by Liz Jensen
‘Oh, and some calorie-free peanuts, please!’ Rose yells across.
‘Boring old fart,’ mutters Rose, as Bugrov returns bearing brimming glasses of spinster virgins’ breast-milk, and crackling half a dozen packets of nuts, and plonks himself between the girls. He is basking in pleasure. And who wouldn’t be, with beauty to the right, more beauty to the left, a morning of sexual gratification behind him, and more just like it ahead if he can only get to the cash machine?
‘Here, look, there’s going to be a reward,’ says Rose. She has chosen her CD track from the juke-box terminal at their table and is now flicking through the Internet news pages. ‘Five million Euros for the first British pregnancy!’
‘What?’ says Blanche, grabbing the mouse. ‘That’ll get things moving again,’ she predicts, scanning through.
‘How d’you prove it’s British, and not foreign?’ asks Rose.
Blanche reads some more. ‘Cos it has to be born in Britain. Look, read the details,’ she says, handing over the mouse. ‘Nothing’s born in this country any more. Look at Harcourt’s Filipina. He paid a fortune to have her sent over, and she hasn’t produced doodly squat.’
‘It’s a blasted heath, this nation,’ muses Dr Bugrov, pulling out his reading glasses and peering at the news on the screen. ‘Your culture has died and now you are dying, too. Money is not going to fix it.’
Rose darts him a sharp look. ‘It fixes some things, though, doesn’t it, Dr Bugrov?’
A pause, as Dr Bugrov pretends to be more deaf than he is, and fights to open a packet of peanuts.
‘We need a new bloke,’ murmurs Blanche, reading her sister’s mind. Dr Bugrov looks up. There is no disguising the pained look on his face.
‘Some young blood,’ agrees Rose pointedly, just loud enough for him to hear.
Time, perhaps, to cash in those Loyalty vouchers?
The twins look at each other.
Yes. A new man.
Now where on God’s earth are they going to find that?
CHAPTER 11
THE FLOOD
‘Now, Tobias. What can a squid do?’
‘Shoot ink to a trajectory of fifteen feet, Father.’
‘Describe an isosceles triangle.’
‘Two sides the same length, one not.’
It is a December evening, and I am studying at home, at the kitchen table, with my father. My education had been haphazard since the age of ten, at which age the local school washed its hands of children. The other boys began work on the fishing boats then, or on their fathers’ farms, or in Tommy’s case, at the forge, but I remained at home, at the mercy of my Father’s well-intentioned but scatter-gun pedagogical techniques. We would do mathematical puzzles, and he would order me to memorise maps of the world and parts of the Bible, and I read daily from Hanker’s World History, which ended in 1666 with the Great Fire of London.
‘Has the mystery of the Marie Celeste ever been solved?’
‘No, Father.’ I look out of the window: the sky is suddenly turning black.
‘Pay attention, Tobias. Can you name the parts of a flower?’
‘Petals-fruit-stamen-pollen-stalk.’
‘What did Donne say?’
‘ “No man is an island.” ’
‘Good boy,’ said my father, himself now glancing worriedly out at the yellow pall which hung over the sea. ‘That colour bodes ill,’ he announced. ‘Now clean your quill and put away the ink. Class dismissed.’
An hour later the River Flid gurgled ominously, there was a restlessness among the cows, and Farmer Harcourt found the milk had curdled to cheese in their udders. The goats, bleating in their panicky way, and craving shelter, made lunatic compasses of their tethering-posts. The sheep huddled in groups, scattered across the land like fallen clouds. The women herded the beasts off the promontory, and into fields in Judlow belonging to relatives of the Peat-Hoves and the Morpitons.
‘Close all the windows,’ commanded my father. ‘And then go and spread a horse-rug on your mother’s grave.’
I went about this and other duties; by mid-afternoon, a threatening mass of foggy air, gun-grey, had congealed on the horizon, the wind had grown heavy and dank, and the herring gulls became self-destructive and reckless and infanticidal, tearing their own nests from the cliff-face and sending the eggs hurtling down to smash on the grey rocks below, streaking them with yellow. After the gulls’ display of panic-induced violence, it was apparent that this year, God’s wrath was going to be mighty indeed. The sky stayed black. When the clocks said it was night – though no stars appeared and only a thin rind of moon hung in the blackness – the villagers loaded themselves and their belongings on to boats, and sailed to Judlow.
But Parson Phelps and I stayed, along with a scattering of men – Bark men, Hayter men, Balls and Tobashes – who were determined to defend their homes, come what may.
‘We are remaining here,’ Parson Phelps said, ‘because it is God’s will.’
And the Lord’s word, as usual, was final.
‘But –’ I faltered.
‘God objects to the word but, with a great intensity,’ Parson Phelps warned. He was intimate with God’s opinions about vocabulary, as they were uncannily congruent with his own. ‘We shall not abandon the church!’ He thundered this at me as though I were Satan trying to drag him bodily away. The wind was banging at the windowpanes of the Parsonage, like the Devil himself knocking.
‘But God can surely fend for himself,’ I argued. ‘He is omnipresent and omnipotent, and everlasting, Father – but we are mortal! We cannot even swim! The church is just a building! It’s people that matter!’ My tapeworm Mildred appeared to agree with me on this issue, for she was giving me holy hell as I spoke and turning my bowels to water.
‘There are other people staying, too,’ my father replied. ‘They are my parishioners. My flock. How can I leave them?’
‘Because they all own boats, and we do not!’ I answered. But he turned his deaf ear on me, and when I pursued it further, he cast me aside and pointed in the direction of the harbour, where the fishing boats were being loaded with passengers anxious to leave.
‘So go, then!’ he shouted, so that my ears hurt. ‘Leave your father to the mercy of God, and to the flood-water that riseth!’ But I couldn’t leave him, mutinous sphincter or no.
Outside, the lightning cracked and the thunder rolled in a sky of a dingy and malicious purple hue. But it was only when the rising sea-water began to insinuate itself beneath the oak door of the Parsonage that we wrapped ourselves in oilskins and left our home; I with a sinking feeling of dread, my father swept along by the frightening tidal wave of his own faith. Carrying an ember from the dying fire with us in a puffball, we stumbled past the wind-whipped trees and through the flattened bracken to the church. Here we made our camp; first by the altar, where fourteen years earlier the Parson had mistaken me for a piglet, and then, as the water rose, to the pulpit. We watched as the waves sloshed beneath the door and swished up the aisle. I remember the sight of Parson Phelps, as he stood in the pulpit like Canute, his hand willing the flood to abate. But despite the force of his will and his character, it did not, and the level of the water continued to creep ever upward. We stayed there all day and all night, drinking from a hip-flask of rum and eating raw the stray sardines that slapped on to the pulpit. At first, my father would only allow us to burn two candles at a time.
‘One for light, and one for heat,’ he explained solemnly.
On the second day, it was just one. By evening, the last candle guttered and died, and we just had a thin impression of daylight though the stained-glass window by day, and by night, the ghostly, fungal phosphorescence of plankton in the nave.
It was here, over the course of those three days and three nights that my father chose to tell me about the world. Sometimes I would ask a question. But mostly, he just talked. It was cold enough to freeze a toad, and mostly dark, and looking back, I realise that it was his passion for life, combined with
the rum, that kept both our hearts from stopping. Every article that he had read in The Times over the past quarter of a century was now being hauled up from the vast archive of his memory and filtered through the prism of his faith until it formed clear shafts of light by which I might see God’s truth; I remember that I listened gratefully and attentively, and that for the three days that we were to live in the besieged church, my father kept us both alive with alcohol and with the earnest and fortifying bagpipes of his informed discourse, while I made paper boats from the pages of a collapsed hymn-book and sent them bobbing across the water in search of land and safety.
As the waves slapped at our ankles in the pulpit, he told me about the Monarchy and the hierarchies of the Kingdom in which we lived, starting at the top with Her Majesty and working down the ladder through dukes and archdeacons and Sir Thises and Sir Thats, as laid down through the ages, down to humble us, Parson Phelps and Master Phelps his son. As we heard the wind screaming around the church spire, and the rusty weather-vane spinning wildly on its axis, he spoke about a man, Cromwell, who in history had once attempted to overthrow the Monarchy. An ugly man with warts on his face, and a wart for a heart, said my father. He told me, too, as we rescued an exhausted cormorant, about the heinous slave trade in America, and the slave-traders who had pillaged Africa for its manhood and shipped the poor savages half-dying to labour in the sugar plantations so that vainglorious trollops in London could sweeten their cakes, as if honest honey from the noble bee wasn’t good enough for them. And as dawn broke on the second day, about happier things: the invention of the hot-air balloon by a Frenchman, Montgolfier, and about the conquest of the Empire, and the conversion of millions of native savages who, were it not for Queen Victoria, would still be hopping around worshipping baboons and practising cannibalism. That night he told me about Galileo and his charting of the planetary system, which had once been seen as heretical, but was now an accepted truth. He named the Planets for me, and though we couldn’t see the stars through the stained-glass window, he described them to me, and even now, when I look at the constellations, I remember his words. (‘Three fingers to the right of the Plough … a little southerly from the North Star … draw a diagonal line directly left of the Milky Way and you will discover …’) He waited till dark to inform me, in a vigorous but incomprehensible way, with many praise-thees and therefores, about the reproductive process, as enacted by a type of Highland cattle not seen in this part of the world. He made no mention of the human equivalent, and I dared not ask. Nor did he mention the adder in his knickerbockers which had prevented him from pleasuring his wife – but he reminded me, in the anonymity of darkness, of the brimstone and hellfire that would come raining down on me and strike me blind if I were to practise the deadly vice of onanism. On the third dawn he told me the history of the sea-storm in 1822 in which three boats capsized, killing fifteen fishermen from two families in one fell swoop, and of how Mrs Firth’s idiot cousin Joan came to live with her, having been hounded out of Judlow accused of being a witch, after she had vomited on the floor and the regurgitated stew created a puddle in the shape of a five-legged sea-monster, complete with horns.
Then he told me, not for the first time, that no man was an island. It was a favourite theme of his.
‘ “No man is an island, entire of itself!” ’ he thundered.
‘– self, elf, elf, elf!’ his voice echoed in the dark rafters. (Ironically enough, during this evocation of Donne’s topological conceit, we were now actually marooned on the very geographical feature in question. Though we did not know it, the peninsula had been cut off from the mainland, turning our speck of land into a small and threatened oval, like the back of an engulfed spoon.)
‘Every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main!’
‘– main-ain-ain-ain!’ the church replied.
It was at that moment that the pulpit broke, and we fell into the water.
I recall little of what immediately preceded my holy vision: only that I saw a jellyfish wobble past me, its trailing skirt a-jingle with tiny bubbles. That a herring collided with my nose. That a crab pinched my finger. That for a moment my floundering sent me bobbing up to the surface, where my father floated serenely, turning slowly in a whirlpool, his cassock expanded around him like a big bubble of faith.
That he announced, ‘Have courage! The Lord has seen fit to challenge us, Tobias, and we shall rise to His command!’ And that then, instead of rising, I sank like a stone beneath the surface.
And here, deep in the freezing waters of the flood, I met an Angel.
It is said that a dying man sees his life pass before him in the form of a small morality play, so that when he reaches St Peter’s Gate, he may humbly accept whatever direction the saint commands him to follow. This thought only came to me much later, as an explanation for what I experienced while I drowned.
The Angel before me is beautiful, and I love her instantly.
She is dressed like a ballerina, in a white garment with a skirt of stiff fabric sticking out horizontally from her waist, and white stockings on her small legs. Her wings must be folded behind her, or perhaps they are transparent as gossamer, for I do not see them. Her face is pale, and in her dark hair she wears a band of gold. A stream of silver bubbles pours from her mouth.
Sunlight is streaming in on us from somewhere high above. The Angel smiles at me. In the background, I hear people laughing and cheering. I am in a golden cot, with bars. A huge bristle-haired animal is on the other side. Its snout is soft, its eyes are ochre-orange, the irises vertical slits. I hear a high, grating song in my head, like a distant echo of something long gone.
Rock-a-bye-baby, on the tree top,
When the wind blows, the cradle will rock …
‘O Lord do not take him from me, I beg you!’ a man’s voice is crying. It is far away, as distant as the moon. ‘Hold on!’ yells Parson Phelps, louder this time. My Angel trembles, like a reflection in a pool. Then something grabs me and yanks me upwards with a wrenching pain. I break the surface and scream, and the water takes me again, this time to Hell, where I see –
Other things. A cage. Teeth. Blood. The Angel, screaming. Broken glass.
And worse.
My father was slapping my face, hard. The water sloshed about us.
‘Now wake, Tobias! Wake up!’ And he slapped me again. ‘Wake-up-up-up-up!’ echoed the church. The vision of Hell disappeared in a flash, and only the swirling waters remained.
‘You are delirious with hunger and exhaustion,’ my father said at last.
‘I saw a vision of a Holy Angel,’ I spluttered.
But I had seen Hell, too.
When the Flood finally drew back, and the sea was calm, the church was strewn with seaweed and oysters and clams, I was weak from too much knowledge on an empty stomach, and shaken by my visions. Parson Phelps had lost his voice completely by now. He could only croak his praises and his heartfelt thanks to the Lord in a ragged manner. We staggered up the aisle, gathering fish in the collection bucket, fighting off the gulls that swarmed in, and headed for the Parsonage.
We were met with a shock. The whole exterior of the house, from top to bottom, was covered in giant barnacles, which clung on with an awesome force. (I had never seen such huge specimens; later Tommy and I would lever them off with crowbars.)
My father laughed shakily. ‘God has cracked a joke,’ he explained. ‘For his own almighty pleasure!’
And God had more pranks up His sleeve, because when my father opened the Parsonage door, a huge wall of sea-water came hurtling out, knocking him sideways. He lay there as it flooded over him and spent itself in the sodden earth. Then he stood up, and laughed, and said, ‘Praise be, for the Lord is in good humour!’
Ever the optimist. Personally, I did not think much of God’s sense of humour. Then or later.
That morning, as the villagers came rowing and sailing back, there was a sky as capricious as oil, conjuring itself back and forth from light to da
rk under a wedge of lemon sun. The heavy salt-bearing wind still racketed in from the east, and in the harbour, the masts and sails of the returned fishing boats danced and glimmered in a chaotic mirage. That’s how I remembered Thunder Spit, after I left it. Strewn about in pieces like a smashed glass bowl, after the storm. Later, in the city, when I was lost, if I put my whelk to my ear, I could hear it, smell it, taste it. Wind and fish, fish and wind, salt and spike-grass and gulls.
Home sweet home!
Sweet, but sour, too. The Parsonage never fully recovered from the Flood, and the first of the jokes that God was to play on us. Most of the house was ravaged, and was to remain so for several years; from then on, when we needed to salt our food, we just scraped a kitchen flag-stone with a penknife. In the meantime, sea-life rotted in corners, and for months the larder was a rockpool, containing a variety of living creatures, including a blue starfish, an array of clams, and four lobsters. We spent the rest of the year trying to repair the damage, and every fine day we would haul out our furniture and belongings in an attempt to dry them out.
Look: there’s the sofa steaming in the warmth of a spring morning.
And listen: crrrkkk! That’s the sound of the mahogany dresser splitting suddenly, and gaping soggily apart to reveal a lumpy mass of disintegrating jellyfish on its floor.
Don’t inhale: hold your nose! Pffffwah!
‘God moves in a mysterious way,’ boomed my father, the eternal looker-on-the-bright-side, as he chopped up the useless furniture wood, ‘His wonders to perform!’
If my father was distraught at the damage the sea had inflicted upon my mother’s grave (the blanket he had bade me lay upon it had been carried off by the waters), he hid it well. The waves had churned up the earth, and all the shrubs and plants we had so carefully tended were destroyed. Or so we thought, until the following autumn, when the gourd plant appeared.