by Will Self
‘His ability unconsciously to gauge the disposition of his own body. This is normally the result of organic damage, but it does dovetail rather neatly with what has obviously been preoccupying him – it could be what we denote hysterical conversion. Watch, Mr Levinson, thank you for your confidence in this “grnn” matter. I do hope to have some positive news for you soon, but I certainly wouldn’t count on him being well enough to attend the private show –’
‘How about interviews “huu”?’
‘I very much doubt it, he’s still incredibly confused.’
After finishing the pant-hoot George Levinson pivoted himself through a hundred and eighty degrees and squatted, motionless, regarding one of the canvases he had been describing to the psychiatrist. To suggesture there was something pathological about it was on the one hand an understatement, and on the other – as far as Levinson himself was concerned – an irrelevance. The debate about madness and creativity appeared otiose when it came to Dykes’s work and the work of most truly talented artists that he represented. They did what they did – that was all.
But these paintings, this one in particular which imprisoned in a thick layering of oils the very instant when the horrific King’s Cross fire of 1987 had begun, was the stuff of nightmare. The commuters, mouths gaping open, tumbling backwards down the escalator as the fireball erupted from the booking hall. Two or three chimps at the head of it combusting already, their clothing and fur in a white-orange efflorescence; and an infant – actually in mid-air, falling towards the viewer. George Levinson shook his head wonderingly, for he knew that wherever a viewer positioned herself the infant was still falling in that direction – threatening the passive with the most active of requirements – to catch the mite. The infant was Dykes’s equivalent of the eyes of The Laughing Cavalier. In the context of this painting it added worse than insult to inconceivable injury. Levinson thought back to the evening before Simon’s breakdown, remembering that odd gesticulation at the opening in Chelsea. Was this the lack of perspective he had signed about? Or had the artist, even then, sensed himself sliding into the abyss? But whatever the answer there is, George mused, going to be a riot when the critics get sight of this stuff.
Surrey summers, thought Sarah to herself, leaning on the fence surrounding her parents’ tiny paddock; do I miss them? Maybe, or maybe I simply miss the young female I was, obsessed by gymkhanas, the teachers at school, playing at mating.
Massy yew trees mounted up beyond the end of the paddock and between their hard green strokes of foliage Sarah could glimpse the knapped flint wall of the Reverend’s church, St Peter’s. ‘Handy that. ’ She remembered Peter signing this so many times during her childhood. ‘Being the Reverend Peter from St Peter’s “huu”?’ One of the hounds bounded over to where she leant. Her father’s old hunter, Shambala, a grey-streaked Alsatian some fifteen hands high. The dog yapped and extended a forearm’s length of pink tongue, slopping with drool. Sarah stroked and massaged the beast’s scruff, while Gracie neighed and snuffled at the dog’s ankles. ‘No more hares to course, “huu” Shammy, “grnn” Shammy old fellow?’ Sarah in-parted his scruff.
She was interrupted by her mother who pant-hooted from the conservatory door. Pant-hooted ‘Sarah’ and ‘Food’, and also wreathed those two meanings in a sonority of reproach, “H’h’oooGraa!”
“H’hoooo!” Sarah responded. Although having called that she was coming, she felt no great desire to make her way back across the sculpted garden, with its kidney-shaped beds of delphiniums, poppies and chrysanthemums.
It was always the same after the first two days, the visits to relatives – and now, of course, because she was in oestrus the almost hourly cavalcade of mating – Sarah felt trapped in her parents’ comfortable house, trapped in their comfortable world. Her parents’ little turns of phrase, ‘Just coming, dear’ from her alpha, almost always calling forth a ‘Time means nothing to him’ from her mother. And their worn idiosyncrasies. Her alpha’s old horn-rimmed spectacles tied round his balding pate with a length of garden twine; her mother’s ludicrously unfashionable padded swelling-protectors, which must – Sarah felt – make the sweat course unpleasantly in this heat, as well as providing a hot-bed for tics and lice.
‘I need them for the dogs, y’know,’ Hester Peasenhulme would sign absent-mindedly, giving that impression of not really showing to Sarah, which her daughter almost always felt. ‘They take it amiss if I haven’t got the old familiar swelling-protector. ’ She had been signing this for all the years since Sarah left the natal range for college in London. For all the years since Sarah was a barely receptive female, her first swellings matching her own awkwardness about them; until now, when only the two hounds remained in the paddock at the bottom of the garden, Shambala, and her last show dog, Sugarlump, with whom Sarah had swept the board at the kennel-club gymkhana for year after year.
And if the swelling-protector was an issue between them, it was because it concealed more than her mother’s now infrequent, prune-wrinkled swellings. No, it concealed a deep trauma about mating, Sarah and the Peasenhulmes in general. A trauma Sarah had felt so confused about during sub-adulthood.
‘Did your alpha mate you this morning “huu”?’ Mrs Peasenhulme signed, trembling as Sarah crawled in through the back door from the garden.
‘ “Hooo” you know he did, Mother – you were there. ’ She tried to keep the cramp out of her fingers, but without success.
‘I’ll thank you not to sign “euch-euch” like that to me, young lady, you’ll never be old enough – as far as I’m concerned – to stop being respectful to your mother.’
‘Mother “hooo” …’ Sarah wanted her to get wound up, wanted her to lash out, wanted to feel the slash of old nails, chipped from weeding, against her cheek, but they didn’t come now – just as they had hardly ever come during Sarah’s infancy.
Instead Hester Peasenhulme merely pouted and threw a dishcloth at Sarah, waving, ‘Help me with this drying up. ’ As ever, Sarah found it hard to believe that her mother really cared about her, so infrequently did she attack, or otherwise practically enforce the hierarchy.
For years Sarah had wondered about this, wondered if it had anything to do with the infrequency with which her alpha mated her. While her infancy was ostensibly nurturing and secure, when she left the natal range feelings long sensed – but unacknowledged – had swum, unpleasantly, to the surface.
At college in London, doing foundation and laterly illustration and design, she had had the same kind of work crises as her peers, and the same kind of disruptive, if exploratory, consortships. She had sat up late at night, revising with the assistance of speed, then come down with the ad-dabs – just as her allies had. And like them, she had felt that her psyche was plunging into the deep end of life.
But for Sarah everything had been that bit worse, the consortships more destructive, their fissions more histrionic; the sadnesses more global, the depressions more intransigent.
When at last she could take no more and found herself sobbing for days on end, unable to attend lectures or classes, Sarah sought out the counsellor whose task it was to deal with the emotional and psychological problems of the students. He was reassuringly straightforward. Sarah had been fearing a lot of psychofiddle, a damning diagnosis, kinky therapies and the mapping of her dreamscape.
‘Point out to me,’ signed Tom Hansen, blond, upright, strong of nasal bridge and commanding of lip, ‘did your alpha mate you when you were younger “huu”?’
‘Of – of course.’
‘Often “huu”?’
‘I suppose it depends what you mean by that –’
‘As frequently as the other natal group males did “huu”?’
‘No, he didn’t. More like once during each oestrus “euch-euch”. I always wondered about that. And I suppose I was jealous of my sister Tabitha, who he seemed to prefer. He began mating her when she was eight – and barely showing.’
Up until this interview Sarah would
have been incredulous and even angry to learn that she was what was denoted ‘an abused infant’, but once Tom Hansen began inparting her quite how potentially damaging her alpha’s neglect had been, other pieces of the jigsaw began to fall into place. Her mother’s chronic diffidence, hardly ever taking Sarah on solo patrols – that surely was a function of her own guilt over the way Harold Peasenhulme had neglected his eldest daughter, refused to give her the good mating every female requires from an alpha if she’s to grow up happy, well adjusted, comfortable with her very sense of femininity and simiousness.
Sarah’s first inclination on confronting this hard, hurtful fact about herself was to abandon her natal group altogether, and become a lone female dedicated to pleasure seeking. But Tom Hansen coaxed her round. ‘They may not fuck you – your mum and alpha,’ he paraphrased Larkin, ‘but perhaps you need to consider whether or not they were fucked by their parents.’
‘What do you mean “huu”?’
‘This kind of “euch-euch” abuse tends to run in groups, Sarah. It may well be that if you have the courage to work on this thing with me, and work at the same time to form a better relationship with your parents, that you can stop the rot, stop it going on down through the generations.’
For the rest of her time at college, Sarah went every week to see Tom Hansen, and to gesticulate over and over and over again the minutiae of her upbringing. So often did she recreate the exact circumstances of her weaning tantrums for the personable therapist that he became incorporated into the memories themselves, a benign – if disengaged – influence.
Hansen showed her about Freud, the founding alpha of psychoanalysis, and how he had been the first chimp to recognise the destructive emotional effect of a biological alpha not mating his daughter. And so Sarah came to understand herself, and her parents, if not altogether forgive either of them.
But things also changed on the home range. Although nothing was signed, Harold Peasenhulme did begin to mate her with a little more frequency – albeit with exactly the same chronic disengagement he had always evinced, sometimes taking as much as a minute to achieve climax.
And now, what with this prostate trouble, I suppose he’ll never, ever give me a really sound, thorough covering, Sarah thought angrily as she took another willow-patterned plate from the drying-up rack and subjected it to a cursory wipe. The mating that her mother had pointed out took ages, her alpha heaving over her back, his flaccid penis barely penetrating her. Eventually he had given up – not even reaching climax – picked up his discarded Telegraph and retired to his study without bothering to groom her.
If that was a mating, then I’m Mae West, Sarah had thought, and hating herself for it, she forced Jane, the Peasenhulmes’ delta female, to groom her for a good hour, although she was practically useless at it and insisted on inparting with every tweak and comb some asinine piece of tickle-slapple.
The Peasenhulmes’ house, like their car, was comfortably furnished in a staid, almost inter-war style. Every room was tastefully William Morris wallpapered. In the drawing room a collection of plump sofas and tubby armchairs sat muzzling a highly polished coffee-table adorned with a cut-glass bowl, always flower-filled. In the nestrooms the chests of drawers had lavender cushions buried in their soft depths. And in the large open-plan kitchen the old Aga still squatted, although for years now it had been purely decorative, Hester Peasenhulme preferring to cook on the modern, gas-fired range that her son Giles had fitted for her.
Giles, bloody, conscientious Giles. If it wasn’t bad enough for Sarah having a sister like Tabitha, who inflamed male lust when she was days off oestrus, and whose exquisitely beautiful swellings sometimes lasted for weeks, there was also Giles, the perfect son. Giles, who had gone no further than Oxshott to found his own sub-group, and who somehow managed to find time to get back to the natal range almost every day and help his poor old parents out.
The previous evening, after their last supper, with Giles and most of his simpering sub-group in attendance, Harold Peasenhulme put the finger on Sarah. ‘I don’t know what I’d do without Giles’s help, you know. ’ His fingers complacently formed the signs. ‘He’s a lifesaver now that I find it so hard to crawl around the place. ’ Harold Peasenhulme had had a career in the City notable solely for its great length and even greater stolidity. Length and stolidity also characterised his signing, never using one sign where five would do, and never upping his gesticulant tempo. He had once stood upright for selection as a parliamentary candidate – Tory, of course – but been rejected by the committee with the succinct ascription: ‘Dull’.
Giles grinned widely at his alpha’s compliment, displaying the characteristically pointed Peasenhulme canines. He was diligently grooming his alpha. “Hooo”, thought Sarah. Goody two toes is going to pack you off to a rest home, and take over the house and the group before you can sign knife, old chimp. Then she succumbed once more to guilt, which was the emotion she associated more than any other with her alpha. She almost felt sorry for the punctilious old chimp. Almost – but not quite.
After second lunch on the third day of Sarah’s stay, her alpha called her into his study. “H’hooo.”
She bounded through from the kitchen where she had been helping her mother make jam. ‘“’H’huu” yes, Alpha?’
‘Sarah, I need to have a gesticulation with you,’ he signed awkwardly, most of his hands and feet occupied with pipe cleaners and pipes. ‘Have you seen this morning’s paper “huu”?’
‘No, Alph.’
‘Well, you’d better take a look. ’ He dropped a pipe, picked up the Telegraph and tossed it across the desk to her. It was opened at the ‘Peterborough’ column.
The first thing that caught Sarah’s eye was Simon’s. She blanched. It was an old photo, and Sarah recognised the fur casually draped around his shoulder as belonging to his exalpha. She felt the flush of jealousy that always came upon her when she was presented with even the remotest evidence of Jean Dykes’s existence, then summoned herself and read the copy.
* * *
Despite the good weather there’s no prospect of a sunny opening at the Levinson Gallery in Cork Street next Thursday. That brooding and temperamental painter Simon Dykes, whose penchant for seeking creative stimulus in the smallest room is well known to the denizens of the Sealink Club, has apparently become even more brooding and temperamental.
Is he engaging in some last-minute life sketching of the kind of brutalised figures that feature so prominently in his new paintings? Perhaps this explains his current residence, the psychiatric ward at Charing Cross Hospital, definitely the wrong end of Fulham.
Or possibly it’s something to do with that bright young female Sarah Peasenhulme, whose absence from her normal night range has coincided with the artist’s indisposition? Undoubtedly, the only way to find out will be to attend the opening and beard George Levinson, a chimp not known for keeping his fingers to himself.
‘ “Wraaf”! Bloody tickle-slapple columnists, who the f–’
‘ “Wraaaf”! Sarah, watch your vocalisation, if you please.’
‘But, Alph, this is repulsive stuff. Hitting Simon when he’s down like this. You can’t surely –’
‘As it happens this sort of drivel does lend me some sympathy for your “euch-euch” consort. Although I find the implication here that he is a drug user disturbing, and as you know I have never approved of your association. ’ Harold Peasenhulme picked the paper up from where Sarah had let it fall, folded it and tucked it away on his side of the desk, as if it might be required for future reference.
‘ “Huu” Alph, you’re not going to go into all of that again, are you? Simon and I have been consorting for more than a year now.’
‘I’m well aware of that. And well aware also that he’s very unlikely to found a new group with you, for all sorts of reasons; reasons that I’m sure you are aware of as well. All I can sign is I trust you’re taking this opportunity to do some mating elsewhere. I covered you this morning –’
‘Sort of.’
‘Giles will come over and bring his distal males to give you one any time you pant-hoot. Peter and Crispin are always happy to mate you. Sarah “gr-unn”, I know we’ve never seen exactly eye-to-hand on things, but won’t you consider finding a stable, polyandrous group “huu”? You must be aware of how unsuitable this consortship is, verging on monogamy as it does, and without the likelihood of any issue to justify it. ’ His fingers stumbled over the sign ‘monogamy’, as if fearful of being contaminated.
‘I can’t, Alph. I love him. I want to help him. He’s a brilliant chimp, a great ape. I wouldn’t mind being his consort … for ever.’
With this inflammatory remark she fled the room, not even bothering to give her alpha the slightest of valedictory grooms. And as she packed her bag and readied herself for the journey she felt the dead weight of Harold Peasenhulme’s indifference. Why, “hoo” why, “hoo” why can’t he beat me the way an alpha should. I insult him, I challenge his authority and he does nothing. Clearly he doesn’t love me – never has.
The Reverend Peter drove her back to West Byfleet Station an hour or so later. She didn’t bother to give her parents a valedictory pant-hoot, she was still too angry. Peter mated her three or four times on the way, pulling over into lay-bys, twitching aside the light cotton swelling-protector she wore and entering her with surprising alacrity – considering his age, that is. ‘You wouldn’t “huuu” consider staying just another day or so, would you, my dear? Just so I could mate you a bit more. It does my soul good.’
‘Oh, Reverend, if only you were my alpha. Your arseholiness is so beautiful, your spirituality gushes like spunk from your cock.’
‘You’re too sweet, my dear.’
They kissed each other many times on the platform and the Reverend petted Gracie as well. They had ten minutes to wait for Sarah’s train, and in that time as many males displayed to her. At one point the platform contained three such suitors, strutting up and down, waving magazines or newspapers to indicate their availability for mating. ‘I do wish you’d let one of them, my dear,’ the Reverend gestured. ‘You might even enjoy it, you never know.’