Great Apes

by Will Self

  “Shouldn’t, mustn’t, really ought not to. I’ve got to work all day tomorrow and it’s getting edgy, I open next week.”

  “But, Simon.” She rose and crossed towards him, came right up to him, so close he could smell her, see the saliva behind her lips. A pill appeared between her thumb and forefinger, she took it into orbit in the space between their faces. “Next week is on the dark side of this moon, wouldn’t you say.” The little white satellite rose again and was dropped into his open mouth. Simon turned away, picked up his whisky and washed the thing down.

  They stayed on in the club for quite a while, despite the fact that there was fuck-all happening. In fact they revelled in the fuck-alledness of it. Submerged themselves in this lukewarm footbath of anti-sociability, with its froth of tragic bathos. Until the ecstasy bit Simon drank to offset the great oubliette of emptiness and self-loathing he felt the cocaine about to tip open beneath his feet; and he took the cocaine to keep him sober. His natural geniality was not yet the aberrant genitality it would become; now it was simply crushed and then extruded from between the up and the down. And so he flowed all over the bar, talking, talking, talking. And always joking, hurling witticisms, looping in people he barely knew, people he didn’t even like.

  The shiny happy people formed a core group in one of the seating arrangements; those moving past would prop themselves on the arms of chairs to pick up their niblets, to insinuate themselves. It was nearly eleven when George Levinson turned up, plainly drunk and smartly dressed. He had lost the boy he’d picked up at the opening in Chelsea, but managed to acquire another one over dinner at Grindley’s. The good thing – as far as the clique was concerned – was that this boy had a girlfriend, a girlfriend who was even drunker than George. Drunker than any of them in fact, and as they saw it gauche as well. She lunged across the table knocking over glasses, she made jokes that fell utterly flat – providing no relief whatsoever – she lolled against the gay and inveighed against the straight, she talked about drugs, loudly. In a word, she was a find. A find because every clique needs to have a litmus paper on hand with which to test its acidity, its determination to dissolve and exclude foreign bodies.

  Simon joined in with this, assisted George in his bantering attempts to prise the boy away from the girl. Whenever they linked arms, or showed one another any physical affection, George would butt in, crying ‘Say no to hugs! Hugging is a crime!’ And then Simon would take up the cry, and then the others. ‘Hugging is a crime!’ They all cried. It was, Simon reflected, staring moodily at the distorting lens that was the bottom of his whisky glass, a ludicrously appropriate slogan for the clique, the members of which only ever touched one another on greeting or parting. For the rest of the time – especially when in this desert of white powder – touch was a mirage.

  Simon looked across at Sarah and felt this. Felt that he might never touch her again, might never hug her again, feel her bird-brittle ribs against his. There was an undulation in the air now, a distortion that pushed her still further away, across an acre of table, several furlongs of carpet. She sat, shiny-browed, blanched in chemical sweat, listening to Steve Braithwaite explain some detail of a new artwork. She was their agent, so this made sense. Indeed, the clique were really her friends, not his. George wasn’t a shiny happy person, he belonged to Simon, to Simon’s past, to his marriage to Jean. He was Magnus’s godfather. Seeing him with the shinies felt wrong, uneasy. Like catching a favourite, jolly uncle coming down the seedy stairs from some whorish fuck pad.

  Not only that, his presence showed the clique up for what they were, spoilt children, playing viciously because unsupervised.

  “I’m going to walk,” said Steve Braithwaite, “from the nuclear power station at Dounreay, all the way to Manchester, staying right under the power lines for the entire distance. Ken will make a visual and aural record of the whole thing –”

  “What’s the point of that?” the girl broke in.

  “The point, young – and ignorant – lady,” George Levinson went offensively on to the offensive, “is to experience various kinds of parallax. Isn’t that it, Steve?”

  “Exactly. Both the parallax of vision derived from the pylons themselves – the way they march, girdered clefs stringing the notation of power across the land –”

  “Quoting from my – as yet unwritten – catalogue copy are we, Steve?” Figes donated his pennyworth.

  “And, of course, the parallax of power itself. As I absorb all of this incredibly damaging radiation, as my cells themselves begin to fission, so I will be gifted a true fusion, a proper perspective on the nature of power, raw power, in our society. D’you see?”

  “No I don’t,” the girl slurred. “I think it sounds like a load of crap. All this stuff is just crap. It’s not art, it’s crap. Crappy crap. It’s toilet art, the sort of thing anybody might think of sitting on the bog, but it takes a real idiot to get up, wipe himself and then actually go out and do it. It’s crap.”

  “She seems to think our idea’s crap,” Steve said to his brother. Ken sucked on his cigarette and squinted at the girl, who was sexy in an overweight sort of way. Long black hair, vaguely Eurasian features, lips that looked not so much bee-stung as swarmed upon.

  “She could have a point,” he replied, eventually. “Mind you – it’s only at the ideas stage.”

  Simon felt a tinge of guilt, doubly so. He agreed with the girl about the Braithwaites’ stuff, it was toilet art. Suitable only for flushing away. And even after that the smears it left in the conceptual bowl would still need to be vigorously brushed, zapped with naturalistic Domestos. It was as terminally irrelevant as the photogravure silkscreens he and George had seen earlier that evening. He also felt guilty because he wouldn’t have minded fucking the girl. No, this was incorrect, he wanted to take the girl away somewhere quiet and sequestered. Find out all about her – her thoughts, aspirations, girlish memories – and then make love to her with a virtuosity so great as to be world-beating, a timeless exploration and elaboration on the fact of love. This very deep love he felt for her. Simon was, he realised, coming up on the E.

  Why now did he think about his children? Why now, when he should have been able to abandon them anew, did the smell of them and the sight of them cut in front of his vision of the girl? Where were they? In their beds in the Brown House in Oxfordshire. Asleep under flowered counterpanes, their gummy mouths stickily exhaling, stickily inhaling, the sweetness at the heart of them. In the humming bar, edged now with chemical distortion, underpinned by the sensurround of his labouring heart, he saw the three umbilici snaking towards him, festooned over furniture, the shoulders of journalists and television producers coiling across the floor, and all converging on the pit of him, threatening to turn him inside out with the acknowledgement of the longing-for-them.

  What was he doing here with these children – and so clearly without his own? He looked across at Sarah, who was now listing towards the girl, casting her off still more from the boyfriend who George, all sharp suiting and blunt technique, was working over. What was he doing here – what was George doing here? Too tall and too old for this company, the art dealer was almost primly erect, his false-coloured hair smarmed down over his low brow, his oval designer spectacles, his floppy bow tie, all bespoke someone who was not cut out for this creche. Having him there was almost like having Jean here. Jean looking at Simon from under a straight fringe, eyes aglow with religious semi-fervour.

  Yes, we, they, us, we are children. Children playing like chimpanzees in the jungle gym of the night. We have no application, no purchase on this present with its terminal self-referentiality, its ahistorical self-obsession. We are brothers and sisters, in a sibling society – fighting over the toy box. We are allowed to come here and behave thus, while elsewhere meaning resides. No wonder we’re reduced to such pathetic expedients, excluding her, including him, in order to establish some platform from which we can swing, out, over the abyss. What if we fell? What if armed men, some band of Balkan
freebooters, raided the club. Took all these lovely men and shot them, these lovely girls and raped them?

  * * *

  A band of Balkan freebooters raided the Sealink Club. They shot their way through reception, firing from the hip. “Members, eurghhhh …” was all Samantha – who was on – had the opportunity to say before five rounds from the AK gave her an impressive cleavage – although not the one she had always wanted. The gunmen fanned out. Two took the stairs down to the toilets, two burst into the main bar, one stayed in reception and guarded the door.

  For seconds after the two armed men entered the barroom nothing happened. Through the swing doors the hubbub of chatter was so loud that the fracas in reception had been interpreted as just that, a minor fracas, a drunk withheld admission – or allowed it.

  Having obtained temporary membership with unusual dispatch, they stood, rifles propped on hips, bandoleers sagging around sweat-stained fatigues. They were tired, so fucking tired, and the sight of so many expensively dressed people, drinking cocktails and smoking American cigarettes, stunned them. As for the members, they barely noticed the armed men. They were a little shabby for the club, and must be – or so those who did notice them thought – some music company execs from one of the independent labels. Either that, or maverick ad men.

  So slight was the intrusion, that one plump young woman, who was sitting by the doors pleased with herself in a backless, black velvet dress, kindly asked the taller and ranker of the two, to shift the position of his rifle because the stock was tickling her spine.

  The men recovered themselves and shouldered their way to the bar. Julius came along it to meet them. The taller, smellier man eyed the barman. He was barely more than a youth, but his face was mottled with the horrors he had witnessed. It was a collage of clashing colours, brushstrokes of green nausea, a wash of white fear, blotches of red anger and a tinge of blue death. His stubble had marched for ten days and was nearing beard. His breath reeked of some vile barn-distilled liquor. His eyes were loose in a string bag of veins. His brain was hot, swollen. “Can I assist you, sir,” Julius intoned, “to a refreshing beverage?”

  The freebooter was having none of this – he didn’t understand the question, for one thing. Perhaps if he had things would have turned out differently, a few quiet drinks, a little networking; a series of articles on the conflict for the Sundays. But as it was he grabbed the barman by his neat little goatee and yanked his head down on to the bar’s metallic surface so hard that Julius’s jaw shattered with a CRACK! that could only mean violence.

  This at last brought about silence – although slowly. Those clustered around the bar saw what had happened immediately and their jaws also fell. Others, further off, standing in the vacant spaces, heard this silence and matched it. But those in the clustered seats still further from the bar – including the clique and their hangers-on – remained oblivious, gabbing away for some seconds, until, in the stun-gap the words, “Like, what does he know about styling, he’s never even been on a shoot…” lingered and then died in the inspissating atmosphere.

  “Simon?” Sarah’s little paw was on his knee. He looked up from the glass ball of his glass, in which he had been scrying this alternative future. “Are you OK?”

  “Yeah, yeah. Fucked – I guess.”

  “Me too,” she replied, and then, “Good stuff.”

  “Mmm. Yeah … mmm.”

  “Maybe … maybe we should go on somewhere?”

  “Go on …?”

  “Somewhere.”

  Chapter Five

  It took a series of phased withdrawals for Simon, Sarah and their clique to leave the Sealink. Each time they achieved a tittering quorum they discovered that a voter was absent. Someone would be sent out to scout the bogs, the telly room, the restaurant and recover the errant suspect. But by the time they’d been rounded up someone else would have gone missing. Figes kept on sliding off to try and pick up boys, as did George Levinson. Tabitha cantered up and down the bar, gathering ungentlemanly gnats around her seductive mane.

  Julius was going to join them. He knew of some shebeen or other. In Cambridge Circus – or wherever. Thought there might be crap coke. Knew there would be liquor. But there were further problems – not just gathering the right people but excluding the wrong ones. And the drugs made it all so difficult. The ecstasy made their sociable instincts break out along with the sweat. Everyone was worthy of their attention – inclusion in their lives.

  During this whole jump-cut episode of leaving-the-club, Simon had a fully formed interlude of near seduction, involving a girl he remembered talking to about Dada, at a party he couldn’t remember attending. “Think of me as your Dada,” he said to her on this occasion, on this half-landing. “I will care, protect and –”

  “Molest me?” She giggled, showing wine-stained teeth, flicked her hair back which he hated, but chose to ignore.

  “Exactly.”

  He moved in on her like a landing module about to coyly retract its legs on impact with a porous, lunar surface, and … was snagged by the back of his jacket, turned to see Steve Braithwaite. “Tch-tch,” admonished the self-denigrating performance artist, “we’re all waiting for you in the reception. Sarah too.”

  “You aren’t,” Simon replied. He was managing the strange feat of backing away from the girl without giving her so much as a backward glance.

  At last they left – last. Samantha was shunting the dregs of the crowd out through the main door. They revolved in its revolution and found themselves still spinning in D’Arblay Street. In the group that trolled off through the mountainous streets of London were the shiny happy people plus George, the irritating girl, her boyfriend, Gareth the hack, and three other nameless but recurring minor characters. A tall vampish woman, wearing a black corset over a grey dress – she’d taken a shine to George, presumably unaware of his orientation, but then, looking at the way she was heading it was perhaps wrong to presume anything; a show-business lawyer with a coke problem, who talked of nothing but scams scammed and scummy money skimmed; and a girl Simon had noticed many times in the club before, a very very pretty girl, silky hair, slight figure, girlie dress which twirled from the hips. She was, he thought, too young to be here, or anywhere other than tucked up in bed, next to a nightlight with a Disney shade.

  The cavalcade headed down Wardour Street, words fluttering around them. Simon tasted his own metallic cud and began fully to regret the evening, regret it with deep, passionate loathing. They could have been in bed. They could have been sober. They could have made love without him having to be a poor workman, once again blaming his tool. As it was his resistance to more drink, more crap cocaine, more of everything, was all but departed. He would – he realised with the shock of the old – do almost anything, or anyone.

  Tabitha and Sarah walked arm in arm shouting at one another. The squat machines were moving along the dawn gutters, their automatic revolving brushes and jets of water stir-broiling the trash. Fat black whores stood on the corners. ‘Business?’ they enquired with third-mondial weariness of the revellers passing by, as if they were Wabenzi hustling the IMF. We’re a caparisoned horde of enlightened fun seekers! Simon said to himself one instant. We’re a sad trickle of dysfunctional debauchees, he took on board the next. Julius’s goatee was out in front. A pointless point, walking point.

  The shebeen was up four flights and had as many more oddly shaped rooms stacked up stairs with too-steep treads. They got in with a Julius’s say so and a clutch of notes. The crowd inside was more densely packed than that at the Sealink, and far more polyglot. Big black guys, slab-sided, grey-sheened, were holding intense conversations with each other in huddled colloquy. Elsewhere they danced with young white girls, who were tightless, short-skirted and wearing white sling-backs. The colourist in Simon appreciated the fact that even here, even with the violet, pink and blue flashing lighting, he could still make out the stippling of brown goose pimples on the backs of their calves. He considered how he might depic
t this. The music was needling, thudding, reverberant ragga. “Ya-ya-ya-Hi’-ya-ya-ya-Inna side you like / Inna way you like / Thass the way you like / Me to show you / Ya-ya-ya-Hi’!” Again and again and again. To Simon the music’s repetitiveness might have been its actual subject: “Ya-ya-ya-Hi’-ya-ya-ya-Annagain an’again / Thass the way you like it / Again annagain …”

  Faces moved towards Simon and passed him by. Each one seemed to contain the outline of a possible intimacy. A set of coordinates and congruencies from which five, ten or twenty years of conversations and cuddles might have been extrapolated by some computer modelling, a morphing of relationships. Sarah had been holding his hand, but she seemed to have faded now, been absorbed into the shebeen’s lurid ochre. Simon struggled to the bar and managed to secure four tumblers of warm, rank vodka. Tony Figes appeared at his shoulder and took one. His stamp of hair had been peeled off in a corner that exposed the pate of an older man; his scar was deeply grooved.

  “You know how they get this?”

  “Wassthat?”

  “You know how they get this – get this…” Tony was holding up his cup.

  “N-no.”

  “They take those teenage girls out back, strip them down, then they sponge them off and squeeze the sponges out into a vat. Then they re-bottle it.”

  “Ha-ha,” Simon said – he couldn’t laugh, his throat was a cement mixer, and so numb he couldn’t feel the viscid mortar blocking it up, choking it off.

  “Simon! Tony!” It was Tabitha, gesturing to them from the stairs. They went up to the room above, and found the others chopping out lines on some kind of shelf that was sticking out from the wall at an irrelevant angle.

  “Line?” Ken Braithwaite was holding up the credit card interrogatively. What a senseless go-round, thought Simon, but said, “Yeah, thanks, Ken.”