Ark Baby (10 page)

Answer: not many!

Time passed, and Violet cooked and cooked and cooked. And ate, ate, ate.

By the age of ten, she was fast turning into a human pyramid, a heavy wedge that moved about the house from kitchen to dining room, from dining room to kitchen, sweating like a great cheese on castors, a stack of cookery books a permanent fixture under her arm. The Empress was at her wits’ end, and repaired with increasing frequency to the comfort of the Ouija board and the seance.

‘The girl’s a mystery!’ she confided in the spirits. ‘She reads a cookery book the way she eats a plate of cake. Blink and it’s over!’

The spirits shrugged their shoulders.

Could Violet perhaps be shipped off to somewhere like Australia? the Empress wondered.

Crash! The breaking of a mixing bowl.

Sloop! the licking of a sauced finger.

Yum yum.
C’est bon.

‘Or might New Zealand be further, as the crow flies?’

The spirits shrugged again. ‘Wait and see,’ they said.

‘Fat lot of good
you
are,’ muttered the Laudanum Empress, crumpling up a page of automatic writing and hurling it into the fire.

She bought Violet her first corset at the age of eleven. The child was popping out all over the place; her body had to be put under control. One day she actually fainted from constriction in the street, and collapsed on to a grocer’s cart, knocking a thousand carrots off a precarious pile. With considerable difficulty but even more exasperation, the Empress took her by the scruff, and they stumbled through the sea of rolling orange veg, the grocer’s boy yelling, the Empress flinging a sovereign behind her as you might throw salt over your left shoulder to ward off evil.

To Harrod’s, pronto!

‘Bring us the biggest corset you have,’ ordered the Empress, ‘and be ready to add gussets.’ And she made a thin, tight line of her perfect mouth.

‘A relative?’ asked the assistant, as Violet disappeared to try on the hosiery.

‘No,’ responded the Empress quickly, checking the mirror, where a fine figure of a woman – a creature of remarkable beauty, in fact, to whom the word ‘paragon’ could be applied without exaggeration – greeted her gaze. ‘Just a child I happen to know.’

From the changing room, the sound of huffing and puffing, and the distinct odour of adolescent perspiration.

‘I despair of you,’ hissed the Laudanum Empress later, as they sat before a plate of cinnamon muffins in the tea shop downstairs. What could a mother do with such a child? Having felt lately the call of the Other Side, she knew she was not much longer for this world. Could she perhaps have some influence in death, which she had so signally failed to have in life? It was worth trying.

‘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.

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:

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 petticoats. 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:

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.’