Ark Baby

by Liz Jensen

  ‘I’d better have another look,’ sighs Abbie. ‘And give them all a good dust. How many are there, d’you reckon?’

  ‘Well, there’s the famous ostrich, for starters,’ says Norman through a mouthful of flip-cake. ‘Plus a wombatty-looking job, a big monkey, and what looks like a badger. Oh, and a dog. He’s got a whatchermacallit on his collar with SUET engraved on it.’

  ‘That name rings a bell,’ says Abbie, taking out her notepad and adding DUST CREATURES to her list in her neat script. ‘I think the Empress said it was her daughter’s dog.’

  ‘The girls’ve enrolled on another course at the university,’ Abbie says, when Norman returns from chasing the red setter off the lawn. She checks the percolator. ‘Special studies, they call it.’

  ‘What’s that, when it’s at home?’

  ‘Something modern, by the sound.’

  ‘So they’re going intellectual on us again,’ smiles Norman, twirling a three-centimetre screw between finger and thumb. ‘Bless their cotton socks.’

  As Norman returns to his DIY, picture his wife Abbie now a million miles away in her kitchen, reading, as she does every day, from the Recipe for Happiness. The recipe, writ large on a poster featuring cherubs with cooking pots, is dear to her heart; its homely kitchen philosophy has served her well:

  Take one ounce of goodwill, and mix with a measure of frankness. Add a pinch of lovingkindness and stir in well with humour, the spice of life. Sprinkle generously with open-mindedness and courtesy. Add sympathy and optimism to the melting-pot, and apply warmth until a merry glow is achieved. Serve with a dash of glee and garnish with hope. Note: this is a dish for sharing, and is very more-ish!

  It never fails to make her smile, and to put her in the mood for the task ahead. For which observe her now, checking her utensils for the morning’s full dress rehearsal of minestrone suivi par artichokes Riviera, ensuite potted pears avec cinnamon custard. Some people have things in their blood: she has food in hers. She’ll be trying out another of those Victorian veggie recipes later, from The Fleshless Cook by Violet Scrapie. The Laudanum Empress says they’ll be disgusting because they’re her daughter’s recipes, but what sort of taste does a self-confessed drug-addict have?

  Pots, pans, knives, casserole, whisk, scissors, sieve, garlic-crusher, colanders, baking tin, all present and correct, standing by Worktop A ready for Camera One. And soup ingredients to the ready: pre-prepared stock, vermicelli, seasonings, peas, beans, carrots, Parmesan, white wine. The artichokes Riviera and potted pears ingredients are to stay in the fridge until after the commercial break. Camera Two, as always, she pictures perched several centimetres above the microwave, for the wider shot. Quite a flattering angle; she’s checked it from a step-ladder, narrowing her eyes and picturing the on-screen effect. It’s absurd, but despite her years of cooking experience, she still feels a little nervous.

  Yes; nervous. The big day is right around the corner. She can feel it in her bones.

  The scenario for the big day is as follows: an independent television producer’s car breaks down on the A210, and because his mobile phone is also on the blink, he walks to Thunder Spit where he smells a wonderful smell coming from the Old Parsonage. He rings the doorbell, and Abbie answers its chimes, her apron still on. The television producer, whose name is Oscar or perhaps Jack, wonders if he can use her phone to call the AA, as his mobile isn’t charged up. While they are waiting for the AA man to arrive, Abbie offers Oscar or Jack a cup of freshly brewed coffee and some of her home-made Apfelkuchen, and he is so bowled over by the Apfelkuchen, and the elegance and poise and je-ne-sais-quoi of Abbie Ball herself, that he enquires whether she has ever considered working as a television presenter, and would she do him the great honour of accompanying him to the studio for a screen test?

  After that, the rest will be history.

  But now, today, is pre-history, and Abbie stands framed for the opening shot of her rehearsal.

  ‘Hello. Now it’s easy to get into a bit of a tizz when you’re thinking minestrone,’ she begins. ‘But just remember that the secret of success is to take it one step at a time.’

  Minestrone is a good metaphor for Abbie’s life, she reflects, as she runs through the list of ingredients for the benefit of the imaginary viewer at home: full of bits and pieces of interesting things, swirling about in the family pot. Like genes passed down through the ages, some items will crop up more frequently, and others sink to the bottom. One night, she, Norman and the Empress had all watched a programme called Death of a Nation; the extinction of the British was all down to DNA, apparently. Bad thoughts, good thoughts. Traits from Norman’s side, traits from her own side. Look at Rose and Blanche: the red hair; that’s definitely a Boggs characteristic. But their manual dexterity; that’s surely Norman’s side of the family? The Tobash feet, poor dears, and the over-developed coccyx – though they haven’t got it as badly as Granny had, and that was in the days when they wouldn’t operate so readily if it didn’t affect your gait. The excess body hair: guilty again, as charged: that’s the Tobash side, but the cosmetics industry has come up trumps there. I came off quite lightly myself, but thank God for hot wax! The trouble with so many ingredients in the gene pool, in the pot of thoughts and memories, is that there are always a few that you find less appetising than others, and some which are so downright appalling that you force yourself to gulp them down without looking too hard.

  ‘Now a cook’s best friend is her chopping board,’ says Abbie gaily, smiling at the imaginary Camera Two. ‘And as you can see, I use the traditional wooden kind, though if you’re thinking kitchen hygiene, the plastic variety is best, to be honest. Nice sharp knife’ (she holds it up to the imaginary Camera One and lets it glisten in the light) ‘and you’re ready to go.’

  The Laudanum Empress, her soap opera finished, has been watching Abbie, transfixed. Noting the woman’s passion, her exhausting single-mindedness, and her slightly buck teeth. And thinking.

  ‘You remind me of my daughter,’ she says suddenly. Abbie looks up in shock at the opaque phantom perched on the draining-board. ‘Could you by any chance be related?’

  Outside, the sky is a jovial cobalt blue, and the trees are punchbags for a wild, irrational wind. While Abbie has been rehearsing, Rose and Blanche have travelled back from Hunch-burgh by bullet train, and are now stomping purposefully up Crawpy Street in their elasticated trainers, past the giant Lucozade billboard, up a little alley decorated with dog-shit and old Coke cans, and squeezing their way through a rusty turnstile, past a big FOR SALE sign, into the graveyard of St Nicholas’s Church. A cluster of teenagers – the twins recognise Clinton Tobash, Cameron Mulvey, and Jade Yarble, regular truants from Abbie’s home-economics class, among them – sit on a gravestone smoking and kicking at the long grass and nettles. Nearby, an ancient Lord Chief Justice sheep nuzzles about the gravestones like a self-operated Hoover, the mobile nozzle of her lips wiggling to reach the most succulent dandelions: the new ecclesiastical administration, to establish its green credentials, had insisted on not buying a new church lawnmower, but had instead persuaded Ron Harcourt to contract out one of his flock to graze. Rose and Blanche pat the sheep. Then nod at the kids, remembering their own tendency to come here when skiving off school. History repeats itself, they think, as they pick their way past the crumbling gravestones.

  ‘Look,’ said Rose, pointing to a grave from which sprouted a mass of indecently sprawling vegetation with yellow flowers.

  ‘Eugh,’ said Blanche. ‘Creepy.’

  ‘It’s a gourd plant.’ A long-haired, ineffectual-looking man stepped out from behind a gravestone. ‘I looked it up. It’s famous for its adaptability. Repeats itself every four generations. Green one year, yellow the next, then orange, then mauve, then back to green. Amazing, eh? The Lord moves in a mysterious way. I’m Josh – remember?’

  ‘Hi, Josh,’ said the girls.

  They did remember. He helped organise things like the Thistle Festival. They’d seen him at
the Yard of Ale Contest, and he and Dad had taken turns to MC the Karaoke nights at the community centre. And wasn’t he the bloke who did that embarrassing cabaret thing for the Birdspotters’ Association? Yes: the Vicar.

  ‘We wanted to look at some old church records, for our genealogy module,’ said Rose, stepping carefully over the tendrils of the gourd plant. At the base of each yellow flower, an odd-looking purplish fruit was beginning to swell.

  ‘See who married who, in Mum’s family,’ added Blanche. ‘And then put it in a diagram. Family trees are all the rage in the States. We’re going to set up a business.’

  ‘Do a sort of trace-your-roots service,’ Blanche elaborated.

  ‘Yeah, charge a fortune,’ suggested Rose.

  ‘Uh-huh? Well, follow me,’ said Josh. They stepped into the gloom, where after a moment the mournful shapes of some dingy pews began to loom into view. A bucket of whitewash stood on the floor in the middle of the aisle. ‘I’m trying to get rid of the water-mark,’ explained Josh. ‘It dates back to the Great Flood of 1858, but now we’re selling up, the estate agent wants it looking marketable.’

  ‘Selling soon, then?’

  ‘Hoping to. We’ve had a few nibbles from a McDonald’s franchise. It makes financial sense; we can’t compete with the satellite services. I’m off to the States, myself.’

  So, think the twins. Another wanker exports himself.

  ‘You’d better get a move on,’ said Rose, ‘before the Emigration Restriction.’

  ‘The clergy are exempt. I’m doing an ecclesiastical MA in Louisiana, home of the water-melon.’

  ‘So where’s the marriage register?’

  ‘Over here,’ said Josh. Then, suddenly inspired: ‘Ten Euros, and it’s yours.’

  Rose and Blanche exchanged a glance.

  ‘Let’s have a look, then,’ said Rose.

  They wandered into the registry and inspected the book. It was old, thick and faded, its pages oddly bulbous.

  ‘Another victim of the Flood,’ commented Josh. ‘Nowadays we put it all on disc, of course, and send it to the Office for National Statistics.’

  The girls leafed through the tattered pages. The ink had run on many of them, rendering them illegible. ‘It’s a bit shop-soiled,’ complained Rose.

  ‘That’s history for you,’ said Josh with a smile. ‘Take it or leave it.’ He was looking forward to his three-year creation-studies course.

  ‘Five Euros, and you’re on,’ said Rose.

  They settled for seven Euros fifty.

  All right if I invite him to a barbie, then?’ asks Norman, popping his head round the kitchen door.

  ‘Invite who?’ asks Abbie.

  ‘The new vet. Buck, he’s called. Buck de Savile.’

  ‘Ooh, a Frenchman?’ enquires Abbie hopefully, putting away her imaginary TV equipment. She’ll be able to flex her subjunctives.

  ‘Seemed as English as beef to me,’ says Norman.

  ‘Oh well. We’ll soon find out. Tell him the Saturday after next,’ says Abbie.

  ‘Tell who the Saturday after next?’ call Rose and Blanche, slamming the front door behind them. ‘No one boring, we hope.’

  ‘Ah, the return of Double Trouble,’ comments Norman.

  ‘The new vet,’ says Abbie. ‘Nice man, according to your father.’

  The twins exchange a glance of amused contempt.

  ‘Age?’ they ask together.

  ‘Oh, youngish to middle-ish. Told me he was born the day Elvis Presley died, so work it out for yourselves. Drives an Audi Nuance. You can’t say fairer.’

  Rose and Blanche exchange another look; this one more optimistic.

  ‘Any more ideas about earning your keep, you two?’ Norman is asking. ‘Sorry to raise the subject, but there’s been a lot of hoo-ha about the pensions issue, since the Egg Bank. The P-word, they’re calling it. Your mother and I aren’t the only parents racking their brains about how you’re going to cope financially when we’re six feet under.’

  ‘We’re planning to get pregnant,’ announces Rose. ‘That’s our P-word!’

  Norman and Abbie exchange a God-help-us glance; they’ve also heard about the Reward on the news.

  ‘Along with twenty million other bounty-hunters!’ sighs Norman, in frustration. This Reward thing is a big mistake by the Government, he and Abbie have agreed. All it’s going to do is raise hopes, start off a national rutting fever, spread a lot of venereal disease, and break young hearts.

  ‘Have you tried thinking of anything on a practical level?’ sighs Abbie. ‘Just in case you don’t manage to become the first British girls since the Millennium to get pregnant by natural means?’

  ‘Yes, as a matter of fact,’ says Rose. ‘We’re going to research the Ball family tree.’

  She and her sister dump their handbags and a crumpled carrier bag on the hall table. Keys, cigarette packets and chewing gum spill out.

  ‘It’s part of our genealogy module,’ says Blanche.

  ‘Module?’ asks Norman. ‘As in space module?’

  ‘That’s education jargon for you,’ says Abbie.

  ‘Dr Bugrov reckons that with the British becoming extinct, the family-tree market is going to be the next big money-generating thing. We’re going to get into it. We’ve got to start off by making a sort of chart, showing the Ball family’s ancestry.’

  ‘Get the Empress to help you,’ suggests Abbie. ‘She reckons her daughter might be a great-great-great something or other of ours. She was a famous cook, in her day.’ The twins groan in unison.

  ‘No thanks,’ says Rose.

  ‘In any case,’ adds Blanche, ‘oral testimony isn’t allowed.’

  ‘Certainly not phantom oral testimony,’ adds Rose drily.

  ‘Yeah,’ agrees Blanche. ‘It’s all got to be in writing. Empirical, it’s called.’

  ‘We’ve got hold of the Thunder Spit marriage register,’ says Rose, pulling it out of a crumpled carrier bag and waving it at her parents.

  ‘We’ll be using that,’ says Blanche.

  ‘To make a chart,’ continues Rose. ‘Showing who’s related to who.’

  ‘Whom,’ corrects Abbie, scooping the girls’ belongings back into their handbags. ‘It’s not who,’ she says. ‘It’s whom.’

  ‘For whom the bell tolls,’ says Norman, winking at Abbie.

  ‘Pardon?’ say the twins together.

  ‘Ernest Hemingway,’ says Norman, slapping Abbie on the bum. ‘She’s a thoroughbred, your mum. Ask not for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for her.’

  The twins groan in unison and do their puke-face.

  ‘Now on to matters serious,’ announces Norman, aligning his belly over his belt and rocking on his shoes. ‘Have any of you three gorgeouses nicked my strimmer? Because in case it has slipped your collective memories, it’s the Thistle Festival next week. And there’s no peace for the wicked!’

  CHAPTER 14

  THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES

  There is no peace, Parson Phelps always maintained, for he who is pure in heart. 1859 was the year that Charles Darwin’s book, Origin of Species, was published, and it was a date which also marked the decline into melancholy and madness of many a theologian – including Parson Phelps.

  He and I laughed at first. The idea that we were descended from monkeys and apes was not new, Parson Phelps informed me, but this was the first time it had been voiced with such apparent authority. It was only when he realised the extent to which otherwise sane people were actually taking the scientist’s beliefs seriously, that my foster-father’s outrage began in earnest. He was not alone in deciding that the ungodly book was the last straw in a long and uncivilised barrage of assault upon the Lord’s word by his great bugbear, that unseemly vehicle of destruction, science. The whole Christian world – or that part of it that Parson Phelps and I represented, i.e. the humble common clergy of the land – was still weary and frustrated from all the geology battles over fossils, but we rose up against it, stones in a great wall of f
aith that united us all.

  These were heady days in the Church, and every day, including Marble Friday, my Father walked to Judlow to purchase the Thunderer and keep abreast of developments in the Great Debate. But he was no passive participant. His sermons at that time took on a force and a passion I had never seen before, and it was thanks to his stormy sermons from the pulpit that Charles Darwin – hitherto a complete stranger to all Thunder Spitters – became such an object of public contempt in the village that he replaced Guy Fawkes in effigy on Bonfire Night. Shortly after its publication, Parson Phelps appeared in the church brandishing a copy of the infamous book, and during the service ripped out and tore page after page. If the congregation had been permitted to cheer in God’s house, they would have done, but instead they smiled and allowed their faces simply to shine encouragingly in support of Parson Phelps as the pages went fluttering to the floor.

  ‘This is my message to all heretics,’ warned my father. ‘That he who dareth to challenge the word of God, as evidenced in the words of Genesis, may be treated as a worshipper of the Devil himself, and punished accordingly!’

  The congregation had come to adore such scenes – but afterwards Dr Baldicoot looked worried, and shook his head.

  ‘I fear he may have a brain tumour,’ he confided to me. ‘He is taking this evolution debate too seriously.’

  I disagreed. I knew my father, after all. He was simply a man of deep conviction, and I loved him for it. Besides, I knew him to be right, and shared his beliefs most passionately myself. Of all the books of the Bible, that of Genesis was the one that I had always held most dear to my heart, and I felt its truth deeply. The Earth had been without form, and void, and darkness had been upon the face of the deep! And then man appeared! For me, there was simply no denying it, and science could hang.