Ark Baby (26 page)

‘They’re just boisterous,’ the Abbot said airily, drumming his big sausagey fingers on his Bible. I had returned to his office after luncheon, and recounted some of the conversation. ‘I’m afraid that if you view the Church as your true vocation, you’re an exception here,’ he explained. I was taken aback by the somewhat breezy manner in which he announced this news. ‘Most of the fellows here are either younger sons, failures in other professions, or otherwise here against their will. That’s the truth of the matter.’ Then he sat back, and made a thick, blunt steeple of his hands. I wondered whether the same applied to him.

‘As a matter of fact it does,’ he said, reading my thoughts. ‘I’d like to have been a builder, but it would have been over everyone’s dead body.’ He stopped and chuckled. ‘So here I am, constructing souls instead. And doing repairs.’

I hung my head, and tried to stifle my tears. ‘Look, son, let me tell you something,’ he said, when he saw my distress, taking my hand in his large benign paw. ‘This is a dying profession. I fear the Church is headed for extinction. And Darwinism hasn’t helped. All this stuff about being descended from monkeys and apes has turned people away. In a hundred years’ time, this seminary will be gone, and your little church in Thunder Spit will be but an empty shell.’

I said nothing; I just sat there, miserable beyond words.

‘But maybe you are different, Phelps,’ he said kindly. ‘If you have faith, then it’s a good thing. Keep a hold of it. Just see Farthingale and his chums as a challenge God has given you,’ he proposed. ‘You must remember about turning the other cheek, son.’

‘Yes, Abbot, I will.’

‘And another thing.’

‘Yes, sir?’

‘I have the impression that you carry a burden, Phelps. Am
I correct? You don’t walk straight, and you appear to stoop. Your shoes, if I may say so, look like a couple of pancakes.’

I explained to him about my deformities of the foot, and the fact that I had been a foundling, and that my spine had been mutilated when I was a mere babe.

He appeared sympathetic, in his rough and ready way, but had a warning for me.

‘You have suffered Tobias, I grant you that. But the way out of this suffering, son, is to witness for yourself how others suffer more, and to help them. If you’re serious about this as a vocation – God help you – you’ll need to get stuck in. Understand?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘So go out there, Tobias, and visit the slums, of which there are many. Go to Mickle Street, and Petersgate, and Upper Hayside, and bring succour and help and faith to the needy of the parish, and thereby forget your own troubles. That’s my advice to you. Now go and settle in at Mrs Fooney’s, and come to me if you have any problems.’

Although it was by no means what I had expected of my first encounter with my new vocation, I decided to put my worries to one side, and take up the Abbot’s advice. If he gave me little solid comfort, at least I found it elsewhere. Mrs Fooney’s lodging-house was next to the Seminary, and as soon as I crossed her threshold, I felt at home.

‘Come in, young gentleman!’ said Mrs Fooney. ‘Welcome! Wipe your feet on the mat and let me make you a cup of tea!’ Mrs Fooney was as big-breasted as the Abbot had indicated, and also as warm-hearted. Indeed, they are characteristics that have always gone together, in my limited experience of women. You cannot have the one without the other. Needless to say, Mrs Fooney reminded me very much of my own mother, and even offered me barley flip-cakes.

I also met her granddaughter, Tillie, a charming, ringleted, cheeky child of seven who immediately settled herself on my lap and took my hand in hers.

‘You’re very hairy,’ she remarked, stroking my wrist. Suddenly she pulled her hand away. ‘Ugh! He’s got a flea!’

‘Shush, Tillie!’ Mrs Fooney rebuked her. ‘We all have fleas, child. Even men of God!’

Between them, Mrs Fooney and Tillie lifted my spirits immeasurably. Tillie helped me to arrange my possessions on the mantelpiece in my room, and I let her hold my whelk shell while I read to her from the Bible.

So began my new life.

I am proud to say that I was good at my work; I already knew most of the Bible by heart, and the Abbot praised my diligence and the quality of my fledgling sermons. My first sermon, which concerned fossils, was a treatise condemning Darwinism – a subject close to my heart. He heralded it as a work of genius. I argued, just as Parson Phelps had taught me, that God had planted the fossils in the earth to muddle geologists into believing that the world was much older than it was, and tricked Darwin into developing a fantastical theory about man descending from monkeys and apes.

Towards the end of my sermon, I held up the fossil I had brought with me from home.

‘This is God’s joke,’ I concluded. ‘And a fine one it is, too!’

Needless to say, my presentation provoked much derision from my fellow students. However, I persisted with my studies, applying myself with fervour to my library books, thus earning myself another nickname; the Bookworm. In private moments of loneliness, the needs of my male object became ever fiercer, and I spent much time fighting my own bestial urges.

It was then that I thought of my father and his marbles: would that, perhaps, bring me some respite? I bought a bag of these glass balls from a pedlar, and put them in my shoes.

After half an hour, I realised that Parson Phelps must have been mad for longer than I’d thought.

I gave the marbles to Tillie, who thanked me most prettily.

Then she floored me with a strange query, which unsettled me for weeks.

‘Mr Phelps, who made God?’

She had arranged her marbles on a plate, and was now stringing beads. The question hit me like a slap, for it was the very same one I had asked my father, when I was her age. I recalled the reply he had given me then.

I cleared my throat. ‘God is self-made. Like a self-made man, but God.’

‘What d’you mean, self-made?’ asked Tillie, her eyes squinting in puzzlement. ‘Nothing can
make itself
, Mr Phelps. That would be a very silly idea, I think!’

I considered this for a moment.

‘It requires a leap of faith,’ I told her finally. ‘It requires believing in what you don’t understand. It requires believing that everything is connected, like your beads are connected, but with an invisible string.’ Tillie looked puzzled. ‘A gourd plant sprouted on my mother’s grave the year after she died,’ I went on. ‘And every year since, the gourds it sprouts have been of a different shape, colour and texture. Look,’ I said, and took her to the mantelpiece, where I had arranged my dried gourds. ‘This was the first one that grew.’ I pointed to the green, stippled fruit, now somewhat shrunk from its original size. ‘And the next year, this one came from its seed.’ I pointed to the gourd with the orange frill and yellow blotches.

‘And then this one?’ asked Tillie, picking up last year’s gourd, which was green and yellow, and striped.

‘That’s right,’ I said. ‘See? It looks nothing like it, but this is the next generation.’ And then from the seed of the stripy one, came this one,’ I said, handing her the gourd I had picked just before I left Thunder Spit. It was knobbled and almost mauve in colour. ‘Can you explain that?’ I asked.

‘No,’ said Tillie. ‘But there must be a reason.’

‘There is. But only God knows it. All we know,’ I told her, the thought striking me as I said it, ‘is that they are related to each other, as surely as an island is related to the shore. Look
deep enough, and you will see that, below the level of the sea, the land is joined.’

I thought of Thunder Spit. I thought of the Flood, which had turned our herring-shaped peninsula into an island. And I thought of my father’s words in the church, just before we fell into the water and I saw my vision of the Contortionist. He had quoted John Donne’s poem to me, which I quoted to Tillie now.

‘ “No man is an island,” ’ I told her, ‘ “entire of itself. But a piece of the continent, a part of the main!” ’

The tears came into my eyes most unaccountably as I said these words, and Tillie put her little arm around my shoulders.

‘Let’s play marbles, Mr Phelps,’ she offered gently.

And so we did.

When not occupied with my studies, I haunted the slums. I had taken the Abbot’s advice about avoiding self-pity and bringing help to others, and within a few weeks of my arrival in Hunchburgh, I had thrown myself with conviction into my task as a saver of souls and a champion of the Bible. I found Parson Phelps’ voice emerging from my larynx as I preached. I trod the bumpy streets with a stride that mimicked his, and grew increasingly confident in my manly gait, thanks, in part, to the well-fitting shoes Mr Hewitt had so skilfully cobbled for me. Slowly I learned to live without my father’s words and presence; I recreated him inside me instead. I had no choice; he returned my letters unopened. Turning the other cheek, I continued to send them, in the hope that charity, if nothing else, would prevail.

The misery and poverty of the slums had at first made me gasp: whole families of up to twelve children shoved together in stinking rooms, without enough to eat, and dragon-sized rats constantly on the rampage. I saw many children die, or become orphans. I wondered, in my darker moments, what relief I could possibly bring into this despair, with nothing but my prayer-book and my humble bag of medicines. But lo and
behold, my deformities worked in my favour: one woman, Mrs Jeyes, said to me that clapping eyes on a sight as pitiful as me put her own troubles into perspective. I did not know whether to be hurt or grateful.

There was one particular hovel, on Mickle Street, that I visited more often than most, as its need was the greatest; indeed, no other slum dwelling that I knew seemed to match its squalor and decrepitude. I was often to be found there.

‘Like a fly to dung,’ commented Farthingale, my harshest critic, when he saw me one morning preparing my medicine bag and my Bible for my next visit to Mickle Street.

‘He’s got a whore down there,’ speculated Ganney.

I turned the other cheek so many times with my fellow seminarians, I sometimes became dizzy with it. But I ignored their taunts, and continued my regular visits to Mickle Street, for here dwelled a family by the name of Cove, who seemed to be in permanent need of my attentions. The elder Mr Cove, a former seaman with a pitted face and beery breath, had recently developed an ulceration on his leg, and because he was unable to afford the doctor, I took it upon myself, as my Christian duty, to see to him as best I could. It was in this unlikely setting, and quite unexpectedly, that during one of my visits, I had an encounter with physical temptation that was to create both excitement and turmoil within me, in equal measure.

The object of my desire was a thing of great lewdness.

I didn’t even know its name, at first.

‘I stole it off a cargo ship,’ confided the little Cove boy, a little lad of seven with an elfin face and knickerbockered legs as skinny as a sparrow’s.

I had arrived to change the dressings on the ulcerous shin of Grandfather Cove to find the whole family staring and sniffing at a curious object on their table. It was yellow, and about eight inches long, and in circumference, about the same thickness as an engorged male object. As soon as I saw it, I blushed a fierce red, and I felt the base of my spine tingle at the site of my ancient mutilation.

‘They was hanging in huge bunches,’ whispered the boy, recounting what he had witnessed in the ship’s hold, his voice reduced to an awed whisper. ‘From hooks. Some bunches was yellow,’ he said, his eyes flaring wide with excitement. ‘But some was green!’

No one approached the table.

‘I went to grab one,’ said the boy. The Coves were all listening intently, although I was sure it was not the first time he had recounted his tale. ‘But then I saw there was this giant hairy spider guarding them.’

He indicated its size by making a hoop of his thin arms. Bigger than a plate. I knew the wonders of God’s earth to be manifold, and some of them even beyond the scope of the redoubtable Hanker’s
World History
, but I was beginning to suspect that the boy was telling an untruth. ‘So I goes on peering round the place till I sees another bunch, that don’t have a spider,’ the boy continued. ‘And I grab it like this with my bare hands.’ He showed me his hands. They were bony and grubby. I nodded to acknowledge his bravery. ‘I just took the one. I could’ve taken more.’

The boy looked suddenly anxious.

‘You did right, son,’ said his mother. She had a flat face, like a plaice. ‘We don’t know as it’s not poison.’

The thing was dark yellow, and blotchy, and as I have already indicated, obscene in shape. But as I stepped further into the room, I was struck by a sublime and mesmerising fragrance, which pulled me towards it like a helpless magnet.

‘Have you ever in your life seen such an ungodly-looking specimen?’ the ulcerous Mr Cove asked me, eyeing it worriedly. ‘Can the Lord ever have given His holy blessing to it?’ He was looking to me for God’s answer, and I searched my heart to find the reply that Parson Phelps might give, but my thoughts were in turmoil. I did not know what to make of this thing, but I knew that I desired it more fiercely than I had ever desired anything.

‘Beauty is in the eye of the beholder,’ I said at last, dredging up something my mother always used to say to me when she
caught me gazing miserably at my reflection in the hall mirror. I inhaled deeply, and with every second that ticked by on the ancient grandfather clock in the corner of the room, I succumbed still further to the fruit’s exotic lure.

‘The boy swears it’s edible, but we’re not so sure,’ said Mrs Cove. ‘You’ll need to peel off its jacket first!’

She was not to know it, but I was by now so overwhelmed by a desire to eat the thing and to possess it for ever, that I could barely prevent myself from leaping forward and grabbing it.

‘I’ll try it, if you like,’ I offered. I was trembling with a wild urge to cram the whole thing into my mouth. ‘I’ll just take a bite, and tell you if it’s all right.’ Cautiously, I removed its yellow skin, and bared its white flesh.