Ark Baby (5 page)

There is nothing shameful in a little voyeurism. So adjust your balloon until the basket is level with this sash window here, and peer through the curtains of the drawing room. And witness the following things: a
chaise-longue
, a tumbler of whisky, a glimpse of curved breast, and a stiffened male object. Catch sight of a whalebone corset being cast to the ground like the chrysalis of a metamorphosing grub. See what might or might not be two semi-clad human bodies groping for balance upon the
chaise-longue.
The windowpane having now – infuriatingly – steamed up, press your ear to the glass and hear instead a series of noises: a whispered cajoling, a languid rejection, a thick-voiced insistence, an acquiescent sigh, a jostle of petticoats, an unclipping of braces, a fumbling and a slapping, a grunting and panting, a squeaking and a moaning, an increasingly rapid rhythmic thudding, a lion’s roar, a little moan, a big, heavy sigh.

A quiet couple of minutes. After which, the mission of his male object accomplished, Dr Ivanhoe Scrapie returns to his workshop, to do battle with a Highland stork, while his wife, surrounded by a cloud of psychic particles which shape and re-shape ghostly images of the Great Beyond, sinks back into the shadowy dreamland of her addiction.

Then, as your balloon floats upwards into the night, imagine, in the light of the full moon that is emerging through the London clouds, a period of hormonal risk beneath the Scrapie corsetry. A meeting of sperm and egg deep inside the Scrapie anatomy. A fertilisation within the confines of a Scrapie fallopian tube. And then –

Abracadabra! An embryo! An embryo which –

But no! Quick, let loose more hot air, I beg you, into your Montgolfier, and chuck out a sandbag! Let us leave the embryo Violet Scrapie there, going about her homunculoid business, and fly rapidly to London docks, where her future guru, the man who is to shape her – quite literally – into the majestic woman she will become – awaits us on board a ship named
HMS Beagle.

A beagle, as we all know, is a breed of hunting dog. An odd name for a ship.

You’ll need binoculars at this point. The docks are far, far below; night has given way to morning and the bevy of vessels crammed into the dockside is tinged with an orange glow – among them Captain FitzRoy’s ten-gunned three-masted
Beagle.
She is berthed there next to the
Paradigm
(cargo: linen, peacock feathers, liquorice, candle-wax, nuts, bolts, and Brazil nuts). The
Beagle
is a serious, non-profit-making vessel, a vessel that, until several years ago, contained a small group of respectable scientists doing a difficult and painstaking job, but more recently, has housed only the melancholic captain and his brooding whims. Yes; all the scientists, Mr Darwin included, have long since departed to their personal residences and taken their bulky microscopes and notebooks with them. The heyday of the
Beagle
is past, and she has set sail only a few times since then, for survey work in the North Sea. Now, today, Captain
FitzRoy has wandered off, mad and alone, leaving only his crew on board. The sea was rough during their most recent trip, and the seamen are laid low from sickness, bad food and exhaustion. The
Beagle
has a mixed crew, mostly English, but with a few Spaniards. And a Belgian. Let the English and the Spaniards stew in their own juice: it’s the Belgian who’s our man. Land your balloon on the dockside, alight from the basket, and meet Monsieur Jacques-Yves Cabillaud, a seasickness-sufferer who this morning, having cooked breakfast porridge for twenty men and received no thanks for his pains, has thrown down his oat-choked ladle and declared, ‘Ç
a suffit.
’

A proud man. An ambitious man. A man about to do a bunk.

These are the facts that are known about Jacques-Yves Cabillaud’s past:

Certainement pas!
With this in mind, he shoulders his knapsack and heads for the Zoological Gardens. So let us land our imaginary Montgolfier, tether it to this handily situated monkey-puzzle tree, don our walking shoes, and follow him on foot.

The city into which the absconding Cabillaud queasily stumbled from aboard the
Beagle
was a metropolis reeking of parsnips, cabbages, coffee-stalls, the putrefying flesh of poisoned rats, freshly cut flowers, rotten herrings, oysters, and smoke from charcoal burners. Down alleyways, in open sewers, excrement wound its way towards the Thames and thence to the sea, while in the sky, as ever, a thick pall of smoke hung low like a throttling blanket. God knows how Cabillaud managed to leave the
Beagle
unnoticed on his wobbly legs. Nor how this small, intrepid, stubble-jowled man came to stagger halfway across the capital, jostled by an unruly
March wind, and enter the elephant enclosure in the Zoological Gardens. And above all to remain there, unnoticed, for a week, nursing a fever and eating only swill, straw and mouse-droppings. Or how it was that the chief zoo-keeper, Mr Gardillie, rather than tipping him back on to the streets, took a perverse liking to him and, once Cabillaud had explained that his
Beagle
experience had accustomed him to wildlife, offered him a job shovelling elephant shit. Cabillaud, who took a long view of things and possessed a formidably stoical side, accepted the job with the humility required, retreated to the enclosure of Mona the elephant, bided his time, hatched his plans, and shovelled. And lo and behold! After three weeks of negotiating with elephant turds the size of the moon, the kind of opportunity he had been hoping for – as a first step on the glittering pathway of his dreams – arrived on a plate. On a plate, in the form of an irascible-looking man who one morning entered Mona’s enclosure without so much as a by-your-leave, and set up a step-ladder.

The surly gentleman, who is none other than the bipedal mammal we spied earlier from the Montgolfier, mating with his drugged female in Madagascar Street, ignored the Belgian completely. But Cabillaud scrutinised the taxidermist closely. He had already heard much about Dr Ivanhoe Scrapie from the head keeper. Scrapie was one of several taxidermists who often came by the Zoological Gardens, like a vulture in search of carrion. News of Mona’s stomach upset, which was keeping Cabillaud busy round the clock, must have spread to the museum, where Dr Scrapie was not only chief taxidermist, but in charge of Her Majesty’s own personal bestiary of stuffed animals. Which the Monarch was anxious to enlarge in proportion to her growing Empire. Mr Gardillie had told Cabillaud about her proposed Animal Kingdom Collection, which would contain a stuffed example of every living creature in the world, clad in human clothes and depicting pious scenes. Impressive. And now, here, was the man who was by all accounts charged with stuffing the things; all fifteen thousand or so of them. No wonder he
looked haggard and distracted. (The Animal Kingdom Project was indeed to blame, but only partly; there was also the fact that the Laudanum Empress was wearing her pregnancy badly, and even at this early stage, arising sixteen times a night to empty her bladder.) Cabillaud, his mind racing with possibilities, leaned on his giant shovel, and observed Scrapie with interest, as the tall thin man reached the pinnacle of the step-ladder, and raised a lamp to Mona’s ear. She flapped it like a gigantic wing, irritated, and Scrapie wobbled precariously.

‘Monsieur,’ announced Cabillaud, who had by now decided upon his plan of attack. Scrapie slowly looked down, annoyed at the interruption. Then, realising the social stature of the man who had addressed him, he took out his magnifying glass and peered through it at the human insect on the floor.

‘I sweep out elephant’s piss, I clear away
merde
all day,’ Cabillaud informed him by way of self-introduction. ‘And all night, also, now, because ze creature is
malade.
’

Scrapie polished his magnifying glass on a hanky.

‘Zis,’ Cabillaud elaborated, indicating the shovel and the sloppy lagoon of
ca-ca
that Mona’s breakfast had engendered, ‘is not my natural position on ze ladder of nature, Monsieur.’

Scrapie, tottering on his own ladder, leaned forward to peer closer at the elephant-keeper. He could see nothing much: just a black-and-white blur, and some facial hair in close-up. Cabillaud continued, ‘I am not slave of elephant creature, I am
artiste.
Give me to spend one day in your kitchen, Monsieur. I zen will show you what is in true fact
la gastronomie.
’

Mona, swinging her trunk, shifted silently and ominously on her umbrella-stand feet, and Scrapie, sensing danger, disengaged himself jerkily from the step-ladder and re-arranged himself on to the straw next to Cabillaud. This time he drew up close, applied the magnifying glass to Cabillaud’s face and inspected the man again: he noted five days of stubble, a torn and infected ear-lobe from which an earring had clearly been forcibly ripped, a foul odour, and a huge brown eye, larger than a cow’s. An overseas specimen, he concluded. Nothing rare. Probably
European in origin. Satisfied with his diagnosis of both species and genus, Dr Scrapie pocketed his magnifying glass.

‘Well?’ he said.

Cabillaud recognised an order when he heard one. His life-story, as relayed to the taxidermist, necessitated holding the shit-shovel between his knees, clamped as in a vice, so that the hands were free to gesticulate their accompaniment to the tale. Cabillaud described how he was destined for great culinary fame (a reaching on high of the right hand), but had mistakenly ended up on board the
Beagle
(here Scrapie pricked up his ears), a terrible vessel (a thwack of spittle aimed at the water-butt), full of Englishmen (a turning-down of the corners of the mouth), on which since leaving the Galápagos, apart from his experiments in
Cuisine Zoologique
(Scrapie looked puzzled; he had no French), all he had been required to cook was porridge, pickled herring, and seaweed (more phlegm). Dishes containing, sometimes, when the sea was rough –
Dieu me pardonne!
– his own seasick vomit.

‘Seaweed soup, seaweed fishcakes, fried seaweed, mashed seaweed. I make seaweed
gratin
one time, because some cheese falls off another ship, I fish out, I make
gratin
, zey send it back, say no good. You English, you would take the choice to eat human
ordure
if it had lumps in it unchewable
suffisamment
to your taste of like.’

It was a challenge. Hands on hips.
Fini. Voilà.

‘I’ll consider the matter,’ said Scrapie, eyeing up Mona once more, and estimating her weight to be approximately two tons. As every taxidermist can tell you, it’s not the stuffing so much as the skinning and the construction of the armature that are problematic in such cases. Not to mention the space constraint imposed by one’s workshop. Scrapie’s conclusion: Forget it, Your Majesty. She’s overly gigantical; discussion over.

Mona shifts uneasily, as if telepathically interpreting Scrapie’s train of thought, which is now moving on (she sighs a big windy sigh of relief) to the subject of the Monarch, who lurks permanently at the back of the taxidermist’s brain like a constant
nagging headache. Bloody woman! Scrapie is thinking. Bloody, bloody woman! Look at her, with her pink-splotched map of the world and her Animal Kingdom nonsense! Only a woman as rich and unhinged and as grandiose as she is would come up with such an idea. And only a man like Horace Trapp could have the audacity to persuade her that he could actually bring a thousand foreign species home intact, in a single vessel. A royal Ark! What hubris!

‘Bloody woman!’ says Scrapie aloud.

‘
Comment?
’

‘The Queen. I told her not to. I said it was a bad idea. More than bad. Noah did it, but that was in the Bible.’

‘Ah,’ murmurs Cabillaud, doing his best to look sympathetic, and wondering how he is to steer the conversation around towards his own goals. He is also preoccupied with a parallel train of thought: Would the acidic tang of a gooseberry
coulis
go well with the succulence of raccoon?