Ark Baby (37 page)

‘How tall are you, Mr Phelps?’ he is asking.

‘Five feet two,’ I reply, sinking back on to the
chaise-longue.

‘That’s right. Make yourself comfortable. And your waist measures – approximately?’

‘I have no idea, sir,’ I murmured, feeling drowsy.

‘Will you permit me then,’ he asked, ‘to measure you again?’

‘With a view to what, Dr Scrapie?’ I moaned.

But before I could hear his answer, I had succumbed to blackness.

I sped through the streets of Thunder Spit, went the wrong way round the one-way system, got flashed at by the speed-sensitive
road-sign on the high street, and swerved to a halt at my front door. I thumped my way in; in the hallway I stumbled heavily and crashed over a double buggy; an ancient vehicle of steel and nylon, parked there like a tangle of dead crickets.

The twins were sitting in the kitchen knitting.

‘Hi, gorgeous,’ said Rose, not looking up.

‘Been missing you,’ lied Blanche.

Something was up. I could tell.

‘How’s tricks, girls?’ I asked, trying to stay cool.

‘We’ve finished the family tree, look,’ said Rose, shoving a big chart at me with phoney-looking heraldic shields decorating the margins.

‘We’re descended from a parson,’ boasted Blanche.

‘Parson Phelps?’ I asked. I could feel myself going white.

‘Yeah, how did you know that?’ But not waiting for my answer she went on, ‘He used to live in Mum and Dad’s house. The Old Parsonage.’

‘According to the church records.’

‘Quite a coincidence, eh?’

So they
were
descended from the man Scrapie mentioned in his treatise. The man who according to him, was –

‘Mum said she could’ve told us that ages ago, but it would’ve been against Dr Bugrov’s genealogy rules,’ says Rose.

‘It’s cheating to get anything by oral history,’ explains Blanche. ‘You have to have the paperwork to back it up, or the Americans complain.’

I didn’t have all day. ‘Let me see that thing,’ I said, grabbing it. I still felt uneasy, like there was something they weren’t telling me. The huge sheet of card wobbled as I snatched it.

‘Hey!’

‘What are you doing?’

‘Looking for Tobias Phelps,’ I answered.

‘He was our great-great-great-great-grandfather,’ says Rose, pointing to a name near the very apex of the tree. ‘See? Five generations back.’

Christ Almighty.

‘Let me see your feet,’ I demanded.

‘No,’ they said together firmly. ‘No way.’

‘Why not?’

‘Because we think we’re about to go into labour,’ said Rose swiftly.

‘Any minute now,’ threatened Blanche.

‘Along with twenty million other women,’ I said impatiently, my mind still racing. ‘Did you know they’re slapping hundred-Euro fines on hoaxers?’

‘We’re not hoaxers!’ shrieked Rose and Blanche after me, as I rushed upstairs towards the bathroom, two steps at a time. To hell with their feet, I thought. Let’s get this monkey loaded in the car first. They were still yelling after me. Abuse, it sounded like.

But I wasn’t listening. My mind was on the Gent.

In his workshop, the cage assembled and the padlock checked, Dr Scrapie sits in silence, drinking brandy, his brain racing faster than it has done in years. What he has seen is strange and not strange. Bizarre and yet obvious. Unthinkable, yet perfectly possible. Darwin did it. He made that leap of imagination. He made that crude and unwholesome and shocking yet brilliantly true connection. It is the connection a virgin bride makes on her wedding night. After the chintz and flowers and confetti-showers, after the dancing and the music and the merriment, after the well-wishing and the lace-handkerchief-waving and the cooing of doves, there is a moment when she comes face to face with a man’s prick.

It is that sort of blunt information that Scrapie feels he has met in the case of Tobias Phelps.

But he cannot, should not, ought not, shall not and
will not
– God help him – make the same mistake twice, he thinks, his mind on the
Origin of Species.
Another opportunity will not pass him by. And this one has been handed him on a plate. As though by God himself!

Tobias Phelps will be the making of him!

It was then, as I sank into darkness, and all hope died within me, that my madness began. I let it happen. Where else could I flee?

I learned afterwards that my insanity involved neither ranting nor raving: just a terrible, introspective silence broken only by rasping groans and the occasional weak utterance of names such as Tommy, Father, Mrs Fooney, and Gudderwort.

All I knew at the time was the feel of her gentle hand on my brow. And the sound of her murmuring softly as she fed me the strangest food I had ever tasted.

Her. She.

In my miasmic half-sleep, I see the beach again, and I see myself as a young child, clambering among the rocks on all fours, and climbing the little gnarled trees of Thunder Spit, and my parents begging me to stop. I see Parson Phelps guiding my hand as he teaches me to write with a goose-feather quill, and I see me and Tommy Boggs playing in the sand-dunes, burying each other among the spiky sand-grass. I see myself at fifteen, watching with Tommy as the Contortionist argues with my father in the graveyard, and her handing him a jar, and him returning with thunder in his face and stuffing money into her hand. I see him in the church, the ripped pages of Darwin’s book fluttering wildly down from his pulpit. I see the import of my holy vision, and then I see the smashing of the jar. I see my tail, and Kinnon picking it up for me with his handkerchief, and thrusting it back at me to keep. I recall my hasty visit to Fishforth for the purchase of Jared, the carrier pigeon, and then the train journey to London. The Museum with its dreadful knickerbockered creatures and their blue glass eyes. The boarding-house, the visit to Portobello Road and finally the trip to Madagascar Street. And in a ghastly caricature of consciousness that feels like half-dream, half-death, I pick along the shoreline of my past and I see my father, knitting in the Sanatorium. I see him knitting a scarf
so long it could span the world. And I see Tommy in his forge, with his simple life and his bouncing babies, and the seashore, and the Thistle-Pulling Contest. How memory changes things: I see it now touched by my own nostalgia, transformed from a scene of ritual humiliation into an idyllic rural tableau, the cheering, yelling faces of the Balls and the Cleggses and the Peat-Hoves awakening in me a cruel longing for home. I see the Man-Eating Wart-hog.

I awake to find myself in a bed, with her warm hand again on my brow. I open my eyes. She is clad in a huge red dress, with small beads that glitter in the light of the chandelier.

‘My name is Violet Scrapie,’ she tells me.

She is magnificent. I find tears welling in my eyes. I do not know why. I would like to tell her how marvellous I think she is, but all that emerges is a hopeless groan.

She blushes a deep and fetching pink, and offers me a spoonful of something sweet-smelling, glutinous and green.

‘Delicious,’ I murmur, still half-choked with a feeling I cannot name. ‘What is it?’

‘Nettle preserve,’ she murmurs, spooning more in. ‘With caramelised beetroot. My own recipe.’

‘Miss Mosh mashes some mish-mash,’ I murmur.

Through my drugged haze, I feel the power of her.

Bom, bom, bom.

The sound of my heart. Its pounding suddenly fills the room.

What a woman! Her hand on my brow reminds me of home. Sometimes, floating far above me, I see her face. She doesn’t speak, or if she does, I have gone deaf.

The days pass. I am a man, I am a man, I am a man, I say over and over again to myself.

I awoke screaming.

She held me in her arms. And I sobbed.

‘Oh Miss Scrapie, help me, help me!’

She stroked my head, and pulled me closer to her chest. Made calming noises. Felt my forehead.

‘All shall be well,’ she murmured.

‘No!’ I groaned. ‘It can never be!’

Nor could it. For I had realised in that moment, just as my manhood had been denied me, that this was the very moment that God had chosen to subject my soul to a torment more terrible, even, than the one to which I had just been subjected. I had fallen, madly and passionately, in love. The situation was utterly, utterly beyond hope.

Much later, I awoke again and heard her voice, a voice that made my heart veer about like a loose cannon, asking me sharply, ‘Who is Mildred?’

‘My tapeworm,’ I confessed. ‘Could I trouble you, my dear Miss Scrapie, for a banana?’

I pounded up the stairs two at a time. I’d thought it all through. This was a raid. I was bundling him in the car and taking him straight back to London pronto. I’d hold a press conference. That’s what you do, isn’t it, when you’ve made a discovery. I’d take the twins with me. Hold them hostage if need be. Force them to show their feet. Reveal the contents of Scrapie’s treatise. Wheel out the family tree. And be declared the discoverer of a hitherto undreamed-of missing link.

A-be-bop-a-loo-bop, a-bop-bam-boo!

I burst into the bathroom, and there was Norman sitting on the toilet with his pants round his ankles, reading a DIY magazine called
An Englishman’s Home.

‘Just performing a
mea culpa
,’ he explained, folding his mag. ‘Forgot to lock. Good article in here on all the child-proof gizmos on the market. Fancy a trip to B and Q next Saturday? We could get this place fixed up for you in two shakes of a lamb’s whatsit, with the power screwdriver.’

I didn’t say anything. I couldn’t speak.

Norman reached for the toilet roll and measured out five sheets. He was staring at me, puzzled. My face must have shown something of my dismay, because he said, ‘Sorry, mate.
But a man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do, eh, Buck? I’ll be through in a tick.’

‘No,’ I croaked. ‘It’s not that.’

It was the Gentleman Monkey. He had vanished.

They cald me the FROZEN WOMAN later, wen I came to the Workhous, run by that Fat BASTARD wot threw me out, but it wasn’t in the SEA that I freezed, it was befor, wen I lernd wot TRAPP woz plannin for me and my Gentleman FREND. Wen I diskovers wot his Uther Biznis is. Its Higgins wot tells me. Sez it like a JOKE and LARFS and LARFS.

I dusn’t beleev it at furst, and then I duz.

It’s then I no it is TYME TO LEEV.

We must ESKAPE, I tells him, strokin His FUR. Wen I tels him about Trapp’s Uther Biznis, wot hes plannin for our CHILD, he dusnt say nuthin, just givs me a LOOK. As tho hes sayin: so this is CIVILIZASHUN, eh?

We felt the STORM cumin, and that’s wen we dus it. Higgins is REECHIN in for our plates of slop, and I distraks him, and my GENTLEMAN FREND filchis the KEES from his pockit, and it’s dun in a flash.

We opens the CAGES, kwik as we can, bifor BOWKER and STEED and TRAPP cums down, and OUT they rushis, FRANTIK and PANIKING.

God! PANDYMONIUM, in ther. They attaks the slop-bin furst, the LYON and the ELIFANT gobbles neerly evrythin up, then the JAKALS and the RINOSSERUS chargis in, and the smorler BEESTS is grabbin wot they can from the floor, and FITIN over skraps. The doors of the CAGIS clangin and clangin.

The STORM is ragin now, and the creechers we has releesd
is yelpin and howlin and screemin, and wunce the SLOP is gon, the FITING bitween them gets more and more vylent, and thers NO stoppin it. Nacheral instinkts is takin over. HOWLS, YELLS, SCREECHIN. Eetin eech other ALIVE, sum of them. The ARKE is rockin, rockin on the WAVs, and then I heer a clatter from ABUV, and it is the sound of TRAPP.

BLOOD everywer. Fur, fevvers, scales.

Then, clatter clatter, down the sters. Then I sees him. TRAPP. Furie on his FACE. And feer.

He is sterin at me and my Gentleman FREND, and my Gentleman frend is sterin bak.

In His hand, TRAPP has sumthin GLINTIN and SHARP.

In the days that followed my arrival in Madagascar Street, Dr Scrapie took yet more detailed measurements of me, some of a most intimate nature, and launched himself into a spate of feverish scientific activity in his basement workshop, from which the sound of his own laughter, his shouting or his impressively loud farts would emanate at intervals. I felt almost flattered that so much bustle and excitement on the part of the eminent taxidermist was on account of me. Dr Scrapie informed me that he was working on a treatise entitled
A New Theory of Evolution
, about my ‘unusual origins’. He swore me to secrecy on this subject, and instructed me not to leave the house on any account, unless accompanied either by himself or his daughter.

‘You must speak to nobody about my hypothesis,’ he warned, ‘until I have finished my treatise, and have occasion to present you to Mr Darwin himself.’

‘Not even Miss Scrapie?’ I asked him, feeling my spine tingle in trepidation. Had he already told her the truth himself? Although I had seen no hint of it in her behaviour towards me, which remained both charming and courteous, I could not be sure.

‘Most certainly not,’ he replied. He cannot have guessed that a huge warm wave of relief swept through me when he gave me the blessed confirmation, that Miss Scrapie was ignorant
of my secret. Although I knew that it was only a matter of time before my lowly status on the evolutionary ladder was revealed, I wished to savour every moment of my new friend’s most delightful company before she learned the truth. For what chance would I have then, of my growing interest in her ever being returned?

‘How can I ever thank you for your kindness to me, Miss Scrapie?’ I asked her one morning, as I sampled some more of the delicacies she referred to as
Cuisine Biologique.
Miss Scrapie looked surprised.

‘The pleasure is all mine,’ she assured me. ‘Here, try this,’ she offered, preparing to post a piece of pickled fungus into my mouth. I parted my lips, and she popped it in. ‘I have taken great pleasure in nursing you, Mr Phelps, as you are a most useful guinea-pig for my recipes!’