Ark Baby

by Liz Jensen

  ‘You’ll be the death of me, Vile,’ she warned, stirring sugar into her tea with an angry clatter.

  There’s nothing wrong with me, thought Violet, as she crammed another muffin into her face.

  Even then she had a sense of purpose – that rare sense of purpose that comes to children who instinctively know part of their destiny. She didn’t play with dolls. Or hoops. Or marbles, bats or balls. She watched Cabillaud, studied the recipes of Mrs Beeton and Miss Eliza Acton, and hatched grown-up plans.

  CHAPTER 7

  IN WHICH THE ROGUE MALE ATTEMPTS INTEGRATION IN THE STONED CROW

  Thunder Spit relished its heritage, both ancient and modern: its ancient chalk soil, its spanking new community centre, its fame among amateur botanists for its wide variety of sedges (‘the sedge capital of England’, according to the Outdoorsman), its proximity to the Gannymede power station, its sugar-beet and parsnip polyculture, its history of unprecedented cowardice during the plague of 1665, its tortoiseshell cats, its two petrol stations, its River Flid, winner of the Pollution Challenge Award of 1997, its mobile video-hire service, its post-modern vicar, its intolerance of New Age travellers, its prehistoric fossil heritage, its electronic speed-sensitive road-signs which flashed the words SLOW DOWN, YOU ARE GOING TOO FAST at vehicles that drove through the high street at over 50 k.p.h., its Great Flood of 1858, its early and wholehearted commitment to agricultural phosphates.

  All this I learned from Norman Ball, my first Thunder Spitter. I met him in the Stoned Crow. I arrived at 6 p.m., and thought: First stop, a beer. I gave the Nuance a little pat on the arse. She’d done well. I parked her round the back of the pub, near the quay. Across the car-park I saw a driving-test centre and a billboard advertising Lucozade, both dwarfed by sky. Too much sky, I thought, as I locked the car – chk! – with the remote-control doo-da. So much sky, compared to land and buildings, that it seemed to be pressing down on you. Agoraphobia is probably quite similar to claustrophobia that way. I looked across to where I reckoned the sea should have been, but there was a huge concrete barrier in the way, covered in strangely hopeful-looking graffiti:

  DON’T DRINK AND DRIVE – TAKE CRACK AND FLY

  ROSE AND BLANCHE ARE SLAGS

  URBAN CHAOS

  Forget the geography, I told myself, as I pushed open the swing door of the pub. Concentrate on the social life.

  So it was through the cheery cigarette fug of the Stoned Crow that I caught my first real glimpse of the town that was to be my new home. The pub windows had that thick Olde Worlde glass, but through a more transparent section I could see the black, gloomy silhouette of a church spire, and a row of bollards. I watched a woman in a sou’wester being dragged by a border collie across the high street. The lead she was holding had a handle like a giant trigger. The dog was wearing a bright coat with a spaceship design; the sort of thing a boy of six might have specified if his granny had offered to knit him an exciting woolly. Bloody hell, people and their pets, I thought. At least I’ll be dealing with farm animals here. I remembered Mr Jenks at the Veterinary Society saying something about Lord Chief Justice sheep. What the hell were they? I downed my beer, and was just telling myself to go and buy another, when I saw a fat man at the bar waving at me.

  ‘A stranger in our midst!’ he called across. ‘What’s the betting you’re the new vet?’

  He was coming towards me now with two pints of bitter, foam frothing down the sides of the glasses and on to the red-patterned carpet, walking carefully, like he was giving his own blubber a piggy-back. He planted the pints on little flannel mats, then eased himself down next to me. The red velour stool shuddered.

  ‘Welcome to Thunder Spit, mate. You’re among friends.’

  ‘It’s an honour to be here,’ I said, though what I’d seen of Thunder Spit had yet to enthral me. ‘I’m a big fan of the countryside. Used to come up this way on camping holidays as a kid. Plant flags on sandcastles. Cool stuff.’

  We shook hands.

  ‘Buck de Savile,’ I said. I was pleased to notice that he looked impressed.

  He told me that Norman Ball was the name. ‘Good journey? Saw you drive up while I was in the little boys’ room, pointing Percy at the porcelain. Noticed your Audi.’ He gave me a thumbs-up sign. ‘Nice one. Nuance, if memory serves?’

  ‘Yup. Turbo.’

  Despite the burp smell, you couldn’t help warming to a man who’d buy you a beer and could appreciate the thrill of a shiny red chassis. Norman told me he was in insurance, and that, for his sins, he commuted to Hunchburgh. As well as being an active member of the village council, he was a keen DIY-er.

  ‘A fanatic, you could say. I’m a dab hand with a router, though I say it myself. So need any advice, just give me a tinkle.’ Something about the way he spoke made me feel that I knew him already, but I couldn’t put my finger on what it was. ‘So, young Buck,’ said Norman. ‘To what do we owe the pleasure?’

  I had known this question would pop up at some point, and I’d formulated a few Giselle-free replies on the journey up, while trying out some of my new faces. Knowing the veterinary complaints procedure well, I reckoned I had at least six months’ leeway vis-à-vis Mrs Mann. If not more. According to my enquiries, most complaints were dropped as soon as the pet-owner acquired a new baby-substitute. Boundless hope.

  ‘I got fed up with pets,’ I told Norman. ‘They were too –’

  ‘Tame?’ Norman guffawed. I couldn’t help laughing, too.

  ‘After the wild stuff then?’ Norman asked. ‘I’ll give you wild stuff. My wife Abbie was clearing out the loft, doing a big old spring-clean-and-chucking-out job, cos the planning permission came through to refurbish. It’s a listed building, the Old Parsonage, so we had a helluva wait. Anyway, what do we find up there?’

  I realised he was waiting for an answer, and racked my brains.

  ‘Some of that vintage Japanese pornography?’

  ‘Not even close, mate.’

  ‘A skeleton in a cupboard?’

  ‘Hey. Getting warmer. A collection of stuffed animals, as a matter of fact.’

  My heart sank: I knew what was coming next.

  ‘Heirloom of Abbie’s, bless her heart,’ Norman is saying. ‘Dates back to the nineteenth century sometime. Reckons there must’ve been a taxidermist in the family, way back. She says they’re a dust-trap, wants the whole lot binned. Fancy a squizzerooney?’

  You come across this in all jobs, I suppose. You’re a lawyer, and they ask if you’ve ever had to defend someone you knew was guilty. You’re a dustman, and they enquire whether you’ve ever come across a wad of banknotes in a rubbish bin. You’re a doctor, and people want you to look at their piles. You’re a vet, and they demand an inspection of Great-Aunt Ethel’s stuffed menagerie.

  ‘It’d be a pleasure,’ I said, groaning inwardly. ‘I did a bit of taxidermy myself at vet school. It’s quite an art. Not one I ever mastered myself, I’m afraid, though,’ I told him, remembering a succession of botched squirrels and rabbits with wire sticking out in unhelpful places. We were taught by an ex-con, who said it was his way of putting something back into the community. ‘It’s the ears,’ I added. ‘They’re a bugger. So what’ve you got? Any interesting specimens?’

  ‘Most of them birds and small mammals, by the looks. Oh, and an ostrich. Blue eyes, rather human. And they’re all wearing old-fashioned frocks and breeches and stuff, like something out of a kinky costume drama. There’s a monkey, too. Wearing pantaloons.’

  I had a sudden picture of Giselle in her pink frock and her nappy, stiffening with rigor mortis on my operating table, and felt a chill creep over me.

  ‘You all right, mate?’ he asked. ‘You look like you’ve seen a ghost.’

  ‘I’m fine,’ I mumbled.

  ‘Talking of ghosts,’ he said, ‘we’ve got one back at the Old Parsonage. Victorian lady. Quite a beauty. She’d be fanciable, I reckon, if she had a bit more flesh on her. The Laudanum Empress, she calls herself. Wears a lot of pet
ticoats. Abbie reckons she popped out of the same wardrobe she found the animals in. She’s been wreaking havoc with our telly.’

  That was another post-Millennial thing. I’d read about it. Supernatural sightings had gone up by 300 per cent. This, I thought, does not bode well.

  ‘Fancy some nibbles?’ Norman’s asking. ‘Pork sushi? Cheese Loons?’

  And he’s wheeling his bulgy bottom across to the bar.

  What did Norman and I discuss that night, before the momentous newsflash?

  The usual things: how United were doing, my virtual Elvis collection, the new freak strain of ulcerative arthritis in Spain, the pros and cons of the new Windows software, the fact that it was quite a year for aphids but you could zap them with that new eco-chemical, the latest on the Fertility Crisis. It made Norman glad he wasn’t my age. He had two grown-up girls, he said, his ‘Gruesome Twosome’. Rose and Blanche. The names somehow rang a bell.

  ‘We’ve had twins in the family since way back when,’ Norman is saying. ‘My side of the family, that. My mother was a Tobash.’

  He might as well have told me she was a Martian, for all it meant to me.

  It was that evening, from Norman, that I learned that Thunder Spit, population fifteen thousand, had once been a herring-shaped peninsula, but a land-reclamation scheme back in the late 1980s had knocked sense into its impractical geography, rendering it more a suburb of Judlow than a separate town.

  ‘Some folk were against it being rationalised,’ said Norman. ‘But not me. Include me out, I said. Me and the hard core on the Council stuck to our guns. It put paid to the barmy one-way system for a start.’ He had a weak bladder; as he wobbled off for yet another ‘Jimmy Riddle’, he called over his shoulder: ‘Show me a man who says he isn’t proud of being a Thunder Spitter, Buck, and I’ll show you a liar!’

  While he was gone, I wrote a mental list:

  1. Sort out the surgery.

  2. Check out the farmers.

  3. Get laid.

  Norman returns with two more beers, slosh, slosh, and another fistful of plastic-wrapped snacks. He plonks the lot on the table, and beer-foam whudders down the sides of our glasses.

  ‘Cheers.’ He slurps a big mooshful of bitter.

  And then, as though intercepting item number three on my list: ‘Women. I love ’em to bits, but do I understand them? The hell I do!’ There is a pause, as I nod and he ruminates. ‘Woman’s a mysterious creature,’ he pronounces finally. ‘And we’re entranced by her mystery, aren’t we, Buck, as men?’ I try out one of my new agreeing faces. ‘I saw a documentary about it,’ he continues. ‘It’s all to do with the DNA business.’

  Here we go, I thought. Another spouter of gobshite putting in his ha’p’orth on the subject. There’s nothing worse than a scientific ignoramus with a biological theory. They pick them up like verrucae. Norman’s telling me it’s all in the genes.

  ‘DNA’s simplicity itself, Buck. I reckon that, in a nutshell, it’s all about history having to replicate itself. Enigma variations on a theme, type-of-thing. Bit of this, bit of that, chuck it all in the melting-pot. You’ve heard about these new pig-heart transplants. Their DNA’s been doctored so’s we don’t reject them. Amazing, eh? And Jessie Harcourt, she’s got a llama’s pancreas. You know what I reckon about this Fertility Crisis,’ he said. ‘I reckon our time’s up. That’s the bottom line. Look at the dinosaurs. They died out, didn’t they? Same thing’s happening to Homo Britannicus.’ He paused to burp. ‘We’ve evolved as far as we can, mate.’

  That’s what the woman on the radio had said, too.

  As a child, I used to try to imagine how the earth looked when it all began, those millions of years ago. The whole planet was just a wilderness of mares’ tails and dinosaurs and stagnant pools, back then. And the wind wasn’t so much wind, as a load of blue steam whirling about. I used to dream about earthquakes splitting the crust of the earth, like a failed soufflé of my mum’s, or eczema. I’d read those science-fiction comics. They’d show artists’ impressions of lower life-forms squabbling for supremacy. They were always bulbous, with little eyes on stalks, and they’d be submerged in a kind of churning primordial gloop. I had a vision of time speeded up, and dwarfy creatures with fins – not animals, but not plants either, a kind of horrible in-between thing – wriggling and twisting. Eating one another and being eaten.

  ‘I once watched a praying mantis eating a beetle,’ I told Norman. ‘Its jaws crunched from the side. They’re like mechanised clamps, an insect’s jaws.’ I demonstrated with my thumb and index finger, making pinching motions at Norman’s nose, and he shrank back in mock-fear, laughing. ‘The beetle put up quite a fight,’ I said. ‘It was still trying to defend itself when it only had one leg left, hanging by a thread.’ It had really impressed me. Things like that do, when you’re six. Then you forget about them, until suddenly they snap into your head one evening, years later, in a pub, after a few lagers. ‘Kicking and struggling to the very last. In the end, all that was left was a back foot, waving.’

  Norman was looking at me sideways.

  ‘Well, that’s us, isn’t it?’ I continued, remembering why I’d thought about the mantis. ‘We’re that foot, waving. We’re being eaten alive. Swallowed up by time.’

  He nodded slowly. ‘Point there, Buck. Bit of a philosopher, then, are you?’

  To counteract this flattering but way-off-the-mark impression, I did him one of my brooding Elvis looks, and he guffawed.

  It was my dad who told me about evolution, or rather his idea of it. I don’t suppose that either of us realised, then, how important it would become.

  Even before the gizzard stone and, later, my Saturday job at Harper’s, I’d had a passion for skeletal biology, fuelled by the discoveries I made in the back garden, a long, narrow sliver of land subsiding towards the canal, black as Coke, which flowed sluggishly in a diagonal across the south of the borough. Both garden and canal were flanked by thin privet hedges and dust-filled urban weeds – bastard forms of dandelion, burdock, teasels, and rosebay willowherb which had mutated to outwit the weedkiller my father used to attack them. Every September, around the time the school term started, the cotton-wool tufts of willowherb drifted aimlessly on gusts of wind and settled on the lawn like lint, stirring up that strange feeling of melancholy that accompanies the changes of season in a city. At weekends, while my brothers helped our father fight weeds or prune hydrangeas or tackle rhubarb, I’d pick my way over the upturned earth, avoiding the lumps of half-buried cat-shit, to exhume the more ancient detritus of nature: snail-shells, cow’s teeth, old sparrow-skulls, a dog’s femur as drilled and pocked as a hard sponge. By the canal I found dried beetles, dead dragonflies, stiffened birds, and once, three-quarters of a fox. I became obsessed with this jetsam of calcium, and the audacity of its design.

  ‘Daddy, how did they make this?’ I ask, thrusting part of a shrew up at him.

  My father’s spade is an extension of his foot, a submerged stilt. He’s digging a trench for beets. ‘Make what?’

  ‘This bone. Look, it’s teeny-weeny. Look, Dad.’

  ‘It made itself, Bobby. The shrew grew in its mummy’s tummy.’

  ‘But who made the mummy shrew?’

  ‘The mummy shrew’s mum and dad.’

  ‘So, Dad, who made the first ever shrew, then?’

  ‘Evolution. It developed from another type of creature.’ Dad heaves his weight down on the spade, makes an ‘Eurkah’ noise, wipes sweat from his upper lip, stands back, and looks love-hatingly on his tiny, fenced kingdom. The beet-trench has thrown up a negative of itself: a long bulbous spine of earth.

  ‘What kind of creature, Dad?’

  ‘The elephant, I believe. Now help me with this root.’

  ‘And the elephant?’

  ‘From the pig.’

  ‘And the pig?’ I’m enjoying this; it’s like that game where you keep asking why until they give you some money for sweets.

  Dad sighs. ‘There were little fi
shy things. They crawled out of the water and lost their fins and learned to breathe and eventually became pigs.’

  ‘And the fishy things? Where did they come from?’

  ‘From the sea.’

  ‘But how did they get in the sea, Dad, in the first place?’

  ‘They grew from plants. Plants that –’ He looks uneasily about, checking that no neighbours are in earshot, perhaps sensing that he is on shaky ground. He lowers his voice slightly, just in case. ‘Plants that developed from tiny underwater mushrooms.’

  ‘And the mushrooms?’

  Dad looks up at the sky and frowns. A pigeon whizzes past, as though on a mission. ‘There was a big bang in space, and they burst out of nowhere.’

  Even at the age of seven, I suspected that this was bollocks.

  Norman’s still talking about DNA. I haven’t really been listening.

  ‘Anyway, this documentary I saw, on BBC 2 – no, I tell a lie, it was Channel Four – there was a bloke saying the mystery of woman is actually just a mystery of DNA. And once we’ve unravelled the conundrum, the women’s eggie things’ll get back to normal, and they’ll start getting pregnant again, and we’ll be laughing. But in the meantime –’

  Here he threw up his hands and made a face, and I made a face, too, and laughed.

  ‘Crying, more like,’ I joked, picturing Holly and Mrs Mann huddled together over the complaint form, with a little urn containing Giselle’s ashes stood next to them on a plinth.

  ‘Anyway, chez moi,’ says Norman, ‘for mysterious, read infuriating. Take my Abbie: illogical is putting it mildly. She tries to set the video to record the Lottery, right, but she wants to watch something else while it’s on. So what does Madame do? I call her Madame sometimes, Buck,’ he confided, ‘cos she’s a French teacher. Well, French and home economics, actually, pardonnez-moi, Monsieur. Anyway, she records the thing she’s watching, then acts all surprised when she discovers she hasn’t recorded the other thing. And d’you know what she says to me? “Stupid machine,” she says, and I quote: “I thought it could record two programmes at once, but all I’ve got is a blank tape.” Woman’s the eighth wonder of the world, I reckon. Mind you, joking apart,’ says Norman (‘’Scuse I’) belching, ‘I’ll give credit where credit’s due. My two gals – Tweedles Dum and Dee, I call ’em, my daughters – they’ve never had any problems with technology. If there’s one thing they’ve learned from yours truly, it’s how to use an instruction manual.’