Ark Baby

by Liz Jensen

  ‘Ah, my dear Hillber!’ calls Cabillaud, spotting the Mechanical Millipede engineer. Hillber – so small and wiry he might almost be fabricated from a coat-hanger – skips past a row of pastry-makers in a cloud of flour, and comes to shake Cabillaud’s hand warmly. Then he gestures to introduce his companion, also emerging from the flour: he is a sharp and frostbitten-looking man sporting a bow tie.

  ‘Mr Edward Ironside. I believe you have met in the past. He arrived this morning.’

  ‘Welcome, my dear friend!’ says Cabillaud, smiling in recognition. It has been many years since they last met, at Dr Scrapie’s, when Ironside was a mere stripling, an apprentice taxidermist. It was he who supervised the Arctic iceberg and its safe arrival in the Scrapie ice-house, and now his expertise in the dual disciplines of freezing and taxidermy make him an invaluable member of the team.

  ‘Excellent,’ says Cabillaud, shaking Ironside’s freezing hand.

  ‘Shall we zen begin? We ’ave ze problem of ze breathing to discuss.’

  ‘And the woman?’ asks Ironside. ‘The artiste? Has she been informed of our requirements?’

  ‘Yes, indeed,’ confirms Hillber. ‘She volunteered herself – begged, even – to be a part of it. She has asked me to report that she is honoured to do anything we require.’ He pauses, then lowers his voice to an excited whisper. ‘Anything, within or even beyond reason!’

  ‘Merveilleux,’ beams Cabillaud, gratified but not surprised at the reaction of the artiste concerned. Who would not give their eye teeth to be a part of his great creation?

  ‘Shall we proceed, zen, gentlemen?’ Cabillaud motions them towards a table upon which sketches and diagrams of the Time-Bomb and its audacious contents are pinned. Within minutes, they are deep in discussion, and Hillber is sketching furiously.

  ‘A system of holes?’ he suggests.

  ‘Or a periscope solution?’ wonders Ironside.

  ‘Perhaps a hosepipe?’ offers Cabillaud.

  ‘Or,’ ventures Hillber, ‘more daring but more aesthetically discreet – a miniature inflatable balloon?’

  ‘Why yes!’ The man is indeed a genius!

  Kashoum, kashoum, kashoum.

  ‘Zer! Over zer!’ yells Cabillaud, glancing up from Hillber’s latest drawing and pointing to a barnacle half-concealed beneath the ridged lip of the clam.

  The sous-sous-sous-chef looks up anxiously from his brushing. ‘Yes, sir.’

  Kashoum, kashoum, kashoum.

  Is it not something, to be master of one’s own kitchen, the best kitchen in the whole of Britain?

  A something which Cabillaud, who once served seaweed gratin with human vomit in it aboard the Beagle, is entitled to celebrate.

  And celebrate he will!

  Kashoum, kashoum, kashoum.

  Jusswannabe

  Yurteddyber

  Puddachaynarannamahnekkah an leedmi anywayah …

  Blaggerfield, Norton’s Krig, Wipperby. The Nuance purred its way down the motorway, and I yodelled along with Elvis. But it wasn’t long before the sound of my own voice began to grate on me, and my singing turned to yawning, and then silence. Outside the car, the green grew greyer, the skyscrapers taller as I journeyed south. It had been almost a year since I’d left London, I realised with a jolt. Christ. For the first time in ages I thought of the surgery in Tooting Bee, and then I suddenly remembered Mr Mann, and the thousand Euros, and Giselle in her little pink frock. And Holly and the body-bag and the letter. And the phrase ‘Would not hesitate’. I shuddered. Odd, that I should have left because of a monkey, and was now returning because of another one.

  I glanced at the photo of the Gentleman Monkey that I’d perched on the dashboard. I’d thought of taking him with me to London, to show him to an expert at the Museum in person – but then dismissed the idea. He was too bulky. And possibly – exciting thought, this – far too valuable. So I’d borrowed the twins’ polaroid camera and taken a few shots. They hadn’t come out very well, but I was in a hurry. This was the best one, but it still didn’t do him justice. The ruffed shirt and the red pantaloons didn’t help; they were the kind of clothes an organ-grinder’s monkey might wear. They demeaned him, somehow. I say ‘him’, but it still wasn’t clear to me whether the creature had been male or female. He was dressed in male clothes, but the genitals had been completely done away with. Although Scrapie’s treatise claimed the creature was male, you had to take anything he said with a shovelful of salt. A madman with a vision is a dangerous thing. I thought about his bizarre hypothesis: A New Theory of Evolution, he’d called it. Nothing if not grandiose. Maybe the idea didn’t seem so crazy at the time, I thought: the Victorians didn’t know about DNA. And it was another century or so before blokes like Dawkins and Gould evolved.

  Looking at the photos now, that feeling of excitement I’d had when I first saw the monkey started rummaging away again. He really was some specimen. I realised that I was curious about this weird, almost human creature in a way I hadn’t been since I was a kid, when I unearthed three-quarters of a desiccated fox in the garden, and kept rat spleens in the fridge.

  At midday I stopped for lunch at a service station at Grommet Hill. While I was waiting for my order, I spread out the photographs in front of me and inspected them one by one. I also had my eye on the waitress; it wasn’t often these days that you spotted a young woman who wasn’t sporting the obligatory pregnant belly. She wore a badge on her tit that said I’M PAULA, HOW CAN I HELP YOU? When she came back to my table with my chicken and chips, plus side-salad, I peered at her chest closely.

  ‘Sorry,’ I said, when she showed signs of embarrassment. ‘I’m dyslexic’

  ‘It says “I’m Paula, how can I help you?”,’ she said.

  ‘By getting me a Coke, Paula, my darling,’ I told her. And gave her my Elvis look, the one that’s designed to make them melt with desire. But she hadn’t noticed my curled lip; she was looking at the photographs.

  ‘Aaaw, isn’t he sweet,’ she said, in a gooey voice. ‘I do love children. I’ve got a chimp. How old is he? Have you had him long?’

  Christ, I thought, snatching up the pictures. The whole nation is insane.

  ‘He’s dead,’ I snapped.

  A tear instantly welled in her eye. ‘Oh, I am so sorry!’ she said, touching my arm. ‘How did you – lose him?’

  ‘I killed him,’ I said, remembering Giselle. ‘I’m allowed to. I’m a vet.’

  That sent her packing.

  Betty Botter bought some butter…

  Before I left the north by steam train I said a prayer on the platform: Please God, make this a wild goose chase. As we chugged and stopped at every small town on the way to London, I cheered myself up as best I could with my tongue-twisters, and read the names of the towns we stopped at: Snail’s Rump, Hinkley Firth, Knaveswood-under-Gab, Blaggerfield. By the time we reached Grommet Hill, my mind was awash with a flotsam of Viking balderdash.

  An elbow kept jamming into my ribs; it belonged to a woman who was knitting a strange pair of leggings for her son. She told me he was a member of a dance troupe. The front gusset was the size of a horse’s nosebag.

  ‘He’s quite a man,’ she said, reading my thoughts, and burst out laughing.

  I laughed with her for politeness’s sake, but my laughter was hollow. If a male object is all it takes, I thought, then I am human, too.

  ‘What makes a man, in your opinion, madam?’ I asked her suddenly.

  ‘That he’s a civilised gent is all I ask,’ she said, her face looking suddenly weary. ‘That he says his pleases and his thank-yous, and if the need arises, he would lay down his life to protect another.’

  I scratched my flea-bites for a while, lost in thought.

  When I had told Kinnon my story two nights earlier, he had diagnosed madness, and administered first Epsom salts, then castor oil, then laudanum. Now, as the steam train chugged though the flatlands of Northumberland on its journey south, I could feel all three remedies beginning to wear off, and my
heart began to shrink in cowardly trepidation.

  Norton’s Krig, Wipperby, Brill. The trees grew taller, the landscape lusher as we journeyed south. We stopped for half an hour at Nobb-on-Humber, where the sun came out and threw a shaft of sudden wonder into the carriage, and the knitting-woman offered me a bite of her chicken leg. Politely, I said no. I was weak with hunger, I told her, but had to starve today on account of my tapeworm. It was at that point that she spotted my fake dog-collar beneath my scarf, and apologised for her crudeness vis-á-vis the mentioning of her son’s ‘thingummyjig’.

  ‘Not at all, madam,’ I said, in my parson’s voice. ‘A mother’s pride is a blessed thing.’

  ‘He’s doing Swan Lake at the Royal Ballet,’ she said, relieved that I had not taken offence. One plain, one purl. ‘He’s not a swan, he’s one of them other birds.’

  A crake? A cormorant? A herring gull? I wondered, remembering the sea-birds wheeling in the skies of Thunder Spit, and Jared, my carrier pigeon, now asleep in his cage, covered with a cloth. I would sooner place my faith in a humble bird than in the Penny Post.

  Fib’s Wash, Crowtherly, Axelhaunch. I slept fitfully and awoke half-crazed, remembering my dread quest.

  ‘Are you all right, dear?’ the woman asked me suddenly, near Gladmouth, jamming her elbow in my ribs as she jerked at her skein. ‘You’re trembling.’

  I said nothing, but pulled my coat tighter around me, like a shell.

  London at last: at St Pancras Station, the train disgorged me and I stood on the platform, fingering my whelk on its string. It was indeed soothing, I reflected, to carry the ocean round one’s neck at all times. Tommy must have known, when he gave it to me, how much I would miss the sound of crashing waves. I will go nowhere now, I thought, without my precious whelk.

  I put it to my ear. Slosh, slosh.

  But after a minute standing there on the platform I gave up, and nestled the shell back in the warmth of my greatcoat next to my crucifix rum-flask.

  The platform was noisy. My heart was skinned.

  ‘You must forget this nonsense,’ Kinnon had insisted, pouring me more castor oil. After my jar had smashed, he had taken me back to his lodgings, and I had shown him the evidence of my feet.

  Never, I thought, as we gazed at them together, had they looked hairier or more deformed. ‘You need rest, and sleep,’ prescribed Kinnon.

  He was wrong. I had learned my lesson. What I needed was the truth.

  I can’t, I protested to myself.

  But I will, said the creature within.

  I left Jared with the pigeon man at St Pancras, saying I would return in a week to send my letter back north.

  In Paddington, I found a boarding-house; the woman who ran it obviously had a sixth sense about her lodgers’ finances, because she warned me she’d always need the money in advance. The place was dismal and filthy – a far cry from my cosy bachelor rooms back in Hunchburgh, where Mrs Fooney’s motherly warmth permeated the kitchen along with the smell of baking bread and poppyseed.

  I slept with cotton wool in one ear and my whelk pressed against the other. The next morning I found a tick on my shin. I burnt it, but its jaws remained in my flesh.

  ‘And no more screaming in your sleep!’ the landlady commanded the next morning, ignoring my mention of the parasite. Unlike the pillow-chested Mrs Fooney, her bodiced torso was as flat and hard-looking as a beetle’s carapace, and her eyes were small green marbles of mistrust. ‘This isn’t Bedlam.’

  It was some other little Hell, though. I paid the woman for another night, and she put a mark in her ledger. I knew for a fact that I wasn’t the only screamer. Parson Phelps always used to tell me that London was a place where young men from the provinces quickly go insane.

  ‘Or a place they flee to once their madness is a fact,’ he’d add darkly.

  I found a little coffee gazebo in Regent’s Park where I sat, absorbing it all: the deals struck, the philanthropy, the pimping, the Empire-boasting. In the end, homesick for the ocean, I wandered to the docks, but this wasn’t water as I knew it. I had seen many a ship out at sea, her sails bloated with wind, but what I saw here were stranded sea-creatures, their great hulls cracked with sunlight, their souls trapped by gang-planks and wheelbarrows and ropes.

  As I left my lodging-house the next morning, a fellow lodger joined me; he introduced himself as Hikes. Together we strolled to my coffee gazebo in Regent’s Park, and there he listened to my tourist’s tales.

  ‘You’re nervous,’ he said, eyeing me up.

  ‘It’s nothing,’ I said.

  ‘Here.’ He proffered me some brandy in a hip-flask – little knowing what I carried in my hollow crucifix. ‘Drink this,’ he said. ‘Then do what you really came here to do.’

  ‘And you?’ I asked.

  ‘I bought an hour’s worth of fat whore and gambled the rest.’

  We sipped our coffee.

  ‘I’m going to find a man,’ I blurted at last, smashing my cup down on to the saucer and spilling half my coffee in my jitteriness. He raised an eyebrow. ‘And I am going to make him tell me the truth.’

  ‘Go on,’ said Hikes, shoving his liquor-flask under my nose. ‘Get that inside you.’

  ‘I’m normally teetotal,’ I lied. But I took it from him and swallowed a large gulp of brandy and it glowed in my upper body like religion.

  ‘The truth about what?’ Hikes called after me as I left.

  In Portobello Road I stopped and made some purchases: a waistcoat, a pair of scissors, a needle and thread, a small revolver. I mended the waistcoat, and slipped the gun into its pocket. Then I headed for the centre of the city.

  That bit of London near the Museum has always been Hell, parking-wise. I’d forgotten that. It was pissing with rain; I eventually found a space in a nine-Euros-a-day multi-storey, then bought a paper and stopped for coffee in a gloomy little roadside caff called The Gazebo. The waiter who brought me my cappuccino slopped it into the saucer and didn’t apologise; he was wearing a Walkman. My paper reported that hoax calls to the ambulance service had risen by 50 per cent, as the phantom pregnancies reached their barren and inevitable conclusions. In most cases, according to the report, it was an accumulation of wind, and the women felt physically much better once they had released it. Pity the ozone layer, I thought. In the distance I could hear the sirens.

  ‘Intense depression is bound to ensue,’ it quoted the ubiquitous Dr Keith Eaves, now the undisputed therapist to the nation’s buffeted psyche, ‘as we all undergo a period of mourning for what never was.’ They’d cleaned up his stammer for him in print. ‘In Swan Lake, the swan flutters before it dies. What we are witnessing here, in a final act of yearning, disappointment and acceptance, is the dying dance of Homo Britannicus.’

  You had to hand it to him; he had a way with words.

  The article also made the point that the inevitable anti-climax of the largest attack of mass hysteria on record was causing chaos on a practical level, and genuine emergency cases were being forced to wait up to 47 per cent longer than stipulated by their health charter. Some poor sods had even died as a result, I read. Now there was going to be a one-hundred-Euro fine for every hoax call. Enter a small industry in the form of cowboy midwives offering phoney services for bogus events. I thought of Rose and Blanche, with their Ovaltine and their novelty straws and their pathetic industriousness, sighed, and shoved my cup and saucer to one side. The coffee was pure swill.

  I left.

  In the underground walkway, I fought my way through crowds of Saturday shoppers, street hawkers, homeless and sightseers. I followed the signs like an obedient tourist, climbed a flight of pissy-smelling concrete stairs, and emerged in the open air, next to a life-sized fibreglass triceratops guarding the Museum.

  Pray God this is a wild goose chase, I murmured as I approached the vast building. As I entered the arched portals and stepped into the gloom, I thought of Jonah. The Museum’s belly was filled with footsteps and echoes and whispers. I looked
above me. The cornices crawled with ornamental tiles, and the stained-glass windows refracted and smithereened their colours, stippling the varnished walls with haphazard designs; it was not a whale, I realised, but an Aladdin’s cave, monstrous in its grandiosity, not a surface left undecorated. I know what Parson Phelps would have said. He had always hated a decorated surface. Something about the Devil finding work for idle hands. Something about the worship of graven images. He would have made the sign of the cross.

  I reached inside my greatcoat, where my hand brushed against the crucifix and the whelk. Still there.

  HER MAJESTY’S ANIMAL KINGDOM, said the copperplate writing on the notice before me. EXHIBITS ON LOAN FROM HER MAJESTY THE QUEEN’S COLLECTION. Following the direction of the sign’s pointing finger, I walked nervously into the gloom, my footsteps echoing on the ceramic tiles.

  I could feel the eyes before I saw them. They stared from all directions, baleful and disturbing. My spine was bristling, and I felt my heartbeat betray my fear. And then I saw the beasts, and a chill ran through me.

  They stood in stiff rows, staring at me from plinths and pedestals.

  ‘Good God!’ I breathed. I closed my eyes for a second, hoping that when I opened them again, the vision would have disappeared. But it had not.

  The creatures were all wearing clothes.

  A giraffe in a long tent-like dress with a fleur-de-lis design towered above me. A lion in pantaloons and braces, wearing a top hat, crouched next to it, ready to pounce. A wildebeest in a white nightgown and matching nightcap stood fixing me with its glare, its hooves clasped in a position reminiscent of prayer. What frozen forest of horror had I entered? Feathers gleamed beneath frilled shirts and frock-coats; fur was flattened beneath petticoats and pinafore dresses. An ostrich wore a frilled hat, like the one Mrs Sequin used to wear to church. A cow sported spectacles. A raccoon in a cassock wielded a walking-stick. The human eyes stared, both knowing and blank.