by Liz Jensen
I had to admit he had a point.
‘Rule Britannia!’ shouted Norman. And began to sing. Soon we had all joined in. It made you feel quite patriotic, the whole thing. Blokes together.
‘Rule Britannia, Britannia rules the waves!’ we sang, lurching about, our arms around one another’s shoulders. ‘B-B-B-B-B-Britons never never never shall be slaves!’
It was that night, when I staggered home from the Crow, that the twins broke their news to me. They were sitting up in bed surrounded by party balloons, drinking more Ovaltine through novelty straws.
‘Buck, we’re pregnant.’
‘Congratulations, girls,’ I said. They were kidding, of course. They’d seen the news, and they were trying it on. But I felt myself going faint.
‘And am I the lucky father?’ I tried to keep my voice steady, but what with all the beer and the nationalistic emotions sloshing about inside me, it came out slurred. They sucked on their straws, then looked at me solemnly.
‘Yes,’ they said together. ‘You are.’
‘We’re going to be rich!’ said Blanche.
‘I need to sit down for a minute,’ I said. And fell into blackness.
CHAPTER 23
THE JAR
It is true that in nurturing me from boyhood to manhood, Parson Phelps had prepared me to follow in his footsteps. Had he and Mrs Phelps not raised me as their son, Heaven knows what path I might have followed. Would I ever have ceased to scramble on all fours? Would I ever have learned to speak?
Yet the expression ‘a self-made man’ came to my mind with increasing frequency as my stay in Hunchburgh drew to a close. For what had I been, these past three years, but a young man, forced by circumstance, into the process of making of himself what he could? Like the whaling-ship that Tommy Boggs and I had once unleashed from its moorings, I was now a vessel voyaging alone. I had left the captain on the shore. And I had finally (if I may be pardoned the pursuit of this nautical metaphor) landed on an even keel. Or so I thought.
But how quickly and suddenly can a storm break, and fortune change! In my case, it took no more than a few seconds.
It was the winter of 1864, and I was about to become ordained. The ceremony was to be the crowning moment of my two years’ stay in Hunchburgh, and as a gift to myself, I had indulged in purchasing from little Jimmy Cove a bunch of eight green bananas, which were just ripening nicely in my wardrobe. I planned to eat them, one by one, after my ordination ceremony, which was the following morning at eleven o’clock, presided over by the Abbot and the Bishop. I was looking forward to both events – though I am ashamed to say that I was by now so in thrall to the banana that the prospect of eating some more of the fruit appeared even more exciting to me than my elevation to the status of Parson.
‘Hey, Betty!’ yelled Farthingale across the refectory table at me that morning.
I looked up and saw his weasel face.
‘We’re holding a party in your rooms tonight!’ he said. It was a Seminary tradition, he told me, that a sort of ‘stag-night’ is always held for those students about to enter the Church. My heart sank, for now I understood what all the recent whisperings in corridors had been about. Mrs Fooney was away in Wales with Tillie visiting her cousin, and would not be back for a week; my fellow theologians had clearly discovered this.
‘Happy, Fartybockers, that your lodgings have been chosen?’ Farthingale asked, smirking. ‘Quite an honour for you, eh? And if you’re a good boy, you’ll even be invited!’
‘So what d’you say, Hobble-de-Hoy?’ asked Ganney menacingly, joining Farthingale with his plate of soup. I turned the other cheek.
‘Hey, listen, everybody!’ yelled Popple, standing on the table. ‘Fartybockers is inviting us all to a party in his rooms tonight! Meet at Mrs Fooney’s lodging-house at eight o’clock sharp!’
At eight, as threatened, my unwelcome guests began arriving, and within half an hour, my two small rooms were swarming with fellow theologians. Soon the place was crammed to bursting; students from other disciplines had caught wind of the party, and before I knew it, five students of botany, a geology student, and several medical scholars who had just finished their final exams decided to turn up, with more hangers-on in tow. The rooms were filled with the pungent haze of tobacco smoke, and I began to feel ill. Soon the party had no choice but to implode, or to spill over into Mrs Fooney’s own private quarters. The former not being an option, the latter course was taken, and I was horrified to see my beloved landlady’s neatly arranged belongings being scattered to the floor, and the contents of Tillie’s toy-box investigated.
A group of young men were soon playing with the marbles I had given her, and peeking beneath the petticoats of her china dolls. I was horrified, and from time to time tried to stammer my objections, but to no avail.
‘Enjoy yourself for once, Fartybockers!’ jeered Farthingale.
‘Unless, of course, you would rather celebrate with your whore on Mickle Street,’ added Ganney, swigging at a bottle of rum.
‘Hey, look at this!’ yelled a student from my bedroom. And he emerged bearing the trophy of my cherished bunch of bananas – the very bananas I had been saving to celebrate tomorrow’s ordination.
‘Bananas!’ cried Ganney. ‘I tasted one once! Capital! Share them out, everybody!’
I groaned, and could only watch as my prized fruit was torn from Ganney’s hands amid big beefy roars of delight. The revellers made quick work of the fruit, and soon there was nothing left of my bunch of bananas but the scattered skins on Mrs Fooney’s floor.
‘Hurrah for Parson Fartybockers!’ yelled out Higgs through a mouthful as he thumped me on the back. ‘Most excellent bananas!’ A morsel flew out of his mouth and landed on my waistcoat, and I was filled with melancholy. ‘Have a drink, sir!’
At this, a bony-kneed boy of about twenty, already quite drunk, had the bright idea of standing on my mantelpiece, which was wide enough to take three men, and proposing further toasts to us all, in honour of our forthcoming ordinations.
Some of my ornaments had to be displaced for this purpose, and I watched nervously as Farthingale swept my whelk shell to the floor, and Ganney fingered the fish-gutting knife that Tommy’s mother had given me. My Bible, likewise, was removed, and my mermaid’s purse, and my copy of Hanker’s World History, and Herman’s Crustacea; my dried gourds were all shoved unceremoniously to one side. My eyes were on my jar; I did not wish to draw attention to it, but was concerned for its safety. I watched worriedly as Farthingale slid it over to the far end of the mantelpiece, and Ganney gave him a leg-up. But as soon as he was up there, Farthingale must have spotted that my focus was on the jar, for it immediately became a topic of interest.
‘What’s in here, Phelps?’ he asked, picking it up.
I said nothing, but my heart yawned in fear.
‘A secret?’ asked Farthingale. He could spot any sign of weakness at a thousand paces.
‘Yes, tell us what you keep in it!’ demanded Popple. ‘Is it rum?’
It was he who had once referred to me, because of my cordial respect for the Abbot, (forgive me, reader, for repeating his crude words) as an ‘arse-licker’.
‘Or pickled herrings?’ asked Farthingale. He knew I came from a fishing village. I was dragged over to explain.
‘How about the toast?’ I managed weakly, but Popple had set his heart on my explaining what was in the jar.
‘It’s nothing,’ I said. ‘Just something my father left me.’
But Popple was infuriatingly insistent. I racked my brains for a lie, but untruth does not come naturally to me, having been punished for it so consistently when I was a child, so I could think of nothing.
‘Well?’ Farthingale was demanding. ‘What’s the big secret? Is it edible?’
‘No!’ I cried, shocked. God forbid that they should eat human flesh!
‘Animal, vegetable or mineral?’ called another student.
‘It’s animal,’ I managed weakly. I just wanted them
to stop talking about it. So I blurted, ‘It’s an umbilical cord. I have reason to believe,’ I faltered, ‘that it once joined me to my mother.’
At this, the room burst out into a cacophony of jeering, laughing, baying, hoots and whistles, as the jar and its by now distraught and miserable owner both became the focus of their mirth and derision.
‘Hand it over here!’ called Farthingale, egging them all on. ‘Let’s have a proper look.’
‘Yes, go on,’ said Popple. ‘Kinnon’s a student of medicine. He can give you an opinion as to the health of this intriguing object.’
‘There’s nothing to see,’ I cried. ‘Nothing!’ This was true enough; the liquid in the jar had reacted to the heat of my fireplace by becoming even murkier than on the day I received it from Thunder Spit. The cord was just a fuzzy blur.
But Kinnon, the young medical student, was adamant that he must inspect the thing, as he was currently most interested in obstetrics and gynaecology (here he winked at his fellow students), and he would hand it back to me as soon as he had had a peek-a-squeak at the object in question.
‘Please, I beg you, be careful!’ I cried, as my jar – suddenly incalculably precious to me – was handed down from the mantelpiece. I watched it being passed across everyone’s heads to Kinnon, who was over by the door next to another student smoking a pipe.
‘There may be a risk of fire!’ I murmured, feeling faint. Then I sank into a chair and said a silent prayer. Kinnon squinted into the jar.
‘May I open it?’ he asked, finally beginning to wrestle with the seal.
‘Yes!’ urged Farthingale. ‘Let’s all have a look!’
‘No, I beg you not to!’ I blurted, suddenly gripped by an inexplicable panic. My spine bristled. ‘It is an heirloom,’ I added weakly.
At this, the whole room fell about laughing again, and the women squealed with derision. One of them, I noticed, had her skirt hitched up high above her waist, and two drunken students were snapping at the elastic of her bloomers. I shot up from my chair and thrust my way through the throng as best I could to grab the jar back. This was going too far. With a sudden force of will, and an unaccustomed courage, I reached across to snatch it, but by now Farthingale had grabbed the jar from the medical student and was holding it high above his head. I could see the sediment in the bottom swirling up, hiding the white organ completely from view.
Farthingale was now standing on the table. ‘Shall I open it, everyone?’ he yelled.
‘Yes!’ Many of the students, I now realised, were quite drunk, and I saw that the woman with the bloomers had now reached inside the trousers of one of the men and was fishing about inside. He was groaning.
‘No!’ I called pathetically, and lurched forward to snatch the jar. I managed to grasp it with one hand, but at that moment I trod on something slippery – doubtless a banana skin – and lost my grip. Farthingale pulled backwards and in the ensuing flurry of hands, the jar went flying through the air.
And smashed, horribly, and suddenly, at Kinnon’s feet.
Pandemonium!
A horrendous, pungent stench rose up from the puddle on the floor, and the room exploded into immediate panic as everyone flung their hands to their faces, choking.
‘Quick! Get out!’ shrieked Popple through the coughing. ‘Open the door, before we all suffocate!’
‘Fetch water!’ Ganney’s voice choked. ‘Dilute it!’
There was a great rowdy and chaotic surge for the door, and more slipping on banana skins, as screaming, shouting, coughing people, their eyes and noses running, tried to escape the fumes, but I just stood there, my eyes smarting from chemicals and tears, staring at the shattered fragments of glass and at my umbilical cord there on the floor. I groaned.
Kinnon, the medical student, was holding his nose and had crouched down to peer at it. Together, coughing, we stared at the thing.
‘A strange mother you must have had, Mr Phelps,’ he spluttered, ‘to play a trick on you like that.’
‘Trick?’ I asked shakily. ‘How is this a trick?’ I felt very faint.
‘All right, lad?’ enquired Kinnon. ‘Shall we get out of here?’
But I couldn’t answer just then. Kinnon wiped his mouth and nose with the back of his sleeve and coughed some more.
Finally, ‘How’s it a trick?’ I faltered. My voice was like that of the dying Mrs Phelps. Suddenly I had a vision of her blackened lung on the white sheet. She had thought it was her soul. ‘How’s it a trick?’ I repeated.
We gazed at the thing together as the formaldehyde vapour steamed off it. Kinnon looked at me. ‘Because that’s no umbilical cord,’ he said at last.
‘What is it, then?’ I managed queasily. I was still choking on the fumes that rose from it.
I need not have asked him, though, for anyone looking at it could have told me.
Help me, God.
‘Steady on,’ coughed Kinnon. ‘She was probably just having a joke.’ The base of my spine tingled in a violent, ghastly recognition: I reached across Kinnon and was violently sick into his lap.
Of the fifteen theological students due to be ordained the next morning, one was missing from the ceremonies. For I had fled.
The thing I had seen was a tail.
Wot I beg you to UNDERSTAND, Parson Phelps, the Contortionist wrote, is that the Cercumstancis woz most partikular.
CHAPTER 24
A PREGNANT PAUSE
The circumstances were unprecedented; unique, even. That was the world’s verdict. Britain, as a nation, had entered a nine-month period of insanity. The first trimester was a shaky time, during which many marriages dissolved amid mutual recriminations.
‘It’s a war of the sexes,’ declared Norman. He was right; the situation was serious. Not least because –
No; wait. I’m telling this all arse about face.
The night the twins made their pregnancy announcement – along with five million other women – I was so battered by alcohol and shock that I’d passed out, unable to digest the news. The next morning, I didn’t have to: the nation had regurgitated it on my behalf. It turned out that the whole thing was an out-of-season April Fool’s joke. Or, as Ron Harcourt put it, ‘A load of hormonally induced female gobshite.’
Within twenty-four hours of the first scare in Glasgow, it had emerged that what we were witnessing was not a sudden wave of fertility emanating from Glasgow, but a sudden wave of mass hysteria, prompted by greed, prompted in turn by the five-million Euro Fertility Reward. The stammering psychologist had been right after all. Not a single pregnancy was real. They were all either deliberate hoaxes, or cases of delusion. And that was official. So official, that the Prime Minister said it three times in the House of Commons. ‘Official, official, official.’
‘Never in history,’ jeered the Leader of the Opposition, ‘has a government – or the media in its response – been so disastrously hoodwinked! The words headless and chickens spring to mind!’ You couldn’t help agreeing. A domino effect set off by one woman, a certain Mrs Belinda Gillie, was to blame for the epidemic of delusion and trickery. Her pregnancy – the first case to be reported – had been a deliberate fake. Mrs Gillie had persuaded her husband – a doctor – to falsify two tests. She’d wanted the money from the reward.
‘She was so insistent,’ pleaded the shamefaced Dr Gillie on television. ‘I just wanted to make her happy.’ He paused, desperate. ‘You do things like that sometimes, to please someone.’
‘Even if you know it’s wrong?’ jabbed in the reporter.
Dr Gillie hung his head. ‘Well, sometimes, yes.’
When the news of Mrs Gillie’s ‘pregnancy’ had spread, first by word-of-mouth, then by rumour and local radio, then nationally – other women had latched on to the idea, subconsciously. All the pregnancies were either copycat hoaxes, or the result of a contagious mass hysteria whose epicentre was Glasgow. Everyone had been out for the Reward, was the analysis. Mass hysteria was common among women in times of crisis – varieti
es of Münchhausen’s syndrome in particular. It was practically de rigueur. It was a wonder, some speculated, that it hadn’t happened before.
‘Still pregnant?’ I asked the twins, after we’d switched off the TV the next morning. They were looking pale and worried.
‘Yes,’ they insisted indignantly. ‘Theirs may be fakes, but ours are real.’ Their voices, I noticed, were quite shaky.
‘Well, there’s a deadline on this one,’ I said. ‘Shall we lay bets?’
They scowled at me, and I left for Clegg’s farm. When I came back that evening, they were still huddled together in bed in their yellow dressing-gowns, whispering conspiratorially. There was a special programme on TV about it that night; a national poll had shown that, despite the quite incontrovertible medical proof that the pregnancies were fake, 60 per cent of the women who had claimed to be pregnant at the beginning of the scare hung on to their delusion.
And therein lay a social problem, the TV experts said, on a massive scale. You couldn’t get hold of a pregnancy-testing kit for love nor money, and all ultrasound scans were booked six months ahead. With delusional chaos – either euphoric or depressive – among the female population, male morale was hitting hitherto unplumbed depths. Primate sales had slumped since the mass hysteria struck, according to Pets Today, and many apes and monkeys – once beloved child-substitutes – were being found abandoned, now that their surrogate mothers were convinced they were expecting the real thing. In London, they’d set up a refuge for orphaned primates. That’s where I’ll go, I thought, if it all gets too much up here. Back to the jungle. The threat of Mrs Mann’s litigation seemed more distant than ever now; she’d be pregnant with the rest of them.
The weeks passed, and sociologists and social psychologists from all over the globe flocked to Britain with their camcorders and their questionnaires to chart the progress of the new ‘British disease’. A whole new industry seemed to spring from nowhere: suddenly there were phone-ins, ante-natal classes, public debates, pram sales, crisis-counselling services, baby books, hypnotherapy, aromatherapy, reflexology, foot massage, divorce negotiation, suicide counselling, and cuddly toys on every street corner. In the Stoned Crow, opinion was divided about how to handle the phenomenon of the mass hysteria. Keith Eaves, the weedy stammering psychologist who had been booed off the television on what became known as the Night of Madness, was now revered as an icon of common sense, and was appearing at charity events, photo opportunities and garden centres up and down the country. When he confessed to having considered abandoning his wife and emigrating to Finland at the beginning of the crisis, he was guaranteed instant hero status and offered his own TV show – Breakthrough – as counsellor to the nation. We watched Breakthrough regularly in the Crow.