by Liz Jensen
‘Praise be, for the life that sprouteth from Thine earth!’ he shouted, when I told him that I had identified a gourd shoot among the nettles and sand-grass.
He must have felt vindicated after all for his meek acceptance of the damage at the time. We cared for the plant as I will warrant you no plant has ever been cared for before or since, including those in Her Majesty’s own greenhouses. My father would collect horse-dung from Harcourt’s farm, a mile away, every day, including Marble Friday, and drip pure spring-water into its roots from a glass pipette he received by courier from a medical supply shop in Hunchburgh, to mimic God’s rain falling drop by drop. And I must confess that there were some startling results to be had from this method. It’s a well-known fact that gourds hate a salty climate, and do not normally thrive north of London. They are a Mediterranean quasi-fruit, quasi-vegetable, and they crave the sun, which was always in short supply in Thunder Spit, but the plant, nourished by manure and goodwill, thrived in an almost obscene way, and when its yellow flowers fell, ten fruits began to swell. And what gourds they turned out to be.
It was only years later that I heard about the monk Gregor Mendel, and his experiments with peas. By selective breeding, Mendel could create green peas from yellow, and tall from short. Within a mere two generations, he showed that a species of plant can abandon the inheritance of its forefathers, and create a new legacy all its own. Our gourds must have decided to take such a step – alone. For on inspection, it could be seen that they bore little or no relation to the original green-striped gourd my mother had so admired. They were whorled in orange and yellow, with bulbous protuberances and a distinctly hairy leaf.
– this big emptie CAGE.
Get in there, He sez.
Wot for, I sez, steppin in. Ther is a BUKKIT on the floor, and a sort of bed, like a litel shelfe. There is a bole of WATER, that is all.
To see if it is the rite SIZE, He sez.
The rite size for WOT, I sez.
The rite size for you and SUMWUN ELS.
He loks the door and puts the kee in His pockit.
Good gerl, He sez. We will be leevin next week, so get acustomd, ay.
I forls to the flor and I crys and crys and crys.
Wot a stupid cow, ay? Wot a stupid –
CHAPTER 12
THE EMPRESS TAKES HER LEAVE
‘Phew! Oomph! Whuuur! Huh!’
The primate carcass now chopped and its flesh marinating gently in the coriander-and-lemon preparation, Violet Scrapie is huffing and puffing her way up the stairs to the workshop, where her father is smoking a cigar.
‘You need to get some exercise,’ he tells her as she flops in, panting. The child is bearing far too much weight. Completely overloaded. Her skin will overstretch itself. Her internal organs will be squashed. Her armature will give way. ‘A bit of walking. That’ll do the trick.’
‘Yes, Father,’ says Violet dutifully, peering through the fug of cigar-smoke at a small, humanoid creature perched on the table. ‘Is that the Monkey?’
‘Most of him, yes. One arm and a pair of buttocks missing for now. Made a mistake with the cutting. Bloody annoying. Had to re-do it. And the tail’s a bugger. Take a look.’
Violet manoeuvres her bulk around the table, and surveys the half-finished creature, some of whose skin hangs loose, falling away from the sawdust-sprinkled wire of the armature. The animal is bigger than she expected from the bits of carcass Cabillaud had chopped earlier. There hadn’t been much in the way of meat, once you’d eliminated the bones and gristle. Its tail rises behind it like a question mark.
‘A handsome beast,’ she comments. ‘There’s something very noble about him, considering he’s just an animal. You can actually begin to see why he’s called a Gentleman.’
‘Yes,’ agrees Scrapie. ‘Intelligent, too, by all accounts. Shame they’re extinct. They were a very under-researched species, unfortunately. A type of ape, according to some, but the tail sets them apart. And then they died out, so there’s bugger all way of finding out more.’
‘Definitely handsome,’ repeats Violet, musingly, stroking the creature’s hairy arm.
‘He will be, when he’s finished. Such a waste. Not a mark on him, though. Still haven’t fathomed how he died.’
This was true. Of all the creatures Scrapie had chosen from the remains of the Ark menagerie that day, the Gentleman Monkey had been the only one without any traces of violence on his body. Odd, that. As though he’d died of something else altogether.
Violet glances down and sees a pair of blue glass eyes on the table.
‘The Hippo still wants them all to have blue eyes?’
‘She does indeed, God blast her.’
‘And the –?’ Violet blushes; the subject is rather intimate.
‘Yes. That, too. No genitalia of any kind. And then the pantaloons on top, to discourage the curious. Bloody woman.’
Every time he thinks about the Monarch, Scrapie becomes enraged. He twiddles with the glass eyes, doing his best to calm himself, and then observes his youngest child once more. She really is enormously fat. Almost a young woman, and as distressed a spinster as you could ever wish to meet! Will he be stuck with her for life?
‘What you need,’ Scrapie tells Violet with sudden inspiration, ‘is a dog.’
Later that afternoon, his mind still preoccupied with the distressed-spinster issue, Scrapie left the house and returned with a corgi pup, spared from a vivisector’s laboratory by his charm.
‘Here,’ he says now, shoving a wooden box at his daughter, with a snuffling thing inside.
‘Thank you, Father,’ she replies dutifully, wiping her hands on her bloody apron and peering down into the wooden box. She has no interest in pets. A small puppy looks back up at her with large brown swelling eyes.
‘Hello, dog,’ she says doubtfully, calculating the creature’s weight with a practised eye.
‘What are you going to call him?’ enquires Scrapie. There is an edge of annoyance in his voice. As far as he can recall, the creature is the only gift he has ever presented to his daughter. She might at least attempt a little gratitude.
‘Suet,’ she replies vaguely. What is actually on her mind is a recipe for Alsatian, of which suet is a major ingredient.
Scrapie sighs in exasperation, and returns to his workshop to do battle with the monkey towel-holder.
The newly christened Suet whimpers in his box.
‘We’ll need to fatten you up a bit, eh?’ murmurs Violet, lifting the creature out. There is even less of him than she had thought; he can’t weigh more than two pounds. She and Cabillaud have developed a marvellous canine repertoire. Dog (in case you have not partaken of it, gentle reader) tastes similar to fox, which is in turn not unlike rat, though with more of a venison twang.
And nothing at all like Gentleman Monkey, as the Scrapie family discovers that night when they take their first taste of the extinct, de-frosted primate. The flavour is strong and slightly musky – though by no means offensively so. The flesh, they agree, is tender, almost veal-like in consistency. Of the parts of the carcass Cabillaud and Violet have removed from the ice house and chopped, the thigh and rump were certainly the best cuts, followed closely by the ribs.
‘Excellent!’ pronounced Dr Scrapie.
‘Delicious. I haven’t enjoyed flesh so much for a long time,’ agreed the Laudanum Empress.
But under the table, the puppy Suet whimpered.
‘He must be hungry,’ murmured Violet, retrieving the last remaining scraps of the braised primate from her mother’s plate and chucking them on the floor. But instead of snapping them up, as any normal dog might have done, the ungrateful Suet merely growled suspiciously at the meat.
‘Oh well,’ said Violet. ‘Suit yourself, stupid.’
But Suet’s canine instinct turned out to be astute.
It was the following day that gastric illness struck the Scrapie household. Violet and Dr Scrapie were doubled up with acute diarrhoea, and Cabillaud took
to his bed. On the chaise-longue in the drawing room, the Empress’s psychic particles dispersed, and the shadow of death took their place.
‘I see a town called Thunder Spit,’ the Empress muttered feebly, her eyelids flickering. ‘I see a jar on a shelf. I see a gourd plant, and a rockpool, and a ballerina and a –’ The Empress never finished her sentence.
She had officially crossed to the Other Side.
Cuisine Zoologique had claimed its first victim.
CHAPTER 13
GONE TODAY, HERE TOMORROW
‘Food poisoning?’ asks Abbie Ball, aghast, when the Victorian phantom has finished recounting the circumstances of her death. As a home-economics teacher, Abbie is more aware than most of the dangers of unhygienically prepared food. ‘Most likely to have been salmonella, I expect. Or E coli. Well, I suppose you didn’t have fridges and clingfilm in your day. Things can’t have been as developed then as they are now, Mrs Scrapie.’
The phantom sighs. This silly woman, Abbie Ball, in whose home she has recently had the misfortune – thanks to something called a ‘loft conversion’ – to find herself, appears to be convinced that the world has improved in the hundred and fifty years since her death – although a quick glance at the year 2005 is enough to inform one that this is far from so. Why, the whole British race is becoming extinct, according to the electronic spirits inhabiting the crystal box in the living room. Only last week, the news spirit told her that religious fanatics had destroyed something called the National Egg Bank – making a disaster out of a crisis. Can this really be called progress?
‘Actually, it wasn’t the flesh that was poisonous,’ she tells Abbie, adjusting her petticoats and sipping at the glass of Pepto-Bismol that is her one physical indulgence in these godforsaken times. ‘It was the praxin the creature had been injected with before death. My husband did an analysis of the remaining meat. Suet was right not to touch it.’
‘Suet?’
‘My daughter’s dog.’
‘The stuffed corgi in the attic? Is that him?
‘Well observed, Mrs Ball,’ murmurs the Empress.
‘Oh do call me Abbie.’
‘I’d rather not, if you don’t mind. Now please excuse me for a moment; I do believe The Young and the Restless is showing on your crystal box.’ And she floats off into the living room. Seconds later, the signature tune of her favourite soap opera blares out.
Abbie winces. ‘I wish she’d keep the sound down,’ she mutters.
When, a month ago, Abbie Ball had first spotted the Victorian wardrobe up in the attic, she had assumed that it contained the outdated camping equipment of her late parents, Iris and Herman Boggs, who had been tragically killed in a Swiss avalanche ten years previously. The huge second Empire meuble towered over her, two metres high and almost as wide. It was made of a darkly polished walnut, lovingly adorned with cherubs, bulging of thigh and cheek, bearing fruit and trumpets and little scrolls tied with ribbons. Abbie had not been keen to re-awaken memories of her beloved parents, but her domestic urge to clear up the loft overcame her hesitation, and she prised open the wardrobe’s vast door, which creaked and wheezed with age, and leaked from its ancient hinges the bitter dust of woodworm. Imagine her surprise when, instead of finding the poignant items she had anticipated, to wit, a chemical loo, aluminium pots and pans, folding camp beds and a portable gas cooker, she had instead unearthed a collection of stuffed mammals, ranging in size from small (a guinea-pig) to large (an entire ostrich), an ancient cookery book, an old painting of Noah’s Ark, a fossil, a scientific treatise about evolution, and a curious flask in the form of a crucifix, smelling faintly of rum.
‘Norman!’ she had wailed.
Her husband came heaving breathily up the stairs and followed the direction of her accusing finger. ‘Look at all this junk!’
‘Blimey,’ said Norman, sitting down heavily on an old laundry basket. You could have knocked him down, he said, with a proverbial feather.
‘What d’you reckon, love?’ he asked Abbie. ‘Worth a call to the Antiques Hotline?’
Neither of them spotted the phantom till later. The ghost – dressed in myriad petticoats – took a day to materialise, and then another day to declare herself fully.
‘My name is Mrs Charlotte Scrapie,’ she had announced, wafting into the room one Sunday teatime. ‘Although my family knew me as the Laudanum Empress, because of my unfortunate enthralment to a certain opiate. Is there a chemist’s shop in the vicinity? I feel the need of some pink medicine.’
And with that by way of introduction, she had allowed herself to solidify sufficiently, as a presence, to polish off four of Abbie’s barley flip-cakes. Her attention then turned to the execrable dress sense of her hosts, which she criticised in no uncertain terms.
‘What’s this?’ she had accused, snapping at Abbie’s elasticated waistband. ‘And what are those?’ she groaned, pointing at Norman’s giant frog slippers. ‘In my day we stuck to whalebone.’
By the following morning she had solidified completely, installed herself on the settee in the living room, and promptly substituted her laudanum dependence with an addiction to Pepto-Bismol and television.
As uninvited guests go, she was something of a pain, but there was no getting rid of her.
‘She’s one of those après-fin-de-siècle phenomena whatsits,’ pronounced Norman, after reading an article in the Sunday Express. ‘ “A tangible symptom of the Zeitgeist”, in boffin-speak. They reckon there’s more and more of them about, with the Extinction Crisis. People looking backwards, rather than forwards. Going a bit doo-lally over history.’
Abbie made a face. ‘Well I certainly didn’t invite her here,’ she said firmly. ‘As far as I’m concerned, she can get straight back in that old wardrobe and stay there. All she does is criticise.’
‘I heard that,’ the Empress called through from the living room. ‘And by the way, your upholsterer should be shot.’
The Balls had mentioned the Old Parsonage’s new inhabitant casually to the Vicar at the Twitchers’ Association AGM, but they were disappointed; he said he was only interested in her as an artefact of their joint psyche. Later, in the pub, Norman had discovered that the Vicar had said exactly the same thing, vis-à-vis the Peat-Hoves’ poltergeist, and the Morpitons’ haunted barn. ‘These sodding marriage-guidance counsellors,’ he grumbled. ‘They’ve got a one-track mind.’
So for lack of a means of exorcising her, the Laudanum Empress had, in the last month, become a fixture at the Old Parsonage. Apart from costing the Balls a small fortune in Pepto-Bismol, she made no real demands, Norman finally conceded, and reached the conclusion that they should be grateful for small mercies. Every cloud has a silver lining, after all.
‘And every silver lining has a stinking great cloud,’ muttered the Empress, who wasn’t keen on her side of the deal, either, but didn’t share Norman’s natural optimism. She would gladly go back in the wardrobe, if only they’d finish emptying it of stuffed animals, and would supply her with a portable crystal box.
Today Norman and Abbie are occupied with their Saturday jobs: he Black-and-Deckering at an intransigent piece of skirting in the upstairs toodle-oo; she preparing her weekly TV rehearsal. The Empress is still in the living room, engrossed in a soap opera. She’ll get square eyes if she doesn’t watch out. Meanwhile Rob Morpiton’s huge red setter has found its way into the garden of the Old Parsonage. Sensing the presence of the supernatural, it has now begun to bark frantically.
‘Sodding dog,’ mumbles Norman, fiddling with his drill-bit. ‘If that hound does a mea culpa on my lawn, I’m phoning Ron to come round with a pooper-scooper pronto. There’s a limit to goodwill, and it’s just been reached.’
But as well as inciting Norman’s anger, the red setter has also prompted animal connections in Norman’s brain, because after a couple of minutes, he remembers something, and wheezily plods his way down to the kitchen.
‘Getting to know the new vet,’ he tells Abbie. ‘He’s be
come quite a regular at the Crow. In fact, as regards my hangover the morning after the explosion at the Egg Bank, I can confidently tell you that the finger of blame points at him.’
‘Hope he’s handsome,’ Abbie remarks. ‘That’ll be a nice treat for the girls.’
‘How about a nice treat for me?’ Norman ogles at her, forgetting Buck de Savile’s rendition of a string of Elvis Presley hits, his drunken monologue about a macaque monkey called Giselle and an insane woman called Mrs Mann, and the workings of the veterinary complaints procedure, and remembering instead how, last night, after the pub, beneath Abbie’s nightie – brushed cotton in winter, plain in summer – her White Cliffs of Dover had allowed themselves to be attacked by his eager earth-moving equipment. Norman’s jeu de mots concerning earth movements was in tribute to Ernest Hemingway’s famous oeuvre, For Whom the Bell Tolls, in which the leading lady says, after having it away, ‘The earth moved.’ Sometimes, as a variation on the same linguistic theme, he would ask afterwards, ‘Did I toll your bell all right for you, then, love?’ Abbie would always smile and say, ‘Yes thanks, Norman,’ and pull the nightie back down over her bony knees. She wasn’t bothered about not having her bell properly tolled: she always used the time to think up a new dessert recipe. Last night had been a gratifying experience for both of them; Norman’s earth-moving equipment had scraped through its MOT again, and Abbie had dreamed up a new way with profiteroles.
‘What?’ says Abbie, oblivious to Norman’s sexual reverie.
‘What d’you mean, what?’
‘You said something.’
‘Did I?’
‘Yes. About the vet.’
‘Oh,’ remembers Norman. ‘Nice bloke. He says he’ll look at the junk in the loft for us.’ He reaches for the biscuit tin. ‘He says he might have a book on taxidermy antiques. Reckons if they’re vintage, and a professional taxidermy job, they could well be worth something. Expect it depends on how they’re mounted.’ He chuckles, and wiggles his eyebrows up and down. ‘As ’twere!’ he adds, popping a barley flip-cake into his mouth.