problem with foundlings), we celebrated the event on the anniversary of my parents’ wedding. See them there, at the big kitchen table, every knot of whose oak surface I know with intimacy, their hands clasped; it is the thirtieth year of their marriage. My father moon-faced, earnest, his bushy brows turning to grey; she quiet and unassuming, like a friendly potato or a lardy bun. And see their smiles of parental pride as they gaze lovingly at the child sitting opposite them, the linen napkin tucked beneath his chin, a fried sardine before him on his plate. I am their darling, their joy.

  ‘Happy birthday, Tobias! May the Lord bless you and keep you!’ booms Parson Phelps.

  I smile. In my lap, I finger the wheels of a toy train they have given me. It is made of wood, carved by the cobbler, Mr Hewitt.

  ‘Eat up,’ whispers my mother, her eyes bright with excitement, her mouth trembling with delight. ‘And then you shall have your surprise!’

  Dutifully, I pick some more at my sardine, and leave the spine on the side of my plate.

  ‘Now shut your eyes,’ whispers Mrs Phelps, ‘and make a wish!’

  I close them, and (my imagination being limited, and the hair-shirt mentality of Thunder Spit prompting luxurious urges in me even at this early age) I pray for a magnificent cake.

  It has already been established that miracles did not often come to Thunder Spit. So when two came into the Phelps household within the space of five years, there was joy to be had indeed, and a feeling of extra-special blessedness. There is no physical explanation for what happened (although the good Dr Baldicoot did his best to come up with a diagram of a larynx that had been blocked and then suddenly unplugged, due to a sudden stimulation of the psyche, thus confirming his theory) but – for what it is worth – it is my belief that at that same moment that I was wishing for a cake, my mother was making a wish of her own. How else to explain what next transpired? In her neat and careful script, my mother wrote down in her diary that night:

  The sequence of events, as Parson Phelps and I recall it, was thus:

  Firstly, the child opened his eyes, and saw the cake.

  Secondly, he blew out the candles, one by one.

  And thirdly, clear as a choirboy, Dear Lord be thanked, the CHILD SPOKE!

  At the bottom of the page, in writing that was a mere scrawl, and jittered with emotion, she had added: Fourthly: I shall die a happy woman!

  My first words – ‘Words we will cherish for ever,’ declared my delighted father – came suddenly, unbidden, from my mouth.

  ‘What a delicious-looking cake,’ I said. ‘Please, dear Mother, would you kindly be so good as to cut me a slice?’

  A child prodigy! And so polite with it!

  ‘Manners maketh man,’ choked my father, then joined my mother in weeping with joy. As I helped myself to another slice, I smiled at the pleasure I had given them, and watched them hauling out the prayer-cushion and flinging themselves on the floor to thank God. Their prayers were so long and passionate that I managed to polish off the whole cake before they got to their feet again.

  From that day, I never squeaked or grunted again, and so proud were my parents of my newly acquired talent that they encouraged me to read long passages of the Bible aloud, and to memorise tongue-twisters: Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled pepper, Miss Mosh mashes some mish-mash, Betty Botter bought some butter, and the like. My ability to surmount difficult verbal challenges such as these has been much remarked upon throughout my life, and remains a source of pride. Needless to say, soon my father was training me to read aloud long passages from the Bible in church, and the congregation marvelled at my sudden precociousness.

  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, bu
t 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.