Great Apes (2 page)

“Excuse me – where?”

“To Grindley's first, then maybe the Sealink later.”

“I may see you at the Sealink, I have to see what Sarah's doing first.”

“Right-o.”

Levinson disappeared downstream, flirting with a youth he'd picked up, a boy like a puma, with slim hips, violet eyes and a black coat. And, in the wake of seeing-George-and-him-go, bobbed the recognition of what had preceded it. Simon straightened up, pulled himself into the present. In a life where every third person he met assumed an expression that showed they recognised him, was it any wonder that he constantly found himself talking to strangers as if they were friends?

All ofthis, and then Simon said to Vanessa Agridge, who had a Dictaphone – as he now saw – in threatening evidence, “You must excuse me –”

“I just did.” She was catching his style – it happened.

“No, I mean now. I must go. I have to work.”

“To meet Sarah?”

“She's my girlfriend –”

“Model?”

“Girlfriend. Look, I'm going.” And he started off, out of the trap.

“One thing…” she called. He turned, she was a shadow now, exiguous, wavering against the summer evening.

“Yes?”

“This Lévi-Strauss fellow.”

“Yes?”

“You haven't got a number for him, have you? It's just that I thought I'd run that quote by him – if I do the piece, that is.”

* * *

There was a small rank of pay phones by the main doors of the gallery. Simon levered his phonecard out of his cardholder and fed it into the slot. He punched Sarah's number at the artists' agency where she worked and waited in a virtual aviary with the chirrupings and tweetings of connection. Then her lips grazed his cheekbone, her voice breathed into his ear: ‘I'm not available to take your call right now, so …' Not her voice. As close to her voice as the voice of Hal in
2001
was to a human voice. Not her sparky tone either, but horrifically measured, every word a spondee.

“Are you there?” he queried after the peep, knowing that she would be.

“Vetting, yeah, I'm call-vetting.”

“Why?”

“I dunno,” she sighed. “I just don't feel like talking to anyone. Anyone except you, that is.”

“So, what's the plan?”

“A few of us are meeting up –”

“Where?”

“At the Sealink.”

“Who?”

“Tabitha, Tony, I guess – though he hasn't confirmed. Maybe the Braithwaites.”

“Shiny happy people.”

“Yeah.” She laughed, very briefly, their shared laugh, a kind of lipsmacking hiss. “Shiny happy people. When will you get there?”

“I'm
en route
now.” He hung up without further ado, then negotiated a flurry of final ‘Catch you later's, ‘We must get together's and ‘Next week's – that ought to have
been ‘Next year's – before taking the cast-iron stairs down to the street.

Summer London on the far cusp of the rush hour. The gallery wasn't in Chelsea Harbour, but it might as well have been, for all the relevance that the opening had to the world outside. Simon set off along the Embankment, occasionally peering back over his shoulder to look at the golden ball atop the central tower of the development. Someone had once told him that it rose and fell with the tide, but as he couldn't tell whether it was low or high tide he was unable to make sense of the balls.

He felt tired and his chest slopped with the sweet phlegm that comes either at the onset or the demise of a lung infection. Simon couldn't decide which as he gurgled and gobbed his way past the cars crammed in the crook of road leading up to Earls Court. The Braithwaite brothers. Shiny happy people. The Sealink Club. It all meant a late night of shouting, laughing and flirting. A production mounted with a shifting cast of nameless but recurring minor characters. And it all implied getting in at three, or four, or past five, dawn coming in prismatic beams, the world's furniture haphazardly rearranged by the clumsy removal men of narcotics.

Drugs, he sighed, drugs. Which drugs? The crap London barroom cocaine that managements turned a blind eye to the sale of, knowing that the only effect it had on its snorters was to make them buy more marked-up booze? Yeah, definitely some of that. He could already picture himself chopping and crushing, crammed into some dwarfish toilet stall. And he could already see how it would end up, Sarah and he fucking with the dismal end-of-the-world feel
that the crap cocaine imparted. Like two skeletons copulating in a wardrobe, their bones chafing and stridulating. And tomorrow morning, disembodied, ghost-like, he would find himself at the cashpoint, a rime of white powder worked into the embossed numerals on his credit card.

Or perhaps there would be some of the ecstasy that Sarah got hold of, presumably from Tabitha although Simon hadn't asked. Ecstasy had initially seemed a fraudulent description for the drug, as far as Simon was concerned. The first couple of times he had taken it he'd said to Sarah, “If this is ecstasy, then a drug which produces mild pique could justifiably be called ‘rage'.” But he'd got the hang of it. Learnt to stop regarding it as a psychedelic, akin to the acid and mushrooms he had – more or more – taken as an art student at the Slade, and understand that it only worked on the interfaces of people's minds, their relationships with one another. It was a drug of vicariousness, of using another person's emotions as a prop, a route to abandonment. All conversations on E acquired an adolescent intensity, a titivation of the very possibility of intimacy.

It also had other weird effects. Even with a gut full of liquor and a few honks of crap cocaine on board, a white dove still made Simon feel like penetrating every body in sight. Male, female, whole, crippled, it hardly mattered. What he desired was a flesh pit full of writhing naked bodies, smeared with glycerine; or better still a conga-line of copulation, where a cock-thrust here would produce a cunt-throb way over there.

E-ed up, Simon's body, like some rain-swelled river, breached its banks and flowed all over the place, all over the
people. But Sarah would take him in hand at this point. Like some proficient hydrologist she would enact lightning-quick embanking and canalising work, until he flowed into her.

Yeah, ecstasy. And then they would get home to the Renaissance, home to the golden bower of her bed, where they would pluck and strum upon one another's mandolin bodies, until they eventually, belatedly came. Eventually, belatedly slept.

I don't want to get loaded. Simon thought, turning into Tite Street. I don't feel exactly
hot
at the moment and there's a full day's work to do tomorrow, no shirking. And in the contemplation of the night ahead, with its slalom of toxicities, he assayed his own body, its fit between mind and metabolism, metabolism and chemistry, chemistry and biology, biology and anatomy, anatomy and protective clothing. His toes scrunged in semi-sweat-stiffened hosing, and he felt their fungal deterioration, the gritting of their webbing. His hands felt numb at their finger ends. Simon thought about peripheral neuralgia, and thought of the half-bottle of whisky he skulled most nights, but then again considered it unlikely. Physical addiction to alcohol, that is.

His stomach was inflated now – as if the Chilean wine were still fermenting – so that his walk was counterpointed not simply by the harrumphing and spitting – neat that, between the two front teeth, so that a dash of phlegm hit whichever paving stone he aimed at. He remembered learning it from lads at school, upsetting his fastidious older brother with demonstrations – but also by poot-pooting from between soft-clenched bum cheeks. Like some cartoon, Simon, thought, fart-powered, 2-D.

Simon's bum exercised him nowadays, as if his arsehole was haltingly learning to talk, in order to inform him that his days were numbered.

He remembered now the business of getting to know new lovers as a young man. How intimacy was defined by sexual interaction: the shared, tacit acknowledgement of the refusal to be embarrassed by a vaginal fart or a premature ejaculation. And how that intimacy was then broadened, given further substance, by a willingness to include the other's shit and piss and furtive secretions. It all reached a climax with childbirth, with her swollen vagina stretched to tearing, voiding a half-gallon of what appeared to be won ton soup on to the plastic sheeting. And the placenta, organ-that-was-hers and not-hers, maybe even partly his. But no, they didn't want to fricassee it, on any of the three snacking opportunities, with onions and garlic, so it was removed for incineration, borne in a take-away, cardboard kidney dish.

And now he could no longer face that kind of getting-to-know anyone. He and Sarah had been gasping into one another's napes for nine months now, but he didn't want to share the bathroom with her. Not only did he not want to share the bathroom with her, he didn't even like the idea of her being in the house when his bowels moved. He wouldn't have minded going to another town to do a shit. His arsehole was sending him internal memoranda on his own mortality – and it leaked. Bowel movements were no longer discrete, his bowels seemed to move all the time, telegraphing him fart bulletins, and faxes of shit-juice that soiled the gussets of his pants in hideous ways. And thinking this Simon paused to hoick at
the girding of his waist, trying to give his persecutor a little more air to foul.

Whenever he stopped to contemplate his relationship to this body, this physical idiot twin, it occurred to Simon that something critical must have gone wrong without his noticing. He was bemused to awaken to this insistent reminder of his corporeality. He seemed to recall – within the memory banks of the body itself– those unconstrained, atemporal afternoons of childhood, twilight playing, parental calls to return home like hooting apes in the suburban gloaming; and accompanying that memory, suffusing it like the sunset, a sense of his body as also unconstrained, not as yet inhibited, hemmed-in, by the knowledge of the future, which became like a thermostat, regulating any enjoyment or ease of action, ease of repose.

And now, turning into the King's Road, past the Duke of York's barracks where mobile artillery stood immobile, Simon wondered if he could pinpoint the moment when it had all gone wrong. For now his bodily awareness was one solely of constraint, of resistance, of a missing fit between every ligament and bone, every cell and its neighbour. How could it have happened? He thought again of acid trips – they were still there, salient in the three-minute memory defile he was traversing. He remembered the contrived astral trips he and other psychic venturers had taken under its influence. Perhaps in one such he had departed his physical body, but on reentry failed to achieve an exact fit, leaving the psychic and the physical ever so slightly out of registration, like a badly reproduced photograph in a magazine. That's how it felt, at any rate.

There was that lack-of-fit, and there was the amputation
of his children, which had caused another confusion in bodily perception, another more profound discorporation. When his marriage to Jean had collapsed in on itself, like a tower block demolished with carefully placed charges, his children had been five, seven and ten, but his physical relationship with them was unbroken; conscious cables plugged their snot noses and wipeable bums directly into his nervous system. If they nicked or cut themselves the pain was grossly enhanced, amplified, so that Simon felt it as a Sabatier to the intestines, a scalpel to the tendons. If they swooned in babyish fevers, hallucinating concepts and visions – ‘Daddy, Daddy, I'm Iceland, I'm Iceland' – he hallucinated with them, climbed alongside them the shoddy Piranesi of the nursery wallpaper, hoicking up a leaf to gain a toehold on a flower.

No matter how much he saw them now, how many times he picked them up from school, how many times he made them oven chips and fish fingers, how many times he petted them, kissed them, told them he loved them, nothing could assuage this sense of wrenching separation, their disjunction from his life. He may not have snacked on the placenta, but somehow the umbilici still trailed from his mouth, ectoplasmic cords, strung across summertime London, snagging on rooftops, car aerials, advertising hoardings, and tied him to their little bellies.

Simon pulled up by a newsagent's on the brink of Sloane Square. Shiny unhappy girls walked past clad in tabards, chaps, and yokes of leatherette material. He thought briefly of a woman he had fucked in Eaton Square. Fucked in the dead zone between Jean and Sarah. Jean and Sarah, so silly, the caesura: JeanandSarah. Anyway, this woman appeared
to Simon now, in Sloane Square, the ghostly set of her flat arranged on the pavement.

Big divan, glass-topped coffee-table, abstract paintings and their two bodies, each selling the other figurative insurance. Touching one another up, in the same sense that a stretch of land might be sung up, created by allusion. Here are breasts, here are hips, here is a cock, there a cunt … Simon wormed her out of her leggings, the leggings like worms pulling away from her shanks, the ankles cheekily rough with stubble, hers and his. He buried his drunk head in the folds of her white belly, the folds slack, skinlaps. They giggled, honked coke, half-naked, his pants round his ankles. They swilled vodka, warm and nasty. When he came to fuck her he had to poke his cock into her with his finger, but she didn't seem to mind, or didn't have a mind. One or the other.

Simon struck the set and looked to his right where a freestanding rack of newspapers stood. He scanned the headlines: ‘More Massacres in Rwanda', ‘President Clinton Urges Ceasefire in Bosnia', ‘Accusations of Racism in O. J. Simpson Trial'. It wasn't, he reflected, political news, it was news about bodies, corporetage. Bodies dragged by thin shanks through thick mud, bodies smashed and pulverised, throats slashed red, given free tracheotomies so that the afflicted could breathe their last.

There was some fit here, Simon realised, between the penumbra around his life, the darkness at the edge of the sun, and these bulletins of disembodiment, discorporation updates. His imagination, always too visual, could enter into these headlines readily enough, but only by casting Henry, his eldest, as Hutu; Magnus, the baby, as Tutsi; then watch them rip each other to shreds.