Ark Baby (7 page)

‘Anything closer to home?’ I asked. ‘I’m not bothered about reproduction, myself.’ This was true. Unlike Elvis, I’d never felt the urge to pass on my genes. No rock-a-hula baby for me.

‘Well, there’s a locum going up north,’ he said. ‘A suburb of
Judlow called Thunder Spit. By the sea. Famous for a breed of sheep called the Lord Chief Justice.’

‘Sounds interesting,’ I lied. But the idea of the coast appealed. I thought of those camping holidays, with sun-cream and popcorn.

‘I’ll put in an application, then,’ I told him.

‘An excellent choice of name, if I may say so,’ said Jenks, when I spelled out my new identity for the records. I was pleased with his reaction.

‘You’ll be hearing from us soon, Mr de Savile,’ Jenks said. ‘Or may I be among the first to call you Buck?’

‘It’s a tragedy,’ the brooch woman was saying, as my windscreen wipers swished me past Axelhaunch, Fib’s Wash, Blaggerfield. Viking names. I’d heard a couple of blokes speaking Danish once; they sounded like clogged drains.

‘But to go back to the central point, as long as we have our stored eggs, then we have hope, surely?’ put in the radio man. He was paid to make sure people didn’t get too depressed. A difficult job. As the discussion took its usual apocalyptic course, the earring-and-brooch woman’s voice grew ever more quivery with emotion, and the hallelujah man with the Y-fronts and dentures became more and more triumphant, and the reasonable professor sounded more and more like a herbivore chewing old cud, and I thought: Desperate times. And desperate women. Hence the primates. No self-respecting woman over thirty could afford to be without her cute little companion. That’s what it said in an old copy of
Cosmopolitan
in the surgery waiting-room, anyway. I had a sudden clear picture of Giselle, the doomed macaque, handing Mr Mann a flea.

Desperate times, but a bonanza for vets.

My involvement with animals began with blood, meat, and a gizzard stone.

I am six. Unexpectedly, I visit the butcher’s shop with my mother.

‘Why not the supermarket, Mum?’ They had a popcorn machine, and photo booth where you could have your picture taken with the Terminator.

‘Because he’s organic’

She walks fast, dragging me by the wrist, to buy lamb cutlets for her actressy dinner party, at which she plans to call them ‘
côtelettes d’agneau’.
The year is 1983, and the shop is one of those expensive old-fashioned London butcher’s you rarely came across, even back then. (You see extinction everywhere, when you look for it.)

Meat hangs from hooks and languishes in little bloody trays; crimson sawdust confettis the floor. I gob in it and rake it about with my toe as I stand in the queue next to Mum. Then suddenly the butcher is heaving down towards me, holding something out in his palm. It’s a stone. I take it. It feels smooth and slightly oily.

‘From a chicken’s gizzard,’ says the butcher. ‘For you, mate. Freebie!’

I clasp it tight. In my innocence, I recognise I belong here.

‘When I grow up,
I
want to be organic,’ I say as we leave the shop.

‘Oh Bobsy-Wobsy, how horrible,’ says Mum, popping the plastic bag of bloody
côtelettes
into her shopping net. ‘Meat’s so grisly, darling.’

‘I like that. I like grisly.’

‘Well, be a surgeon, then,’ says Mum. ‘You can open up people’s bodies, and take out the bits with cancer and sew them up again.’

‘I don’t want to cut up people.’ I am fingering the gizzard stone in my pocket. And there, by the Norwich Union Building Society, the enormity of it stops me in my tracks.

‘I want to cut up animals.’

There’s nothing abnormal in this.

When I was twelve, I built a rat-trap, and then one for squirrels, because in those days the Council, which still deemed them urban vermin, gave you 50p for every tail you brought in. I
dismantled the bodies the way my friends dismantled toy cars or aeroplanes. I kept a plastic box of animal bits in the far corner of the fridge, and another in the freezer. Mum never really noticed. As long as her ice and lemon were within reach, she paid no heed. Mum rested a lot, ‘Because actresses just bloody do,’ and because of her migraine sessions. It was left to Dad to see us boys through. He raised us efficiently, and he raised us to be men.

At fifteen, I was spotty and sweaty, with limbs that seemed roughly modelled out of plasticine and a penis likewise. All were embarrassing and unmanageable. It was this version of myself that began work as the organic butcher’s assistant. My mother hated the idea, and went off for one of her migraines. She was having them daily by this time. Dad was seeing another woman, Jilly, who wore tight-fitting jodhpurs and was married to a fox-faced man who skulked in the City all week. Fact: Jilly caused Mum’s migraines. Dad’s version: Jilly had ‘come into his life’ (he said it like she was Jesus) because Mum was always drunk.

But when I started work at Mr Harper’s, Mum made it clear that today’s migraine extravaganza was for me.

‘You’ll chop off a finger!’ she screeched through the door. ‘Or worse! You could lose a whole arm in those electric slicers!’

But this did nothing to put me off. In fact, the idea that I’d be working with lethal instruments increased the thrill. I pictured feeding my right index finger into the greedy blade, and saw it emerge in wafer-thin strips of pink flesh with a central spot of pellucid white bone. From behind the door, the familiar whiff of Amontillado sherry and the sound of heartbreak. Like all Mum’s noises, it had a thespian ring to it: Mrs Sullivan, stage left, falls to floor, clasps magnificent bosom, dies in sorrow. Exit spotty teenage son running, head in hands.

Things evolved from there, and before I knew it, I was at vet school.

The radio discussion had degenerated into a phone-in: a woman
from Cleethorpes was wanting to know why it was
Britain
that had been affected by the Crisis.

‘It’s so unfair!’ she wailed. ‘Why not the whole of Europe? After all the kow-towing we’ve done to Brussels!’

The brooch-woman gave a piggy snort.

‘Well, the infertility is certainly very
regionalised,
’ said the radio man, covering for her. ‘Do you have an explanation, Professor Hawkins?’

‘Well, if you look at it globally,’ he droned, ‘it’s perhaps unfortunate that it should have just hit our archipelago of islands, but in evo
lut
ionary terms, it’s not unusual for a disaster to be contained in this way.’ He paused, chewing on his words. ‘Islands are well known for housing species that aren’t found elsewhere in the world. But by the same token, their populations are
also
prone to be wiped out in accidents such as this. Be they caused by rainfall, triggering a genetic malfunction, or something else which we don’t yet understand. The end result, of course, being –’

I switched off the radio.
Extinction.
I’m fed up with that word, I thought. Let’s put on our blue suede shoes and dance like we did in the good old days, before I was born! I have twenty-nine virtual Elvis concerts on tape.

I peer through the windscreen: outside, the land is as flat and bare as a splat of emulsion, and the few trees seem to be cringing from something. As I drive past the hypermarkets, car-phone warehouses, carpet wholesalers, discount shoe shops, DIY stores and bungalows that herald the outskirts of town, a sign enlarges ahead of me. WELCOME TO THUNDER SPIT.

Which is the cue for the butterfly that is Buck de Savile, emerged from the caterpillar that was Bobby Sullivan, to press his foot harder on the accelerator and speed into town.

Yo!
Homo Britannicus
is dying, but the son of Elvis is going to live!

Dr Baldicoot said I would die, but I lived. The Parson and his wife christened me Tobias, and I formally took their surname, Phelps. A solid name, evoking oakwood and rainy autumns and English brawn, passed down through many a generation in Thunder Spit.

But I was not as sturdy as the name I bore. Unlike the Phelpses who had gone before, whose graveyard epitaphs spoke of long, industrious and healthy lives, I was small and sickly; they said that all the energy of my babyhood seemed to be put into growing more hair. My head was a great thick tangled clot, and I had copious body hair from an early age, which promised great manliness, my father said wistfully.

Others took a different view.

‘His real parents must’ve been infidels,’ I heard Mrs Tobash say once, as she and Mrs Fletcher gutted fish at the harbour market. ‘There’s nothing Christian about body hair.’

My hair was rust-red.

‘Another sign of evil,’ asserted Mrs Fletcher, throwing some mackerel innards down for the tortoiseshell cats to gobble. ‘He’s crawling with fleas, too, they say.’ This much was true. ‘I reckon he’s witches’ spawn.’

‘And
I
reckon he’s from the Fair,’ said Mrs Tobash. ‘He’s a misbegot. One of them freaks. He’ll never be a man.’

I ran and hid in my mother’s skirts.

I will be frank with you, reader: I grew up with a distinct sense that all was not well.

Proud though I am now of my eloquence and literacy (if you will forgive me a moment of self-praise), it may come as a surprise to you that in childhood my lack of speech was the cause of great anxiety to my foster-parents. It was clear to them that I was not unintelligent (indeed, I was quite the opposite, although it is perhaps immodest to mention it) but it was evident that some inexplicable blockage was preventing me from uttering a single sound other than a squeak or a grunt, which bore no relation to the human language. In the opinion of the good Dr Baldicoot, the matter was related to my general sickliness at birth, and the trauma caused by my unfortunate mutilation.

‘For who knows,’ he argued, puffing on his vile-smelling pipe, ‘what effect such an attack may have had upon the psyche?’

My father had a more theological explanation for my silence.

‘“
I speak in the tongues of men and of angels,”
’ he would quote from the Bible, comforting his worried wife. ‘He is an angel. These grunts are angelic discourse.’

My foster-mother, who had the task of dressing me every morning and knew with intimacy the extent of my physical oddities, including my singularly un-angelic hairiness, was not so sure.

‘Speak to me, Tobias,’ she would wail. ‘In God’s own English, I pray!’

It was not, in fact, until my fifth year that words finally emerged from my mouth. I remember the occasion well, for it was my official birthday. My true date of birth being unknown (a common problem with foundlings), we celebrated the event on the anniversary of my parents’ wedding. See them there, at the big kitchen table, every knot of whose oak surface I know with intimacy, their hands clasped; it is the thirtieth year of their marriage. My father moon-faced, earnest, his bushy brows turning to grey; she quiet and unassuming, like a friendly potato or a lardy bun. And see their smiles of parental pride as they gaze lovingly at the child sitting opposite them, the linen napkin
tucked beneath his chin, a fried sardine before him on his plate. I am their darling, their joy.

‘Happy birthday, Tobias! May the Lord bless you and keep you!’ booms Parson Phelps.

I smile. In my lap, I finger the wheels of a toy train they have given me. It is made of wood, carved by the cobbler, Mr Hewitt.

‘Eat up,’ whispers my mother, her eyes bright with excitement, her mouth trembling with delight. ‘And then you shall have your surprise!’

Dutifully, I pick some more at my sardine, and leave the spine on the side of my plate.

‘Now shut your eyes,’ whispers Mrs Phelps, ‘and make a wish!’

I close them, and (my imagination being limited, and the hair-shirt mentality of Thunder Spit prompting luxurious urges in me even at this early age) I pray for a magnificent cake.

It has already been established that miracles did not often come to Thunder Spit. So when two came into the Phelps household within the space of five years, there was joy to be had indeed, and a feeling of extra-special blessedness. There is no physical explanation for what happened (although the good Dr Baldicoot did his best to come up with a diagram of a larynx that had been blocked and then suddenly unplugged, due to a sudden stimulation of the psyche, thus confirming his theory) but – for what it is worth – it is my belief that at that same moment that I was wishing for a cake, my mother was making a wish of her own. How else to explain what next transpired? In her neat and careful script, my mother wrote down in her diary that night:

The sequence of events, as Parson Phelps and I recall it, was thus
:

Firstly, the child opened his eyes, and saw the cake.

Secondly, he blew out the candles, one by one.

And thirdly, clear as a choirboy, Dear Lord be thanked, the CHILD SPOKE!

At the bottom of the page, in writing that was a mere scrawl, and jittered with emotion, she had added:
Fourthly: I shall die a happy woman!

My first words – ‘Words we will cherish for ever,’ declared my delighted father – came suddenly, unbidden, from my mouth.

‘What a delicious-looking cake,’ I said. ‘Please, dear Mother, would you kindly be so good as to cut me a slice?’

A child prodigy! And so polite with it!

‘Manners maketh man,’ choked my father, then joined my mother in weeping with joy. As I helped myself to another slice, I smiled at the pleasure I had given them, and watched them hauling out the prayer-cushion and flinging themselves on the floor to thank God. Their prayers were so long and passionate that I managed to polish off the whole cake before they got to their feet again.

From that day, I never squeaked or grunted again, and so proud were my parents of my newly acquired talent that they encouraged me to read long passages of the Bible aloud, and to memorise tongue-twisters:
Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled pepper, Miss Mosh mashes some mish-mash, Betty Botter bought some butter
, and the like. My ability to surmount difficult verbal challenges such as these has been much remarked upon throughout my life, and remains a source of pride. Needless to say, soon my father was training me to read aloud long passages from the Bible in church, and the congregation marvelled at my sudden precociousness.