Ark Baby (17 page)

‘Delicious. I haven’t enjoyed flesh so much for a long time,’ agreed the Laudanum Empress.

But under the table, the puppy Suet whimpered.

‘He must be hungry,’ murmured Violet, retrieving the last remaining scraps of the braised primate from her mother’s plate and chucking them on the floor. But instead of snapping them up, as any normal dog might have done, the ungrateful Suet merely growled suspiciously at the meat.

It was the following day that gastric illness struck the Scrapie household. Violet and Dr Scrapie were doubled up with acute diarrhoea, and Cabillaud took to his bed. On the
chaise-longue
in the drawing room, the Empress’s psychic particles dispersed, and the shadow of death took their place.

‘I see a town called Thunder Spit,’ the Empress muttered feebly, her eyelids flickering. ‘I see a jar on a shelf. I see a gourd plant, and a rockpool, and a ballerina and a –’ The Empress never finished her sentence.

She had officially crossed to the Other Side.

Cuisine Zoologique
had claimed its first victim.

‘Food poisoning?’ asks Abbie Ball, aghast, when the Victorian phantom has finished recounting the circumstances of her death. As a home-economics teacher, Abbie is more aware than most of the dangers of unhygienically prepared food. ‘Most likely to have been salmonella, I expect. Or E coli. Well, I suppose you didn’t have fridges and clingfilm in your day. Things can’t have been as developed then as they are now, Mrs Scrapie.’

The phantom sighs. This silly woman, Abbie Ball, in whose home she has recently had the misfortune – thanks to something called a ‘loft conversion’ – to find herself, appears to be convinced that the world has improved in the hundred and fifty years since her death – although a quick glance at the year 2005 is enough to inform one that this is far from so. Why, the whole British race is becoming extinct, according to the electronic spirits inhabiting the crystal box in the living room. Only last week, the news spirit told her that religious fanatics had destroyed something called the National Egg Bank – making a disaster out of a crisis. Can this really be called progress?

‘Actually, it wasn’t the flesh that was poisonous,’ she tells Abbie, adjusting her petticoats and sipping at the glass of Pepto-Bismol that is her one physical indulgence in these godforsaken times. ‘It was the praxin the creature had been injected with before death. My husband did an analysis of the remaining meat. Suet was right not to touch it.’

‘Suet?’

‘My daughter’s dog.’

‘The stuffed corgi in the attic? Is that him?

‘Well observed, Mrs Ball,’ murmurs the Empress.

‘Oh do call me Abbie.’

‘I’d rather not, if you don’t mind. Now please excuse me for a moment; I do believe
The Young and the Restless
is showing on your crystal box.’ And she floats off into the living room. Seconds later, the signature tune of her favourite soap opera blares out.

Abbie winces. ‘I wish she’d keep the sound down,’ she mutters.

When, a month ago, Abbie Ball had first spotted the Victorian wardrobe up in the attic, she had assumed that it contained the outdated camping equipment of her late parents, Iris and Herman Boggs, who had been tragically killed in a Swiss avalanche ten years previously. The huge second Empire
meuble
towered over her, two metres high and almost as wide. It was made of a darkly polished walnut, lovingly adorned with cherubs, bulging of thigh and cheek, bearing fruit and trumpets and little scrolls tied with ribbons. Abbie had not been keen to re-awaken memories of her beloved parents, but her domestic urge to clear up the loft overcame her hesitation, and she prised open the wardrobe’s vast door, which creaked and wheezed with age, and leaked from its ancient hinges the bitter dust of woodworm. Imagine her surprise when, instead of finding the poignant items she had anticipated, to wit, a chemical loo, aluminium pots and pans, folding camp beds and a portable gas cooker, she had instead unearthed a collection of stuffed mammals, ranging in size from small (a guinea-pig) to large (an entire ostrich), an ancient cookery book, an old painting of Noah’s Ark, a fossil, a scientific treatise about evolution, and a curious flask in the form of a crucifix, smelling faintly of rum.

‘Norman!’ she had wailed.

Her husband came heaving breathily up the stairs and followed the direction of her accusing finger. ‘Look at all this junk!’

‘Blimey,’ said Norman, sitting down heavily on an old laundry basket. You could have knocked him down, he said, with a proverbial feather.

‘What d’you reckon, love?’ he asked Abbie. ‘Worth a call to the Antiques Hotline?’

Neither of them spotted the phantom till later. The ghost – dressed in myriad petticoats – took a day to materialise, and then another day to declare herself fully.

‘My name is Mrs Charlotte Scrapie,’ she had announced, wafting into the room one Sunday teatime. ‘Although my family knew me as the Laudanum Empress, because of my unfortunate enthralment to a certain opiate. Is there a chemist’s shop in the vicinity? I feel the need of some pink medicine.’

And with that by way of introduction, she had allowed herself to solidify sufficiently, as a presence, to polish off four of Abbie’s barley flip-cakes. Her attention then turned to the execrable dress sense of her hosts, which she criticised in no uncertain terms.

‘What’s this?’ she had accused, snapping at Abbie’s elasticated waistband. ‘And what are those?’ she groaned, pointing at Norman’s giant frog slippers. ‘In my day we stuck to whalebone.’

By the following morning she had solidified completely, installed herself on the settee in the living room, and promptly substituted her laudanum dependence with an addiction to Pepto-Bismol and television.

As uninvited guests go, she was something of a pain, but there was no getting rid of her.

‘She’s one of those
après-fin-de-siècle
phenomena whatsits,’ pronounced Norman, after reading an article in the
Sunday Express.
‘ “
A tangible symptom of the Zeitgeist
”, in boffin-speak. They reckon there’s more and more of them about, with the Extinction Crisis. People looking backwards, rather than forwards. Going a bit doo-lally over history.’

Abbie made a face. ‘Well
I
certainly didn’t invite her here,’ she said firmly. ‘As far as I’m concerned, she can get straight back in that old wardrobe and stay there. All she does is criticise.’

‘I heard that,’ the Empress called through from the living room. ‘And by the way, your upholsterer should be shot.’

The Balls had mentioned the Old Parsonage’s new inhabitant
casually to the Vicar at the Twitchers’ Association AGM, but they were disappointed; he said he was only interested in her as an artefact of their joint psyche. Later, in the pub, Norman had discovered that the Vicar had said exactly the same thing,
vis-à-vis
the Peat-Hoves’ poltergeist, and the Morpitons’ haunted barn. ‘These sodding marriage-guidance counsellors,’ he grumbled. ‘They’ve got a one-track mind.’

So for lack of a means of exorcising her, the Laudanum Empress had, in the last month, become a fixture at the Old Parsonage. Apart from costing the Balls a small fortune in Pepto-Bismol, she made no real demands, Norman finally conceded, and reached the conclusion that they should be grateful for small mercies. Every cloud has a silver lining, after all.

‘And every silver lining has a stinking great cloud,’ muttered the Empress, who wasn’t keen on her side of the deal, either, but didn’t share Norman’s natural optimism. She would
gladly
go back in the wardrobe, if only they’d finish emptying it of stuffed animals, and would supply her with a portable crystal box.

Today Norman and Abbie are occupied with their Saturday jobs: he Black-and-Deckering at an intransigent piece of skirting in the upstairs toodle-oo; she preparing her weekly TV rehearsal. The Empress is still in the living room, engrossed in a soap opera. She’ll get square eyes if she doesn’t watch out. Meanwhile Rob Morpiton’s huge red setter has found its way into the garden of the Old Parsonage. Sensing the presence of the supernatural, it has now begun to bark frantically.

‘Sodding dog,’ mumbles Norman, fiddling with his drill-bit. ‘If that hound does a
mea culpa
on my lawn, I’m phoning Ron to come round with a pooper-scooper pronto. There’s a limit to goodwill, and it’s just been reached.’

But as well as inciting Norman’s anger, the red setter has also prompted animal connections in Norman’s brain, because after a couple of minutes, he remembers something, and wheezily plods his way down to the kitchen.

‘Getting to know the new vet,’ he tells Abbie. ‘He’s become quite a regular at the Crow. In fact, as regards my hangover the
morning after the explosion at the Egg Bank, I can confidently tell you that the finger of blame points at him.’

‘Hope he’s handsome,’ Abbie remarks. ‘That’ll be a nice treat for the girls.’

‘How about a nice treat for me?’ Norman ogles at her, forgetting Buck de Savile’s rendition of a string of Elvis Presley hits, his drunken monologue about a macaque monkey called Giselle and an insane woman called Mrs Mann, and the workings of the veterinary complaints procedure, and remembering instead how, last night, after the pub, beneath Abbie’s nightie – brushed cotton in winter, plain in summer – her White Cliffs of Dover had allowed themselves to be attacked by his eager earth-moving equipment. Norman’s
jeu de mots
concerning earth movements was in tribute to Ernest Hemingway’s famous
oeuvre, For Whom the Bell Tolls
, in which the leading lady says, after having it away, ‘The earth moved.’ Sometimes, as a variation on the same linguistic theme, he would ask afterwards, ‘Did I toll your bell all right for you, then, love?’ Abbie would always smile and say, ‘Yes thanks, Norman,’ and pull the nightie back down over her bony knees. She wasn’t bothered about not having her bell properly tolled: she always used the time to think up a new dessert recipe. Last night had been a gratifying experience for both of them; Norman’s earth-moving equipment had scraped through its MOT again, and Abbie had dreamed up a new way with profiteroles.

‘What?’ says Abbie, oblivious to Norman’s sexual reverie.

‘What d’you mean, what?’

‘You said something.’

‘Did I?’

‘Yes. About the vet.’

‘Oh,’ remembers Norman. ‘Nice bloke. He says he’ll look at the junk in the loft for us.’ He reaches for the biscuit tin. ‘He says he might have a book on taxidermy antiques. Reckons if they’re vintage, and a professional taxidermy job, they could well be worth something. Expect it depends on how they’re mounted.’ He chuckles, and wiggles his eyebrows up
and down. ‘As ’twere!’ he adds, popping a barley flip-cake into his mouth.

‘I’d better have another look,’ sighs Abbie. ‘And give them all a good dust. How many are there, d’you reckon?’

‘Well, there’s the famous ostrich, for starters,’ says Norman through a mouthful of flip-cake. ‘Plus a wombatty-looking job, a big monkey, and what looks like a badger. Oh, and a dog. He’s got a whatchermacallit on his collar with SUET engraved on it.’

‘That name rings a bell,’ says Abbie, taking out her notepad and adding DUST CREATURES to her list in her neat script. ‘I think the Empress said it was her daughter’s dog.’

‘The girls’ve enrolled on another course at the university,’ Abbie says, when Norman returns from chasing the red setter off the lawn. She checks the percolator. ‘Special studies, they call it.’

‘What’s that, when it’s at home?’

‘Something modern, by the sound.’

‘So they’re going intellectual on us again,’ smiles Norman, twirling a three-centimetre screw between finger and thumb. ‘Bless their cotton socks.’

As Norman returns to his DIY, picture his wife Abbie now a million miles away in her kitchen, reading, as she does every day, from the Recipe for Happiness. The recipe, writ large on a poster featuring cherubs with cooking pots, is dear to her heart; its homely kitchen philosophy has served her well:

It never fails to make her smile, and to put her in the mood for the task ahead. For which observe her now, checking her utensils for the morning’s full dress rehearsal of minestrone
suivi par
artichokes Riviera,
ensuite
potted pears
avec
cinnamon custard. Some people have things in their blood: she has food in hers. She’ll be trying out another of those Victorian veggie recipes later, from
The Fleshless Cook
by Violet Scrapie. The Laudanum Empress says they’ll be disgusting because they’re her daughter’s recipes, but what sort of taste does a self-confessed drug-addict have?

Pots, pans, knives, casserole, whisk, scissors, sieve, garlic-crusher, colanders, baking tin, all present and correct, standing by Worktop A ready for Camera One. And soup ingredients to the ready: pre-prepared stock, vermicelli, seasonings, peas, beans, carrots, Parmesan, white wine. The artichokes Riviera and potted pears ingredients are to stay in the fridge until after the commercial break. Camera Two, as always, she pictures perched several centimetres above the microwave, for the wider shot. Quite a flattering angle; she’s checked it from a step-ladder, narrowing her eyes and picturing the on-screen effect. It’s absurd, but despite her years of cooking experience, she still feels a little nervous.

Yes; nervous. The big day is right around the corner. She can feel it in her bones.

The scenario for the big day is as follows: an independent television producer’s car breaks down on the A210, and because his mobile phone is also on the blink, he walks to Thunder Spit where he smells a wonderful smell coming from the Old Parsonage. He rings the doorbell, and Abbie answers its chimes, her apron still on. The television producer, whose name is Oscar or perhaps Jack, wonders if he can use her phone to call the AA, as his mobile isn’t charged up. While they are waiting for the AA man to arrive, Abbie offers Oscar or Jack a cup of freshly brewed coffee and some of her home-made Apfelkuchen, and he is so bowled over by the Apfelkuchen, and the elegance and poise and
je-ne-sais-quoi
of Abbie Ball herself, that he enquires whether she has ever considered working as a television presenter, and would she do him the great honour of accompanying him to the studio for a screen test?