Great Apes (24 page)

Now Tony swung around a lamp post from Grafton into Cork Street, and hung there for a while, observing the marvellously pink and effulgent arsehole of a cycle courier who was powering himself, up on the pedals of his racer, down towards Piccadilly. Tony shook his head. His head fur was moulting already – although he was barely thirty-five. For events such as this opening he felt he
had
to wear a toupee. He was as small and lithe as a bonobo – but that was a mixed blessing. Worse than any of this was that he knew he carried with him the taint of his mother's decay; that the smell of her despairing old age hung around him prematurely.

Tony Figes linked his sense of bodily disgust with what he had gleaned about Simon, and Simon's work. How germane, he thought, that this should be preoccupying him too, perhaps to the extent of driving him mad. Maybe Simon has lost the ability to suspend disbelief in mating – just as I have. Although no doubt for different reasons.

Tony may have felt physically cowardly – but he was brave enough to apply pressure to these digitations and speculate that this failure was linked to how chimps now lived, cut off from the natural world – housed in an essentially de-natured environment. Was it any wonder that the newspapers and magazines were full of cartoons that primatomorphised?

The
New Yorker
, which Tony took mostly to catch the photographic portraits of Mapplethorpe – and latterly Richard Avedon – was always full of cartoons that primatomorphised and often in the most ridiculous way; signing dogs, wisecracking moose, speculative bison, philosophic humans. There seemed no self-consciousness about this –
or at any rate Tony had never seen anyone remark on the obvious species neuroticism that he detected lying behind them. The compulsion that must be prodding these wits to expose our rift from the rest of creation.

Only the previous week, the
New Yorker
had carried a cartoon depicting a typical Madison Avenue advertising male in gesticulation with a squirrel who was attached to a tree in Central Park. The squirrel was signing, ‘Sure, he's as guilty as hell, now can we gesticulate about something else “huu”?', an obvious reference to the trial of O. J. Simpson, a media circus that was whipping up the poisonous hysteria of bonoboism all over the USA. The ironies of the cartoon went deeper though, far deeper, Tony reflected as he got bipedal and swaggered into the Levinson Gallery.

‘ “H'hoooo” I'm so glad you're here, Tony,' George Levinson pant-hooted as he came knuckle-walking from the back of the gallery. ‘I'm a bundle of nerves – a bundle of nerves “eek-eek-eek”!'

‘ “H'hoooo” now, George, really, do try and get a grip on yourself …' Tony countersigned, his scar writhed with embarrassment, transforming his already puckered muzzle into something resembling a crushed football.

The two chimps sank to the floor by the reception desk and cradled each other's genitals for a while, then began to groom in an idle way. Tony managed to free globules of glue from between George's toes, bits that had been troubling the dealer from the day before. George's grooming was far more desultory – just an inattentive preening of the younger chimp's fur.

As they groomed Tony could hear the grunts of the receptionist on the ‘phone, who was putting off a number
of would-be latecomers to the opening. ‘It's been like this all day,' George inparted Tony's belly. ‘Yesterday as well “hoooo”. I'm very anxious about openings at the best of times, but I think this one may well finish me off! I'll probably end up in that hideous hospital – along with poor Simon “hoooo”!'

‘ “Grun-nnn” now, George “chup-chupp” – George, please …' Tony broke off and grasping the edge of the desk pulled himself upright. The receptionist, seeing who it was, and being an ambitious young gallery female on the make – half presented to him, without ceasing her flutterings to the pant-hooter on the other end of the ‘phone.

George got bipedal as well. He was wearing, Tony noted, one of those irritating faux swelling-protectors that some of the younger gay chimps were currently sporting. Tony thought the fashion frankly absurd, and on George Levinson a case of an old ram dressed as a lamb, but didn't have the heart to point it out – given the state George was in.

Tony Figes had been to the Levinson Gallery many times before. He approved of it, generally – if not always of what was within it. While the traditional exterior – full plate-glass window, discreet engraved sign – implied a complementary interior of oak panelling and brass picture hooks, George Levinson had, in fact, done his best to create a pure, negatively capable exhibition space. The walls were covered with a fine light-beige fabric; the overhead lights were sunken pin-pricks, faint and sidereal; the carpeting was so neutral in both colour and weave, as to be barely there at all. Following George Levinson's scut down the long room, Tony imagined his hands and feet were sinking
into a comfy voidlet. But this was not what impinged – the canvases impinged.

The gallery space was some forty hands high, twice as many wide, and a full two hundred hands long. Ranged along either wall were Simon Dykes's paintings of modern apocalypse. The booking hall of King's Cross tube station at the exact moment that the fire of 1987 erupted was the first canvas to engage Tony's attention. He zeroed in on the pitiful wraaaaing face of the infant who was hurtling to a painful death, recognising it as the original of the detail he had received along with the invitation. Tony stood upright in front of the painting. It was at least twenty hands square. The brushwork at the very centre, where the infant was suspended, was exact, nearly photoreal, but towards the edges it grew looser and looser, until near the frame there were thick layers of paint, worked into ridges and troughs.

‘ “H'hooooo” my God, George,' Tony signed. ‘ “Hoo” my God! I see what you m –'

‘You see what I mean “h'huu”?'

‘I do – I do. ' Tony moved on to the next canvas, which Simon had entitled simply
Aerial Chartres.
This portrayed the interior of a Boeing 747 at – he instantly realised – the exact moment that its fuselage was being crumpled by impact. Whole rows of seating were being tossed together with their occupants, into a heavy salad of death. As with the previous canvas there was at the centre a photoreal depiction of an infant. This one was oblivious of its fate, still strapped into its seat; its toes and fingers were fully employed in manipulating the toggles of a Sony Gamemale. Clearly visible on the screen was the paradoxically miniature, humanoid figure of Donkey Kong.

‘My God!' resigned Tony Figes, then vocalised, “Hoooo.”

‘They're scary, aren't they “huu”?' George Levinson was gaining some sense of security from Tony's distress. George had, after all, been living with the paintings for weeks. And because of Simon's breakdown he had also been responsible for the stretching and framing – work the painter normally undertook himself. He continued gesturing. ‘To put it crudely – with Simon in hospital and apparently mad, the urge the critics always have to conflate life and work will become ineluctable, wouldn't you sign “huu”?'

‘I would, George. Let's go out back and have a drink and a line. I think we're both going to need them.'

When the two chimps emerged from George's office, some twenty minutes, two drinks, and three lines later, the gallery was already beginning to fill up. It was the usual sort of opening crowd – or at any rate the usual sort of crowd attracted to one of Simon Dykes's openings. The group of younger conceptual artists who were currently dominating the scene in London were among the first to arrive.

Tony knew them all – of course. He'd met them at the Sealink, or out with the Braithwaites, who were closer to them in both age and aesthetic. Tony found them – at least collectively – more than a little affected, if not absurd. They were now hanging about the place, all either dressed to the nines, or looking like dossers, ostentatiously not grooming one another. There were a couple offemales among them – both attractive, both with magnificently pink, bulging
swellings – and yet none of the males made any attempt to display to them – let alone mate.

This ‘Like, chimp, we
don't
groom' act was constantly being undercut by the nervous and repetitive presenting they all indulged in. They'd try to restrain themselves, but when – as now – someone like Jay Jopling, the dealer and prestigious owner of the White Cube, swung into the room, they would all begin to grunt, and shuffle backwards towards him, arses frantically waggling.

They tried – Tony Figes reflected – to prevent themselves, but they couldn't. For all their vaunted membership of the avant-garde, whatever that was, they were just like everybody else, addicted to the pecking order and the superior's arse-lick – however cursory.

But neither Tony, nor more importantly George, was worried about the Conceptualists. They had a certain – albeit grudging – respect for Simon and his work. As for the mental breakdown, Tony supposed they would in their normal, perverse way regard it as being cool. No, the worrying chimps were those like Vanessa Agridge, the pushy hack from
Contemporánea
who had just knuckle-walked into the gallery. The glossy manipulators of the press were going to have free range when they got an eyeful of this stuff. Tony pulled himself together. The liquor had calmed his body, and the coke had honed his mind. He would try to poke some sense into the critics he knew, and when Sarah swung by, he'd look after her, keep her under his wing.

George Levinson was gesticulating with the art critic of
The Times
, a bigoted New Zealander denoted Gareth ‘Grunt' Feltham. ‘They are, of course “gru-nn” explorations
of the chimp body, the essence of chimpness. Freud, after all, said that the ego is first and foremost a bodily ego “huuu”?'

‘ “Wraaf”! I'm not so sure about that, Levinson. It would seem to me “euch-euch” that the soul comes into all of this, and here we see paintings that exploit the bodies of chimps – and furthermore make a mockery of their souls. “HoooGraaa,” he pant-hooted forcefully, while aiming a mock blow at George's head, then resumed his imperious signing.

‘ “Euch-euch” you know, I've always had my reservations about your chimp Dykes's work and I have to sign, Levinson, that this sort of thing confirms them. ' He gestured with one of his large, hairy hands at the work in front of them,
Flat Pack Stops at Ebola.
‘ “Waaa” what does he mean by this – this cheap, essentially degrading vision “huu”?' Feltham was furiously agitated and he now proceeded to lift back his head and unleash from behind canines winnowed by decay and yellowed by tobacco, a series of spine-tingling hoots and barks: “HoooooGra! Wraaaf! HoooooGra! HooooGra! Wraaaaf”!

Whereupon other critics, throughout the gallery, also put their rented glasses on the floor, braced themselves and began to vocalise, “HoooooGraa! HoooooGra!” The air was thick with their vinous exhalations, and George felt quite queasy, regretting the drinks and lines he'd had with Tony. Some of the critics even began drumming on the walls and floors, until solicitously requested not to by the gallery females. But amidst all the vocalising, George couldn't really tell if any kind of fusion was emerging.

There were now well over fifty chimps in the gallery.
Critics, collectors, dealers, artists and their hangers-on. Thankfully, George noted, the ratio of females in oestrus was fairly high, and quite a lot of attention was taken up with displays of one kind and another, but unrelated to the show itself. Indeed, after the vocalising had died down Feltham stopped applying pressure to George and shamelessly thrust his index finger into the ischial scrag of a passing female. She slapped his hand away, and Feltham brought it to his nostrils. “Gru-nn Gr-unn,” he sniffle-grunted, then signed, ‘She can't be more than a week off, excuse me, will you, Levinson – not exactly your bag “huuu”?'

George shucked off the insult, he couldn't be bothered to fight with the burly critic over such crassness. Later though, he was thrilled to see the burly critic mating the female at the far end of the gallery, his corduroy jacket riding down over his scut as he panted and tooth-clacked, and judging by the weary expression of the female – whose muzzle was pressed hard into the carpeting – not managing to effect climax in either party.

George looked once more at
Flat Pack Stops at Ebola
. As with Simon's other paintings there was an infant at its centre. In this case the poor mite was haemorrhaging horribly from mouth and anus, the blood pouring down its coat and on to the flat pack in question, which was – according to the stencilled lettering on its side – for assembly into an attractive, freestanding wine rack. Simon had caught the feel of an aisle at the Swedish furniture supermarket, Ikea, perfectly. The bland irradiation of overhead lighting, the bays full of flat packs for assembly into tables, chairs, shelving units and stereo cabinets. In this
environment, constructed, as it was, to determine a prefabricated choice, the imposition of violent, contingent death was obscene.

Particularly the form of death Simon had chosen to portray. Drawing on accounts of the outbreak at Ebola in Central Africa, he had envisioned the effects of the flesh-dissolving virus, massively speeded up, on a group of furniture shoppers. The figures of the adult chimps were distressing enough, the blood, excrement and bile had worked into their coats and they slumped here and there against the flat packs, cradling one another's heads. But the sight of the infant on the wine rack
was
revolting.

“Hooo,” George cried quietly and turned to confront the gallery. He saw Sarah Peasenhulme swagger in through the door, flanked by the Braithwaites. Immediately all three were surrounded by yammering chimps, some of whom presented to Sarah, while others tried to display to her. She was still in the full flower of oestrus, her swelling massive and pinkly gleaming, as if a party balloon were rammed between her thighs.