Ark Baby (29 page)

This was true. During the daytime, the sun’s brilliant rays pierced the windows, creating haloes of dust on the furniture, and causing the dark wood table to gleam, Parson Phelps now noted, like the carapace of a great mystical beetle.

‘God loves the beetle,’ he said, staring at the table. ‘That’s why He made so many.’

‘ “
And the earth was without form and void
,” ’ intoned the bearded clergyman, ‘ “
and darkness was on the face of the deep
.” ’

‘I had to pay her,’ said Parson Phelps. ‘Otherwise she’d have told him who his father was.’

‘ “
Our Father which art in Heaven
,” ’ droned the blond-haired clergyman, doing something complicated and unsuccessful with the tangle of his fingers.

Parson Phelps asked in a croak, ‘Did I do wrong?’

‘
Thy Isambard Kingdom come
,’ said the bearded clergyman. ‘
Thy Isambard rum-te-tum
.’

‘God will forgive you. You are a lost sheep in distress.’

‘Baa-aa,’ bleated the blond and the bearded clergymen in unison, untangling the purple Clifton Suspension Bridge.

Charles Darwin had a lot to answer for.

Now, alone, Parson Phelps adjusts his needles and his ball of wool, and commences another row of knitting, but after three stitches, he stops. He can’t see for tears. He sniffs a long, shuddering sniff, then wipes his eyes with his ball of blood-red wool. Snatching up his crumpled letter, he rises from his chair, and his knitting falls to the floor. The ball rolls to the other side of the room, dividing the floor with a thin line of red. Parson Phelps stands still for a while. Then he carefully steps over the line, and walks to the darkened window.

Below: the ocean. Huge. Chaotic. Dark as ink. He pictures the slashing rain on the glassy waves, and the
Ark
bobbing. A toy of wood and string.

Clutching the Frozen Woman’s crumpled letter in his hand, he stares out into the void, and into the darkness on the face of the deep.

Then, just as we reechis the shors of MOROCKO, I falls ill.

Very ill. Fever.

The Arke rolls and rolls on the wavs, and I thinke: I am in a dreem. I hav been so SIK wiv this Fever that I dont no wen the Ark stops, or wen the GENTLEMAN cums. Just wak up wun mornin or afternoon or wotever, an smel the barber, stil in darknis, and he is ther. I tuches him and I SCREEMS, an he SCREEMS too. I shufles to the other side of the cage.

Storm in the nite. Arke rockin in the dok like its goin to sinke. Giraf forls over an dyes. Rogers sicke like a dog, sew him rite. TRAPP nower to be seene.

Me and him is thrown agenst eech uther. He stil hasnt sed a wurd. But in the storm, suden, we is flung together and he puts his arms round me, stil dusnt sa a wurd. And nor dus I. He just holds me and I feel his HART beeting, beeting, against MY OWN HART.

I could feel a heart beating on either side of me, as we lay in bed. And my own heart a piggy-in-the-middle.

‘Polygamy’s a natural instinct,’ murmured Rose, breaking the silence with a yawn of Sunday-morning contentment.

‘A bestial urge,’ mumbled Blanche, reaching for the heritage chart on the bedside table. They’d start conversations like that, sometimes halfway through. Like they’d done the first half in silence.

‘Look, Buck, we’re nearly done,’ said Rose, thrusting the chart at me.

‘We worked on it last night,’ said Blanche, while you were down the Crow with Dad.’

I looked. It was impressive. They’d added some heraldic shields with fleurs-de-lis and lions rampant round the edge since I last saw it, and felt-tipped in the structure of the tree; just the names were missing.

‘Hope it’s all worth it,’ I said. I had my doubts. The more I heard about this Dr Bugrov, the less I liked the sound of him. He’d managed to convince the girls that the American heritage craze, where the newly retired come over in coaches to bore you with their roots, was also going to take a grip on our own dying nation, and make them rich. Though how they’d managed to wangle a grant to research their own family tree was beyond me. Oh well. Maybe he was right. There were certainly a lot of foreign film crews about the place, recording poignant documentaries about the end of an era, like they did
in Hong Kong, before it was handed back to China. Voyeurs, I thought. Parasites.

‘Look, Mum’s mother was a Clegg,’ said Rose, shoving a computer printout at me.

‘And her mother was a Tobash,’ put in Blanche, accordioning it out in front of me. They could be a couple of trainspotters, with a map of a gigantic and rather tedious railway junction.

‘And before that, there were Boggses on her father’s side, and Morpitons on the mother’s.’

‘So we’re incredibly interbred,’ they said together, and made a face.

‘Practically a species in your own right, then,’ I said. They seemed to like this idea, and did some giggling.

‘Just one generation to go,’ commented Blanche, yawning.

‘God, I feel sick,’ said Rose.

‘Me, too,’ said Blanche.

‘Must be those Victorian veggie things Mum cooked,’ says Rose, yawning. ‘From that recipe book she found in the attic.
The Fleshless Cook
. Puke City.’

‘But who’s to say when you stop?’ I asked, peering at their genealogy chart. ‘Surely a family tree can go on for ever?’

‘The module only requires five generations,’ said Rose firmly, yawning again.

‘Then we get our diploma,’ said Blanche, yawning, too. Yawning’s infectious; suddenly I had to do it, too. I snuggled down under the duvet. Idly, Sigmund stirred. I ran my foot up Roseblanche’s shin. Ugh; it was all stubbly. I tried Blancherose’s: likewise. Sigmund shrank back. It hadn’t been like that in the beginning.

‘We haven’t shaved lately,’ they said together.

‘We’ve been feeling too lazy,’ said Rose. ‘In fact, we’re going to spend the whole day in bed.’

‘Because we feel ready to throw up,’ finished Blanche.

‘You certainly know how to turn a guy on,’ I said.

What was it about women? This was a question that was aired from time to time in the Stoned Crow, but no one seemed to have
the answer. Charlie Peat-Hove thought it was purely hormonal. Ron Harcourt said it was their mothers’ fault. Tony Morpiton said it was to do with the nature of society. But I reckoned they just evolved that way.

‘Your turn to make the coffee, Buck!’ said Rose, jabbing me in the ribs.

‘It’s always my turn.’

‘Hey, he’s observant!’ they giggled.

‘Except this morning, we don’t feel like coffee,’ announced Rose.

‘We feel like Ovaltine.’

Roseblanche, Blancherose, my Balls and chain, I thought, as I heaved myself out of bed, and headed downstairs to do their bidding.

‘Chop chop!’ they yelled after me.

‘Your whim is my command!’ I yelled back. I’d heard it somewhere.

Believe it or not, it had only been a month since they moved in. It had certainly been a novelty in the beginning. I suppose that’s the nature of novelties. I hadn’t been involved in anything polygamous before. I’d always associated it with baboons and sheiks.

After the nightclub in Hunchburgh, they’d stayed the night at my place. And the next night, and the next. The beauty of it, but the trouble, too, was that there were two of them, and only one of me. I’d always been in charge of things in bed, with other women. But I wasn’t, with these two. It wasn’t just our limbs that got entangled; it was our roles as well. It was quite a thrill, at first, being outnumbered and manhandled like that. I was the luckiest bloke in the world, I kept telling myself. Not everyone could have hacked it; there was stamina required, after all. I was doing the work of two men, let’s face it. At weekends they’d wear me out, so that sometimes, come Sunday night, Sigmund would go on strike. Then they’d insist, and pummel away at me and cajole me with licking and whispers and I felt like their sex object, being pushed and shoved about according to their
whims. Afterwards, I’d lie between them and listen to their stereo breathing. But it wasn’t just sex they dominated. They kept making bilateral rulings about everything we did. Whose decision was it, that they’d move in with me? Not mine.

You went and asked the father’s permission, in the old days.

‘I would like to ask you for your daughter’s hand in marriage, sir,’ you’d say.

Those days are gone.

‘Bog off,’ was Norman’s reaction when I announced that his daughters and I were all three planning to live together on a semi-permanent basis. ‘That’s what they call it in advertising,’ he said, noticing my puzzled look. ‘Buy one, get one free. Good thinking, Batman! I’ll buy you an emperor-sized bed. There’s a flat-pack model down at B and Q. Sorted!’

‘Now we’ll all be able to breathe,’ sighed Abbie happily. It wasn’t that it hadn’t been a joy having the twins at home all these years, she explained; it was just that with the Pepto-Bismol addict in the lounge all the time nowadays, the place was feeling a bit crowded. ‘Plus – don’t laugh – I feel ready to spread my wings a bit, TV career-wise!’

We didn’t laugh. It was sad.

‘Time they flew the nest, anyway, I reckon, if the truth be told,’ said Norman. ‘No offence, Buck, but we’d been scratching our heads a bit over their future. We reckoned they’d be on the shelf for ever, what with the curtains coming down on Britain, and all the young blokes buggering off like rats leaving the proverbial.’

All had gone well to begin with, I reflected, as I hunted for the Ovaltine and microwaved the milk for the two-headed monster upstairs. It’s every bloke’s dream, I reminded myself, to have two nubile women squirming all over him like a couple of audacious eels. ‘So don’t knock it, mate!’ I murmured aloud, as I fumbled about with mugs and artificial sweeteners.

Then I stopped. ‘Come on, Buck!’ I urged myself. ‘Get a grip! Isn’t it obvious that you’re living in paradise?’

I plinked two sweeteners into each mug of Ovaltine.

I realised early on – within a couple of days – that the girls had their eccentricities, but I coped. While I went about my veterinary practice, which consisted mainly of vaccinating cows against BSE and grappling with a dispute over Mrs Clegg’s foal, which she claimed had been driven insane by the hallucinogen I’d administered, the twins had been working on their genealogy chart with disconcerting zeal, using the St Nicholas’s Church marriage register for what they called empirical data. They’d spent hours poring over it, and copying out entries, and computerising tables. As for their obsession with unwanted body hair – they’d been great leg-shavers in the early days, both of them – it hadn’t bothered me unduly. Quite the opposite, in fact, I thought now, ruefully. Call me old-fashioned, but who wants to be scratched all over by stubble, or have his girlfriends look like a couple of dykes? And their phobia about showing their feet – well, Sigmund and I actually found it quite sexy that their feet were a no-go area, and that they insisted on keeping their socks on during –

‘The joy of socks,’ I called it. They’d made a face, like it wasn’t the first time someone had made that quip. Like it was the hundredth, in fact. I’ll admit that it did bother me that they’d been round the block somewhat. The twins exchanged one of their secret looks whenever their genealogy teacher, Dr Bugrov, cropped up in conversation, and I got wolf-whistled in the pub, when the word spread that we were a threesome. Ron Harcourt made a ‘Rather you than me’ sort of face, and Jimmy Clegg winked at me, and Keith Hewitt made the double thumbs-up sign, and Tom Morpiton asked me rather pointedly how I was bearing up.

One night I went out with a spray-can, and attacked the graffiti on the harbour wall. It made me feel gallant, to insert that word NOT, in between the ARE and the SLAGS.

The microwave pinged at the same time as the doorbell rang. It was Abbie, laden with boxes from the Old Parsonage, which she thrust at me with finality. ‘If they’re moving in with you, they might as well make a thorough job of it,’ she announced,
taking off her coat and beginning to sort through some of the paraphernalia she’d brought: an array of Barbie dolls, sheets, quilts, thermoses, aspirin, and articles of feminine hygiene. When I saw the economy boxes of tampons, my heart sank; female plumbing always makes me squirm. It’s all those rogue hormones.

‘By the way, Buck,’ said Abbie, smoothing the pristine cuffs of her baby-blue seersucker blouse, ‘there’s something for you in that box of magazines over there; I thought it might be of interest. I found it stashed away in a corner of that old Victorian wardrobe, the one that had the stuffed animals in.’

I looked at the cardboard box she’d indicated: it was full of women’s magazines. I pulled one out; it was covered in headlines about human freaks. MY MUM STOLE MY HUSBAND – AND THEN MY CHILDREN! THIS MAN WAS PREVIOUSLY A WOMAN – TWICE! I PAID MY TEACHER FOR SEX – IN CHEWING GUM! I was getting quite sucked into one of the articles – about a beautiful woman whose plastic surgeon had accidentally amputated both her ears – when Abbie interrupted me.

‘There it is,’ she said, pointing to the box. It was a yellow, tattered old notebook, bound together with string. ‘I thought you might be interested, it seems to be zoological.’

Reluctantly, I abandoned the article about the woman who’d lost her ears (she married the surgeon who did it), and blew some dust off the notebook. The title was hand-written, in faded ink.
A NEW THEORY OF EVOLUTION
, BY DR IVANHOE SCRAPIE. The date at the bottom was obliterated by a smear of what looked like blood.

While Abbie bustled about re-arranging the furniture and running her finger along the mantelpiece to check for dust, I flicked through the treatise. I’m not much of a reader, but there were some pictures in it that caught my attention. They were quite amateurishly done, but I recognised the ink sketches none the less; they were of mammal bones and the skulls of what were undoubtedly primates.

‘Interesting?’ asked Abbie. ‘The Empress suggested it would be up your street.’

‘Yes. Thanks.’ I continued leafing through. It was the ink sketch of the monkey that made me stop and stare.