by Peter Høeg
They are hunkered down on a branch. The ape is naked and Madelene wears nothing but a bit of cloth around the top half of her body and another bit of cloth around her bottom half. Outwardly they look like two displaced apes—for Madelene too could pass for an ape. Erasmus rarely carries her now; she can manage on her own, even seventy-five feet above the ground. And the way she sits there on the branch, curling her toes around it, one might think she was growing fingers on her feet. Erasmus’ face is clean-shaven—Madelene insists on this, she wants to be able to lay eyes and hands on him directly—but the top of his head is covered with a layer of fine white down. So too with Madelene’s head. Her hair has been bleached white by the sun and cropped to make it easier to get at the head lice. And while she surveys the city she catches a louse and crushes it between her thumbnails.
There is a fresh coolness in the air and Madelene shudders. They look so frail sitting there on that branch, she and Erasmus, so helpless. They seem, on this night in July, like the feeblest, most unlikely hit squad ever to strike London Town.
two
There was someone else who had been thinking about Madelene and Erasmus, who had possibly thought about them more than anyone else, and that was Susan. Today was the first day in seven weeks that they had not been in her thoughts. She had forced herself out of the depression that had fallen on her upon their disappearance by coaxing her husband and children into vacating the apartment for an hour and a half. During which time her lover paid her a call.
Susan had a penchant for compact sexual encounters. They suited London life. There was something provocatively unnerving about knowing that even as such a tableau called for great care in its planning, implementation and cleaning-up—all while in a state of utter abandonment—the whole thing had to be over, leaving no trace of its passing, in ninety minutes.
Here she was getting undressed. Here she was stepping into the shower. Here she turned on the hot water.
“Are you coming?” she called.
* * *
In the living room Donny LaBrillo peeled off his jacket, unbuttoned his white shirt, slipped it off his shoulders and regarded his own reflection in a piece of Japanese lacquerwork.
Donny was one of a new generation of boxers—handsomer, slimmer and smarter than Henry Cooper in his heyday ever dared to dream of being. After seventeen wins in seventeen sensational professional light-heavyweight fights under the British Boxing Board of Control he had the look of an angel straight from heaven who had never donned a boxing glove.
He liked this setup. Very elegant. The woman had class. The fancy apartment and the parklike grounds in which it lay had class. He liked the thought of being in strange pastures. LaBrillo the Stud among another man’s flowers.
He looked around him. He liked the exotic antiques. The lacquerwork. The blue porcelain elephants in the window bay. The life-size doll on the sofa. The elongated masks on the wall.
His eyes slid back to the sofa. It was not a doll that sat there at all. It was a man. With a squashed-in face and a blanket around his shoulders, like a punch-drunk boxer at a toga party.
“What the hell?” said Donny.
Erasmus eased himself onto his feet. This man was the first human being other than Madelene with whom he was to communicate. It was imperative that he be correct in every detail of grammar and etiquette.
“How do you do?” he said, slowly and distinctly. “Now let me show you out.”
LaBrillo stared at the ape.
“I have an appointment here,” he said.
“I am delighted to hear it,” said Erasmus.
He ushered the boxer solicitously through the hall and opened the door.
“Thank you so much for calling.”
LaBrillo made a little side step and dropped his right shoulder ever so slightly. Then he belted Erasmus in the midriff, just under the breastbone and level with the solar plexus, at a point where the layer of muscle is very thin.
It was not like hitting a concrete wall, because there was a certain superficial elasticity to the torso beneath the blanket. It was like ramming a fist into the wall of a padded cell.
LaBrillo straightened up and gaped at the ape. He had scored a few knockouts with that punch. Being hit like that would give any ordinary untrained man in the street a heart attack.
The ape’s expression remained deadpan. Gently it nudged LaBrillo through the doorway.
“Very best wishes for the future,” it said. “Come back soon.”
Then it shut the door.
LaBrillo grabbed hold of the banister, seeking some sort of mainstay in his life. He stood there, outside the closed door, for some time. Then he turned around and slowly, bare-chested, he started down the stairs, walking away from his first defeat as a professional.
* * *
Erasmus and Madelene sat down opposite one another in the living room. The ape picked up the boxer’s jacket and put it on. The sleeves were too short. It pulled a pair of sunglasses out of an inside pocket and placed them on its nose. Madelene reached for the ape’s hand; it stretched out an arm that extended with ease from the sofa back across the coffee table. Madelene put its hand over her crotch and before her eyes the ape’s face gradually changed color, from pale yellow to chocolate. It was blushing.
“Donny,” called Susan from the bathroom. “Grunt like a pig.”
The bathroom door opened. Susan stared at them.
“Donny left,” said Madelene. “He wanted his mommy.”
* * *
It was over fifteen years since Susan had begun experimenting with the quicksilver of hastily improvised sex and she had developed the reflexes of an explosives expert. Losing none of her outward composure, she wrapped herself in a large bath towel, hugged Madelene, shook Erasmus’ hand and sat down on the sofa.
But inwardly she was terrified.
It was their poverty that scared her. The experience of being confronted, for the first time ever, by two people with not a thing to their name—not even clothes for their backs—and no social support.
“We’ve been … out of town,” said Madelene. “We know nothing.”
Every unforeseen disaster separates people into two groups. Those who panic and those who operate at maximum efficiency and save the fear and trembling for later. Susan launched into a precise, unexpurgated account of what she knew—of Adam, of Andrea Burden and of the New London Regent’s Park Zoological Garden.
As she spoke, she became aware of a warmth which prompted her to glance toward the radiator and the grate, but both were out of action. The radiation emanated from somewhere on the other side of the coffee table and after a while she succeeded in placing it. It was the heat of people in love. It glowed in the space between Madelene and the ape as if they had brought along an invisible, transportable sauna from which they were constantly letting out heat. Susan snuggled up to this warmth and slowly, as the heat spread, while she was talking, she began to suspect that perhaps these two indigents were not totally lost after all.
For a while after she finished there was silence. Then she asked her first question.
“Couldn’t we just try to get you two away from here?” she said. “Out of the country?”
Madelene shook her head.
“There are the others,” she said, “apes, like Erasmus. If the outside world learns of their existence they’ll be hunted down like never before. Trophy hunters. Reporters and photographers. The international zoological underworld. Hordes of scientists. Just the fact of knowing—Adam’s way of knowing—destroys anything of which we have any knowledge. Or changes it.”
She stood up.
“Johnny,” she said. “The man who drove us. We have to find Johnny.”
Susan looked keenly at her friend. The cloven-hoofed obstinacy upon which she had remarked not so long ago had now been joined by a new trait, the panoramic perspective of a bird of prey. She checked her watch.
“You’ll need clothes,” she said. “And money.”
“Wo
uld it,” asked the ape, “be too much to ask to have a hot shower? And if I might borrow a razor?”
* * *
Susan let them out through the back door.
Erasmus was attired in a pair of flip-flops, the baggy trousers from a karate suit, a T-shirt ripped at the sleeves—this, however, being covered by LaBrillo’s jacket—sunglasses and a felt hat slit up over the brim and crown.
The overall effect, while not exactly harmonious, was in no way alarming. The ape paused for a moment on the landing, resting on its knuckles, then it straightened up, rectified its posture and tipped the sunglasses forward. Erasmus had entered the world of man.
Madelene and Susan stood facing one another. Madelene had borrowed some sandals, a long skirt, a blouse and a cardigan. She was her old self again and yet at the same time someone whom Susan had never seen before: a woman with a share in a sauna.
Susan followed Erasmus with her eyes. His careful tread, the mindfulness around hip level.
“We’ve never taken any of one another’s belongings,” she said. “But maybe sometime I could borrow him…”
It sounded like a joke and Madelene smiled at it too, and leaned forward to kiss her friend on the cheek.
But it was not just a joke and this Madelene knew and her kiss was not merely a show of affection. As she leaned forward—cautiously, consciously—she rubbed her temple against Susan’s and ten head lice, ten bloodthirsty, ineradicable anoplura which Madelene and Erasmus had caught from the red lemurs and twenty-five of the lice’s sticky, robust eggs passed from Madelene’s cropped scrubland to Susan’s rampant temperate rain forest.
“That,” said Madelene, “we will have to talk about.”
three
Kempton Park racecourse has accomplished the feat of lying on the same spot and maintaining the same appearance for twenty-five years while everything it has enclosed for all that time has been going downhill. The horses are going downhill, the jockeys are going downhill, as are the spectators. And on this particular afternoon no one was going downhill faster than Johnny.
The two thousand pounds and the threats he had received from Andrea Burden upon his inexplicable release from custody had produced much the same effect as if she had put a pair of gilded lead shoes on him and thrown him out into deep water. Now—seven weeks later—he was in the process of settling on the seabed.
At his side stood Samson. Johnny looked down at the dog with bleary but fond eyes. Its coat was thick and glossy, its nails clipped short, its eyes clear, its nose cool. It stood as only a Doberman can stand, as though perpetually posing for a photograph for next year’s Kennel Club calendar. When—soon—Johnny was no more, the truck was to be sold and all the money raised from its sale would go to Samson, who would have a good life. Right at this minute the dog radiated all of the carefree contentment and the pluck that Johnny himself had never possessed.
Now, however, a sudden change occurred. The gleaming hair on Samson’s back lifted and stood on end, making the dog look all at once like a wire-bristled brush. Then its ears were pressed back flat against its head and its teeth bared. Then it rolled over onto its back, gave a little whine and stuck all four legs in the air.
Johnny bent down. Samson was not sick. He was not having a fit, he had not thrown himself to the ground in pain. He had prostrated himself in an act of unconditional submission.
Johnny looked around. The only living creature anywhere near them was a man standing a few yards off, leaning on the railing, looking across at the horses.
“So what d’you think?” said Johnny.
Slowly the man turned around.
“I beg your pardon?” he said.
At the sound of his voice Samson turned to stone.
“Who’s going to win?” Johnny asked.
“The horse in the red coat,” said the man.
Johnny tried to focus on the face in front of him. Kempton Park is a popular spot for day-tripping loonies from London. The face across from him was broad and innocent-looking. The face of a loony. Sometimes idiots brought good luck. Johnny waved a bookie over and put his last hundred pounds on the horse with the red blanket.
It was some weeks since Johnny had sold his field glasses because he couldn’t hold them steady anymore. Now he followed the field with the naked eye. His and the stranger’s horse came in a full length ahead of the favorite.
Johnny collected his winnings. Then he focused on the man.
“How could you tell?” he asked.
The man removed his sunglasses.
“I could … smell the hormones,” he said.
There was something disquietingly familiar about his face. Johnny turned around and started to walk away.
The man was right on his tail. Johnny speeded up. The man was still there. Johnny stopped dead, spun around and thrust half his wad of notes at him.
The man shook his head.
The hair on the back of Johnny’s neck rose. He had not thought of the devil since he was little. Now seven weeks of alcoholic poisoning had toned down the present and revived his boyhood. The devil had come to get him.
He shoved the whole bankroll into the man’s jacket pocket. The man stepped right up to him and Johnny inhaled the scorched reek of the flames of hell. An arm went around him and he was swept off his feet. Johnny closed his eyes.
“Take me,” he said. “But spare the dog.”
* * *
That night, two months earlier, when he had put up Erasmus and Madelene in his mobile home had been the most wonderful night of Johnny’s life. Out of the mire that had passed for his life for so many years he had suddenly pulled a sparkling existential highlight.
He had known that what had been granted him that night was too intense to last. Meekly he had taken the moment off the hook and thrown it back without any hope of a repeat performance. Now the same situation was being reenacted, more forcibly than before. In the van, sitting at the table beneath which Samson lay quaking—close beside him—were Madelene and the ape.
“We were thinking of asking whether we could stay here for a while,” said Madelene.
Faint with joy, Johnny stretched out a hand toward the sink in which dreg-sticky glasses had been dumped to make room for his guests. Madelene placed her hand over his.
“We were also wondering whether you would do the driving for us,” she said. “So you’re going to have to stop drinking.”
She looked across at Erasmus.
“We have to talk to Bowen,” she said. “If he recognizes us he’ll call the police. How can we get him away from the hospital?”
“Perhaps,” said Erasmus, “I could.”
Madelene lifted Johnny’s telephone onto the table, keyed in a number and handed the receiver to Erasmus. Only when a woman’s voice said, “Holland Park Clinic,” and Erasmus took the receiver away from his ear and looked around the back of the phone to see where the voice was coming from did Madelene remember that this was the first telephone conversation of the ape’s life.
She curled her fingers around the receiver and pressed it gently but firmly to his ear.
“I would be extremely grateful to you if I might please speak to Dr. Alexander Bowen,” said Erasmus.
“Who may I say is calling?”
“If you would be so kind as to say that it concerns a large ape that has disappeared.”
It took the vet five seconds to extricate himself from whatever he was doing.
“Do you remember,” said Erasmus, “the man in whose garden you picked up the big ape? It’s back. The ape. The same one.”
Several seconds passed before the vet was capable of answering.
“What is its general condition?”
Erasmus glanced down at himself.
“Good,” he said. “What do you think we should do?”
“Stay where you are,” said the doctor. “I’m on my way.”
The line went dead, and instinctively the ape pulled the receiver away to see where the doctor had gone. Madelene to
ok it out of his hand and handed him the hat and the sunglasses. She stroked Johnny’s cheek.
“Let’s go,” she said.
* * *
Madelene and Erasmus climbed from the gloom of the van into the bright Dulwich sunlight. They then walked fifty yards down the road to the house in the garden of which, two months earlier, Andrea Burden had first set eyes on Erasmus, and rang the bell. A maid opened the door.
“My uncle has been taken ill,” said Madelene. “Could we possibly come in and sit down?”
There were black and white marble tiles in the hall and white lacquered furniture. The maid brought two chairs.
“I’m very thirsty,” said the ape.
It searched its increasing, but as yet incomplete, vocabulary.
“A bucket,” it said. “Could you please let me have a bucket of water?”
Three months earlier the man who came walking toward them would have scared Madelene out of her wits. Now—from her new viewpoint on society and the people in it—she nonchalantly classified him as a layer cake: a base of irritation at being disturbed, a layer of fear of burglars in disguise, a layer of insecurity at the prospect of physical closeness, all topped off by a frosting of urbane politeness.
“We’re terribly sorry for bothering you,” she said. “An ambulance has been called. It will be here any minute.”
The man relaxed and walked over to the ape.
“How are you feeling?” he asked.
“Very well, thanks,” said Erasmus. “How are you feeling?”
At this most inappropriate of moments Madelene learned something new about the man she loved. That he was incapable—physically and mentally incapable—of lying.
The man blinked.
“I’m glad to hear you’re feeling better,” he said.
“I’m glad that you’re glad,” said Erasmus.
The man started to rock back and forth on the balls of his feet. The maid brought a bucket. Erasmus raised it to his lips and drank down ten quarts of water.
