Wish

by Peter Goldsworthy

  ‘Chateau Cardboard,’ she said, ‘but it works for me.’ She turned to Clive. ‘Let’s replay the interview before we eat.’

  The screen stopped flickering; the flat, reddish-brown face of an orang-utan appeared, staring past the camera with an expression of infinite boredom. A voice-over, its animation sitting oddly with the indifference of the ape, excitedly announced that Fatima was a previously infertile ape, artificially inseminated by a gynaecologist. A series of more talkative heads replaced Fatima’s: the surgeon himself, a zoo keeper, a veterinarian.

  ‘I’m next,’ Clive murmured.

  His familiar face abruptly filled the screen. ‘In my opinion such procedures should only be performed with the ape’s informed consent.’

  The interviewer—a standard-featured beauty, mid-twenties, perfectly groomed—was bemused. ‘I’m sorry, Professor?’

  ‘Gotcha,’ Stella chuckled behind me.

  ‘I don’t think she saw it coming,’ Clive murmured. ‘So bound up with self-congratulations about saving an endangered species.’

  ‘Fatima may not want to be a mother,’ his earlier, interviewed, self was saying, simultaneously, on the screen.

  The interviewer was lost, floundering. ‘But what about the survival of the species, surely that is an issue?’

  ‘It would be regrettable if the species became extinct. But the rights of a particular individual of that species are far more important—far more tangible. I believe that we should be able to define those rights much more precisely under law. The client ape should be fully acquainted with the pros and cons and allowed to make an informed judgement.’

  The interviewer laughed, but uncertainly. It sounded like a joke, but she wasn’t sure; Clive’s prim, deadpan face was giving nothing away.

  ‘An orang-utan giving informed consent?’ she asked. ‘Surely you’re not serious, Professor?’

  ‘Extremely serious. It’s a very serious issue.’

  ‘But how can a monkey give consent?’

  ‘Not a monkey,’ Clive told her, patiently. ‘An ape.’

  ‘How can an ape give informed consent?’

  ‘Various methods of communication have shown promise in recent years. I would have thought this was well known. Several keyboard languages have been developed for use by apes. You have perhaps heard of Yerkish: a language invented at the Yerkes Primate centre in the United States…’

  The interviewer’s face, full-screen, was relieved, amused, patronising. Apes being taught to speak? This she could handle: St Francis Clive Kinnear, crackpot patron saint of animal rights, making a fool of himself on cue.

  ‘That’s it,’ Clive said. ‘They cut the rest.’

  Stella rose and switched off the television, then lovingly rubbed the back of his neck.

  ‘You shouldn’t antagonise them,’ she said. ‘You have to learn to milk them. Use them.’

  ‘I only told the truth,’ he said. ‘The argument is unassailable.’

  He rose and stepped behind the kitchen bench, lifted a pot lid, stared inside.

  ‘The idea is a little surprising,’ I said. ‘It sounds a little off the planet.’

  He replaced the lid: ‘There’s nothing new in what I said, J.J. There’s quite a body of published work now on ape languages. Bekoff in Colorado has been suggesting some sort of public guardianship arrangement—State-appointed guardians—for the great apes for years.’

  If I had seen the argument in black and white I might have agreed, if it had been a petition I would probably have signed, but something in his spoken tone got my back up: that cool assumption of agreement.

  ‘Apes have been taught to sign,’ he said.

  I knew a little of this, a hot issue in the Deaf world several years before. To many it seemed an insult that their—our—beautiful language should be taught to apes. It re-opened an old wound: the once-common notion that Sign wasn’t a real language, more a primitive pidgin, an amusing pantomime, a game of charades.

  I drained my glass and said: ‘I understood that it was more a kind of imitation. Monkey-see, monkey-do.’

  ‘Not monkeys. Apes.’

  His correction, once again, was patient, matter-of-fact; there was no trace of recrimination. Clive seldom laughed; I sensed that the expression of anger was even more infrequent.

  He stepped out from behind the bench; Stella took his place, the kitchen tag-team.

  ‘It was far more than imitation, J.J.,’ he said. ‘The chimps had vocabularies of several hundred words. And used them creatively.’

  ‘There’s some dispute about that,’ Stella put in, taking the words from my mouth.

  ‘Not in my mind. It’s conclusive. Washoe, the first of the chimps, was offered a radish to taste. She invented her own composite sign-word: “cry-hurt-food”. She called a watermelon a “drink-fruit”.’

  ‘A poem!’ Stella called across the bench.

  ‘A metaphor, at any rate, my dear.’

  I said: ‘I heard that there was only one native signer on the Washoe project. And she was not very impressed by many of the so-called signs that the chimps learnt.’

  ‘There were exaggerations,’ Clive said. ‘Of course. The number of signs. The sentences.’

  I dredged up another criticism from some mental recess. ‘If you put a chimp in a room with a typewriter, sooner or later, among all the other permutations and combinations of letters, it will bang out Hamlet—by sheer probability. Maybe the so-called signing of the apes was nothing more than that.’

  Clive nodded, clearly bored by the old argument, but as patient as ever. ‘I grant that much of the work wouldn’t stand up to statistical analysis, the claims are exaggerated. I grant that the trainers had an incentive to discover signs. But I’ve examined the evidence closely over the last few years. There is a core, a kernel, that seems beyond dispute. It seems clear that the great apes share many of the characteristics we would regard as human. An awareness of self. An awareness of the future—even a sense of time, and of death.’

  ‘That’s what you should have said in the interview,’ Stella told him, carrying out a large bowl of food.

  ‘I did say it in the interview. It was cut.’

  Stella set the bowl, stir-fried greens, in the centre of the table; I smiled at the sight of it and lifted my hands into neutral Signing Space.

  ‘Asparagus?’

  Stella answered in speech. ‘Eliza’s favourite food. We eat a lot of it.’ She offered the wine bottle, I covered the glass with my hand after she had half-filled it. The discussion might bore Clive but it intrigued me, I wanted to keep a clear head. I also sensed the stirrings of a new urge inside me: to needle him, to ruffle those smooth feathers.

  ‘Do apes have an awareness of the dangers of artificial insemination?’

  ‘Perhaps, if properly explained.’

  ‘It might depend on who was doing the explaining.’

  He shrugged. ‘Perhaps on how it was explained.’

  ‘But surely you wouldn’t want to teach a chimp Sign-language?’

  He watched me, puzzled, waiting. I pressed on.

  ‘I would have thought you’d regard it as wrong. A form of exploitation, like dressing apes in circus clothes. Turning them into performing monkeys…’

  He sipped his soda and bitters, thoughtfully. ‘Perhaps,’ he said. ‘But that’s a separate issue.’

  My turn to be puzzled. Stella interpreted: ‘The work has already been done by others, J.J., whatever its morality. Apes have been taught the rudiments of language. The work might be immoral but Clive feels it would be illogical not to make use of the results.’

  A sudden, weird notion came to me—call it inspiration—of why I was there, and why they had befriended me. Auditioned me.

  I said, abruptly: ‘Your foster-child is a chimpanzee.’

  Clive looked at me, clearly surprised; for once I had caught him off-guard. I had caught myself off-guard—even as I uttered it the idea seemed irrational. But his body language—and that of Stella,
behind him—told me, shouted at me, that my inspired guess was right.

  ‘Eliza is a chimp!’ I said.

  It was more a conclusion than a question but they answered it.

  ‘A gorilla, in fact,’ Clive admitted, after a time.

  ‘A gorilla?’

  Stella added, quickly: ‘A very special gorilla.’

  We sat for a long moment, silent, becalmed in the aftermath of revelation. I had astonished myself as much as Clive and Stella—perhaps more so. The cogs of my brain, momentarily frozen, finally ground on again, slowly. ‘You want me to teach it Sign-language.’

  ‘Her,’ Clive corrected, calm and unruffled again. ‘Not it.’

  Stella was excited. ‘We need you, J.J. Eliza is developing so quickly we can’t keep up. She needs a proper Sign teacher.’

  Another elongated moment of quiet. I sipped my wine on autopilot, thoughts churning. Two emotions were struggling inside my brain: amusement, yes—these people were clearly out of their minds—but also a growing disappointment. I had assumed I was being courted as a friend; it now seemed that their dinner invitations were nothing more than job interviews.

  ‘It’s a very important project,’ Clive said. ‘Eliza’s education is crucial to the movement.’

  He was speaking even more slowly and carefully than usual, as if to a child. ‘We see her as a spokesperson for her whole species. Her whole genus.’

  Stella risked a typical joke: ‘A kind of spokes-animal.’

  I didn’t laugh; I felt used. I found it difficult to say so, however. I could tell them only obliquely.

  ‘Then aren’t you using her? Aren’t you making her the subject for another kind of animal experiment? Exactly what you are opposed to.’

  Clive heard me out impassively. ‘Perhaps. But perhaps she will agree that the ends justify the means.’

  Stella’s argument was more direct. ‘You’re right of course, J.J. But we can’t turn back the clock—can’t make her forget what she knows. We certainly can’t put her in the wild. She’s grown up with humans—of sorts.’

  ‘Where?’

  She glanced at her husband; he shook his head, almost imperceptibly; she continued: ‘I don’t think we can say more at this stage. Let’s just say her early life was…deprived. We want to offer her a real human home. And teach her, among other things, about the plight of her fellow animals.’

  ‘You must be out of your minds! Crazy!’

  My hands, as often during moments of high emotion, moved involuntarily as I spoke: a flurry of gestures underlining the words. Or were the words mere noise, underlining the gestures? ‘Out-of-your-minds’: the fingertips at the forehead opening out, exploding out; the shape of reason gone, vanished, flown away. ‘Crazy’: the Point Hand circling off-temple, stirring furiously, an ancient Esperanto-insult from the schoolyard.

  Stella reached across the small table, took my hands in hers, and stroked them gently, as if trying to calm a pair of panicking birds.

  ‘I’m sorry we couldn’t be completely frank with you, J.J. We needed to get to know you first. And…for you to get to know us.’ She smiled: ‘We like you. Both of us. We think you’re perfect for Eliza.’

  I sat, stony-faced, resistant.

  ‘Please, J.J. It has to be you. You’re a very special person. Just meet her, that’s all I ask. Decide for yourself.’

  The flattery did its work, slowly; the suggestion of friendship buttered the hard bread beneath; curiosity reasserted itself. ‘If I agree, and I’m not saying I will, when can I meet her?’

  ‘As soon as possible.’

  ‘Tonight?’

  A look of satisfaction passed between them; they knew they had me.

  Clive said: ‘We don’t like to wake her—she sleeps sunset to sunrise. Why don’t you stay the night? You can meet her first thing in the morning.’

  I was tempted, momentarily. ‘My parents would worry.’

  ‘Phone them,’ Stella said, then caught my glance and banged her fist against her forehead. ‘Sorry. What a stupid thing to say…Fax them.’

  ‘They might not see the fax till morning.’

  ‘I’ll phone you another cab,’ Clive said.

  ‘No,’ I insisted. ‘I’m fine.’

  ‘You’ve been drinking again, J.J.’

  ‘Half a glass?’

  ‘The amount isn’t always important.’

  I raised my voice, needled. ‘It’s my decision, Clive, not yours. I’m perfectly capable of driving.’

  I refilled my empty glass. Clive turned to Stella for support; she merely laughed. ‘Yay, J.J.—way to go!’

  He shrugged, rose and fossicked in his desk instead, and pressed a pile of loose A4 pages into my hands.

  ‘Some bedtime reading. The manuscript of my new book. It’s still in rough draft form but if you have any doubts about the project it might help convince you.’

  I stared, incredulous, at the title page: Primate Suffrage.

  ‘You want to give apes the vote?’

  ‘The title is a simplification. The publishers wanted something marketable, something catchy.’

  ‘Who wanted something catchy?’ Stella said.

  He smiled his minimal smile. ‘Stella came up with the title.’

  ‘Poetic licence,’ she told me.

  ‘Of course it overstates the case,’ Clive said, then added, after a pause: ‘Although I think some of the great apes may well be given voting rights in due course. There would have to be some kind of screening test. General knowledge. Comprehension.’

  ‘Maybe they could stand for Parliament,’ I suggested.

  Stella’s turn to laugh out loud: ‘They might do a better job.’

  Clive said: ‘They might see through the bullshit. There is often a kind of wisdom in simplicity.’

  His calm brain was working it through, placing one implacable fact in front of the other, refusing to leap to conclusions. He reminded me of a competitive walker, one foot always touching the ground before the other was lifted.

  ‘Of course, to vote they would have to become Australian citizens. Which means—if they were treated as normal immigrants—passing a basic comprehension test. Which would solve the problem.’

  This time I was reasonably certain that he was joking, sending himself up. His sense of humour, when it attempted to show itself, was what might be called ‘droll’—meaning non-detectable, almost non-existent. Sign, usually so eloquent, has no equivalent. A certain limp-wristedness in the shaping of ‘funny’ might come close.

  ‘What about apes born here?’ I said, still determined to rile him. ‘In the zoo, say? Wouldn’t they automatically be Australian citizens, by birth?’

  A wide smile creased Stella’s face; she saw clearly that I was making fun of her husband. He was staring absently beyond us, unfocused, thinking it through, following each path to its logical conclusion, then returning to follow the next.

  She winked at me behind his back. I extracted a cigarette from her pack, lit it, and reached across the table and jammed it gently between her lips. She smiled.

  ‘Thank you, J.J.’

  ‘A pleasure.’ An especial pleasure, weirdly, in full view of her husband, as if placing that cigarette between her lips was some kind of illicit act.

  ‘Just read the manuscript, J.J.,’ he was saying, unperturbed. ‘I like to think it’s very persuasive. Even if you don’t think a cow, or an earthworm, say, should have rights—read about the great apes.’

  Stella tacked in from a different compass point. ‘Read what they think about death, about pain—about themselves.’

  ‘One other thing,’ Clive said. ‘Until we’ve discussed it further, I would ask that nothing we’ve said here goes beyond these walls.’

  ‘It’s a secret?’

  Stella zipped her lips. ‘Please, J.J.—it’s very important you tell no one. At least for the time being.’

  We rose together; as Stella preceded us through the front door and out into the night Clive took my arm, ret
arding me slightly. His voice was low, an aside meant only for me.

  ‘I don’t like to encourage Stella in her smoking, J.J. I hope you will support me in this—it’s such an irrational habit.’

  16

  I read Clive’s manuscript that night, cover to cover. I began in bed, later I rose and decamped to the kitchen, partly because the loose leaves were too awkward to read in bed, mostly because I was soon too agitated to stay there.

  The book was another collection of horror stories, told with extreme coolness; a book that first made me squirm, then made me want to shout out in indignation. Once again there was nothing emotive, no easy appeal to righteousness in the style. It was exactly the kind of book I had come to expect from C. Francis Kinnear, a logical accumulation of cold facts. Ape-facts. Yet the final effect was one of fierce angry heat.

  The stories were largely interchangeable, variations on a single theme. The medical experiments were worst of all. Conscious chimps smashed repeatedly in the base of the skull by mechanical devices, to study the effects of concussion and fractured skulls. Rhesus monkeys shot in the head from point-blank range to investigate gunshot wounds. The spines of baboons broken, mechanically, to allow study of paraplegia…

  Many of the stories came from spies, Animal Rights activists working as deep throats within various research institutions: military, academic, industrial. Others came from experimenters who just couldn’t stomach their work anymore.

  These same stories were repeated throughout the book, with various more or less inventive tortures, different species of primates, larger quantities. Huge quantities: somewhere between 200,000 and 400,000 primates a year had been shipped from tropical homes to temperate-zone laboratories in the 1950s, I read, declining a little to 50,000 a year at present. Millions of primates, an Auschwitz of primates.

  Do I sound like a teacher, repeating these figures? Chalking them on the page? I am a teacher.

  The last few chapters of Primate Suffrage were less disturbing but no less riveting. Here were documented the stories of all those great apes—chimps, gorillas, orang-utans—with whom attempts had been made to communicate in language. Koko, signer of Ameslan. Donald and Gua, talking to each other through a keyboard language. The tragedy of Washoe, raised as human, abandoned among zoo-chimps, desperately signing to any passing human, begging to be set free, demanding to know what she was doing among these ‘black bugs’.