Great Apes

by Will Self

  Why did they go out? Why did they do drugs? Because this was too much for both of them, because, Sarah sensed, this was something that could be atrophied rather than toned by exercise. Something that might be worked out of them in the working out. She had not read Lycurgus, but had she done so she would have recognised the beauty of the Spartan law on adultery. In Sparta adultery was without sanction, but woe betide the man caught making love to his wife, for certain death would ensue for both parties. This imparted a dangerous tension to marital relations, kept them forbidden, truly sexy. So it was for Simon and Sarah, the Sealink, the drugs, the gaping lacuna was their Laconia.

  There was this, but more locally there were his ex-wife and his ex-girlfriends. The many many ex-girlfriends. Unpack Simon and there wasn’t just Simon there, there was also a series of Russian dolly-women, his reified memories of lovemaking with them packed each inside the other. He was a cyclopaedia of clitrubs, a compendium of cunt-sucks, and a Britannica of breast-caresses. If Sarah caught herself thinking of this as they made love it was enough to make her cry, burst out crying with him inside her. Sometimes she thought of this on the very brink of coming, the very teetering edge. Then she would be wracked by two kinds of sobs. As she subsided, Simon would hang on to her, bewildered by this perturbation he had wittingly produced.

  Where was he? Why wasn’t he there already, so she could grab hold of the mast of him, hang on in the watery flux of the Sealink? Once Simon was there the whole evening would become a tipping deck, the two of them sliding down it towards bed, like a pair of hands entwined in practical prayer, then clenched in pleasure. Where was he?

  He was in Oxford Circus, standing outside Top Shop sucking on an unfiltered Camel, looking across the arena of tar towards the reef of Regent Street, which curved away to the south. He was standing back from the pavement, against the plate-glass window. His temples thrummed and he felt claustrophobic. The tube had been bad enough, had been, in two words, a mistake. Or rather the joint he had smoked in Sloane Square before getting the tube had been a mistake. He had hoped for a little respite from his body, a mental excursion whilst it was transported into the West End. But instead the hash with its heavy predictability, like a bulky butler, ushered in more unpleasantness, more bad feeling.

  It began on the escalator down, which was packed with a commuter crowd. I have been looking at these descending ranks of people all my life, it occurred to Simon, robotic, not touching, but moving in tight formations along tunnels and up stairways. They are like the proles in Lang’s Metropolis. Exactly like the proles in Lang’s Metropolis. This glancing observation, quite slight, nonetheless pulled up a deeper memory, depth-charged it, so that it shot up into Simon’s consciousness streaming bubbles. He had seen Metropolis as a child, been appalled by Lang’s vision of an inhuman, urban future, ruled by the Moloch of machinery, but had not, aged seven, seen it as dark fantasy at all. Simon thought it was a documentary – of sorts.

  And it had been. A fly-on-the-tube-wall report of shuffling anonymity, every body reduced by the Frankensteinian future to no more than the sum ofits fellows’ parts. And by the vending machine Simon blanched, and under the train indicator Simon sweated; he felt the ridging of sweaty cloth cut into his perineum – visceralupdateviscera-lupdatevisceralupdate.

  He had also lied to the woman at the opening, the pushy hack from Contemporanea. It wasn’t true about the forthcoming exhibition of his work. It wasn’t true about his love affair with the human body. He hadn’t painted pictures that displayed the ideal couched within the real flesh, the real bone, the real blood. He had painted the unreal, the twisting and distressing of that body by the metropolis, by its trains and planes, its offices and apartments, its fashions and fascisms, piazzas and pizza parlours.

  A year or so before, in the dark age between Jean and Sarah, Simon had lunched one day with George Levinson at the Arts Club and then sliced his way down through the cake-and-icing streets of Chelsea to the Tate. He knew why. He was blocked again, badly blocked. He not only didn’t want to paint, or draw, or construct, or carve. He felt like some frontal-lobe fuck-up, incapable of remembering why it was that anyone should paint, or draw, or construct, or carve. The world seemed replete with its own imagery already – too like itself already. In this mood he forced himself in the direction of the gallery, urging one foot in front of the other. He had arrived for lunch stoned, and left drunk.

  The visit to the Tate was a bit of masochism for Simon. Worse than that – a failed bit of masochism. Simon felt himself to be a middle-aged JP with a taste for birching, picking up a boy in the Charing Cross Road with the sure knowledge that his money will be taken by the pimp, and that the police will pass him on to the tabloids.

  He scuttled up the wide stone stairs and entered crabwise, skirting the main hall, ducking past the arch leading to the contemporary galleries, eyes averted, lest he catch sight of one of his peer’s works, or worse, one of his own. He escaped into the Renaissance and hung out there a while, feeding deer and goats in the blue distance of Umbrian panelling. It meant nothing to him, the colours, the positioning of figures, the lines of sight, the religious iconography. Every aspect of the paintings he stared at had been traduced and traduced and traduced again by the glossy and matt betrayals of photography, of advertising. Simon wouldn’t have been surprised if a putti had driven out of the frame of a Titian in a Peugeot 205.

  He wandered on, trying to lose his bearings, but not trying too hard, because then he wouldn’t – for he knew the gallery too well. Remembered being there aged sixteen, on the verge of a first kiss with a girlfriend. The two of them, palms cemented and oiled with childish sweat, had moved along, making up conversation, while his eyes took in the cornices, ventilation grilles, fire extinguishers, light switches, everything but the incandescent Blakes they had allegedly come to see. Such training – brain labouring while thin sixteen-year-old cock was straining against thin pants, and thin fifteen-year-old chest acted as crucible for the consuming heart of lust – was enough to stamp the floor plan on his neurons.

  But he was lost, or at any rate unknowing, when he looked up and saw the two canvases by John Martin, the apocalyptic nineteenth-century painter, The Plains of Heaven and The Fall of Babylon. In the former a conventional enough view of romantic upland – bluer and yellower peaks and valleys, receding to a hazy horizon – was reviewed when Simon saw that what he had assumed initially was a plume of smoke or spume, issuing from a rocky cleft in the foreground, was in fact a great tumult of angelic beings in close, but irregular, formation. There were so many of them that they altered the scale of the picture entirely. What Simon had thought a horizon of some thirty or forty miles seen from a peak perspective became an unreal hundred to two hundred miles of nonlocatable nirvana. An impossibilist realisation of another planet, leaning towards the spray-guns and computer manipulations of Now, rather than the layered, mannered evocations of Then.

  The other canvas, The Fall of Babylon, was both a complement and a corrective. A massive vortex of stone, wood, water, fire and flesh, gurgling down an invisible plug hole of destruction. Grey-robed Babylonians were caught up in this, flung holus-bolus, arms and legs cartwheeling, their disordered whipped-cream beards froth to the maelstrom. Martin seemed to be saying … what? Saying nothing, only carried away by the sheer mechanics of the graphic destruction he had wrought. The painting was about this: that Babylon contained this moment of explosion, this blastosphere, latent in all its solidity, its municipality.

  And if not Babylon, why not London? And if not the plains of heaven, why not the moors of cumulo-nimbus? The smudged cotton wool that kissed the curved undersides of aircraft as they powered across the sky. Why not, why not indeed? Simon distrusted epiphanies. He’d been sent scampering down blind-alleys of endeavour far too many times to give credence to those moments of believing something was instinctively right. But he knew a good trope when one diverted him. He recognised an inspirational scaffold which would support him, if only for do-it-y
ourself.

  So it had been with the series of modern apocalyptic paintings he had embarked upon the following week. In Martin’s canvases the body was violate, or inviolate, but always violable. In Simon’s the human bodies would be scarcely viable: the massed termites of Lang’s city, their bodies uniform, their uniforms body-like. Insectoid humans – all carapace, all exoskeletal. They would sit in ranks, in an aircraft the size of a lumbering Chartres, whole choirs and transepts of them, reading blocks of wood with the pages delicately carved out, and playing Donkey Kong with twitching thumbs, tossing off the miniature plastic clitorises.

  Simon conceived of a large canvas showing the interior of a Boeing 747 as its nose explodes on the Earth’s crust, as its deathly decal – winged defeat – destructs in a thirty-two-feet-per-second/per second ram-raid on the concrete floor of an empty reservoir near Staines. The ripped up rafts of human figures flying actually inside the disintegrating plane, achieving true weightlessness at last, just at the point at which their burial anticipates their burial.

  And once this canvas had come to him, the others had followed. They were all depictions of the safest and most urbanely dull of modern environments, but subject to an horrific destructive force which shook, stirred and ultimately shredded their human cargo. The interior of the Stock Exchange beneath a tidal wave; the booking hall of King’s Cross tube station on that November night in 1987, at the very instant the fireball erupted; the car deck of a ro-ro as the green gush rolled in, and the red and blue cars were flushed out; instant Ebola attacking Ikea, the processing hordes of young newlyweds purchasing flat-pack furniture liquefying, still hand-in-hand. And so on, twenty canvases in all.

  And while at the point of conception Simon had imagined that these paintings would be satiric, concerned with the futile impermanence of all that was held likely to last, as he worked on them he saw that this was not so. That the paintings had nothing to do with the settings, the backgrounds. That these were little more than montages, depictions of crude massifs and underwater reefs, on to which children might rub celluloid transfers of suitable human figures. And that it was those figures that were the real subject of the paintings.

  The human body had – Simon felt – been pushed out over a purely local void, an overhang of time; it dangled there, a Navaho on a steel girder, pitting its head for heads against the sheer cliff of just-constructed, concretised techno. The wind had changed and left Simon’s human subjects distorted in the attitudes required to live in this world of terminal distressing. A crick had run through the Tower of Babylon, leaving language communities on all five hundred floors with wrenched shoulders and necks. This was what he wanted to express, but had the deregistration of his own body preceded, or followed from this? He could not tell.

  At around the same time he had met Sarah. But he wasn’t sure that that was working, or that the working was working. All that he knew was that in the last year the days had got longer, had been filled with painting and the new people she introduced him to. That the hangovers had come, a hopeful sign because before – in the caesura, the and between Jean and – there had been no over, only hang. Further, that his children had in some way come back to him, felt comfortable with him once again. Sensed that the parasites eating him from within were, at least for the moment, sated.

  Where was he? He was in Oxford Circus, standing outside Top Shop smoking an unfiltered Camel, looking across the arena of tar towards the reef of Regent Street, which curved away to the south. He was standing back from the pavement, against the plate-glass window. His temples thrummed and he felt claustrophobic as he envisioned the whole scene dumped upon by a giant ape. A post-imperial Kong who smashed the windows of the department stores and pulled out wriggling handfuls of humans, twined between his digits and caught like the termites they were in the cable-thick fur on the back of his huge hands. These people were finger food to the god, sushi for the divinity. He disentangled them from his fur, eyed their knotted faces, and then popped them between his teeth, each of which was the size of a dentist.

  Mmmm …! Crunchy … and yet chewy. The clacking and gnashing of this car-park of a mouth filled the precincts, bio-noise greater than mechanical tumult. He paused, spat out a traffic warden whose reflective bandoleer had caught between his lower seven-and-eight. Inappropriate dental floss. He flexed his mighty arms, drummed on the roof of Hamley’s and let out a massive “HooooGraaa!”, which seemed to mean: I am body. I am the body. Sod the Father. Sod the Son, and piss on the Holy Ghost.

  This pantagruelian pongid then paced around the block, kicking up cars like metallic divots, eating double-deckers as if they were Double Deckers, and then finally squatting in the very centre of the Circus itself to strain, push and deliver a turd the size of a newspaper kiosk, which wavered, lengthened from stub to cigar, before plummeting fifty feet from Kong’s arsehole on to the shaven heads of a posse of style-victim cycle couriers, who, like cattle in a thunderstorm, had taken shelter in the open.

  Simon shook his head, the vision cleared, shaken into motes and flecks of humanity who scurried now at ground level. He checked his watch, saw that he was late, and turned in the direction of Sarah, to the Sealink.

  Chapter Three

  Dr Zack Busnee, clinical psychologist, medical doctor, radical psychoanalyst, anti-psychiatrist, maverick anxiolytic drug researcher and former television personality, stood upright in front of the bathroom mirror teasing some crumbs from the thick fur under the line of his jaw. He’d had toast for his first breakfast that morning and, as usual, managed to get a fair amount of black cherry conserve into his coat instead of his stomach. He’d washed his fur thoroughly around the neck area – using the watercomb the Busners kept for just that purpose – but the crumbs obstinately refused to dissolve along with the jam. And the more he attempted to dig them out, the deeper into his fur they seemed to dig in.

  No matter, he thought, turning his attention to dressing, Gambol can cope with it on the way into the hospital. Gambol, Busner’s research assistant, was waved upon to groom his boss a great deal. Of course, so were all the junior doctors, nurses and auxiliary workers at Heath Hospital, whether attached to the psychiatric department or not. Nowadays the more senior medical staff – and sometimes even administrators – would cluster around Busner as he swung into the hospital and attempt to get their fingers in his fur. If they couldn’t give him at least a cursory groom of deference, they would present to him and then scamper off about their business.

  For, Busner, while a nonconformist and even zany psychiatric practitioner in youth and middle age, had on the cusp of old age begun to acquire something approaching respectability. The doctrinal excesses of the Quantity Theory of Insanity, with which he had been associated, fresh from his analytic training under the legendary Alkan, had long since been forgotten. The theory was now viewed – if chimps thought about it at all – as a piece of amusing wrongheadedness, a kind of socio-psychological version of Logical Positivism, or Marxism, or Freudianism. Obviously the predictions it had been designed to make had been disproved fulsomely, and yet, a second wave of apologists had sprung up to defend the theory, pointing out that the empirical verity of a hypothesis may not be the sole criterion on which to judge its significance.

  Busner took the freshly ironed shirt from the hanger dangling on the back of the door and slipped it over his rounded shoulders. His fingers were still as nimble as ever. He fastened the buttons speedily, his thumbs managing to locate the knuckles of his index fingers to effect torsion, despite the arthritis that now plagued him. When he picked up his habitual mohair tie, looped it round his thick neck, knotted it, and folded down the collar, he was further reassured by the blur of motion in the mirror.

  He left the collar unbuttoned and the tie knot slack – the better for Gambol to get at the crumbs. Meanwhile, one of his feet had, without any thought on his part, snatched a curry comb from the glass shelfunderneath the sink, and he now found himself absent-mindedly combing his muzzle while squinting at hi
s own reflected features.

  Pronounced eyebrow ridges with a light coping of silver-grey hairs, deeply recessed nasal bridge, neat, almond-shaped nostrils, no bagging of the muzzle, just a series of wriggling lines scored at oblique angles across the smooth skin of his full and froggy top lip. His lips were as moon-crescented and thinly generous as when he was young.

  Not bad for a chimp nearing fifty, he mused, fluffing up into a halo the long tufts of grey fur surrounding his balding pate. No sign of goitre or mange, no ulcers either. At this rate I might make it to sixty! He thrust out his broad chest and flexed his long arms. While it’s true that in motion – which they almost always were – his features projected an impression of barely contained energy, in repose they slumped somewhat, slid into fleshly landslip, epidermal erosion. But Busner didn’t notice this. Distinguished, that’s what I am, he decided, and turned to remove a tweed jacket of uncommon tuftiness from a second hanger.

  Busner’s return to the popular media role that he had filled with such assurance – some might say bumptiousness – while a young male had been tempered by maturity. In the previous five years he had published three books3 that had enormously augmented his reputation. While ostensibly collections of his patients’ case histories, they had performed the unusual feat of making quite difficult themes and theories in the fields of psychology and neurology accessible to a wide audience. Further, this had not been achieved by in any way trivialising. Busner prided himself on not condescending to his readers.