Ark Baby (22 page)

‘If you think Mr Darwin’s revelation is shocking, let me inform you, my dear Ivanhoe, that there is far worse to come! Don’t say you haven’t been warned!’

‘Worse to come? What? Charlotte, what are you talking about? Are you there?’

But she’s gone. Vanished. Skedaddled. That’s the trouble with ghosts.

It was a time of national panic. The Fertility Crisis was now officially a disaster, and the Sperm Drain became so intense that the Government decided to launch the Loyalty Bonus Scheme immediately. Overnight, I found myself eligible for an extra hundred yo-yos a week. In the meantime, the Pregnancy Reward had been announced. There’s nothing like greed, is there? Five million yo-yos aren’t to be sneezed at. The plus side of it all, of course, was that Britain was a lad’s paradise. I was in with a chance now, I reckoned. A bloke could have any girl he wanted.

Or girls.

The Saturday of the barbecue came. Norman and his wife Abbie were in their element there on the patio, he fussing with charcoal pellets and firelighters and wind direction, she all flushed with mother-hen excitement at the prospect of a new palate to tempt at her elegant pale-green plastic flexi-table.

‘Meet the harem,’ said Norman proudly. ‘This is Abbie’ (I shook her flour-covered hand) ‘and these are Tweedles Dum and Dee.’

‘Buck de Savile,’ I said. The girls looked at each other and giggled. There was a glamorous but rather eccentric-looking woman in white petticoats hovering about in the doorway; I caught a whiff of mothballs.

‘And who’s this?’ I asked.

‘Oh, she’s just our ghost,’ said Norman. ‘The skeleton from the cupboard. I told you we’d been invaded by Victoriana. She came with the stuffed animals. Don’t mind her.’

I laughed. ‘Nice one, Norman! I hear they’re all the rage!’

The eccentric woman made a sour face, and slunk back indoors.

‘Nice cuts of pork you’ve got there,’ I said, eyeing something marinaded. Those teenage Saturdays working at the butcher’s hadn’t been entirely wasted.

‘Oh, call me Abbie,’ said the head of the harem. ‘Much friendlier. The pork’s organic, because you never know, do you? I’m a bit of an ingredients nut.’

‘She likes food that’ll respect her in the morning,’ put in Rose, reaching through the window for a pot of dip, then joining her sister to confederate next to a concrete urn. They kept looking in my direction, and I couldn’t help wondering if I was the topic of their whispered conversation. Rose and Blanche were both wearing dresses, one white, one pink. Sigmund stirred, and I imagined them –

‘That’s my two lovelies,’ says Norman, as though intercepting the vision. ‘Sociable is putting it mildly.’

‘Can I help you with anything, Norman?’ I asked quickly.

‘No, mate, just you relax. Abbie is just finishing off her TV rehearsal in the kitchen, bless her. She’ll be along with the rest of the or doovers in half a tick. I’m off for some more of these charcoal pellets; the gals’ll keep you on the straight and narrow in the interim, won’t you, gorgeouses?’

‘TV rehearsal?’ I said. ‘I didn’t know Abbie was involved in television.’

‘She isn’t,’ said Norman. Then added, loyally, ‘But she will be, if there’s any justice in the world!’

The twins snorted.

‘Food’s her thing,’ says Rose.

‘There’s nothing she doesn’t know about food,’ adds Blanche. ‘Food allergies, the origins of food, the sociology of food, food and music, the nutritional value of food, how to cook food, when and how to re-use the leftovers, storage of food, how to tell if something’s edible or non-edible –’

‘And she’s an expert on food symbolism,’ says Rose.

I wasn’t entirely sure what food symbolism might be, but I nodded knowingly.

‘Food and love, food and the post-war generation, food and cutlery,’ continues Blanche.

‘Food and discipline,’ adds Rose.

‘Food and God,’ counters Blanche.

A pause.

Then Rose blurts, ‘Only she’s never really made it.’

There’s another pause, and then Blanche adds, ‘Never will.’

Food and failure, then.

‘Well, Buck. What’s your real name, then?’ asked Blanche, or was it Rose, when Norman had disappeared from view. Not a great start.

‘Buck de Savile
is
my real name,’ I insisted. I’d have to think on my feet here.

‘Pull the other one,’ said Rose, or was it Blanche. They were nothing if not direct.

‘My father was French,’ I lied. ‘That’s where the
de
comes from. It’s what’s called an aristocratic prefix, I’ll have you know.
Voulez-vous coucher avec moi ce soir
, et cetera.’ They giggled. So they liked the idea, too. ‘And the Buck is short for Buckingham.’

‘There was a young Frenchman called Buckingham,’ began one of them.

‘Who always kissed girls before –’ giggled the other.

‘I’ve seen you both,’ I intercepted. ‘In the hypermarket in Judlow.’

‘Saturday job,’ the Roseblanches said in unison, and sniggered some more.

‘But you didn’t notice me,’ I said ruefully, teasingly. Flirtatiously. They laughed.

‘We’re the living dead in there,’ said Rose.

‘Yeah,’ agreed Blanche. ‘If God himself walked in, we’d just treat him like any other customer.’

‘I’d prob’ly ask him if he wanted extra carriers,’ laughed Rose.

‘I wouldn’t even notice if he signed his cheque GOD in big letters,’ added Blanche, enjoying the fantasy. ‘Or if he didn’t pay for his shopping at all but just wheeled his trolley right through the checkout area, past the redemption desk, and out into the car-park.’

‘And then flew up into the air with it.’

‘To His celestial home beyond the clouds,’ finished Rose.

They certainly had a vivid imagination.

Then the conversation moved on to wildlife.

‘I’m just a glorified plumber with a stash of drugs,’ I told them, when they begged me for details about which was the cutest fluffy animal I’d ever cured of cancer. Norman was under a similar illusion about my veterinary knowledge; he’d been going on about the stuffed-animal collection again, and had insisted that I take a look at it this afternoon. Frankly, I had other things on my mind.

‘We had a hamster called Mohammed,’ Rose was telling me.

Uh-o, I thought.

‘He used to run about loose in our bedroom,’ sighed Rose.

And together: ‘He was so sweet!’

‘He’d sit on your shoulder, and stuff his cute little cheeks with sunflower seeds,’ remembered Rose.

‘They’d be so bulging that sometimes he got overloaded and keeled over like a little wheelbarrow,’ added Blanche.

‘Then Dad trod on him by accident,’ said Rose.

There was a brief pause as they exchanged a glance, recalling their shared mini-moment of tragedy.

‘But we’re going to get another one,’ offered Blanche. ‘A female, because we want babies.’

Disaster ahoy!

‘But we’ll need a male, too,’ suggested Rose.

‘You’d better watch out or you’ll create a plague of them. One day soon there’ll be more hamsters in the world than humans.’

Their faces went suddenly serious.

‘It might just be a blip, like they say,’ I said, to break the
sudden silence that had fallen. The subject of extinction was quickly turning from an obsession into a taboo. I’d heard a stammering psychologist on the radio saying that since the b-b-b-b-bomb, we were going through a d-d-d-d-denial phase. ‘You never know,’ I added weakly.

The signs were indicating the opposite, though, and we all knew it. Funnily enough, the less people suddenly talked about it, the more it began to hit home that we might actually die out.

‘It’s because we’re badly designed,’ said Rose ruefully.

‘Especially us,’ offered Blanche, exchanging a secret look with her sister. For some reason, they both glanced down at their shoes. They were wearing oddly shaped trainers that looked familiar, though I couldn’t place them.

‘Two friends of ours have tried committing suicide over it,’ offered Rose.

‘And everyone’s having sex like crazy,’ mused Blanche, giving me a sly look.

‘Is that an offer?’ I asked, flashing them a smile.

‘Might be,’ they said together.

Which I took as a yes.

During the course of the meal, despite my promise to myself to avoid fluffy-animal fans, I found myself charmed by the twins’ unity as sisters, their team-spiritedness, the way they took it in turns to speak, the way they held my attention like something in a pair of pincers. I noticed, too, their habit of biting their rather narrow lower lip and letting their round, quite deep-set eyes go slightly out of focus. I observed their innocence, their gaucheness, their fun-loving turn of mind, which I guessed – rightly, as it turned out – was the outward manifestation of a fun-loving turn of body. The smell of their flesh, which I now began to detect beneath the protective layers of cheap perfume, was unusual, almost feral, and marvellously tantalising. I had to admit that by the time we’d finished the meal, I was completely under their extraordinary spell.

I have had cause to ask myself since then, in my more
philosophical moods: Was it because I was two men, Bobby Sullivan and Buck de Savile, that I was so inevitably drawn to two women? What if it had only been one girl? Would I have felt the same way about her?

Does one feel differently about broken scissors? Were lives revolutionised by the first photocopiers?

Buy the sausage and onion lattice pie, get the coleslaw free.

‘Delicious, Abbie,’ I told their mum, when I finally pushed away my plate. ‘Mouth-watering, unusual, and satisfying. And very attractively presented.’ I winked at the girls. I was talking about the food, but I meant them, and they knew it. ‘I’m sure you noticed that I took double helpings of everything,’ I added.

They giggled.

‘And now,’ said Norman firmly, steering me indoors, ‘you’re coming with me. I’m luring you up to the loft for an hour to inspect Abbie’s stuffed menagerie. There are some beasts up there that are sorely in need of a professional assessment, mate,’ he informed me, as I followed him upstairs, resigned to my fate.

As it turned out, the Victorian stuffed-animal collection in the attic turned out to contain some interesting stuff, including a corgi named Suet – obviously someone’s pet, because taxidermically speaking it wasn’t a great specimen – a few birds, all rather greasy but worth a bit if you sold them in the right place, i.e. some kind of fayre – and a weird primate, strangely humanoid and dressed in red velvet pantaloons. The brass plate underneath was labelled ‘The Gentleman Monkey’. If that was its species name, it was a new one on me, I thought – but then it’s all too easy to forget that there are more than two hundred and fifty species of primate, other than us. I must admit, though, that I shuddered when I looked at it. It was the clothes that did it. I couldn’t help remembering Giselle, in her little pink frock and her nappy, and Mrs Mann, and her threat to –

‘Abbie says they’re worthless,’ Norman was telling me. ‘She
called the Antiques Hotline, and now she wants me to bin the lot.’ He patted a stuffed wombat on the head absent-mindedly. It was wearing a frock-coat. ‘That’s the danger of your loft refurbishment. Bugger of a house, if you’ll pardon my franglais. Jellyfish in the larder, salt all over the flag-stones, and there’s sweet FA you can do, cos of the blinking listed building malarkey. Thank God for charity shops, say I. A bit of recycling doesn’t go amiss, eh, Buck? Or maybe we could flog ’em at a car-boot sale. There’s a big Firework Night do at the community centre looming on the horizon; we could do with some funds for a few bits and bobs.’

I was staring at the primate. No; it was nothing like Giselle. There were similarities with the macaque family – the shortness of the tail, the humanoid expression of the face – but it didn’t fit into any of the categories I’d seen. And Christ knows, back in Tooting Bee I’d seen quite a few. I’m not a specialist by any means, but I knew enough to recognise that this was an unusual specimen. It had ape-like characteristics, a strangely human-looking head, and was stuffed in an upright posture – a posture which the angle of its pelvic girdle indicated wasn’t a mere whim of the taxidermist, but the creature’s natural stance. I was immediately fascinated. It appeared to be more of an ape than a monkey, but there was a tail sticking out of its pantaloons like a question mark. It didn’t make sense. And its glass eyes were blue; an unlikely colour, and also over-large, I reckoned, for any of the primates.

‘Keep it,’ I told Norman. ‘I’ve got a hunch that it’s rare.’

‘Can’t,’ he replied. ‘Boss’s orders. Everything’s got to go.’

‘I’ll take it back to my place, then,’ I told him. I’d taken a liking to the thing. There was something familiar about its features that I couldn’t place.

‘Abbie says it looks like her grandmother,’ said Norman, reading my thoughts. ‘Gives her the creeps.’ I peered at the creature again. Now that he said it, you could even see something of Abbie in it, when you looked. The odd pelvis, and the deep-set eyes. I laughed.

‘Not flattering,’ I said. ‘Best get her Gentleman friend out of the house, then, mate.’

Norman helped me load the monkey on to the passenger seat of the Nuance, and I took him home. I tried him in various rooms, then finally opted for the bathroom. I hung a towel off him. His arm was crooked in just the right position.

It was almost as though he had actually been stuffed with that in mind.

Higgins feeds me throu the bars.

Let me out, I wispas. I wil do anything.

Cant he sez. Wer on the SEA. Nower to go. NOWER. Exept DIE in the wavs.

Then I wil throw myself out and DIE, I sez. I dont care.

(Here another stain obliterates a few lines of the text.)

–
stil in darkness. The giraf cums on in TANGEER. And the turtels and the wulvs and the smaller creechers. Higgins feeds them. They grunt and they howl. Thats wy its DARK, to mak them sleep mor. Lordnum for all of us.

Im sleepin all the tyme. Sleepin away my lyfe. DREEM sumtymes that sumwun wil cum and SAVE me.