Ark Baby

by Liz Jensen

  As I was to discover for myself, some weeks later, when they expertly demonstrated to me the workings of their vibrator.

  I was in the middle of my Elvis impression – ‘Jailhouse Rock’, as I recall – when the barman shouted at me.

  ‘Hey, you! Shut up over there! Shut up!’

  Norman and I whirled round on our stools; so fast, in my case, that I had to grab hold of the table to stop myself spiralling into lift-off. When I regained my bearings, I saw that everyone in the pub had suddenly congregated around the television above the bar, and was gawping intently at the screen.

  ‘Newsflash!’ mouthed the barman through cupped hands, and turned up the volume so that the television was blaring at full pitch.

  The whole screen was filled with a scene of devastation. Dust falling. Firemen at work with hoses, shooting water and foam at the twisted metal-and-concrete armature of a multi-storey building in flames. A reporter in a hard hat and gas-mask picking his way through the smoking debris.

  ‘This is all that remains of the National Egg Bank tonight, after it was blown up by a massive Semtex bomb,’ he said. Even through the gas-mask, you could tell he was almost in tears.

  We all gawped at the screen.

  The reporter couldn’t go on. After some more shots of fire-fighting and smoking detritus, all he could manage, through a muffled sob, was, ‘Back to the studio.’

  Where a tougher news nut took over. ‘Britain’s hopes for the future were dashed tonight,’ the newscaster said, ‘when a huge explosion ripped through the National Egg Bank. The building – and its contents – were completely destroyed. No organisation has claimed responsibility for the attack, but religious fundamentalists are suspected of being behind tonight’s blast.’

  The pub went completely silent as the news continued. There was now not a single British egg left in the world.

  We watched, Superglued to our seats, to the very end of the extended news programme. Then the barman stood up and flicked off the TV. Still no one said anything. But the implications of what had happened must have sunk in to all of us at about the same time, because suddenly, as though choreographed, we all reached for our beers and downed the remains in one.

  Then Norman spoke. ‘Looks like that’s the end of Albion, then, folks.’

  Which was as good a cue as any to get rat-arsed.

  CHAPTER 8

  IN WHICH DISEASE STRIKES

  I did the splits agen the next nite, the woman wrote, even tho sumthin about Him makes me scared enuf to piss. Him on the table an He kissis me an wen He stops I feel lik Im in luv but still scared.

  Wot els can you do, He asks me.

  Revers crab, I sez. Scorpion. Headstand. Handstand. Human notte.

  Bed, He sez. You is cumin to bed wiv me now.

  Only after that I find out Hes rich.

  It was on the beach that I looked up from a rockpool one morning and saw a boy. He was a stocky little figure, standing on the shoreline in the distance. He was wearing a strange knobbled head-dress, which I was curious to inspect more closely. When I approached, holding a crab in one hand like a gift but also, just in case, like a weapon, I saw a tough, confident face, topped by a huge lump of seaweed. Sandhoppers were shooting out of it hysterically in all directions.

  ‘This is my warrior’s helmet,’ said the boy. He had a stone in his hand, which he threw and caught, threw and caught. I was frightened he might throw it at me: I was an easy target in the village. Only the week before, a four-year-old girl, Jessie Tobash, had called me Prune-face.

  ‘I can see a little wentletrap in it,’ I said, in a conciliatory way. Thanks to Herman’s Crustacea, I knew the name of everything, from abalone to Nilsson pipefish, from dog cockle to sand-smelt.

  From this distance the boy’s helmet looked like the sort of hat Mrs Simpson wore to church, all precarious-looking and featuring cornucopias of foodstuffs and flowers made of felt: more a market scene than a piece of headgear. I recognised him now, from the playground at school. He was Tommy Boggs, the blacksmith’s son. The Boggses were a rough, threatening family. They had loud voices and they shouted unstintingly, as if it was their job, and the father, Matthew Boggs, was often drunk: not quiet-drunk, like the fishermen, or happy-drunk, like Farmer Harcourt, or even tipsy-tottery drunk like Mrs Sequin, but wild and angry drunk like no one else. The Boggses were heathens, too, according to my father. I never once saw them in church, not even at Christmas or Easter. Their aunt read the future in tea-leaves, a sure sign, my father said, of spiritual wantonness.

  As Tommy approached, I dug my toes into the sand to hide them. But he was looking at me questioningly.

  ‘I collect Crustacea,’ I blurted, by way of conversation, hoping that words might defend me from him in case he saw fit to attack me. But the boy said nothing; he simply stood there in his seaweed get-up and stared, a human fortress. I felt the opposite – vulnerable without my shoes, like a hermit crab that’s left the shelter of its shell.

  Still the boy said nothing. He neither threatened me, nor shrank away.

  In fact, he smiled.

  And then, because I must have felt, suddenly, that I could trust this boy, and because I was lonely enough, despite my self-sufficiency, to feel the need of a young friend my own age, I did a desperate and unprecedented and foolishly brave thing: without warning, I withdrew my toes from the sand, and showed him the sad deformity of my feet.

  ‘There,’ I said. My soul was at that moment laid barer than it had ever been, and inside I quailed at the risk I had taken with this boy whom I did not know, and partly feared. What had possessed me? To this day, I am not sure, though I like to believe it was an inner instinct that guided me.

  Tommy gazed down at my feet. Sea-water was lapping at them, leaving little bubbles that popped and died. He noted my flat-footedness, and the way my hairy toes sat all wrong.

  ‘I can’t run fast,’ I told him. ‘But I can beat my mother in any race, because of her bunions.’ Still he said nothing, so I went on: ‘And on Fridays I can beat my father, too, because of the marbles in his shoes.’

  Tommy looked puzzled, but interested. He was clearly unacquainted with the Parson’s weekly idiosyncrasy. He was still staring at my feet.

  ‘I like them,’ he said finally. ‘They don’t look too foolish to me. In fact, I would say they are magnificent.’

  My heart somersaulted in joy, and I felt the tears sting in my eyes.

  ‘But please tell no one,’ I whispered.

  ‘Our secret, then,’ he said.

  From that moment, Tommy and I were friends. Apart from the secret we now shared, we had other things in common: Tommy also had fleas, and an aggravating tapeworm, he told me. His was called Benedicta, but she mostly kept herself to herself.

  My own tapeworm, Mildred, was a cruel mistress, however. Knowing her likes and dislikes to some extent, I did my best to appease her. Fortunately I shared her love of fruits, fungi and sweet berries – and it was Tommy who taught me where to find them. Sugar was unknown in Thunder Spit, though Tommy assured me that the streets of London were paved with hundreds of minuscule sugar-cubes like Roman mosaics, depicting the glories of Empire. But there were fruits aplenty. We went searching in the early mornings, before school, the cows staring at us as they always did with that resigned look they cast on humans, then trundling away, mucus trailing from their noses, when they caught a whiff of me. In summer, there were raspberries, and in autumn, we’d trawl the hedgerows and copses for hazelnuts or cram our mouths with wild strawberries.

  Tommy and I became firm friends. When it rained, or during the winter months when only a crazed fool would step on to the frozen beach, choked with salt and ice and lashed by a screeching wind, I used to visit Tommy and we would play together at the back of Mr Boggs’ forge, where the furnace kept us warm. We’d spit on the dirt floor, full of iron filings, and rake the resulting grey-flecked mess about, while watching Tommy’s huge muscular father bashing at red-hot steel as if it had done him some
terrible wrong.

  ‘That’ll be me one day,’ said Tommy, with that careless certainty of his, that was as part of him as his shadow.

  Later, it was Tommy who taught me how to spill my seed, and I soon became expert at it, though I knew it to be wrong, because the Lord had said so, and my father had reinforced this message with another, more immediate threat; that the profane activity would blind me. Every time I indulged in my foul habit, I pictured my vision blurring until all I could see were little pinpricks of light in the firmament, but this never happened. In fact, the opposite; I always had the impression that my eyesight was clearer afterwards, as though a blockage had been removed.

  Looking back, I can try to see myself as they saw me.

  A boy with a need to ask questions.

  A boy with a low-slung walk, a love of cliff-climbing, and a coarse thatch of red hair, always in his eyes.

  A boy always small for his age, but surprisingly strong and agile, and with a natural love, said Parson Phelps, of the blessings of the physical world. (Also a natural love of throwing tantrums and playing practical jokes, such as placing a dead hedgehog on the seat of the Parson’s chair at Sunday school. For this misdemeanour he was forced to administer three blows of the cane, to set an example to the other children.)

  A boy who puzzles and infuriates his adoring parents with his need to show off by climbing dangerous rocks.

  A boy who has become a little unruly.

  And then, suddenly, a boy whose mother has developed an alarming cough.

  A boy who, terrified by this cough, and hoping to take some of God’s punishment on to himself, has now, at the age of thirteen, taken to extreme naughtiness.

  The ship was a whaler en route to Hunchburgh, dragging an entire whale skeleton destined for Queen Victoria’s wardrobe. I can still see it: the huge vessel lolling slowly out on the ebb tide, dragging the great bobbing stinking creature behind her as she drifts with the tide. And I can still recall the scene the next morning, and the ensuing cries and screams when the whole village realised what had happened: that Tommy Boggs and I, having stolen a file from Mr Boggs’ forge, had cut the vessel loose from its moorings. By the time the sailors aboard ship worked out what had happened, and scolded the night watch for falling asleep, they were a league out at sea. It took a whole day to manoeuvre the ship back.

  When you grab something, such as the attention of a whole village, you pay for it later. They put us in the village stocks and pelted us with wodges of goose-dung. And then, when the sun went down and we were released, our fathers came to collect us; Mr Boggs angry, and brandishing the metal bottom-whisk, Parson Phelps sorrowful, ashamed, and preoccupied with distressing events at home concerning the cough.

  And now it is his turn to punish. I have been called a naughty jackanapes, and sent to my room, and locked in, but I feel safe, my world condensed to the span of this one room. And now I am here, eating stale bread and with only a drop of water left in my pottery bowl, unsure of why it came upon me to perform this act of naughtiness, and wondering whether the recent upheavals in the house – upheavals I have done my best to ignore – could have provoked me into an odd kind of madness.

  For the sound of the cough has been getting worse.

  If I close my ears and my eyes, time will stand still, and I will be safe.

  My room is an attic they have arranged for me at the top of the Parsonage. There’s a criss-cross of low beams, ideal for gymnastics, a writing desk, bed, a chair, and a simple rag rug, woven by Mrs Phelps in my favourite colours, mauve and green. And on the wall a picture I love: of Noah and his animals of the Ark. Noah stands on the deck, with his three sons and his nagging wife, and below him is spread the hierarchy of creatures, from mighty elephant down to humble ant. Looking down on them all from the top right-hand corner is the face of an elderly gent whose white beard dissolves into the grey storm-clouds of the Great Flood. Behind his head, a silver Heaven gleams. This is God, who has made us all. I am snuggled into my goose-down quilt, looking at the picture. A sea-beetle has crawled across its canvas surface, and is making its way inexorably towards God’s Roman nose.

  At last, I hear the rattle of the key in the door, and my father enters, pale-faced. Silently, I pray that he has simply come to punish me some more. But I know in my heart as I look at his drawn features and the set of his eyes that, next to what lurks downstairs, my misdemeanour with Tommy will pale into insignificance.

  If I shut my ears and my eyes.

  ‘Your mother is unwell,’ he blurts out. ‘I should have told you before, but I could not. I hoped that if I ignored it –’

  I say nothing.

  ‘Tobias! Did you hear me?’

  Then I speak. ‘So according to this picture, man’s place is between God and the animals.’ What I am thinking is that I would like to bring some warmth to his cold face. I notice on the Ark picture that the sea-beetle is now attempting to tunnel its way up God’s left nostril, but to no avail. ‘Why is that?’

  ‘Why is a big question,’ says the Parson, smiling stiffly. ‘And it has a big answer. It’s because we have souls, and the animals do not.’

  ‘What does a soul look like, Father?’ (Downstairs: cough, cough.)

  ‘Well, some are bright and shining, if they are righteous, and others are blackened and shrivelled, if their owners have committed foul acts.’ (Cough, cough.)

  ‘If you cut up a man’s body, would you see his soul?’

  ‘Yes, son, you most assuredly would. It is situated above his heart, where it forms a translucent canopy.’

  Later in life, when I had cause to reflect upon the nature of the human soul, I would wonder how Parson Phelps, who was not a stupid man, came to dream up such lunatic twaddle.

  Then, from the floor below, the terrible sound comes again. I will remember it for ever. This time it is too loud to ignore. Loud and brutal.

  ‘That is nothing like her usual cough,’ I venture.

  And he takes me to his breast and holds me tight.

  That night I dreamed I was aboard a vessel that was like a whale inside. I was Jonah but a son of Noah, too. My job was to feed the caged beasts that surrounded me – tigers and hippopotami and giant wingless birds – but I could not for I too was caged, and manacled like a slave.

  My foster-mother was always good to me. I remember her bent over the stone sink, scaling fish, the plainness of her face, the redness of her hands, rough from heavy work. Or forcing down my throat a new purgative she’d invented to oust our mutual enemy, Mildred. Or standing by the stove, frying barley flip-cakes for my tea. Or at the scrubbed-pine table stripping the perfumed seeds off sprigs of lavender, to stuff into little bags and put in my underwear drawer. The trouble she took to make a fine man of me, knowing how much harder I would have to struggle in life than my contemporaries! She must have known, deep in her soul, as she watched me clambering up the huge oak tree outside the door, my crazy shoes slipping on the bark, that I would one day have dire need of those little civilising touches that make a God-fearing gentleman.

  I suspected it myself, too.

  My mother’s cough could no longer be hidden; we lived with it every day. We saw it doubling her up. Tearfully, one day, she informed me that she had become possessed by a Thing.

  ‘If only I could cough the Thing out,’ she said, ‘I feel I should recover, Tobias. It is crushing me from within.’

  But the Thing stayed put, and grew; every day her breathing became shallower, and her suffering racked the whole house.

  At night, I lay in bed watching the sea-salt twinkling on my collection of shells, listening to the cawing of sea-birds above my attic room, and my mother’s wild cough coming up from below. It mocked us all. It was like a demon’s laugh. I prayed, but a little pang at the base of my spine told me that prayers were no use.

  Mother took a whole summer to die; I measured out her wasting in the progress of the vegetable plot which grew lusher and more abundant every day, as though it were a parasite
siphoning off her vitality and growing fat on it. And I was a conspirator in this process: for two months I tended the vegetable patch with a fury and an intensity that startled me. I was surely searching for something other than earth, but I never did discover exactly what. We moved my mother’s bed to the window, so that she could see me working. The sight of it pleased her, but I felt she was watching me digging her grave.

  I was thirteen, that age of reckless physical sprouting and transcendental uncertainty, which provided me with a new cross to bear: a permanent uncouth urge in my loins, which I did my utmost to quell. I worked harder and harder, hoping to exhaust myself thus. As Mrs Phelps drank thin soup, and spluttered into a handkerchief, I planted potatoes, and grew crimson radishes whose furious sting punished the mouth, bulging Cinderella pumpkins, skinny haricot beans, and purple-veined, crinkle-leafed cabbages. While her mind wandered back repeatedly to the goose farm of her girlhood, and to the incompetence of the Parson’s male object (it was from her delirious ravings that I caught my first inkling of the human mating process), I killed slugs with sea-salt collected from rockpools, and planted garlic to keep the snails at bay. Autumn came, and as Mrs Phelps lay skeletally dying in her bed, I harvested a bumper crop of sprouts, and carrots as thick as a bull’s horn, and an ornamental gourd, knobbled and useless, stippled pale and dark green.

  One day she waved her hand at me, summoning me to her bedside. When she spoke, her words were wheezed out like air from a stiff pair of bellows, and her inhalations were winded gasps of pain. I put my ear close to her mouth.