by Liz Jensen
The misery and poverty of the slums had at first made me gasp: whole families of up to twelve children shoved together in stinking rooms, without enough to eat, and dragon-sized rats constantly on the rampage. I saw many children die, or become orphans. I wondered, in my darker moments, what relief I could possibly bring into this despair, with nothing but my prayer-book and my humble bag of medicines. But lo and behold, my deformities worked in my favour: one woman, Mrs Jeyes, said to me that clapping eyes on a sight as pitiful as me put her own troubles into perspective. I did not know whether to be hurt or grateful.
There was one particular hovel, on Mickle Street, that I visited more often than most, as its need was the greatest; indeed, no other slum dwelling that I knew seemed to match its squalor and decrepitude. I was often to be found there.
‘Like a fly to dung,’ commented Farthingale, my harshest critic, when he saw me one morning preparing my medicine bag and my Bible for my next visit to Mickle Street.
‘He’s got a whore down there,’ speculated Ganney.
I turned the other cheek so many times with my fellow seminarians, I sometimes became dizzy with it. But I ignored their taunts, and continued my regular visits to Mickle Street, for here dwelled a family by the name of Cove, who seemed to be in permanent need of my attentions. The elder Mr Cove, a former seaman with a pitted face and beery breath, had recently developed an ulceration on his leg, and because he was unable to afford the doctor, I took it upon myself, as my Christian duty, to see to him as best I could. It was in this unlikely setting, and quite unexpectedly, that during one of my visits, I had an encounter with physical temptation that was to create both excitement and turmoil within me, in equal measure.
The object of my desire was a thing of great lewdness.
I didn’t even know its name, at first.
‘I stole it off a cargo ship,’ confided the little Cove boy, a little lad of seven with an elfin face and knickerbockered legs as skinny as a sparrow’s.
I had arrived to change the dressings on the ulcerous shin of Grandfather Cove to find the whole family staring and sniffing at a curious object on their table. It was yellow, and about eight inches long, and in circumference, about the same thickness as an engorged male object. As soon as I saw it, I blushed a fierce red, and I felt the base of my spine tingle at the site of my ancient mutilation.
‘They was hanging in huge bunches,’ whispered the boy, recounting what he had witnessed in the ship’s hold, his voice reduced to an awed whisper. ‘From hooks. Some bunches was yellow,’ he said, his eyes flaring wide with excitement. ‘But some was green!’
No one approached the table.
‘I went to grab one,’ said the boy. The Coves were all listening intently, although I was sure it was not the first time he had recounted his tale. ‘But then I saw there was this giant hairy spider guarding them.’
He indicated its size by making a hoop of his thin arms. Bigger than a plate. I knew the wonders of God’s earth to be manifold, and some of them even beyond the scope of the redoubtable Hanker’s World History, but I was beginning to suspect that the boy was telling an untruth. ‘So I goes on peering round the place till I sees another bunch, that don’t have a spider,’ the boy continued. ‘And I grab it like this with my bare hands.’ He showed me his hands. They were bony and grubby. I nodded to acknowledge his bravery. ‘I just took the one. I could’ve taken more.’
The boy looked suddenly anxious.
‘You did right, son,’ said his mother. She had a flat face, like a plaice. ‘We don’t know as it’s not poison.’
The thing was dark yellow, and blotchy, and as I have already indicated, obscene in shape. But as I stepped further into the room, I was struck by a sublime and mesmerising fragrance, which pulled me towards it like a helpless magnet.
‘Have you ever in your life seen such an ungodly-looking specimen?’ the ulcerous Mr Cove asked me, eyeing it worriedly. ‘Can the Lord ever have given His holy blessing to it?’ He was looking to me for God’s answer, and I searched my heart to find the reply that Parson Phelps might give, but my thoughts were in turmoil. I did not know what to make of this thing, but I knew that I desired it more fiercely than I had ever desired anything.
‘Beauty is in the eye of the beholder,’ I said at last, dredging up something my mother always used to say to me when she caught me gazing miserably at my reflection in the hall mirror. I inhaled deeply, and with every second that ticked by on the ancient grandfather clock in the corner of the room, I succumbed still further to the fruit’s exotic lure.
‘The boy swears it’s edible, but we’re not so sure,’ said Mrs Cove. ‘You’ll need to peel off its jacket first!’
She was not to know it, but I was by now so overwhelmed by a desire to eat the thing and to possess it for ever, that I could barely prevent myself from leaping forward and grabbing it.
‘I’ll try it, if you like,’ I offered. I was trembling with a wild urge to cram the whole thing into my mouth. ‘I’ll just take a bite, and tell you if it’s all right.’ Cautiously, I removed its yellow skin, and bared its white flesh.
I had intended to take a small bite only, but a sudden and unnatural greed overwhelmed me. My shameful urge at that moment was simply to stuff the whole thing in, but I managed, with extreme difficulty, to restrain myself. Instead I merely took a large bite, which broke the fruit in half. I closed my eyes and ate, transported into Heaven. When I opened them again, the whole of the Cove family was gawping at me. They must have been surprised at how much I had bitten off. The adults said nothing, but the boy let out an indignant, ‘Hey!’
It was the best thing I had ever tasted; better, even, than the toffee apple Tommy had stolen for me at the Travelling Fair of Danger and Delight. And as I chewed on it, savouring it, I knew that I must have it again. As its glorious taste spread across my tongue, I even contemplated cheating the Cove family, by twisting my face into an expression of disgust and telling them I thought the thing was poison. Anything to keep the whole fruit for myself! But in the end, God’s stern leadership prevailed, and I reluctantly quelled my more selfish desires. I told them, ‘It’s good.’ Then added, weakly hoping it might yet repel them, ‘though not to everyone’s taste, I imagine.’ Reluctantly, I held out the half-fruit to the Cove boy, who sniffed it, then took a bite. He chewed slowly, and a smile spread.
Guiltily, I cornered him on the way out, and slipped him a coin.
‘There are more pennies where that came from,’ I said, ‘if you can get hold of a whole bunch of those things.’
The boy grinned at me, showing broken teeth.
‘And mind the giant spider!’ I called after him, as he ran off to the harbour.
My new-found passion for bananas – a passion so extreme as to be almost uncontrollable – provided me with inspiration and comfort in my moments of darkness. The Cove boy brought me several bunches of the fruit, which I cloistered in my wardrobe, and I repaid him generously with all the money I could spare from my ever-dwindling supply. Occasionally I worried about the single-mindedness of my diet, and forced myself to eat a little bread or fish to supplement it, but both my palate and my tapeworm recoiled increasingly from such fare, and I returned to the comfort offered by the noble fruit.
Comfort I was coming to need more and more. For events at home had taken a sudden downward turn.
This is Dr Baldicoot’s letter. I have it still.
Dear Tobias,
It is with a heavy heart that I write to tell you of your father’s removal to the Sanatorium for the Spiritually Disturbed at Fishforth, where he declares he will not see you. It grieves me to tell you this, but it is for the best, I am sure. He is there among men who are similarly distressed by the issue of man’s creation, and has learned to knit. If he were in his right mind he would convey his kind regards, for I know he loves you. It was he who fought for your life when you were a baby, though I personally would have given up, if you will pardon my being so blunt.
Your
s sincerely,
Will Baldicoot.
PS. The Parsonage is now inhabited by a temporary parson by the name of Gudderwort, of whom none of us is fond, as he has tried to ban our Thistle-Pulling Contest, which he says is paganism. All of Thunder Spit wishes you well in your studies, and awaits your return as Parson, for we are a flock with no shepherd!
PPS. A few ounces of good tobacco would not go amiss, on your next visit.
‘Welcome home, my little friend!’
Tommy squeezed me tight against his huge muscled torso, so hard I feared he might crack my ribs, for he did not know his own strength. I hugged him back. How I had missed him! I had arranged a week’s compassionate leave from the Seminary, and travelled to Thunder Spit to settle Parson Phelps’ affairs. Tommy was a father now; he had a bonny child, a boy, by his wife Jessie. ‘We’ve called him Nicholas,’ said Tommy. ‘After the church.’
Although she was now a grown woman, I remembered Jessie from childhood days; the little Jessie Tobash who had once upset me by calling me Prune-Face – a cruelty about which she was most red-faced and apologetic as she welcomed me into her kitchen and laid a place for me at table.
‘She’s expecting another,’ Tommy told me proudly, patting her rump as if she were a horse. Jessie served us sardine pie and sloeberry wine, and I gave them a present of a small bunch of bananas, at which they marvelled.
I begged for news of Thunder Spit, and they furnished me with a brisk account of how Ron Harcourt had lost five of his cows, and Tommy’s brother Joe had run away to sea, and Mrs Firth’s idiot cousin Joan had got her senses back for a week and then lost them again, and the new parson, Gudderwort, had banned the Thistle-Pulling Contest, as Dr Baldicoot’s letter had said, prompting the whole village to boycott the church.
‘And Hunchburgh?’ Jessie begged. ‘Tell us all about your life in Hunchburgh!’ So as they savoured their bananas, I told them about the Seminary, and about the weasel-faced Farthingale and his henchmen Ganney and Popple, my trio of persecutors. And I told them about my visits to the poor and needy, and about the breezy nonchalance of the Abbot who ran the Seminary, and about Tillie and Mrs Fooney, and the Cove family and my discovery of the banana.
Then I came to the letter I had received from Dr Baldicoot. When I told them its contents, Tommy confirmed that Parson Phelps had indeed gone quite mad.
‘Jessie was there, at his last service. ‘She saw him.’
‘Yes,’ said Jessie, sitting down heavily at the table next to us. ‘He didn’t read aloud from the Bible,’ she said, ‘but from other books.’
‘What books?’ I asked.
‘Hanker’s World History was one,’ said Jessie, untying her hair and letting it fall across her shoulders. I would one day like a wife who would do that, I thought. But I am Prune-Face. Fartybockers. Hobble-de-Hoy. The Bookworm. Only a blind woman would ever want me as a husband!
‘And the Origin of Something,’ said Tommy, interrupting my reverie. ‘That selfsame book he was always preaching against before.’
‘The Origin of Species,’ I murmured. ‘By Charles Darwin.’
‘That’s the one,’ confirmed Jessie. ‘We didn’t understand a word of it. It was all science and nonsense to us, about the fins of fish transforming into arms and legs. It quite turned my stomach to hear it. And then he tore up his Bible.’
I felt the blood fade from my face. Oh, my poor beloved father! I hated Mr Charles Darwin at that moment, stranger to me though he was, for putting Parson Phelps through this agony. Parson Phelps, and all the others, too! For he was not alone in his suffering, if Dr Baldicoot’s letter was to be believed. Had the letter not implied that there was an entire sanatorium in Fishforth, chock-a-block with befuddled souls such as my father’s? And that the blame lay entirely at Mr Charles Darwin’s feet? I pictured the Bible pages fluttering to the church floor, just as the pages of Mr Darwin’s book had once done, at a happier epoch in our lives.
‘Then he swore foul oaths at us,’ Jessie continued, putting her hand on mine gently. ‘And then he called us all sea-slugs and barbarians. And he called you, Tobias, a –’
‘Never mind,’ interrupted Tommy. ‘He is mad.’ In the silence that followed, a flea hopped off my wrist and on to the chequered tablecloth. Jessie squashed it with her nail, and continued: ‘And then Mrs Sequin got up to leave, and we all followed her. Only Dr Baldicoot stayed.’
‘And then?’
‘And then the next day, Dr Baldicoot took him away to Fishforth. He was clutching an envelope, but he took nothing else with him, not even a bag of clothes. He left it all behind.’ She patted my hand, and passed me a white handkerchief that smelt of fish. I took it, and blew my nose fiercely.
I wondered about the envelope. Could it be the same one that the Contortionist had thrust at him when she gave him the jar? I shuddered.
When I visited Dr Baldicoot the following day, he told me that his diagnosis of a tumour of the brain remained a possibility. Such an affliction, he said, would undoubtedly account for the Parson’s odd behaviour over the last few years, and his painful rejection of me.
‘Fate is cruel,’ he said, knocking out the dead seaweed tobacco from his pipe and filling it, with barely disguised rapture, with the tobacco I had brought him from Hunchburgh. Lighting it with his tinderbox, a cloud of smoke, pungent as a burning haystack, was soon trailing upwards, spreading to fill the whole room.
‘Yes!’ he exclaimed, sinking back in his chair and savouring the smoke.
A jealous God, my father had said. The smell of Dr Baldicoot’s burning tobacco made me dizzy, and I was suddenly filled with an immeasurable sadness, not only that my father might die, but that our relationship should be so soured by principles I could not understand.
‘One day,’ I coughed through Dr Baldicoot’s smokescreen, ‘I shall bring him home.’
‘I hope that you one day shall,’ he replied, laying down his stinking pipe on his desk. ‘But for now, I fear he still has no wish to see you. He has developed what I consider to be an unhealthy obsession with your origins.’
‘Of what nature?’
But Dr Baldicoot began to fiddle furiously with a sheaf of pipe-cleaners, and would not speak.
The new Parson, Gudderwort, was dry and gaunt and ascetic, with a high, domed forehead, and skin like parchment. He poured out acidic seaweed tea, and I poured out some of my woes to him, but I fear they fell on stony ground. My father had left a legacy of mistrust in Thunder Spit, Gudderwort informed me somewhat accusingly.
‘After he’d torn up his Bible in the church, nobody was keen to return,’ he said bitterly. He seemed to lay the blame for this on me. Or so I felt.
‘Shall we pray?’ he suggested, in his mealy-mouthed way, when we had finished our tea.
So we knelt down together on the uncomfortable flag-stoned kitchen floor (Where was the embroidered pew-cushion my father had always used, his one concession to luxury?) and Gudderwort pressed his dry palms and skeletal fingers together, and we prayed for the safety of my father’s diseased soul, and my forgiveness of him. And I prayed, secretly, that Dr Baldicoot was not lying to me about the cause of my father’s madness in order to make me feel better. Uncharitably, I also prayed that Gudderwort would get water on the knee.
Just as I was leaving, Gudderwort called out to me. He was carrying something in both hands.
‘Your father left this,’ he said drily. ‘Mrs Firth suggested that I not bother you with it, once she saw what it was, but I have no use for it, and it appears to be a personal object.’
And he thrust it towards me.
I felt a lurch of vertigo. The room seemed to contract, and then expand.
The jar.
‘So here you are,’ prompted Gudderwort irritably, waiting. My hands felt jelly-like as I took the jar from him. Its thick glass was cold, and heavy.
‘I found it in the vestry,’ said Gudderwort, guessing my thoughts. ‘Hidden away beneath his spare cassock.’
I gulped and t
rembled, summoning the courage to investigate what the jar contained. When I did, I had to squint. It was full of a dark liquid. A dark liquid, with something floating in it. I felt both sick and baffled in equal measure.
‘Do you know what it is?’ I asked Gudderwort. My voice cracked as I spoke. There was a pause before Gudderwort replied. His parchment lip creased with disapproval and distaste.
‘An umbilical cord,’ he said finally, depositing the words as if they were small turds. He clearly wanted to be rid of me, and even more, it.
‘A what?’ I blurted.
‘An umbilical cord, according to Mrs Firth,’ he said. Mrs Firth was his housekeeper. He was still unable to hide the deep disgust in his voice. What foul parish had he landed himself in, he must be thinking. What bad luck to be obliged thus to mop up the mess of another parson’s spiritual crisis!
I raised the jar to my eyes: and sure enough, behind the swirling blur of dark pickle, there lurked a whitish thing.
Suddenly I found myself laughing aloud. But there was hysteria in that laugh.
‘Shall I see you to the door?’ said Gudderwort with finality. ‘I think it best that you be on your way.’ Like father like son, he was no doubt thinking. Lunatics both.
I wrapped the jar in a crumpled old fish-paper and took my leave.
Back at the forge I told Tommy what had happened. I showed him the jar, and together we peered at it.
‘Mrs Firth told Gudderwort it was an umbilical cord,’ I said. Tommy grunted. ‘Not poison, then,’ he said. ‘Let’s ask Jessie.’ She’d borne a babe. She would know. Jessie lifted Nicholas from her hip and plonked him on the floor, then wiped her hands on her apron, and peered into the jar.