Ark Baby

by Liz Jensen

  ‘I love that gourd,’ she croaked. ‘It is a freakish vegetable, without obvious purpose, but it has its place in our garden. God knew what he was doing when he made the gourd.’

  There was a pause, as she breathed in and out a few more times, raspingly. I wished I could breathe for her. But all I could do was watch.

  ‘That gourd, in its oddity, and freakishness, reminds me of you,’ she said finally. If this was supposed to be a compliment, it was sadly misjudged, I thought. Oddity? Purposelessness? Freakishness? A gourd? I’d have preferred her to use her precious breath on something a little kinder.

  She fell asleep again. It was midnight when she woke up, or seemed to, and sat rigid and suddenly attentive. Then she said, ‘Listen to me carefully, Tobias. I have some requests I must make of you before I go to Heaven.’

  ‘Yes, Mother,’ I whispered. ‘Tell me what you want. And I will do it.’

  ‘Firstly,’ she breathed, ‘I want you to plant that gourd upon my grave so that I can take the memory of you with me where I go.’

  ‘I will, Mother.’ I would have agreed to anything, at any level of absurdity, to make her happy.

  ‘And Tobias,’ she croaked. I put my ear to her lips again, to hear. ‘I would have liked to purge Mildred,’ she mustered. ‘Perhaps I tried too hard. When I am gone, do all you can to coax her out, Tobias.’

  ‘I will, Mother. I swear.’

  ‘And Tobias.’

  ‘Yes, Mother?’

  ‘Remember that God does not like a man to be naked. Keep your body covered at all times, son. For the sake of modesty.’

  ‘Yes, Mother. It goes without saying.’ It had always been an unspoken rule in the Parsonage that one should always keep as much clothing on as possible, even when washing. I had never so much as glimpsed myself naked, and would not think of doing so.

  ‘And there is something else,’ my mother croaked. ‘We do not know where you came from,’ she whispered. ‘But promise me that you will never visit the Travelling Fair of Danger and Delight.’

  The Fair came once a year, and though I had always been forbidden to go, I had longed one day to taste its illicit pleasures. My mother’s mention of the Fair – and of my unknown origins – puzzled me. Had my parents not always told me that, unlike other children, who were brought by storks or found beneath gooseberry bushes, I had been left at the altar of St Nicholas’s Church by none other than God himself? This was the first time I had thought otherwise, and then and there, a seed of curiosity was planted deep within me.

  ‘Promise me,’ my mother repeated.

  ‘I promise,’ I told her. We do not know where you came from.

  ‘Good boy,’ she said, and fell back into a painful twitching doze.

  ‘She wants to be buried beneath a gourd,’ I reported to my father the next morning. He had been cleaning his shoes at the kitchen table, waxing them with great care with black wax polish, and buffing them, bashing the brush against the leather in the same particular motion and rhythm that he always used. Now it was his turn to look surprised and pained. I remember him standing there, a buckled shoe in one hand, the little black brush in the other, the smell of black shoe-polish, vinegary and burnt.

  ‘And holding the Bible, of course,’ I added quickly. The lie seemed to help.

  The next day my mother coughed suddenly, and very hard, and the Thing that had been tormenting her shot out of her mouth and on to the white sheet. We stared. My father groaned.

  ‘What is this?’ she mouthed faintly, picking up between thumb and forefinger a purple-black object, leather-like and riddled with holes. She held it aloft. ‘Look, dear Edward, dear Tobias, I have coughed up my own soul and it is all shrivelled with sin, and as black as night! Forgive me, O Lord!’

  Two minutes later she was dead.

  The Parson and I did not believe the Thing could be her soul. It was too solid, and it stank. So when the doctor told us it was a cruelly diseased lung, we were enormously relieved.

  ‘For if that poor good woman contained an ounce of evil,’ sobbed the Parson, grinding his teeth in sorrow, ‘then I contain three thousand tons.’

  And I five thousand, I wailed inwardly, thinking of the pleasurable but unholy habit Tommy Boggs had taught me in the privacy of the sand-dunes, and at which I now had considerable and shameful expertise. There was no more talk of translucent canopies after that. We buried my mother in the cemetery beneath a huge mackerel sky, the sea-salt mingling with our tears, the sand-grass prickling our ankles, the kittiwakes squalling, the sea roaring wide as a whale’s yawn. The next summer, a gourd plant was to appear on the grave, but the gourds were not of the same variety as the knobbled green one I had planted. These fruits were orange, with a frilled rim, and yellow stains; Parson Phelps said he found them miraculous but disturbing, a sign that God’s plan for Nature had veered off course.

  As indeed it had.

  CHAPTER 9

  THE SCRAPIE DINOSAUR

  ‘There will be two world wars,’ murmurs the Laudanum Empress, yawning over her untouched cup and saucer. It is the heyday of her psychic particles. ‘As a result, a million skulls will be strewn all over France.’ She pauses, squinting sideways. ‘But on the more positive side, there will be something known as long-life milk.’

  Since the birth of her bovine daughter Violet, the particles have not ceased to swarm about her head like a cloud of angry mosquitoes, and the slightest peripheral glance on her part can conjure up a dizzying maelstrom of flotsam from the future. Even Dr Scrapie, a strict non-believer in hocus-pocus, has recognised the presence of the famous particles.

  ‘Pardon?’ he says irritably. He hates being interrupted while reading the paper, and this morning he has been engrossed in several articles of interest. A more experimentally inclined scientist might have been inspired to harness the Empress’s particles to his research, but Dr Scrapie’s imagination is sadly limited. Of what concern is the future to him, he argues, when the present is proving so problematic? The Scrapies are taking breakfast with their daughter Violet. Time has passed, as it does; the child is now sprouting two majestic bosoms.

  ‘There will be heat-seeking missiles, and split-crotch panties,’ says the Empress. ‘Not to mention a substance called Play-Doh.’

  Scrapie grunts, and shuffles his newspaper. She’s talking balderdash again. Violet butters some more toast, pours green Gunpowder tea into bone china, swirls in milk, applies her spectacles and skims an article on a page her father has discarded about how slavery on the American plantations is a cruel and inhuman thing, and must be stopped. She bites into a beef mushroom. All men were born equal, the writer argues. Then a sliced tomato, somewhat underdone for her taste. Rich and poor, Negro and white man. But we must beware of taking things too far. This butter is rancid! Women, for example, might anticipate sharing these equal rights. But if we accept that, as some strident females in our midst are urging, what next? Children? Dogs? Macaws? Woodlice?

  ‘There will be gambling machines called one-armed bandits,’ says the Laudanum Empress. ‘And artists will display their own excrement in galleries.’

  ‘Pass the marmalade, will you, please?’ says Violet, sipping more tea, as she glances at her mother, all madness and beauty and draped shawls and shimmering particles and glistening jet beads.

  ‘Marmalade,’ murmurs the Empress. Her heavy-lidded eyes have turned inward again, speaking silent volumes: Daughter – bother me not, for I am not at home. Aerial buzzings, automatic writing, Ouija boards, phantom scraps, whisperings and groans from the past and the future; these have been the stuff of Mother’s life for as long as Violet can remember. How much is drug-induced, how much the result of insanity, and how much real, Violet has never fathomed; all she knows is that Mother is very much elsewhere, and always will be. Returning to her article on human rights, Violet fails to notice the dish of marmalade levitating itself. Or making slow but efficient progress across the table in her direction, as per her request.

  ‘Do you k
now,’ whispers the Laudanum Empress softly, ‘that there will still be beggars on the streets of London in two hundred years’ time? Progress is a dangerous myth, I can assure you. If my particles are to be believed, the world is moving not forwards, but backwards. I see men and women dancing and cavorting in the open air half-naked, like savages. I see a vehicle called the Audi Nuance. I see the entire nation fizzling into extinction!’

  ‘Come along now, Mother,’ says Violet briskly, patting the Empress’s arm and adjusting her shawl like an invalid’s. ‘You are getting hysterical again.’

  ‘Hysteria is in the eye of the beholder. Your orange conserve has arrived.’

  ‘Thanks, Mother,’ says Violet, as the dish settles itself on the table before her.

  The Empress sighs. We see only what we wish to see.

  Dr Scrapie shuffles his newspaper. There is an article in it about old maids. Distressed spinsters. Their financial cost to the family. Their social status. Their general undesirability. As he observes his daughter Violet consuming her usual gargantuan breakfast, a terrible note of doom strikes within the heart of Dr Ivanhoe Scrapie, and shudders there for several minutes.

  ‘According to this newspaper article, a girl like Violet will never marry,’ he announces bleakly.

  ‘I don’t trust the word never,’ declares Mrs Scrapie. ‘Especially in print. My spirits say that Violet’s actually in with a chance.’

  ‘No,’ says Scrapie firmly. ‘Impossible. Never in a thousand years. Just look at her. She’ll never marry because she’s completely unmarriageable!’

  ‘Good,’ thinks Violet, dusting toast-crumbs from her two newish breasts. ‘That’s one thing Father and I can agree on.’

  Violet is opposed to marriage – or rather, to the act of union it legitimises. It was only last week that she witnessed Jacques-Yves Cabillaud coitally occupied in the chopping room with Maisie, the scullery maid from next door. She shudders as the scene revisits her: Maisie is crouched on the chopping-table, her skirt over her head, an apple in her mouth like a stuck pig. Cabillaud rocks behind her, as if he is steering a boat, his face wild and throttled.

  ‘Water will cost more than wine,’ the Empress is droning. ‘And there will be a Millennial flood that rains down poison!’

  Violet sighs, as the Empress’s wretched particles spew forth their usual crazed concoctions, relayed by the channel of her vocal cords. ‘A cobweb of misinformation and gossip will buzz all over the world like an aura,’ she continues, ‘but it will be corrupted by a giant lunatic headache, and sink into mist.’

  ‘She’ll never marry because she is a dinosaur,’ says Ivanhoe Scrapie, ignoring his wife and expanding angrily on his old-maid theme, fuelled by the spinster article in The Times. ‘Look, Charlotte. Observe the quantities. She eats as much as a bloody dinosaur.’

  Mrs Scrapie jerks out of her trance of future particles and gives a faint smile of acknowledgement.

  ‘Did that man over there say something?’ she questions vaguely. Her voice is slurred. Scrapie rustles his newspaper angrily; there’s another article here that’s getting his goat, concerning a newly recycled zoological rumour that’s doing the rounds. Meanwhile Violet remains silent: it’s impolite to speak with your mouth full. Besides, she agrees with her father. She is like a dinosaur, in that she is developing a thick skin.

  ‘It’s what’s inside that matters, Father,’ she grunts, finally, wiping her mouth on a napkin and patting her satisfied stomach. Her celebration of the alimentary canal, aided and abetted by Cabillaud, has given her a wisdom beyond her years.

  A wisdom, and a certain kind of odd grace.

  Don’t laugh: despite the uncooked-pastry aspect of her face, and her somewhat buck teeth, which render her not a traditional beauty, she has grace, and there’s no explaining it. You either do or you don’t. All sorts of things can be embedded in fat. Grace is one of them.

  Violet, under the auspices of Jacques-Yves Cabillaud, has been continuing to expand her childish girth. At two she had already been pronounced a heffalump; by seven, she was the size and shape of a barrel. And now –

  ‘Why do her very expensive dresses always manage to look like an old rug thrown over a milking cow?’ the Empress murmurs, sipping her laudanum.

  But yet – deep down, deep, deep within, there is grace.

  ‘I said a dinosaur,’ repeats Dr Scrapie, returning to the subject of spinsters and society.

  ‘Yes, dear,’ murmurs the Empress, whose particles are now receiving some unusual signals from the ghostly and unappetising future, concerning freeze-dried coffee granules. ‘A dinosaur. That’s what you said.’

  Dinosaurs were the talk of the town; the terrible lizard had the educated world a-jitter with excitement. Bones of these lumbering and monstrous creatures had recently been discovered in the chalk soil of Lyme Regis, and fossilised dragons had been unearthed in China. A new and frightening light was being shed on the makings and doings of the earth. Minds boggled. Dr Scrapie had attended a banquet in Crystal Palace, inside a concrete replica of the iguanodon, where afterwards, in a japonica bush, he had come across a set of false teeth stuck in a meringue. The incident had marked him. Meanwhile a Czech monk called Gregor Mendel had made some alarming discoveries about reproduction in peas, which might or might not disprove the existence of God, and there were rumours that Darwin’s Beagle voyage, on which his own chef Cabillaud claimed to have been a crew-member, had gathered enough zoological information to challenge the Creation story itself! Furthermore, in this morning’s Times, Dr Scrapie has just read that Lamarck’s Theory – that it is possible for a child to inherit characteristics acquired during its parents’ lifetime, such as a liking for mulligatawny soup, or an ability to play scales upon the pianoforte – is once again being resurrected, and that as a result (oh foolish clowns!) London is now rife with allegations that, as of tomorrow, if a man lost an eye, his son would be born a cyclops like the porcupine in the Zoological Museum’s Abnormality Annexe.

  ‘Tosh!’ Scrapie now yells, having finished the article, and flinging down The Times. ‘I stuffed that porcupine myself! Its father was completely normal, and I have the paperwork to prove it! It’s all a pack of bloody lies!’

  ‘That’s where you are wrong,’ says the Empress languidly. ‘There’s something in the air. I can feel it wafting past me.’

  Violet, future distressed spinster, butters yet more toast with a practised hand.

  ‘But these gaps in the fossil record,’ muses Scrapie. ‘There’s no explaining them. It’s not enough for Darwin to say that they will be filled one day, that the geologists of the future will find the missing pieces. We want to know the answers now, dammit!’

  ‘They will never find them,’ says the Empress suddenly, and sharply. ‘The gaps will remain just that, Ivanhoe: gaps. I’ve seen it. They are evidence of sudden, rapid changes. Transformations. There is …’ but here she trails off.

  Scrapie lights a noxious Havana cigar, and the Empress sinks back into her cloud of particles, which is now exhibiting the collapse of the worldwide Web.

  ‘A bloody dinosaur,’ repeats Scrapie, his glance once again scaling the human Himalaya that is his youngest child and twiddling his pencil over a diagram he is working on. He is having a table made out of fossilised dinosaur turds, sliced through and arranged in a mosaic pattern.

  I am the child of mad people, reflects Violet Scrapie, scribbling a note of the ingredients for this evening’s dinner on the tablecloth.

  ‘Tell me about the Gentleman Monkey, Father,’ she says. ‘Cabillaud and I are planning to stew its flesh tonight. With coriander and a rather unusual shrimp sauce.’

  Over the years, thanks to the imaginative genius of Jacques-Yves Cabillaud, the willingness of Violet, and the ready availability of exotic animal carcasses, the Scrapie diet has grown ever more refined, audacious and splendid. Violet has learned how to baste and pickle and stuff and jelly and devil, and to make forty-five different kinds of pastry. She has also throw
n herself wholeheartedly into the waste-not-want-not philosophy of Cuisine Zoologique. By the time the second shipment of Arctic ice arrived for the ice house, she and Cabillaud had prepared material for the first three chapters of Cabillaud’s book, Cuisine Zoologique: une philosophie de la viande. Cabillaud would cast his mind back to Brussels and remember dishes he had seen through the windows of restaurants, or smelt wafting from beneath the doors of imaginary châteaux, castles of air. Reminiscing and imagining, he would describe and then re-formulate, and together with his young assistant, concoct recipes that grew increasingly unusual. Cabillaud was particularly inventive when it came to sauces – so much so, Mrs Scrapie had the nerve to complain in one of her more practical moments, that one was never sure what kind of meat or fish one was actually eating, so drowning was it in an artful mix of flavours. By now he and Violet had invented successful recipes for a variety of creatures salvaged from Trapp’s Ark. They had eaten zebra and boa constrictor and walrus, experimented with mongoose and emu and Goan lizard, partaken of tiger, and conjured up budgerigar mousse à la Grécque. And tonight they are planning to cook another primate carcass – the umpteenth casualty of the Trapp Ark débâcle. It is in the chopping room at this very moment, defrosting after its years of residency in the bosom of the Arctic iceberg.

  Violet sips more tea. ‘I said the Gentleman Monkey, Father.’

  ‘Oh him. Yes. Fascinating creature,’ replies Scrapie, pleased that his daughter is finally taking an interest. ‘Quite strikingly human in appearance. Almost shocking. I’m working on him today. The Hippo wants him as a bloody towel-holder for the ladies’ powder room in the banqueting suite, so I’ve done an armature with an elbow bent crooked, so they can hang the towels off that.’

  ‘But I thought it was part of the Animal Kingdom Collection,’ objects Violet. ‘Aren’t they all supposed to be stuffed in positions of prayer?’

  ‘Mostly, yes. But she’s taken a liking to the primates. She doesn’t want them in the Museum, she says. She wants them dressed more like servants, helping out at the Palace. You know.’