Free Ark Baby by Liz Jensen Page B

keeps TWURLIN and TWURLIN away at it. Sumthin about Him. Dont no wot till later.
    I likes you, He sez. You hav nacherel GRASE, animal GRASE.
    I has wot? I arsks.
    Exept wen you speeks, He sez. So I kept my mouth shut mostly arfter that remarke. HE was in business, He says, but He doesnt say wot.
    He takes me home. I dont object to THAT, wot with my lodgings at Mrs Peersons, the BICH. The hous is big and shabby but posh, no mistake. Grand PIANNA in the drorin room, big chairs, big PIKCHERS on the worls. Pikcher of him, Trapp, standing on top of NELSONS COLUM in TRAFALGA SKWER. He sez its Him, anyway, THE FACT IZ the man is too smorl to see and He is SPITTIN on the crowds below. Thats wot E sez, but thats too smorl to see as wel.
    I enjoyed that IMENSELY, He sez. An EXELENT evenin that wuz. See that PIANNA, He sez. I wonts you to stand on top of it an DARNS for me.
    So He plays the PIANNA, and I darnsis, and He has teers in his eys after, I SWER IT. That was a good nite, that furst nite with Trapp, but it didnt stay good.
    UNFORCHENATLY FOR ME.
    My next mistake woz to moov in with Him as a servant, but to liv with Him as a wyfe, and thus to lern all about SLAVERIE.

CHAPTER 6
HEADS WILL ROLL
    As Tobias Phelps pursues his lonely childhood in Thunder Spit, let us now catapult ourselves back in time to observe the beginnings of a parallel childhood: that of Miss Violet Scrapie. The normal gestation period for
Homo sapiens
is nine months, and it is now November 1845, forty weeks to the day since we bore voyeuristic witness to the scene of marital union enacted by Dr Ivanhoe and Mrs Scrapie behind the chintz curtains of Madagascar Street, Belgravia.
    Time for some screaming!
    ‘AAAGH!’
    That is the Laudanum Empress, in the early stages of childbirth.
    And some cursing!
    ‘Buggeration and damnation!’
    That is Dr Ivanhoe Scrapie, reacting to this piece of ill-considered timing on his wife’s part; he is battling with an awkwardly lopsided yak which refuses to conform to the structural requirements demanded by the armature. He is loath to leave his workshop to hang around outside the bedroom door; he will stay here, he decides, and fiddle with the armature, and smoke a cigar, as is traditional. Damn the whole business, he thinks, surveying the yak. He has approximately seven other children, if his memory serves him. Aren’t they all more or less grown-up by now? He thinks so. Many have surely departed abroad, or have married, or both. And now – just as the Queen’s Animal Kingdom Collection is weighing him downwith work (eighty-one animals completed; fifteen thousand-ish to go) another wretched child!
    The screams are getting louder. Scrapie hears the midwife calling for more water. He hears Cabillaud shouting
merde.
He puffs at his cigar.
    ‘AAAGH!’
    The Laudanum Empress again. Unlike other mammals, who bear their offspring in silence,
Homo sapiens
has a tendency to scream in agony. This is due to bad design on the part of God. He wished to give man a large brain, but forgot to give woman a proportionately structured pelvis.
    ‘
Merde alors!
’
    That is Jacques-Yves Cabillaud.
    Symbiosis describes a relationship in the natural world by which two creatures very different in nature and characteristics come to a mutual accord of assistance. This is the status that the two human animals, Jacques-Yves Cabillaud and his employer, Dr Ivanhoe Scrapie, have quickly reached in Madagascar Street. At the heart of the exchange is the use of the carcasses of other, non-human animals – largely mammals, but embracing also bird-life, reptiles and fish – and the motto, beloved of Nature itself,
Waste not want not.
And thus it is that while Dr Scrapie puffs on his cigar and adjusts his lopsided yak in the taxidermy workshop upstairs, Monsieur Cabillaud, in the basement kitchen, has been preparing a hearty yak-meat stew, which he is now forced to leave on the back burner, while he heats vast quantities of water for the midwife