Ark Baby

by Liz Jensen

  CHAPTER 6

  HEADS WILL ROLL

  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!’

  The Laudanum Empress again. Unlike other mammals, who bear their offspring in silence, Homo sapiens has a tendency to scream in agony. This is due to bad design on the part of God. He wished to give man a large brain, but forgot to give woman a proportionately structured pelvis.

  ‘Merde alors!’

  That is Jacques-Yves Cabillaud.

  Symbiosis describes a relationship in the natural world by which two creatures very different in nature and characteristics come to a mutual accord of assistance. This is the status that the two human animals, Jacques-Yves Cabillaud and his employer, Dr Ivanhoe Scrapie, have quickly reached in Madagascar Street. At the heart of the exchange is the use of the carcasses of other, non-human animals – largely mammals, but embracing also bird-life, reptiles and fish – and the motto, beloved of Nature itself, Waste not want not. And thus it is that while Dr Scrapie puffs on his cigar and adjusts his lopsided yak in the taxidermy workshop upstairs, Monsieur Cabillaud, in the basement kitchen, has been preparing a hearty yak-meat stew, which he is now forced to leave on the back burner, while he heats vast quantities of water for the midwife attending Mrs Scrapie in the throes of childbirth.

  Merde encore!

  He fills another kettle. But it must be said that, apart from today’s interruption, Cabillaud is pleased – more than pleased, with his lot. His instincts on the day Scrapie walked into the elephant Mona’s enclosure had all been sound, and now, the initial territorial disputes with Mrs Jiggers sorted out (a common occurrence when one animal low in the pecking order is ousted by another who presumes to be slightly higher), Cabillaud has assumed his role as dominant male in the Madagascar Street kitchen, and by pure force of his culinary talent, has revolutionised the Scrapie diet.

  Doing his best to ignore the sounds of childbirth which can still be heard, faintly, from the Scrapie bedroom two floors above him, Cabillaud settles the kettle on the hob and pokes at the simmering yak stew.

  Mais oui, he reflects, he has the world at his feet, quand même! He had arrived at the Scrapies’ home in Madagascar Street armed with a dead wallaby from the zoo, and that very evening, had furnished Dr and Mrs Scrapie with their first decently cooked meal. Decently cooked? May he presume to say that it was in fact unparalleled? The meat was neither burnt, nor stone-cold, nor tough – the three idiosyncrasies that had been the hallmarks of Mrs Jiggers’ cooking. Cabillaud had been declared a genius (a fact he was already aware of), and Mrs Jiggers relegated to housekeeping duties. Because how, having tasted wallaby aux dix-neuf oranges, could the Scrapies ever look back?

  ‘Mais bien sûr que non,’ murmurs Cabillaud, fishing out a ladleful of stew-juice and sniffing something to which the adjectives majestueux and formidable might well (though it is not for him to say) apply.

  ‘AAAGH!’

  That is Mrs Scrapie once again. How did she come to be in this sorry mess? And is she now about to pass to the Other Side? She remembers nothing of the episode that triggered her condition. Phantoms whirl in a miasma about her head, and in the middle distance, her cloud of psychic particles shimmers ominously. As Mrs Jiggers trickles more laudanum-water into her mouth by means of a sponge, the Empress sees the cloud’s inner recesses writhing into strange shapes. Is that a piglet among all those flying feathers? Is that a child sitting on a beach? Surely that’s a swarm of seagulls, over there! And is that a fossil? And surely that is a sardine?

  What does all this mean?

  She wails again, as her ravaged womb contracts once more. As the pain lunges through her and appears to rip her very soul apart, the particles swirl and re-form. From a high corner above her bed, she observes herself sprawled horizontally, her legs aloft, Mrs Jiggers mopping at her brow, the midwife prodding at her nether regions. And as the particles shimmer, the future dances before her: she sees a monkey in a short pinafore dress, and a man with a syringe; a gleaming motorised vehicle shooting along a huge wide road; an immensely fat woman dressed as a meringue, a pair of identical female twins, an odd-looking man in extraordinary shoes hopping on a doorstep – her doorstep – Her Majesty the Queen wielding a scimitar and splitting in half the belly of a –

  ‘AAAGH!’

  The doorbell clangs. Two minutes later, the door of Scrapie’s workshop is suddenly flung open by a flushed Mrs Jiggers, whose apron is falling off and whose hairpins are dangling skew-whiff across one eye.

  ‘Boy or girl?’ asks Scrapie, laying down his skinning-knife.

  ‘Neither, sir. She’s still in labour. But there’s a messenger arrived from the Palace, sir! Says he’s the Queen’s equerry! He awaits you downstairs!’

  With some reluctance, Scrapie stubs out his cigar. Mrs Jiggers wipes her hands on her apron and dances about nervously. It’s not every day there’s this much activity in the house. Or such news arriving! The good woman cannot contain herself.

  ‘He’s come to tell you, sir, that Horace Trapp’s Ark has landed at the docks!’

  Scrapie groans. Two years and five months behind schedule! The nerve of the man!

  ‘Oh, and I’ll be needing more water, sir,’ Mrs Jiggers frets as she pants her way along the hallway, Scrapie striding purposefully in her wake. ‘It won’t be long now.’

  ‘Cabillaud will see to it. What else does he say, this equerry?’

  ‘Oh. Just one thing,’ says Mrs Jiggers, stopping in her tracks and turning to look down with excitement at her employer. She wipes her hands feverishly on her starched apron, and bites her lip, scared and thrilled in equal measure. She has not felt this way since the Travelling Fair of Danger and Delight passed through London last March, and she rode on the Mechanical Millipede.

  ‘Well?’ barks Scrapie.

  ‘He says that Horace Trapp is missing, sir. And that all the animals are dead!’

  And she gathers up her skirts and rushes out.

  Our imaginary Montgolfier awaits us; let us therefore abandon the Laudanum Empress to her ghastly screaming (which will continue for several more hours) and follow Scrapie, Cabillaud, and the equerry to the docks, to witness the scene of devastation that is Trapp’s Ark. The Hippo’s equerry, a man of a certain femininity and nervous energy, has been voluble on the subject of Trapp, as they made their way, post-haste by hansom cab, to the docks.

  Rumour had it, he said, that Trapp had fled.

  Rumour had it, the equerry claimed, that Trapp had abandoned th
e Ark in order to marry a foreign princess.

  Rumour had it, the equerry counter-claimed, that Trapp had drowned.

  Rumour had it, the equerry mused, that Trapp had gone back into the slavery business, and was working out of Georgia.

  Rumour had it, too, that –

  ‘Shut up,’ said Scrapie tersely, descending from the halted hansom cab. ‘Just show me the bloody ship.’

  Silently, the nervous equerry leads Scrapie and Cabillaud to the Ark. The balloon goes like the wind. Before we know it, we too have arrived.

  The Ark is berthed next to HMS Barcelona, and is in comparison a sorry sight indeed. A huge hole gapes in its hull, its sails are torn and bedraggled. It lolls in its berth, its belly ragged as an old husk.

  ‘Jesus Christ on a penny-farthing!’ exclaims Scrapie, who has quickly scurried on board and is now heaving open the door of the cavernous beamed hull. He is hit full-force by an atrocious stink. The Ark is a former galley ship, a slave-trader, and the first things the taxidermist can make out in the gloom are the rows of manacles chained to the wooden planking of the walls.

  Now, pinching their noses, Scrapie and Cabillaud peer through the darkness, attempting to decipher what they can. Cabillaud, who after his miserable seafaring experience is less than keen on ships, lurches out on to the gang-plank to inhale fresh air. Dr Scrapie, who is made of sterner stuff, notes that the smell of putrefaction means that many of the specimens – in the unlikely event that they are not completely ruined – are beyond taxider-mic hope. The rest must be frozen immediately. The equerry hovers in a corner, shifting nervously from foot to foot. This place gives him the creeps, and he doesn’t mind who knows it.

  Cabillaud now returns from the quarter-deck, staggering, and grabs Scrapie’s arm. As they accustom their eyes to the darkness, both men blanch, for neither has ever before witnessed such a terrible scene of destruction. Every door of every cage, large and small, has been opened. The carcasses are strewn everywhere. Fur, feathers, reptilian skin, broken bones, staring eyes. Huddled, stiff little shapes. Wings awry. Dry crusts of maroon-coloured blood.

  ‘Merde!’ yells Cabillaud suddenly. He has tripped on something, which now rolls slowly across the planking to land at Scrapie’s feet. A rotten old coconut, by the look of it, its hair long and matted, and stinking to high Heaven. Scrapie is about to kick it away, but something stops him. Instead, he squats, holding his nose, to inspect the object at his feet.

  ‘My God,’ he murmurs. ‘It is a head!’

  It is indeed a head. The head of a human. Months old. Reeking.

  Despite its rottenness, Scrapie recognises the moustache. And the excellent teeth.

  ‘God Almighty,’ he whispers. His voice is hoarse, a mere croak.

  This head is Horace Trapp’s.

  Scrapie has long prided himself on his lack of squeamishness, but his normally cast-iron belly now turns to gelatine, and he lunges forward, grappling with the door, to escape. Outside on the deck, Cabillaud and the equerry, who have swiftly followed him, both vomit copiously over the side of the Ark, and Scrapie tries to calm his frayed nerves by reciting to himself a smorgasbord of logarithms. Finally, he pulls himself together.

  First things first.

  ‘Tell the Queen,’ he orders the equerry, ‘that Trapp has been murdered. And that as far as the Animal Kingdom Project is concerned, I shall be needing a ton of Arctic ice shipped over immediately. Immediately is in fact an understatement. I need ice NOW. I will commandeer her supply until my own arrives. Understood? There is no time to lose. We have work to do.’

  That, too, was an understatement.

  The project Scrapie was about to embark on would take him twenty years.

  ‘AAAGH!’ comes a faint cry from the bedroom. The Mont-golfier has whisked us back to Madagascar Street.

  In the nick of time!

  Welcome, Miss Violet Scrapie! Welcome to the world!

  As the Laudanum Empress sinks back on the pillow and retreats into the comfort of her psychic particles, the newborn Violet yells lustily for the milk that is her birthright.

  The other Scrapie children had the small bones and delicate features of the Laudanum Empress, a famous belle. The four sisters were beautiful. The two brothers were handsome.

  But now, into this collection of valuable Society china, charged the big-boned Violet.

  Crash, thump, disaster. What had gone wrong? There was no rhyme or reason to it, as far as Dr Scrapie could tell, when he returned, badly shaken, from the débâcle that was Trapp’s Ark and inspected his newborn infant. It was a bad day altogether. First, all the Animal Kingdom nonsense, then Trapp’s severed head rolling about like a pustular football, and then another bloody girl. Skeletally, the child was definitely bovine. So much so that the Empress, for whom the act of union had been just a vague interruption of her normal psychic trance, wondered whether she could perhaps have been impregnated by a visitor from the Other Side, and she surreptitiously inspected the chaise-longue for signs of ectoplasm. Meanwhile odd visions still swirled among her cloud of psychic particles, and she remained puzzled by their import.

  Time passed, and the baby grew, and grew, and grew, a great greedy cuckoo in the Scrapie nest. Neither of her parents was sure when it was that Violet decided to up sticks and descend into the basement kitchen, to live with Cabillaud. Was she perhaps three or four? Or maybe as young as two? Both were too preoccupied with their own doings to pay the girl much attention, that much is certain, and it was a good month before they noticed her absence, prompted by hints and mutterings from Mrs Jiggers, who did not approve of the new arrangement. It was wrong for a child born to be a lady, a member of the upper classes, to descend to the level of servants. It upset the natural order of things. Being uneducated, Mrs Jiggers had not heard of the word hierarchy. But it is the word she would have used, to explain what it was that was being overturned, in her humble view.

  But no one listened to her. Least of all Violet herself. It was Cabillaud to whom she was drawn, as though by magnetism. And to his domain, the kitchen.

  So while Tobias Phelps spent his boyhood years climbing trees and digging his unusual toes in the sand of the beach, Violet Scrapie spent her childhood on the floor of the kitchen in Madagascar Street, playing with pots and pans, and gobbling up whatever tasty morsel the Belgian chef Cabillaud threw her way. For he had soon spotted the child’s unseemly preoccupation with ingestion, and her vocation as a gastronome.

  Nature or nurture? Who cares!

  ‘Ouvre la boucbe, ferme les yeux, ma petite chérie!’ Cabillaud would order, and the child Violet would duly comply, her cherub’s mouth agape, like a baby seal waiting to receive a herring from its mother. When she opened her eyes, she would have to guess what delicacy Cabillaud had popped through her parted lips.

  What better training for a fine palate?

  How many children have the good fortune to be able to distinguish, by the age of five, between fifteen different types of poultry? A whole genus of rodents? A hundred different herbs and spices? And how many children can claim to have access, via the carcasses in the ice house at the bottom of the garden, to a whole arkful of frozen meat, including such exotic rarities as the smooth savannah rhinoceros, the Mediterranean spotted turtle, the lesser quaggar, the two-headed Goan snake, the black-footed rabbit, Humboldt’s penguin, Rufous Tinamon, the Surinam toad, and the Gentleman Monkey?

  Answer: not many!

  Time passed, and Violet cooked and cooked and cooked. And ate, ate, ate.

  By the age of ten, she was fast turning into a human pyramid, a heavy wedge that moved about the house from kitchen to dining room, from dining room to kitchen, sweating like a great cheese on castors, a stack of cookery books a permanent fixture under her arm. The Empress was at her wits’ end, and repaired with increasing frequency to the comfort of the Ouija board and the seance.

  ‘The girl’s a mystery!’ she confided in the spirits. ‘She reads a cookery book the way she eats a plate of cake. Blin
k and it’s over!’

  The spirits shrugged their shoulders.

  Could Violet perhaps be shipped off to somewhere like Australia? the Empress wondered.

  Crash! The breaking of a mixing bowl.

  Sloop! the licking of a sauced finger.

  Yum yum. C’est bon.

  ‘Or might New Zealand be further, as the crow flies?’

  The spirits shrugged again. ‘Wait and see,’ they said.

  ‘Fat lot of good you are,’ muttered the Laudanum Empress, crumpling up a page of automatic writing and hurling it into the fire.

  She bought Violet her first corset at the age of eleven. The child was popping out all over the place; her body had to be put under control. One day she actually fainted from constriction in the street, and collapsed on to a grocer’s cart, knocking a thousand carrots off a precarious pile. With considerable difficulty but even more exasperation, the Empress took her by the scruff, and they stumbled through the sea of rolling orange veg, the grocer’s boy yelling, the Empress flinging a sovereign behind her as you might throw salt over your left shoulder to ward off evil.

  To Harrod’s, pronto!

  ‘Bring us the biggest corset you have,’ ordered the Empress, ‘and be ready to add gussets.’ And she made a thin, tight line of her perfect mouth.

  ‘A relative?’ asked the assistant, as Violet disappeared to try on the hosiery.

  ‘No,’ responded the Empress quickly, checking the mirror, where a fine figure of a woman – a creature of remarkable beauty, in fact, to whom the word ‘paragon’ could be applied without exaggeration – greeted her gaze. ‘Just a child I happen to know.’

  From the changing room, the sound of huffing and puffing, and the distinct odour of adolescent perspiration.

  ‘I despair of you,’ hissed the Laudanum Empress later, as they sat before a plate of cinnamon muffins in the tea shop downstairs. What could a mother do with such a child? Having felt lately the call of the Other Side, she knew she was not much longer for this world. Could she perhaps have some influence in death, which she had so signally failed to have in life? It was worth trying.