Ark Baby

by Liz Jensen

  Those dishes they had prepared together had indeed been a delight – but a price had been paid, in the form of lives. Animals’ lives – and now that of a human. What’s more, her own mother! Could there not be some other way? She stroked Suet, deep in thought. Mr Salt’s words began to haunt her. Imaginary tastes turned to ashes in her mouth. And imaginary smells – smells that had once made her mouth water – now began to make her retch.

  She descended to the basement kitchen, from whence the odour of walrus tripe was wafting ominously.

  ‘There is a problem,’ Violet announced.

  Cabillaud looked up from his cooking pot. ‘Ah, chérie. You have returned. I am making ze mustard sauce with ze peppercorns, and a little tiny hint of sweetness, in ze form of my own rosehip compote.’ Cabillaud had not yet noticed Violet’s stony and tear-besmirched countenance. ‘This walrus, he has need of lifting a little from his unhappy heaviness of taste.’

  ‘I said a problem.’

  The chef looked up, saw the finality on the face of his protégée, and read some of her thoughts, for was she not an open book to him? Was she not his own little Violette, whom he had personally perched on his weighing machine a million times, and to whom he had fed the best morsels of everything! His own little Violette, whom he had single-handedly educated in the pleasures of the palate!

  ‘Meat is murder,’ she announced.

  His own little Violette, now turning against him? Mon Dieu! How could she?

  ‘But ze human being is a carnivore!’ countered Cabillaud. ‘Ze animals, is not ze peoples! Zey have no human rights, chérie!’

  One thing has a terrible tendency to lead to another – and sure enough, this sudden, bitter exchange proved to be but the hors d’oeuvre to a whole menu of conflict, whose main course was the marinated and long-simmered substance of Violet’s grief, accompanied by an ethical dispute on animal rights featuring mille-feuille and crushed garlic and coriander, leading into a rich, repercussive meringue and sherry trifle of a debate on personal morality, an argument with scalloped icing and raspberries, a confrontation of furiously clashing flavours, multiple toxins, and flagrant disjunctions of taste. Tears were shed on both sides. A pan was thrown. Knees were got down upon. Belgian beseechings were to be heard. Pages from Cuisine Zoologique were spat upon and shredded out of pique. And finally, sobbing but victorious, the mistress of the house, the loyal dog Suet at her side, dismissed her former guru. Violet Scrapie. No longer a girl, but a woman. And what a woman.

  As Violet Scrapie experiences her coming of age in the basement kitchen, a banging rhythmical noise is emanating from the taxidermist’s workshop on the ground floor. Thump, thump, thump. It is the sound of flesh on wood. Fist on table, to be more precise. It’s a busy life, being dead, reflects the Laudanum Empress; satisfied with Violet’s progress, she drifts upstairs clutching her phantom petticoats to discover Dr Ivanhoe Scrapie in a state of utmost distress.

  ‘Why, why, why?’ he wails, his voice catching. As she passes through the closed door of his workshop, the Empress pats her hair and adjusts her ghostly face. She is briefly touched by his display of emotion, but also somewhat piqued; could the man not have tried a little harder to summon up such feelings while she was alive? But her sympathy is short-lived; it soon becomes apparent that the emotion we are witnessing here is neither grief nor remorse over the death of Mrs Scrapie; it is that green-eyed monster, professional jealousy.

  ‘Bastard!’ he moans, thumping harder on the table. ‘Damned, bloody man!’

  When the findings of the great scientist Charles Darwin had been published yesterday, Dr Scrapie’s reaction, after he had stayed up all night reading the scholarly work, had been even more extreme than that which we are now witnessing. They had involved his forehead, and a marble mantelpiece. Human blood had been shed.

  And why not? For he had been an idiot, a buffoon, an intellectual amoeba!

  ‘Thirty years in zoology – how could I not have seen it?’ he growls. ‘It’s so obvious! Any child who has visited a bloody farm could have spotted it!’

  The hideous fact at the epicentre of Scrapie’s misery is this: Darwin’s Origin of Species, charting and explaining the great ladder of Nature, has made the sum of his own life’s hitherto not inconsiderable achievements look suddenly so unambiguously lightweight that they almost fly into the air of their own accord. His historically successful stuffing of an earthworm, the publication of his paper On the Epidermis of the Chameleon, his appointment as Taxidermist Royal, his work on the Animal Kingdom Collection and the defunct specimens of Trapp’s Ark, his discoveries about the rhino’s hip-joint: all are as nothing compared to Darwin’s spectacular triumph! Dr Ivanhoe Scrapie will now be consigned for ever to the dustbin of history! The grotesque injustice of it leaves him winded. His whole career blotted out by another’s fame! It is all so monstrously galling!

  He slumps over the table and breathes heavily, his chest shuddering, as though it houses a volcano instead of a heart. A volcano now on the verge of a most dangerous eruption. Oh, God! If only he, during his long career, had made a discovery of similar note! If only he had ventured forth on the Beagle, journeyed to the Galápagos, and, when drunk on ship’s rum (how bloody well else?) imagined a stretch of time over which scales became feathers, fins mutated into legs, legs metamorphosed into wings, and swim bladders fashioned stomachs of themselves, all through the vagaries of chance. Instead, he had stayed here in London all these years, working for Her Majesty’s absurd Animal Kingdom Collection, and faffing about with the carcasses of Trapp’s Ark. In short, spending years of his life cleaning up another man’s mess, to feed the whimsy of a crazed monarch, and a woman to boot! Why? Why? Why?

  ‘Bloody book!’ he yells, now flinging the tome to the floor in frustration, rage and pique.

  ‘It’s obvious that human beings are primates! I always knew we were! It’s obvious that we evolved from monkeys and apes! So why didn’t I come out and say so? Instead of messing about stuffing the buggers and putting breeches on them?’

  ‘Calm down, Ivanhoe,’ soothes the Empress, floating away from the shelter of the moose antlers to hover opaquely above him. ‘I foresee mat this kind of violent emotion will be the death of you.’

  ‘Charlotte?’ he murmurs. ‘Charlotte? Is that you?’

  ‘You will blow a gasket in your heart,’ predicts the Laudanum Empress.

  ‘A gasket in my heart?’ he breathes. He must be hyperventilating, he concludes. Dreaming. Overworked. Something.

  ‘If you think Mr Darwin’s revelation is shocking, let me inform you, my dear Ivanhoe, that there is far worse to come! Don’t say you haven’t been warned!’

  ‘Worse to come? What? Charlotte, what are you talking about? Are you there?’

  But she’s gone. Vanished. Skedaddled. That’s the trouble with ghosts.

  CHAPTER 16

  THE FEEDING RITUAL

  It was a time of national panic. The Fertility Crisis was now officially a disaster, and the Sperm Drain became so intense that the Government decided to launch the Loyalty Bonus Scheme immediately. Overnight, I found myself eligible for an extra hundred yo-yos a week. In the meantime, the Pregnancy Reward had been announced. There’s nothing like greed, is there? Five million yo-yos aren’t to be sneezed at. The plus side of it all, of course, was that Britain was a lad’s paradise. I was in with a chance now, I reckoned. A bloke could have any girl he wanted.

  Or girls.

  The Saturday of the barbecue came. Norman and his wife Abbie were in their element there on the patio, he fussing with charcoal pellets and firelighters and wind direction, she all flushed with mother-hen excitement at the prospect of a new palate to tempt at her elegant pale-green plastic flexi-table.

  ‘Meet the harem,’ said Norman proudly. ‘This is Abbie’ (I shook her flour-covered hand) ‘and these are Tweedles Dum and Dee.’

  ‘Buck de Savile,’ I said. The girls looked at each other and giggled. There was a glamorous but rather eccentric-
looking woman in white petticoats hovering about in the doorway; I caught a whiff of mothballs.

  ‘And who’s this?’ I asked.

  ‘Oh, she’s just our ghost,’ said Norman. ‘The skeleton from the cupboard. I told you we’d been invaded by Victoriana. She came with the stuffed animals. Don’t mind her.’

  I laughed. ‘Nice one, Norman! I hear they’re all the rage!’

  The eccentric woman made a sour face, and slunk back indoors.

  ‘Nice cuts of pork you’ve got there,’ I said, eyeing something marinaded. Those teenage Saturdays working at the butcher’s hadn’t been entirely wasted.

  ‘Oh, call me Abbie,’ said the head of the harem. ‘Much friendlier. The pork’s organic, because you never know, do you? I’m a bit of an ingredients nut.’

  ‘She likes food that’ll respect her in the morning,’ put in Rose, reaching through the window for a pot of dip, then joining her sister to confederate next to a concrete urn. They kept looking in my direction, and I couldn’t help wondering if I was the topic of their whispered conversation. Rose and Blanche were both wearing dresses, one white, one pink. Sigmund stirred, and I imagined them –

  ‘That’s my two lovelies,’ says Norman, as though intercepting the vision. ‘Sociable is putting it mildly.’

  ‘Can I help you with anything, Norman?’ I asked quickly.

  ‘No, mate, just you relax. Abbie is just finishing off her TV rehearsal in the kitchen, bless her. She’ll be along with the rest of the or doovers in half a tick. I’m off for some more of these charcoal pellets; the gals’ll keep you on the straight and narrow in the interim, won’t you, gorgeouses?’

  ‘TV rehearsal?’ I said. ‘I didn’t know Abbie was involved in television.’

  ‘She isn’t,’ said Norman. Then added, loyally, ‘But she will be, if there’s any justice in the world!’

  The twins snorted.

  ‘Food’s her thing,’ says Rose.

  ‘There’s nothing she doesn’t know about food,’ adds Blanche. ‘Food allergies, the origins of food, the sociology of food, food and music, the nutritional value of food, how to cook food, when and how to re-use the leftovers, storage of food, how to tell if something’s edible or non-edible –’

  ‘And she’s an expert on food symbolism,’ says Rose.

  I wasn’t entirely sure what food symbolism might be, but I nodded knowingly.

  ‘Food and love, food and the post-war generation, food and cutlery,’ continues Blanche.

  ‘Food and discipline,’ adds Rose.

  ‘Food and God,’ counters Blanche.

  A pause.

  Then Rose blurts, ‘Only she’s never really made it.’

  There’s another pause, and then Blanche adds, ‘Never will.’

  Food and failure, then.

  ‘Well, Buck. What’s your real name, then?’ asked Blanche, or was it Rose, when Norman had disappeared from view. Not a great start.

  ‘Buck de Savile is my real name,’ I insisted. I’d have to think on my feet here.

  ‘Pull the other one,’ said Rose, or was it Blanche. They were nothing if not direct.

  ‘My father was French,’ I lied. ‘That’s where the de comes from. It’s what’s called an aristocratic prefix, I’ll have you know. Voulez-vous coucher avec moi ce soir, et cetera.’ They giggled. So they liked the idea, too. ‘And the Buck is short for Buckingham.’

  ‘There was a young Frenchman called Buckingham,’ began one of them.

  ‘Who always kissed girls before –’ giggled the other.

  ‘I’ve seen you both,’ I intercepted. ‘In the hypermarket in Judlow.’

  ‘Saturday job,’ the Roseblanches said in unison, and sniggered some more.

  ‘But you didn’t notice me,’ I said ruefully, teasingly. Flirtatiously. They laughed.

  ‘We’re the living dead in there,’ said Rose.

  ‘Yeah,’ agreed Blanche. ‘If God himself walked in, we’d just treat him like any other customer.’

  ‘I’d prob’ly ask him if he wanted extra carriers,’ laughed Rose.

  ‘I wouldn’t even notice if he signed his cheque GOD in big letters,’ added Blanche, enjoying the fantasy. ‘Or if he didn’t pay for his shopping at all but just wheeled his trolley right through the checkout area, past the redemption desk, and out into the car-park.’

  ‘And then flew up into the air with it.’

  ‘To His celestial home beyond the clouds,’ finished Rose.

  They certainly had a vivid imagination.

  Then the conversation moved on to wildlife.

  ‘I’m just a glorified plumber with a stash of drugs,’ I told them, when they begged me for details about which was the cutest fluffy animal I’d ever cured of cancer. Norman was under a similar illusion about my veterinary knowledge; he’d been going on about the stuffed-animal collection again, and had insisted that I take a look at it this afternoon. Frankly, I had other things on my mind.

  ‘We had a hamster called Mohammed,’ Rose was telling me.

  Uh-o, I thought.

  ‘He used to run about loose in our bedroom,’ sighed Rose.

  And together: ‘He was so sweet!’

  ‘He’d sit on your shoulder, and stuff his cute little cheeks with sunflower seeds,’ remembered Rose.

  ‘They’d be so bulging that sometimes he got overloaded and keeled over like a little wheelbarrow,’ added Blanche.

  ‘Then Dad trod on him by accident,’ said Rose.

  There was a brief pause as they exchanged a glance, recalling their shared mini-moment of tragedy.

  ‘But we’re going to get another one,’ offered Blanche. ‘A female, because we want babies.’

  Disaster ahoy!

  ‘But we’ll need a male, too,’ suggested Rose.

  ‘You’d better watch out or you’ll create a plague of them. One day soon there’ll be more hamsters in the world than humans.’

  Their faces went suddenly serious.

  ‘It might just be a blip, like they say,’ I said, to break the sudden silence that had fallen. The subject of extinction was quickly turning from an obsession into a taboo. I’d heard a stammering psychologist on the radio saying that since the b-b-b-b-bomb, we were going through a d-d-d-d-denial phase. ‘You never know,’ I added weakly.

  The signs were indicating the opposite, though, and we all knew it. Funnily enough, the less people suddenly talked about it, the more it began to hit home that we might actually die out.

  ‘It’s because we’re badly designed,’ said Rose ruefully.

  ‘Especially us,’ offered Blanche, exchanging a secret look with her sister. For some reason, they both glanced down at their shoes. They were wearing oddly shaped trainers that looked familiar, though I couldn’t place them.

  ‘Two friends of ours have tried committing suicide over it,’ offered Rose.

  ‘And everyone’s having sex like crazy,’ mused Blanche, giving me a sly look.

  ‘Is that an offer?’ I asked, flashing them a smile.

  ‘Might be,’ they said together.

  Which I took as a yes.

  During the course of the meal, despite my promise to myself to avoid fluffy-animal fans, I found myself charmed by the twins’ unity as sisters, their team-spiritedness, the way they took it in turns to speak, the way they held my attention like something in a pair of pincers. I noticed, too, their habit of biting their rather narrow lower lip and letting their round, quite deep-set eyes go slightly out of focus. I observed their innocence, their gaucheness, their fun-loving turn of mind, which I guessed – rightly, as it turned out – was the outward manifestation of a fun-loving turn of body. The smell of their flesh, which I now began to detect beneath the protective layers of cheap perfume, was unusual, almost feral, and marvellously tantalising. I had to admit that by the time we’d finished the meal, I was completely under their extraordinary spell.

  I have had cause to ask myself since then, in my more philosophical moods: Was it because I was two men,
Bobby Sullivan and Buck de Savile, that I was so inevitably drawn to two women? What if it had only been one girl? Would I have felt the same way about her?

  Does one feel differently about broken scissors? Were lives revolutionised by the first photocopiers?

  Buy the sausage and onion lattice pie, get the coleslaw free.

  ‘Delicious, Abbie,’ I told their mum, when I finally pushed away my plate. ‘Mouth-watering, unusual, and satisfying. And very attractively presented.’ I winked at the girls. I was talking about the food, but I meant them, and they knew it. ‘I’m sure you noticed that I took double helpings of everything,’ I added.

  They giggled.

  ‘And now,’ said Norman firmly, steering me indoors, ‘you’re coming with me. I’m luring you up to the loft for an hour to inspect Abbie’s stuffed menagerie. There are some beasts up there that are sorely in need of a professional assessment, mate,’ he informed me, as I followed him upstairs, resigned to my fate.

  As it turned out, the Victorian stuffed-animal collection in the attic turned out to contain some interesting stuff, including a corgi named Suet – obviously someone’s pet, because taxidermically speaking it wasn’t a great specimen – a few birds, all rather greasy but worth a bit if you sold them in the right place, i.e. some kind of fayre – and a weird primate, strangely humanoid and dressed in red velvet pantaloons. The brass plate underneath was labelled ‘The Gentleman Monkey’. If that was its species name, it was a new one on me, I thought – but then it’s all too easy to forget that there are more than two hundred and fifty species of primate, other than us. I must admit, though, that I shuddered when I looked at it. It was the clothes that did it. I couldn’t help remembering Giselle, in her little pink frock and her nappy, and Mrs Mann, and her threat to –