Terry chuckled, and refilled her wineglass, encouraging her.
‘Surely you must have known the baby had a big head,’ I said.
‘A caesarean was planned. The mother went into premature labour: it was suddenly too late. The head got stuck. The foetal monitors were going haywire—we…’ there was a slight flicker in his gaze, a near-seamless correction ‘…they thought they might lose the baby. It came down to a simple choice, but everything happened in a hurry.’
‘The dumb mother was sacrificed for the smart child?’
‘Not deliberately. Fertile mature gorillas don’t grow on trees.’
I opened my mouth to ask another question but he held up his hand, smiling.
‘My turn, John. Fair’s fair.’
I nodded, granting the point, reluctantly.
‘Stella mentioned your experiments with music,’ he said. ‘I’d like to hear more.’
‘She strummed my guitar a few times. I wouldn’t call it an experiment…’
I sketched an outline of the guitar episode; Stella, more talkative as she drank more wine, coloured in the spaces. Later, still drinking steadily, she became suddenly less talkative, as if her blood alcohol had crossed some hair-trigger threshold from stimulation to sedation. After draining the last of the wine, she climbed the stairs, yawning, returning shortly with a pillow and folded quilt, and the news that our joint charge was sleeping peacefully.
‘I’m for bed,’ she said. She dumped the bedding on the couch, and turned to Terry. ‘The sofa okay?’
‘Fine. But I’m not tired. I’ll sit up for a few minutes.’
I watched this transaction, eagle-eyed, but could detect no hidden messages, or invitations—no cues for me to make myself scarce. I also wanted to sit and talk a little more. The day had been spent rolling in a heavy surf of emotions and ideas; I was exhausted, but not unpleasantly, beached in a tranquil aftermath.
Stella seemed reluctant to leave us alone, unchaperoned, as if fearing that more secrets might be shared. She urged us both again in the direction of bed, but finally trudged up the stairs alone. I made no move to follow. Bed seemed impossibly distant, the reward at the end of a long journey strewn with Herculean tasks: the climbing of stairs, the removal of heavy clothing, the emptying of a bladder, the brushing of too many teeth. Water-music carried down to us; the gurgling of bathroom pipes of various pitch, amplified by the drumskin of the ceiling; then, after some minutes, silence.
We faced each other, sunk deeply in ersatz-leather armchairs. The room, walled by bookshelves, had a distinctly clubbish atmosphere in the half-darkness—if I had known where Stella kept the port I would have filled two glasses. I was drawn again to the question of Terry’s motivation, his frank confession of amorality, a charge mitigated only partially by his admission of the lesser charge of sentimentality. He answered my questions, but briefly, wanting to take turns again, more interested in asking than answering.
‘I’ve told you enough of my secrets, John. Perhaps it’s time for you to tell me some of yours.’
My pulse lurched: did he suspect?
‘Wish is in oestrus,’ he said, bluntly. ‘I could smell it as soon as I walked into the house.’
He waited; finally I said: ‘I think you can guess.’
‘I’d rather hear it from you.’ His tone was neutral, uncritical—the tone, exactly, of his teacher and mentor, Clive.
‘It’s extremely embarrassing to talk about.’
‘Try me.’
A hesitation, a deep inhalation. ‘She…presented to me.’
The zoological term seemed safest; keeping the events in textbook discussion mode, positioning myself at a distance, less participant than observer. I restrained my hands, itching to provide illustrations.
Terry shrugged, unimpressed. ‘Haven’t you ever had your leg mounted by an aroused dog?’
‘I’m afraid it was more than that. This was specific to me.’
‘And you rebuffed her?’
‘Of course!’
He watched me, sceptically. Had there been too much protest in my ‘of course’? Was his eye trained at least partially by the study of Sign, made sensitive to the revelations of body language? His pronouncement came after several long seconds. ‘It’s happened before in primate institutions. It’s no big deal. Think of it as—a student crush.’
‘Is it normal for the student to shave off all her hair afterwards?’
He leant back in his chair, hands tucked behind his head. His pony-tail jutted between his clasped fingers, he toyed with it as he spoke, thinking aloud. ‘A student crush is not the best analogy. Clive would tell me I’m thinking too much in human terms. It’s probably more some sort of ritual thing—submission to the dominant male.’
I laughed, relieved. The notion was absurd.
‘I’m the dominant male?’
‘You are the biggest. No offence.’
‘None taken.’
‘You’re the silverback in this troop, John.’
He grinned, taken with the idea. I tried to joke my way free. ‘I know I’ve got a few grey hairs…’
‘It’s all a matter of size in the wild. Survival of the strongest genes. A female must always choose the strongest partner.’
‘Somebody should tell my ex-wife.’
Now I was getting close to secrets, to True Confessions—but he wasn’t listening, wasn’t remotely interested in Life-Before-Wish. He was already following another train of thought. ‘Adolescence is hard enough for humans—trying to reconcile thinking and feeling. Instinct versus social constraint. Imagine what it’s like for Wish—with a whole different set of instincts.’
‘What are you saying? Apes will be apes?’
‘The interesting thing about Wish presenting to you,’ he said, ‘is that gorillas are not a tournament species.’
‘What do you mean?’
A look half-mischievous, half-curious was written on his face. ‘Gorillas mate for life, John. The silverback has several females in his harem, but they are his and his alone. The males are not all in competition for one female, which is what I mean by a tournament species. Female gorillas are not promiscuous—like, say, chimps. Or humans.’
He smiled again.
‘I still don’t follow.’
‘If Wish has decided on you she may be heading for spinsterhood.’
I was silenced, half-convinced; he pressed on: ‘It might be best if you kept your distance, just for the time being. And maybe we should suspend your lessons.’
Antagonism, dormant since earlier in the day, flared in me again. ‘You want to suspend the teacher?’
‘We have to think this through very carefully. I was a little flippant at first—but it does have ramifications.’
‘I’ll need to think it through,’ I said. ‘The project means a lot to me.’
Wish means a lot to me, I wanted to say—but perhaps I had said it, implicitly.
‘Fine,’ he said. ‘I’m just an outsider now, looking in. I realise it would be a big sacrifice if you left the project. But we wouldn’t want this situation to get out of hand.’
I looked across the small room at him, his hands clasped behind his head, flipping his pony-tail up and down. It seemed he could read my thoughts.
‘Goodnight,’ he signed, then added in slow fingerspelling, a wry smile on his face: ‘S-I-L-V-E-R-B-A-C-K.’
I retreated into teacher-mode, showing him the quick way, the sign for ‘silver’—an elaborate ornamentation of the letter ‘s’ followed by a simple pat on the back. My own broad back.
Silverback. I repressed the deeper implications; there was something in the nickname that I liked, some implication of greybeard wisdom that appealed to vain parts of me.
‘Think of it as a kind of title,’ Terry said. ‘Like Duke. Or King.’
So much for wisdom. As I mounted the stairs to bed this last word resonated in my mind, mockingly: King of the Apes.
5
Not even the most fluent ha
nds could properly describe the events of the night that followed. As for words, I can only promise this: not to gloss over those events or smother them with euphemisms. What follows is central to this story—what follows is the story, in essence.
I lay in my bed, brooding. Terry’s words faded from notice, I could think of nothing but Wish, lying in the next room. Was she sleeping, as Stella had claimed? Her proximity excited me against my will; I felt again the tremble of arousal.
I rose and tugged on my wetsuit, refusing to accept the physiological fact. Shouldering my flippers, I tiptoed down the stairs. Terry was audible if not visible—a vague pale bundle on the couch, purring rhythmically. I slipped out of the house and through the trees. Three horses were drinking from the edges of the dam, they scattered before the lumbering creature that appeared from the trees, clad in black rubber, heading for the lagoon. I waded through the shallows with difficulty, my flippers retarded by the suck of soft mud; finally I was out of my depth, floating freely. Freshwater is less buoyant than brine; I floated, sunk to my top lip, breathing with difficulty, my nostrils barely millimetres above the mirror-smooth surface. The frigid water shrank my half-erection, but my thoughts remained aroused. With that name Silverback—that title—went certain duties, I argued with, and against, myself. Wish was, finally, my responsibility. We shared more than language; we also shared the nearest thing to a natural relationship in her life. It was to me that she must finally turn for advice, and leadership.
Not to mention love.
Swimming failed to relax me, there was something too yielding and unsupportive about the water. I waded from the dam after half an hour, leaving my right flipper stuck fast in the sludge, irretrievable. I sluiced my muddy feet beneath the garden hose, hung my wetsuit over the verandah rail, and sneaked into the house, shivering. The rhythm of Terry’s breathing didn’t falter as I crept upstairs. Stella’s door was shut; I towelled myself dry, pulled on a loose tracksuit, then unlocked and pushed open the door to Wish’s room. She was sleeping on her stomach, head facing the wall, arms folded beneath, haunches raised. Clive believed that her rhythms should be attuned to the natural cycle of light and dark; her windows were curtainless, her black-crepe skin silvered by moonlight. She had become a silverback herself, at least until the moon set. Her smell—that familiar sweet rankness—grew overwhelming as I approached.
As I knelt at the side of her bed she turned her head abruptly to face me, startling me; she had not been sleeping. Her broad head watched, waiting; it was my turn to act—to prove something.
‘Me sad. Come back. I miss you.’
Words, or signs, were not enough, it seemed. She turned her head back to the wall.
I reached out tentatively, and lightly stroked the dark scabbed mound of her shoulder; she shrugged off my hand, effortlessly.
It occurred to me that she was still embarrassed by her hairlessness—her nakedness. I stood and peeled off my tracksuit top, then my pants, balancing with difficulty on one foot, trying to pull off my jocks, feeling suddenly ridiculous. She turned her head again at the sound of my struggle in moonlight, and this time did not turn away. I stood bathed in moonlight; her eyes travelled over my naked body, pausing here and there, curiosity overcoming reticence. After a few moments she reached up a long arm and lightly brushed the hair on my chest. She seemed reassured to find a different kind of human surface, a surface that had more in common with hers, if only a few token body hairs. She gripped my shoulder and looked directly at me; I felt a rush of love.
She shifted her haunches a little, raised them higher, and a gust of her smell came to me; not her usual asparagus-musk, but the raw smell of heat, a hot universal woman-smell. I began to harden again. Her eyes left mine, moving down to watch this strange growth. This time I didn’t turn away. I stood by the bed, facing the curtainless window, clothed only in moonlight, fully aroused. I felt, for once in my life, beautiful: a giant of a man, a human silverback, in full sexual rut.
6
A childhood memory: emerging from bed one morning to find my parents huddled at the breakfast table, heads together, chortling over some newspaper article. I pushed my own head between theirs, curious, but my father quickly turned the page, and changed the subject. The newspaper vanished after breakfast and was never seen again—‘Sorry, Sweet-Tooth—wrap rubbish.’
I bought a copy from the newsagent en route to school, and spent the morning sitting in the sand on a windy beach, searching those big, fluttering pages for clues. I found only a brief mention of a court case involving a lonely farmer and his favourite ewe. It seemed more pitiful than obscene. The ewe had not been his first. He complained that he had been ‘widowed’ several times. Surely, he argued, the laws of bestiality should take this into account—the fate of all those who choose short-lived animals as their lovers. Multiple bereavement, he seemed to be arguing, was punishment enough. Years later, in the pages of some trashy men’s magazine, flipped through in a barbershop, I read of another case. This time the gender roles were reversed, female stripper and male Great Dane. The tone of both reports was more amused than serious—which is, Clive would surely argue, unfair to the animals. They are as much victims as any human victim, a crime against them is as serious as any human crime.
I lay down on the bed and wrapped my arms about Wish, but awkwardly, trying to keep the lower half of my body out of actual contact. She rolled suddenly onto her back and pulled me on top of her, the force of her great arms gentle, but irresistible. For the first time our lower halves came in contact, which meant the end of my resistance. I wanted suddenly to be inside her—not because of the thrill of a forbidden sexual act, but simply because I loved her. And yet somehow I couldn’t enter her in that position; our limbs did not seem to fit together, our body shapes were mismatched.
Perhaps it was my ineptitude; perhaps it had been too long. With Jill such hesitations would have caused instant deflation, but here, glowing with the warmth of Wish’s presence, her scent of her arousal filling my nose, I remained hard. She rolled onto her stomach again, raising her hindquarters.
The English word is ‘to mount’, ugly, loveless—veterinarian. ‘To cover’, likewise. Even Sign offers no help. I was slitting my throat certainly—but the shape is imprecise, non-specific. I need to be exact. The various permutations of the sexual act in Auslan are merely two-handed mimes of whatever position is used. The left hand plays the part of one partner, the right hand the other. Index and middle-finger become a pair of legs, the left hand can ‘mount’ the right from behind, or face to face, or inverted head between legs. A beautiful language at times, certainly; at others, blunt and economical. Modifications of position, speed, and tension can add further nuances—but here I can illustrate only the bare mechanics.
Afterwards she turned to face me, we lay in the bright moonlight holding each other. The Deaf will sometimes shape a one-handed sign using both hands as an added emphasis, a kind of shout, in stereo. As we lay on the bed Wish went further, gently lifting her two feet—those longer, flatter hands—into the Signing Space between us. All four Flat Hands moved outward in turn from her chin, folding into the you-shapes of the Point Hand.
Thank you. Thank you, thank you, thank you.
I watched, stunned—deafened—as those four limbs moved repeatedly and silently in the moonlit room. I had seen nothing like it before: an expression of love and gratitude, bizarre and thrilling. The stirrings of guilt were stilled, temporarily. Her four hands, waving like those of some dark Hindu goddess, seemed at that moment the most beautiful thing I had ever seen.
7
I lay with her, cradling her, till her rapid breathing slowed into the rhythms of sleep, then slipped off the bed and out of her room. I should have spent the night with her, my limbs tangled in hers, loving her in the wider sense—but I felt I needed to be alone, to examine my feelings, increasingly dissonant. I still felt, in part, exultant—but a residue of other, messier feelings remained. Given four hands, each would surely have signed
a different emotion: joy and gratitude, yes—but also guilt and shame.
Sign does not separate this last pair; for once, the discrimination of English is superior. But having named them, which is worse? Guilt or shame? The inability to face ourselves, or to face others? Self-contempt, or the contempt of the world?
Other body parts also still had things to say. Back in my own bed I found myself aroused again, surprisingly. My skin tingled as if with some static sexual charge, the bedsheets clung to my body, adherent, magnetised. Years had passed since I had felt such rapture.
I rose and shut my bedroom door, if only to keep out whatever subliminal woman-scent might still be wafting from her room, then stood at the window, staring out. The dam glinted, moonlit, through the trees; I pulled open the door again, and tiptoed downstairs. Terry was still asleep on the couch, wrapped in the quilt, oblivious. Stella’s cigarettes sat on the coffee table; I pocketed the pack and her disposable lighter. My wetsuit was draped on the verandah rail; for the second time that night I pulled it on, never an easy task when damp. I hurried through the trees and waded into the water barefoot, holding a single lit cigarette high above my head. And there I floated, smoking, my legs slowly pedalling.
Neither water nor nicotine could soothe me, and the tight pressure of the wetsuit only seemed to heighten my excitement. I tried to summon images that might provide an antidote: memories of lovemaking with Jill, human fashion, face to face. It seemed a useful test, a measure of the present against the past. I had treasured these memories of Jill once. I had loved the way lust changed her expression completely, her calm, cool face became the mask of someone else, someone far more—ugly. I loved the way her dimples and laugh-lines vanished, her wide smile narrowed into a painful hole, her face became first humourless, then distorted.
At first, I was in awe of these changes. And flattered. I felt that I was special, that the two of us were special together. As time passed, I began to wonder if it was merely Jill who was special, if perhaps I didn’t even need to be there. All too quickly she reached a point where she was on her own, her eyes turning upwards and inwards, her shudders synchronised to the beat of a deeper, slower pacemaker, unrelated to mine.
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