Great Apes

by Will Self

“And that’s your last.” This from Sarah who looked now like Simon’s mother, or some long-left lover, not like herself.

  “Izzthatso?” He took the note from Ken, rammed it up to where he felt the paper edge snag and ground in bloody snot, like the keel of a miniature boat on granular shingle. He added a couple of milligrams of crap to this headborne midden. Simon swigged on the vodka, felt it jolt and ram down his throat, took a pull on his googolth Camel, but couldn’t sense its smoke. He could go on for … ever.

  “Right – we’re off.”

  “Are we?”

  “We are.”

  There weren’t even proper farewells, only glottal garbles and ape-like hoots. She had him by the elbow, and like some mahout who by subtle pressures and sotto commands can direct the amble of a vast, potentially truculent beast, goaded him down the stairs, through the long queues of youth, along the bulging corridor, past the two slick toughs in their string vests, black dungarees and holstered miniphones, then out into the pewter dawn of central London.

  “What about Tabitha?” asked Simon. The single question had been formulated so as to emerge unslurred, perhaps the only reason for saying it.

  “What about her?” Sarah wasn’t angry – she was in love. She wanted his body whether or not he could do anything with it. She wanted to lie in the angled crook of him and eventually sleep. She wanted sleep the way sun-worshippers long for an eclipse, piously, awe-fully, and with mounting fanaticism.

  Men recently arrived from Africa were touting for minicab trade along the curve of pavement fronting Charing Cross Road. Simon imagined himself Sarah’s pimp as she bent by a rolled-down window to strike a deal. Then they were heading west, the car radio keeping pace with them. A boxing match was being commentated on; Simon ducked and feinted with the stream of words, trying to avoid the knockout. They caromed down Park Lane. Funny, Simon thought, that London can be simultaneously vernal and venal, the park frothing green against its railings, the cabs and commercial vehicles bucketing along the roads at this hour conspicuously ignoring it.

  Then Harrods, a crenellated hunk of Babylonian commerce, a vertical souk. Simon turned to look at Sarah. She sat, mysteriously demure, unaffected by the night of booze and drugs, save for a puckering, a drying-out of the skin beneath her eyes. She sat, knees to one side, hands resting lightly in her lap. The toque was still poised on the lappet of hair. Did he want to stroke it? Hold the neat prettiness of it? He didn’t know. He was exhausted by this workout of his sensuality. It was as if his body had been taken from him while he slept and put through an extreme assault course, then returned to him as he awoke. His insides were liquid and his skin a scaly carapace. He shifted in his seat, felt the gusset of his pants pinch and grab at his sweaty perineum. Full circle, for this occurred as the cab was passing the top of Sloane Street. The visceral updates were keeping their own rhythm, their own counsel.

  I’m lying down within the impress of all his other bedmates’ bodies, thought Sarah, watching the now lemon beams of morning light pass across her lover’s brow.

  When I touch her I think only of my children, Simon thought, caught up once more in the winsomeness of her, the smallness of her.

  If only there were some preparation, Sarah thought, some embrocation he could give me, rub into me, to eliminate these memories. A kind of Ret-GelRM, which would burn at first but then sink in deeper, removing the impress of their touch and its influence on his.

  “Wipe my bum, Daddy … Wipe my bum!” High tones of culpable imperiousness, the small blond head bent forward, pressed between his thighs. The curvature of the buttocks and beyond their arcs of perfection the rim of the toilet seat in a plastic bow. He tugs at the holder, tears off a couple of sheets, feeling their dryness, their rasping dryness. Bends down himself and passes fold through crack: “Ow! That hurts, Daddy, that hu-urts …” Where are my children? Simon thought. Where are they? They’re not here. They’re in Oxfordshire, at the Brown House, with their mother. They’re OK, absolutely all right. And I’ll see them soon, all three of them, I’ll subside under them, they’ll use me as their climbing frame. I’ll see them soon, two days at most.

  The minicab sped along the Cromwell Road, Simon’s finger-clamped Camel burned uselessly in the slipstream from the window the driver insisted on being open. In the west of London the Middle East was already awake, pallid men in sacks of khaki cotton unworriedly flicked worry beads as they wafted past their hotels. Sarah looked absently at the house-sized billboard on the junction with Warwick Road. It had an electronic display that showed the numbers of Windows computer programmes IBM had sold worldwide. As she blanked it, it blinked, recording another transaction in Seoul or Syracuse. Sarah thought: What if those were the numbers of women he has imagined penetrating? The seas of muff he’s considered diving into? The mounds he’s mounted? ‘2,346,734’ the billboard proposed, and Sarah thought: Not enough, not nearly enough.

  The minicab neared Barons Court. Simon could see the glass hull of the Ark, the vast, new office block that dominated the Hammersmith Flyover. Sarah’s flat was in the knot of small streets behind it. They would be home soon. Home by the Ark, with its fifteen storeys ofplate glass and concrete, rising up, then swelling above the tangled roofs. The Ark, with its crest of aerials and satellite dishes connecting it to the ether, ready to receive the information that a dove bearing an olive branch had been sighted on the other side of the world. The Ark, an entirely suitable vessel to sail a menagerie away from the inundation of the city. Ground it again on a greenfield shore, where evolution could begin anew.

  “Come on, monkey,” Simon said, but then noticed that he was too late, she was already paying the man. He was young and his long arms protruded stick-like from the wide, short sleeves of his patterned shirt.

  “She’m no monkey, man,” he threw over his shoulder, fixing Simon’s bloodshot eyes with his own in the rearview mirror.

  “Wha-ss-that?” Simon was hunching his way out on the off side.

  “She’m no monkey.”

  “It’s just a pet name,” Simon replied – he was half out of the minicab.

  “Where I come from monkeys ain’t pets, they’re meat, man. Meat or dead.”

  “Oh.” Why am I being polite, Simon thought as he replied. “Where’s that then?”

  “Tanzania, man. Thass where. Where I’m from, by the big lake, we hunt the monkeys, their meat … we like it. Tasty, innit. Specially the chimps, yeah, specially dem. They eat our babies – we eat theirs.”

  “Is that so. I thought chimpanzees were apes, not monkeys –”

  “Mon-key, ape, makes no difference, y’know. It’s bush meat. We need it. ’ The cab driver emphasised this, as if Simon were about to argue. “Need it to live, you understand?”

  “Sure, sure, of course I understand.” Simon was on the pavement now, Sarah was opening the front door; he leant down to speak to the driver before closing the rear door, speak to him male-conspiratorially. “I’m the same way. I need this monkey’s meat” – he gestured at Sarah who was unlocking the front door – “to live.”

  The minicab driver frowned, flicked the shift into drive and drove off. Simon went up the little path with its diamond-shaped tiles, in between the files of pot plants, herbs to the left, flowers to the right. He entered the house and shut the front door carefully; the thick, distorting glass rattled. He stood for a moment in the vestibule, with its trapezoid floor covered inefficiently with an oblong of beige carpet, then opened the door to Sarah’s ground-floor flat, a composite wood-chip affair, magnolia in colour, and shut it after him with an indecisive whoosh.

  She was standing in the main room by the music centre, petting her dog, Gracie, an old, plump golden retriever who drooled almost constantly. The dog could only just get its paws up on to Sarah’s thighs; its shaggy belly scraped the floorboards, its stiff tail swept a Moroccan rug. “There-there,” she was saying, “there-there …” running her hands down over the dog’s sharp muzzle, smarming the tawny scruff and then pushin
g a wavelet of slack flesh along its sides. “There-there.” Gracie was uttering soft grunts of pleasure, interspersed with strangulated yelps, which skidded in and out of human hearing. “There-there, there-there, there-there …” Each picture on the wall was doubly framed; the hard shadows of a bright early morning provided salience where there was no significance.

  Sarah’s flat, nice, with its tones of warm wood and china, its soft blues and reds, things looped and things dangling, mementoes of an accommodated life now given their proper accommodation, was nonetheless denuded, bleached by the morning and the irradiation of drugs. Simon moved around it, pulling down blinds, pulling to curtains, staunching the light, suturing the brightness, performing triage on the diurnal in the futile hope that it might be saved at some later hour. Still she patted and smarmed, still she indicated, “There-there, there-there, there-there …” still the soft grunts of canine pleasure.

  And then elsewhere as well. “There-there, there-there,” or rather, “There … there, there …” Simon was touching Sarah up now. She lay athwart the bed, the edge of the mattress beneath her shoulder blades. He lay athwart her, a hairy thigh across her shaved ones. He was up on his left elbow, and like a child flung down in the act – he read her like a book. One hand smoothed the blonde hair over her forehead, down to the nape of her neck, then down the small oblong back of her, while the other worked up over thigh, into arse cleft. The second joint of his thumb snagged there, then skated round to rest on the jut of her mons, the fingers scrabbling to open the leaves of her vagina. “There … there …” Simon was saying, “there … there …” not asking, but stating where each finger-fall was coming next. Her hands were on his penis, one softly tugging the dome, the other smoothly tugging the shaft. But to no avail, it was bendable, a bendy toy version of The Penis, push it over and it would spring back up again, but not up Sarah, and not for long. “There … there … There … there-there-there.” Should he stick his finger up her arsehole, or get a tissue and wipe it? Daddy, Daddy, wipe my bum! It was all so stylised, an elaboration on the idea of making love, rather than making love itself. A school of love in which the lover strives to represent the manner in which he would make love, if by any chance he were able to. The day was coming back to Simon unbidden. Her body was so light beneath his arm, the careful assessments of weight retailed him disturbing information. Was he molesting her? ‘There … and there…’ Were his children here – or there? Sarah was uttering soft grunts and pants of exasperation. What he was doing was out of context…out of genre…He could no longer suspend disbelief in the genre of sex, or the medium of the body. His hand caressing her was like a boom mike protruding into the corner of a film frame depicting peasant life in nineteenth-century Lombardy. It shouldn’t be “There …” a harder grunt of exasperation. They were strangers to one another, fully in split screen. The small paws on his penis slowed and stopped, slowed and stopped, Sarah said “There-there, there-there … !” patting Simon, reassuring him. He slept.

  Sleep in the day is negative sleep. It throws up negative images, blackened faces staring out of the glare, ape-like skulls under tow hair, albino eye sockets. And drugged sleep during the day is doubly negative; especially sleep under cocaine, under ecstasy, when the brain-stem is implanted in the earth, the dead ground of Slumberland – as if the sleeper has been gifted a negative pillow, recessed into the posture-impedic mattress – leaving the twin lobes of synaptic leaves to flicker in chilly breezes of stark imagery.

  They had tossed, and now Sarah and Simon turned away from one another, grabbing armfuls of blanket, sheet and pillow, wrestling them down on to the gritty surface. Their faces were contorted with the effort of thrusting their minds below the gelid surface of consciousness, then holding them there until gasps turned to snores. In sleep Simon found himself fucking Sarah with long, whooshing, regular strokes. His cock was adamant, inflexible, it oozed into and out of her with machine rhythm, oiled ease. Her cunt was tight around the base, then tight around the shaft, then tight around the dome; annagain, annagain. Tight. Tight. Tight. He felt the the sub-sonic shudder that was the beginning of her climax, a laval worm of hot liquefaction boiling deep-down in the faulted core of her. He went further up on her, so that the whole of his upper body was projecting right out, an overhang, a proud outcrop, no longer exiguous, no.

  They were in a bedroom that contained the world, oceans of blanket, continents of pillow, a biosphere of billowing sheet that supported their plunging, aerodynamic bodies like piled-up cumuli. “Come, baby / Come, baby / Baby, come-come …” Lucidity here, or what? Simon thought to himself within the dream, the Ragga trope getting caught up in the thrusting, in the rhythm. Then there was some complicated limbering, some contorting within the contortion. As if Simon were a child gymnast, exercising on a bar that spanned the empyrean, he found his back arching, arching, arching back and back, while his legs did something, sleight-of-limb: This is the church / This is the steeple / Open the doors and these are … the people were face to face again now, but separated by the length of both upper bodies. Yet Simon was still fucking Sarah, fucking her with long, whooshing, regular strokes. If anything this new position – their upper bodies pointing in opposite directions, each the distorted doppelgànger of the other; his knees bent beneath her bent knees; he holding himself up on locked arms and using those cranking knees to yank his cock in and out of her cunt – made the whole process even more deliciously juicy. Squidge-squidgy-squidge, they squidged. Her cunt so firm – yet so moist; his cock solid and liquid.

  Simon had another irruption of lucidity, of ridiculous dream logic – he couldn’t be managing this, it wasn’t physically possible; to effect this position his cock would have to be … long. He looked down, it was long, very long, at least eighteen inches; and as he watched, awed, it grew still further. He was pulling it out from the outsiness of her, the pink effulgence of her, and it was lengthening and lengthening and rarefying at the same time, as if it were a stria of chewing gum being pulled by finger and thumb from the crumbling milk teeth of a child. Where was that child? Sarah seemed not to have noticed this. Her upper body had fallen back on to the mattress, but still it writhed, legs flexing as ifhe were still bearing down on her. She gave the stiff grunts of effortful sex, this was sex as hard labour. A late, tragic fuck? He was getting further away from her now, much, much further. She was on the other side of the ocean from him and still he scampered backwards on paws-for-hands, hands-for-paws. She was so nonchalant – or so Simon thought – crouching there while these yards and yards and yards of stringy penis uncoiled from her cunt and fell in loops and even knots, all streaked with blood, across the sheet.

  Then Sarah was outside the window – the little monkey. She was scampering up the trunk of the oak in the garden, grinning at him over the downy hair on her pointed shoulder. Downy hair, or downy fur? She had scaled it and reached the first branching; here she crouched, the umbilical penis trailing from between her legs. She was utterly unconcerned, but Simon felt awfully aware of the strangeness of this, its laden quality. She must have done something – someone must have done something, because now he could feel himself running back into her. Even at this great remove – down the tree, across the gravel, up the outside of the house, in through the window – his penis was moving back into her again, being sucked up by the trap of her. She’d pressed some operative button, and now he was being retracted like a hominid tape measure into her simian casing. Truly, Simon mused, man is the measure of all things. His heels skittered and bounced across the sheet, he fell hard on to the strip of the carpet between the bed and the window, was yanked up and over it. Whumph! Simon fell on to the small patio her godfather had laid for her. She was still grinning down at him from the fork as scherluppp! he came wobbling, arse above tit, up the trunk towards her. A final scherluppp and Sarah was engorged by Simon, made fully gravid. She absent-mindedly rubbed the still-wet lips of her cunt, smelt the fur on the back of her hand. Then she made her way carefully along the thi
ck branch of the oak. One arm cradled protectively around her distended belly she dropped softly into the next garden and made off.

  They woke again towards noon. The light that streaked from between curtain hem and windowsill had gone from lemon to orange. The memory of the dream, the little monkey that was Sarah sucking in his umbilical penis and then disappearing into the next garden, was still so vivid, so present, that it vied with the grittiness of the mattress, the bent pipe of his throat, the grout in his eyes, for inclusion in this reality.

  It wasn’t a nightmare, of that much Simon was certain. There had been no access of dread, no pounding dream heart, no paralysis of dream body, as he watched his cock transmogrify. Rather, it had been something he had wanted to happen. The sense of lucidity within the dream had affirmed this.

  Simon held himself still on the mattress, appreciating the particular cramping of his shoulder, the jarring twang of his pelvis. Should he rise, attack the hangover, hose himself down? He rolled over and his blood-filled cock, stoppered off at the root by a full bladder, twanged. He ungummed his eyes. Sarah lay along the flattened length of a pillow, her upper body canted at an angle of some twenty degrees, her arms flung out any which way, her hair damp and tousled.

  Simon hoicked himself up on forearm and elbow and observed her. The edge of the sheet was tucked below her breasts, and it crumpled and bulged below that. Her back was stretched in this posture and he could see the slight bunchings of muscle that cushioned her – as far as Simon was concerned one of her imperfections. There were others, the too thin lips, lips he sometimes felt the thinness of when he kissed her, and which now were half-open revealing her oddly pointed canine teeth; which – when conscious – gave her an air of workaday vampirism, as if she had been temping for Van Helsing. The breasts were neat, but her nipples were never hard enough, teat-like enough.

  As he watched they rose and fell, fell and rose. Her bruised eyelids flickered. Was she engaged in the dream he had just left – or some other? He lifted his big brown hand and laid it against the outflung white arm. In his grasp it looked as small as a chopstick, and as breakable. I must stop this, Simon, thought. I do this to debase her – to devalue us. Perfection is meaningless – and worthless, a Tupperware grail. If I carry on like this I’ll argue myself out of this.