Great Apes

by Will Self

  If Simon concentrated on one chimp’s progress up the road, or up a building, he could almost admire the power and efficiency with which it moved; he could see the foresight and anticipation required to negotiate the crowded pavement, the packed road and the pocked escarpment of masonry. But if he allowed himself to view the mass of chimpunity as just that: a mass of chimpanzees, he saw nothing but a pack of animals, locomoting with as much awareness as a herd of sheep, or worse – a swarm of locusts.

  It all got appreciably nastier as the Volvo finally reached the Hammersmith roundabout. Here the rivulets of bobbing, bouncing chimps flowed into a racing river of bobbing backs-for-breakers. The fact that all the chimpanzees Simon had seen wore only upper garments was vitiated when observing them in – as it were – captivity. But now, seeing the cataract of animals that poured into the brutal maw of the pedestrian underpass, Simon was struck anew by the absurd sight of furry little legs and fleshless arses poking out from the hems of pin-stripe jackets, denim jackets, flowery blouses, and T-shirts blazoned with slogans. When one turned, wrinkled its muzzle, then bagged out its cheeks with the beginning of a pant-hoot, Simon laughed out loud at the animal’s expression. It was this deep-throated chuckle that provoked the first fiddling since they had departed from the hospital, the first real gesticulation since Simon had regained his liberty.

  ‘ “Gru-nnn”! Well then, Simon, what is it that you find so amusing “huuu”?’ Busner leapt so that he was standing on his seat, then leapt again, swivelling in mid-air to muzzle his ward. He ended up grasping the thick headrest, his chin propped against it, his fingers titivating the car fug.

  ‘It’s the chimps “clak-clak”, those chimps. ’ Simon gestured at the bobbing scuts going down the concrete stairs. ‘They just “clak-clak-clak” look ridiculous – utterly ridiculous!’

  ‘ “Hoo” and why would that be “huuu”?’

  ‘It’s the way they’re dressed, you see, dressed only on the top half of their bodies, exposing their “h’hee-hee” silly, scraggy, ugly bums.’

  Busner followed Simon’s gaze. It was a tribute to his skills as a highly empathetic therapist that he could partially work himself into his patient’s perspective. He furrowed his eyebrow ridge and squinted. True enough, there was inevitably something absurd in the contemplation of the mass of chimpunity going about its business. What appeared purposive in the individual looked lemming-like in the multitude. It was, Busner reflected, manipulable that a twisted shard of clarity should lance through Simon Dykes’s delusory state in this manner, and he signed as much.

  ‘ “Chup-chupp” I suppose you have a point there, Simon, but there’s nothing ugly about the rear end of a chimpanzee; a chimp’s ischial scrag is his or her most beautiful feature. Wasn’t it the “chup-chupp” Immortal Bard who wrote –’

  ‘Was it “huu”?’

  ‘It was, and furthermore you can, so to sign, know a chimp by his arsehole, divine a chimp’s soul.’

  ‘Is that so “huu”?’

  ‘It is.’

  ‘So, presumably that’s why you chimpanzees don’t cover them up. ’ Simon was enjoying this fencing, it provoked a burgeoning hilarity that eclipsed the horror of the simian street.

  ‘Cover them up “huuu”?’

  ‘Yes, you know, like I wanted you to do.’

  ‘ “Hoo”! I see “chup-chupp” you mean wear trousers. Is that what humans do “huu”?’

  It was Busner’s turn to feel like giggling, but he retained his composure, sensing that this idiotic exchange might be the beginning of real gesticulation with the delusion. If he could correctly map this territory, might it not dissolve, leaving Simon Dykes a whole chimpanzee once more. ‘Yes. ’ Simon chose his signs carefully. ‘You see nudity is a taboo in most human cultures, to expose the lower half of the body is to reveal the genitals which arouse an inappropriate sexual interest.’

  Busner was taken aback by this and fell to self-grooming. He’d long since dealt with Simon’s shit, but there was another, tiresome, dried secretion that was bugging-up his chest fur. He dabbed his hands with saliva and smeared the tacky portion, then countersigned from within this slick bib, ‘I do see, I do see, it does make sense, after all humans are – I assume – without much fur “huuu”?’

  ‘None at all to sign of.’

  ‘And humans, so I envisage it, mate whether or not the female is in oestrus “huuu”?’

  ‘Mate “huu”?’

  ‘Copulate, have sexual intercourse, make love … fuck, when the female isn’t in an ovulating frenzy.’

  ‘ “Clak-clak-clak”! Absolutely! Why, most of the human males I know would go out of their way to avoid fucking a female human who was ovulating. After all, you don’t want to make an infant every time you fuck, do you “huu”?’

  ‘I see, I see, no, of course not.’

  Busner flagged down at this point. He felt quite bewildered by the ramifications of Simon’s delusion, they all made such perfect – if deranging – sense. If you had an intelligent animal with such mating practices, completely divorced from the paradigm of biological necessity; an animal without fur covering its genitals, then nether garments of some kind would be essential ‘to cover up their sexual swellings, I imagine …’

  “HooGraa!” It was Simon’s turn to grasp the headrest, pull himself up on his hind legs and present an uncomprehending, wrinkled muzzle to his therapist, for Busner had signed visibly.

  ‘ “H’hooo” what I was imagining was that a female human would need to wear nether garments to avoid exposing her sexual swelling …’ Busner’s fingering turned once more into smearing the patch of lubricated fur. Simon goggled at him signlently. That was what was so disconcerting about these animals, they gesticulated with you, albeit in sign language, but obviously with great intelligence. Then, just when you thought you were getting somewhere, they started fidgeting with themselves like the most mangy, old dog imaginable. Like Sarah’s retriever, Gracie, one rigid leg spasmodically raking her underbelly.

  Sexual swellings – that’s what they were, right enough. They were like grossly engorged pudenda. No, they were grossly engorged pudenda. Simon turned the idea over in his mind, and remembered turning Sarah’s body over. Her hairless, slim, body. Turning it over so that her legs, slight as a young girl’s, fell open to reveal a brush of hair and gaping, stratified pinkness. The chimpanzee – the one claiming to be Sarah, the one who had visited him in the hospital, gesticulated with him on the ‘phone – she had sported an engorged groin. What was this, if not the ultimate, incarnate crotch-shot? Was that the truth? That this ape world was a ghastly phantasmagoria, built out of odds and ends of obsession? His apocalyptic paintings, his uneasy relationship with Sarah’s body, the dismal truncation of feeling that followed the loss of his children – all seemed implicated, all seemed incorporated in this ugly now. A now at once so ineffable and so mundane, with its current set – the Hammersmith roundabout; and its current props – a Volvo saloon; a hoarding advertising a soft drink; a chicken thigh, half-eaten, lying in a gutter; and next to it the ironic eschatological counterpoint – a turd.

  Simon shuddered, hunched still lower in his chair, indicated to Busner that he didn’t feel like signing any more for the moment. He placed his hands over his large ears, pushed his head down into his lap, and sat waiting for things to change.

  Gambol carried on piloting the Volvo through the traffic. His alpha, giving up on Dykes for the moment, hunkered down in his seat, pulled out his briefcase and opened the latest issue of the British Journal of Ephemera. Neither the pant-hooting of chimpanzees, nor the growl of the traffic distracted him. For, of course, he was reading one of his own articles.

  Simon came out of his funk as the Volvo came off the Marylebone Flyover and started up Gloucester Place towards Regent’s Park. This was an area of London that Simon knew far better and he was intrigued to see how chimpification h
ad changed it. The answer was – not a lot. London was, Simon reflected, at the best of times an unholy mish-mash of buildings. Something old, something new – borrowed architectural styles all over, and blue reflective glass everywhere, mirroring segments of the same.

  By the Regent’s Park Mosque Simon was amused to see Muslim chimpanzees. The males wearing skull caps and flicking inordinately long strings of worry beads; the females’ purdah compromised by their cutaway chadors.

  In the branches of the trees that filled the wide verge between the canal and the road, chimpanzee dossers reposed. Simon didn’t notice them at first – so hidden were they by the foliage, but when first one leafy limb quivered, then a furry limb tossed out a crushed Special Brew, he saw the pongid piss artists and once more grinned to himself.

  Then the Volvo was tilting up Hampstead High Street, past shops, wine bars and cafés that Simon had known, Simon had drunk in, flirted in, got drunker in. The chimps in this area were better dressed than those in the centre of town. Most of the females carried rigid paper bags, bearing the names of designer emporia. They also affected those garments that Simon now knew were swelling-protectors, rosettes of satin or silk, several hands in diameter, artfully pleated and ruched so as to resemble the engorged – or potentially engorged – folds of perineal and ischial skin that they hid from view. Simon heaved with soundless, bitter merriment. The correspondence was so neat, so exact and so asinine.

  Gambol twirled the wheel at the lights. They turned left into Heath Street, then right down the bare Georgian terrace of Church Row. Simon stirred at last and resumed gesticulation with his hirsute hermetist. ‘ “H’huu” where exactly are we headed, Dr Busner?’

  Busner raised a hand aloft. ‘To my house, as I signed.’

  ‘And where “huuu” might that be?’

  ‘On Redington Road – d’you “huu” know it?’

  ‘ “Hoo” yes, I used to come here with my parents when I was an infant – to visit friends of theirs –’

  “‘Gru-nn” well, it will be something of a home from home for you, won’t it “huuu”?’ and Busner resumed reading the Journal, without so much as a backward glance.

  Gambol brought the Volvo to a halt by the kerb and his passengers clambered out. ‘I won’t be needing you the rest of today,’ Busner flicked at him, ‘but please be sure to get here in good time tomorrow. I want to take Mr Dykes on an outing. ’ Busner pounded on the car roof by way of valediction, and Gambol peeled away. As soon as he’d rounded the corner the epsilon let out a great shriek of irritation. Then he shifted up five gears in as many seconds and the big car lurched back in the direction of central London.

  * * *

  The Busner group home was empty on this sultry afternoon. It was partly by design – Busner had pant-hooted ahead, to warn them to keep a low profile – and partly by accident; summer sales, jobs, patrolling, school, mating activities and twenty different, other reasons were keeping the bulk of them away from home.

  Once Busner had unlocked the front door, and Simon had followed the skimpy derrière of his therapist inside, he found an environment so familiar, so reassuring, so homely after the antiseptic, signlent, screaming nightmare of the hospital, that he almost wept from relief.

  Simon padded from room to room, examining everything, sniffing everything, rubbing the palms of his hands and the soles of his feet over carpeted, painted and upholstered surfaces. In the main living room there were high fitted shelves of dark wood, stacked with a multitude of volumes, without regard for subject or author classification. Simon recognised titles that he knew. Most of the classics – ancient and modern – were represented; there were also works of history, philosophy and, of course, medicine and psychology. Simon pulled the occasional Everychimp Library volume, or Penguin out, just to check the feel of the cover with his questing lip. Naturally he grinned and clacked to see a copy of Maugham’s Of Chimpanzee Bondage.

  There were paintings on the walls. Real paintings. In the hospital some of Simon’s greatest mental anguish was provoked by the ghastly, washed-out reproductions that the administration had seen fit to place on the walls. Some of Busner’s paintings were amateurish daubs – obviously by group members, but others were more impressive. There was a small Eric Gill drawing that with one pure line defined the silhouette of a chimpanzee. Simon sighed when he saw this. The articulation of the line was so elegant and necessary, it was like a graphic sedative for the disordered psyche of the former artist.

  In the large, parquet-floored hall there was a ticking cabinet clock, a hat stand, some old mezzotints in heavy frames. Everywhere Simon roamed in the house the colour scheme was muted, dark, comforting. Walls were painted either in shades of plum and mulberry, or else blood reds and ochres. On the floors were thick rugs; some Persian, cluttered with curlicues; others old geometric Axminster.

  Upstairs each of the nestrooms was decorated individually. One was oppressively female with a flounced, white-painted four-poster nest, adrift on a sea-blue carpet; another was equally masculine, full of footballs, ski sticks and other sporting equipment.

  It could be, Simon fluttered to himself, just the sort of house my infants and I might have lived in – had things turned out differently. A substantial group home on a tree-lined road in a comfortable North London suburb. Only two things marked the Busner house as being unassimilable, different, other, as furnished by the delusion as by furnishing: there were all sorts of handholds attached to the walls at convenient heights for bustling apes, handholds that were obviously as old as the house itself – wooden, brass, or covered with anaglypta. There were these, and there was also the oppressive, rank smell of those animals, who although now absent, were bound – like the three bears – to return.

  Chapter Fourteen

  He’s in the sub-adult males’ room,’ Busner in-parted Charlotte, his alpha female. ‘They’re out on night patrol and he seemed more comfortable in there for the moment than in the spare bedroom.’

  ‘ “Hoo” Zack. ’ Charlotte stirred in the nest. ‘ “Grnn-gr”’ do you really think it’s a good idea to have such a severely disturbed chimp staying with us “huu”?’

  ‘Good idea for who “huuu”?’ he replied absent-mindedly, the signs falling like the footfalls ofsome heavy insect between her shoulder blades.

  ‘For him, for you “hooo”, I don’t know. It seems like only yesterday that you had that chimp with Tourette’s here – don’t you remember how his ticcing and involuntary vocalising began to drive you round the bend “huu”?’ She rolled over to muzzle him and pressed her soft, liver-spotted cheek into his belly fur.

  ‘ “Chup-chupp” that’s true enough, old thing, but remember what irritated me most about poor Nairn was how stereotypic his condition was. It was flamboyant, true enough, but there was nothing really there to get my fingers round. With Dykes I think the situation is rather different. His is a unique condition “gru-nn”. I don’t know, Charlotte, you could be right, but I have a hunch that Dykes’s may well prove to be my last truly important case –’

  ‘Zack, Zack, you shouldn’t sign so.’

  ‘Charlotte, “huh-huh” as my oldest nestmate, my adored alpha, I think I need to show you something.’

  ‘What, Zack “huuu”?’

  Charlotte struggled upright in the nest, pulling the sheets with her, and snapped on the nestside lamp. Dr Kenzaburo Yamuta, the Busner distal-zeta male, and Mary the theta female who were sharing the nest deprived of their covering stretched, groaned, rearranged their limbs and recommenced snoring.

  In the sudden exposure Busner noted again how tired Charlotte looked. This oestrus had really taken it out of her. She was wearing a cotton nightgown that had rucked up over her belly. Her swelling was healing but still raw, there were gashes and nail marks around her neck. ‘Charlotte “clak-clak”, Charlotte old thing, neither of us is as young as we used to be “huh-huh”. We’ve done well in the past few years, the group is better established than ever, all our offspring are doing
well – at the end of this year I’ll be able to retire on full pension.’

  ‘Zack, do you really mean this “huuu”?’

  ‘Not only do I mean it, but there’s another, less voluntary factor. I believe that Gambol is making an alliance against me.’

  ‘ “Euch-euch” Zack! You can’t be serious, the little swine! “Wraaa” after all that you’ve done for him!’

  Her fur erected under the thin cotton, her fingers grasped his, her brown eyes stared deep into his green ones. Busner began to groom the backs of Charlotte’s hands. This was a special, intimate act of grooming that was exclusive to them. Busner, ever so delicately, teased out the fur on the back of Charlotte’s fingers using the thicker fur on the backs of his. It calmed her more or less instantly and she began to pant and smack her lips, while snuggling back down into the nest. ‘Charlotte,’ the former television personality inparted, ‘your arsehole means more to me than anything, your “huh-huh” swelling is the whole world engulfing me –’

  “‘Chup-chupp-hoo” sweet scrag, you silly old fool “chup-chupp” –’

  ‘I mean it, Charlotte. But you know, if Gambol can topple me from the apex of the hierarchy, then so be it. I’m old – this is the chimpanzee way, always has been. No, the only thing that really troubles me is that he and Whatley – I know Whatley is in with him – will mount a coup before I can make any real progress with Dykes. I’m certain that they’re going to leap from the branch soon – the only question is when.’