Ark Baby (4 page)

Blood that came pouring from the piglet.

A piglet that was not a piglet.

It was, by God and by merciful Christ in Heaven, who gave His life for us that we may be saved, and by the Holy Ghost, and by the saints also, the following thing: a human baby, armed with a full set of sharp milk-teeth.

A miracle after all. (Have you guessed, gentle reader?)

It was Tobias Phelps!

Me!

That not-quite-nativity scene in the church is what I call the mistaken-piglet episode. Like the Morpiton family, from whom they had both individually descended five generations back, the Parson and his wife were prone to exaggeration, so how accurate their representation is, I cannot say, although I convey the spirit of their reports as faithfully as I am able, I do assure you.

Near death comes next.

This section of the story unfolds as follows: my bloody wound, consisting of a lacerated lower back, was so terrible that the Parson and his wife feared that by morning I would be dead. But being blessed by God (though in a later, more cynical version this changed to ‘cursed by the Devil’) I made it through the night, sweating furiously, and as hot as a cooking pot. Dr Baldicoot arrived in a cloud of seaweed pipe-smoke and inspected my wound, and took note of my other physical oddities, and shook his head, but he refrained from voicing his thoughts in front of the Parson, knowing they would be interpreted as a slap in God’s almighty face. What Dr Baldicoot thought was that it would be kinder to let me die. Was this what God called fairness? Who, or what, could have been the cause of my ghastly mutilation? And what mother could have abandoned a baby with such an injury? In a cold church?

As I look back in time, I find that I harbour no resentment of the good Dr Baldicoot within my heart. He knew the odds were grievously stacked against my survival. I have since consulted Professor K.G. Hornblast’s weighty tome,
The Rudiments of Spinal Injury
, which states categorically that a wound of this nature affecting the lower vertebrae means that the victim, in the rare event of his recovery from inevitable infection, will never walk straight. Not that my gait would ever have been normal in any case. There exists another weighty volume,
Congenital Abnormalities below the Knee
, which discusses,
inter alia
, deformities of the foot. Club feet, flat-footedness, the hereditary long toes of the egg-scavenging cliff-climbers of the Orkney Islands, et cetera. My flat feet, and the somewhat thumb-like big toe, emerging at a right-angle, which made them resemble nothing so much as a pair of squashed and rather hairy hands, fitted into several of these categories, though none exactly. But as J.M. Bellowes, its author, points out, ‘The variations are as many and varied as
Homo sapiens
himself.’ (So where does
that
leave us?)

Dr Baldicoot was a simple country doctor, with little room in
his bulging bag of instruments for books, weighty or otherwise. So he puffed on his pipe, administered a large dose of morphine, and shook his head. Apart from the formalities of greeting and parting, he remained taciturn. As the room filled with Dr Baldicoot’s noxious seaweed smoke, Parson Phelps’ heart filled with anger. He had not read
The Rudiments of Spinal Injury
either, but he had read the thoughts that boiled beneath the doctor’s silence. He diagnosed pessimism, born of lack of faith.

‘I shall cure him myself,’ he stormed, breaking Dr Baldicoot’s pungent silence. It was a Friday, and the marbles were afflicting him.

Dr Baldicoot, in turn, had also divined the Parson’s mind: arrogance, born of ignorance. He knocked his pipe out into the fireplace, bade my parents goodbye, and stepped out of the Parsonage into an east wind, which blew his cloak up into a great dark bubble. As the wind-buffeted doctor wobbled off into the night, Parson Phelps sat down heavily to take the weight off his bad knee at last, and took his wife’s hand. He said, ‘God has given us a chance.’

They were both forty-six. A baby at last. A foundling babe whose own mother has attacked it and thrown it from the nest like a vicious herring gull, thought the Parson, stroking my cheek, which was covered with a soft down of rust-red baby-hair. As he was fond of remarking, herring gulls can be the worst parents in the world, after humans. He resolved in that moment, he told me later, to be the best father a boy ever had, and Mrs Phelps made a similar vow concerning motherhood. This solemn promise undertaken, she made the sign of the cross with her blunt, practical finger, and took out her needle and thread, and a roll of hessian. I would be needing nappies.

Years later, when my foster-mother was delirious and dying, I discovered why she and Parson Phelps had no children of their own. It was due to a private incompetence of the Parson’s male object and related accoutrements, dating back to a childhood incident. He had discovered a live snake – an adder – in his
knickerbockers, and had been obliged to strangle it with his bare hands. The trauma had tragic consequences, for as he passed through adolescence and into adulthood, every time his object stirred, Parson Phelps saw the adder in his mind’s eye and was forced, despite himself, to remember its strangulation – the effect of which was to quell whatever tentative excitement had occurred well before any occasion between himself and Mrs Phelps could be risen to.

‘And that’s a true fact, Tobias,’ she breathed to me hoarsely on her deathbed. ‘That killjoy creature had a lot to answer for, in our bedroom.’

Had they not been so desperate for a child, would they have taken me in? I cannot tell you, but they were good people, and until the moment of my father’s great madness, they did not wish me ill.

But I digress.

Back, instead, to the thrust of my memoir, which has begun, in the traditional manner, with the story of my coming into the world, insofar as I am able to convey it. Yes, Ladies and Gentlemen, I was a foundling. But a fortunate one; Parson and Mrs Phelps took me into their home, the Parsonage, Thunder Spit, near Judlow, Northumbria, England. There was nothing to be done about my mis-shapen feet, so they applied clean bandages to the wound at the base of my spine and prayed for a week. My foster-father, like a champion player of the bagpipes, did not lack stamina when it came to communicating with the Lord. Together, my adoptive parents removed my bandages, applied seaweed and dandelion poultices that the Parson made with his own hands, sealed them with oatmeal mash, and prayed some more. Within six weeks, their prayers were answered. The skin began to heal over the wound, creating a bulbous and jaunty scar over the coccyx.

Now, on his knees, Parson Phelps forgave the adder its treachery and thanked the Lord: ‘This is Thy mission for us, O mighty one, for we had given up hope, but now Thou hast sent us a baby, though I mistook it for a piglet, which as Thou
canst imagine, is easily done when the creature is surrounded by cushion-feathers, to raise in Thine honour, Lord, and in Thy worship, here in Thunder Spit, home of St Nicholas’s Church, and home also of three hundred and twenty-three, nay now three hundred and twenty-four, human souls. Not to mention beasts of the sea, such as the mackerel, and the octopus, and the whale, and last but by no means least, Lord, the sardine, Thine own fish. And the birds of the sky, among them the cormorant and the noble kittiwake and at the risk thereuntofore of losing the thread of my prayer, Lord, I, that is to say me and Mrs Phelps my dear wife, even though our marriage is not strictly speaking consummated in Thine eyes, on account of the ignoble adder incident, we thank Thee most profoundly for the unexpected but most welcome addition to our family. Praise be!’

So, Edward Phelps, thought Mrs Phelps. This foundling creature is the least you can give me, being such a dolt in bed. She said nothing, but merely smiled at her husband in that half-weak, half-heroic way she had, and sighed in queasy gratitude. Surely, any child is better than no child when one is nearing the change, she acknowledged, as she pursed her lips and changed my scratchy nappies. My stool didn’t seem normal to her, appearing greenish and a smidgeon cowpatty; Mrs Phelps wasn’t accustomed to children, but she was a willing servant of the Lord, and when she investigated the soilings more closely, she knew what needed to be done. She bundled me in a cloth so that I wouldn’t wriggle, and gamely nestled my little thin-lipped mouth and squashed-up nose against her floppy dug, and let me suck. If ever there was a consummate example of the triumph of blind faith over human physiology and reason, it was this. For three days, nothing came, and Mrs Phelps’ forty-six-year-old nipples were sore and cracked, despite the camomile cream she applied day and night. But then, suddenly, just as she was about to give up, another miracle: full-cream human milk sprang from her bosom and I began to gorge myself and thrive and grow a head of fiery red hair, thick and coarse as a donkey’s. So my parents lurched down on their knees on the embroidered
pew-cushion placed on the stone floor for just such spontaneous exultations, and praised the Lord, even after I had nearly bitten off my mother’s nipple.

That’s the story.

Like Jesus, and many other small boys whose parents dote on them, I grew up being told that I was ‘a gift from Heaven’.

Later, this changed to ‘a curse from Hell’.

What is a man, I wondered then, but a conglomeration of skin and skeleton, his giblets and his kidneys trapped inside? And what is this thing, his brain, but a mere giant overgrown walnut in a case of bone? What is his heart, but a mere organ?

As for his soul –

In London, it is a chill February. The year is still 1845, but it is a very different 1845 from the simple churning of Nature’s seasons that constitutes the twelve-month in the tiny nowhere of Thunder Spit, where Tobias Phelps has just arrived. This is a metropolitan, sophisticated, and worldly 1845, an 1845 of monumental historic changes and fierce political and social debate, an 1845 of philanthropy and commerce, Empire and oysters, multiple petticoats, child chimney-sweeps, grocery deliveries and boiled breast of mutton with caper sauce. A bright, shining 1845, full of hope and grandeur, with not a little debauchery and grime at the edges, a year in which we are now crossing the capital in an imaginary Montgolfier balloon, gazing queasily down at the lumpy grey quilt of London spread below. There’s St Paul’s Cathedral, a great blackened dome, peeking out through the lurking cloud of chimney-smoke. And there’s the Thames, twisted like a cobra with appendicitis, and Tower Bridge, and the Houses of Parliament, both fortressy and cake-like, and the great thrust of Big Ben.

Oi, can anyone steer this thing?

If so, float west now, and guide our craft over elegant Belgravia, and here pause a moment to admire the crescent curves of white-painted brick and the shiny black doors, the forbidding doorsteps and the potted boxwoods of the exclusive cul-de-sac called Madagascar Street. And hover here a moment, by the third-floor window of number fourteen, to observe a pair of two-legged mammals in their natural habitat, the home, a
nest that is also a den that is also a warren that is also a lair, a repository for food, a rearing site and a thinking parlour. What a strange creature is man! Strange, too, that unlike many mammals, the human animal has no particular mating season. All the luckier, then, that we have arrived here on what will turn out to be a momentous day.

Peer through the ground-floor window first and observe Dr Ivanhoe Scrapie, taxidermist, in his workshop, engaged in the complex process of stretching the skin of a Chilean bear over a plaster cast he has made of the carcass in the ridiculous, sentimental position chosen by the Queen. The creature is to stand upright, Victoria has commanded, with its paws together, as though at prayer. In keeping with all animals destined for her Royal Highness’s Animal Kingdom Collection, its genitalia must be excised completely; as a double measure of prudery, the creature will also, later, be clad in custom-sewn breeches. Furthermore, as per usual, the Monarch has commanded Scrapie to endow the beast with eyes that are ‘blue, a sort of eggshell blue, such as you gave our other royal mammals’. But, she had specified, ‘somewhat larger than the normal for a bear of this kind, which should, we feel, be gazing Heaven-ward as though in holy contemplation’. The idea being to transform the bear into a sort of noble, brutish creature of piety, fit to join the growing ranks of beasts in her whimsical bestiary: a whole Arkful of stuffed and de-sexed mammals, absurdly clothed, and in the posture of religious maniacs. As though, Scrapie is fond of remarking, Buckingham Palace were not such a vessel itself.

‘Buggeration and damnation,’ he mutters now, through a mouthful of pins, then lifts one foot off the floor and raises a haunch, to facilitate the emission of a thunderous fart, which echoes through the workshop and out into the hall, as he bellows, ‘To Her Majesty Queen Victoria, Royal Hippopotamus and bane of my life!’

Meanwhile upstairs in the drawing room, Mrs Charlotte Scrapie, wife, mother, and celebrated medium, has sprinkled lavender-water in an attempt to drown the stench of that noble
medicine, laudanum, which fuels the engine of her psychic thoughts. Observe, through the chintz, this: that her daily dose has had its narcotic effect. That despite an unappetising luncheon, cooked by Mrs Jiggers, there is something aphrodisiac in the air. That suddenly Mrs Scrapie’s husband, finally bored by the silence and wire and sawdust of his workshop and fed up with the increasingly ludicrous demands of the Monarch concerning her Animal Kingdom Collection, tired of the jars of camphor and the little trays of glass eyes and the rows of pegs and steel pins, and the sheaves of notes and the skins and the little rubber noses that are the tools of his trade, is ascending the stairs.

For there is only one thing to do when you are in this sort of mood, in Dr Scrapie’s experience. Impose the needs of your reproductive organ upon your wife, Charlotte Scrapie, affectionately – and sometimes not so affectionately – known as the Laudanum Empress. Whether or not she is drugged.

And there is only one way to respond to such a mood on the part of Dr Scrapie, if you are his wife, and in a laudanum daze: succumb.