Great Apes

by Will Self

  Simon behaved most peculiarly in response to this impulsion. Without waiting to be further galvanised, he dropped to his hands and moved away on all fours at speed – Busner followed on behind. As he gained the edge of the arboreal precinct, the former artist leapt for the lowest bough of the first plane tree, grabbed it, swung himself aloft, and continued, brachiating as a chimp to the canopy born.

  Busner didn’t have time to be taken aback by this; he could almost feel on the back of his neck the Ready Brek breath of the big chimp chasing him. He gained the tree some seconds after his protégé, and dragged himself painfully aloft, arthritis sparking in his fingers like neural electricity.

  The pursuing chimps didn’t even bother to ascend. Instead they halted at the base of the first tree, uttered some final, furious waa-barks, then disappeared back in the direction of the tube. Presumably, Busner thought, observing their pin-stripe-suited backs, off to work in some estate agency or insurance office.

  It transpired that for Simon the whole episode had been a revelation of chimpunity. ‘I just “chup-chupp” swarmed up into these trees. I didn’t stop to think. It was astonishing the sense of fluidity, of ease – and of power. I haven’t climbed a tree “h’h’h’hee-hee” since I was a sub-adult!’ Simon’s whole sense of embodiment was affected. He hung casually by one arm from an insecure bough, whilst prinking his therapist’s lower belly fur.

  Busner wondered – although not visibly – whether the transformation might be due to the rush of adrenalin Simon had experienced during the mock attack. That, and the fact that flight response would make use of the more primitive, more truly essential parts of his patient’s brain. Confirmation came soon enough, for, as Simon’s horripilation subsided, and his fur drooped to its accustomed lankness, he found himself unable to get down from the tree, or to continue above ground. He was also scared of falling. Busner had to disembark, go and find the janitor in the library, and return with him and a disabled chimps’ ladder. Only then could Simon be coaxed down.

  As they knuckle-walked on towards Regent’s Park they encountered several more mating rounds, and each time Simon fell back to observe, although he didn’t make the mistake again of wringing his hands over it. By the electronic gates of a large villa, an attractive young female with blonde head fur was dangling halfway out of a large black BMW. Her head thwacked the inside of the door and her copulation squeals were accompanied by the flashing of the headlights. Inside, artfully taking her from the driver’s seat, was a wiry bonobo, his teeth tearing at the back of her dress.

  By some garages recessed from the road, Simon paused to gawp while a tough-looking party of sub-adults, obviously down on patrol from somewhere up north, took a dark-muzzled female almost as big as they were, with quite blinding speed. None of them needing more than fifteen seconds from the first screeching penetration, to the final tooth-clack, pant and withdrawal.

  When they reached the park, and plunged across the Outer Circle, they came through the fringe of trees and on to a broad expanse of grass where just the kind of congaline of copulation Busner had described was in full swing. Busner, practised at disentangling such scenes, grasped at once what had happened; some culturally marauding phalanx of Benelux language students and attendant teachers had become mixed up with three distinct groups of patrolling cockney males. The resulting queues and counter-queues of displaying males and accepting – or rejecting – sub-adult females now formed interlocking and quite intricate arrangements of runtish buttocks and receptive swellings. The sub-adults had colonised the trees as well. From where Busner and Dykes squatted they could make out brown bodies swirling about in the branches, some even turning full circles while dangling by their arms, like gymnasts. The ragged symphony of vocalisations echoed over the park.

  ‘Delineate for me more about all of this, Dr Busner – please. ’ Simon signed, his fingers tense, but his tempo even enough. He reached into the side pocket of his black jacket and pulled out a pack of unfiltered Bactrians, lit one and relaxed on to his haunches.

  “Grnn,” Busner grunted, then signed, ‘Well, what you see here is the absolute core – some might point out – of chimpunity itself. Throughout the ages artists have depicted such mass matings. In the early Renaissance these reels of rutting would have been set amongst flora and fauna, framed by proscenium hills. Titian painted great aerial mating scenes, in which angelic chimps copulated amidst swirls and garlands of cloud –’

  ‘But, Dr Busner, I don’t understand it. Surely the connotation of such sexual practices is a fearful “uh-uh”, unloving world, in which mating is anonymous and meaningless “huuu”?’

  Busner regarded his patient quizzically, eyebrow ridges raised, bifocals lowered. Simon Dykes was, he thought, reaching towards an elegance of gesture. It made the artist peculiarly likeable. Busner nuzzled Simon’s muzzle and inparted, ‘Well, indicate for me once more what it’s like in your world. Humans are, of course, monogamous “huuu”?’

  ‘Well, no, not exactly. It’s the prevailing cultural norm in most Western and Western-influenced societies, but elsewhere polyandry and polygamy are still practised –’

  ‘I see. So do Western humans view such sexual arrangements as – in some sense – more primitive “huu”?

  ‘That’s right.’

  Busner, observing the way the smoke from Simon’s Bactrian curled and snagged in his neck fur, reflected wryly on the elegant reversals and mirrorings of this persistent delusion. Monogamy as an end rather than a beginning, a state of rarefied intimacy, rather than a crude, animal pairing. Which is, of course, what it was.

  ‘But, Simon “gru-unnn”, do all human consortships last a lifetime “huu”?

  ‘By no means, no, no. Humans will bond with one another for all sorts of periods of time. There are unions that may last many years and consortships which are over in days or weeks.’

  ‘And the organising principle of these couples remains “huh-huh” fidelity “huuu”? Exclusive mating rights?”

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And is it adhered to “huu”?’

  ‘Not exactly.’

  “Huuu?”

  ‘Well, obviously both males and females find themselves mating outside the relationship … it happens all the time.’

  ‘And these exogamous matings – are they all intentional “huu”?’

  Simon took another pull on the Bactrian, pinched the glowing tip between his calloused fingers and jettisoned it. ‘I should “h’h’hee-hee” sign not. In many cases they’re involuntary – driven even. The human impulse towards inconstancy seems as strong as the drive to consort.’

  At this point a young female in full oestrus scampered past the two gesticulators. Her swelling – as big as a three-pint bowl – nearly coming into contact with Busner’s muzzle. The great ape inhaled noisily, savouring the whiff of musk. ‘Look at that!’ he flourished. ‘If we didn’t have a train to catch I’d have a crack at her myself, she’s delicious! Look at that pink flower dangling off her “h’hoooo”!

  ‘But, Simon,’ the eminent natural philosopher continued as they resumed their knuckle-walk, ‘you sign of numerous consortships, and of consistent exogamous mating despite their existence. Mark me if I’m wrong, but it looks to me much the same as what chimpanzees get up to “huuu”?’

  Simon looked at the grey testicles swinging in front of him, marking out procreative time like the pendulum of a biological clock. He had to admit it – the old ape did have a point.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Sniffing and snuffling, his muzzle pressed against the diamond-patterned mullions of his study, Dr David Grebe peered myopically down into the back quad of Exeter College. Cackfootedness made contact lenses a problem for Grebe; vanity – and a more than averagely deep recession in his nasal bridge – put spectacles out. Zack Busner and his latest pathological protégé should have been here by now – it was nearly time for third luncheon. Grebe hadn’t bothered to make any particular arrangements for the repast – a restaurant r
eservation, whatever – and he had no image whether the ape man would be sufficiently held in Busner’s captivity to be presentable in hall, let alone at high table.

  He checked his watch again, pulling away the thick hanks of ankle fur that covered its face. Nearly one-thirty, where could they be? The Paddington train got in at five to one, surely they would have taken a cab from the station? Grebe scratched his ischial scrag meditatively. Would the ape man be worth it? That was the question. The notion of a delusion that played upon basic concepts of signage acquisition was – to a philosopher such as Grebe – an intriguing one. Busner had indicated on the ‘phone that Simon Dykes was sensitive, intelligent and – despite his ataxia – elegantly gestural. If this was the case, Grebe might learn something.

  Learning things was what Grebe craved. A bent little Welsh chimp in his early thirties, yet with only a few grey hairs fringing his bald pate, Grebe had bounded up the steep stairs and the wide treads of the university hierarchy, grabbing easefully the awkward handholds of influence. He had obtained his fellowship at Exeter not through the conventional methods of alliance and intrigue; nor by currying favour with a clique of graduate students and junior academics, but simply through his dogged capacity for absorbing more and more information – and then manipulating it into credible theories.

  From where he now crouched, atop a twenty-shelf escarpment of a bookcase, he could turn and take in with one sweep of his eyes five other repositories of the Sign – each as geologic. Grebe’s study, which occupied the body of an arch over the back gate to the college, also had ample room for four filing cabinets, two large work tables and an impressive computer system to boot. This was in addition to the usual Oxfordian clutter of occasional tables, overstuffed tutorial armchairs, teetering piles of papers, journals and still more books.

  For, while Grebe was an inveterate hoarder, holding fast to a single byte if he thought it might become useful, he was no anal retentive, amassing philosophical information with no regard for its dissemination. In fact – and this explains why Zack Busner had chosen him as an interjector for his perverse patient – Grebe was a theoretician of great flair.

  It was Grebe who first proposed that signing developed as a means of gesticulation for chimpanzees directly from the practice of grooming. Grooming, Grebe posited, while effective in the small groups chimpanzees must have originally lived in, when they – like humans – roamed the tropical zones of Central Africa, would have been insufficiently visible to allow for cohesion and progress in larger social units. Hence signing.

  Hence also – and this explains why Grebe’s name was known beyond the narrow precincts of academia – the magnificent efflorescence of the female chimpanzee’s sexual swelling. However peculiar and repugnant it might seem to contemporary chimpunity, Grebe – in association with a primatologist colleague – firmly believed that the perineal regions of primitive female chimpanzees were in all probability small to the point of being discreet – not unlike those of modern human females.

  By the same token, the human ability to generate as many as fifty different phonemes, and – it was believed – interpret them, must, Grebe had argued, be an example of how human neural development had become maladaptive. So much of the vast human brain capacity must be taken up with the business of interpreting these confusing sounds that there was no possibility of the ‘Big Bang’ that had occurred in pongid evolution.

  Unlike the chimpanzee, whose signage competence had evolved over two million years of continuous selection, determined by brain–sign interaction, the human had become bogged down in a perverse and clamorous sound garden; its capacity for effective gesticulation as stunted and atrophied as its stunted and atrophied fingers and toes.

  Such arguments placed Grebe firmly within the range of Noam Chomsky, and the other psychosemioticians who held that signage was a unique attribute of the chimpanzee’s compact brain. Given the incredible plasticity of the primate brain, was it any wonder that a neural over-sufficiency resulted in natural selection being unable to work on cognitive capacities? Thus, the human’s ability to process information and hence learn tasks was ironically circumscribed by a lack of circumscription. Put simply: the human was lost inside her own head. Unable to create an esemplastic mind; doomed for ever to obey the useless dictates of phyletic memory, and the ghastly gargles of her own purposelessly promiscuous vocalisations.

  But Grebe wasn’t fiddling with this as he stared down at the quad – noting the pert anal scrags of the undergraduates poking out from the hems of their commoners’ gowns – he was palpating that part of himself that wanted the decanter, wanted it very badly.

  The decanter sat on a small octagonal table positioned strategically by his favourite armchair. It never moved. When necessary Grebe, or Grebe’s scout, would recharge it and check the seal on the stopper – but it was never ever moved. Was it too early in the day for a snifter? Grebe fumbled. Should I wait and see whether Busner and his ape man would like one? It would hardly be polite for them to arrive and find me already at it.

  As is so often the way with habit Grebe’s body made the decision for him. He arched backwards on the high bookcase, turned an inelegant – but not inefficient – back-flip, and landed on all fours right next to the table with its precious load. “Aaaaa’,” the distinguished fellow cried out appreciatively. He unstoppered the decanter and gave its neck a judicious lip-curling sniff.

  * * *

  In point of fact Zack Busner and Simon Dykes were in plenty of time for the Oxford train. As they knuckle-walked up the platform at Paddington, alongside the hammering bulk of the engine, Simon looked up at the barrel vaulting of the Victorian station and signed to his doctor, ‘Some things really don’t change.’

  ‘ “Hoo”, really “huuu”?’

  ‘This station,’ Simon gestured. ‘It’s got exactly the same light quality it always had, as if the entire structure were sunk beneath a dirty green sea – like the English Channel.’

  Busner regarded his psychic ward with undisguised pleasure. It was the first metaphoric representation he could remember Dykes making and the first painterly remark. Could it imply some further slackening, or dilution of the delusory state?

  The journey was uneventful. Busner bought first-class tickets, anticipating there would be fewer chimps and less stress for Simon. But in the event it was Busner himself who was discomfited. The constant tapping of horny fingertips on the keyboards of laptop computers; and the incessant yammer of businesschimps using mobile ‘phones irritated him to such an extent that shortly before they reached Reading he was compelled to launch a display.

  Busner grabbed an armful of the Intercity customer magazines from their wall-mounted dispenser, and charged up and down the aisle tossing them in the muzzles of his fellow passengers. For good measure he gave a couple of the more noisome individuals a smack on the head. Although this exhibition of dominance had the desired effect – novocal reigned for the rest of the journey – it was at the cost of a very English kind of frozen collective embarrassment. Just like Paddington Station, Simon realised, some things don’t change. Ever.

  Quitting the station at Oxford, Simon caught up with Busner, whose scut was moving purposefully towards the taxi rank, and presenting low signed, ‘Would you mind if we knuckle-walked to this chimp’s college “huuu”? You know I used to live outside Oxford, I’d like to see something of the town again.’

  ‘That’s all right Simonkins,’ Busner replied, laying on reassuring hands ‘but “gru-nnn” remember, try to give me some warning if you feel a panic attack coming on.’

  Simon didn’t feel anxious as they proceeded up past Worcester and along Bartholemew Street to St Giles, he felt something between amusement and disgust. His memory of Oxford was of a graceful, Renaissance city of elegant, immemorial architecture; not this tacky warren of aged buildings swarming with chimpanzees.

  In London the tri-dimensional character of chimpanzee urban life had been apparent to Simon, but not to this extent. On top
of the Randolph Hotel, swinging from the Martyrs’ Memorial, scampering over the roofs of Balliol and St John’s – everywhere Simon looked were chimp students, scrapping, mating and brachiating. The fact that so many of them wore the short gowns of commoners – it was the first week of Michaelmas term – cut strategically so as to expose their anal scrags, only served to tickle Simon more.

  As they rounded the corner of Balliol – bipedal such was the press of tourists coming in the other direction – Simon witnessed a scene that made him break out into great peals of merriment. “H’h’hee-hee-heee,” he cackled. Busner stopped and turned back towards his patient, worried lest this presage an attack, but Simon held out a hand to his therapist. “Gru-nnn,” he cried, then signed, ‘Look, there!’ Busner followed Simon’s finger. On the other side of Broad Street there was a tourist attraction denoted ‘The Oxford Experience’. Simon remembered it from before his breakdown, from his years at the Brown House. Around the entrance to this gimmickry milled a crowd of American tourists – even Simon could tell they were American by the cut of their shortie Burberry mackintoshes – who had become tangled up with a group of undergraduates returning from their matriculation ceremony at the Sheldonian Theatre.

  A couple of the female undergraduates were in full, magnificent oestrus, their sexual swellings marvellous pink beacons lighting up the grimy esplanade. Naturally a mating chain had got going, with the male tourists scuttling up and down the pavement waving expensive cameras and video equipment about their be-hatted heads. The combination of signboard and scene was cartoonish. This was the Oxford experience, rutting, scrapping beasts.

  Simon chopped the air. ‘The thing that gets me about this’ – he indicated the mêlée on the other side of the road – ‘is that contrary to what one expects of Oxford students “hee-hee-hee”, they’re all so lowbrow!’ and with this he collapsed into a serious episode of giggling.