Ark Baby (6 page)

‘Everyone knows that Trapp is nothing but a fool,’ Scrapie is saying. ‘A dangerous fool.’ Blast him, thinks Scrapie, his exhausted brain churning with rage. The man has a whole history of entrepreneurial disaster behind him. Not to mention the slavery business. It was well known that the only reason he’d been forced to quit trading in humans was because a whole ship-load had died on him for want of food. Bloody hell! What possessed the Hippo to put her faith in such a man? What wild promises did he make her? (I must have some sleep. Sixteen times in a single night! And she had drunk no liquid!)

‘A dangerous fool,’ echoes Cabillaud, not having a clue what Scrapie has been mumbling so angrily about, but hoping to please. ‘I too have heard zis same thing. Dangerous, and a little bit deranged also, zis man Tropp.’

‘Trapp,’ Scrapie corrects him wearily, patting Mona on the big leather wall of her thigh. ‘Horace Trapp.’

‘Yes,’ rejoins Cabillaud with enthusiasm. ‘That’s iz name! Trapp! Complete madman! Complete
idiot!
’

Scrapie remains lost in thought. It is now two years since
Trapp and his entourage set sail for Africa, and needless to say, nothing has been heard since. Just as well, maybe, the taxidermist reflects. For it is he, Scrapie, who will be in charge of stuffing the creatures on their return. As if he doesn’t have his hands full already. (The Laudanum Empress is no help to him. Pregnancy sends her into a nine-month trance, broken only by her nocturnal sorties to the Crapper.) Meanwhile, Horace Trapp appears to have taken the royal money and run.

‘And that’s no surprise,’ says Scrapie.

‘No, no it is surely not,’ agrees Cabillaud. ‘Not one bit surprise at all, I sink.’

‘Bugger the Queen!’ concludes Scrapie.

‘And bugger Trapp, also!’ says Cabillaud with gusto. ‘Bugger him utterly, zis madman who I hate with all my heart and my very soul also! And ze Queen also who is nothing but a big, big, big, big, big –’

‘Hippopotamus,’ finishes Scrapie.

Mona snorts through her trunk in agreement, and begins to work her way through a bale of hay.

Then Cabillaud, emboldened by his own vehemence on a subject about which he knows nothing, ventures; ‘
Vous acceptez, done, ma proposition, Monsieur?
’

Scrapie takes out his magnifying glass again and stares the man in the eye. Yes: they appear to speak the same language.

‘I’ll give you three days in my kitchen.’ And he turns to leave.

‘Thank you, sir,’ whispers Cabillaud, barely able to contain his joy. His heart is all set to leap out of his very chest! ‘You will not
regrettez!
’

Scrapie folds his step-ladder and swings himself over the gate.

‘Three days.’

Cabillaud and Mona watch him as he makes his way down the gravel path past the monkey enclosure, a tall, lanky figure with a rolling walk.

Then they see him turn. Cabillaud blanches. Can the man have changed his mind?

The taxidermist is cupping his hand over his mouth to yell something.

‘Any objections to cooking unusual meats?’ comes his voice, faintly, over the chattering of chimps. ‘The casualties of the Zoological Gardens have a tendency to come my way. Waste not, want not!’

Mon Dieu!

‘No objections at all, sir! My very own delight!’

He is grinning so widely, he realises, that his jaws hurt. When was he last so happy? He kisses Mona on her trunk, which she curls around him affectionately. Then like the lady she is, she lifts her keeper clear of the ground and high into the air like a little toy, and gratefully opens her bowels.

The dusty old peacock feather bobbed in the gaslight as the Frozen Woman scratched away with its quill on a sheet of onion-skin parchment.

My first mistake
, she wrote,
woz to BELEEV that wen a man sez he has a DREEM, that DREEM is to be TRUSTID and must command RISPECT. It is NOT. The things He spoke of were:

He twurld his MUSTARSH, and I beleeved him.

She paused, and fingered the nib of her quill, then bent her head again, and continued her laborious scratching.
Wel, He wuz gud to me wen we furst met, I was dansin at the Kings Arms, nites, then. E see me an He wont me, that’s wot E sed.

E sed, you do the SPLITS like that for me?

Posh talking. Munny in iz vois, I thinks. He stands me on the table.

The Nuance was in her element on the motorway. She purred with oil like a randy lioness, and before I knew it, I’d covered a hundred and fifty kilometres, and had entered a transcendental travel limbo. There’s nothing like having A behind you, and B ahead.

Nah.

I turned on the radio. It was one of those programmes where grown-ups get paid for indulging in opinionated argy-bargy. They were talking about the Fertility Crisis again.

‘My feeling is that we reached an evolutionary cul-de-sac,’ pontificated an earnest woman. I imagined her: reading specs, dangly earrings, a Ph.D., halitosis, a brooch. ‘We’d gone as far as we possibly could, in terms of sophistication, civilisation, humanity –’

Then a bloke, a religious type, cut in. No-no-no-no-no. Sorry, sorry. Ha-ha. Lovely idea, Susan, blah-blah, he was saying, but with all due respect, the facts couldn’t be plainer. I pictured him, too: dog-collar, dentures, sensible Y-fronts, dumpy wife at home trying to tune in but not being able to find the right wavelength. The Crisis happened, he was saying, because the Lord had become angry with the world, just as He had done
once before. He’d sent the Flood then – he quoted something here – bla-de-blah – and
unleashed mighty waters
, et cetera, so that only the meek should inherit, bah blah, and it was all our own doing.

‘If I could just cut in here –’ the Ph.D. brooch woman began, but he was on a roll.

‘–
Not
because we were so sophisticated, civilised, morally advanced, and humane as a species, but the very OPPOSITE. We didn’t honour what He had done for us. We, here in Britain. This once great nation.’

‘Susan? Would you like to come in here?’ said the radio man. He was just a voice.

‘Yes. Well, what we experienced was hardly a flood,’ the earnest woman remonstrated. ‘You can’t possibly call it a real flood! It was no more than a few inches!’

She was right there, I thought. The hallelujah types liked to call it a deluge, because of what happened after, but it was hardly what you’d call a big deal. New Year’s Eve, 1999 – very apocalyptic, of course. They all seized on that. But it was just a bad shower, maybe; no more. ‘A noxious squall,’ the Met Office called it at the time. The surgery got swamped, but it was nothing that a couple of
Sunday Timeses
couldn’t mop up, in the end.

‘Now come on. You can’t deny that it changed our lives,’ said the radio man. ‘Flood, heavy shower, call it what you will, things haven’t been the same since.’

‘Nobody’s claiming they
have
been,’ said another man. He had that reasoned, slightly chewing voice that scientists use when they’re on the radio. ‘I’d be the
last
person to say that the sudden infertility of the human egg in Britain isn’t a national catastrophe. As for whether the flooding on the night of the Millennium was the cause of it –’

‘But Professor Hawkins,’ butted in the woman. ‘I don’t frankly
care
about the cause of the problem. I care about the
solution.
We’ve got to remember that if it weren’t for the National Egg Bank, the British would already be headed for complete extinction. All
I’m
saying is –’

‘Should we really be that pessimistic?’ said the radio man. ‘After all, the Government’s telling us that in fact it’s only a matter of time till the fertility curve swings up again. And in the meantime, we’ve got the stored eggs to tide us over, so –’

‘But there are nowhere near enough pre-Millennial eggs in storage to deal with the queues!’ The woman was getting quite shrill. ‘Look at the evidence. There hasn’t been a single natural conception since New Year’s Day 2000! Five years of sterility! I say release ALL the eggs now, and get the girls pregnant as soon as possible, and –’

‘Big mistake,’ said the religious man. ‘Look, if God had
wanted
us to store human eggs, he’d have
designed
us to store them. It’s this very type of scientific intervention we were being punished for in the first place.’

‘
Punished
!’ squawked the woman. ‘You think –’

‘Yes,
punished.
You don’t like that word, do you. It’s not very liberal-friendly, I’m afraid.’

‘Well, you can’t deny it’s incredibly
value-laden.
’

‘I can’t, and I won’t. I say,
What’s wrong with values?
And if I may make another point, I don’t call two inches of rainfall ‘just a shower’. I call it a flood.’

‘So you’re saying God just wants us all to fizzle out, then, does he? You lot are quite happy to witness our decline? It’s all right for you. You’ve had your children, haven’t you? Boys, I’ll bet. If you had girls, you
certainly
wouldn’t be taking that line. When I see my daughter taking hormones so she can breast-feed an orang-utan, my heart breaks. If you take away the human eggs that were put in storage before the Millennium, you’re killing their only hope of becoming mothers. Not to mention the future of Britain as a nation.’

‘
God
knows what He is doing,’ the dog-collar man said complacently. ‘I’m confident that He’ll offer us some hope, if we show humility. Can’t you see it? This is a
test
!
A challenge for us all!
We will arise from the ashes of our impurity, as Christ arose on the third day!’

But it wasn’t going to be like that, and he knew it. Everyone
knew it. I remembered the sequence of events, when the Fertility Blip officially became no longer a blip, but a crisis. First, when it became clear that male sperm were not affected, only female eggs, there’d been a whole spate of hastily arranged marriages to foreign imports. The women arrived here, fine, amid much domestic resentment, but within a couple of months, it became clear the new pregnancies weren’t going to materialise. Nature had played its wild card; their eggs seemed to have died as soon as they passed Customs. The whole country was an egg-killing zone. A nation of ovarian doom. The quickie divorces followed, and the Sperm Drain began. The tourist industry collapsed completely, and overnight, we became a third-world leper colony. Europe poured millions of Euros into fertility research, but was desperate to get shot of us.

‘How can anyone be resurrected, when half the men have left?’ snapped the woman. She was becoming quite strident. ‘Even the frozen eggs in the Egg Bank are only 50 per cent viable. I suspect it’s less. When did you last see a baby?’ she accused. They were getting rarer than hen’s teeth. It was like the Lottery used to be; anyone who benefited from the Egg Bank had to go into hiding. ‘Unless something’s done soon about the Sperm Drain,’ the woman was saying, ‘there’ll be no men left!’

True. A lot of blokes were leaving, now that it was clear the country was blighted. There was nothing wrong with British sperm, after all. Or foreign eggs. Emigration restrictions for men were on the cards; there was a rumour that, come next year, you wouldn’t be able to leave unless you could prove you’d fathered a genuine
Homo Britannicus
before the Crisis.

And that there’d be Loyalty Bonuses for men who stayed.

Was it the prospect of that, that stopped me going abroad? Not really. The fact was, I didn’t give a monkey’s about the future.

Carpe diem
, I say. Seize the day. Grab it by the throat and rattle its bollocks.

Before I left London, I phoned the Veterinary Society to inform
them of my change of name by deed poll. I spoke to a Mr Jenks. I told him I needed confidentiality. Should anyone, such as a woman called Holly Noakes, or Mrs Patricia Mann, for example, try to contact me by the name Bobby Sullivan, he was to inform them that I was no longer on their books. I could hear the sound of a Jenks eyebrow being raised.

‘There was a sort of vendetta against me,’ I explained.

‘A vendetta?’ Jenks asked.

Oh Christ, I realised. He’s interested now. I’ve used a foreign word. He wants details.

‘A client with a grudge,’ I said, going for a spot of honesty. Busking it. I pictured Mrs Mann with a little silver revolver pointed at me over Giselle’s body-bag. ‘A dead-monkey scenario. Husband gets me to put the animal down, licence in order, all legal and above-board, wife comes along, threatens me. Bad marriage, baby-substitute, the old story. You feel more like a shrink sometimes.’

‘A common complaint,’ Jenks sympathised. When I assured him that I was completely in the clear, and (stroke of genius, this) that I was taking out a legal injunction against the deranged pet-owner concerned, he became even more understanding. ‘There’s a lot of it about,’ he confided. ‘We had a member shot with a crossbow last year, over a bushbaby. Claims and counter-claims, insurance hoo-ha and now the Court of Appeal. It’s the anthropomorphism,’ he mused. ‘Gets people carried away.’

There were several possibilities, Mr Jenks explained, clicking away at the vacancy file on his computer. A Saudi Arabian zoo, for instance, if I was interested in sunshine, but there was a strict no-women-no-booze clause which wasn’t everyone’s
cup of tea
, as it were. ‘Not many reproductive possibilities there, I’m afraid,’ he said. ‘Most men opt for Holland or the Far East.’