Ark Baby

by Liz Jensen

  The Ape of Mogador: Also known – erroneously, because of its misleading tail – as the Gentleman Monkey.

  Jesus Christ. And there was more.

  As I read on, I began to feel sick with excitement.

  Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled pepper, I said to myself as Dr Scrapie took out a small roll of measuring tape and encircled my skull with it. Miss Mosh mashes some mish-mash, I thought, as he shone a little torch into my eye. Minewort, lungwort, I thought, as he peered first into one ear, and then the other. Gudderwort. The arid Gudderwort. I can see his face. I can see his face and the distaste on it as he hands me the jar. And other faces, too: the Mulveys, the Cleggses and the Balls and the Tobashes. Tommy Boggs’ wife was a Tobash. Jessie, who had called me Prune-Face. Jessie’s belly, rounded with child.

  The girl in my rooms, her hand down a student’s trousers, fishing about for his –

  The woman I had glimpsed in the upper window, beneath whose corset –

  The jar that contained my –

  ‘Now breathe in slowly,’ Scrapie is saying; he has a cold stethoscope to my chest. Can he hear how fast my heart is pounding?

  From this angle, with his flowing white hair, grizzled beard, and authoritarian expression, Dr Scrapie resembles God; the same God whose beard dissolved into the white storm-clouds of the Great Flood in the Noah’s Ark picture on my bedroom wall at home. Have I not come to the expert of experts? The man who single-handedly peopled the Queen’s ghastly Animal Kingdom Collection with its human-eyed bestiary?

  His eyes are all fired up with a strange gleam, and it dawns on me that I will have no more need of my revolver. I have his attention.

  ‘Sir Ivanhoe,’ I hear him murmur.

  ‘I beg your pardon?’

  ‘Nothing,’ he replies quickly. ‘I am just trying to think how I can –’ There is a long pause as he appears to search the recesses of his memory for the right word. ‘Help you,’ he says finally.

  Now he is questioning me intensively, scribbling notes as he does so, and I am suddenly telling him everything. About being a foundling, discovered by the altar of St Nicholas’s Church in Thunder Spit, the day after the Travelling Fair of Danger and Delight left Judlow, with a ghastly mutilation to my lower spine which had nearly killed me. About the way the animals of Thunder Spit growled at me, and how I was rejected by humans, too. About the Contortionist at the Travelling Fair, who had handed my father the jar containing the –

  ‘The object in question,’ I falter. Scrapie’s eyebrows shoot up.

  ‘Aha,’ he says. ‘Now we are getting somewhere.’

  But he does not say where. Instead, he questions me in detail about what he calls my ‘well-spokenness’. This prompts me to impress him further with a few tongue-twisters, and I recount how I used to read long passages from the Bible in church.

  ‘Speech came to me late,’ I tell him, ‘prompted by the sight of a cake on my fifth birthday.’ This seems to stir even more excitement in him.

  ‘And before that? How did you communicate?’

  ‘In squeaks and grunts, as far as I am aware,’ I told him. ‘They said it was a miracle.’

  ‘A case of nurture overcoming nature, perhaps?’ mutters Scrapie, almost to himself. And then, addressing me: ‘In what manner were you raised?’

  ‘In a Christian manner, sir,’ I tell him. ‘Cleanliness, reading, self-improvement and piety were encouraged. Indulgences of the flesh, nakedness and childish play were not. A traditional English upbringing, sir.’

  He questions me further, and I find myself telling him more: about how I believed the jar to contain an umbilical cord, until it had smashed, and about how Kinnon had put me right. About how, when I had told Kinnon my fears, he had assured me I was mad. About how I had insisted on knowing the truth. About how he had advised me to come to London, and search out an expert.

  ‘You could not have come to a better place, young man,’ murmurs Scrapie reassuringly, as he begins to carry out a series of quick sketches of me in his notebook. ‘You can trust me implicitly.’

  This is a profound relief.

  ‘And you say your foster-father will not see you?’ Scrapie asked when I had finished telling him about Parson Phelps’ removal to the Fishforth Sanatorium for the Spiritually Disturbed.

  ‘That is so, sir.’ I hung my head.

  ‘I am – sorry to hear that,’ he said thoughtfully. ‘And nobody has any idea that you are here in this house? With me?’

  ‘No, sir. Why should they?’

  ‘No reason at all. Indeed not. My poor young man. No relatives? No friends? You are here completely – alone?’

  It seemed important to him, though I could not see why.

  ‘Completely alone,’ I confirmed. Although I did not like this lonely thought, Dr Scrapie seemed to find it particularly appealing; he started rubbing his hands as if I were a warm hearth.

  Finally he blurted excitedly, ‘You looked familiar to me, young man, as soon as I saw you.’

  I was surprised.

  ‘Are there others like me, then? I asked, filled with a sudden tremulous hope.

  ‘In a manner of speaking, yes,’ said Scrapie. ‘Or at least there were. What I mean is, I have seen a creature that resembles you. Resembles you so closely, and according to my records so accurately, anatomically speaking –’

  He went over to his desk and pulled out a notebook full of measurements and sketches. Then he said, ‘Have you heard of a creature called the Gentleman Monkey? An extinct primate, from Morocco?’

  ‘No.’ I said. Why was my heart suddenly plummeting downwards like a leaden fishing weight?

  ‘That is the creature you resemble, young man.’

  I pressed the key to call the picture up from the CD ROM, and watched the 3-D image emerge. It was an artist’s impression, and was accompanied by an etching of the creature, made in 1843 by a wildlife artist who had visited the last remaining specimen in the Jardin Zoologique in Mogador, Morocco. I gasped when I saw it. It showed the monkey standing with its hands on its hips, in a defiant and disconcertingly human posture, behind the bars of a large cage.

  ‘It’s him!’ I shouted. ‘It’s bloody-well him!’

  ‘Language!’ said the man in the mauve tracksuit. The pancake mixture had finished its progress up the stairs, and was now slurping Coke from cans and mock karate-kicking each other with feet clad in blocky trainers. ‘There’s kids about,’ the teacher went on. ‘If you can’t keep your mouth clean you shouldn’t be here in school hours.’

  ‘Sorry,’ I lied, desperate to get rid of him. He was glaring at me now like I was some kind of paedophile. When he finally shuffled off, trailing his charges behind him like a pedagogical jellyfish, I turned my attention to the text that accompanied the etching. The Gentleman Monkey was an unusual specimen, and had baffled naturalists at the time. Strikingly humanoid, with a larger brain than man’s, and a fun-loving temperament.

  Polygamous by nature.

  That word ‘polygamous’ got me thinking. It was then that some phrases from Dr Ivanhoe Scrapie’s eccentric treatise came floating back into my head, and my brain began to whirr.

  ‘So this – Gentleman Monkey,’ I croaked finally, gulping at air. ‘What is it, exactly?’

  ‘Was,’ Dr Scrapie corrected me. ‘It is no more. It was an interesting species of monkey; not so much a monkey, in fact, as a tailed ape. Anyway, highly intelligent, and strikingly human in appearance. Polygamous by nature, and a fructivore, but in other respects remarkably similar in many ways to the human. Child-like but courteous by nature; that’s why they called him the Gentleman, I suppose. And probably also why he became extinct,’ he added thoughtfully.

  I was having trouble breathing by now. ‘And what happened to it?’

  ‘The last remaining member of its race is now housed in Buckingham Palace,’ said Scrapie. ‘I stuffed him and he became a towel-holder for the ladies’ powder room in the banqueting suite. That’s where he is now.’

 
If only I had heeded Kinnon’s advice, accepted his diagnosis of madness, and remained in Hunchburgh! I would be ordained by now! I would be Parson Phelps the Second, preaching my anti-Darwinian sermon loud and clear from the pulpit!

  I pictured the creature’s skin being removed from its body, and filled with sawdust, then dressed in human clothes, like the creatures I had seen at the Museum.

  ‘And the – carcass?’ I mustered finally, following the ghastly thought through to its conclusion.

  ‘You’d rather not know about that, young man,’ said Scrapie, looking suddenly tired and slightly throttled. ‘Suffice it to say that it was highly toxic. It contained poison.’

  ‘Poison?’

  ‘So it would appear. Not something I discovered till – later,’ said Scrapie. ‘When I had cause to investigate the creature’s remains.’

  ‘You mean the monkey was poisonous by nature, or it had been poisoned?’

  ‘It had been poisoned,’ he said slowly. ‘With praxin.’

  ‘But why? Where? Who did it?’ I felt my sanity slipping away as I spoke.

  ‘Nobody knows,’ sighed Scrapie. ‘But I have my suspicions.’

  The last of this species of ape, according to the interactive CD ROM display, had been purchased by the entrepreneur Horace Trapp from a Moroccan menagerie for Queen Victoria’s collection and shipped over to Britain, but it had died in mysterious circumstances on the voyage back to London, following a mutiny on board Trapp’s vessel, the Ark. The creature had later been stuffed by the Taxidermist Royal, Dr Ivanhoe Scrapie, as part of Queen Victoria’s Animal Kingdom Collection, most of which was housed in the Museum. But the Queen had so taken a liking to the primates that she decreed they should grace the rooms of Buckingham Palace, which was where the ape was dispatched, once stuffed, sometime in the 1850s. But in 1864, to the dismay of later generations of evolutionary scientists specialising in primates, the stuffed creature was stolen from Buckingham Palace. And never traced.

  It was there, as I flicked through the interactive zoology encyclopaedia, that I realised. The Gentleman Monkey in my bathroom was the only known specimen in the whole world of this breed of extinct primate. The only remaining evidence that such a creature had ever existed. There was no mention of its having been stolen in Scrapie’s treatise. Could he perhaps have written it before the creature had disappeared from the Palace? And if he had not been lying about the rarity and the final extinction of the species – was it (I got all choked up at the thought), was it possible that the rest of his extraordinary document was also true?

  That word ‘polygamous’ kept haunting me.

  Yes: I’d definitely have to think about this.

  ‘We found the Gentleman Monkey dead on the Ark,’ said Scrapie, after he had finished telling me what he knew about Horace Trapp’s career, first as a slave-trader, then as an animal-collector for the Queen. ‘Along with all the other creatures. Over a thousand of them. Most of them half torn to bits. Nature’s cruel, you know, young man,’ he said, eyeing me in a strange way. ‘But there wasn’t a mark on the monkey. It was the praxin that killed him. It must have been injected.’

  I winced.

  ‘We found Trapp’s head, too,’ Scrapie continued, going slightly pale. He paused for a moment and re-filled his pen with ink. He did it slowly, applying great concentration to the task. ‘Not a pretty sight,’ he said finally.

  ‘When was this?’ I asked. ‘When did Trapp’s Ark arrive in London?’

  ‘1845, the same year Violet was born,’ said Scrapie. ‘It was found floating on the Channel, and hauled in.’

  ‘Violet?’

  ‘My youngest daughter.’ I remembered the face of a woman in the window. So this was Violet Scrapie. I felt my heart shift, and desolation sweep through me like a cold wind. ‘It was a bloody nuisance,’ Scrapie was saying. ‘Had to ship an iceberg over to deal with it. Trapp’s Ark kept me busy for fifteen years.’

  I gulped.

  ‘1845 was the year of my birth,’ I told him. ‘As far as it is known.’

  Scrapie picked up his notebook again, and began to scribble furiously.

  I had dismissed the assertions in Scrapie’s treatise as nonsense; the ravings of a demented man.

  But –

  Hope gobbled at my innards, and my brain raced. I found myself actually having to grab hold of a fibreglass gibbon to keep my balance. The kids had moved off, but their voices wafted up from the hall below, a faint echo buzzing in my head.

  What I was thinking was that, by a quirk of fate – that chance meeting in the pub with Norman Ball? Or was it even earlier, when the threatened litigation over Giselle catapulted me north? Or did it date back to my childhood wish to work with animals? In any case, by some quirk of fate, some kind of extraordinary missing link had fallen into my lap.

  The de Savile Theory of Evolution, they would rename it. I would insist on it. I’d hold the Gentleman Monkey hostage, if necessary, until it was official. You try stopping me.

  I’d be given a Euro Award.

  Then I started thinking about the other stuff in the document, and my stomach heaved. There were implications. Phelps, the man was called. Tobias Phelps. I didn’t recognise the name from the twins’ family tree. But they hadn’t finished it.

  I was hallucinating now, surely. I had never seen their feet. They didn’t have tails, that was for sure. But it was still possible – was it not? That –

  No. I was going mad. It was impossible.

  ‘Impossible!’ I said.

  Scrapie said, ‘So you know, since you have become aware of Mr Darwin’s theories, that we are all descended from the humble primate?’ He spoke slowly, as if I were suddenly a child, or a creature not too quick on the uptake. Perhaps he was right. ‘All of us,’ he said. ‘Even Her Majesty Queen Victoria.’

  No, I thought. It wasn’t like that. The earth was without form and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep.

  ‘Human beings stand at the top of Darwin’s ladder of nature, you know, Mr Phelps. Of all the species of primate, we are the most evolved.’

  Blasphemy!

  ‘Have you ever seen a fossil, Mr Phelps?’

  ‘I have. My father used to say that they were God’s jokes,’ I told him. My voice sounded weak and thin.

  ‘Jokes?’

  ‘God moves in a mysterious way,’ I said, scraping about in my memory for the comfort of my fledgling sermon on God and the fossils. ‘Fossils are clearly the Lord’s doing, and evidence of His grand design.’

  But my heart wouldn’t stop pounding; I felt that I might explode and scatter, like a distraught firework.

  ‘Well, according to Darwin and others,’ said Scrapie, ‘they are evidence of a distant past, of which we are the biological inheritors. Have you heard of natural selection, young man?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘It is Darwin’s theory. I have studied his book, and his profane ideas.’

  ‘Natural selection,’ said Scrapie, brushing my remarks aside, ‘is Nature’s way of making advancements. From simple to complex, from complex to even more complex, until you reach man. Darwin says that we must not, however, forget the principle of correlation, by which many strange deviations of structure are tied together, so that a change in one part often leads to other changes of a quite unexpected nature.’

  Scrapie stopped in his tracks and steered me towards a chaise-longue.

  ‘Sit down here,’ he said. Obeying him, I found myself face to face with the male object and related accountrements of a stuffed horse.

  ‘A fine specimen, your horse,’ I mustered politely. Miss Mosh mashes some mish-mash. The creature looked nothing like the horses back in Thunder Spit.

  ‘Well, it would be an odd specimen, if it were a horse,’ says Scrapie. ‘Actually, it’s a mule. An ass. A hybrid.’

  ‘A hybrid? A sort of cross?’

  Mildred doesn’t like this idea one little bit, and wrenches violently at my long-suffering sphincter.

  ‘Exactly.
Father a stallion, mother a donkey. Or occasionally vice versa. They are always sterile,’ continued Dr Scrapie slowly, keeping his eyes levelled on my face. ‘They are sterile,’ he said, ‘because Nature doesn’t like breeding across species. Yet –paradoxically – it has always happened. In the case of the mule, it has been virtually an institution. Most examples occur in the world of botany, but there are plenty of zoological examples as well. More than you’d think. Wallabies and kangaroos. Crocodiles and alligators. Lions and tigers, even. And then there are historical cases, or should I say mythological ones, though where mythology ends and history begins we can only guess at.’

  ‘Cases such as, sir?’ I falter faintly.

  ‘Such as the Minotaur, the Centaur, the mermaid; Pegasus, the winged horse. Medusa, the snake-headed woman. The Devil is half goat, is he not? And then of course there’s the Angel.’

  Blasphemy and more blasphemy!

  ‘I cannot agree with that, sir,’ I retort, my cheeks burning. ‘The Angel is a creature of Heaven.’ But then I feel my face slacken, and I reach for my whelk. For I know, suddenly, and with a force that sets Mildred attacking my innards, that if a creature of Heaven is possible, then so is a beast from Hell.

  ‘So how –? What –?’ I stammered.

  ‘Darwin,’ said Scrapie, ‘asked the following question: “If the cross offspring of any two races of birds or animals be interbred, will the progeny keep as constant, as that of any established breed; or will it tend to return in appearance to either parent?” I’ll say this much for Darwin: he’s asked some sensible questions. But he doesn’t have all the answers. Not by a long chalk.’

  I am perched stiffly now on the edge of the chaise-longue.

  ‘And – do you have answers, sir?’

  ‘I think your existence upon this earth is beginning to provide me with some,’ he replied. He sat still for a while, lost in thought. ‘A form of natural selection,’ he finally murmured to himself. ‘An evolutionary tangent. A new branch of the family. Or an old one.’ Then he jumped up and began to pace the room. I could see his mind was tumbling in all directions. ‘Yes; very possibly an old one. Humans are evolved from other primates. Apes. Monkeys, too, but further back. But what if –?’ He paused, then began to drum his fingers on a table.