Great Apes (6 page)

“Wraaf!” barked the eminent psychiatrist, and then bending down and grabbing him by the scruff he signed on the muzzle of the epsilon male with his left foot, ‘Shut the fuck down, Gambol, you little piece of shit. When I want you muscling in on my second breakfast, you miserable subordinate creep, I'll ask you to, but for now just shut the fuck down! “Waaa”!'

‘I'm sorry, boss, I'm sorry,' Gambol flourished frantically, his darting hands emerging from the pod of his crouching body. ‘I didn't mean “eek-eek” to annoy you so much, please don't beat up on me, please. ' He half squatted and presented to Busner, his scut quivering.

‘That's all right, honey-bunny, I didn't mean to hit you so hard, wassums,' Busner gestured, grunting softly. ‘You're still my favourite itty-bitty research assistant. ' He reached out a hand, still roaring with pain after the blow he
had inflicted, and tenderly stroked Gambol's ruffled back fur. For a while Busner groomed Gambol, removing some particles of what looked like solidified correction fluid from the thick fur between the epsilon's shoulder blades.

Typical young intellectual on the make, Busner thought as he opened up parting after parting in Gambol's fur. Doesn't groom enough, doesn't mate enough. Why, without his position as my factotum I don't think he'd have any designation in the hierarchy, let alone epsilon. He finished off this purely formal groom of reassurance with a tweak of Gambol's nape hair.

Gambol moved away from the table, still presenting, his hands flickering from behind his back. ‘Thank you, Zack, thank you, I acknowledge your suzerainty. I admire your eminence, I revere your reign over the group, your anal scrag enfolds us all “grnnn”.'

‘Get the car out of the garage, Gambol,' Busner snapped. ‘We'll go to the hospital in about twenty minutes, as soon as I've finished my second breakfast. ' Busner pulled himself back up on to his chair and resumed munching on some sloes, mashing the bitter juice of the berries through his strong molars, savouring it. He turned once more to the
Guardian
, and with an ease borne of long experience, shut his large and gnarled ears to the hubbub of the kitchen, the squeals of infants, pants of copulating adults and neighing of lap ponies.

It took quite a lot longer than twenty minutes for Zack Busner to finish his second breakfast. The milkmale dropped that fortnight's bill in, cause enough for another round of mating, as was the arrival home of Dave 2, another of Busner's offspring, who worked for a bonobo
community organisation in Hackney. By the time all the males present had covered Charlotte and Cressida again it was getting on for ten.

‘I'm off now, dear,' Busner signed to Charlotte, who was still crouching on the stairs, her vagina bleeding a little. ‘Try not to overdo the mating, remember what happened last oestrus. “Grnnn” I shouldn't be too late. In fact, I think I'll come back after my lecture, I'd like to do some reading at home this afternoon. “H'huuu”?' he enquired.

‘OK, Zack, but you know how hard it is to refuse them, and there's so many sub-adult males in the house, what is one to d –' She stopped wringing her hands. One of the sub-adult males in question, William, was waving a couple of tea towels around, trying to get Charlotte's attention with this pathetic courtship display.

Busner considered William. The young male was shaping up very nicely, sleek brown-black fur, fine eyebrow ridges, tidily recessed nasal bridge, pale muzzle – every inch the Busner. “HoooGrnn,” pant-grunted William, his vocalisation warbling up and down the scale, and then signed, ‘May I mate you, please, Auntie, please “huuu”?'

Busner moved over to William and administered a few swingeing blows to his muzzle with his left – and not so arthritic – hand. “Wraaf! he barked, then signed, ‘Leave your poor aunt alone, can't you see the state of her vagina. She's got quite enough senior males to mate this oestrus, without worrying about you whippersnappers.'

William retreated to the garden whimpering and signing, ‘Sorry, Alph, sorry, Auntie.'

Busner turned to survey the room with its teaming horde of chimps. “HoooGraaa!” he pant-hooted, impressing on
the gathering the force and potency of his valediction – and by extension himself. The senior male chimps broke off eating, mating and grooming to salute him, and he left the room.

Marigold, one of the Busner infants, aged around four, came scuttling down the stairs with his briefcase. ‘Here you are, Uncle,' she gestured, dragging it towards him. ‘Have a good day at the hospital. ' Busner took the briefcase and bestowed a drooly kiss on the little female. He checked his arsehole once more in the hall mirror, then let himself out the front door.

Simon barely acknowledged the receptionist at the Sealink Club, who, recognising him as a roller who got high and then acted it, was fulsome-ish.

The club was underground – in site only. The reception lobby was accessed down two flights of stairs. Wide, plush treads, ochre walls with the uplights set behind horrid metal basketry – keeping the illumination down, taking the members down. You could imagine a judge saying ‘Take her down!' and the cold shock of realising you've been sentenced to a lifetime's networking.

Through the swing doors from the lobby was the club's main room. This was dominated by a bulging belly of a bar, buckled into its leatherette décor by belts of chrome, a corset of mirroring and scintillating steel suspenders. The Sealink's clientele – or members, this place was, after all, as private as any utterly public place can be – hung off the bar, or housed themselves in the conchate seats in the conchate seating areas; they flipped their leather fins and floated up to the restaurant on the gallery level, or upended and dived down to the toilets and table-football room on the level below the bar. But mostly they just sat there, cemented in place by their secretions of chatter.

For, if a net were to be cast into the Sealink Club and trawled through its corridors and vestibules – even a seine
net, monofilamented, micro-meshed, gill-slicing – all it would come up with would be a few spluttering servitors, or gasping groupers who had ligged their way in.

No, to catch one moiety of the members you'd need a pot or cage, baited with publicity, or gossip, or innuendo, or money, or all four; or combinations thereof: gossip about money, public innuendo, lucrative publicity, and so on. Because this lot were bottom feeders, pure and simple, who came to the club in the unadulterated spirit of undersea exploration, to check out how low they could go.

As for the other moiety, well, you'd have to say that they were even easier to catch, if no better to eat. All that would be required to land them was a low tide – which came twice in the twenty-four, at noon and three in the morning, when the barroom was little more than a muddy flat of wrack – a dinghy which could be manoeuvred around the downlights – which were set behind horrid metal basketry – and a long knife-arm, with which to reach down and prise them from the carpeting.

For this box-load were bivalves – to an hermaphrodite. Eyeless in the gloom, de-tentacled by devolution, possessing at most one febrile limb with which to lift a glass or tote a cigarette, they reposed as the currents of conversation flowed through them, extracting sufficient nutriment simply by the act of being. Some argued – and Simon was on occasion among them, there had to be some defence – that if a grain of insight, a granule of originality, were inserted into their cloistered, sharp-edged minds, placed on the mantel where the invitations sat, it might well be cultured, swaddled in a carbonate of some kind until it formed, if not wisdom, at any rate something resembling culture. But
Simon only ever said this when he was drunk and full of the world. Drunk, and so full of the world that the world must be good – or at any rate capable of inclusion – for him to be so full of it.

Sarah saw Simon from the stool where she still sat. Saw him pause in the doorway while two sumo suits squeezed by him, saw him crane his neck to scan the room, while at the same time dipping his eyes down, keen to avoid the taint of seeming to scan the room. The very sight of him lanced across the room to Sarah, every entrance he made was a penetration of her; and every time that he left, it was a slithery, warm withdrawal.

She unglued her thighs in anticipation, signalled to Julius that he was required, twirled on the stool to summon the shiny happy people, then finally turned right round to face Simon, thighs now parted, and guided him into her.

Simon and Julius arrived at the back and front of Sarah simultaneously. Simon bent down and kissed her at one side and then the other of her lips. She placed a hand on the nape of his neck, feeling the scalp beneath the hair and held him against her face until his lips nuzzled sideways to her mouth. Then their tongues slithered over and under, pink shrews blindly questing. Her small knees pincered his thick thighs. She wouldn't let him go, wouldn't let him order a drink, until she had the firm reassurance of him, that crosstown coil of erectile tissue with which she had drawn him in, and now landed him. And Simon felt relieved too. Relieved in her attraction to him – a different kind of visceral update.

His gusset unstuck from his perineum, his clothes dried on his sticky flesh as if a blast of cool, dry air had been
blown up his sleeves and trouser legs. The stubble on his cheek softened to fur, the gunk on his eyes and mouth turned from sour to sweet. She sensed through his nape all the embarrassment of the kiss, and yet she still held him, challenged him to withdraw, to reject her in any way. This, naturally, he did.

“Hello, darling,” he said, and then to Julius, “My man.” They shook hands.

The barman stood behind his bar, all barman. White apron, white shirt, black tie tucked just-so. Behind him his reflected back was equally exact. The ranks of bottles proclaimed near-pharmaceutical alleviation of whatever ailed Simon; and Julius, the physician, prepared for the laying-on of hands. “Can I assist you, sir,” he intoned, “to a refreshing beverage?”

Simon regarded Julius as if he had never before encountered such a noble barman and this was his first visit to the Sealink. He straightened up, aware of the importance, the solemnity of ordering. He yanked the bottom hem of his nondescript black jacket and placed his blunt hands in the pockets of his nondescript black trousers. If there had been a nondescript black tie knot around the neck of his unremarkable white shirt, you could have been certain that he would have straightened it before replying, “A large Glenmorangie for myself, straight up. A Samuel Adams to chase it … and for you, my little monkey? The usual?” The toque tilted.

Tony Figes appeared next to Sarah, ostentatiously blowing his nose on a piece of thick paper towel. “Simon …” he drawled, and the two men awkwardly embraced, side on; Tony's scar writhed. The drinks were placed gently in
front of Sarah. Simon asked Tony if he would like something, and then widened the order to encompass the Braithwaites and Tabitha, who had sidled up and who also had the sniffles. The snotty children waited – like the good adults they were – for their drinks.

“Simon,” Tony redrawled, “how was the opening?”

“Open,” Simon countersigned, “partially, at any rate.”

One of the Braithwaites palmed him a wrap, hip bones touched, hands stroked. Simon was in possession and even the tenth part of the law was far away from him now. He raised his eyebrow ridges at Sarah and the two of them, without further preamble, sidled away from the group, sidled across the room, out of the doors, and took the stairs down to the car-deck room.

Down in the car-deck room Simon went to where the window should have been, and under a downlight that illuminated a duff political cartoon – axes labelled ‘cuts' – opened the wrap. The cocaine was yellow and lumpy. It looked good. He raised his eyebrows again, and she tilted her toque once more. He was halfway through chopping out the lines on the rough pseudo-grain of a large television, which was camouflaged so as to resemble a sea locker, when he broke off, gestured with the corner of his credit card.

“Good day?”

“Mmm.”

“By which?”

“Crap. Boring too.”

“Talk about it?”

“Nah.”

He carried on chopping, scientifically, feeling the chemical crunch of plastic on granule.

When she took the rolled note and bent her head to snort the line, perspective was re-banished; she became an ochre swathe of face with pinkness in the exposed interior of the nostril. The swathe wound back into a bolt, which turned to him, becoming a face. “Simon?”

“Umph.” He took the note. The cocaine burned his nose and anaesthetised it at the same time. Alternative medicine. Like the sodden cloth of a ragamuffin at traffic lights the drug squeegeed its way over his fore-brain, both clouding and cleaning his mind. Then he was erect and erect, Kundalini currents running both ways. Perhaps I have two spines, he thought inconsequentially, backing his petite lover between the chunky furnishings. She ended up in the corner of the room, his mouth clamped over hers.

Downstairs in the bar, Tony Figes was putting the bite on a journalist.

“It's like some neurological disorder,” he told the man, who wrote a column on columns. “A compulsion to say, write, do, the glibbest and most ephemeral thing possible; a kind of glibolalia –”

“Give me an example,” the man replied. He was fat, with licks of vanilla hair on a conical head, but despite this – or perhaps because of it – he wasn't going to be intimidated by a faggot.

“Well.” Tony's scar squirmed. “What you wrote about the raising of veal calves in your column yesterday.”

“What was wrong with that?” The fat man – whose name was Gareth – moderated his tone. Even if he was to be criticised, at least he had been read.

“You added nothing to the debate. All you said was that the mental state of the animal was an unknowable thing –”