Ark Baby

by Liz Jensen

  It is then, in the space of a single second that seems to last an hour, that I am drowning once again. I am dashed back into the flood-water of St Nicholas’s Church, and the memory returns to me as vividly as a blow to my stomach.

  My Angel is near. I am in a cot with golden bars, and I can hear the sound of a woman’s voice singing a lullaby. Rock-a-bye baby on the tree top …

  A bristle-skinned animal with orange-ochre eyes guards me.

  Then I hear Father’s voice calling me through the flood-water, begging me to return. I remember bobbing to the surface, and seeing the Parson’s cassock balloon about him in a bubble of righteousness. I sink again, and this time visit Hell.

  My Angel has disappeared, and my golden cot has become a rusty cage. I am lying in a pool of blood. And I hear a scream, high and shrill, that plays up and down my spine like fingernails screeching across a blackboard.

  Yes: I remember this.

  And as I do so, my heart begins to thump horribly, banging at my ribs like a caged beast desperate to escape. The Contortionist is pointing at me. On her face is anger, and pride, and wildness, and beauty, and desperation, all in one. Tommy clutches my hand.

  Time freezes.

  And remains frozen.

  It is indeed fortunate that I am in many ways my father’s child. For there, stuck in frozen time, I find a mood of sudden calm growing within me, and I feel the presence of Parson Phelps as solidly as if he were there in the flesh. And there, as I stare at the woman staring back at me, the full force of my faith tells me in a sane and measured fashion that there is nothing here that I know. The face, the ballet shoes, the little tutu whose skirt sticks out horizontally: nothing about the Contortionist is familiar to me in any way. Nothing, I realise, could in fact be further from my world, and the calm and ordered life of Thunder Spit: that I can swear with my hand on my heart. A heart which, although it is still thumping within me madly, witnesses no swirl of recognition, feels no stirring of memory, and experiences no instinctive rush of hatred or of love. None. Nothing.

  Just a desire to run away and return to my father, and the church, and God, and all the safety and security of home.

  ‘Come along, Tommy!’ I croak. I have grabbed his arm so hard that he yelps in pain. ‘Let’s go!’

  So from that place of horror and depravity, gumdrops flying around us, the smell of sherry in our nostrils, the memory of a tuneless, wordless ballad ringing in our ears, we flee.

  – stuk ther. Nothin to do. NOTHIN, ever.

  Then I waks up one day and am SUMWER ELS. Dark. I ratles the CAGE. I screems and screems. Wer am I, I screems.

  London Doks. This woz a SLAVE SHIPPE, says Trapp. I used to keep slaves in it. Afrika, and Gorgia. Gorgia, and Afrika. To-in and fro-in, like that. NOW it is sumthin els. Much mor CUMFTERBLE, He sez. Lots mor roome! It is an ARKE. And he is gon, larfin.

  Ther is a man cald Higgins, feeds me, changis my BUCKIT. Wen do we sail, I arsks. Wer to.

  He dusnt no, or says not.

  But He tels me their is a LIST, and wen we hav got everythin on the LIST, we can cum home agen.

  Wot kind of things is on this List, I sez.

  Animals, He sez. The animals went in two by two, HURRA!

  A few lines are obliterated here. But further down the page, the writing continues:

  – so they brings me FOOD, and water. Empties my buckit of piss and shit. Then TRAPP cums bak. Cumfterble? He arsks. Barsterd.

  We will go to DISTANT CUNTRIES wer you will be QUEEN, He sed, that nite wen we met, wen I was DANSIN at the kings Arms. Long Ago.

  Let me out of this CAGE, I sez. I am screemin and cryin. Wot is this for, I sez. Wy cant you treet me like a lady.

  Becos you is an ANIMAL now, He sez.

  I am an animal alrite, I sez, I am a COW, I sez, I am a stupid COW. He stil has a hold of me. Dont no wy. I luvs Him stil, even wen He shuttes the dor of the CAGE and leevs me in the darke agen.

  Its WOT YOU WONTS, He sez. Wimin DREEM of this.

  I opens my mouth to speek but ther is no words ther for wot I feel. And not a thing in the WURLD that I can do. Becos by now the ARK is aflote.

  CHAPTER 15

  LONG LIVE DEATH

  Which guests to invite and which to shun, what type of frilled smocking would best suit the bridesmaids, whether there will be enough champagne to go round, how the in-laws will get on: from as young as three, a normal healthy young girl will spend a fair proportion of her time, in the company of her favourite doll, agonising over the details of her hypothetical future wedding. Mrs Charlotte Scrapie being neither normal, nor healthy, nor a young girl, and in addition being already married, and indeed also dead, had long been concerned with a ceremony of the more gloomy variety, involving not white lace, but black. The happy hours she had spent preparing for this day! Earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust! Ding-dong, loud and long and tragic may the bells toll! A time to live, a time to die, a time to love, a time to hate, a time to bawl your eyes out and blow long and hard into a big black hanky!

  ‘It was a marvellous funeral,’ bragged the Laudanum Empress to Abbie Ball, a hundred and fifty years later. ‘Far be it from me to boast, but it was certainly one of the most moving occasions I have ever attended.’

  In accordance with her wishes, set out in detail in a document of some twenty-five pages, the ceremony was a grandiose affair, involving acres of pungent waxen lilies, hymn after tear-inducing hymn, black confetti, white faces, a fawning tribute to the deceased penned by the Empress herself and read by a hunchbacked vicar, and much booming organ music. Many of the Empress’s grateful former clients – from both sides of the Great Divide – sat in rigid and respectful attendance. In the front row of the church, Violet Scrapie, clad in mourning garb, dabbed at her eyes as the coffin was borne in, heaped with a mountain of lilies topped with the Empress’s favourite old fox-fur.

  ‘I’ll let you into a secret, Vile,’ murmured the dry-eyed Scrapie, sitting next to her. ‘I gave her that fox because I botched it. It was unstuffable. Too many bullet-holes.’

  Suet, reprieved from his fate as a dinner of the future, wheezed at Violet’s feet. For him at least, something positive had emerged from the calamity: from now on, the kitchen would be needing an official food-taster. Neither Scrapie nor Violet noticed the presence of the psychic particles hovering above their heads. It was an extraordinarily moving service, Mrs Scrapie felt, allowing her own ghostly bosom to shudder and a single human tear to roll down her pale cheek as she listened to the hunchbacked vicar’s heartfelt eulogy. ‘Mrs Charlotte Scrapie, adored by all who knew her – gone, but still with us!’ The tear fell upon the nose of the dog Suet with a plop. Crouching low with fear, he licked it off and whimpered.

  ‘Farewell, Mrs Charlotte Scrapie!’ intoned the vicar. ‘May you rest in peace!

  Rest in peace? Fat chance!

  It is a well-known fact that grief can set all manner of other emotions shooting off in odd directions. The result of Mrs Scrapie’s untimely death by food poisoning was to cause a deep doubt to hatch within the breast of Violet Scrapie. The week after the funeral, Monsieur Cabillaud, in an effort to relieve the child’s troubled spirits and take her mind off her bereavement, urged her to resume her hitherto tireless work on his great tome Cuisine Zoologique: une philosophie de la viande, but she refused outright.

  ‘I’m having nothing more to do with the wretched book!’ shouted the blubbering Violet, distraught. ‘I have poisoned my own mother!’

  Cabillaud had the common sense to button his lip, but at the back of his mind lurked rebellion. Should his life’s work grind to a halt, just because of a single, isolated misadventure? Should Cuisine Zoologique fail, just because a lone recipe within it had proved (in one case only) fatal?

  There is a saying that goes: Too many cooks spoil the broth. Did too many, in the Scrapie household, now mean two? Was the Scrapie kitchen, spacious though it was, large enough to contain two consciences as afflicted as those of Violet Scrapie a
nd Jacques-Yves Cabillaud? Both were volatile. Grief hung over them like a pall.

  A philosopher such as Confucius might have said, ‘We witness before us here an imbalance of yin and yang.’

  But a young woman such as Violet Scrapie said instead, ‘This is unbearable. I’m going out. Find your lead, Suet, and follow me!’

  Cabillaud, kicking the stove, said, ‘Merde!’

  Was it the ghostly presence of the Laudanum Empress and her cloud of psychic particles that steered Violet and the faithful Suet in the direction of Oxford Street that day?

  Or was it simply fate that caused them to barge past the stalls selling roast-chestnuts, past the organ-grinders and the charlatans and the hansom cabs, and clatter straight, slap-bang, into a placard on which the following words were printed: MEAT IS MURDER?

  The placard was attached to a man. The man in question – now cast in the role of victim, picked himself up off the pavement, and patiently awaited the apology he deserved. He was accustomed to abuse from strangers, but being a Christian, he also made a point of always hoping, most fervently, for the best.

  ‘I am most terribly sorry,’ said Miss Violet Scrapie. She said it with simplicity and grace. The man noted that, despite her quite monstrous size, she had a pretty, sad face, and was wearing mourning garb. So feeling suddenly sorry for her despite the shock she had caused him, he smiled at her, and began to speak.

  ‘Your apology is – OUCH!’

  He yelped in pain. He had been assaulted a second time.

  Violet never knew what it was that came over Suet. So far his canine instincts had been proved utterly sound – witness his refusal to eat the braised primate that caused the death of the Laudanum Empress – but surely this was utterly out of character? It was not in his nature to hurt a fly. It will take more than another gracious apology to fix this, Violet thought, as she whipped out her black lace handkerchief – still sodden with funeral tears from a week ago, that’s how much she had cried – and began dabbing at the wound on the man’s curiously skinny leg.

  ‘Suet’s never attacked a human before,’ Violet mustered. ‘I don’t know what’s got into him. He’s gone after rats, but …’ Her voice trailed off in confusion. ‘Look, can I escort you anywhere?’ she offered the bleeding man.

  ‘As a matter of fact you can,’ he told her, mopping furiously at his shin. ‘You can be good enough to help me stagger to a meeting I am about to hold in the public chambers.’

  ‘What’s happening there?’ asked Violet, picking up the MEAT IS MURDER placard and propping it against a railing.

  ‘A meeting of the Vegetarian Society,’ he replied. ‘Let me introduce myself. My name is Henry Salt, and I would like to invite you, miss, and your dog, to be my guests.’

  ‘I am Violet Scrapie,’ she said, proffering her hand. ‘And this is Suet.’ She kicked the creature lightly, and he hung his head. Going to the man’s wretched meeting was the least she could do, she supposed, as she half-carried the limping Mr Salt to the public meeting hall, the reluctant Suet pitter-pattering along in their wake. The hall was dusty, and as Violet seated herself, it was filling up with an odd selection of people, all spectacularly thin. Violet shuddered, grateful for her own padding on these hard little chairs.

  ‘Silence, please!’ called Mr Salt, standing before them with his hands in a supplicating gesture. ‘I would like to welcome a newcomer to our gathering! Please allow me to introduce Miss Violet Scrapie!’

  There were murmurs of acknowledgement from the crowd, and a woman next to Violet, who looked like a bony fish, piped up, ‘Pleased to meet you, Miss, I’m sure!’

  Mr Salt’s speech was a lengthy one, during which he exhibited himself to be most passionate about his fellow beings. More particularly those with feathers, fur and scales. Violet, who had seen the carcass of many a fellow being, and cooked and eaten not a few of the more exotic ones, thanks to Cuisine Zoologique, listened with irritation to his evangelistic discourse. It was clear to her, glancing briefly round the half-empty hall, that Mr Salt was preaching to the converted. His argument was contorted, wordy and earnest, but boiled down – reduced, as you might reduce a stock – its central argument was simple: men are hypocrites.

  ‘Look at us,’ he stormed, ‘cherishing our pets, and treating them like humans,’ here he cast a glance at Suet, who retreated further beneath Violet’s chair, ‘and then destroying a whole class of animal for our ghoulish consumption.’ Suet began to wheeze unhappily. Violet, meanwhile, recalled her father’s work on the Animal Kingdom Collection, and the Royal Hippo’s insistence that the stuffed beasts be clothed in breeches and the like, and conceded that Mr Salt had something of a point here. ‘Anthropomorphism makes cannibals of us all,’ he continued. ‘The only solution is to abandon our lust for the carcass, and eat herbs of the field!’

  Now here, they parted company.

  ‘We are the most complex and highly developed creatures on earth,’ he proclaimed. ‘Yet despite our thousands of years of civilisation, we pander to our primitive urge to feed on flesh. Is this the pinnacle of humanity, to breed creatures in order that they may be killed for our consumption? Are we no more than uncivilised fatteners of calves?’

  As Mr Salt delineated the rights of God’s beasts, and the holiness of St Francis of Assisi, and the inhumanity of man, a guilty tear rolled down Suet’s cheek, but Violet’s mouth remained set in refusal. After Mr Salt’s speech had ended, there was much applause from the group of undernourished-looking people, and the bony-fish woman next to Violet rose to her feet, reached beneath her chair, and whisked a linen cloth off a platter. Violet began to concentrate, sniffing the air as the thin woman sidled round with the platter, bearing lumpy vegetarian pies. Violet took a single bite, then spat.

  ‘That’s disgusting,’ she said.

  ‘Any chance you might be interested in becoming a member?’ asked the thin woman, apparently undeterred. ‘Vegetarianism is excellent for the figure.’

  ‘No chance at all,’ said Miss Scrapie, suddenly peckish and feeling the urgent desire for a pork chop. Dragging the distressed Suet behind her, she swept her huge bulk out of the hall, and headed for the butcher’s.

  Again: was it the ghostly presence of the Laudanum Empress and her cloud of psychic particles, or was it fate, that gave her this desire for a chop? Or was it simple, straightforward human greed?

  Whatever the cause, Violet Scrapie finds herself, minutes later, peering through the window of Mr Samuel’s shop, where a plaster statuette of a pig, whose chubby, cheeky face displays no irony, proffers a platter of chops, sausages and bacon rashers. Violet enters, dragging Suet behind her. But – what idiocy has entered the creature’s foolish brain? He’s whimpering! What’s going on?

  ‘Shut up, you silly dog,’ Violet hisses, and kicks him again. He squeals on the blood-stained sawdust. In the crowded butcher’s shop, upside-down poultry hangs from hooks, exuding that seductive and atrocious smell of death, so familiar to Violet from an early age, when she played on the floor of Cabillaud’s chopping room. The butcher, like Cabillaud on his chopping days, wears a murderous apron and Violet notices how his fat fingers, mottled with blood and cold, are indistinguishable from the chipolatas he holds bunched for wrapping in paper for his customer. It’s as though he has wrapped his own severed hand.

  ‘Lovely piece of meat, there, madam,’ he murmurs, handing it over to the woman in a little bloody parcel.

  The invisible ghost of the Laudanum Empress hovers above Violet as she gazes about her, taking in the scene – so similar to the chopping room back home, but suddenly so alien. What’s come over her, all of a sudden?

  Suet squeals again, and whimpers, pulling on his lead to get out. ‘Herbs of the field … cannibals of us all …’ These are Mr Salt’s words. Why are they coming back to her now? Why here? Still rooted to the floor, Violet gawps as the butcher now serves his next customer, a little coughing man, with a rack of lamb; watches as he wields the chopper, slamming it down with a crunch, bru
tally cleaving the gristle and holding up half a rib-cage for the man’s inspection. She turns, and sees dead pigs hanging gaped open like small pianos, alongside calves’ heads, mutton thighs, trays of kidneys in puddles of ink-dark blood, slobbery white brains and strips of tripe, thick and pale as undercarpet.

  ‘Good afternoon, miss,’ says the butcher, addressing Violet, who has suddenly reached the front of the queue. He offers his bloody hands. ‘How can I help you?’

  She stares for a while at the butcher. ‘You can’t,’ she says bluntly. Something is choking her. ‘There’s too much blood.’

  ‘Begging your pardon, miss?’

  Silence. Then a strangulated gulp. Suet, flooded with a sudden audacity, seizes the moment and tugging on his lead, drags Violet Scrapie forcibly from the shop.

  Violet Scrapie has since argued that it was indeed that chance meeting with Mr Salt in the street, and the eye-opening visit to the butcher’s shop that was the first step on her road to Damascus. For that afternoon, sweaty and disturbed after her adventure, Violet returned home to find that, despite herself, the words of Mr Salt were still ringing in her head. ‘Anthropomorphism makes cannibals of us all,’ he had proclaimed. ‘If we truly believe that animals have souls, then we should refrain from eating our brothers! And if they do not have souls, then why, I pray, does the elephant shed tears and the mother leopard lay down her life to save her cub?’

  Violet heaved her way up the stairs in Madagascar Street, with Suet anxiously scampering in her wake. She flung open the door of her father’s workshop and gazed upon the scene before her. Her father lay slumped over his work table, fast asleep and snoring gently. An eviscerated squirrel dangled on a hook above his head, and in front of him, pinned to the wall, was a diagram of a jaguar’s skeleton and musculature. Suet drew in a sharp breath; it was his first foray into this chamber of horrors, and doggy memories swirled in his brain: long-forgotten inhumanities performed upon him at the laboratory as a pup came floating into his consciousness, and he shuddered and whimpered. Violet, sensing his unease, took a step back, and stumbled over a jawbone. A crocodile lay belly-up, slit open on Scrapie’s stuffing table, its flesh and a wobble of unspeakable viscera gleaming in a pile beside it. Violet recalled Cabillaud’s blood-stained chopping room, and felt, for the first time in her life, a pang of remorse.