by Will Self
“‘Hoo” yes! What, what at the same time? What! “Wraaa”!’ Simon came to a halt in front of Busner, he was shaking with anger, with fear, with awful weariness. Busner was near to cracking – he felt his control going. Only long years of dealing with the most abusive and intractable of patients allowed him leeway, leeway not to punish this insolence.
‘At the same time, Simon, you can “gru-nn” show me about your world – your view of the world.’
‘ “Wraaa”! I’d like that very much, really I would –’
‘ “Hooo” we can regard the exercise as educative – as much as therapeutic –’
‘Of course, of course, why not. What a good idea “euch-euch”!’ Simon’s signing was, Busner noted, improving rapidly. This last semiotic string was shaped with oblique slashes of sarcasm. The anti-psychiatrist couldn’t stand it; his arm lashed out and his nails raked across Simon’s chest. For good measure Busner bit him on the eyebrow ridge – quite hard. Simon, naturally, turned tail and squeezed off a spray of liquid shit at his bestial soul doctor. The two of them then engaged in briefscrimmage – arms and legs flying, wraaing and screeching.
It was all over in seconds, Simon lay spreadeagled on the filthy linoleum, his shit-dashed shrink atop him. Simon mewled and whimpered pathetically. ‘Now then, Simonkins darling. ’ Busner’s fingers as they played upon Simon’s body were tender, placatory. ‘You get out the fear, get out the hurt, the anger. Attack me by all means – that’s very chimp, very chimp indeed.’
And the former artist responded to the fingers that moved on his chest, responded to them as he hadn’t before. He felt Busner’s concern – and allowed himself to believe in it. Within minutes the two apes were squatting cross-legged, Simon behind Busner, and he was picking the fast-drying shit out of his doctor’s fur. It was his first grooming session since the breakdown.
Dr Bowen did a pant-hoot round. She pant-hooted Jean Dykes and Anthony Bohm in Oxfordshire. She pant-hooted George Levinson in Cork Street, and Tony Figes at the newspaper. Finally, she pant-hooted Sarah Peasenhulme.
“HoooH’Graaa’.”
‘ “HoooH’Graaa’”. Have you any news for me, Dr Bowen “huu”?’ Sarah’s signing betrayed all kinds of anxiety – she was, Jane Bowen noted, wearing a very elaborate swelling-protector for a female who was squatting in an office.
‘I have, Sarah, some good, some not so good. Dr Busner is – as it were – taking Simon in hand –’
‘ “Huuu” meaning?’
‘Well, he’s done it with others of his patients before – usually those with neurological damage, or a condition that is “graaa” productive –’
‘What do you mean “huu”?’
‘ “H’hoo” I mean that we fear Simon’s condition may be fundamentally intractable – there is considerable damage to his brain.’
‘ “Wraa” but how “h’huu”? Why? Was it the drugs, or that bloody Prozac he was on? What “huuu”?’
‘Sarah, we don’t know, but believe me Dr Busner has had considerable success with this kind of case in the past. He takes what he ascripts a
Sarah’s small blonde head shook with disbelief and sorrow. She was tipped back in her seat, feet up on her work table, which was why Jane Bowen had an uninterrupted view of the silken rosette of her swelling-protector. A hand went now to a foot, grasped it, pulled it to a questing lip. Sarah signed back immaturely with toes and fingers intermingled, ‘Can I – please, can I – will he see me “huu”?’
‘I don’t know if that’s such a good idea, Sarah. He still finds any simian contact very difficult to cope with. Dr Busner is, I believe, just beginning to win some trust from Simon. There’s been a limited grooming session today, and, of course, Simon has agreed to be discharged into his care.’
‘But “hooo” we’re consorts, nestmates, surely –’
‘I’ll show Simon you requested contact, Sarah – but really, the rest must be up to him. You must understand that given the nature of his condition it may be that a nestmate is the last chimp he wants to see.’
Tony Figes knuckle-walked along Ladbroke Terrace and swung into the Portobello Road. He wasn’t really following the cute young Italian chimps who scuttled in front of him down the road – he just happened to be behind them, and happened to be enjoying watching their pink little anuses bobbing about. One of the sub-adults was sporting a novelty knapsack, designed to resemble a human infant. The Italian chimp was bipedal, full of holiday swagger, and his anthropoid portmanteau wiggled and waggled as if it were alive and enjoying the ride.
The sight put Tony Figes in mind of his errand. He had acceded readily enough to Dr Bowen’s request; yes, he could get the key to Simon’s flat from George Levinson; no, he didn’t mind going over there, packing a bag for Simon and then bringing it down to the hospital. It would be a pleasure – the least he could do. ‘Kiss my arse!’ he had signed respectfully – if a trifle ironically – to Dr Bowen before breaking the connection. ‘Kiss mine!’ she had countersigned with equal formality.
The market was in half-swing today – a Friday – and the costermongers were wraaing their wares to each other, as much as the tourists. From time to time one of them would let out a howl and do a little display, racing upright along the tarmac alleyway between the stalls, kicking rinds, cobs, husks and other vegetable detritus in front, while juggling two hands of bananas, or a dozen oranges.
Tony Figes paid this no heed; he kept his muzzle down and the knapsack-wearing Italian’s scut in view. It was a muggy day and Tony could feel the sweat percolating through his fur. He paused, opened his jacket and allowed the slack breeze to play over his chest. By the time he readjusted his clothing the Italian chimps were gone. Tony grunted softly to himself. He considered stopping in at the Star to translate his brown loneliness into the sepia tones of the bar, into the inky heft of a pint of Guinness, but thought better of it and swung into Colville Terrace.
A gaggle of tough Bonobo sub-adults was hanging out on the corner, holding cans of Special Brew to their pink lips and signing to each other with the fluent gestures of patois. Their body fur poked in tufts through the holes of their string vests; their head fur was either razored with lightning strikes or carved into squares and triangles. Tony hunched himself up protectively and scuttled along the inside of the pavement. He certainly wasn’t frightened of bonobos in general – but these ones were so lithe, so gracile. Tony envied them their effortlessly upright posture, but all bonobos – and especially these ones – had a hint of the human about them, a hint of the bestial. Tony shook his head, internally admonishing himself – like any good liberal he considered bonoboism beneath him – and knuckle-walked on by.
The bonobos were listening to a ghetto blaster someone had plonked down on the pavement. It was pounding out that summer’s ragga hit. The vocalisations were familiar to Tony and brought back memories of the night of Simon’s breakdown. “HooGraaWraaHoo/HooGraaH’hoo/Eee-Wraa-EeeWraa …” He shook his head; Simon was in a place where no one could possibly want to mate.
The heavy door whooshed open. The stairwell smelt of cabbage and urine. Funny, Tony mused, how the separate waves of gentrification had backed up on one another in these terraces, to create a choppy sound of poverty and wealth, where the targets for health education, and the members of exclusive health clubs were quartered scut by pleat.
Tony rubbed his eyes in their sore sockets. He was shagged from the night before, a night that had ended with him picking up a rentmate at a club in Charing Cross, taking him home – a manoeuvre that involved considerable risk, given the radar ears of old Mrs Figes – and getting him so pissed and coked-up that the poor little thing’s dick had telescoped into desuetude. Tony had paid him all the same.
Simon Dykes’s flat was on the third floor of the house. With a conversion as raggle-taggle as this one, some of the flats were expansive, others were contracted into the interstitial spaces available, bits of half-landing, former bathrooms and servants’ bedrooms. Simon’s was the latter kind. It was, Tony knew, the first dwelling he had managed to organise after his group fissioned, but even so, for a chimp allegedly doing well in his career, his paintings and other art works selling for considerable sums, it seemed on the seedy side of humble.
Tony swung himself up and over the last set of banisters, had the door open before all four limbs had touched carpet, and knuckle-walked in. The long, airless corridor was rank with the odour of male chimp gone to seed. An overflowing wastepaper basket shedding fag butts, whisky bottles and worse caught his eye. There was a cotton trail of discarded clothing leading to a heavily shuttered, cubicular bedroom. In the front room, which Tony vaulted into, the venetian blinds strained the sun outside into the room’s fetid stock of images, illusions and mortal tokens.
A large table set beneath the bay window carried a slew of sketch pads, picture books, pots of pens and pencils, photographs, ashtrays and empty glasses. In the corner, a dicky divan was piled with more filthy clothing. Tony paused, mewling. The atmosphere of dislocation – despair even – was far worse than he feared. This was the credible compost from which such a fearsome delusion as Simon Dykes’s might sprout.
Still mewling Tony knuckle-walked to the table. Gathering himself on to a chair he tipped back and began to feetle his way through the mess of papers. There was, he registered, a lot of material relating to humans. All of Jane Goodall’s books on working with the wild humans of Gombe, newspaper articles on research into humans, flyers put out by animal rights groups concerned with human welfare. Tony hoooed softly; there was more than enough fodder here to provide high-calorie nutrition for Simon’s human delusion. But there was also more concrete evidence of the direction the artist’s thoughts and fantasies had been travelling in the weeks before his breakdown, the weeks he had spent completing his series of apocalyptic paintings.
Sketch after sketch, executed using thick pencil on thick card, showed the backdrops for his vast canvases of modern London, but in place of the chimpanzees who inhabited the finished works were the naked, zombie-like figures of humans. Humans running upright with their stiff-legged gait; humans walking in throngs, all separated by an arm’s length; humans sitting with one another, not touching, not grooming, lost in the uncommunicative prison of their own meagre sentience, their own primitive cast of mind.
Tony Figes had begun sorting through these sketches out of curiosity, as an ally of the ally who was ill, but as he scrutinised these oddly satirical depictions of the city as an arboreal enclave, his critic’s acumen came into play. They were really – he concluded – rather better than the canvases that had resulted. By making his focus the conceit of a world dominated by humans, Simon had managed to express far more, with a few pencil lines, about the condition of modern chimpunity, than he had achieved with barrels of oil paint.
Thinking about what an unscrupulous character might do with this material made Tony pant-grunt apprehensively. At the very least it could constitute the illustration for a devastating report of Simon’s breakdown, and that would compromise not only the artist’s reputation but the art itself. What to do? Tony, still hooing to himself, got up from the desk and patrolled the flat. He found a plastic bag in a kitchen drawer and filled it with several of the cleanest shirts and T-shirts he could find. He paused, seeing a pair of trousers at the bottom of a gaping cupboard, but the possibility of Simon engaging in such intimate mating practices was, he knew, a long way off.
The pitiful packing done, Tony readied himself to leave.
But he found he couldn’t turn his back on the sketches of the world-turned-human. He tried to, but each time he started for the door the sketches seemed to pant-hoot in his inner ear. He knuckle-walked backwards to the table and looked over his shoulder at them. His eye caught the dark socket of a cardboard tube propped by the dusty radiator, and before he had time to analyse what he was doing Tony was holding the tube with his feet, while his hands furled and inserted the sheaf of rolled-up card.
Revealed beneath where the sketches had lain was a little cache of prescription-pill pots, three in all. Tony picked them up one by one and examined the labels. They were Simon’s home head-doctoring – Prozac 50mgs daily; Diazepam 20mgs whenever; and something called Calmpose which came in 5mg pink spangles. He opened the pots and swirled their confected contents in the powder of their own disintegration. He capped them again and pocketed the Prozac – a good prequel to dropping a white dove; and the Valium – a good antidote. Neither would be much good to Simon in his current condition.
The long, low Seven Series Volvo grumbled under the portico, at the entrance to Charing Cross Hospital. A thick burble of exhaust fumes boiled out from its scrag-end, soiling a patch of the sky that was too near the earth. Gambol was at the wheel, all four limbs grasping it in the recommended ten-to-three, twenty-past-eight position. There was a fixed grin on his foxy muzzle, a grin that was unusual in being both entirely sincere – his plans were coming to fruition – and utterly duplicitous.
There was something of a kerfuffle over Gambol’s right shoulder, a kerfuffle he registered with one of his mobile ears. He didn’t have to turn to know that Zack Busner, together with his new house guest, was leaving the hospital.
‘ “HoooGra”’! Well, Jane, Whatley, we’re off then. ’ Busner was upright in the vestibule; one hand firmly grasped the shoulder of his new charge, the other was fending off some of the more persistent junior doctors who were, even at this late stage, attempting to give him a groom.
‘ “HoooGra”’ Busner. I would wish you luck with Mr Dykes’s condition – but I don’t think “grnnn” luck will be enough –’
‘ “H’huuu” what do you mean by that exactly?’ Busner’s signing was contained – but spiky. Whatley immediately backed off and turned arse-about.
‘Nothing! “Hooo” really, nothing at all.’
‘Good. Well, Jane, I will pant-hoot you in the morning. As we gesticulated, I consider your input to Mr Dykes’s care has been invaluable for both clinical and research purposes.’
‘ “Chup-chupp” thank you, Your Effulgence, Your Radiant Arseholeness –’
‘Jane, please. Let me kiss your arse –’ Busner bestowed a valedictory kiss on the slim female’s scut, drummed briefly on an orange plastic milk crate that was keeping the dysfunctional electric doors to the hospital open, then guided Simon – who was too bewildered by the daylight, the chimp activity and the prospect of queered liberty, to be anything but signless – to the car. Busner opened the back door, pushed Simon in, shut it, reared up, vaulted over the top of the Volvo, drummed again on the roof, pant-hooted once more to the assembled company, then leapt in through the open passenger window.
There was a chorus of loud, valedictory pant-hoots from the chimps on the kerb, and the Volvo pulled away. Only to become hopelessly entwined in the metallic weave of stalled traffic on the Fulham Palace Road. It was already four-thirty and the rush hour – which lasted for four and involved hardly any rushing on anyone’s part – was underway. ‘ “Euch-euch” anything you can do about this, Gambol “huu”?’ asked the preeminent natural philosopher of the age. He was still spattered, despite their session, with some of Simon’s shit, and as he signed he scratched a dried glob in his neck fur.
‘ “Euch-euch” nothing I can think of, Alpha – it’s Hammersmith that’s the problem. We could try and cut along the Lillie Road, but quite honestly we’ll get just as jammed there.’
Busner swivelled round to see how his suitable case was dealing with the first few minutes of freedom; he even toyed with asking if Simon had any image of the route they should take – after all his consort lived nearby, he must be able to visualise the area. But Simon had his muzzle pressed against the glass, his hands cupped
tight around his eye sockets and those hands rammed against the window. ‘No, there’s probably no point, we may as well take our time and let our passenger get a good look at the world he’s rejoining “hooo”.’
It was a world that Simon was finding utterly bewildering. He had walked, driven and been driven to distraction down this stretch of road many thousands of times. He knew every scabrous take-away joint, losers’ bookie and extra-strength-lager-stocked off-licence in the crippled parade of shops that limped from the hospital to the Hammersmith Flyover.
While he occupied secure room six, Simon had tracked this tawdry topography many times in his mind’s eye, confirming over and over the veridical nature of his memories. Now he was out it was as he remembered it, right down to the grottily stylised yellow rooster’s head that adorned the Red Chicken Shack take-away; right down to the eroded lip of tarmac that leprously kissed the traffic islet, right down to the net curtains that smeared the windows of the flats above the shops like giant cobwebs. Everywhere Simon directed his gaze he saw something familiar, a shop sign, a petrol station decal, a peg-board menu in a café window. To be confronted with such a mundane, familiar scene only served to enhance the distortions which had been wrought upon it.
As with his trip to the hospital sub-basement for the tests there was a problem of scale. Simon had to hunch up to fit in the back seat of the Volvo, even though he knew it was a large car. This spatial incongruity infected everything around, buildings, other vehicles, the road itself – all were small. And roving over this two-thirds set were its dwarfish inhabitants.
They knuckle-walked the pavement, arseholes aloft for all to admire; they congregated in shaggy groups by bus stops; they swarmed up the outside of buildings, using spindly trees, narrow ledges, crumbling rendering and insecure television-aerial stanchions to haul themselves aloft. They moved with astonishing ease and insouciance. As the car advanced haltingly, Simon watched one of them who was level first knuckle-walk twenty yards, then leapfrog a series of bollards and dustbins, then strip-the-willow through a gaggle of oncoming conspecifics, then brachiate along the underside of a bus shelter, before dropping to the ground and resuming on all fours.
