‘Thank you,’ she signed, placed her palm over her heart, and added in English, ‘that’s very beautiful.’
Beautiful: a smooth blend of ‘good’ and ‘face’; I demonstrated the hand-shapes.
‘That sign is beautiful too,’ she said.
Wish practised the new names, brow furrowed. I remembered something Jill had once told me—that we learn a new word every forty minutes from the age of one. Wish had a lot of catching up to do. I picked out other nearby objects, linked them into simple phrases—more word-strings than sentences—she handled these with ease. Her mind was a sponge; I supplied the flow of signs, she soaked them up, effortlessly. I was still guilty of speaking Motherese, a grammarless language. See the bottle. Baby want drink? Wish clearly deserved more than baby-talk. I introduced a simple subordinate clause, she grasped the concept instantly. I showed her several verb modifiers, building phrases from her existing vocabulary. I showed her the inflections that Sign uses to indicate tense, subtle forward movements into the future, backwards movements into the past.
Too much, too soon? I found it impossible to pace myself; her mind seemed to have been waiting for such knowledge.
Which meant what for the notion—a favourite of Jill’s—that we humans have a unique grammatical structure wired into our brains, an inbuilt language machine, peculiar only to us? Were there also reserved parking spaces in the gorilla brain for these simple rules of grammar?
Time flew as swiftly as ever; the world about us baked in the summer sun. There were beads of sweat on Wish’s black brow, charmingly human. The shadows of the trees moved across the grass; several times the sleeping dogs woke and struggled to their feet, and shifted, following the sun. After an hour or two Stella fetched a tray of cold drinks and sandwiches from the house; otherwise we sat impervious to the heat, insulated, or shaded, by our total absorption in Sign. The shadows were long, the sun almost gone when Clive’s wristwatch bleeped, and he rose from his seat.
‘Medicine time,’ he announced.
Wish screwed up her face, clearly recognising the spoken word.
‘What medicine?’ I asked.
Clive explained: ‘She takes various diet supplements. And a dose of cortisone each day. If she misses her dose it could be very dangerous.’
‘Cortisone?’
‘She was born with no adrenal glands,’ Stella added, then changed the subject. ‘Maybe you could teach us the sign for medicine, J.J.?’
A Bad Hand shape, the pestle of the little finger stirring an imaginary mortar. Wish mimicked my hands exactly, so enamoured with the symbol that she momentarily forgot her distaste for the thing itself.
‘Bad medicine,’ she signed, a visual pun with the Bad Hand, and laughed her odd purring laugh. Joy flared inside me again, a surge of pleasure and excitement.
Clive tapped his watch; a message aimed more at me than at Wish. Time to go. Time to take my medicine, the end of the lesson, and another afternoon’s adventure.
‘Tomorrow,’ I signed to Wish. Then added in English, signing an exact word-by-word transcription of the phrase as I spoke: ‘Same time, same place.’
I still wasn’t sure how much speech she understood—a few words, certainly, probably even more. It seemed sensible to attempt to develop both senses, listening and signing.
Stella and Clive walked me to the gate; Wish, after a long farewell hug, a filibustering hug aimed at preventing my departure, remained reluctantly behind the tree line, out of sight.
Stella was gushing; too preoccupied with the subject of Wish to spare more than a passing glance at the animals clustering about her: ‘An amazing transformation, J.J. Her whole attitude has changed overnight. I can tell you that these last few months haven’t been easy. Her moods have been bleak, to say the least.’
Clive demurred. ‘They haven’t been that bad, my dear.’
‘You wouldn’t notice,’ she told him, and turned to me: ‘Clive tends not to see what she feels—only what she says. Signs.’
‘I am always cautious about ascribing human emotions to her. She is an animal, after all.’
Stella, flushed with the success of the day, loose-tongued, laughed, mockingly. ‘Clive doesn’t believe in emotions.’
I sensed more than a hint of genuine grievance beneath the teasing banter.
‘I believe in emotions,’ he said, smoothly. ‘I just don’t trust them.’
‘You’re a cold fish,’ she said. ‘You’ve got a brain like a squid.’
Her face was still glowing with pleasure—but other, different emotions also seemed close to the surface. I hate marital discord, mine and others. Perhaps mine has sensitised me to others, perhaps oversensitised me—it was possible that this was still a joky, stylised game. Clive liked at times to play the role of pedant, sending himself up, forestalling criticism. But it felt more serious; it certainly made me feel uncomfortable. I tried to shift the focus back to Wish.
‘She’s been difficult to live with?’
Stella answered: ‘Moody more than difficult. Up one minute, down the next. The first weeks were wonderful—there were so many new things to do, to see. She’d been cooped up in a laboratory all her life. After a few weeks she seemed to get bored. Or maybe just lonely. She’d sit up in the tree-house for hours. There was only so much that she could communicate to us.’
Clive intervened: ‘We became bored too, Stell. I think she sensed that.’
Stella shrugged. ‘Maybe. Whatever—now there’s a new enthusiasm.’
The smaller of her ancient horses, frustrated by her lack of attention, gave her a sharp nip on the elbow. She turned, smiling, fossicking in her pocket for cubes of sugar.
‘Mummy’s been ignoring you, hasn’t she? You were quite right to remind me.’
The animals, encouraged, jostled about, separating her from Clive and me. We reached the outer gate; with Wish out of sight, I could once again raise matters that were unmentionable in her presence.
‘One thing puzzles me. All these great apes that were taught to sign—Washoe, Koko, Lucy, Nim Chimsky—none remotely approached what is happening here.’
‘You’ve been doing your homework.’
‘A little. Their vocabularies were a few hundred signs at most. Their grammar was minimal, almost non-existent. Sentences of no more than two, three words. And these were mostly repetitions of what a trainer would say.’
Stella called across the feeding multitude: ‘Maybe Eliza—Wish—is a genius among gorillas.’
Clive added: ‘There was enormous variation among those apes, J.J. Some couldn’t manage to memorise a single sign.’
‘Some couldn’t sign boo to a goose.’
Stella laughed a little too loudly at her own joke. Clive kept the conversation moving under cover of that laughter, chatting about my plans for tomorrow as I climbed into the car. Their different body languages—her loud laughter and his tact—were telling me the same thing, that the high intellectual ability of Wish was a sensitive subject. I wondered, as I drove away, if I was getting the full story.
7
Unfamiliar smells saturated my mother’s small kitchen; a new cookbook stood propped in a clear perspex stand on the bench. Vegetarian Cookery.
‘I help?’
She shook her head: ‘Too many cooks.’
I gathered together my library books and sat at the kitchen table, reading and jotting notes, as she worked. Her hands were busy with bowls and implements; conversation would come later, during dinner. I pored over the illustrations again; the sense that something was wrong with Wish still tugged at me, a sense of unease. The shape of her head seemed more human than those of her wild relatives, her forehead had greater depth, her brow was less protuberant. The juvenile gorillas in the photographs shared that same human look: larger head relative to body, higher brow, smaller jaw, bigger eyes—and more delicate features. Wish, at eight years old, fully mature, weighing more than most adult humans—weighing almost as much as me—appeared to my untrained eye to be a
much younger gorilla.
Another problem: I was studying photographs. Stills. They had been edited, carefully selected to illustrate certain traits, more or less human, such as ferocity, cuteness, curiosity, signs of intelligence. They surely bore as little relation to a living gorilla as the hand-shapes I have sketched on these pages bear to Sign. I needed to study apes in the flesh, moving, breathing, eating—even beating their chests, signing their own collective noun, introducing themselves, in a sense.
My mother leant over my shoulder to examine my books, set down her egg-whisk and beat her own fists against her small chest, amused.
‘Research,’ I tried to explain. ‘Take Rosie to zoo Sunday-next.’
A plausible excuse. My daughter is a relentless source of questions, a machine that fires question after question. Tennis-Ball-Machine, I once nicknamed her.
‘You visit zoo Sunday-past.’
‘Saw apes not. Rosie wishes,’—I found myself, ungrammatically, using the Wish Hand—‘to look apes.’
‘You spoil Rosie.’
‘School project.’
A bald lie, followed by an omission. I failed to tell her that the zoo I planned to visit with Rosie Sunday-next was seven hundred miles away, in Melbourne. There were chimps aplenty in Adelaide, and orang-utans—but no gorillas.
How to get there? Alone, I would have cheerfully driven, I love long-distance driving, but a day cooped in a car would stretch my daughter’s patience. I rose from the table, riffled through the phone book, lifted the receiver and dialled. My mother watched, suspiciously; she has a nose for these things.
‘Phone who?’
Another lie: ‘Saint.’
I turned to the wall, shielding my lip movements from view. Even as I booked the seats—one adult, one child, return flight, Sunday morning—an easier alternative occurred to me: film footage. I cancelled the booking, recalling a movie I had watched, and translated for my parents, a few months before.
I hung up, turned and signed to my mother: ‘Film with gorillas. Remember?’
She was seeding black olives; she set down the knife.
‘Gorillas in fog,’ she signed back.
‘I borrow that movie tonight?’
‘I see it—before.’
‘See twice? See again?’
She shook her head: ‘Too depressing.’
Depression: the Flat Hand pressing down on the Point Hand.
‘Very important,’ I signed back.
‘Ask Father,’ she signed, stalling. ‘Maybe watch football tonight.’
I couldn’t ask; he was working late. Miraculously, a teletype apology arrived mid-meal, announcing that he wouldn’t be home for some hours. We ate dinner facing each other across the narrow table, but signing little. My mother was clearly on high alert, studying me intently, but trying to hide her concern.
‘Yummy,’ I signed, Flat Hand rubbing belly, circular motion, as if I hadn’t a care in the world.
After washing the dishes I set out for the local video-shop. The evening was clear and mild, the sun about to dunk itself in the gulf to the west. Not a breath of wind stirred the air, the sea was smooth and flat and tea-milky, as far from the undulating wave-mime for ‘sea’ as it’s possible to get. Sign also has a shape for calm seas, the same Flat Hand smoothing motion that is used for ‘floor’. The sea that night was a grey flat floor, stretching to the far wall of the sky. I turned down the beach steps on impulse, sat on the bottom step, pulled off my shoes and socks and dabbled my bare toes in the cool sand. I felt another rush of contentment, a sweet exhaustion in the aftermath of the day’s excitements.
A large warning sign was fixed to a pole set in the sand at the base of the steps; a dozen red, diagonally barred circles contained silhouettes of activities forbidden on the beach. The prohibition was comprehensive. No Dogs. No Motorbikes. No Alcohol—a stylised, slightly opaque beer bottle. I studied the list, diverted by its simple Sign-Esperanto. Bicycles were forbidden. Littering—a hand casting away a scrunched food wrapping—was forbidden. Diving from the jetty was forbidden. Scattering burley from the jetty was forbidden. It seemed there wasn’t much left to do on the Glenelg foreshore.
Gorillas were not specifically forbidden. I wondered, idly, if Wish had ever seen the sea, except in books, and what she would make of it. It warmed me in the cooling twilight to imagine her excitement, even though I knew, more deeply, that such a visit was impossible.
At length I pulled on my shoes and climbed the steps. The video-shop was empty, Gorillas in the Mist was sitting among the Recent Releases; I claimed it.
‘You have anything else with gorillas in it?’
The manager, watching a new release on a monitor, resentful of the interruption, ran a scanner over my borrowing-card without looking. ‘Tried King Kong?’
My father was eating dinner when I arrived home. The stench of grilled pork sausages filled my nose the moment I entered the house; nestled on his plate they looked like a litter of blind, newborn piglets. He watched me suspiciously from across his meat, he had clearly been discussing me with my mother, my new food fad, my gorilla obsession. I showed him the spine of the video-cassette; he scanned the title, briefly, gave me another odd look, then pointed to himself: ‘Early bed.’
I watched the movie after my mother had also gone to bed, fast-forwarding the human-only scenes, freezing, frame by frame, the ape sequences. Was Wish the same species? She possessed the same nobility—the same presence—as the adult females and big silverback males on that small screen, but she lacked their fearsome appearance. She was unmistakably finer boned, less thickset, an overgrown child-ape. A thought: the apes in the movie were mountain gorillas, Gorilla gorilla beringei. Wish would surely come from the commoner western lowlands subspecies, Gorilla gorilla gorilla.
I had recently become expert in the classification of the species Gorilla.
I replayed certain crucial scenes again, and the more I watched, the more my suspicion became a certainty: the differences between Wish and her wild cousins were more than the subtle variations between subspecies.
8
‘But we went to the zoo last Sunday, Pop.’
‘We didn’t see all the animals.’
‘I saw all the animals I wanted to see.’
‘We didn’t see the monkeys, sweetheart.’
‘I hate monkeys. I hate those red bits. They always look so sore.’
‘You hate too many things, sweetheart. You should save your hate for more important things.’
My daughter looked up at me, incomprehendingly: ‘Like what?’
‘Oh—war. Pollution.’
I’ve never quite known how to talk to her. If I attempt to speak Child, she will invariably move into sophisticated mode, patronising me. If I speak to her as an adult, she will take refuge in Child; I find myself lecturing, talking down.
At times she still is a child. Beneath the smart talk, behind the precocious mouth, there are still glimpses of the little girl I loved inordinately as an infant.
‘Racial prejudice,’ I added. ‘Poverty. Double-bacon cheeseburgers.’
‘What?’
‘Just joking, sweetheart.’
She shook her head, and looked up at me from under her brow with tolerant contempt: ‘You’re heaps weird, Pop.’
I steered her, still protesting, through the front gate of the zoo and followed the winding path to the Primate Section. An ice-cream from the adjacent kiosk helped keep her moving, acting as a kind of lubricant.
The great apes were housed in a row of pits that were more giant squash courts than cages. Enclosed on three sides by high stucco walls, each pit was open at the front, separated from the viewing public by a stagnant moat and a low wire fence. A dead tree was set in concrete in the centre of the chimpanzee enclosure, surrounded, or perhaps supported, by a network of wooden scaffolding. A thick hemp rope hung from the topmost branch of the tree, dangling a huge tractor tyre several feet from the ground.
The big adult chimps we
re slumped here and there in various postures of apathy. They bore little resemblance to Wish, seeming less noble and more clown-like with their jug-handle ears and smaller, flat-topped skulls. Cartoon apes. The mid-size chimps were more active, poking straw stems into an artificial termite mound, sucking whatever reward—honey? sugar water?—had been secreted inside. The infants of the colony came closest to establishing some sort of family connection with Wish; full of cheeky energy and curiosity, not yet bored by their tiny, cramped world. The smallest and most human of the faces peered at me intently; on impulse I waved hello, the simple Flat Hand salute. Of course there was no reply, not even monkey-see-monkey-do mimicry.
Rosie rolled her eyes, and took a step away, distancing herself.
An identical enclosure next door contained several orang-utans; a huge single male was housed in a third, separate pit. The orangs seemed even less interested in my sign-greetings that the chimps.
‘Can I feed the monkeys, Pop?’
‘Apes, not monkeys. Monkeys have tails. And no, you can’t.’
Warning signs were posted everywhere: red-barred peanuts.
She tugged at my hand: ‘I hate the zoo. I want to see the Children’s Zoo.’
I resisted for a moment, studying the big orang-utan. A coat of orange-red matted dreadlocks covered his entire body; his eyes had a vacant drugged look. Rosie, still tugging at my hand, was chattering.
‘You’re not listening, Pop.’
‘I was trying to listen, sweetheart.’
‘Then what did I say?’
‘Sorry, darling—I was thinking.’
‘Your hands were moving,’ she said. ‘You were thinking out loud.’
‘What were my hands saying?’
‘Something about monkeys. And wishes.’
My own wish—for a visit to the zoo under different circumstances. With different company. I was imagining sharing those same sights and sounds and smells with Wish instead of with Rosie. What would she make of these great apes, her cousins, imprisoned in barren squash courts, bored out of their large brains?
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