by Will Self
So, Simon weathered the crew and even became blasé to the extent of being unaware of their presence, taking a light from Bob for one of his interminable Bactrians, without so much as a glance or sign.
For Busner, the trip to Africa was the final watershed, the gutter at the back end of his career. Upon his return he had no idea what he might find himself doing – if anything. On the day Simon’s ex-group had visited Redington Road, Busner had a brief private gesticulation with Anthony Bohm that confirmed all of his suspicions. Bohm had, of course, been targeted by the GMC as well, now that Phillips had blown the whistle on the activities of Cryborg Pharmaceuticals. ‘I have no image,’ his signing was fluttered, anxious, ‘what Jean’s reaction will be to this, I may be only a distal member of her group, but even that “hooo” status will undoubtedly be affected – you know how high-minded she is.’
Busner calmed Bohm down, soothed, smarmed and prinked him. ‘Dr Bohm, you mustn’t worry yourself, get so tangled up in this. I have resolved to take the blame for the unfortunate incident entirely on my own shoulders. If you stick to the line that you were unaware of the covert prescribing of Inclusion, which I asked you to do – then I will “chup-chupp” support that delineation. It is the least I can do – the least recompense I can make to all concerned. I hope that you’ll get off with a caution.’
‘And what “huuu” about Simon?’
‘What indeed. He has many different images of what’s responsible for his breakdown. Sometimes he attributes it to being hit by a bus as an infant, sometimes to the drugs he used to take. As he is now recovering I feel no special need to show him what may, after all, not be the truth.’
That was how they had left it – dropped from the hands that held it. Busner informed the GMC that he would give evidence on his return from Africa, and that until such time he would give his sign that he would not gesture publicly on the matter.
As for Gambol, Phillips and Whatley, the three chimps whose alliance had toppled Busner from the tree and irrevocably undermined his status as a great ape, theirs was an altogether Pyrrhic victory. Phillips succumbed to an opportunistic chest infection within weeks of the grooming session at Human Zoo. This was lucky for him, for had he lived long enough, he would have seen Cryborg Pharmaceuticals throw the full weight of their corporate power on to the scales of justice, with predictable results – a full acquittal.
Whatley, on learning of the GMC’s letter to Busner, went straight to the Trust and applied for the vacant senior consultancy at Heath Hospital. This, he duly won, once Archer – the senior administrator – had confirmed that Busner was to take early retirement. But Whatley’s reign as psychiatric department alpha was a troubled one. The staff were used to a hierarchy both elastic and rigorous, whereas Whatley was a martinet as well as ineffectual. The patients were as aware of this as the medical and auxiliary staff, so it was little surprise to anybody when Whatley was badly savaged by a manic chimp whom he was attempting to thrash. The bite wounds took six months to heal and he was never the same chimp again. When last seen, Dr Kevin Whatley, MD, FRC Psych., was running stop-smoking seminars with Allen Carr.
He was succeeded as consultant at Heath Hospital by Dr Jane Bowen, whose sympathetic observation of Simon Dykes’s deluded state resulted in an elegantly written paper9. Her careful delineation of the symptomatology, pathology and aetiology of the condition, led – as Busner had prophesied – to many more cases being diagnosed. Fittingly, the human delusion became identified and known as ‘Bowen’s Disease’.
Gambol, hooo Gambol! The scrawny, pale-muzzled epsilon who had managed to pull Zack Busner from the bough of celebrity and cast him to the forest floor. Gambol, once a fervent admirer, then a skulking Iago, naturally enough decided to quit psychology and do the next worst thing – write a novel about it. The Far Side of the Mind, a roman-à-clef based tightly on his experiences with Busner, and featuring a protagonist by the ascription of ‘Jack Sumner’ was a rogue hit and the toast of the autumn lists the following year. Gambol found himself taken up by the literary world and spinning from party, to reading, to fourth dinner, in a dizzy dance of celebrity. He began to get first instead of fiftieth crack at a fresh swelling and joined the Sealink Club.
Needless to sign, this phase didn’t last for long. His material exhausted – Busner was the only interesting thing that had ever happened to him – Gambol was unable to complete his second, contracted book. He’d spent the advance on high living, and could no longer find any sort of employment in his old field, such was the long shadow that the Cryborg affair cast.
Within months Gambol was a pathetic, broken male. The literary types dropped him as speedily as they’d picked him up. They might all have pretended that they found nothing more romantic, or honourable than the idea of the writer as a selfless artist labouring away in a poorly heated tree house, with no hope of readers or remuneration, but the truth was that they had as little time for failure as the rest of chimpunity.
The only chimpanzee, besides Jane Bowen, to come out of the sorry affair of Simon Dykes’s breakdown with any semblance of an improvement in her life was Sarah Peasenhulme. The final, joyous mating with her former nestmate at the Saatchi Gallery completely released Sarah from the oppressive vice of her consortship. She found herself curiously relieved to be rid of the responsibility of caring for the highly-strung male. When at the end of her longest oestrus ever she discovered that she was pregnant despite a barrier contraceptive the size of a sink plunger, she decided to ask the Braithwaites if they would form a natal group with her.
Steve and Ken were delighted. They brought on board Earl – an old, old ally – as gamma, their uncle, Marcus, as distal-delta, a friend denoted Cuthbert as epsilon, and two other brothers, Paul and Delroy, as respectively zeta and theta.
Sarah got all the mating she needed – all the firm, fast penetration that she’d so missed out on as a sub-adult. And years later, when her daughters were only just beginning their own small swellings, Sarah rejoiced in the sight of them getting a good solid fucking from all their loving male parents. If she ever chanced to visualise the artist at all, it was with a wistful expression playing on her muzzle, but she wasn’t remembering his speed and athleticism as a coverer, only the drawings which Tony Figes had taken from Simon’s flat. They’d secured a handsome five-figure nest egg when sold to a private collector.
This was particularly useful to Sarah, because, of course, given the nature of her new group – she could never go back to Surrey again.
‘ “H’huu” do you think we should be grooming the driver?’ Bob, the swaggerer, inparted Simon’s shoulder as they lurched and bucked together.
‘I don’t know,’ he replied. ‘It could be a mistake – you know all of this region is riddled with AIDS “hooo”.’
“Euch-euch,” Busner coughed in the front seat, then gestured, ‘I hardly think you can get CIV from grooming – let me “chup-chupp” see if I can help the fellow out. ’ The eminent natural philosopher – as he still styled himself – put his fingers in the bonobo’s muddy chest fur, and was instantly rewarded with a great clack of teeth and a sloppy kiss on the muzzle. This Busner received only just without wincing.
The flight from London had been long and bumpy. Busner had no idea why it should be that Air Lanka had the only scheduled service to Dar es Salaam, unless it was on the bizarre assumption that chimps in one crisis-torn part of the world might want to check out what it was like in another.
The Busner–Dykes group then got stuck in the city for three days while permission for internal travel was secured, together with a guide-cum-driver who could get them the eight hundred miles from the coast to Lake Tanganyika, where Camp Rauhschutz squatted on the shore. They were three days of getting to grips with a country in more than its usual disarray. The hideous massacres in Rwanda were still going on and even as far away as Dar es Salaam refugees were everywhere. If they had money, taking up whatever accommodation was available, and if they didn’t whatever trees wer
e still standing. The Busner–Dykes group had to put up in a brothel, where they were asked to pay by the half-hour.
This gave Busner an opportunity to lecture them all on curtailing mating activities while they were in Africa. ‘It may not be the case that heterosexual mating is the most efficient means of transmitting the virus, but the females here have often been subject to “euch-euch” infibulation – and even swellingectomies. Not only that “hooo”, but as far as we know the virus itself is still mutating. We are in the tropics – where the greatest “chup-chupp” biodiversity on the planet is to be found; there are more species here than anywhere else, species of virus as much as any other organism. And with this “hooo” dreadful business in Rwanda and Burundi, you can be certain that all kinds of “euch-euch” infections are on the move.
‘Nonetheless. ’ He continued to wave his long arms about. ‘I’m not too worried about any of you, because apart from these “euch-euch” working females, I don’t think you’ll find that much in the way of mating opportunities. The bonobos, as you are – with the possible exception of Simon – no doubt aware, are rather “euch-euch” perversely non-penetrative, preferring frottage to a good, sound insertion. A fact which helps to explain their woeful fecundity – with no alien sperm roaming around inside their uteruses the females conceive with ridiculous alacrity.’
Simon found the reality of chimpanzee-dominated Africa far too overwhelming even to consider mating. It was as much as he could do to pick out an individual female from the bustling black multitudes swarming over the crumbling concrete buildings of Dar es Salaam, let alone see whether she had a swelling on her. He kept his head down and followed his alpha’s scut.
The driver-cum-guide recommended to Busner was trusty enough, but signed nothing but pidgin ES, making gesticulation difficult. As the group headed north the downpours grew worse and the country wilder. The road dwindled first from a pot-holed warped multi-lane highway, to a pot-holed warped strip of blacktop, and then eventually to the pot-holed warped track which ran from Kigoma, north to Nyarabanda, a mere five miles short of the Burundian border.
Refugees were thick on the ground here, and in the palm trees as well. They brachiated beside the road, limply hauling themselves from frond to trunk, or they knuckle-walked in the morass that constituted the verge, risking a mud bath every time a vehicle slewed by. Simon wondered how the humans could possibly be faring in this world turned upside-down – with chimpanzee life so cheap, who would care about a few miserable animals?
Simon’s anxiety over the fate of humankind was only compounded by the suave bonobo he’d had a brief grooming session with in Kigoma. A bonobo who, judging by his neat tunic and designer sunglasses, must have been a party cadre. He showed Simon that human meat was more in demand than ever. ‘It don’t matter what they sign about protected species here, chimp,’ he fingered, ‘those humans still try and get our infants – so we go out and get “grrn’yum” theirs. And with this business’ – he waved northwards – ‘there’s even a market for bush meat.’
But Busner – who’d seen this, reassured Simon. ‘Don’t pay any “chup-chupp” attention. The truth of the matter is that the human reserve is better protected than anywhere else in this benighted country – although I’m afraid the same can’t be signed for the Virungas Mountains reserves on the Rwandan–Ugandan border where Dian Fossey set up the Karisoke Research Centre to study gorillas. But here it’s an “h’-h”’ irony, which I’m sure hasn’t escaped the locals, that while chimp is killing chimp with such relentlessness, humans go about their business undisturbed.’
Busner had sent sign to Ludmilla Rauhschutz that they were coming. As with almost any chimp he needed assistance from, Busner had discovered a useful connection. Rauhschutz’s alpha, it transpired, was the opera impresario Hans Rauhschutz, whom Peter Wiltshire had directed several productions for in the past. Wiltshire pant-hooted Rauhschutz and he gave them a letter of introduction to his offspring, which was duly faxed on.
Ludmilla Rauhschutz was, even by the standards of anthropology – a branch of zoology which had always attracted zealotry – extreme in her belief that wild humans were both sentient and intelligent. In her book Among the Humans she had written that her fieldwork with wild humans led her ‘… as close as I will ever come as a chimpanzee to understanding the mind of God’.
While her work with the Gombe humans had been recognised initially as being of profound importance, both for anthropology itself and for the understanding of chimpanzee origins, as she continued to insist on their abilities and their claim to some form of chimpunity, she was sidelined by the scholarly hierarchy.
There were flutterings that the reintroductions of captive humans she was undertaking were little more than a pretext for getting more tourists to visit Camp Rauhschutz. Tourists wanted to see humans, and the formerly captive humans, unable to fend for themselves in the wild and often meeting with considerable aggression from their feral conspecifics, tended to stay close to camp for feeding and photographing. One anthropologist, who had visited the camp, gesticulated with Busner before they left for Africa signing, ‘It looks more like a petting centre than a place where animals are rehabilitated.’
Busner had also seen worse things about the female herself. It was signed that she was ‘a horrible fat female who treats her pet human as if he were a chimpanzee’. Other flutterings included a similar slur to the one fingered on Fossey and many other female anthropologists. Namely that Rauhschutz, whose swellings were so small as to be insignificant, sought out humans as nestmates because of her inability to get chimpanzee suitors. The further – and obvious – bit of tickle-slapple, was that the only reason Rauhschutz had achieved any position in the hierarchy, let alone research alpha, was because she was sterile. But this was what males always signed about successful career females.
Busner registered all this, but resolved to keep an open mind. After all, he mused, it would ill behove a chimp as vilified by the academic hierarchy as I am to believe seesign against another similarly vilified.
Now, within hours of their destination, Busner recalled all of these digitations and wondered what lay in store for them. In his own mind he remained absolutely undecided as to whether Simon’s conviction that the human numbered 9234 was his missing infant was merely the appendix to the former artist’s psychosis, or the very linchpin. Whether encountering humans in the wild would free him – or condemn him. Busner was, he decided, operating on the same principle as Alex Knight and his crew: point the recording device at what was happening and see what it looked like.
What the country around them looked like was highly telegenic. As they gained the border of the game reserve, and had their papers checked by the Kalashnikov-toting bonobo at the checkpoint, a vista of steeply rolling verdancy stretched away from them towards the blue immensities of the great lake beyond. As if Mother Nature herself were pant-hooting their arrival, the heavy rain faltered and then died away altogether. The Landcruiser bucked and slithered between thirty-hand-high banks of grass, which were wreathed with steamy evaporation. There were coconut palms in profusion and candelabra trees aglow with brilliant red blossoms.
Alex Knight kept his camera panning about the place, turning three hundred and sixty degrees in his seat every minute or so. ‘ “Aaaa” it’ll be dark soon,’ he delineated for Simon, ‘and I want to be absolutely certain that I have enough establishing shots.’
They gained the final ridge of hills and below them was the lake. The dagaa fisherchimps’ outriggers were coming into shore, their outboards cutting grey-white grooves across the rumpled azure. And there was Camp Rauhschutz, a mean little huddle of corrugated iron shacks, their galvanised roofs glowing orange with the rays of the setting sun, which like some stellar swelling bulged as it was penetrated by the horizon.
Simon saw it all and registered it all, but his thoughts and imaginings were entirely taken up with the human business in hand. How quickly would he be able to find Simon junior? He hadn’t d
ared fully to form the image that lurked in the recesses of his mind, an image so in keeping with the other furniture of his human delusion that it might have been purpose-built by the same psychic carpenter who had converted his frontal lobes, installing the focal hyperintensities and manipulating the view. It was an image of Simon junior’s bare little visage, his undershot jaw and slightly goofy teeth. It was an image that like a hardy tug drew behind it an entire freight of change. For, when Simon met Simon, the whole ghastly planet of the apes, would – or so he almost dared to hope – waver and dissolve. Busner would put on trousers and get a shave. They’d fly back to an England where the politicians brown-nosed metaphorically – rather than literally.
“HoooH’Graa!” The six chimps in the Landcruiser sent up a great pant-hoot of arrival as the vehicle lurched to a halt in the muddy compound. There to meet them was Ludmilla Rauhschutz, together with her bonobo assistants. Rauhschutz was a striking figure, so obese as to be almost a ball of dark-brown fur. Her muzzle was disturbingly flat and animal for a German chimp, and her close-cropped head fur didn’t help matters. Nor did the hideously patterned shortie mumu that flared around her shoulders like a perverse material garnish on an unappetising dish. The mumu unobscured the non-object of desire that lay between her lanate legs. It was easy to see why Rauhschutz eschewed a swelling-protector – she had no need of one. When in full oestrus her swelling must have been a paltry affair, for now, in a fallow period, her perineal region was barely noticeable.
Even Simon found this off-putting to the point of being unsettling, inparting Bob’s shoulder, ‘ “Euch-euch” it’s revolting, she’s got hardly any scrag at all!’ Busner sign-lenced him with a low bark, because Rauhschutz was knuckle-walking over to the Landcruiser, while the useful-looking bonobos were drumming on the metal sides of the nearest hut to clamorous effect.
