Ack-Ack Macaque

by Gareth L. Powell

  “I hope he’s got a good lawyer.”

  Merovech shook his head. “He won’t need one. With my mother dead, her share of the company passes to me. And it’s a controlling interest, so I can do whatever I like.”

  “Well, you are the king.”

  His young face darkened, like a cloud passing across the sun.

  “For now, anyway.” He took her hand. “Thank you, Victoria. You’ve done so much, I can’t begin to—”

  “Ah, c’est rien.”

  “No, I’m serious. If there’s anything I can do, just say the word. How about a knighthood? A stately home? Something like that?”

  Victoria laughed, and gently extricated her fingers from his grip.

  “I don’t think so.” She turned to look back along the length of the hull, towards the airship’s tail. “I have a place here now.”

  At that moment, Ack-Ack Macaque stuck his dishevelled head through the stairwell hatch. His fur looked patchy and ragged; he had a few new scars around his muzzle; and safety pins held the sleeve of his jacket in place. K8 had fashioned him a new eye patch from gauze, and he’d bummed half a dozen cigars from the assembled reporters.

  “Hey,” he said. “What are you all doing up here? You’re missing all the fun.”

  Victoria held up her hand, warding him away.

  “We’ve all had more than enough ‘fun’ for one day, thank you.”

  “Then what’cha doing?”

  “We’re getting ready to leave.”

  The monkey pulled himself up onto the helipad and lit a cigar. K8 followed him out, blinking in the sunlight.

  “In that case,” he said, “we’re coming with you.”

  “What about the cameras?” Victoria asked. “What about your fans?”

  Ack-Ack Macaque stuck his bottom lip out. “I’m not cut out for stardom. I’m a pilot.” He blew smoke at the clear dawn sky. “And, with the old man gone, and his pilot injured, I’m guessing you could do with someone to fly this tub for you? Am I right?”

  “Can you fly an airship?”

  Ack-Ack Macaque cracked his knuckles.

  “I can fly anything.” His face dropped into a simian scowl. “I’ve got a hell of a lot I need to figure out. This will keep me out of trouble while I decide what I’m going to do with the rest of my life. And besides, there’s a whole world out there that I never knew existed. I’d like to see some of it.”

  “And K8?”

  “Well, we’ll need a navigator, won’t we?” Ack-Ack Macaque scratched his cheek. “From what I can see, most of this ship’s run by computer, and she can do anything with them.” He grinned proudly. “The girl’s a goddamn genius.”

  Victoria’s hand fell to her side.

  “Okay then, it’s settled. Welcome to the crew, Monsieur Macaque. And you, K8. We set sail in an hour.”

  The monkey touched leathery fingers to his brow in salute.

  “Much obliged, skip. What’s our heading?”

  “First London, for repairs. After that, we’ll play it by ear.”

  Merovech laced his fingers in Julie’s, and looked at the three of them. “Where do you think you’ll go?”

  Ack-Ack Macaque scratched his belly. Even battered and scorched, he looked ready for another adventure, and Victoria knew for certain that, with him at the wheel, life on board the Tereshkova would never be dull.

  She watched as he turned and grinned into the wind, his yellow eye scanning the far horizon, taking in the cloud-flecked cobalt dome of the sky, and all the myriad countries stretched beneath.

  He took a pull on his cigar.

  “Everywhere,” he said.

  THE END

  EXTRAS

  ACK-ACK MACAQUE FIRST lumbered his way into my consciousness some time in 2006, and I still have no idea where he came from. One day, I simply found myself repeating his name, over and over and over again, like a tune I couldn’t get out of my head.

  Ack-Ack Macaque. Everything else came from those four syllables. Catchy and deceptively simple, unpacking them demanded I come up with a world in which a monkey could credibly pilot a fighter plane.

  About a year later, the following short story appeared in the September 2007 issue of Interzone, the long-running UK fiction magazine. Writing of it on his website, the novelist and comics writer Warren Ellis memorably described it as: “The commercialisation of a web animation into some diseased Max Headroom as metaphor for the wreckage of a fucked-up relationship.”

  I like that description.

  As ‘Ack-Ack Macaque’ was only my second fiction sale to Interzone, I was both surprised and delighted when the magazine’s readers voted it as their favourite story of the year.

  Delighted, and a little stunned. You see, as a twenty-something creative writing student in the early 1990s, I’d dreamt wistfully of publication in Interzone. To have something I’d written finally appear in its pages, and then to have it so wholeheartedly endorsed by its readership, seemed more than I could ever have hoped for.

  Pleased and encouraged by this response, I included the story in my first collection, The Last Reef (Elastic Press, 2008), and moved on. I wrote some more stories, and a couple of novels. But that monkey wouldn’t leave me alone: he wanted more adventures; he wanted to get out into the world and cause mayhem; and he wanted to see his ugly mug on the front cover of a book.

  So, when Jon Oliver at Solaris asked if I had a book I wanted to write, Ack-Ack Macaque was right there waiting, puffing on a huge cigar, a stupid grin plastered across his grizzled face.

  “I knew you’d be back,” he said. And he was right. I’d never quite shaken him off. I probably never will.

  But now, as he rides off into the sunset at the end of his first novel-length adventure, let’s look back five years, to that September 2007 issue of Interzone, and the short story that started it all.

  This was his first public appearance; these were his first baby steps into the world; and I hope you enjoy them.

  Gareth L. Powell

  Bristol, July 2012

  ACK-ACK MACAQUE

  GARETH L. POWELL

  I SPENT THE first three months of last year living with a half-Japanese girl called Tori in a split-level flat above a butcher’s shop on Gloucester Road. The flat was more mine than hers. We didn’t have much furniture. We slept on a mattress in the attic, beneath four skylights. There were movie posters on the walls, spider plants and glass jars of dried pasta by the kitchen window. I kept a portable typewriter on the table and there were takeaway menus and yellowing taxi cards pinned to a corkboard by the front door. On a still night, music came from the Internet café across the street.

  Tori had her laptop set up by the front window. She wrote and drew a web-based anime about a radioactive short-tailed monkey called Ack-Ack Macaque. He had an anti-aircraft gun and a patch over one eye. He had a cult online following. She spent hours hunched over each frame, fingers tapping on the mouse pad.

  I used to sit there, watching her. I kept the kettle hot, kept the sweet tea coming. She used to wear my brushed cotton shirts and mutter under her breath.

  We had sex all the time. One night, after we rolled apart, I told her I loved her. She just kind of shrugged; she was restless, eager to get back to her animation.

  “Thanks,” she said.

  She had shiny brown eyes and a thick black ponytail. She was shorter than me and wore combat trousers and skater t-shirts. Her left arm bore the twisted pink scar of a teenage motor scooter accident.

  We used to laugh. We shared a sense of humour. I thought that we got each other, on so many levels. We were both into red wine and tapas. We liked the same films, listened to the same music. We stayed up late into the night, talking and drinking.

  And then, one day in March, she walked out on me.

  And I decided to slash my wrists.

  I’VE NO IDEA why I took it so hard. I don’t even know if I meant to succeed. I drank half a bottle of cheap vodka from the corner shop, and then I took a kit
chen knife from the drawer and made three cuts across each wrist. The first was easy, but by the second my hands had started to shake. The welling blood made the plastic knife handle slippery and my eyes were watering from the stinging pain. Nevertheless, within minutes, I was bleeding heavily. I dropped the knife in the bathroom sink and staggered downstairs.

  Her note was still on the kitchen table, where she’d left it. It was full of clichés: she felt I’d been stifling her; she’d met someone else; she hadn’t meant to, but she hoped I’d understand.

  She hoped we could still be friends.

  I picked up the phone. She answered on the fifth ring.

  “I’ve cut my wrists,” I said.

  She didn’t believe me; she hung up.

  It was four-thirty on a damp and overcast Saturday afternoon. I felt restless; the flat was too quiet and I needed cigarettes. I picked up my coat and went downstairs. Outside, it was blisteringly cold; a bitter wind blew, and the sky looked bruised.

  “TWENTY SILK CUT, please.”

  The middle-aged woman in the corner shop looked at me over her thick glasses. She wore a yellow sari and lots of mascara.

  “Are you all right, love?”

  She pushed the cigarettes across the counter. I forced a smile and handed her a stained tenner. She held it between finger and thumb.

  She said, “Is this blood?”

  I shrugged. I felt faint. Something cold and prickly seemed to be crawling up my legs. My wrists were still bleeding; my sleeves were soaked and sticky. Bright red splatters adorned the toes of my grubby white trainers.

  She looked me up and down, and curled her lip. She shuffled to the rear of the shop and pulled back a bead curtain, revealing a flight of dingy wooden stairs that led up into the apartment above.

  “Sanjit!” she screeched. “Call an ambulance!”

  ACK-ACK MACAQUE RIDES through the red wartime sky in the Akron, a gold-plated airship towed by twelve hundred skeletal oxen. With his motley crew, he’s the scourge of the Luftwaffe, a defender of all things right and decent.

  Between them, they’ve notched up more confirmed kills than anyone else in the European theatre. They’ve pretty much cleared the Kaiser’s planes from the sky; all except those of the squadron belonging to the diabolical Baron Von Richter-Scale.

  They’ve tracked each other from the Baltic Sea to the Mediterranean and back. Countless times, they’ve crossed swords in the skies above the battlefields and trenches of Northern Europe, but to no avail.

  “You’ll never stop me, monkey boy!” cackles the Baron.

  THEY KEPT ME in hospital for three days. When I got out, I tried to stay indoors. I took a leave of absence from work. My bandaged wrists began to scab over. The cuts were black and flaky. The stitches itched. I became self-conscious. I began to regret what I’d done. When I ventured out for food, I tried to hide the bandages. I felt no one understood; no one saw the red, raw mess that I’d become.

  Not even Tori.

  “I did it for you,” I said.

  She hung up, as always. But before she did, in the background, I heard Josh, her new boyfriend, rattling pans in the kitchen.

  I’d heard that he was the marketing director of an up-and-coming software company based in a converted warehouse by the docks. He liked to cook Thai food. He wore a lot of denim and drove an Audi.

  I went to see him at his office.

  “You don’t understand her work,” I said.

  He took a deep breath. He scratched his forehead. He wouldn’t look at my hands; the sight of my bandages embarrassed him.

  “The Manga monkey thing?” he said. “I think that’s great but, you know, there’s so much more potential there.”

  I raised my eyebrows.

  “Ack-Ack Macaque’s a fucking classic,” I replied.

  He shook his head slowly. He looked tired, almost disappointed by my lack of vision.

  “It’s a one joke thing,” he said. He offered me a seat, but I shook my head.

  “We’re developing the whole concept,” he continued. “We’re going to flesh it out, make it the basis for a whole product range. It’s going to be huge.”

  He tapped a web address into his desktop, and turned the screen my way. An animated picture of the monkey’s face appeared, eye patch and all.

  “See this? It’s a virtual online simulation that kids can interact with.”

  I stared at it in horror. It wasn’t the character I knew and loved. They’d lost the edginess, made it cute, given it a large, puppy dog eye and a goofy grin. All the sharp edges were gone.

  Josh rattled a few keys. “If you type in a question, it responds; it’s great. We’ve given it the ability to learn from its mistakes, to make its answers more convincing. It’s just like talking to a real person.”

  I closed my eyes. I could hear the self-assurance in his voice, his unshakable self-belief. I knew right then that nothing I could say would sway him. I had no way to get through to him. He was messing up everything I loved–my relationship with Tori, and my favourite anime character–and I was powerless in the face of his confidence. My throat began to close up. Breathing became a ragged effort. The walls of the office seemed to crowd in on me. I fell into a chair and burst into embarrassed sobs.

  When I looked up, angrily wiping my eyes on my sleeve, he was watching me.

  “You need to get some counselling,” he said.

  I TOOK TO wearing sunglasses when I went out. I had a paperback copy of The Invisible Man on my bookshelves and I spent a lot of time looking at the bandaged face on the cover.

  April came and went. Ashamed and restless, I left the city and went back to the dismal Welsh market town where I’d grown up. I hid for a couple of months in a terraced bed and breakfast near the railway station. At night, the passing trains made the sash windows shake. By day, rain pattered off the roof and dripped from the gutters. Grey mist streaked the hills above the town, where gorse bushes huddled in the bracken like a sleeping army.

  I’d come seeking comfort and familiarity but discovered instead the kind of notoriety you only find in a small community. I’d become an outsider, a novelty. The tiniest details of my daily activities were a constant source of fascination to my elderly neighbours. They were desperate to know why I wore bandages on my arms; they were like sharks circling, scenting something in the water. They’d contrive to meet me by the front door so they could ask how I was. They’d skirt around a hundred unspoken questions, hoping to glean a scrap of scandal. Even in a town where half the adult population seemed to exhibit one kind of debilitating medical condition or another, I stood out.

  The truth was, I didn’t really need the bandages any more. But they were comforting, somehow. And I wasn’t ready to give them up.

  Every Friday night, I called Tori from the payphone at the end of the street, by the river.

  “I miss you,” I said.

  I pressed the receiver against my ear, listening to her breathe. And then I went back to my empty little room and drank myself to sleep.

  MEANWHILE, ACK-ACK MACAQUE went from strength to strength. He got his own animated Saturday morning TV series. Pundits were even talking about a movie. By August, the wisecracking monkey was everywhere. And the public still couldn’t get enough of him. They bought his obnoxious image on t-shirts and calendars. There were breakfast cereals, screensavers, ring tones and lunchboxes. His inane catchphrases entered the language. You could hardly go anywhere without hearing some joker squeak out: “Everybody loves the monkey.”

  My blood ran cold every time I heard it.

  It was my phrase; she’d picked it up from me. It was something I used to say all the time, back when we lived together, when we were happy. It was one of our private jokes, one of the ways I used to make her laugh. I couldn’t believe she’d recycled it. I couldn’t believe she was using it to make money.

  And it hurt to hear it shouted in the street by kids who only knew the cute cartoon version. They had no idea how good the original a
nime series had been, how important. They didn’t care about its irony or satire–they just revelled in the sanitised slapstick of the new episodes.

  I caught the early train back to Bristol. I wanted to confront her. I wanted to let her know how betrayed I felt. But then, as I watched the full moon set over the flooded Severn Estuary, I caught my reflection in the carriage window.

  I’d already tried to kill myself. What else could I do?

  WHEN WE PULLED in at Bristol Parkway, I stumbled out onto the station forecourt in the orange-lit dawn chill. The sky in the east was dirty grey. The pavements were wet; the taxis sat with their heaters running.

  After a few moments of indecision, I started walking. I walked all the way to Tori’s new bed-sit. It was September and there was rain in the air. I saw a fox investigating some black rubbish sacks outside a kebab shop. It moved more like a cat than a dog, and it watched me warily as I passed.

  THE AKRON CARRIES half a dozen propeller-driven biplanes. They’re launched and recovered using a trapeze that can be raised and lowered from a hangar in the floor of the airship. Ack-Ack uses them to fly solo scouting missions, deep into enemy territory, searching for the Baron’s lair.

  Today, he’s got a passenger.

  “He’s gotta be here somewhere,” shouts Lola Lush over the roar of the Rolls Royce engine. Her pink silk scarf flaps in the wind. She’s a plucky American reporter with red lips and dark, wavy hair. But Ack-Ack doesn’t reply. He’s flying the plane with his feet while he peels a banana. He’s wearing a thick flight jacket and a leather cap.

  Below them, the moonlight glints off a thousand steam-driven Allied tanks. Like huge tracked battleships, they forge relentlessly forward, through the mud, toward the German lines. Black clouds shot with sparks belch from their gothic smoke stacks. In the morning, they’ll fall on Paris, driving the enemy hordes from the city.