Great Apes (10 page)

Then Sarah was outside the window – the little monkey. She was scampering up the trunk of the oak in the garden, grinning at him over the downy hair on her pointed shoulder. Downy hair, or downy fur? She had scaled it and reached the first branching; here she crouched, the umbilical penis trailing from between her legs. She was utterly unconcerned, but Simon felt awfully aware of the
strangeness of this, its laden quality. She must have done something – someone must have done something, because now he could feel himself running back into her. Even at this great remove – down the tree, across the gravel, up the outside of the house, in through the window – his penis was moving back into her again, being sucked up by the trap of her. She'd pressed some operative button, and now he was being retracted like a hominid tape measure into her simian casing. Truly, Simon mused, man is the measure of all things. His heels skittered and bounced across the sheet, he fell hard on to the strip of the carpet between the bed and the window, was yanked up and over it. Whumph! Simon fell on to the small patio her godfather had laid for her. She was still grinning down at him from the fork as scherluppp! he came wobbling, arse above tit, up the trunk towards her. A final scherluppp and Sarah was engorged by Simon, made fully gravid. She absent-mindedly rubbed the still-wet lips of her cunt, smelt the fur on the back of her hand. Then she made her way carefully along the thick branch of the oak. One arm cradled protectively around her distended belly she dropped softly into the next garden and made off.

They woke again towards noon. The light that streaked from between curtain hem and windowsill had gone from lemon to orange. The memory of the dream, the little monkey that was Sarah sucking in his umbilical penis and then disappearing into the next garden, was still so vivid, so present, that it vied with the grittiness of the mattress, the bent pipe of his throat, the grout in his eyes, for inclusion in this reality.

It wasn't a nightmare, of that much Simon was certain. There had been no access of dread, no pounding dream heart, no paralysis of dream body, as he watched his cock transmogrify. Rather, it had been something he had wanted to happen. The sense of lucidity within the dream had affirmed this.

Simon held himself still on the mattress, appreciating the particular cramping of his shoulder, the jarring twang of his pelvis. Should he rise, attack the hangover, hose himself down? He rolled over and his blood-filled cock, stoppered off at the root by a full bladder, twanged. He ungummed his eyes. Sarah lay along the flattened length of a pillow, her upper body canted at an angle of some twenty degrees, her arms flung out any which way, her hair damp and tousled.

Simon hoicked himself up on forearm and elbow and observed her. The edge of the sheet was tucked below her breasts, and it crumpled and bulged below that. Her back was stretched in this posture and he could see the slight bunchings of muscle that cushioned her – as far as Simon was concerned one of her imperfections. There were others, the too thin lips, lips he sometimes felt the thinness of when he kissed her, and which now were half-open revealing her oddly pointed canine teeth; which – when conscious – gave her an air of workaday vampirism, as if she had been temping for Van Helsing. The breasts were neat, but her nipples were never hard enough, teat-like enough.

As he watched they rose and fell, fell and rose. Her bruised eyelids flickered. Was she engaged in the dream he had just left – or some other? He lifted his big brown hand and laid it against the outflung white arm. In his grasp it looked as small as a chopstick, and as breakable. I must stop
this, Simon, thought. I do this to debase her – to devalue us. Perfection is meaningless – and worthless, a Tupperware grail. If I carry on like
this
I'll argue myself out of
this.

His hand had knocked against his erect cock, reminding him that he had one, reminding him of what it could be employed for. His other hand went to the folds and bulges of sheet. He ran fingertips over these, as if they were the ruches and pleats of her sex. Simon swallowed and tasted the guttural grimness of his mouth, a pannikin full of cold Camel leftovers. Could he commit the culinary crime of compelling her to taste this? In the pit of the bed his cock thwanged. He could.

She woke as his fingertips made the final, fiddly assaults on her nipples, his palms having pitched camp in the col of her breasts. Sarah seemed to experience no discomfort, nor even momentary revulsion at the idea of this sodden, vodka-blanched body over-toppling hers. She turned on, turned on. Her small head rose up, the ruff of blonde split-ends giving it a clownish air. The thin lips parted, he caught a glimpse of white pointiness, and then she received him, the little slug of her tongue uncoiled in his mouth, swelled and died in his saltiness. Their upper bodies married. Simon tasted the crap of her gullet, smelt the shit on her breath – as she did his. Soon each cancelled out the other's, as more and more saliva eroded the little seams of mucus, with their worthless veins of crap cocaine.

It was hard and abrupt. A bout of love. One of his big hands went to her mons, tearing the bunched sheet away. The fingers of the other went to their sucking mouths, gathered wallow, deposited it in her juncture. His fingers plunged into her – she gasped, bit his lip. His other hand
went below her back – her child's back; his single hand could almost span it. He yanked her to him. Her small claws tore at his back, almost unable to gain purchase on the sweat that had sprung up on it. “Open your legs!” he barked into her mouth: “Open your legs!” He pushed his fingers further into her, widening her; a thumb circled over her clitoris. She bucked beneath him like a trapped animal. Bucked and bucked again. He removed his hand from her back, his mouth from hers. He put two fingers into her mouth, three. Felt the sharpness of her teeth, the taut skin of her gullet. He pulled the fingers out, smarmed them across her brow, and further – grasping a handful of her hair and pulling it down to her nape, stretching her body over the form of pillow so that all of her was exposed, laid doubly bare.

Sarah's hands had found his penis. Simon gasped, almost came from that one touch. Her fingers smoothed up and around, up and around. Then down, touching his balls, cradling them, then lower, into the sweat-filled runnel of him. She dabbed and palped his arsehole; dabbed and palped his arsehole.

His fingers were hooked inside her, he could feel the whole shape of her pubic bone. Her eyes were rolled back so only the whites showed. He could sense the precise texture of this internal, membranous skin. He could almost taste through his fingers the salty gush of come that now spasmed out of her. His mouth was clamped on hers once more and it was into this cave that she shouted, so that the echoes reverberated in his head. He wouldn't release her. He kept on kissing her, chewing on her. Then he slid down her, tasting her breasts, her hips, the twistle of lint her belly
button. He placed the whole of his tongue against the wet openness of her, felt the seed of her clitoris wobble on the root of his tongue. Then he moved up again. Her hands were tugging on his cock, her hands were tugs guiding the great draught of his penile vessel, bringing it into harbour. There was such urgency in this, such will on both sides to couple – it could hardly be called desire.

Outside in the narrow passageway, Gracie, the old retriever, whuffled and scratched, hearing the commotion within as a chase that she would wish to join. She heard the yelps and drummings as the paws of lapine quarry bursting from a sandy burrow. She grabbed the hem of a batik scarf dangling from a hook and worried at it with her slack lips, her meaty teeth.

The shock of their marriage pushed Sarah backwards still further on the pillow so that it ended up beneath her buttocks. Her heels were on the small of Simon's back, and he was fucking her as he had been in the dream, with great, whooshing, oiled strokes of machine regularity. She was coming ceaselessly, her vagina rippling along the length of him. Her mouth was agape, the cries torn from it with each implosion of him-into-her. Cry after cry after cry, until he, at last, with an internal wrench of his urinary tract, came as well, and realised that she was no longer uttering these cries, but simply crying. Crying and sobbing, with heaves that wracked her thin shoulders, ground her thin shoulder blades against his supporting hand.

Simon withdrew, slumped out of her. He then took her lengthwise in his arms, one threading through her crotch, the other cradling her neck. She sobbed – he knew – not necessarily from emotion, for this happened often enough
when they fucked. No, she sobbed almost as a purely physical reaction, the way that some women sweated profusely after coming. This is how he thought of her tears, as eye-born perspiration. She sobbed and sobbed and he said, “There-there, there-there, there-there.” Then they slept again. The digital alarm on her bedside table read 12.22 a.m.; and by the time it read 12.34 a.m. Simon was dreaming once more.

The dream picked up at a point some short time before it had left off. The bower that was her bedroom, all wreathed around with a forest that both breached and formed its walls. The tall trunks and massy undergrowth fell away in a gentle slope on the garden side. Simon was as he had been: on heels of hands and heels of feet, propped up by his back-angled arms. And there was the little monkey, squatting on the branch of a tree some sixty feet away. Squatting easily, but with legs opened so that he could clearly see the pink effluvium of her; and running from without it the red rivulet of him.

I can look at my cock, thought Simon, and then looked at his cock. I am lucid, he realised. I am in control of this dream. His cock wavered away from his groin, crossed the tangled sheet in a series of corkscrew curls. He could see some more of these corkscrews, pigtails on the forest floor, their gummy loops encrusted with leaf mould and twigs, before they vanished amidst the humped roots of the trees. Simon called out to Sarah, who was unconcernedly picking at the skin on her forearm.

“Sarah! Sarah!”

“Simon?” She looked up.

“Sarah, pull me in now, pull me in! I want to be inside
you now.” He gestured at the hanks of him ‘n' her that linked them.

“Simon?” She was glancing around, as if trying to search him out among the trees. She was looking everywhere but at the small clearing, with its fitted sheet, where he lay. “Simon? Simo …?”

Her voice trailed off. She bent forward on the branch and plucked at something. Simon felt a twinge. It was him! She was plucking at him! Sarah brought the plait of vesicles up to her mouth. She held it in her hand as casually as if it had been a rope and she some arboreal campanologist. And then without preamble, she began to gnaw at it.

Simon felt her small, sharp teeth bite into him. “Sarah!” he cried. “Don't… Sarah, that's me!” But she didn't seem to hear him, she kept on gnawing, occasionally breaking off to pick a bit of their gristle from between her teeth. The thing that linked them – was it umbilicus or penis? He could not say – was now almost cut through, and still she gnawed, and still he shouted out, “Sarah! Stop it! Sarah – you'll lose me, we're in a forest!” But she paid no heed, just kept gnawing. Now only a single string of pink remained, glistening in her incisors. She bit down – and severed him altogether.

I want to wake up, Simon thought. Wake up! he commanded his body, which lay coldly athwart his volition, a grave weight. Wake up! He struggled to shift it, some tiny part of it, any movement at all would be enough to release him from the dream, but he could engineer nothing. Nothing. He strained, and thought: I am here, I am lying in this nest with … Sarah. Sarah, he could feel the warmth of her above or below him. He swam up to
where he could … feel it beneath his cheek. The warmth of her small breast with its fine covering of coarse blonde fur.

Simon Dykes, the artist, awoke, his consort's breast cushioning his cheek. He sighed, and nuzzled his muzzle down into the sweet animality of her.

It was a beautiful, late-summer morning. Redington Road was lined with trees at their final, fructive stage. The smells of yeast and verdancy filled the air. Busner surveyed the solid red-brick villas flanking the road. Despite the mounting heat, the early mating had left him feeling zestful and before heading off down the garden path, he took a lip-funnelling breath then let out a great pant-hoot, full of
joie de vivre.
This was answered by a chorus of pant-hoots from his neighbours, some of whom he now noticed were crouched in the surrounding branches.

“H'hooo!” they pant-hooted, then waved, ‘Morning, Busner.'

“H'hooo!” he revocalised, cheerily saluting them with a wave of his briefcase. This initial exchange of greetings was echoed by chimps in the adjoining streets, who pant-hooted their welcomes to the suburb, and then echoed by still more chimps at a greater remove, and still more chimps at a still greater remove, their calls dying away in the direction of Belsize Park.

Gambol had got the car, a maroon Seven Series Volvo Estate, out of the garage and it now stood idling by the front gate. Busner could see three of his sub-adult males in the back seat. They were so entwined in mutual grooming
that he couldn't establish which, but he was pleased to note that Erskine and Charles were there; neither of them had been doing enough patrolling recently as far as their alpha was concerned.

Busner threw his briefcase in the boot and got in on the passenger side. ‘Now then, Gambol,' he signed as the subordinate chimp powered the car away from the kerb, his hands flying as he changed up through the first eight gears. ‘ “Euch-euch” what on earth is it that's so important that it couldn't have waited for me to finish my second breakfast, “huu”?'

‘I had a call from Jane Bowen at Charing Cross emergency psychiatric unit this morning,' Gambol signed. ‘She's now working for a chimp denoted Whatley – you remember Whatley, don't you, Dr Busner “huuu”?'