Ark Baby (21 page)

‘Silence, please!’ called Mr Salt, standing before them with his hands in a supplicating gesture. ‘I would like to welcome a newcomer to our gathering! Please allow me to introduce Miss Violet Scrapie!’

There were murmurs of acknowledgement from the crowd, and a woman next to Violet, who looked like a bony fish, piped up, ‘Pleased to meet you, Miss, I’m sure!’

Mr Salt’s speech was a lengthy one, during which he exhibited himself to be most passionate about his fellow beings. More particularly those with feathers, fur and scales. Violet, who had seen the carcass of many a fellow being, and cooked and eaten not a few of the more exotic ones, thanks to
Cuisine Zoologique
, listened with irritation to his evangelistic discourse. It was clear to her, glancing briefly round the half-empty hall, that Mr Salt was preaching to the converted. His argument was contorted, wordy and earnest, but boiled down – reduced, as you might reduce a stock – its central argument was simple: men are hypocrites.

‘Look at us,’ he stormed, ‘cherishing our pets, and treating them like humans,’ here he cast a glance at Suet, who retreated further beneath Violet’s chair, ‘and then destroying a whole class of animal for our ghoulish consumption.’ Suet began to wheeze unhappily. Violet, meanwhile, recalled her father’s work on the Animal Kingdom Collection, and the Royal Hippo’s insistence that the stuffed beasts be clothed in breeches and the like, and conceded that Mr Salt had something of a point here. ‘Anthropomorphism makes cannibals of us all,’ he continued. ‘The only solution is to abandon our lust for the carcass, and eat herbs of the field!’

Now here, they parted company.

‘We are the most complex and highly developed creatures on earth,’ he proclaimed. ‘Yet despite our thousands of years of civilisation, we pander to our primitive urge to feed on flesh. Is this the pinnacle of humanity, to breed creatures in order that they may be killed for our consumption? Are we no more than uncivilised fatteners of calves?’

As Mr Salt delineated the rights of God’s beasts, and the holiness of St Francis of Assisi, and the inhumanity of man, a guilty tear rolled down Suet’s cheek, but Violet’s mouth remained set in refusal. After Mr Salt’s speech had ended, there
was much applause from the group of undernourished-looking people, and the bony-fish woman next to Violet rose to her feet, reached beneath her chair, and whisked a linen cloth off a platter. Violet began to concentrate, sniffing the air as the thin woman sidled round with the platter, bearing lumpy vegetarian pies. Violet took a single bite, then spat.

‘That’s disgusting,’ she said.

‘Any chance you might be interested in becoming a member?’ asked the thin woman, apparently undeterred. ‘Vegetarianism is excellent for the figure.’

‘No chance at all,’ said Miss Scrapie, suddenly peckish and feeling the urgent desire for a pork chop. Dragging the distressed Suet behind her, she swept her huge bulk out of the hall, and headed for the butcher’s.

Again: was it the ghostly presence of the Laudanum Empress and her cloud of psychic particles, or was it fate, that gave her this desire for a chop? Or was it simple, straightforward human greed?

Whatever the cause, Violet Scrapie finds herself, minutes later, peering through the window of Mr Samuel’s shop, where a plaster statuette of a pig, whose chubby, cheeky face displays no irony, proffers a platter of chops, sausages and bacon rashers. Violet enters, dragging Suet behind her. But – what idiocy has entered the creature’s foolish brain? He’s whimpering! What’s going on?

‘Shut up, you silly dog,’ Violet hisses, and kicks him again. He squeals on the blood-stained sawdust. In the crowded butcher’s shop, upside-down poultry hangs from hooks, exuding that seductive and atrocious smell of death, so familiar to Violet from an early age, when she played on the floor of Cabillaud’s chopping room. The butcher, like Cabillaud on his chopping days, wears a murderous apron and Violet notices how his fat fingers, mottled with blood and cold, are indistinguishable from the chipolatas he holds bunched for wrapping in paper for his customer. It’s as though he has wrapped his own severed hand.

‘Lovely piece of meat, there, madam,’ he murmurs, handing it over to the woman in a little bloody parcel.

The invisible ghost of the Laudanum Empress hovers above Violet as she gazes about her, taking in the scene – so similar to the chopping room back home, but suddenly so alien. What’s come over her, all of a sudden?

Suet squeals again, and whimpers, pulling on his lead to get out. ‘Herbs of the field … cannibals of us all …’ These are Mr Salt’s words. Why are they coming back to her now? Why here? Still rooted to the floor, Violet gawps as the butcher now serves his next customer, a little coughing man, with a rack of lamb; watches as he wields the chopper, slamming it down with a crunch, brutally cleaving the gristle and holding up half a rib-cage for the man’s inspection. She turns, and sees dead pigs hanging gaped open like small pianos, alongside calves’ heads, mutton thighs, trays of kidneys in puddles of ink-dark blood, slobbery white brains and strips of tripe, thick and pale as undercarpet.

‘Good afternoon, miss,’ says the butcher, addressing Violet, who has suddenly reached the front of the queue. He offers his bloody hands. ‘How can I help you?’

She stares for a while at the butcher. ‘You can’t,’ she says bluntly. Something is choking her. ‘There’s too much blood.’

‘Begging your pardon, miss?’

Silence. Then a strangulated gulp. Suet, flooded with a sudden audacity, seizes the moment and tugging on his lead, drags Violet Scrapie forcibly from the shop.

Violet Scrapie has since argued that it was indeed that chance meeting with Mr Salt in the street, and the eye-opening visit to the butcher’s shop that was the first step on her road to Damascus. For that afternoon, sweaty and disturbed after her adventure, Violet returned home to find that, despite herself, the words of Mr Salt were still ringing in her head. ‘Anthropomorphism makes cannibals of us all,’ he had proclaimed. ‘If we truly believe that animals have souls, then we
should refrain from eating our brothers! And if they do not have souls, then why, I pray, does the elephant shed tears and the mother leopard lay down her life to save her cub?’

Violet heaved her way up the stairs in Madagascar Street, with Suet anxiously scampering in her wake. She flung open the door of her father’s workshop and gazed upon the scene before her. Her father lay slumped over his work table, fast asleep and snoring gently. An eviscerated squirrel dangled on a hook above his head, and in front of him, pinned to the wall, was a diagram of a jaguar’s skeleton and musculature. Suet drew in a sharp breath; it was his first foray into this chamber of horrors, and doggy memories swirled in his brain: long-forgotten inhumanities performed upon him at the laboratory as a pup came floating into his consciousness, and he shuddered and whimpered. Violet, sensing his unease, took a step back, and stumbled over a jawbone. A crocodile lay belly-up, slit open on Scrapie’s stuffing table, its flesh and a wobble of unspeakable viscera gleaming in a pile beside it. Violet recalled Cabillaud’s blood-stained chopping room, and felt, for the first time in her life, a pang of remorse.

Those dishes they had prepared together had indeed been a delight – but a price had been paid, in the form of lives. Animals’ lives – and now that of a human. What’s more, her own mother! Could there not be some other way? She stroked Suet, deep in thought. Mr Salt’s words began to haunt her. Imaginary tastes turned to ashes in her mouth. And imaginary smells – smells that had once made her mouth water – now began to make her retch.

She descended to the basement kitchen, from whence the odour of walrus tripe was wafting ominously.

‘There is a problem,’ Violet announced.

Cabillaud looked up from his cooking pot. ‘Ah,
chérie.
You have returned. I am making ze mustard sauce with ze peppercorns, and a little tiny hint of sweetness, in ze form of my own rosehip
compote.
’ Cabillaud had not yet noticed Violet’s stony and tear-besmirched countenance. ‘This walrus,
he has need of lifting a little from his unhappy heaviness of taste.’

‘I said a problem.’

The chef looked up, saw the finality on the face of his protégée, and read some of her thoughts, for was she not an open book to him? Was she not his own little Violette, whom he had personally perched on his weighing machine a million times, and to whom he had fed the best morsels of everything! His own little Violette, whom he had single-handedly educated in the pleasures of the palate!

‘Meat is murder,’ she announced.

His own little Violette, now turning against him?
Mon Dieu!
How could she?

‘But ze human being is a carnivore!’ countered Cabillaud. ‘Ze animals, is not ze peoples! Zey have no human rights,
chérie
!’

One thing has a terrible tendency to lead to another – and sure enough, this sudden, bitter exchange proved to be but the
hors d’oeuvre
to a whole menu of conflict, whose main course was the marinated and long-simmered substance of Violet’s grief, accompanied by an ethical dispute on animal rights featuring
mille-feuille
and crushed garlic and coriander, leading into a rich, repercussive meringue and sherry trifle of a debate on personal morality, an argument with scalloped icing and raspberries, a confrontation of furiously clashing flavours, multiple toxins, and flagrant disjunctions of taste. Tears were shed on both sides. A pan was thrown. Knees were got down upon. Belgian beseechings were to be heard. Pages from
Cuisine Zoologique
were spat upon and shredded out of pique. And finally, sobbing but victorious, the mistress of the house, the loyal dog Suet at her side, dismissed her former guru. Violet Scrapie. No longer a girl, but a woman. And what a woman.

As Violet Scrapie experiences her coming of age in the basement kitchen, a banging rhythmical noise is emanating from the taxidermist’s workshop on the ground floor.
Thump, thump, thump.
It is the sound of flesh on wood. Fist on table, to be
more precise. It’s a busy life, being dead, reflects the Laudanum Empress; satisfied with Violet’s progress, she drifts upstairs clutching her phantom petticoats to discover Dr Ivanhoe Scrapie in a state of utmost distress.

‘Why, why, why?’ he wails, his voice catching. As she passes through the closed door of his workshop, the Empress pats her hair and adjusts her ghostly face. She is briefly touched by his display of emotion, but also somewhat piqued; could the man not have tried a little harder to summon up such feelings while she was alive? But her sympathy is short-lived; it soon becomes apparent that the emotion we are witnessing here is neither grief nor remorse over the death of Mrs Scrapie; it is that green-eyed monster, professional jealousy.

‘Bastard!’ he moans, thumping harder on the table. ‘Damned, bloody man!’

When the findings of the great scientist Charles Darwin had been published yesterday, Dr Scrapie’s reaction, after he had stayed up all night reading the scholarly work, had been even more extreme than that which we are now witnessing. They had involved his forehead, and a marble mantelpiece. Human blood had been shed.

And why not? For he had been an idiot, a buffoon, an intellectual amoeba!

‘Thirty years in zoology –
how could I not have seen it
?’ he growls. ‘It’s so
obvious
! Any child who has visited a bloody
farm
could have spotted it!’

The hideous fact at the epicentre of Scrapie’s misery is this: Darwin’s
Origin of Species
, charting and explaining the great ladder of Nature, has made the sum of his own life’s hitherto not inconsiderable achievements look suddenly so unambiguously lightweight that they almost fly into the air of their own accord. His historically successful stuffing of an earthworm, the publication of his paper
On the Epidermis of the Chameleon
, his appointment as Taxidermist Royal, his work on the Animal Kingdom Collection and the defunct specimens of Trapp’s
Ark
, his discoveries about the rhino’s hip-joint: all are as nothing
compared to Darwin’s spectacular triumph! Dr Ivanhoe Scrapie will now be consigned for ever to the dustbin of history! The grotesque injustice of it leaves him winded. His whole career blotted out by another’s fame! It is all so monstrously galling!

He slumps over the table and breathes heavily, his chest shuddering, as though it houses a volcano instead of a heart. A volcano now on the verge of a most dangerous eruption. Oh, God! If only
he
, during his long career, had made a discovery of similar note! If only
he
had ventured forth on the
Beagle
, journeyed to the Galápagos, and, when drunk on ship’s rum (how bloody well else?) imagined a stretch of time over which scales became feathers, fins mutated into legs, legs metamorphosed into wings, and swim bladders fashioned stomachs of themselves, all through the vagaries of chance. Instead, he had stayed here in London all these years, working for Her Majesty’s absurd Animal Kingdom Collection, and faffing about with the carcasses of Trapp’s
Ark.
In short, spending years of his life cleaning up another man’s mess, to feed the whimsy of a crazed monarch, and a woman to boot! Why? Why? Why?

‘Bloody book!’ he yells, now flinging the tome to the floor in frustration, rage and pique.

‘It’s
obvious
that human beings are primates! I always
knew
we were! It’s
obvious
that we evolved from monkeys and apes! So why didn’t
I
come out and say so? Instead of messing about stuffing the buggers and putting breeches on them?’

‘Calm down, Ivanhoe,’ soothes the Empress, floating away from the shelter of the moose antlers to hover opaquely above him. ‘I foresee mat this kind of violent emotion will be the death of you.’

‘
Charlotte?
’ he murmurs. ‘Charlotte? Is that you?’

‘You will blow a gasket in your heart,’ predicts the Laudanum Empress.

‘A gasket in my heart?’ he breathes. He must be hyperventilating, he concludes. Dreaming. Overworked. Something.