Ark Baby (31 page)

‘Well?’ Farthingale was demanding. ‘What’s the big secret? Is it edible?’

‘No!’ I cried, shocked. God forbid that they should eat human flesh!

‘Animal, vegetable or mineral?’ called another student.

‘It’s animal,’ I managed weakly. I just wanted them to stop talking about it. So I blurted, ‘It’s an umbilical cord. I have reason to believe,’ I faltered, ‘that it once joined me to my mother.’

At this, the room burst out into a cacophony of jeering, laughing, baying, hoots and whistles, as the jar and its by now distraught and miserable owner both became the focus of their mirth and derision.

‘Hand it over here!’ called Farthingale, egging them all on. ‘Let’s have a proper look.’

‘Yes, go on,’ said Popple. ‘Kinnon’s a student of medicine. He can give you an opinion as to the health of this intriguing object.’

‘There’s nothing to see,’ I cried. ‘Nothing!’ This was true enough; the liquid in the jar had reacted to the heat of my fireplace by becoming even murkier than on the day I received it from Thunder Spit. The cord was just a fuzzy blur.

But Kinnon, the young medical student, was adamant that he must inspect the thing, as he was currently most interested in obstetrics and gynaecology (here he winked at his fellow students), and he would hand it back to me as soon as he had had a peek-a-squeak at the object in question.

‘Please, I beg you, be careful!’ I cried, as my jar – suddenly incalculably precious to me – was handed down from the mantelpiece. I watched it being passed across everyone’s heads to Kinnon, who was over by the door next to another student smoking a pipe.

‘There may be a risk of fire!’ I murmured, feeling faint. Then I sank into a chair and said a silent prayer. Kinnon squinted into the jar.

‘May I open it?’ he asked, finally beginning to wrestle with the seal.

‘Yes!’ urged Farthingale. ‘Let’s all have a look!’

‘No, I beg you not to!’ I blurted, suddenly gripped by an inexplicable panic. My spine bristled. ‘It is an heirloom,’ I added weakly.

At this, the whole room fell about laughing again, and the women squealed with derision. One of them, I noticed, had her skirt hitched up high above her waist, and two drunken students were snapping at the elastic of her bloomers. I shot up from my chair and thrust my way through the throng as best I could to grab the jar back. This was going too far. With a sudden force of will, and an unaccustomed courage, I reached across to snatch it, but by now Farthingale had grabbed the jar from
the medical student and was holding it high above his head. I could see the sediment in the bottom swirling up, hiding the white organ completely from view.

Farthingale was now standing on the table. ‘Shall I open it, everyone?’ he yelled.

‘Yes!’ Many of the students, I now realised, were quite drunk, and I saw that the woman with the bloomers had now reached inside the trousers of one of the men and was fishing about inside. He was groaning.

‘No!’ I called pathetically, and lurched forward to snatch the jar. I managed to grasp it with one hand, but at that moment I trod on something slippery – doubtless a banana skin – and lost my grip. Farthingale pulled backwards and in the ensuing flurry of hands, the jar went flying through the air.

And smashed, horribly, and suddenly, at Kinnon’s feet.

Pandemonium!

A horrendous, pungent stench rose up from the puddle on the floor, and the room exploded into immediate panic as everyone flung their hands to their faces, choking.

‘Quick! Get out!’ shrieked Popple through the coughing. ‘Open the door, before we all suffocate!’

‘Fetch water!’ Ganney’s voice choked. ‘Dilute it!’

There was a great rowdy and chaotic surge for the door, and more slipping on banana skins, as screaming, shouting, coughing people, their eyes and noses running, tried to escape the fumes, but I just stood there, my eyes smarting from chemicals and tears, staring at the shattered fragments of glass and at my umbilical cord there on the floor. I groaned.

Kinnon, the medical student, was holding his nose and had crouched down to peer at it. Together, coughing, we stared at the thing.

‘A strange mother you must have had, Mr Phelps,’ he spluttered, ‘to play a trick on you like that.’

‘Trick?’ I asked shakily. ‘How is this a trick?’ I felt very faint.

‘All right, lad?’ enquired Kinnon. ‘Shall we get out of here?’

But I couldn’t answer just then. Kinnon wiped his mouth and nose with the back of his sleeve and coughed some more.

Finally, ‘How’s it a trick?’ I faltered. My voice was like that of the dying Mrs Phelps. Suddenly I had a vision of her blackened lung on the white sheet. She had thought it was her soul. ‘How’s it a trick?’ I repeated.

We gazed at the thing together as the formaldehyde vapour steamed off it. Kinnon looked at me. ‘Because that’s no umbilical cord,’ he said at last.

‘What is it, then?’ I managed queasily. I was still choking on the fumes that rose from it.

I need not have asked him, though, for anyone looking at it could have told me.

Help me, God.

‘Steady on,’ coughed Kinnon. ‘She was probably just having a joke.’ The base of my spine tingled in a violent, ghastly recognition: I reached across Kinnon and was violently sick into his lap.

Of the fifteen theological students due to be ordained the next morning, one was missing from the ceremonies. For I had fled.

The thing I had seen was a tail.

Wot I beg you to UNDERSTAND, Parson Phelps
, the Contortionist wrote,
is that the Cercumstancis woz most partikular
.

The circumstances were unprecedented; unique, even. That was the world’s verdict. Britain, as a nation, had entered a nine-month period of insanity. The first trimester was a shaky time, during which many marriages dissolved amid mutual recriminations.

‘It’s a war of the sexes,’ declared Norman. He was right; the situation was serious. Not least because –

No; wait. I’m telling this all arse about face.

The night the twins made their pregnancy announcement – along with five million other women – I was so battered by alcohol and shock that I’d passed out, unable to digest the news. The next morning, I didn’t have to: the nation had regurgitated it on my behalf. It turned out that the whole thing was an out-of-season April Fool’s joke. Or, as Ron Harcourt put it, ‘A load of hormonally induced female gobshite.’

Within twenty-four hours of the first scare in Glasgow, it had emerged that what we were witnessing was not a sudden wave of fertility emanating from Glasgow, but a sudden wave of mass hysteria, prompted by greed, prompted in turn by the five-million Euro Fertility Reward. The stammering psychologist had been right after all. Not a single pregnancy was real. They were all either deliberate hoaxes, or cases of delusion. And that was official. So official, that the Prime Minister said it three times in the House of Commons. ‘Official, official, official.’

‘Never in history,’ jeered the Leader of the Opposition, ‘has a government – or the media in its response – been so disastrously
hoodwinked! The words
headless
and
chickens
spring to mind!’ You couldn’t help agreeing. A domino effect set off by one woman, a certain Mrs Belinda Gillie, was to blame for the epidemic of delusion and trickery. Her pregnancy – the first case to be reported – had been a deliberate fake. Mrs Gillie had persuaded her husband – a doctor – to falsify two tests. She’d wanted the money from the reward.

‘She was so insistent,’ pleaded the shamefaced Dr Gillie on television. ‘I just wanted to make her happy.’ He paused, desperate. ‘You do things like that sometimes, to please someone.’

‘Even if you know it’s wrong?’ jabbed in the reporter.

Dr Gillie hung his head. ‘Well, sometimes, yes.’

When the news of Mrs Gillie’s ‘pregnancy’ had spread, first by word-of-mouth, then by rumour and local radio, then nationally – other women had latched on to the idea, subconsciously. All the pregnancies were either copycat hoaxes, or the result of a contagious mass hysteria whose epicentre was Glasgow. Everyone had been out for the Reward, was the analysis. Mass hysteria was common among women in times of crisis – varieties of Münchhausen’s syndrome in particular. It was practically
de rigueur
. It was a wonder, some speculated, that it hadn’t happened before.

‘Still pregnant?’ I asked the twins, after we’d switched off the TV the next morning. They were looking pale and worried.

‘Yes,’ they insisted indignantly. ‘Theirs may be fakes, but ours are real.’ Their voices, I noticed, were quite shaky.

‘Well, there’s a deadline on this one,’ I said. ‘Shall we lay bets?’

They scowled at me, and I left for Clegg’s farm. When I came back that evening, they were still huddled together in bed in their yellow dressing-gowns, whispering conspiratorially. There was a special programme on TV about it that night; a national poll had shown that, despite the quite incontrovertible medical proof that the pregnancies were fake, 60 per cent of the women who had claimed to be pregnant at the beginning of the scare hung on to their delusion.

And therein lay a social problem, the TV experts said, on a massive scale. You couldn’t get hold of a pregnancy-testing kit for love nor money, and all ultrasound scans were booked six months ahead. With delusional chaos – either euphoric or depressive – among the female population, male morale was hitting hitherto unplumbed depths. Primate sales had slumped since the mass hysteria struck, according to
Pets Today
, and many apes and monkeys – once beloved child-substitutes – were being found abandoned, now that their surrogate mothers were convinced they were expecting the real thing. In London, they’d set up a refuge for orphaned primates. That’s where I’ll go, I thought, if it all gets too much up here. Back to the jungle. The threat of Mrs Mann’s litigation seemed more distant than ever now; she’d be pregnant with the rest of them.

The weeks passed, and sociologists and social psychologists from all over the globe flocked to Britain with their camcorders and their questionnaires to chart the progress of the new ‘British disease’. A whole new industry seemed to spring from nowhere: suddenly there were phone-ins, ante-natal classes, public debates, pram sales, crisis-counselling services, baby books, hypnotherapy, aromatherapy, reflexology, foot massage, divorce negotiation, suicide counselling, and cuddly toys on every street corner. In the Stoned Crow, opinion was divided about how to handle the phenomenon of the mass hysteria. Keith Eaves, the weedy stammering psychologist who had been booed off the television on what became known as the Night of Madness, was now revered as an icon of common sense, and was appearing at charity events, photo opportunities and garden centres up and down the country. When he confessed to having considered abandoning his wife and emigrating to Finland at the beginning of the crisis, he was guaranteed instant hero status and offered his own TV show –
Breakthrough
– as counsellor to the nation. We watched
Breakthrough
regularly in the Crow.

‘There are three natural responses to any p-p-p-p-predicament of this n-n-n-nature,’ declared Dr Keith Eaves. ‘F-f-f-f-ight, f-f-f-f-flight, c-c-c-c-ollusion, or n-n-n-n-non-reaction.’

‘That’s four,’ I said.

‘I reckon it’s kinder to go along with it,’ said Norman. He and Abbie had taken the line – right from the beginning – that it would be unfair to burst the twins’ bubble. I disagreed; I thought it should be popped right away – if only I could pop it. I was a fighter.

‘Of these responses,’ Dr Eaves told us, ‘c-c-c-c-ollusion is the most dangerous.’

‘Hear that, Norman?’ I said.

‘Well, I happen to know that my wife
really is
pregnant,’ said Ken Morpiton, addressing the TV indignantly. ‘So what d’you say to that, Dr Eaves?’ We all exchanged a look. Ken was nuts.

‘I’m buggering off to my mum’s for a few weeks,’ confessed Ned Peat-Hove, taking the flight path. ‘I can’t stand it any more. All the nest-building that’s going on. The wife’s bought a buggy, and she’s knitting like crazy.’

We all agreed – apart from Ken Morpiton – that it was exploitative of the babywear manufacturers to flood the market with all this baby paraphernalia that was going to be unusable. It’d all have to be exported to the Third World, like all that frozen beef a few years back.

‘It’s greed that started it,’ said Billy Clegg. We all – apart from Morpiton – agreed.

‘Subconscious, of course,’ I added. ‘We’re dealing with severe delusion here.’

Ron Harcourt favoured the non-reactive approach, which Dr Eaves reckoned was the best way of dealing with the pregnancy delusion; neither confirm nor deny the fantasy. Not difficult, in his case. His Filipina, whom he’d ordered from a catalogue in the days when it was believed foreign women could be fertile in this country, was one of the few wives in Thunder Spit who wasn’t claiming to be pregnant. That was because she refused to have sex with Ron any more. He wouldn’t tell her he loved her. She couldn’t live without love. It had been a bad transaction. She was going back to the Philippines; she
was fed up with him. She’d rather live in poverty with a real man, she said.

‘Well, what if they really
do
have babies?’ persisted Morpiton, shouting over the television. ‘What if the doctors’ pregnancy tests are wrong?’ I exchanged a glance with Ron. Morpiton spotted it, and swung round to poke me in the chest accusingly. ‘OK, Buck, so when did your two girlfriends last have a period?’

This was true; the monster pack of tampons Abbie had brought remained untouched.

‘At least we won’t be suffering any more of that PMT malarkey,’ mused Billy Clegg. ‘But it’s funny, the way they all reckon they’re due nine months to the day after the Reward was announced.’

Norman agreed that we were talking loony tunes. That five-million yo-yo Reward had certainly had an impact on the nation’s psycho-wotsit. ‘If you’ll pardon my German.’

Not least in my own ménage. To celebrate the five million Euros – ten million, they reckoned, if they gave birth simultaneously – Roseblanche stole my credit card and went on a spree. Their bogus hormones had turned them into a couple of decorating maniacs, who felt the need to give my rented cottage a complete overhaul: Venetian blinds and a cloggy ochre paint-job in the downstairs loo, too close to shit-colour for comfort, peach and cranberry marble effect in the porch, reminiscent of dog-spleen, a Jackson Bollocky sort of wallpaper in the kitchen, three-piece suites with tassels and framed prints of arty-looking turnips bunging up the lounge. All my virtual Elvis concert tapes were relegated to the garage. As lust triangles go, it was expensive: within a month, they’d run me up a huge overdraft. Abbie, who took the collusion approach to their fake pregnancies, was the high priestess of taste, master-minding the whole operation from the John Lewis catalogue and cooking for the giant freezer she insisted I buy for her gals, to make honest women of them. The labour-saving device stood out in the garage, waiting to be fed with little cling-filmed dishes like a hungry gourmet animal. Meanwhile Norman would call round
every day with his toolbox, exhorting me to call him Mr Fixit, and nailing me ever more securely into my coffin of domesticity. By the end of the second trimester, Thunder Spit was awash with waddling women padded with wind, cushions, or genuine fat. Rose and Blanche, who had opted for genuine fat, had swelled to such a size that they could barely squeeze through the doors; the way they shared the weight of their phantom pregnancies, it was like a triplet had joined them. They were still attractive, but only in the way that a sculpture fashioned out of pure lard might be. Like all the other hysterics in the town, they were enjoying their mock fecundity, and flaunting it. They’d all get together in a gaggle for the swimaerobics classes at the leisure centre, then converge on Pizza Hut, which had a special ‘Eating for two’ discount on pizzas.