by Heide Goody
“Well spoken,” said a SCUM mum.
“The right to do as we wish,” said another.
Toyah and Dungarees were equally wrong-footed by this turn of events.
“Er, thanks,” said Toyah.
Dungarees bowed her head, cheeks aflame. “Maybe I misspoke,” she mumbled.
Ben saw the builders on the scaffolding tut and roll their eyes. They’d been treated to a bit of unexpected nudity, but had been denied a full-on pavement brawl. And then something far more pressing caught Ben’s attention. Above and behind the two builders, a powerful clawed creature was thrashing about on the roof by a skylight. It looked like a sharp-faced dog-creature, albeit one the size of a small horse. In fact, it looked like it could eat a small horse at a single sitting. And gripping tightly to its neck …
“Jeremy?” said Ben.
The beast and the idiot riding it rolled across the rooftop. Ben couldn’t tell if Clovenhoof was trying to subdue it or simply stay on its back and out of the reach of those claws.
Ben pointed high.
“Look. Look.”
One of the builders turned. The beast flung Clovenhoof from its back and skidded on the tiles. The builder gave a cry of terror and pitched over the scaffolding rail. Clovenhoof rolled off the roof entirely and down past the builder, who clung one-handed to a lower rail. As the first gasps rose from the crowd, fingers pointing not at the beast, but at the fallen men, the beast slipped over the corner of the roof and out of sight.
Ben ran forward. The builder, despite his mate trying to reach him, lost his grip on the rain-slicked rail and fell the dozen remaining feet to the ground, landing awkwardly on the pavement and spilling over. The builder then proceeded to grasp his ankle and swear violently.
The ability to swear being a clear sign of rude health, Ben ran past him to Clovenhoof, who lay sprawled over a row of parked supermarket trolleys.
“Jeremy!”
Clovenhoof groaned, eyes closed.
“Don’t move,” said Ben.
Clovenhoof feebly patted the air with his fists as though they were trotting feet.
“… tiny goat ninjas … I’ll be a millionaire,” he murmured, and passed out.
Chip kept an office at the Consecr8 church, a room at the rear of the building with a wide, gently curving window that commanded a view over the new Rainbow estate and, further to the south west, the currently damp-looking city of Birmingham. Michael thought it likely that being owner of various enterprises, Chip had any number of offices in various establishments, but he imagined that this was the most impressive.
It was the size of a small flat, would provide more than agreeable accommodation for one person, and, judging from the little corner of bedsheet poking out from a wall panel, possibly did just that. The walls were covered with an eclectic mixture of religious paintings, pre-Raphaelite prints, maps of both the UK and the globe, and a version of the immorality-causes-climate-change pinboard Michael had previously seen in Chip’s garage.
Chip’s desk was a vast oval map table, inset with a relief map of the world.
Michael had only been in the room a few times previously, but only now saw it for what it really was: a stateroom.
“Good afternoon, Chip,” said Michael.
“I hope it is, Michael,” said Chip, putting his coffee mug down on Greenland. “Talk to me about the DNA bank. Do we have the space we need in this building?”
“Oh, yes. Absolutely, Chip. The unused holds, I mean halls, would provide all the room we need. Obviously, there’s the power supply, and even the emergency generator, which is just a boon and, er … Chip?”
“Yes, mate?”
Michael found himself laughing at that. “Would that be first mate, Chip? Or should I say ‘captain’?”
Chip gave Michael a look. “What’s the matter, Michael?”
Michael unrolled a plan of the church building and put it on the map table.
“You’re going to think me mad, but when I was looking at the plans to best place the additional laboratory space, I …” Michael cleared his throat. “This building is one hundred and fifty nine meters long, twenty seven metres wide, and sixteen metres high.”
“I know,” said Chip. “I built it.”
“Which, in itself, is not unusual, except if one converts it into cubits, then – you know what a cubit is?”
“I do.”
“Well, it’s three hundred cubits by fifty by thirty.”
“Exactly.”
“Just as God told Noah in Genesis.”
“Correct.”
“The building is made of wood.”
Chip was now smiling.
“Well spotted.”
“And the bottommost levels are curved under and water-proofed like a, like a …”
“A boat?” suggested Chip.
Michael made a noise to himself. He knew what he had to ask. He knew Chip knew what he had to ask. Both of them already knew the answer. So why was it so hard to ask?
“Chip?”
“Yes, mate?”
“Is this an ark?”
“No,” said Chip.
“Oh.”
Chip stood.
“This isn’t just an ark, Michael. This is the ark. I’ve looked. This is mankind’s only current and credible attempt to preserve human life and, of course, the genetic data for God’s creatures in the event of the inevitable deluge.”
Michael let the confirmation of his suspicions wash over him. The church was a ship, an actual ship, sat in deep curved foundations, but not fixed to them. Over a hundred miles from the sea, Chip had built a ship, an ark to be precise. Questions queued up in Michael’s mind.
“Who?” he said.
“You’ve seen the leader board in the church. You know how the Piety Points system works.”
“When?”
Chip shrugged and smiled. “When? No man will know the day or the hour, but it’s coming.” He gestured to the window and the rain. “This downpour could be the beginning of it.”
“Why?”
Chip blinked. “Why? Why would anyone want to save the faithful? Why would anyone want to do God’s work?”
“No,” said Michael. “Why …?”
“Why me?” said Chip. “That is a perfectly reasonable question. Here.”
He directed Michael’s attention to one of the many pictures on the wall. It was not a religious painting. It portrayed a narrow stream between two plant-crowded banks and, in the stream a young woman, floating on her back, a string of flowers in her hand.
“This print, this very one, hung in my parents’ bathroom when I was a child. Either they just thought it was pretty picture of a bathing woman – bathing in her dress, mind – or they had a strange sense of humour. If you laid in the bathtub, you could not avoid looking at it. As a child, I thought it was sinister. I hated it. Do you know what it is?”
“Ophelia,” said Michael, “by John Everett Millais.”
“Very good!” said Chip. “Brownie points for you.”
“Piety Points?” asked Michael hopefully.
“The Lord does not give salvation in exchange for general knowledge questions. If that were the case, Heaven would be full of pub quiz teams. I have a fear of drowning, mate, and I partly put it down to having that picture fixed in my vision throughout my childhood. And, yes, partly because of that time big Simon Jenkins pushed me in the Birmingham Fazeley Canal when I was twelve. I don’t want to drown when the rains come.”
“And you are so sure that the flood is coming?” said Michael.
Chip nodded.
“I am, even if others are not. Look at that picture. As we can see, Ophelia is not yet drowning. What is she doing?”
“She’s singing, Chip,” said Michael, who, as an extension of the omniscient will of the Almighty, was well-versed both in the works of the immortal Bard and the perfectly praiseworthy pre-Raphaelites.
“She’s singing,” agreed Chip. “I’m a plain-speaking man, Michael. I
speak as I find, and I’m not usually one for metaphor but this …” He wagged a finger at Ophelia. “… This is a metaphor for the blindness and the wickedness and the madness of our world. We’re drowning in sin. We’re drowning our world with pollution and greenhouse gases. And what are people doing? They’re drinking and they’re whoring and they’re watching their YouTube and their rude tube and they’re refusing to see that their skirts are filling with water and that their wickedness is going to drag them down.” He looked Michael square in the face. “My eyes are open, mate. Wide open. I see perfectly clearly, even if the idiots in the street cannot.”
The office door slammed open, and Nerys stormed in, with Michael’s receptionist Freddy scuttling nervously in her wake.
“I tried to stop her,” said Freddy weakly, “although there’s only so much Freddy can do. And I was taking a message at the time.”
Nerys strode up to the map table.
“You colossal cock!” she snarled at Chip. “You jumped-up petty excuse for a builder’s mate! How fucking dare you!”
“I’m sorry,” said Chip, a superior half-smile on his face. “Have we met?”
“You know full sodding well who I am!”
“Your face looks vaguely familiar.”
“I know what you’re up to,” she said.
“Nerys,” said Michael in reasonable tones, “whatever’s upset you, maybe you should go home and have a nice …”
“Shut it, pixie-wings!” she snapped. “I’m talking to the organ-grinder, not his flying monkey.” Nerys threw down a handful of papers on the table, obliterating much of central Asia. “I know how you funded this church, Chip! Property fraud! You’ve borrowed against properties which you don’t even own. Hundreds of thousands! Millions!”
“That’s a slanderous accusation,” said Chip, “and I mean that in the full legal watch-that-your-mouth-doesn’t-land-you-in-court sense.”
“I have all the evidence here.”
“Oh, financial law and property conveyance are your areas of specialisation, are they?”
“Sir, if I may,” Freddy tried to interject, “there’s been an incident you should be aware of.”
Chip ignored him completely.
“You see, Miss Thomas, I thought you worked at a recruitment agency. That is what you do, isn’t it? Or did do.”
“You lost me my job. You killed my dog. And you – you! – got me kicked out of my own home!”
“Nerys, please,” said Michael. “You know full well that it was Jeremy’s impromptu demolitions that led to your … accommodation problems.”
“Yeah, but he’s the one who owns the bloody land our flats are built on. I saw the paperwork. It was his solicitor and his building inspector who had us evicted.”
Chip was shaking his head sadly. “You think I did that? You think I personally oversee the actions of all my businesses and individual employees? Do you honestly think you’re that important?”
“It’s your bloody fault I have to live in the sodding storeroom above an undertakers and, yes, damn it, you are doing this on purpose! You’ve got your name written on half the land in this town and you think you own it. You’re a horrible, ugly octopus sat in the middle of its web, with your tentacles in all the pies and …”
“Do you mean a spider?” suggested Freddy.
“What?” snapped Nerys. “Yes! Fine! Spider in its web, and you think you can push us all around and I’m not going to stand for it.”
“Oh, dear,” said Chip, entirely unafraid.
“I’m going to expose what you’re doing, you pathetic little man, and I’m going to bring you down! This …” She performed a wild expressive movement that Michael judged was meant to be a cross between a world-encompassing gesture and some form of you-go-girl streetwise sass but simply looked weird. “… This is fucking war.”
At that, she turned on her heel and stormed back out again.
Chip gripped the edge of the table and breathed heavily. Michael decided it was probably best to say nothing for now.
“You know,” said Chip, eventually, “I might have previously mentioned that I don’t like that woman.”
“You might have,” agreed Michael.
“You had a message for me,” Chip said to Freddy.
“Oh, yes,” said Freddy. “I quite forgot in all the hullabaloo. I thought you ought to know that there’s been an accident. One of your construction workers has slipped off the scaffolding outside the supermarket.”
“What happened?”
“As best as I understand it, there’s been some sort of protest thingy going on in town. Mothers and babies angry about milk or something. Anyway, one of the women flashed her, you know, lady cushions, and your chappy took a tumble.”
Chip closed his eyes. Something dark and furious rumbled in his chest.
“Is he hurt?” he said.
“He’s been taken to Good Hope, but it’s nothing critical,” said Freddy.
Chip made a noise, an unexpected noise. It was a laugh.
“Not critical?” he said. “Some crazed woman goes around exposing herself, causing injury to an honest, hard-working man, and you say it’s not critical?” He fixed both Michael and Freddy with a steely stare. “She’s right.”
“Who is?” said Michael.
“This is war,” said Chip.
Chapter 10 – In which Clovenhoof has his day in court, and things get rather heated
Toyah Wilson’s first appearance at the Lichfield Road magistrates’ court on a public indecency charge had been a brief event, only enlivened by her colourful protestation of her innocence. Her second appearance, just under a month later, looked likely to be a longer and more intriguing affair and, subsequently, by the time Ben and Nerys sat down, the public gallery was almost full. There was barely a face they did not recognise.
“The SCUM are out in force,” said Ben, regarding the various mums (for once without their sticky little offspring).
“And the real scum,” said Nerys, nodding towards the surprisingly happy-looking figure of Chip Malarkey.
Chip caught her gaze and a look of oily smugness washed over his face. Nerys shuddered in disgust.
Toyah’s mum, the fiery Stella Wilson, sat on the front row of public seats, flanked by a number of large men and scary women Nerys took to be the extended family. They kept giving cheery waves and thumbs up to Toyah, who sat, sullenly and silently defiant, in the dock beside the court security officer.
“Family outing,” said Ben.
“Probably a rite of passage,” Nerys replied. “I bet the magistrate has seen each and every one of them at some point.”
“All rise,” said the court usher.
The public stood, along with the advisors, solicitors and defendant, as the three magistrates – two women and a man – entered and sat beneath the royal crest.
“Tessa Bloom,” Nerys whispered to Ben.
“Who?”
“The chief magistrate. An old friend of Chip Malarkey and a regular churchgoer.”
“Ah,” said Ben, eyeing the red-haired woman suspiciously. “Totally impartial then?”
As the public sat once more, Nerys looked round.
“I thought Jeremy was coming.”
“Me too,” said Ben. “I’m sure he said he had to pick up some things on his way down.”
Nerys laughed grimly to herself.
“Probably best that he misses it,” she said. “Knowing him, he’d do something stupid and get charged with contempt of …”
She was interrupted by the courtroom door slamming open and a ridiculous figure in a black gown and grey barrister’s wig swaggering in.
“Sorry, your honours,” said Clovenhoof loudly, hefting a large bag with him. “Didn’t have the outfits in my size. Had to make do with Sexy School Teacher.” He gave a twirl of his cape as he approached the solicitors’ desks.
“Who is this person?” said Mrs Bloom to the court at large.
“Defence solicitor, your worshi
p,” said Clovenhoof.
“But the court has appointed a defence solicitor.”
“But Toyah, showing infinite taste and wisdom, plumped for me instead.”
“And who are you?”
“Jeremy Clovenhoof, your judgeness.”
“You were meant to be looking after Bea,” Toyah hissed to him.
“She’s with Spartacus,” Clovenhoof hissed in reply.
“And are you qualified to practise criminal law?” asked Mrs Bloom.
“Practise is all I do.”
“Where with Spartacus?” Toyah demanded.
“Laserquest.”
“I find that it hard to believe that you are a solicitor,” said Mrs Bloom.
“I like scepticism in my judges,” said Clovenhoof.
“For one, you are wearing a wig. We do not wear wigs in this court.”
“Wig, madam? This is all perfectly natural,” he said, and stroked his grey locks.
The magistrate raised her hand to signal the court security, but Nerys saw her stop at a glance from Chip Malarkey. Something unspoken passed between them. Chip nodded in assent and Mrs Bloom turned the gesture into a dismissive wave.
“Well, if no one objects …” she said.
“Oh, crap,” said Nerys.
“Parcel for you,” said Freddy, stepping through the sliding door into the ARC Research Company laboratory.
Michael, who had been working through samples of various South American vertebrates, clocked the company label on the box and grinned.
“Excellent.”
Perhaps his grin was too obviously child-like, because Freddy lingered to watch him open it. Michael took a scalpel to the binding tape.
“Is it those cryo-tubes you’ve been waiting for?” said Freddy.
“No.”
“That centrifuge that you said you were going to get?”
“Nope.”
Michael sliced under the folding panels.
“This, Freddy, is a ticket to salvation.”
“Oh,” said Freddy, in the manner of someone who wished to appear excited but had no idea what was being discussed.
“Chip may not realise it yet, but I’m going to do a great service for the people of this parish.”
