Instead I pulled to the side of the road, tilted back my seat and slept for a time, overcome by drowsiness. I dreamed that I was walking on the beach at home, wading in the shallows. A commotion disturbed the water: two whales roared out of the surf like locomotives and beached themselves each side of me. They spouted steam. Their hides were as thick as rhino-hide, scarred and barnacle-encrusted. Their low-set eyes, positioned near the corners of their huge mouths, were blinking, swivelling frantically about, looking at each other, looking at me. Their lips twitched, moving rapidly as if mouthing words—but no sound emerged.
No whale-moo; no sonar-squeak.
As I stared at those twitching lips, inspiration struck; the secret of whale communication. Of course! Whales lip-read! It seemed so obvious, why hadn’t I seen it before? Their eyes were positioned near the corners of their mouths to allow them to watch their own lips as well as the next whale’s—to hear themselves, in a sense, speak.
It seemed a major breakthrough, I knew that it would make me world famous. ‘Known-everywhere.’ The problem was: I couldn’t understand what the whales were saying. It must have been important, a message they had beached themselves to tell me, had given their lives so that they could tell me.
I’ve never learnt to lip-read. Born with a pair of working ears, it’s a skill I’ve never needed. I stared at those violently twitching lips without the slightest inkling of their meaning.
3
Eliza was wedged in the same corner when Stella ushered me into the living room the next morning, a black Buddha, immobile and impassive. Had she been squatting on her haunches all night? At least she had turned her back to the wall and was now facing the door. I had the impression that she was waiting, for me.
‘J-O-H-N J-A-M-E-S,’ she finger-spelt, slowly, and turned to Stella, seeking approval.
Stella smiled, smugly—but to me, nothing was proved. Perhaps they had spent the night in parrot-work.
I pointed to Eliza, and raised my eyebrows: ‘You…?’
She sat, motionless. I glanced back to Stella, my turn for smugness. And then, in the corner of my eye, without warning, came the first small miracle; I turned in time to catch the last letters in a sequence: Z-A-K-I-N-N-E-A-R. The various letters were misshapen, but her hand movements were rapid, the most rapid finger-spelling I’d seen—a fast-forward blur, the hands of a pianist playing some difficult, closing passage.
Astonishment, extinguished the day before, flared inside me again. If the movement of her hands was merely a form of aping, then it was a very superior aping. Lost for words, lost for signs, I retreated into the banality of speech.
‘Longwinded name for a gorilla.’
Stella answered: ‘Clive believes the usual clown names—Koko, Bobo, that kind of thing—are too undignified.’
‘Circus names,’ he confirmed.
‘Sign again,’ Stella signed in the direction of Eliza.
She watched us, suspiciously. Was there also a hint of resentment in those sharp, black eyes? Her name might not be a circus name but she was still expected to perform tricks.
Stella finger-spelt again—E-L-I-Z-A-K-I-N-N-E-A-R—and Eliza copied again, in full, the same rapid blur of finger-spelling, although it still took far longer, of course, than the words, spoken.
I signed an ‘E’. And added a ‘you’—the Point Hand, aimed.
She watched, puzzled.
‘Short name,’ I explained, in Sign, not expecting her to follow the argument, but not knowing what else to do.
‘Short’ was even beyond Clive and Stella. I tried a more universal shape, the Hook Hand pincers of ‘little’:
‘Waste time—not,’ I added.
She copied my movements fluently, without the speech-impediment of her earlier hand-shapes. A realisation: the slurring of her sign-speech had nothing to do with odd hand anatomy, or the limitations of ape intelligence. She had merely copied, faithfully, whatever she had been taught. Her teacher or teachers had not been native signers.
There was still no evidence of anything beyond aping, however—no evidence of comprehension.
I said aloud: ‘If she can sign, and I’m not saying yet that I believe she can, then she should have a sign-name.’
Blank stares this time from Clive and Stella: please-explain.
I tried: ‘A single sign—or two. A pet name.’
‘She’s not a pet,’ Clive insisted, always the literalist.
I conceded the semantic point. ‘Bad choice of words. I meant, she should have a family name. A nickname. For ease of signing. Something simple.’
They waited for suggestions.
‘For example, Mink,’ I said, and shaped the fur-coat sign.
Stella was horrified. ‘You want to call her after the skin of a dead animal!’
I said quickly: ‘No hurry. Another name will come to us. Something that’s right for her, something that fits.’
In the corner E. was motionless again, watching, waiting. Her broad black hands rested in her lap; no amount of pleading from Stella could coax further movements from them. We had taxed her enough for the day, Clive suggested.
I waved from the door, this time the answering gesture of her hand was unmistakably ‘goodbye’, if merely the goodbye of a parrot.
Once again she turned to Stella for approval; I wondered, not for the first time, what pressure she was under to perform.
Stella’s goodbyes were far more meaningful: disappointment attempting to hide beneath its opposite, false enthusiasm. She talked me all the way to the gate, pushing her way through the cluster of following animals. I waded after her through the herd; as we reached the gate she stopped and turned and beat her fist against her forehead, a now-familiar part of her repertoire.
‘In all the excitement I forgot the video,’ she said to Clive.
‘Shall I get it, my dear?’
‘I’ll get it.’
We waited for her return, leaning against the outer gate. The animals kept their distance; they seemed to have no affinity for Clive, their chief defender and spokesman in the human world. I found the sudden silence awkward, but Clive seemed relaxed, unfazed. He wasn’t the kind who wasted words; he spoke only when he had something to say. The summer sun poured its warmth over our heads like heavy oil, but I resisted making small talk on the weather. Small talk, I suspected, might quickly grow into a long lecture on isobars, rainfall patterns, computer simulations of the El Nino effect.
Stella reappeared waving a boxed video-cassette.
‘We shot this last night,’ she said. ‘If you are having doubts about being part of the project, I’m sure this will convince you.’
I felt no urgency to view the video. I doubted it would reveal anything I hadn’t already seen; an extra circus trick or two perhaps. I spent the afternoon at the Institute, conquering a mountain of paperwork. At home, after dinner, I watched an ethnic telemovie with my parents, an Indian version of Romeo and Juliet, in Hindi. A Muslim Romeo, a Hindu Juliet, against a background of elephants and marble palaces, with English subtitles. I sat, as of old, on a cushion on the floor. My father’s toes prodded my back from time to time, wanting to know who was speaking to whom, or what was happening off-camera. A happy ending, no one died, my parents went to bed smiling. As soon as their door was closed I slipped Stella’s video into the machine and pressed Play, but without expectation.
I felt exhausted, ready for bed myself; I watched through heavy lids. It might have been shot by the same Hindi filmmaker—there were no subtitles, but the jerky hand-held tracking and poorly focused images were characteristic. Stella’s urging voice filled the soundtrack, as expected; her hands frequently appeared, close-up, in the corner of the screen, prompting, offering examples to be imitated.
Eliza was the central subject, crouched in her corner, offering vague, uninterested hand-shapes in reply. I wandered into the kitchen, set a saucepan of milk on the gas ring for cocoa, keeping half an eye on the television screen through the door. I almost missed it. Ther
e among the parrot-imitations, the indifferent shrugs and refusals, came a sign-series of sudden clarity, repeated several times, rapidly:
‘S-T-E-L-L-A go. Me sleep. S-T-E-L-L-A go. Me sleep…’
Sleep: the universal sleep-mime, or sweet-dreams-mime; the head tilted slightly, pillowed by the Flat Hand.
I was instantly alert, roused, paradoxically, by that sign for sleep, a clearly intended message. I hurried back into the television room, eyes glued to the screen, and witnessed an even more startling message. Eliza pointed angrily to the camera, to Stella, then shaped a Spoon Hand and cupped it to her buttocks, an impromptu scoop. Her own invention, surely, but the meaning was clear:
‘You—shit!’
I paused the tape, stunned; rewound, and replayed that sequence several times, disbelieving: You—shit!
There could be no mistake. Her black hands had shaped that insult with clear intent, had hurled it in Stella’s direction as deliberately and accurately as her cousins in zoos might toss the substance itself through their bars.
After such excitement, what price sleep? I pulled on my wetsuit, and floated, mesmerised, in the sea for a good two hours, replaying that expression in my mind’s eye. To the best of my knowledge Eliza had spoken the first symbolic utterance—the first poem—ever created by another species.
4
On a whim, I stopped the car at a shopping mall the next morning and bought a handful of fresh asparagus sticks. A nearby florist gift-wrapped the bunch, under sufferance, in a cone of green crepe paper, fastened with a dab of tape. Her sarcasm—‘Who’s the lucky lady?’—proved contagious; the bunch looked merely comical, sitting on the passenger seat as I drove up into the Hills. I ripped off the crepe sheath as I climbed from the car at the farm gate, and was tempted to bin the entire bunch.
But what gift do you offer to an eight-year-old gorilla? A banana? Asparagus was my only clue.
I pressed the intercom; Stella’s voice crackled through the speaker, a sound that lifted, as always, the head of every animal within earshot.
‘Push, J.J., it’s open.’
I shoved the asparagus deep in my coat pocket and passed through the gate. The animals bent again to their dry stubble breakfast, ignoring me. I skirted the dam to the second gate, and entered amongst the trees. Magpies warbled, bees hummed, thick columns of sunlight fell between and through the foliage, another glorious morning.
Stella was sitting on the edge of the verandah, sandwiched between dogs. Her overalls and work boots were spattered with fresh mud; she had been working around the dam. The inevitable cigarette was jammed between her lips, her eyes were screwed half-shut against the smoke.
‘Top of the morning to you, J.J.’
‘And to you.’
‘You watched the video?’
I nodded; she smiled confidently, sensing my change of heart, unlaced her boots, kicked them off, and led me inside.
‘I have a good feeling about today,’ she murmured.
Eliza was wedged in her favourite corner, waiting. I pulled the asparagus stalks from my pocket and offered them; she stared at the limp bunch for a long moment, then slowly toppled forward and rolled towards me—a single somersault. Upright again—there was something inherently stable, or self-righting, about that low centre-of-gravity shape—she took the bunch.
‘Thank you,’ she signed with her free hand, a clearly intended meaning.
Clive, watching, held out his own hand. ‘Lunch,’ he said to Eliza, and simultaneously shaped a simple sandwich mime, clearly well practised. The bunch was reluctantly handed over; he turned to me with a mild rebuke: ‘She’s just eaten breakfast, J.J. We don’t encourage snacks between meals.’
Eliza was watching me, intently; I felt the need to defend myself, to defend both of us. Perhaps that rebuke could form the basis for some kind of alliance.
‘I would have thought that gorillas would be snacking all the time in the wild. Constantly grazing.’
He nodded. ‘A necessity when food-gathering is time and labour-intensive. It’s a different matter in captivity—too often it leads to problems of obesity.’
He intended no slight; there wasn’t a malicious bone in his body. At some later date I might suggest to him that the problems of abstinence and self-denial might be as great as the problems of obesity, but for now I bit my tongue. Eliza began signing again, in the corner of my eye. Her slurred, inexact hand movements were difficult to follow, moving too rapidly; her dark hands were still held shyly, close to her body, only partly visible.
The odd anatomy of those black hands also had a distracting effect, the message obscured by the medium.
‘Slow down,’ I suggested, right forefinger tracing left forearm, snail-pace.
She didn’t recognise the sign. I showed her a see-through alternative: left palm an accelerator pedal, right fist a foot, lifted, slightly. Clearly she had driven in cars; the speed of her hands instantly slowed. The room seemed suddenly filled with her scent, a now-familiar mustiness, sweetly pungent, released, surely, by excitement.
I managed to read sense into her hands the third time: ‘Sign me name you.’
The syntax was ponderous—mispronounced Sign grafted onto English word order, with finger-spelling thrown in. A faithful copy of something badly taught, or a spontaneous question?
‘Sign your name, J-O-H-N J-A-M-E-S.’
More comprehensible the second time, but also more redundant—a question that contained its own answer. Did she have less understanding of these sign transactions than I was beginning to think, or hope?
‘Short name,’ she signed, clearly. ‘Quick name.’
My pulse missed a beat. Short name I had shown her previously, but the jointing of quick and name was new, not copied from me. Here, without question, was proof that she was thinking as she signed. I turned to Stella. Smug triumph was written on her face, loudly. Even Clive’s tight lips wore an expression of suppressed pride.
Eliza simplified the question further, as if speaking to a child, or someone too thick to understand: ‘Me—E. You—J.?’
I finally found my hands: ‘J.J.’
Her excitement was clear, though more in the jumpy restlessness of her body than in any facial expression. And in that scent, overwhelmingly pungent. Her gaze remained steady, as if she wanted to miss nothing, yet she still sat a little side-on in her corner, her hands difficult to read.
I showed her my sign-name: Sweet-Tooth. She copied, instantly. I told her that I was pleased to meet her—in sign, literally ‘well met’.
She returned the pleasantry, several times, each time with increasing speed, and with perfect hand-shape.
‘Sign more,’ she demanded, with urgency. ‘Sign more. You sign me!’
To me, these events still had a weird, dreamy feel. I was half stunned; nothing but the standard adult-to-child noises came to mind, or to hand. What’s-your-name? Where-do-you-live?
‘How old you?’ I asked: literally how-many-you?
Did she understand the concept of age, of years? She held up eight fingers, and asked the question back.
I signed ‘too old’, using the eloquent shape for old age: the Two Hand sketching imaginary age-lines on the face, plus a mournful hang-dog expression. She laughed for the first time, a kind of soft, throaty cluck. From a human mouth it would have sounded forced and unnatural.
She signed: ‘Too old—not.’
Her first grin was as disconcerting as her laughter, more a baring of teeth, unsmiling.
‘A crowd of years,’ I signed back; she seemed puzzled, I altered a word: ‘A crowd of birthdays,’ and she grinned again, understanding.
The smile might have looked inhuman, but there was human joy in the deep blackness of those eyes; they shone with the exhilaration of each new discovery.
‘Show me your hands,’ I signed.
She rested them gently in mine; I was able to inspect them closely for the first time. They were longer than human hands: a mix of soft hairless leather, and hai
r—fur—in all the wrong places. She could oppose the tiny thumb and thick forefinger, but I doubted the thumb would reach her little finger. Her hands were a different instrument, a different voice.
‘Beautiful hands,’ I signed.
‘Too crowds of hair,’ she signed, and improvised, or incorporated, another word by pointing at the thick shag-pile carpet on which we stood. ‘Carpet-hands.’
I laughed, half-amused, half-astounded, at the joke, and signed back: ‘Warm hands. Expressive hands.’
Then she did something even more astonishing. Both her hands were resting in mine, but another hand, a third hand—more elongated, differently shaped—appeared between the others, signing.
‘Hello, Sweet-Tooth!’
I stepped back; she was standing on her left foot, laughing; her right foot was deftly tapping her front tooth with its big-toe-cum-thumb.
I dropped her hands and clapped.
‘We don’t like to clap her,’ Clive said. ‘Or reward her with food. She’s not performing tricks.’
There was no rebuke in his tone, merely the usual matter-of-fact statement.
‘But she’s just a child,’ I said. ‘We reward children for learning. For innovation.’
‘She’s not strictly a child,’ he said. ‘She’s eight. Sixteen or seventeen in human years. She menstruates. She comes into oestrus each month. She’s a fully grown, mature female gorilla.’
Sweet sixteen. I looked at her; she watched me back, refusing to avert her eyes, waiting to see more, learn more.
‘More signs,’ she signed, and thumped her right foot, her third hand, impatiently against the carpet. ‘More signs. Now!’
Wish Page 10