Ark Baby by Liz Jensen

Author:Liz Jensen
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9780747585343
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2012-07-03T10:03:31+00:00

CHAPTER 17

A COMING OF AGE

Higgins feeds me throu the bars.

Let me out, I wispas. I wil do anything.

Cant he sez. Wer on the SEA. Nower to go. NOWER. Exept DIE in the wavs.

Then I wil throw myself out and DIE, I sez. I dont care.

(Here another stain obliterates a few lines of the text.)

– stil in darkness. The giraf cums on in TANGEER. And the turtels and the wulvs and the smaller creechers. Higgins feeds them. They grunt and they howl. Thats wy its DARK, to mak them sleep mor. Lordnum for all of us.

Im sleepin all the tyme. Sleepin away my lyfe. DREEM sumtymes that sumwun wil cum and SAVE me.

But fat chance of THAT.

I did my best to forget what had happened at the Travelling Fair of Danger and Delight, and I swore Tommy Boggs to secrecy. But the Contortionist began to haunt my dreams, and barely a night passed without some terrible visitation from her or the Man-Eating Wart-hog. In one dream, she was slitting open her belly to reveal writhing tadpoles. In another, Parson Phelps was nailed to the cross, and she and the Wart-hog were lapping up his blood. In another, she was an Angel again, but when she spread her wings, they were no more than dusty, battered old cobwebs.

It was perhaps in an effort to banish such dreams from my thoughts that I ventured to take part in the Thistle-Pulling Contest for the first time. Perhaps I hoped that the experience would purge me. Or make me a man. After all, my fifteenth birthday having passed, I was now eligible for manhood – defined by Thunder Spit as showing the ability to skewer oneself alive on thistles without complaint.

‘Now you’re to start on a count of three!’ yells Farmer Harcourt. ‘You’re to grab ’em with your right hand, and pull ’em by the root, and may the best man win!’

The villagers cheer. Down by the gushing Flid, beneath the scraggy junipers, a little Boggs boy, Tommy’s youngest brother, takes a straw and blows a live frog into a balloon until it pops. The Thistle-Pulling Contest might easily be defined as a pagan ritual, but Parson Phelps has nevertheless always given it his blessing, for it tallies well with his ‘Marble Friday’ principles of self-denial and sought-after hardship. And as his sermon this morning reminded us, the thistle is part of the glorious function of Nature, designed by God to serve man in a myriad ways. ‘Just as birdsong is God’s way of making music for us, and the herring gull is there to serve us as a warning not to ill-treat our children, and sardines are there to remind us of the loaves and fishes, and the horse He provided for us to ride as transport, and the sheep for wool, so the thistle’ – here he gave one of his famous four-second pauses – ‘the thistle is there to remind us that there is pain in His glory as well as delight.’

Thunder

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