Ark Baby (34 page)

I left.

In the underground walkway, I fought my way through crowds of Saturday shoppers, street hawkers, homeless and sightseers. I followed the signs like an obedient tourist, climbed a flight of pissy-smelling concrete stairs, and emerged in the open air, next to a life-sized fibreglass triceratops guarding the Museum.

Pray God this is a wild goose chase
, I murmured as I approached the vast building. As I entered the arched portals and stepped into the gloom, I thought of Jonah. The Museum’s belly was filled with footsteps and echoes and whispers. I looked above me. The cornices crawled with ornamental tiles, and the stained-glass windows refracted and smithereened their colours, stippling the varnished walls with haphazard designs; it was not a whale, I realised, but an Aladdin’s cave, monstrous in its grandiosity, not a surface left undecorated. I know what Parson Phelps would have said. He had always hated a decorated surface. Something about the Devil finding work for idle hands. Something about the worship of graven images. He would have made the sign of the cross.

I reached inside my greatcoat, where my hand brushed against the crucifix and the whelk. Still there.

HER MAJESTY’S ANIMAL KINGDOM, said the copperplate writing on the notice before me. EXHIBITS ON LOAN FROM HER MAJESTY THE QUEEN’S COLLECTION. Following the direction of the sign’s pointing finger, I walked nervously into the gloom, my footsteps echoing on the ceramic tiles.

I could feel the eyes before I saw them. They stared from all directions, baleful and disturbing. My spine was bristling, and I felt my heartbeat betray my fear. And then I saw the beasts, and a chill ran through me.

They stood in stiff rows, staring at me from plinths and pedestals.

‘Good God!’ I breathed. I closed my eyes for a second, hoping that when I opened them again, the vision would have disappeared. But it had not.

The creatures were all wearing clothes.

A giraffe in a long tent-like dress with a fleur-de-lis design towered above me. A lion in pantaloons and braces, wearing a top hat, crouched next to it, ready to pounce. A wildebeest in a white nightgown and matching nightcap stood fixing me with its glare, its hooves clasped in a position reminiscent of prayer. What frozen forest of horror had I entered? Feathers gleamed beneath frilled shirts and frock-coats; fur was flattened beneath petticoats and pinafore dresses. An ostrich wore a frilled hat, like the one Mrs Sequin used to wear to church. A cow sported spectacles. A raccoon in a cassock wielded a walking-stick. The human eyes stared, both knowing and blank.

‘A travesty,’ I murmured, half-choking with horror. ‘A travesty of Nature!’

Scrabbling in my knapsack for my pen and notebook, I copied down the name of the taxidermist from a plinth – Dr Ivanhoe Scrapie – and fled from the Museum like a bat out of Hell.

Christ, what a whopper of a building; big enough, I reckoned, to house umpteen wide-bodied aircraft if the need arose. After
queuing up for ages, I had to pay nine Euros fifty to get in, though I noticed that, with a family ticket, it would have been a lot cheaper. The place resounded with the echoes of a million children oohing and aahing in the shadow of a huge brontosaurus skeleton. I hadn’t been to the Natural History Museum since I was a kid. I was in for a shock. No stuffed animals, for a start. Apart from the brontosaurus skeleton, it was all acrylic reconstructions and interactive hands-on stuff. A group of schoolkids suddenly poured in and started yelling obscenities. To my left, an ineffectual-looking bloke in a mauve tracksuit put up a hand and called, ‘Yo, kids! Let’s have a bit of shush, please!’

They ignored him, and carried on yelling and kicking their Coke cans about, and making silly faces. He was their teacher.

The primates were upstairs, in an exhibition all about the evolution of man.

In 14 Madagascar Street, Belgravia, Violet Scrapie is dressing for dinner, and picturing the capture of a whale by harpoon. She has recently seen an Italian
gravura
of such a scene, in which the artist, Rafael Ortona, disturbingly managed to show in the creature’s wildly swivelling eye all the agony and indignity of the blubber being stripped from its still-living flesh. In her imagination, she colours in the heart-breaking detail that Signor Ortona has delicately omitted from his
gravura
, yet so vividly evoked: the sea heaves red with blood, while beneath the water-line, the smaller fragments of blubber and flesh float down into the depths.

Nature, like Violet Scrapie, loathes the sight of wasted protein: these fragments will feed whole armies of sea-life. She sees the great sea-cucumber, a living ocean turd, laying claim. She observes the wily scissoring of the lobster’s claws as it snatches a hunk of blubber from a passing quillsnapper. And the thuggish gang of sharks attacking the carcass and stripping whole sections of it to the bone as the skeleton is hauled off. Violet knows,
having read it in one of her father’s zoological treatises, that depending on the swiftness of the action, and the temperature of the surrounding waters, the creature will emit vast quantities of steam from its flesh. Yes, steam. This is the effect of the heart’s great pounding motion as the mammal enters into a state of shock, pain and fright.

Imagine!

Imagine, too, how the blood then boils. How the flesh itself is heated, and the bones cook. And how the whole brute edifice is transmogrified into a grotesquely floating stew, a loose scaffolding of hot bones dragged through the choppy waves to Hunchburgh, where it is dismantled much as a ship itself can be dismantled in a shipyard, and the merchants dispatch its cleaned components – ribs, jawbone, tailbone, skull, in tiny quantities relative to the whale’s size, to the haberdashers and hosiers and couturiers of the Nation.

It is said that the bodices and hats and fashion accessories of Queen Victoria contain so much whalebone that two skeletons’-worth have not been enough to feed her rapacious wardrobe.

Violet bends asthmatically for the corset, reflecting with some resentment on the Royal Hippo’s hosiery supplies. No stingy annual clothes allowance for
her!

(Should whalebone be boycotted? she wonders suddenly. Why, surely it should!)

The contrast, Violet reflects, is stark: Victoria – wife, Queen, Ruler of Empire, owner of two skeletons worth of whalebone, and mother to a whole litter of blue-blooded royal babes. Violet Scrapie, distressed spinster. Violet Scrapie, daughter of the eminent Dr Scrapie, stuffer of animals By Her Majesty’s Appointment. Violet Scrapie, prisoner in her own home:

Huh.
When only one
. And when there are more? Eh, Mr Wordsworth? Ugly as a blasted moon.

On a more positive note, Violet’s mission,
The Fleshless Cook
, has been progressing in leaps and bounds. Only this morning, she has taken pride in the preparation of a hearty chestnut soup containing both cinnamon and parsley. Furthermore, she has finished making her last batch of walnut ketchup, invented asparagus and lemon pudding, made a dozen pastry ramekins, fried two giant Jerusalem artichokes for tomorrow’s dinner, and perfected a recipe for baked Spanish onions which makes Mrs Beeton’s version look laughably naive, and indeed almost inedible. All seventeen stone and five pounds of flesh that is Violet Scrapie stands now in the bedroom in her vast bloomers, staring down at the complex structure that lies at her feet. The Royal Hippo and I have little in common, she reflects: just womanhood, Dr Ivanhoe Scrapie, and whalebone. Or to be more precise, the miracle of soft engineering that is the corset.

Like a clockwork ectoskeletal creature of the deep, Violet now begins the task of assembling the shell of wire and padded whalebone around her stupendous body. First she heaves the heavy black sheath up to her gigantic hips, then twists it so that it lies symmetrically around her pelvis. There are wire hooks that must be aligned, and made to cling together like wrung hands. To do this, she must first draw in her breath and lift her rib-cage so that her waist is elongated, insofar as is possible, a celebration of cause and effect, soon to be reined in by structure. Each breast is the size of a human baby. They quiver and shake, setting up a rolling judder across the great vista of her belly, as – whup! – she hauls up and clasps together, at waist-level, the two sides of the encasing pod.

What are the alternatives? Bamboo? she wonders, exasperated at the effort of it all. Or wire?

‘Fasting,’ whispers a ghostly matriarchal voice. ‘The answer, Vile, is to consume less food.’

‘Bugger off, Mother,’ mutters Violet, wrenching her carapace into position and tugging at the cords.

Three floors below, a small man with an odd gait and unusual shoes is peering at the numbers on the doors. He, too, has little in common with Queen Victoria, apart from his diminutive stature. Like the head of our great British Empire, he measures five foot two, but there any resemblance to the reigning monarch ends abruptly, would you not agree, gentle reader? After all, Queen Victoria does not have a mutilated coccyx, nor does she wear orthopaedic shoes, or a phoney dog-collar, or house a temperamental tapeworm, or harbour fleas; nor does she have the organs known, in polite society, as a male object and related accoutrements (cock and balls to you), and nor does she urgently need to discover the truth of her origins – because Queen Victoria has a family tree that stretches back centuries, adorned with heraldic plates of Huguenot shields and Plantagenet memorabilia, Battenburg gewgaws and Tudor roses, and Tobias Phelps (for it is he) has nothing but the evidence of his own deformity, and a piece of pickled human flesh, re-bottled for him in Hunchburgh by a medical student named Kinnon.

To read the brass-plated numbers on the doors, he has to squint.

Number two.

His deep-set eyes are wild, haunted.

Number four.

His face is thin-lipped, wrinkled, sad.

Number six.

He is mumbling feverishly to himself. A sharp ear might make out the words to a tongue-twister about a woman called Betty Botter buying some butter but finding it bitter and not being able to put it in her batter.

Number eight.

He clasps his frock-coat about him tightly.

Number ten.

He fingers a whelk shell.

Number twelve.

‘Pray God this is a wild goose chase,’ he murmurs.

Number fourteen.

Home of Dr Ivanhoe Scrapie.

Tobias Phelps mounts the steps, and performs a sudden upward leap to ring the bell.

Ding, dong!

Suet, prone on Violet’s eiderdown, lifts his head and yaps feebly at the doorbell. He has not been himself at all lately; his vegetarian diet has weakened him immeasurably.

‘Oh, botheration!’ mutters Violet Scrapie. She’s still struggling with her corset, and wondering about whalebone.

Suet yaps.

The bell rings again. Ignoring its insistent jangle in the hope that her father will remember it is Mrs Jiggers’ day off and answer it himself, Violet abandons her buttoning and lacing in order to fix her late mother’s jet choker around her neck. Despite the jeweller’s recent adjustments, it’s still a fraction too tight, as though the Laudanum Empress is trying, by whatever means she can, to throttle her disappointing daughter from beyond the grave. Which indeed she is.

‘Please, Mother,’ croaks Violet, who has lately become increasingly aware of her ghostly presence in the house. ‘A little less pressure!’

And the choker’s grip is instantly relaxed.

‘Chop, chop!’ the phantom is bossing. ‘Answer the bloody door, child! The future depends on it!’

‘Did you say something, Mother?’

The doorbell rings again, wildly this time. Violet Scrapie shuffles over to the window, irritated by the noise, her white cotton bloomers swishing about her puckered thighs, and peers down on to the street, where a sulphurous yellow glow leaks from the gas lamps across the slush. A small figure directly below her, on the front doorstep, is hopping about in wide pantaloons. Taxidermy, like chess, attracts a strange breed of men, she reflects. Not artists, not scientists, neither fish nor fowl nor duck-billed platypus. Often, Violet has noticed, they have some kind of deficiency, physical or moral, which they must feel can be remedied by stuffing straw and sawdust into cured skin,
and sipping Amontillado sherry at meetings of the Zoological Society.

Could the stranger be one such specimen?

No. He could not.

She realises this instantly, as the man looks up at her, and their eyes lock.

What round eyes he has, she notices. And what thin lips! Now where has she seen that face before? A peculiar and not unpleasant sensation – one Violet has seldom felt before, and certainly never with such exquisite intensity – insinuates its way into the most private interstices of her corset.

She knows this man.

She knows him!

‘We have cause for celebration!’ murmurs the Laudanum Empress, observing her daughter, and interpreting the delicate feelings playing across her face as only a dead mother can.

‘A distressed spinster no longer, perhaps?’ she shouts.

‘Mother?’ breathes Violet. ‘Are you there? Did you speak?’

‘A distressed spinster no longer, perhaps, I said!’ yells the phantom. But Violet hears nothing but a buzz as she sinks heavily on her bed, suddenly aware that she is still in a state of undress. Her whalebone creaks, as the feeling she cannot identify creeps its way further into her –

Her loins, reader. Not to beat about the bush.

Should she go downstairs, and find out who he is? And why that face looks so familiar?

‘Not yet,’ Violet murmurs, putting her hand to her breast to calm the pounding of her heart. ‘Clothes first.’

And she begins to rummage in her wardrobe, in search of her best red frock.

I have since asked myself: is love an instinct, or something learned? Is it part of Nature itself, or a reaction that comes from the way in which we are nurtured? What makes one man seek out the familiar, while another will travel the world in
search of an exotic mate? What propels us? I do not have the answers. All I know is that I looked up at her, and our eyes locked.