Ark Baby

by Liz Jensen

  Violet nods. She gets the idea. She finds it mildly unsettling – like the article in the newspaper – but cannot identify why.

  ‘He’s animal number three thousand and eight, if I recall,’ Scrapie is sighing. ‘You can come and have a look if you like. He’s not finished, but it’ll give you some idea. Good specimen. The last in the world, apparently. From a Moroccan menagerie, originally, according to the paperwork, such as it is. Trapp got about all right. Do you realise, he followed the same course as the Beagle in that old slave tub of his?’

  ‘He went all the way to Australia?’

  ‘He most certainly did. No wonder it took him so long. He went bloody well everywhere. South America, the Galápagos, Mauritius, Tasmania, North Africa, South Africa – bloody lunatic. If that man was ever a naturalist, then I’m a pink-footed goose.’

  ‘How exactly did he die, Father?’ asks Violet.

  The chef, Cabillaud, has told her the story of the human head a thousand times. How, on the day of her birth, he had boarded Trapp’s Ark with Scrapie to examine the damage, and stumbled over a rolling, rotting thing that had once been attached to a human body. How Scrapie had squatted down and stared into what remained of its face, and recognised Trapp. How he and the equerry had both rushed out on deck to be sick, while Violet’s father had remained level-headed and iron-stomached enough to report Trapp’s murder to the Royal Hippopotamus in the same breath as ordering a ton of Arctic ice.

  ‘Nobody knows,’ returns Scrapie darkly, recalling the same scene. Trapp’s bruised and broken face, caked with blood and filth, a ghastly ball of gristle with a human brain within, is an image that he, too, has found it hard to dispel over the years.

  ‘They never found the rest of him,’ he said finally. ‘And the crew had all disappeared. Higgins, Steed, and Bowker; they were gone, too. Along with the lifeboats. They say there was a woman, too. A ballerina. Quite a mystery.’

  For a moment Scrapie sits there silently, brooding on the doomed expedition. Then he snaps out of his dark reverie. ‘Come up to the workshop after lunch and I’ll introduce you to the monkey.’

  Violet stifles a burp. ‘Thank you, Father.’ It is important to know what one is eating.

  ‘And people will one day have mechanical hearts implanted by a surgeon operating through a keyhole,’ warns die Empress, reaching for her medicine bottle with a fluttering hand. Dr Scrapie rolls his eyes Heavenward.

  Trapp wuz givin me a job, the woman wrote. I wuz His mistris and His dancer. Big house, and He giv me munnie. Gents cumin and goin. I DANCIS for them wen E sez. I dont see nufin at first, cos most of the dors is LOKD, but I herd stuff at nite. Screems, LARFIN, Trapp and gents havin there way wiv girls. I lys in bed and I crys one nite. Trapp cums in. He is the wors for DRINK. But insted of hitin me He sez He LUVS me, and taks me in His arms. Dont no wy, but my will is gon. Ther is somthin you must do for me, He sez. Wot, I say. E shows me a big emptie CAGE.

  CHAPTER 10

  IN WHICH THE ROGUE MALE SEARCHES FOR A MATE

  The first client at my new surgery was a bloke called Sequin, who thought his border collie might be gay. It didn’t bode well, I thought. Overnight, people seemed to have become more morose, introverted, and prone to obsession. The whole country was succumbing to a kind of mourning process after the bomb at the Egg Bank. No one could seem to see the wood for the trees.

  ‘I prescribe a holiday for Chum-Boy, Mr Sequin,’ I said. ‘Get him out and about a bit. Take him to a national park and play fetch. It might do you some good as well.’ He skulked off, looking doubtful.

  I’d stayed in the Stoned Crow the first week, then set up shop in the surgery of my predecessor on Crawpy Street. The house was attached: a small cottage overlooking the River Flid. Norman Ball told me that a few years back, the Flid had won the Pollution Challenge Award (north-east section), but looking at it now, you got the sense that it was no longer a contender. From time to time, Norman warned me, it would bear a batch of foamy-scummed fish, which he referred to as ‘eels flottantes’. There was a chemical factory at Fishforth, fifty miles upstream, specialising in detergents. Sometimes the water frothed violet, like something in an extravagant technicolour cartoon. It didn’t really matter any more, how much we screwed up the earth, I thought. Or at least our part of it. The rest of Europe will probably use the whole island as a nuclear dumping ground, once we’re gone. And who can blame them? Strange, but the fertility thing hadn’t bothered me till now. In fact, I’d felt quite cavalier about it.

  I didn’t any more. I felt strangely coshed. I kept thinking: I wish I’d been born in the good old days. I wish I’d been alive before Elvis died. I wish I could’ve seen him perform on stage, just once, in the flesh. I’d have been one of those fans that tried to catch some of the sweat that flew off him, to keep in a little bottle. Try capturing that virtually. I wish –

  Oh well. As Norman said: life must go on. What would Elvis have done? He’d have rocked around the clock, that’s what.

  But no matter how loud I played my virtual concerts, I couldn’t quite get in the mood.

  I reckon urban man must have evolved lungs that needed a certain degree of environmental contamination: I experienced positive withdrawal symptoms during my first week in Thunder Spit, and felt quite nostalgic when I caught a whiff of exhaust. The air, as well as being cleaner than in Tooting Bee, was a couple of degrees colder, and it took my nose a while to detect any smells at all. But when I did, they were pleasant enough: wood-smoke, fresh tarmac, the salt wind. I still hadn’t actually clapped eyes on the sea. The concrete barrier that hid it had been erected, Norman told me, in the 1980s, when they’d done the rationalisation project. Before the land reclamation, Thunder Spit had been prone to flooding: back in the nineteenth century, the water had sometimes come in as far as the church. He said if I looked hard, I’d see the water-line at the back of the pulpit, but I said I’d take his word for it. I’m not into history. After I’d made the first round of phone calls and goodwill visits to a few local farmers – Ron Harcourt, Billy Clegg, Charlie Peat-Hove – I felt I had the measure of the place. It was turning out to be an easy locum. I’d heard rumours about my predecessor; phoney BSE certifications and kickbacks, among other things. He couldn’t be a hard act to follow. If the cuddly stuff – domestic pets like Giselle – had represented a form of chaos, then farm livestock represented the opposite: here were working creatures with a pre-determined lifespan who paid their keep by ending up as leather or meat, and producing milk and eggs in their lifetime; functional beings you could respect, not the slaves-cum-mental-health workers that urban domestic pets had become, sad breeds of prostitute for the lonely and confused human. From now on the budgie-neutering would be restricted to the population of one town. As bad luck would have it, I had to perform an operation on an Indonesian iguana belonging to a little girl – the daughter of some Healthplan bigwig called Baldicoot – on day two, but I put out word in the pub that Buck de Savile was more into the rugged outdoor stuff. It fitted his image, I reckoned. And sure enough, when I visited the farm of the silent Charlie Peat-Hove, I found that I liked pigs. Visiting the squint-eyed Mr Lumpey over at Hawthorn Farm, I discovered I liked the Lord Chief Justice sheep, too – even though, disappointingly, their only difference from ordinary sheep turned out to be a diminished brain capacity and a tendency to fight. I saw to Mrs Harcourt’s addle-brained chickens, which kept drinking from the slurry lagoon and poisoning themselves, and prescribed Narcomorph – a mild hallucinogen with healing properties – for Mrs Clegg’s disturbed foal.

  Despite my overall Weltschmerz – this was the big buzz word to describe the current national mood since the Egg Bank exploded – I felt pleased with myself on a practical level. Within a week, I’d crossed the first two items off the mental list I’d written that first night in the Stoned Crow. Only one remained.

  It was in the unromantic setting of the hypermarket in Judlow that I first clapped eyes on the girls. When I first saw Rose, or was it Bla
nche, I remembered item number three: get laid. Then I spotted the other one, and invented a new item. Number four: get laid again.

  I was near the checkout, where a huge sign flapped: BUY THE SAUSAGE AND ONION LATTICE PIE, GET THE COLESLAW FREE! I was conscious of dithering about which queue to join, aware that there was a petite, attractive, rusty-haired girl on each. They stirred a strange feeling of recognition in me, though I couldn’t have put my finger on who or what it was they reminded me of.

  You see, I didn’t notice, at first, that the girls were identical, and that they were actually reminding me of each other. To my eye, all checkout girls, frankly, are much of a muchness, insofar as women tend to break down into a few basic but useful categories: young and attractive, old and attractive, young and unattractive, mother-type (drunk: avoid!), Holly-type (betraying: avoid!), available, unavailable, et cetera. These categories could all be subsumed into two broader sets, if you were in a hurry: the shaggable and the unshaggable. These two, despite their rather charmless orange-and-white chequered uniforms, were eminently shaggable, so here I was, torn between two checkouts. The shopper nudging at my back with a chariot of wire decided me, and I veered towards Blanche with my mesh basket of essentials: margarine, razor blades, frozen dinners, cans of lager, crisps, ice-cream, socks – a basket which I reckon should have yelled out Buck de Savile’s eligible bachelorhood without him having to say a word.

  I strewed my consumer items on the conveyor belt with manly assurance. But reaction came there none. Blanche didn’t even look up. So feebly, I tried to make conversation (‘Wanted to buy that pie, you know, the sausage and onion lattice one, but couldn’t find the coleslaw’), but she ignored me. Like her sister, she was in a round-eyed trance. As I was paying, I had another stab at it (‘Do you take Visa, darling?’), but she barely reacted to my presence. When I’d finished loading my carrier bag, I turned to have another look at Blanche, and saw she had switched checkouts. She’d been on number nineteen. Now she was on number twenty. Except that when I looked at nineteen, I saw her again. I looked carefully again at both of them. Scrutinised them thoroughly. No, not double vision, I suddenly realised. Identical twins!

  It was then that I remembered something. Norman had twin girls, didn’t he? Double Trouble, he called them. Or the Gruesome Twosome, or Two Peas in a Pod, or Tweedles Dum and Dee.

  I stood there with my two shopping bags, just staring first at one, and then the other. They still didn’t notice me. The hypermarket was busy, and I was impressed with the deftness of their movements as they weighed plastic bags of fruit on their electronic scales, whisked the bar-codes over the infra-red, and dealt with credit cards and loyalty vouchers. It intrigued me, the way their hands could be so busy when you could tell that their minds were blank.

  On the way home, I couldn’t stop thinking about them. And that night they must have crept into my dreams, because by the following morning, they were under my skin, like an itch.

  As Buck de Savile, formerly Bobby Sullivan, spiritual son of Elvis, busies himself with his veterinary tasks and worries away at his desire, the two young women who are causing his pleasurable discomfort are now sitting on bar-stools in the Pig and Whistle in Hunchburgh. Rose and Blanche Ball, conceived of a single bifurcated egg and born on Midsummer’s Day, 1985, more or less simultaneously by Caesarean section to Abbie Ball, née Boggs, home economics and French teacher, are enjoying a glass of Liebfraumilch, which their personal tutor Dr Bugrov has told them means ‘the breast-milk of spinster virgins’.

  ‘Cheers,’ says Rose.

  ‘Here’s to the end of the world as we know it,’ adds Blanche grimly. The Weltschmerz thing has hit them both hard; like all girls their age, their names have been on the Egg Bank waiting list since the beginning. Norman and Abbie hadn’t wasted a moment getting them enrolled. Fat lot of good that’s turned out to be. Oh well. They’ve earned a hundred Euros this morning.

  ‘I’m a lucky man,’ smiles Dr Bugrov, with the smile of a man who knows about cash well spent.

  ‘And we’re lucky girls,’ says Rose, smiling sweetly at the balding professor, while her sister takes advantage of his back being turned on her to waggle two fingers at her throat in a being-sick gesture. Rose sniggers.

  In the beginning, the man who is now their genealogy teacher had been a bit of a long shot, a lonely old git they’d taken pity on in the cinema queue because it had been a day or two since they’d had any excitement in their lives. Dr Bugrov – ‘Call me Sergei,’ he’d insisted, but they couldn’t – had proved a disappointment, and not worth the gamble, until he came up with an unexpected proposal, in the form of cash. A hundred Euros to do it regularly; say, once a week? They didn’t dislike him. His accent was quite sexy if you shut your eyes. And he’d been intelligent and practical enough to recognise straight off that they weren’t going to do it again for free. After a few sessions, he had offered to throw in genealogy, too, as a bonus.

  ‘Like a Loyalty voucher?’ asked Rose as they lay in bed doing special studies.

  ‘Like two Loyalty vouchers, my dears,’ Bugrov had smiled, squeezing Blanche’s tit. ‘I’m in charge of a module.’

  The whole enterprise had seemed like a reasonable idea, since they were always short of money, and Dad had been saying he may be sticking his neck out here, gals, but wasn’t it time they got themselves some gainful employment, instead of forever scrounging off the state? What’s more, Dr Bugrov led them to believe that genealogy could lead to financial self-sufficiency – wealth, even. Now that the whole of the British race was headed for extinction, everyone was looking backwards, rather than forwards, he told them. Ever since the bomb at the Egg Bank had hammered the last nail in the coffin of the British, the whole nation had gone ape-shit. Everybody was in shock. The crisis lines were jammed solid, the worldwide Web was overloaded, all flights out of the country were fully booked.

  A side-product of this madness, Bugrov predicted, was that there would suddenly be millions of gullible Americans wanting to trace their roots, before those roots completely shrivelled. Enter the twins.

  ‘You could set up a service,’ Dr Bugrov advised them. ‘Once you have your diploma. You offer to trace their families. You produce a brochure. Three hundred Euros per generation for the first three generations, then four hundred Euros per generation after that. Anything they don’t like, history of madness, criminality, sex changes – you offer to doctor it for a surcharge.’

  They had liked the idea of a weekly ‘grant packet’ from Dr Bugrov, who was indeed connected, in some tangential way, to Hunchburgh University’s Department of Human Sciences. He was fifty, and he always smoked a pipe of Three Nuns after sex. Like many of the men captivated by Rose and Blanche, he was excited by the idea of two women catering to his sexual whims simultaneously. And intrigued by the way that when one of them climaxed, the other would, too, as though by proxy. It was telepathy, they explained. Everything was interchangeable, with them. Plus they had a strong natural urge. ‘We’re animals,’ they purred sexily. And then spoilt it by sniggering. But Dr Bugrov wasn’t complaining. Like many before him, he would lie back and close his eyes and feel their hands creeping over him – Rose’s right, Blanche’s left – and imagine it was just one woman doing all this to him, an octopus-woman who could kiss him on the mouth and suck him off at the same time. Sometimes he didn’t even want to do it, but just lie there and stroke their four bored tits and reminisce about academic politics, departmental meetings he had attended, and witty ripostes he claimed he had made to deans of this or that institute of higher learning in Britain or America – ripostes so heavily overwrought that it was clear even to Rose and Blanche that they were only remarks he wished he had made, dreamed up years later when nursing the ancient wounds of missed opportunity.

  They’d wash the Three Nuns out of their hair afterwards, and spend the grant money on the usual things: depilatory creams, leg-waxes, or electrolysis.

  Heigh ho. They knew all about unwanted heredity, thank
you very much. Witness the hair problem that they battled with on a daily basis, and the toe thing they had. Thank God for those new elasticated trainers that were all the rage for pets. Shoes had been quite a headache, till then.

  ‘More Liebfraumilch, my dears?’ offers Bugrov. He pronounces it elaborately, stressing the ch ending.

  ‘We wouldn’t say no,’ says Rose.

  ‘In fact we’d say yes,’ asserts Blanche.

  They are twenty years old, and they have the world at their slightly deformed feet, and they know it. Nobody can take that away from them.

  ‘And some soya balls,’ adds Rose.

  ‘Here’s a pink one,’ the obstetric surgeon had said when the girls were born, holding up a screaming female baby by the ankle with his left hand. At which point, according to family legend, Abbie murmured in French, ‘Rose.’

  ‘And here,’ announced the surgeon, wielding a second baby in his right hand, ‘is a white one.’

  ‘Blanche,’ croaked Abbie, and fainted, thinking the baby was dead, because she was so pale and uttered no sound. And from that day, it was always Rose who spoke first of the two.

  Blanche didn’t stay white and Rose didn’t stay pink: the colours melded until they were both equal parts peaches and cream beneath a down of coarse body hair that was to be the cross they bore through life, requiring leg-waxes once a week and extensive electrolysis. Blanche and Rose, beloved twin daughters of Abbie and Norman Ball, citizens of Thunder Spit, England and the world. Marital status: single, but looking! Blanche and Rose, who grew from rock-climbing tomboys into nubile teenagers, who were attractive in a wild, buck-toothed, unclassical sort of way, who had, after leaving school and maturing physically, been to secretarial college and who now worked Saturdays on adjoining checkout tills in the hypermart in Judlow, who kept their socks on during sex so that no one should see their embarrassing feet, who were identical except that Rose always spoke first and was right-handed, while Blanche always spoke second and was left-handed; and who now, in the Pig and Whistle, are watching the elderly Dr Bugrov ordering more Liebfraumilch and soya balls from the bar.