The Chickens of Atlantis
and Other Foul and Filthy Fiends
Also by Robert Rankin:
The Brentford Trilogy:
The Antipope
The Brentford Triangle
East of Ealing
The Sprouts of Wrath
The Brentford Chainstore Massacre
Sex and Drugs and Sausage Rolls
Knees Up Mother Earth
The Armageddon Trilogy:
Armageddon: The Musical
They Came and Ate Us
The Suburban Book of the Dead
Cornelius Murphy Trilogy:
The Book of Ultimate Truths
Raiders of the Lost Car Park
The Most Amazing Man Who Ever Lived
There is a secret trilogy in the middle there, comprised of:
The Trilogy That Dare Not Speak Its Name Trilogy:
Sprout Mask Replica
The Dance of the Voodoo Handbag
Waiting for Godalming
Plus some fabulous other books, including:
The Hollow Chocolate Bunnies of the Apocalypse
And its sequel:
The Toyminator
And then:
The Witches of Chiswick
The Brightonomicon
The Da-Da-De-Da-Da Code
Necrophenia
Retromancer
The Japanese Devil Fish Girl and Other Unnatural Attractions
The Mechanical Messiah and Other Marvels of the Modern Age
The Educated Ape and Other Wonders of the Worlds
The
Chickens of Atlantis
and Other Foul
and Filthy Fiends
Being the memoirs and musings of a
time-travelling Victorian monkey butler.
Adorned with annotations and illustrations by
Robert Rankin FVSS*
* Fellow of the Victorian Steampunk Society
GOLLANCZ
LONDON
Contents
Cover
Also by Robert Rankin
Title Page
Dedication
Acknowledgements
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Copyright
FOR MY BEAUTIFUL GRANDDAUGHTER
LAYLA
HERE IS A BOOK ABOUT A MONKEY
I HOPE IT WILL ONE DAY MAKE YOU SMILE
AND FOR
PETER HARROW FVSS (ETC!)
WHO KNOWS WHY, OR SHOULD.
Acknowledgements
A degree of blame must be
placed like milk upon the
doorsteps of the following:
Steve Campbell, Tim Mavrick, Richard Scott, Richard Fair-gray, Stu Dall, Nick Reekie, Jonathan Crawford, Lee ‘Prist’ Hughes, Ali Salmon, Gavin Lloyd Wilson, Ian Crighton, Kit Cox, Robert Otley, James Southard, Rachel Ball Rat, Steve Lowdell, Xymon Owain, Richard Warne, Spike Livingstone, Jenny Owen, Trevor Pyne, Nigel Haveron, Jon Sykes, the lovely Rachel Hayward and the real Mr Cameron Bell.
The late, great James Stuart Campbell.
‘All ideas are true somewhere.’
Leonard Susskind
‘It is only by attempting the impossible
that we achieve the absurd.’
Norman Hartnell
‘Absurdity is the only reality.’
Frank Zappa
‘The past is the new future.’
Darwin (The Educated Ape)
1
y name is Darwin and I am a monkey butler.
I have travelled through space, I have travelled through time, and I have had many adventures.
My earliest memories are not pleasant to recall, full of stench and of ghastliness, of many bells chiming, of coarse cries and clamour and I all alone and in fear.
I awoke to sensibility in a cage on a Tilbury dock. The year was eighteen ninety; the month, I believe, was May. I have no knowledge of my parents, my tribe or even the country in which I was born. Upon my passport and papers of travel I am now identified as ‘a citizen of London’, and I take pride in this, for within that great and ancient city I have enjoyed more happiness than sorrow, made more friends than enemies and acquainted myself with artists and musicians, knights and noblemen and members of the Royal Household.
I recall too clearly the kicking at my cage and a great face, all red and wildly whiskered, calling upon me to dance. The breath of this face was tainted with liquor, and the eyes of this face were fierce.
At that time I spoke not a word of the Queen's English and as such was limited in my means of communication. My response to the assault upon my tender senses lacked then the sophistication I now enjoy and I make no pretence to the contrary. And so it was there, upon that clamorous, foul-smelling dock, that I committed my first social gaffe. For I produced dung and hurled it!
This act, construed no doubt as one of defiance, was met with a brutal rejoinder: a shaking of my cage, which increased in vigour until it reached an intolerable degree and I passed from consciousness once again.
Cold water awakened me to a room with air made dense by tobacco smoke. A roguish type in a colourful suit wrought a brisk tattoo upon the bars of my little prison with the business end of a swagger-stick and called out to an audience before him. I was announced as, ‘Lot thirty-two. A monkey of cheerful disposition. Eager to learn and as fine a fellow as might grace an organ-grinder's in-stri-ha-ment and lure many pennies into an old tin cup.’
Hungry then was I and bitter at the shaking I had received. And so, I confess, I did not exhibit that cheerful disposition attributed to me by the chap in the colourful suit. I made loud my protests in my ancestral tongue and had I been capable of producing further faeces I would gladly have done so. And gladly hurled them, too.
I was sold for the princely sum of twelve shillings to a gentleman named George Wombwell, the proprietor of a travelling menagerie, and it was he who named me Darwin.
Mr Wombwell was a kindly man, whom I feel harboured a genuine love for the animals in his charge. At the time when I accompanied him on his meanderings along the highways and by-roads of southern England, he owned a pair of charming elephants, a lion of evil intent, numerous trained kiwi birds and performing chickens, a ‘pig of knowledge’ and a mermaid.
The mermaid was a fascinating creature. It appeared for all the world to be part-monkey and part-fish, although the monkey portion never spoke to me. Around and around that creature swam in a vast spherical bowl and many wer
e the heads that shook in wonder. It was many, many years before I saw its like again, and then in somewhat outré circumstances.
Although initially belligerent and uneager to cooperate, I found myself gently won over to Mr Wombwell's wishes. I learned that to please him garnered rewards which, like as not, came in the shape of bananas. To displease him, however, occasioned a falling from grace characterised by an absence of these yellow delicacies.
I learned quickly and became most obliging.
I could write much regarding my travels with Mr Wombwell, for indeed my days with that singular gentlemen were rarely ever dull. We moved from town to village and like-abouts, mostly bringing happiness to those who patronised our performances. I became adept at juggling, tomfoolery, pratfalls and ‘tricks above ground’. I well remember the happy cries of children and the merry jingle of Mr Wombwell's brass cash register. I learned tricks enough to please him and gained an understanding of the English tongue, although at that time I was unable to vocalise and express myself through words. There was the occasional unpleasantness.
I will not belabour my reader with tales of the travelling life. Mr Wombwell has published his autobiography, and although his recollections differ somewhat from my own regarding the extent of his successes, the gist is very much the same as any account I could give.
Now, a man must adapt to what he cannot control, and so too must a monkey. I have lived upon other worlds and encountered beings who, although sharing a common sun with men of Earth, inhabit such strange forms and hold to such quaint manners as to baffle my small senses. These beings do not cogitate like men, but they do exhibit certain attitudes which display, to my thinking, what might be described as an all-but-universal constant.
That of tribalism.
My first experience of this was with Mr Wombwell's Travelling Menagerie. Showmen and circus folk consider themselves a race apart. The ‘hicks’ or ‘rubes’ or ‘billy-docks’ or ‘nadgers’ who attend their performances and fill their coffers are ‘not as they’. Showmen and circus folk are of a tribe that keeps itself apart. They look after their own and hold most others in the lowest form of contempt. Such, sadly, I have found to be the case throughout all levels of society, on this world and elsewhere.
History records that in the year eighteen eighty-five, King Phnarrg of Mars declared war upon the British Empire. He sent a mighty fleet of space-going warships to attack and destroy the subjects of Queen Victoria. Few there are, however, who understand that this was a religious crusade. The Martian tribe considered itself composed of God's chosen people and Mankind to be an impure race of idolaters, fit only for extermination.
Tribalism is the tragedy of the sentient being, and I, who have visited the past and the future, can see no end to it.
I gathered what learning I could from Mr Wombwell and also from others in his employ, for although I was at that time unable to utter words of English, I was perfectly able to converse with others of my ‘tribe’: to wit, the animal kingdom.
A rooster named Junior talked long into the nights with me. He was a prodigious conversationalist and a cock of a religious bent. Junior held to the belief that Mankind had descended from chickens, that the first fowl had been placed upon the Earth by Lop Lop, God of the Birds, and the Great Mother Hen who dwelt on her cosmic nest. I later came to understand that a gentleman whose name I shared held to not dissimilar beliefs – his, however, involved ape-like antecedents.
I will not at this juncture inform the reader as to which of these theories is correct. Although the title of this tome might have released the pussy of metaphor from the sack of obfuscation, thereby saving it from a drowning in the village pond of Penge.
In the year of eighteen ninety-four, I resigned from Mr Wombwell's employ. I am of a mercurial disposition and have what my good friend Sigmund Freud would term ‘a limited span of attention’. I had by this year gained sufficient understanding to realise that the itinerant life held little charm for myself. I had become an ape of ambition and now held to the conviction that I should seek my fortune in the great, good-hearted City of London.
My opportunity to take my leave came one night after a performance at the Egyptian Hall in Piccadilly. An inebriate cage-boy had inadequately secured the fastenings upon my quarters and I stole quietly away into the night.
The closing years of the nineteenth century were, regrettably, characterised by debauchery and decadence. Whether this is the case in every century, I know not. My experiences in several, however, lead me to believe that this is the rule rather than the exception.
During these years, well-to-do ne'er-do-wells behaved with shameless abandon – ingesting morphine by means of gold-plated syringes, guzzling Vin Coca Mariani, a wine laced with cocaine, and concluding their extravagant dinings with a desert of strawberries soaked in ether.
As for myself, I have always preferred Treacle Sponge Bastard for afters.
The literature of this period reflected its social mores and I well recall a popular erotic novel of the day called Fifty Shades of Earl Grey.*
I was free, but all alone once more. From lofty rooftops I viewed others of my tribe, sporting slave-wear of the waistcoat and fez variety and chained to the barrel organ. Not for me, thought I. I am cut from richer cloth. Perhaps I felt I was more of a man than a monkey.
Reality impinged upon such ill-founded graces when I was taken by Lambeth's Monkey-Catcher-in-Residence and found myself once more put up for auction. On this occasion, perhaps on account of the rather smart velvet suit Mr Wombwell had clothed me in and my knowledge that flinging dung brought few rewards, the hammer came down at the sum of one guinea and I became a member of a most exalted household.
That of Lord Brentford, whose stately abode, Syon House, occupied lands between London's most beautiful borough (Brentford) and the fields of Isleworth.
I was greatly taken with his lordship, a gentleman in every sense of the word. He delegated one of his minions to school me in the noble arts of monkey butlerdom, and these I took to willingly and without complaint. The duties were not arduous, the tasks simple but specific. My accommodation was almost luxurious and bananas were in plentiful supply.
Looking back now, I know that Lord Brentford cared deeply for me. He was and is a good man and my times in his employment lacked not for adventure and excitement.
He, too, named me Darwin, which seemed a rare coincidence. Only later did I come across the velvet suit that I had worn during my years with Mr Wombwell, laundered and folded in a drawer of my dresser. By that time, my knowledge had increased and I read the label on the collar, which said ‘Darwin, property of George Wombwell's Travelling Menagerie’. Lord Brentford might well have chosen to return me to my ‘owner’, but he did not. Because he cared for me.
I am grateful that he did and glad to have known that noble lord, for it is because of him that I became what I am today.
The world's first and only talking ape.
The Ape of Space.
The Ape of Time.
The ape who would, through a twist of fate, become the father of all apes and the father, too, of all Mankind.
And many many tribes.
* This may strike the reader as a rather tired and worn-out gag, but do remember that Darwin encountered this book in 1897. (R. R.)
2
have chosen to set down my musings and memoirs in ‘the first monkey’.
This is, I do not hesitate to add, in direct opposition to the wishes of my publishers, who advised strongly against such a course of action, stating that my prose was dense and idiosyncratic and suggesting that I – and here I employ the parlance of the nineteen sixties – ‘dumb it down in the cause of increased sales’.
My response to this did not involve the employment of dung, for I am now above such acts of grossness. Rather I explained to them, with patience and good grace, that I valued quality above the worship of Mammon, adding that as the world's only speaking ape ever to publish his memoirs, I felt that the reading pu
blic might be persuaded to meet me halfway and look up any difficult words in the Oxford English Dictionary.
You may consider my decision rash, or indeed vain, and suggest that one of England's great writers should have been engaged to better tell my tale. Perhaps even Robert Rankin himself might have been presumed upon to take up this endeavour.
And indeed I have, in the spirit of altruism, made the concession of allowing Mr Rankin to lend the considerable weight of his literary celebrity to this venture by adding illustrated letters and annotations to the text at appropriate intervals.
I will confess that after my initial meeting with my publishers, I repaired to my suite at The Dorchester, where I regathered my wits in the company of Château Doveston champagne and vowed, using another term I encountered during my sojourn in the swinging sixties, to ‘stick it to the man’.
I briefly touched upon the matters above because it is now my wish to touch upon other matters connected therewith. To wit, how I arrived at that estate of Man characterised by speech and literacy.
It all came about in this fashion.
I had become Lord Brentford's ‘man’ in that I was now his monkey butler, engaged as a gentleman's gentle-monkey to aid his lordship with his daily endeavours, to ensure that the niceties which should be accorded to a person of noble birth were occasioned with correctness.
A monkey butler's duties are those of the valet. To attend to his master's dressing room and maintain order and tidiness therein, replenishing the jars of pomade, moustache wax and gentlemen's special creams when necessary. To assist his lordship in dressing or otherwise. To accompany him upon outings and be aware at all times of the correct social etiquette. To be on hand, when so required, for anything as may be required.
Naturally, the duties of a human butler go beyond this and extend to the hiring and firing of staff, the admittance of and making of polite conversation with guests, the ordering of supplies and the keeping of household accounts. And, of course, the occasional thrashing of wayward bootboys.
My size and communicative abilities precluded me from several of these duties. Much to my regret, as I would dearly have loved to thrash those wayward bootboys.
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