There were photographs in the book; portraits of young apes, quick-eyed, intelligent—beautiful. And here was the only trace of sentimentality. The photographs were not quite as dispassionate as the narrative. The camera never lies? The portraits had been culled, surely, for cuteness—to find some human essence in the apes, a kinship with which the reader might identify.
The photographs, if not the narrative, had committed that cardinal sin of anthropomorphism.
Not that I saw it as a sin. The effect of those photographs, coupled with the cold horror of the narrative, was powerful, and undeniable, the only possible conclusion was that apes should be given the vote.
Or at least placed under the protection of some sort of public guardianship.
I slept in fits and starts, winding myself in my sheets, a walrus tangled in a deep-line net. At first light I pulled on my rubber sheath, slipped out of the house and down the beach steps. The sea, as still and heavy as oil, calmed me; I floated weightlessly for some time, close to shore, unwilling to make any move that might dent or disrupt the limpid surface. Buoyed by fat and rubber, I floated upright, hands at my side, head well above water. I might have slept there, vertical, comfortably suspended—but to the east, beyond the roof tops, the sky was filling with light; the ridge of hills, backlit, knife-edged, was silhouetted against the coming day. Each time my head, bobbing gently, rotated in that direction I felt a small kick of excitement.
I emerged from the water as the sun peeped above Mt Lofty, climbed back up to the house, sluiced my wetsuit beneath the garden hose, and hung it out to dry. My mother was preparing breakfast; the whole house was steeped in the stink of sizzling bacon. Pig bacon was being fried, not chimp bacon, but I pushed my plate aside.
‘Hungry-not?’
I rubbed my belly, and gave her the Bad Hand sign:
A mirror-image of the Good Hand: little-finger extended instead of thumb. I was sick, I was telling her—but I meant sickened, not merely ill. Sick, sickened: the different meanings share the same shape in Sign, and the same sound in English. The bacon smell nauseated me. I’d always thought that tastes and smells had some sort of absolute intrinsic worth. Other senses—colours, shapes, sounds—were more subjective, but a particular taste was actually, morally, either good or bad. Shit stinks evilly. Flowers smell…decent.
The smell of frying bacon had always seemed an absolute mouth-watering good, but somehow reading the words of C. Francis Kinnear had altered my perception of the flavour.
‘Stay bed today,’ my mother advised.
I shook my head. I was apprehensive about what faced me in the Hills, but I was also excited. And I knew that my apprehension could only be cured by contact with its object, to postpone the moment would merely magnify it. As I drove towards the rising sun, I was overcome again by body turbulence: shallow, tight respirations, fidgety hands. The sign for anxiety is exactly those tense, fidgety hands. The drug of the ocean had long worn off. My heart pounded as loudly as the four small struggling cylinders of the Fiat as I crossed the last ridge beneath Mt Lofty, and coasted into the Summertown valley beyond—although I still half-expected to find that Eliza would not be at home, or would still be in bed asleep, or otherwise engaged and unavailable.
BOOK
‘It is a great baboon, but so much like a man in most things, that though they say there is a species of them, yet I cannot believe but that it is a monster got of a man and a she-baboon. I do believe that it already understands much English, and I am of the mind that it might be taught to speak or make signs.’
SAMUEL PEPYS, 1661
TWO
1
She entered the living room hesitantly, keeping close to the wall, walking upright, on two legs, but awkwardly, a side-swaying waddle. I smelt her instantly—a feral scent but not unpleasant, sweetish and musty, familiar in a way I could not immediately identify. Her long arms brushed the carpet from time to time, but merely to maintain balance. She did not appear to use those arms as forelegs, levering herself as if between a pair of crutches, chimp-fashion.
She glanced up at me, then quickly away, then back again—desperately curious, I sensed, but not wanting to intrude, or threaten.
She was larger than I had expected, almost five feet in height, stocky, barrel-chested, powerfully muscled. And thickly furred, covered with a sleek black pelt, thickest and blackest on the shoulders and upper arms.
Sign has a two-handed mime for richness, or extravagance: the thumbs and fingers stroking the lapels of an imaginary mink coat, feeling the quality.
A perfect description for Eliza’s coat, there is no English equivalent.
‘Try not to stare,’ Clive murmured in my ear. ‘Staring is not considered polite among gorillas.’
His expression remained as earnest as ever, his thin mouth devoid of humour, but how could I not stare? The sight was astonishing, disorientating. Eliza’s head was still half-averted; her nose broad and squashed looking, almost one-dimensionally flat, more an opening directly into the front of the head than a nose. I was reminded of the nose-hole in a human skull.
The ears were small and delicate, fine elf ears, bearing no resemblance to the Dumbo-flaps of chimpanzees, or cartoon-apes. They would not have been out of place on a young girl.
Her black eyes were the most human feature of all. Once I found the eyes, I could look nowhere else for some minutes. They returned my gaze on and off, shyly, lingering a little longer each time.
Clive and Stella waited, expectant but unhurried, not wanting to prompt—wanting their charge to speak, or sign, spontaneously.
Her eyes darted from one to the other, then back to me. She was still standing side-on, reluctant to face me completely; her gaze, steady now, seemed thoughtful and curious. There was still no sign of intelligence in her hands, no trace yet of any movement which could be interpreted as Sign.
I remembered the comments of the Washoe-sceptics: Washoe scratching her nose interpreted as a sign for ‘scratch’, Washoe poking a random finger in her mouth interpreted as the sign for ‘drink’.
Clive still waited, impassively, but Stella, more restless, could restrain herself no longer.
‘Good morning,’ she signed towards Eliza.
No response. Stella repeated the sign, a little more urgently. Her own signing was crude, rough around the edges, and too expansive; she was shouting, without realising it.
‘Perhaps she’s shy with strangers,’ I suggested, embarrassed.
‘You’re her first stranger.’
‘Then she’s probably terrified.’
Stella turned back to Eliza, her signing far too slow and far too loud, as if speaking to a parrot which refused to recite.
Those dark, glitter-black eyes looked from Stella to me, then slowly, reluctantly, the hands moved for the first time: ‘Good morning.’
I had been expecting her to sign, waiting for it—but the effect was still electrifying, beyond the full reach of expectation. It was as if a dog, a cat, a horse had suddenly spoken aloud.
Or was she merely a parrot after all? I tried desperately to contain that first surge of wonder, to keep an open mind. Surely those hand movements were merely a form of mimicry. Words without meaning.
I managed to find my own hands, and give back another version of ‘Hi!’: the Mother Hand saluting from the temple.
She copied the gesture, slowly—aped it, I still couldn’t help thinking—repeating the simple salute several times. Her hands were partly shielded by her body, the gestures minimal, a sign-whisper. Her palms were black and hairless; the fingers were short stumps, more thumbs than fingers; the thumb itself was more like a little finger, a slender appendage, set at an awkward angle to the hand. Her signing had the sense of someone speaking with a thick accent, or a speech impediment: a swollen tongue, or hare-lip.
Stella pointed at me, then slowly finger-spelt the letters of my name, in full: J-O-H-N J-A-M-E-S.
No response. Stella repeated the sequence, with reasonable accuracy.
The gorilla’s eyes found mine again, then slid quickly away. Stella’s hands continued to move, pleading for an answer; her foster-daughter retreated further into her corner, and finally, abruptly, turned her back.
‘You’re hectoring her,’ Clive admonished his wife, mildly.
‘I want J.J. to see.’
‘My dear, this is exactly what we decided not to do. She’s obviously not comfortable.’
‘She’s fine.’
‘She’s not fine.’
A strange thought came to me, watching that broad black back: that Eliza might feel embarrassed by her nakedness, sitting among the three of us, fully clothed.
‘Does she like to wear clothes?’
‘She does,’ Clive said. ‘But we think it demeaning. The effect is merely comical.’
Did he ever use the word comical without that qualifier: merely?
‘We let her dress up as an occasional treat,’ Stella added, quickly.
Of course Eliza was dressed, in a sense: clad in that thick glossy pelt. Her breasts were naked, and large-nippled, but seemed, in human terms, more masculine than feminine. Her genitals were totally hidden in hair. Surely she had no awareness of nakedness, of its social meaning. Had she sensed the embarrassment of humans in similar circumstances and appropriated the emotion without the proper cause? Or merely aped the signs, the body language, without either emotion or cause?
‘I suggest we expose her to your presence more gradually, J.J.,’ Clive said.
He paused, waiting; it took me some time to grasp the implication.
‘You want me to leave?’
‘I hope it doesn’t seem too rude, having just arrived. Eliza has the run of the house during the day. It’s very much her private space. It might be best if you come back tomorrow. My suggestion would be that we increase your contact time a little each day.’
One last argument from Stella: ‘But he doesn’t believe us, Clive. We need him to believe.’
‘I’ve an open mind,’ I said. ‘I’m happy to come back tomorrow.’
In truth, my mind had closed, my opinions hardened. I would return partly out of curiosity and partly for the sake of friendship, but the sense of wonder, the sense of something new and astonishing that had filled me when she first entered the room had faded. The hard facts were surely these: those thick animal hands, those paws, might ape the odd hand-shape, but were incapable of putting sense to the shapes, let alone linking shapes into fluent Sign.
Eliza turned her head slightly, watching from the corner of her eye.
‘You sign goodbye,’ Stella urged, with her hands.
Eliza ignored her, wedged in the corner, unmoving. I felt the stirrings of sympathy; her destiny was beyond her control, whether she could speak of this or not. She looked distinctly human, especially in the delicacy of her facial features: a cross-species, cross-primate childishness. She was almost adult sized, but her face was surely not the face of an adult gorilla. Her forehead was less protruding, her head disproportionately larger and more rounded—a child’s big head.
Stella repeated the request, more sternly in English: ‘Say goodbye, Eliza.’
‘Perhaps that’s enough for today,’ Clive murmured.
As we turned away, the ape finally raised her palm.
‘There!’ Stella said. ‘Did you see that?’
I smiled reassuringly, but she seemed merely to be brushing away a fly.
Clive carefully locked the front door after us, Stella pulled on her muddy work boots, the two of them walked me through the trees to the first gate. If Clive was disappointed, he wasn’t saying; Stella’s disappointment was all too clear in her forced, jollying tone of voice and in the nervous puffing of her cigarette.
We passed through the gate and out into open paddock. Various grazing animals lifted their heads and began moving in our direction.
‘She’s just a little shy, J.J. When she gets to know you you’ll be amazed.’
My curiosity had turned from the question of whether Eliza could sign, to more mundane matters. ‘How did you get your hands on her?’
‘We rescued her.’
‘Stole her,’ Clive corrected.
‘She’s stolen?’
He felt the need to be even more precise: ‘Abducted might be a better choice of word.’
We halted at the second, outer gate. I waited, hoping for more clues; their eyes met, deciding. The three-legged deer arrived, hobbling with surprising speed, and nuzzled at Stella’s hands; she fished a treat from a crevice in her overalls.
‘Eliza was a laboratory animal, J.J.,’ she said.
Clive filled in the details. ‘We had reports of a company in Melbourne working with primates. Rhesus macaques mostly. The usual horror stories.’
‘Which company?’
‘It’s probably best if you don’t know the name. Let’s just say that one of the primatologists became disenchanted.’
‘An attack of the guilts,’ Stella said.
More animals arrived; Stella, distracted, knelt among the nuzzling, bunting noses, distributing sugar cubes and caresses and words of love. She knew each invalid by name; as she whispered into ears and rubbed noses she seemed, momentarily, one of them herself, a warmhearted mother-mammal, wide-mouthed and big-breasted, distributing love like milk.
Clive, thinner, more cold-blooded, ignored the gathering menagerie.
‘The primatologist in question was a former student of mine.’
‘You trained him well.’
He shrugged. ‘We kept in touch over the years. He didn’t like what was happening.’
‘What was happening?’
‘Foetal surgery. I’m not sure I did train him well, J.J. The principles of the research didn’t seem to bother him—more the methods. Lack of adequate anaesthesia. And the fact that the research was moving up from rhesus macaques to great apes, getting too close to home.’
Stella glanced up, half-hidden in the press of big twitchy ears and furry heads. ‘One night he took Eliza home—and didn’t take her back.’
‘He stole a two-hundred pound gorilla?’
She laughed. ‘She was a bit smaller then.’
‘What about the police?’
‘The, ah, abduction hasn’t been reported to the police.’
She turned back to her friends, allowing me time to process this news. Once again it was Clive who filled in the gaps. ‘The company are still lying low. The last thing they want is publicity. It’s become very difficult to experiment with primates in the current climate.’
‘For which we like to think we can take some of the credit,’ Stella said.
Clive waved his hand dismissively, the allocation of credit was of no importance to him. ‘The company had an import licence for macaques, but not in a million years would they be granted permission to house a gorilla. The Federal Police would be very interested in their activities.’
‘So you could dob them in to the police? Or whoever.’
‘National Parks and Wildlife. There is a watchdog body, the Vertebrate Pest Control Committee. The police act on their advice. If we turn the company in, we turn ourselves in. Eliza will be taken from us and put in a zoo. There’s a gorilla colony in Melbourne—and that’s the last place we want her.’
‘Why? Surely she would be happier among her own.’
‘We are her own,’ he said, patiently.
Stella stood up abruptly, less patient, more indignant. The animals shied away from her, startled.
‘J.J.—you’ve met her. You’ve talked with her! And you want to put her in a zoo? A jail?’
Chastened, I passed through the gate; they followed. The autumn sun was high and hot, an Indian summer sun, beating down, an actual physical pressure on the face and head; I felt in need of the ocean.
‘This company,’ I asked, a last parting question. ‘What kind of foetal surgery were they doing?’
Another barely perceptible exchange of glances; Clive elected to answer: ‘As I said, J.J., it might be best if
you didn’t know the full story, at least for the time being. The legal position is unclear.’
Stella said: ‘If she is stolen, we would be in possession of stolen goods. You would be an accessory.’
‘I prefer to think of her as an illegal immigrant,’ Clive said, ‘rather than goods.’
‘A political refugee?’ Stella suggested, less seriously.
We reached the car; I fumbled in my pockets for the keys. Clive grasped my forearm, gently: ‘Once again we would ask that you keep our confidence. Not a word of this to anyone—please. Can we rely on you?’
I nodded, but felt the need to add: ‘I don’t know that I can give any long-term guarantees.’
2
Had Eliza raised her hand to wave goodbye? Perhaps, but what did a single hand-shape prove? Glancing back through these pages, at the cartoon shapes I’ve sketched here and there among the words, I sense I’ve still failed to make one thing clear. To repeat: Sign is no mere pantomime of see-through shapes. My sketches are the figures of a crude alphabet, nothing more; they cannot pretend to be a language.
Granted, these single signs are more natural than the letters of an alphabet; most have a clear mime-meaning, a particular resonance and beauty. But the sum of language is always greater than the parts. The parts become irrelevant. The last thing on a native signer’s mind is the beauty, or even the meaning, of each separate sign.
In fluent hands the language becomes smoothed out, more stylised; the printed block letters of the child’s alphabet become the flowing script of adult cursive.
These thoughts preoccupied me as I drove away—thoughts stained by a sense of disappointment. Distracted, I found myself heading the wrong way on Greenhill Road, driving further into the Hills. I didn’t turn back. The sun shone; the compact glasshouse of the car trapped and magnified its warmth; I soon felt pleasantly baked. The rhythms of the car engine massaged me gently to and fro, my mood slowly lifted. I chugged on through wooded valleys and over sunburnt ridges until the country began to flatten again; the car struggled to the top of a last small rise and I found myself looking down over an immense plain. The Murray River glittered in the distance, a meandering silver ribbon as far as the eye could see; I wished that I had brought my wetsuit, and considered, momentarily, swimming without it.
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