Ark Baby

by Liz Jensen

  After a while, she said, ‘Yes, I think she’s right. An umbilical cord.’

  Tommy and I stared at each other. It made no sense. But then, my father had gone mad. Perhaps it made sense to a madman.

  As I shook his hand in farewell, the jar wrapped in fish-paper and tucked beneath my arm, Tommy smiled at me stiffly, and slapped my back.

  ‘We didn’t half get scared, eh?’ he said. ‘Over something as small and silly as that?’ But his voice lacked its usual hearty conviction, and his words did nothing to quell the anxiety in my heart, or the sudden distress in my sphincter. Until this visit to Thunder Spit, I suddenly realised, the parasite Mildred had been leaving me increasingly in peace. But now she was back with a vengeance. Something was wrong. Just as a strip of seaweed can detect oncoming rain, so my tapeworm could sense ill. I’ll say that to her credit.

  In the meantime, a question of a practical nature occupied me: should I bury the cord, or burn it? Or just leave it as it was, floating in the jar? The pickled human flesh was, after all, my only heritage, that I knew of. I was faced with a dilemma, though not one of the kind that I was used to grappling with in the Seminary. Fundamental questions there concerned such things as whether or not Adam possessed a navel. Not: What does one do with an anonymous umbilical cord, when it is presented to you in a jar, as your sole heritage?

  No two omphalic issues could be further apart.

  I sat in the coach on the way back, with my boxes in the luggage rack and the jar clasped to my breast. I pictured the tiny strip of flesh within, that had once connected a baby to its mother.

  What baby, to what mother?

  Why had the Contortionist sold my father the jar?

  And why had he kept it?

  Did I, even then, suspect the answer to these questions, and deny them to myself?

  I was in a woeful state by the time I returned to my lodgings, where Mrs Fooney, remarking that I looked pale, fussed over me with hot-water bottles and cups of tea, and home-made muffins, while Tillie put my whelk shell to her ear, and listened to the sea, and chatted over her dolls on the kitchen floor. But after a while I could bear this scene of domestic contentment no longer; hot tears welled in my eyes, and excusing myself, I tore myself away, clutching my jar to my bosom.

  For several days, I shut myself in my room, afflicted by a deep and unfathomable depression of the spirits, staring at the jar, and the jar staring at me. It was a wonder the glass hadn’t cracked on the journey from Thunder Spit, or leaked. The pickle was murky-looking; the cord was barely discernible inside: a bulbous, tapering thing, floating in suspension. There was a residue at the bottom, black and gritty-looking. The disintegrated placenta, perhaps? I wondered. I did not know. I was no more familiar with women’s bodies, and their workings, than with the geography of the Planet Mars. I should have thrown it out, then and there, perhaps.

  But I did not; I kept it there on my mantelpiece, as if it was the only thing I had left in the world.

  I am all filld up with a medicin calld lordnum. We hav been at Sea five or six munths, acordin to Higgins. The Arke is getin crowded, and the more crowded it gets, the mor lordnum we gets. Ther is very few cagis left emptie. Howlin and screemin and fartin all nite. Higgins and Steed and Bowker playin cards all day. Trapp drinkin his CLARIT and talkin about the Queen’s Collekshun, and his Slave-tradin days.

  And how wot we need is a NEW WURLD, wer no-wun will hav to WURK. On and on he goes, about this idea. His Uther Biznis, he corls it.

  Then we reech the shors of MOROKO.

  Oi, Deerie. Redy to sher yor HOME with a nice GENTLEMAN? Trapp sez to me, twurlin his MUSTARSH.

  CHAPTER 21

  METAMORPHOSIS

  There’s no smoke without fire, is there? That’s what they say about rumour. It can begin anywhere there’s a tinderbox and a match, or lightning. There is no telling where the flames will spread, or where the smoke will drift.

  The latest rumour doing the rounds of London Society is this: that Miss Violet Scrapie, said to be the anonymous joint author of Monsieur Cabillaud’s controversial book Cuisine Zoologique: une philosophie de la viande, published last week to general bemusement, has become a militant vegetarian!

  What’s more, the rumour is true.

  Mr Henry Salt, who had last seen Miss Violet Scrapie heading determinedly away from the assembled throng of non-carnivores muttering something about her need for a pork chop, had been pleasantly shocked to witness her presence at the November meeting of the Vegetarian Society, an occasion that featured an edifying speech by a guest vegan – a former abattoir-owner – and a display of etchings depicting the horrors of vivisection.

  At the end of the meeting, Violet Scrapie, her face creased with anxiety and excitement in equal measure, approached the podium bearing a covered silver platter, and made her announcement.

  ‘My name is Violet Scrapie, and I am writing a book of vegetarian cookery, with which I dare to rival the achievement of Mrs Beeton herself!’

  There! Done it! She bit her lip and stared down bashfully at her domed dish.

  The audience, who had heard the rumours of Violet’s conversion, gasped and exchanged whispers of amazement at the young woman’s intriguing combination of modesty, presumption and passion. Suet, unaware of the impression his mistress was making, was scrutinising the poster display. It featured ghastly representations of dogs like himself in cages, and prompted him to recall once again the worst moments of his puppy-hood. His mouth went dry with fear, and he began to pant, his tongue lolling out like a slice of ham.

  ‘Now try this, Mr Salt,’ Violet was urging the President, whipping the cover off the platter to reveal an unusual but strangely elegant display of amuse-gueules featuring creamed asparagus, celeriac mousse, jellied mushrooms and devilled grapes, garnished with zest of orange, angelica and fern leaves. ‘My own recipes!’

  The vegetarians gawped at the audacity of her vision, then began to whisper animatedly in little huddles. Their conclusion: Farewell, perhaps, boiled turnips! Let Mr Salt decide our fate!

  Mr Salt, no culinary ignoramus himself, tasted. His first mouthful told him that Miss Scrapie had a fluency with garlic. His second, that she had an innate understanding of the wayward vagaries of paprika. His third, that she had expertly married the demands of texture and taste, form and content, raw and cooked. He swallowed, and spoke.

  ‘I declare this young woman a genius.’

  When the roars of approval died down, Miss Scrapie, perspiring somewhat from the strain of the occasion and blushing from the roots of her hair, but proud of the impact she had made, announced, ‘I shall be inventing and compiling a collection of vegetarian dishes, as mouth-watering as can be imagined.’ Mr Salt smiled in benign approval. ‘May I beg you for your support in this endeavour?’

  The platter was passed round, and within moments, Violet’s offerings had been snaffled up.

  ‘You try to stop us!’ yelled a woman encouragingly.

  Never had herbs of the field tasted so good. It was a moment, they all agreed later, of supreme civilisation.

  With one voice, the thin campaigners cheered in approval.

  ‘Hurrah for Miss Violet Scrapie!’ proclaimed Mr Salt.

  Violet smiled, the first smile of genuine happiness she had been able to muster in recent weeks, and The Fleshless Cook was born.

  Violet Scrapie, a woman with a mission.

  Three hundred miles north from this happy metropolitan scene of conviction, picture another landscape; the landscape of loss. The Fishforth Sanatorium for the Spiritually Disturbed stands high on a hill overlooking the North Sea, the shore on which the Vikings once landed. The Sanatorium, tall and stark and built of grey stone, is perched on the edge of a precipice, as though in sympathy with the mental state of its inmates. Herring gulls and guillemots, oblivious to the symbolic disjunction between land and water, belief and chaos, wheel in the sky overhead, jostled by the sharp salt wind, and screech their hoarse and plaintive cries. Ink-blue, the
sea rolls far below, its surface dashed with the startling white of horses’ tails on the wave-crests. The looming shadows of giant squid, patrolling the coast, lurk ten fathoms deep beneath in an unknown world.

  On the precipice, in a window in the high central tower of the Fishforth Sanatorium, a light burns. Here, in the drawing room, the firelight dancing behind him in the wide grate, the fragrance of cedar-wood filling the high-ceilinged room, Parson Phelps sits alone with his knitting. The wool he knits is dark red, the colour of Christ’s blood. The tightly upholstered chair upon which he is seated has an antimacassar to counter hair-grease, and padded wings to protect its occupier’s head from evil thoughts and cold draughts. A book, a torn and bedraggled copy of the Origin of Species, balances precariously on his once plump, now bony knees. Inside it rests the envelope he brought with him from Thunder Spit when Dr Baldicoot took him away. The envelope contains a crumpled old letter, on onion-skin parchment, and is covered in splattery stains. A useful bookmark.

  ‘She sells sea-shells on the seashore,’ mumbles Parson Phelps, slurring on the words whilst recovering a slipped stitch. Knitting does not come easily to him. Nor do tongue-twisters. Tobias used to recite tongue-twisters, he recalls. The Parson winces in pain at the memory of his son. ‘Miss Mosh mashes some mish-mash,’ he mouths sadly, winding some more red wool around his bony finger. ‘Betty Botter bought some butter!’ A tear falls.

  Despite its forbidding exterior, Fishforth is a far cry from Bedlam. All the inmates here are thoughtful and courteous. Their voices, which once thundered from the pulpit in the confident fortissimo of righteous conviction, are now soft and hoarse with bewilderment, murmuring only the husks of discourse. The gentlemen’s table-manners are impeccable, and such homely gestures as the placing of knives and forks, the breaking of bread, or the smoothing of a table-napkin, are performed with simplicity and grace. After lunch, they read poetry or discuss the religious and social issues of the day, while those who are inclined to pray do so in the privacy of the small chapel in the upper half of the tower. Paying homage to God is neither encouraged nor frowned on here, for Fishforth is an enlightened establishment, which sees the dilemma of its inmates as a passing phase, a rite of passage on the journey towards a fuller spiritual maturity. The beliefs of men like Parson Phelps have been shattered by Darwinism – but should their life’s work be set at nought as a result? And cannot shattered objects be re-assembled in different ways, like fragments of stained glass in a church, to form a new holy picture: another facet of truth’s kaleidoscope? Why, surely they can! As a result of this generous approach, most clergymen recover within a few months of rest, and return to their parishes with a deeper conviction of the Bible’s wisdom, or a broader understanding of creation.

  ‘All depending,’ says the Principal, a former inmate himself, ‘on whether you choose to cling to the solid rock of your already established belief, or to take that leap of imagination and faith that will hurl you into an abyss of chaos and wonder.’ Of those who leap, he preached gravely, some crash upon the stony ground of atheism, while others float or even fly.

  He personally had stayed on his rock.

  While waiting to make his choice of direction, Parson Phelps found himself reasonably content. If you have to be in turmoil, let it be among like-minded men.

  ‘See it as a stage in your spiritual development,’ said the Principal. Obediently, Parson Phelps had tried to see it that way. He’d floated weightlessly, as though emptied, through the thinly furnished rooms, and the hallways where bales of wool were stacked. The Sanatorium ran a small cottage industry of carding, spinning, and dyeing; the institution received no payment, but inmates were permitted, in exchange for work, to use the wool for their personal and recreational purposes. Parson Phelps was not the only clergyman here who had decided to seize on this opportunity. He had fond memories of Mrs Phelps knitting. He could picture her now, sitting on a hard chair in the flag-stoned kitchen, knitting a jersey for Tobias in one of the boy’s favourite colours, either mauve or green. Tobias, who as a child had seemed such a blessing, such a prodigy! Who had spoken in the tongues of angels until the age of five, and had then astonished them all suddenly with his pure, clear speech! Oh, Tobias! God help you now, in your cruel catastrophe!

  And Parson Phelps remembered God, too – God, who had worked His great needles slowly, as he listened patiently, like a second wife, to the Parson’s long, baggy prayers. Long ago. It is now two years since the marriage of their true minds began to go awry, and since that time, Parson Phelps has not directed a single word in God’s direction.

  ‘There was a jar –’ Parson Phelps had said, when Dr Baldicoot first brought him here.

  ‘Shhh, rest now,’ they told him.

  ‘I lied to Tobias.’

  ‘Tobias?’

  ‘My son. Or rather –’

  ‘Your son must look after himself. All shall be well. Concentrate on your own needs, Parson Phelps. You have been shepherd to a flock for too long. Now it is time to be a sheep for a while.’

  ‘Baa,’ said a young clergyman all the way from Basingstoke, whose head was a gleaming ball of silver-blond hair that fitted him like a cap.

  ‘Baa baa black sheep,’ sang his bearded friend. They were making a cat’s cradle together, in purple wool.

  ‘A woman came to see me,’ insisted Parson Phelps. ‘She was from the Travelling Fair of Danger and Delight. She had a jar, and she gave me this letter, too.’ He held out a crumpled sheaf of onion-skin pages, and thrust them beneath the Principal’s nose. ‘She said she was his – Mrs Phelps and I –’ A pause. The Parson cast his eyes to the ground, and flicked at a stray piece of yellow fluff with his slippered toe.

  ‘Yes?’

  Parson Phelps lowered his voice. ‘There was an adder in my knickerbockers as a child. I had to strangle it, and –’

  ‘I see.’ This was said very gently. ‘You must be tired from your journey.’

  ‘So when Tobias arrived –’ Parson Phelps persisted, crumpling the letter back into his pocket.

  ‘Arrived?’

  ‘In the church. By the altar. I thought he was a piglet.’

  ‘A piglet?’

  ‘Yes. A young swine. He bit me.’

  ‘Ah.’

  ‘But it seemed like a miracle, because of all the feathers.’

  ‘Feathers?’

  ‘From the pillow.’

  ‘The pillow?’

  ‘He tore it, and the feathers flew out.’

  ‘Ah. I see. Pillow-feathers.’

  ‘Yes. We thought he was a gift from Heaven.’

  ‘All children are gifts from Heaven.’

  ‘Not this one,’ said Parson Phelps, suddenly vehement. ‘He is from Hell!’

  ‘Let me show you to your quarters.’

  ‘Baa,’ said the blond-headed young clergyman. ‘Welcome to the flock.’

  He and his friend inverted their hands, and a replica of the Clifton Suspension Bridge was revealed.

  ‘Isambard Kingdom Brunel,’ said the blond clergyman. ‘The greatest engineer who ever lived.’

  ‘Apart from God,’ murmured the Principal.

  Parson Phelps said, ‘I paid the woman for the jar, and then I paid her some more so that she would go, and never come back.’

  ‘Baa,’ said the dark-haired clergyman.

  ‘Lunch is served at twelve, and tea at five. As you see, our main window in here is south-facing, so we have the benefit of a sea view, and plenty of sunlight.’

  This was true. During the daytime, the sun’s brilliant rays pierced the windows, creating haloes of dust on the furniture, and causing the dark wood table to gleam, Parson Phelps now noted, like the carapace of a great mystical beetle.

  ‘God loves the beetle,’ he said, staring at the table. ‘That’s why He made so many.’

  ‘ “And the earth was without form and void,” ’ intoned the bearded clergyman, ‘ “and darkness was on the face of the deep.” ’

  ‘I had
to pay her,’ said Parson Phelps. ‘Otherwise she’d have told him who his father was.’

  ‘ “Our Father which art in Heaven,” ’ droned the blond-haired clergyman, doing something complicated and unsuccessful with the tangle of his fingers.

  Parson Phelps asked in a croak, ‘Did I do wrong?’

  ‘Thy Isambard Kingdom come,’ said the bearded clergyman. ‘Thy Isambard rum-te-tum.’

  ‘God will forgive you. You are a lost sheep in distress.’

  ‘Baa-aa,’ bleated the blond and the bearded clergymen in unison, untangling the purple Clifton Suspension Bridge.

  Charles Darwin had a lot to answer for.

  Now, alone, Parson Phelps adjusts his needles and his ball of wool, and commences another row of knitting, but after three stitches, he stops. He can’t see for tears. He sniffs a long, shuddering sniff, then wipes his eyes with his ball of blood-red wool. Snatching up his crumpled letter, he rises from his chair, and his knitting falls to the floor. The ball rolls to the other side of the room, dividing the floor with a thin line of red. Parson Phelps stands still for a while. Then he carefully steps over the line, and walks to the darkened window.

  Below: the ocean. Huge. Chaotic. Dark as ink. He pictures the slashing rain on the glassy waves, and the Ark bobbing. A toy of wood and string.

  Clutching the Frozen Woman’s crumpled letter in his hand, he stares out into the void, and into the darkness on the face of the deep.

  Then, just as we reechis the shors of MOROCKO, I falls ill.

  Very ill. Fever.

  The Arke rolls and rolls on the wavs, and I thinke: I am in a dreem. I hav been so SIK wiv this Fever that I dont no wen the Ark stops, or wen the GENTLEMAN cums. Just wak up wun mornin or afternoon or wotever, an smel the barber, stil in darknis, and he is ther. I tuches him and I SCREEMS, an he SCREEMS too. I shufles to the other side of the cage.

  Storm in the nite. Arke rockin in the dok like its goin to sinke. Giraf forls over an dyes. Rogers sicke like a dog, sew him rite. TRAPP nower to be seene.