Ark Baby

by Liz Jensen

  ‘My father was a monk.’ Violet releases a quiet moan as Dr Scrapie and Mr Darwin continue their conversation. ‘I didn’t finish writing it,’ he had said.

  ‘A monkey? Excellent!’ Mr Darwin is exclaiming. ‘I do approve of your sense of humour, my dear Scrapie! Lead me to this alleged specimen at once!’

  As Violet fans herself with such force that she risks mimicking the un-aerodynamic bumble-bee and taking flight, Charles Darwin’s laughter is overheard by a group of military gents and their wives, who, somewhat affected by champagne, repeat the joke and join in the laughter, which thereby becomes so amplified that the curiosity of others is aroused, and the joke is passed on, and more people are attracted to the steadily growing throng, until a huge gaggle of laughing banqueteers has encircled the two scientists. Violet, pale beneath her face-powder, and still seated near the heart of the kerfuffle, has the presence of mind to keep listening to her father’s urgent and garbled speech to Mr Darwin, the content of which is causing her increasing unease.

  ‘His name is Tobias Phelps,’ continues Scrapie excitedly. As the import of her father’s words dawns on Violet, she groans, then freezes, immobilised with shock. She has not felt such a churning confusion of emotions since the death of the Laudanum Empress. Her father is tugging at Darwin’s sleeve.

  ‘He is a creature aged some twenty years,’ her father is telling Darwin. ‘Nurtured as a man, and with quite remarkable – really most astonishing – success. What I am planning to do, Mr Darwin, once you have inspected him for yourself and verified my findings’ – Violet leans forward, straining to listen – ‘is to keep him captive for a few days, so that other zoologists may have a chance to view him while he is still alive’ – Violet gasps, and clutches her hand over her mouth – ‘then kill and stuff him myself, and present him thus to the Zoological Society.’

  Keep him captive? Kill and stuff him?

  Violet feels suddenly quite monstrously sick. She drops her fan to the floor with a clatter and clutches her chair, her knuckles whitening with the pressure of grasping on. It’s as much as she can do to prevent herself from keeling over. So that is what Tobias was trying to tell her that day! That is why he was so upset, and why he had insisted on writing it down on that piece of paper. Not monk, but monkey! The Gentleman Monkey!

  ‘Oh no!’ she groans, remembering with sudden clarity the braising process, and the shrimp sauce that had accompanied the dish that killed the Laudanum Empress.

  ‘I ate him!’ she whispers to herself, appalled. ‘I ate his father! I am a cannibal!’

  ‘Come along, then, Mr Darwin!’ Scrapie is saying. ‘I left him standing over by that pillar. Let’s go and meet him!’ Another huge smile spreads across the face of Charles Darwin, and the naturalist once again throws back his head and laughs uproariously, shaking little fragments of food from his beard as he does so.

  ‘I should have thought to come in fancy-dress myself,’ he chortles good-humouredly. ‘Dressed as a gorilla. I believe one can hire such a costume. Would that not have been more apt, for such an occasion, Dr Scrapie? Might the’ – he lowers his voice conspiratorially – ‘Royal Hippopotamus, as you call her, have been amused?’

  But Dr Scrapie is not laughing. He is looking strangulated instead. His face is almost blue. He is still clutching Mr Darwin’s sleeve, and now starts tugging it again with urgency.

  ‘There is no time to lose,’ Violet murmurs to herself, gulping back her urge to vomit and smoothing the cream crêpe of her billowing skirts.

  ‘But he is the answer to your paradox, sir!’ Scrapie is insisting to Mr Darwin, who is by now laughing so heartily that he appears at serious risk of choking. ‘I swear, sir, that this is not a joke!’

  Darwin laughs some more. ‘I do not possess a paradox,’ he replies.

  ‘Well, you do now!’ explodes Scrapie, wrenching the man by the arm and frog-marching him across the ballroom. The bevy of interested spectators follows chattering and giggling in their wake. What an unexpectedly entertaining occasion this is turning out to be! As they move off, Violet bites her lip, her mind racing.

  ‘Push!’ Abbie is yelling at the twins.

  ‘I warned you,’ says the Laudanum Empress, hovering by the loo. She did no such thing, but Abbie is in no state to argue. When Abbie had made the call to the Baldicoot Medical Centre, she’d been referred to the Ambulance Service, which had refused point blank to send an emergency vehicle.

  ‘But this is real!’ Abbie had screamed.

  ‘That’s what they all say, love,’ said the duty nurse wearily.

  ‘We’ll pay the fine – we don’t care!’ shrieked the twins.

  ‘Sorry, love,’ said the duty nurse, when Abbie relayed this. ‘The fact is, all the ambulances are out. They’re calling it the Day of Madness.’

  ‘Well fuck you, then!’ shrieked Abbie, distraught. What was happening to her? She’d never uttered a swear-word before in her life, until today. And now two (there was a ‘bugger’, earlier) in front of Oscar Jack! Could she be developing Tourette’s syndrome? Good thing Oscar’s here, though, she realises suddenly. Because there’s no sign of Norman, or of that wastrel Buck. He’s off on some wild monkey chase, apparently.

  ‘Bless you!’ she sobs at Oscar Jack. The television producer has grabbed the twins’ camcorder, perched it on the kitchen table and left it running; no slouch he, when it comes to capturing a potential exclusive. In addition, he’s rolled up the sleeves of his leather jacket and is now doing sterling work with towels and bottles of Perrier.

  ‘AAAGH!’ yell the twins again.

  Wow. If this is another of those bogus ones, thinks Oscar Jack, then it’s frighteningly realistic.

  When I saw the Contortionist leap off the elephant’s head and pirouette across the room, I knew I must confront her.

  Following her with difficulty across the banqueting hall, tripping over the legs of my trousers and bumping into dinner guests with plates piled high with meat, I reached a corridor which led to a parlour which led to a door which swung shut in my face. LADIES’ POWDER ROOM, it said.

  I hesitated for a moment, and then entered.

  And came face to face with my father, the Gentleman Monkey.

  I stopped in my tracks and caught my breath. And stared. He was holding a towel of purple and yellow. His eyes were a bright and unnatural blue. His fur was a rusty orange-red – the same colour and the same coarse texture as my own hair. Like me, he had a thick down on his arms. He was a little shorter than me. His expression was one of great nobility and poise. He had a short tail, which emerged from a slit in his red pantaloons and curled upwards behind him like a question mark.

  The Contortionist was standing in front of him, gazing into his blue and strangely human eyes. She was oblivious to my presence; for a while, we both stood there staring at the monkey, each lost in his own thoughts. Finally I cleared my throat.

  ‘Excuse me, madam?’ I said.

  She jumped, and turned to look at me. She seemed to be crying; the frills of her little ballet tutu were trembling.

  ‘Madam, I believe you are my mother.’

  She stared at me. She said nothing. She just stared.

  ‘And this – gentleman – is my father,’ I ventured. ‘Am I right?’

  ‘Lawks a mercy,’ she said, sucking in her breath. ‘Fancy meeting you here.’

  She bit her lip. I held out my hand, and she took it. We shook hands formally.

  ‘Madam, I think you owe me an explanation,’ I mustered.

  ‘S’pose I do, Tobias,’ she said, sighing. ‘S’pose I do.’

  ‘You – know my name?’

  ‘Yes.’

  She told me everything. Horace Trapp had kidnapped her, and kept her in a cage on his Ark.

  ‘It was an old slave-trader,’ she said. ‘Cos that’s what he used to do. Travelled between London and Africa and Georgia, selling slaves. But then he had a shipload die on him, and there was a big scandal in London. So he switched to animals inst
ead, got this caper going for Queen Victoria. The Animal Kingdom Collection.’

  I nodded. This much tallied with what Dr Scrapie had told me.

  ‘But I finds out he has some other business. And that’s why I’m in the cage with – this dear gentleman,’ she said. Her voice softened, and she took the monkey’s hand in hers as she spoke. It was an oddly moving sight.

  ‘Other business?’ I asked. ‘What sort of other business?’

  But she ignored me; she appeared to be speaking almost from a trance. ‘It’s Higgins tells me what Trapp’s planning. Trapp never bothers to tell me himself, does he? There I was then, having this idea that I was just there to keep the gentleman company, like a playmate for him. But he’s soon a lot more than that to me.’

  I blushed, as the little woman continued the extraordinary tale of my genesis.

  ‘I discovers I’m up the spout, around the same time as I discovers that this is what Trapp was wanting all along. That was his other business.’

  ‘He wanted you and the – gentleman here – to …?’

  I was unable to find the words to complete my question.

  ‘Yes. Higgins tells me he was hoping to breed from us.’

  ‘Hoping to breed? Hoping to? Why?’ I felt sick.

  ‘Slaves,’ she said. A chill ran through me. ‘He had this theory. After the scandal over his dead slaves, and the campaign to have the trade abolished, he’d been hatching this plan to mate a human with a monkey, to get an offspring. To breed a new kind of slave, that’s not completely human. “A race of natural inferiors”, he calls it. If you’re not strictly speaking a man, see,’ she said, ‘you haven’t got no rights like men does.’

  I gasped.

  ‘But why?’ I asked.

  ‘Profit,’ murmured my new-found mother. ‘He was after making a profit. He’d seen the slave trade coming to an end. He reckoned the problem all along with the human slaves was that they’d end up with the same rights as other folk. The only way to ever get that kind of cheap labour again without a big hoo-ha was to create –’

  ‘I see,’ I said.

  ‘Yes. But he hadn’t bargained on my gentleman friend.’

  We both looked at him, with a mixture of pity and awe.

  ‘Anyway, when I finds this out, that that’s what he’s planning, that’s when I know we has to escape, even if it means –’

  She hung her head.

  ‘They all died,’ she said bluntly. ‘It happened the night the storm was brewing. When Steed comes to give us our slop, I distract him with a few little favours while my gentleman friend sneaks the key to our cage from his pocket. When they’ve gone back up to their cabins, we opened all the animals’ cages to take attention away from us, and they all shot out and started rioting, and ripping each other to pieces.’ She paused, and squinted painfully at the memory. ‘It was a nightmare. They was all killing each other and my gentleman friend, when he sees Trapp come towards us, he pounces on him, and grabs him by the throat, all ready to kill him, and I’m screaming at him to do it, to strangle him, but Trapp’s got a syringe in his hand and as soon as the needle goes in, my gentleman friend just falls to the floor stone dead.’ Her eyes fill suddenly with tears.

  ‘So it was Trapp who killed him? With the syringe?’

  ‘Yes.’ She looks up at me, and the tears fall. She makes no attempt to wipe them away. ‘He died trying to save my life, Tobias. And yours. I couldn’t stop him.’ She is sobbing now. ‘I saw him die.’

  Tentatively, I put my arm around her, and hand her my handkerchief. She grabs it and blows her nose furiously.

  ‘He loved life so much,’ she’s whispering through her tears. ‘He was so funny, so clever, so innocent. So good-hearted. He was all instinct. I realised as soon as I saw him in the light of day that he wasn’t a man. I never pretended he was.’ She strokes his arm. ‘He was more than a man.’ She pauses. ‘And he was better than a man.’ The tears begin again. ‘He laid down his life for us, Tobias,’ she wails. ‘He wasn’t called a gentleman for nothing.’

  I swallow painfully. ‘And then?’ I whisper.

  ‘When I sees he’s dead,’ she sniffs, ‘that’s when I jumps ship. I have no idea where we are. Could be in the Caribbean, for all I know. In fact it’s the English Channel. We must’ve been on our way back. Anyway, I swims till I’m half-drowned. I’m just wearing my tutu. Bloody cold, it was. Near froze, but I’m a strong swimmer. Then I gets caught in a fishing net, and pulled along. Must’ve been dragged aboard with all the fish, cos when I wakes up, I’m on a fishing boat, stinking. The next thing I know, I’m in London bloody docks, of all places. Went straight to the workhouse. I got there, and gave birth to you.’

  I felt myself swaying on my feet.

  The Contortionist laughed suddenly. ‘Silly of me, but when I saw your tail, I still got the shock of my life.’

  ‘What is zis, Violette?’ asks Cabillaud, reappearing before her with the fan she has dropped, and flapping it to cool her. ‘You are not well, ma chérie?’

  He has seen this look before. Years ago, on his own face, when he gazed in the mirror aboard the Beagle, and thought of his sweetheart Saskia.

  ‘No. I am suddenly most terribly unwell!’ croaks Violet, still clutching her chair. ‘You must help me, Monsieur Cabillaud! My father is planning to kill and stuff the man I – the gentleman I –’

  ‘Love,’ finishes Cabillaud. He knows. It is written all over her face. ‘You must escape wiz ’im, zen,’ he suggests.

  ‘How?’ wails Violet, kneading her pudgy hands together in distress.

  ‘I will open ze kitchen doors for you, ma chérie! Now go and get ’im! Quick!’

  Violet, her heart beating like a war-drum in her heaving bosom, scans the room; the two scientists and their accompanying mob of laughing guests have finished their search of the northern corner of the ballroom, and are now heading west in the direction of another marble pillar.

  ‘I told him to bloody-well stay put!’ she hears her father shrieking as he strides through the dancing throng, still frog-marching Darwin with him.

  ‘This is a most amusing game of hide-and-seek, is it not?’ laughs Mr Darwin good-naturedly. He had not wished, initially, to attend the Banquet, bad health and a hermit-like disposition combining to make him shun most public occasions – but he has been pleasantly surprised by this evening’s turn of events.

  ‘Hey! Has anyone seen a monkey-man?’ yells Scrapie. And the mob takes up the cry.

  Lifting up the billowing swathes of her skirts, Violet rises from her chair and hurtles off in the direction of the ladies’ powder room like a human torpedo.

  My mother had left me speechless.

  ‘He’s the only reason I come here to do this banquet job,’ she said, still stroking the Gentleman Monkey’s hairy arm. ‘I heard he was here. Friend of mine, Nancy, I told her all about him and me. Her man Frank, he’s a Palace footman. She says to me she’s sure my gentleman’s here, from what Frank’s said. That settles it. When Hillber talks to me about the Time-Bomb, I says yes. I’d’ve done anything to see him again, one last time.’

  The tears were running freely down her cheeks, leaving grey tracks. I, too, brushed away a tear as the Contortionist continued her story.

  ‘So you were born in the workhouse. When they saw you, with your tail, and your monkey feet, they said I’d mated with the Devil, and they chucked me out. I came straight to the Fairground. I knew there was a way of making money, and we did – hand over fist. You were called the Devil-Child of Greenwich. It’s the workhouse people in Greenwich, what gives me the idea to call you that.’

  Devil-Child? I was far from keen on the sound of this, but I held my tongue. Instead I asked, ‘And then what happened? How did I lose my tail?’

  ‘Well, I kept you in a cage –’

  ‘A cage?’ I interrupted. ‘You kept me in a cage?’ I remembered my vision during the Flood: I had seen a cot with golden bars, guarded by a beast.

  ‘I was working,
wasn’t I?’ she said. ‘I didn’t have the choice. I had to do this contortionism thing: human knots and all that. Mr Hillber wasn’t just going to pay me for existing, was he? But you wouldn’t suckle from anyone else, so he had to keep me. Anyway, your cage is right next to the Man-Eating Wart-hog’s.’ I had a sudden memory of the creature; its orange-ochre eyes, with their vertical slits; its vile carbuncles. I shivered.

  ‘Well, it’s thanks to him you lost it. He’s a tricky customer. He’s hungry one day, or playful. You tail is sticking through his bars. So he –’

  She stops. Looks embarrassed. Ashamed. Then drops her voice.

  ‘He bites it off.’

  My God. Again I remembered my vision in the church during the Flood. Suddenly it all made sense. The Angel. The creature. The blood. The screaming, shrill and hoarse.

  ‘I remember it,’ I said. She had been the Angel.

  ‘But he didn’t like the taste,’ she said, giving a little bitter laugh. ‘He spat it out. We tried to sew it back on, but it was no use, so I stuck it in an old jar of pickle.’

  She paused, and began to stroke my father’s furry cheek wistfully. For my own part, I was having trouble taking all this in. All my life I had wondered about my origins. But now – it was as if a dam had burst, and the answers to all my questions were all gushing out at once. I was left reeling.

  ‘After you’d lost your tail,’ my mother continued, ‘you were doing badly. You had a fever, and I knew that unless you saw a doctor, you was going to die. Mr Hillber said you’d have to go. You were no use to him without a tail, and to be honest, I knew that if you were to stand a chance, I’d have to –’ She stopped again, clearly distressed.

  ‘Abandon me,’ I finished.

  ‘Yes. That’s about the size of it.’ Her voice was a mere croak, lost in the increasingly wild noises coming from the banqueting hall. She wasn’t looking at me when she spoke. She was looking at the creature. Staring into his blue glass eyes, as though she could read the past in them.

  ‘The circumstances was most particular,’ she murmured.

  ‘I am sure they were,’ I whispered. I felt a lump in my throat.