Free Ark Baby by Liz Jensen

meat-chambers, like Parson Phelps’ church organ decked with knuckles of calcium, yet the divisions as smooth and papery as the internal walls of a Japanese samurai’s abode. ‘God’s doodlings’, my father called them, inspecting what I brought home in my tin bucket. His belief was that molluscs and other sea-creatures were drawn from the margins of the Lord’s great sketchbook, in which the masterpiece was man.
    He certainly broke His nib the day he drew me, I thought, as I looked wistfully at my reflection in the rockpool. The squashed-up face, too crammed with features for its size, with thin lips and round, dark eyes like two raisins shoved deep into a burnt cake.
    But, ‘Beauty is in the eye of the beholder,’ my mother always said, and I came to believe her.
    To most Thunder Spitters there were two types of Nature: the Nature man could vanquish, and the Nature that vanquished him. The Nature we conquered had long been domesticated for us, by previous generations of Thunder Spitters: our famous cats, that were black-and-red-patched like cows, with a distinctive stripe down the nose, and always fled when I entered the room. Or the skinny sheep who scattered at my approach, or the cows whose milk I was alleged to curdle, or the dogs that so loathed me: mostly sheepdogs, collies and whippets which inter-bred like the families here, the Peat-Hoves, the Balls, the Cleggses:long lines of intermarriage and gravestones to match. But the other Nature always remained: wild Nature, the Nature we couldn’t guard against; the Nature that was always erupting and rattling around us. The swarms of stinging jellyfish, the Portuguese men-o’-war that could kill you or, as in the case of Robbie Tobash, lose you the use of an arm; the floods and the winds that knocked over our boats like paper hats, the giant octopuses that grabbed men overboard in the night, the potato blight and the centipedes and lice and silverfish in the sacks of corn, and the fleas that attacked us, and the parasites we bore within.
    My mother had a theory that I was inhabited by a particularly tenacious tapeworm, which had been my lodger since babyhood. She claimed this sordid stowaway was the cause of my sphincter trouble, and she spent much of her time thinking up new ways to purge me of it.
    ‘This’ll do for you, you evil creature,’ mother would murmur, her plain potato features wincing in concentration as she forced the foul concoctions down my gullet. She christened my tapeworm Mildred. The name was also – ‘By pure coincidence,’ she said – that of a woman my father had once been sweet on in his bachelor days. But try as she might, my mother could never abolish my invisible passenger. Or the fleas, or the bats, or the toe-fungus that haunted us all.
    Yes, Nature infested us, and we fought it off. But it came back. We fought it off again and it came back again. It was like the fizzing waves on the shoreline, leaving a lacework of foam and history that clung to our lives.
    ‘Father, how exactly, how
exactly
, did God make this?’ I remember asking Parson Phelps one day. I was brandishing a mermaid’s purse at him, a black dogfish egg with twirling strands protruding extravagantly from its four corners.
    ‘By His holy craftsmanship,’ the Parson explained patiently. I pictured God in a sort of workshop, like that of Mr Hewitt the cobbler, puzzling over the engineering. ‘And what is more, he created all this, and more, in a mere day. The fourth day.Remember, Tobias? Remember your scriptures? What did God do, Tobias, on the fourth day, that is so apt to your question? God said let
what
bring forth
what?
’
    I had scriptures coming out of my ears.
    ‘God said, “
Let the waters bring forth abundantly the moving creature that hath life, and let fowl fly above the earth in the open firmament of Heaven,
” Father.’
    ‘Well remembered, Tobias. A sound memory is a blessing.’
    ‘But, Father, did he really make it all out of