by Liz Jensen
‘A travesty,’ I murmured, half-choking with horror. ‘A travesty of Nature!’
Scrabbling in my knapsack for my pen and notebook, I copied down the name of the taxidermist from a plinth – Dr Ivanhoe Scrapie – and fled from the Museum like a bat out of Hell.
Christ, what a whopper of a building; big enough, I reckoned, to house umpteen wide-bodied aircraft if the need arose. After queuing up for ages, I had to pay nine Euros fifty to get in, though I noticed that, with a family ticket, it would have been a lot cheaper. The place resounded with the echoes of a million children oohing and aahing in the shadow of a huge brontosaurus skeleton. I hadn’t been to the Natural History Museum since I was a kid. I was in for a shock. No stuffed animals, for a start. Apart from the brontosaurus skeleton, it was all acrylic reconstructions and interactive hands-on stuff. A group of schoolkids suddenly poured in and started yelling obscenities. To my left, an ineffectual-looking bloke in a mauve tracksuit put up a hand and called, ‘Yo, kids! Let’s have a bit of shush, please!’
They ignored him, and carried on yelling and kicking their Coke cans about, and making silly faces. He was their teacher.
The primates were upstairs, in an exhibition all about the evolution of man.
In 14 Madagascar Street, Belgravia, Violet Scrapie is dressing for dinner, and picturing the capture of a whale by harpoon. She has recently seen an Italian gravura of such a scene, in which the artist, Rafael Ortona, disturbingly managed to show in the creature’s wildly swivelling eye all the agony and indignity of the blubber being stripped from its still-living flesh. In her imagination, she colours in the heart-breaking detail that Signor Ortona has delicately omitted from his gravura, yet so vividly evoked: the sea heaves red with blood, while beneath the water-line, the smaller fragments of blubber and flesh float down into the depths.
Nature, like Violet Scrapie, loathes the sight of wasted protein: these fragments will feed whole armies of sea-life. She sees the great sea-cucumber, a living ocean turd, laying claim. She observes the wily scissoring of the lobster’s claws as it snatches a hunk of blubber from a passing quillsnapper. And the thuggish gang of sharks attacking the carcass and stripping whole sections of it to the bone as the skeleton is hauled off. Violet knows, having read it in one of her father’s zoological treatises, that depending on the swiftness of the action, and the temperature of the surrounding waters, the creature will emit vast quantities of steam from its flesh. Yes, steam. This is the effect of the heart’s great pounding motion as the mammal enters into a state of shock, pain and fright.
Imagine!
Imagine, too, how the blood then boils. How the flesh itself is heated, and the bones cook. And how the whole brute edifice is transmogrified into a grotesquely floating stew, a loose scaffolding of hot bones dragged through the choppy waves to Hunchburgh, where it is dismantled much as a ship itself can be dismantled in a shipyard, and the merchants dispatch its cleaned components – ribs, jawbone, tailbone, skull, in tiny quantities relative to the whale’s size, to the haberdashers and hosiers and couturiers of the Nation.
It is said that the bodices and hats and fashion accessories of Queen Victoria contain so much whalebone that two skeletons’-worth have not been enough to feed her rapacious wardrobe.
Violet bends asthmatically for the corset, reflecting with some resentment on the Royal Hippo’s hosiery supplies. No stingy annual clothes allowance for her!
(Should whalebone be boycotted? she wonders suddenly. Why, surely it should!)
The contrast, Violet reflects, is stark: Victoria – wife, Queen, Ruler of Empire, owner of two skeletons worth of whalebone, and mother to a whole litter of blue-blooded royal babes. Violet Scrapie, distressed spinster. Violet Scrapie, daughter of the eminent Dr Scrapie, stuffer of animals By Her Majesty’s Appointment. Violet Scrapie, prisoner in her own home:
A violet by a mossy bank,
Half hidden from the eye,
Fair as a star
When only one is shining in the sky.
Huh. When only one. And when there are more? Eh, Mr Wordsworth? Ugly as a blasted moon.
On a more positive note, Violet’s mission, The Fleshless Cook, has been progressing in leaps and bounds. Only this morning, she has taken pride in the preparation of a hearty chestnut soup containing both cinnamon and parsley. Furthermore, she has finished making her last batch of walnut ketchup, invented asparagus and lemon pudding, made a dozen pastry ramekins, fried two giant Jerusalem artichokes for tomorrow’s dinner, and perfected a recipe for baked Spanish onions which makes Mrs Beeton’s version look laughably naive, and indeed almost inedible. All seventeen stone and five pounds of flesh that is Violet Scrapie stands now in the bedroom in her vast bloomers, staring down at the complex structure that lies at her feet. The Royal Hippo and I have little in common, she reflects: just womanhood, Dr Ivanhoe Scrapie, and whalebone. Or to be more precise, the miracle of soft engineering that is the corset.
Like a clockwork ectoskeletal creature of the deep, Violet now begins the task of assembling the shell of wire and padded whalebone around her stupendous body. First she heaves the heavy black sheath up to her gigantic hips, then twists it so that it lies symmetrically around her pelvis. There are wire hooks that must be aligned, and made to cling together like wrung hands. To do this, she must first draw in her breath and lift her rib-cage so that her waist is elongated, insofar as is possible, a celebration of cause and effect, soon to be reined in by structure. Each breast is the size of a human baby. They quiver and shake, setting up a rolling judder across the great vista of her belly, as – whup! – she hauls up and clasps together, at waist-level, the two sides of the encasing pod.
What are the alternatives? Bamboo? she wonders, exasperated at the effort of it all. Or wire?
‘Fasting,’ whispers a ghostly matriarchal voice. ‘The answer, Vile, is to consume less food.’
‘Bugger off, Mother,’ mutters Violet, wrenching her carapace into position and tugging at the cords.
Three floors below, a small man with an odd gait and unusual shoes is peering at the numbers on the doors. He, too, has little in common with Queen Victoria, apart from his diminutive stature. Like the head of our great British Empire, he measures five foot two, but there any resemblance to the reigning monarch ends abruptly, would you not agree, gentle reader? After all, Queen Victoria does not have a mutilated coccyx, nor does she wear orthopaedic shoes, or a phoney dog-collar, or house a temperamental tapeworm, or harbour fleas; nor does she have the organs known, in polite society, as a male object and related accoutrements (cock and balls to you), and nor does she urgently need to discover the truth of her origins – because Queen Victoria has a family tree that stretches back centuries, adorned with heraldic plates of Huguenot shields and Plantagenet memorabilia, Battenburg gewgaws and Tudor roses, and Tobias Phelps (for it is he) has nothing but the evidence of his own deformity, and a piece of pickled human flesh, re-bottled for him in Hunchburgh by a medical student named Kinnon.
To read the brass-plated numbers on the doors, he has to squint.
Number two.
His deep-set eyes are wild, haunted.
Number four.
His face is thin-lipped, wrinkled, sad.
Number six.
He is mumbling feverishly to himself. A sharp ear might make out the words to a tongue-twister about a woman called Betty Botter buying some butter but finding it bitter and not being able to put it in her batter.
Number eight.
He clasps his frock-coat about him tightly.
Number ten.
He fingers a whelk shell.
Number twelve.
‘Pray God this is a wild goose chase,’ he murmurs.
Number fourteen.
Home of Dr Ivanhoe Scrapie.
Tobias Phelps mounts the steps, and performs a sudden upward leap to ring the bell.
Ding, dong!
Suet, prone on Violet’s eiderdown, lifts his head and yaps feebly at the doorbell. He ha
s not been himself at all lately; his vegetarian diet has weakened him immeasurably.
‘Oh, botheration!’ mutters Violet Scrapie. She’s still struggling with her corset, and wondering about whalebone.
Suet yaps.
The bell rings again. Ignoring its insistent jangle in the hope that her father will remember it is Mrs Jiggers’ day off and answer it himself, Violet abandons her buttoning and lacing in order to fix her late mother’s jet choker around her neck. Despite the jeweller’s recent adjustments, it’s still a fraction too tight, as though the Laudanum Empress is trying, by whatever means she can, to throttle her disappointing daughter from beyond the grave. Which indeed she is.
‘Please, Mother,’ croaks Violet, who has lately become increasingly aware of her ghostly presence in the house. ‘A little less pressure!’
And the choker’s grip is instantly relaxed.
‘Chop, chop!’ the phantom is bossing. ‘Answer the bloody door, child! The future depends on it!’
‘Did you say something, Mother?’
The doorbell rings again, wildly this time. Violet Scrapie shuffles over to the window, irritated by the noise, her white cotton bloomers swishing about her puckered thighs, and peers down on to the street, where a sulphurous yellow glow leaks from the gas lamps across the slush. A small figure directly below her, on the front doorstep, is hopping about in wide pantaloons. Taxidermy, like chess, attracts a strange breed of men, she reflects. Not artists, not scientists, neither fish nor fowl nor duck-billed platypus. Often, Violet has noticed, they have some kind of deficiency, physical or moral, which they must feel can be remedied by stuffing straw and sawdust into cured skin, and sipping Amontillado sherry at meetings of the Zoological Society.
Could the stranger be one such specimen?
No. He could not.
She realises this instantly, as the man looks up at her, and their eyes lock.
What round eyes he has, she notices. And what thin lips! Now where has she seen that face before? A peculiar and not unpleasant sensation – one Violet has seldom felt before, and certainly never with such exquisite intensity – insinuates its way into the most private interstices of her corset.
She knows this man.
She knows him!
‘We have cause for celebration!’ murmurs the Laudanum Empress, observing her daughter, and interpreting the delicate feelings playing across her face as only a dead mother can.
‘A distressed spinster no longer, perhaps?’ she shouts.
‘Mother?’ breathes Violet. ‘Are you there? Did you speak?’
‘A distressed spinster no longer, perhaps, I said!’ yells the phantom. But Violet hears nothing but a buzz as she sinks heavily on her bed, suddenly aware that she is still in a state of undress. Her whalebone creaks, as the feeling she cannot identify creeps its way further into her –
Her loins, reader. Not to beat about the bush.
Should she go downstairs, and find out who he is? And why that face looks so familiar?
‘Not yet,’ Violet murmurs, putting her hand to her breast to calm the pounding of her heart. ‘Clothes first.’
And she begins to rummage in her wardrobe, in search of her best red frock.
I have since asked myself: is love an instinct, or something learned? Is it part of Nature itself, or a reaction that comes from the way in which we are nurtured? What makes one man seek out the familiar, while another will travel the world in search of an exotic mate? What propels us? I do not have the answers. All I know is that I looked up at her, and our eyes locked.
That she was clad in nothing but a corset.
And that she was magnificent.
And that my heart shrieked within me, and that my tapeworm twisted my guts into a cruel knot of longing and delight and fear.
Yes, gentle reader: we met in the most particular of circumstances.
The cercumstancis woz most partikuler.
The nite of the storm, she wrote, wen he took me in his arms, I did not no WOT he wos, or WHO. It woz the next day, or the next, that Higgins came and litte a candel, and I saw the Creetcha for the furst tyme.
Meet a GENTLEMAN, sez Higgins. And larfs.
Remember, Parson PHELPS, I had no book lernin, and no understandin of SYENSE, and at that time I nowd nuthin of MISTER DARWIN’S BELEEFS.
All I nowd, woz that I had ikkstreemlie bad LUKKE in LUVVE.
CHAPTER 26
DARWIN’S PARADOX
I was still reeling from the sight of the magnificent corseted woman – reality or apparition of my crazed mental state, I knew not which – when the door of 14 Madagascar Street opened abruptly, and I found myself face to face with a thin, grey-bearded, grumpy-looking gent whose mouth appeared to be bristling with pins. In his right hand, he was wielding a hoof.
‘Dr Scrapie?’ I stammered.
‘Yes?’ With a gesture of disgust, he spat out his pins into his hand and settled his eyes on me, where they blazed uncomfortably. The shirt beneath his frock-coat was splattered with what might have been cochineal, or blood. A hole gaped in the sleeve of his jacket. ‘Well, young man? What is it?’
‘May I come in, sir?’
‘What for?’ he barked. ‘I’m busy. State the nature of your business, sir, or bugger off.’
My heart began to thump crazily under my ribs. I must persevere, I thought. I have come this far. What I have started, I will finish. Betty Botter bought some butter. Peter Piper picked a peck. Axelhaunch. Fib’s Wash. Blaggerfield.
‘Well?’
‘I would like to request you, sir –’ I begin, trying to effect an entry. But he blocks my path.
‘Yes?’
‘– And as a matter of fact require you –’ (Courage, Tobias!)
‘Yes?’ He was scowling at me now.
‘– And furthermore demand you, sir –’ (Yes!)
‘What, dammit?’
‘Humbly, sir, to –’
‘To what? Get on with it, fellow!’ His voice has growling thunder in it.
Three words left. Grasp those thistles, Tobias, and prove you are a man!
‘Examine my body. Sir.’
Silence. He’s looking at me as if I’m mad.
‘I’m not a bloody physician,’ he spits finally. ‘I am a taxidermist. I stuff and mount animals. Whoever directed you here is an imbecile. Now bugger off.’
‘Please, sir. Please!’ I am wedging my way in now, and reaching in my pocket. ‘There is something only you can answer.’
‘I said NO!’ he shouted. ‘Now bugger off! I’m in the middle of stuffing –’ He stops.
I’m pointing my revolver at him. My hand is shaking. Dr Scrapie freezes.
I can hear how thin and desperate my voice sounds. Like a tin whistle.
I say, ‘You will do it, sir, or I shall blow your head off, and then my own!’
Yes: a man at last!
None of the plastic replicas of primates or the hologram exhibits resembled my towel-holder in any way. There was an interactive CD ROM, though. I scrolled through, beginning to feel that my visit here was already a waste of time. I’d been through all my old veterinary books, and even rung a friend who specialised in primates. He’d never heard of the Gentleman Monkey, and when I described my towel-holder, he drew a blank. The CD ROM display repeated a lot of the stuff I’d already come across in the virtual library that I’d accessed from Thunder Spit: how the monkey differs from the ape in crucial ways such as DNA structure, teeth, skull size, and skeletally, in particular with regard to the tail. There are only three living exceptions to this rule: Kitchener’s Ape, which has a cingulum on its molar teeth, more in keeping with the monkey family, the Yeoman Baboon, whose skull is closer to the fossilised humanoid Neanderthal than an ape as such, and the extinct Ape of Mogador.
Mogador rang a bell. Wasn’t Mogador mentioned in Scrapie’s treatise?
‘My God,’ says Dr Scrapie, a minute later when Tobias Phelps has bashfully undressed. A brief glimpse of Tobias Phelps’ anatomy woul
d be enough to tell any zoologist that they had something remarkable on their hands. As Scrapie’s expert eyes take in the sight of the creature before him, he stifles a gasp.
‘Extraordinary,’ he murmurs.
The hand-like feet.
The abundance of orange body hair, peppered with animal fleas.
The mutilated coccyx.
‘And then there’s that,’ says Tobias Phelps, pointing to the jar.
Scrapie peers at its contents, and soon his pulse is racing furiously.
‘Am I the first to –?’ he asks Tobias Phelps in a haunted whisper.
‘Apart from Dr Baldicoot, when I was a baby. And my mother, but she is dead.’ Tobias Phelps is silent for a moment, and then confesses, ‘I rarely have occasion to be entirely naked, sir. Even when alone.’ Scrapie raises his eyebrows. ‘My upbringing, you know,’ Tobias Phelps whispers sadly. ‘My parents – discouraged nakedness.’
Scrapie’s heart does a complicated somersault.
‘Yes,’ he says, clearing his throat. ‘I quite understand. Now lie down, please,’ he instructs the young man. The phrase ‘on a plate’, keeps running through his head. Meanwhile Tobias Phelps, for his part, cannot help noticing that the taxidermist’s manner has altogether altered, in the direction of sudden, extreme interest.
‘Now,’ announces Scrapie, forcing his mouth into a smile. ‘My dear young man. I need to investigate you further.’
I keyed in ‘Ape of Mogador’, and waited for further details. As the computer was running the search, I looked about: the schoolkids were flowing up the stairs like an anti-gravitational pancake mix. Everything echoed. I didn’t like this place. It gave me the creeps.
Just then there was a muted beep, and some text came up on the screen: in pink, on a yellow background, with an insistent techno-beat of music behind it. I began to read.