Will Self - Great Apes

“Vanessa Agridge, Contemporanea,” She flipped her birdlike claw under his hand and didn’t so much shake it as scratch the palm. “I came to this, but I don’t think there’s much I can write about her, so it’s a bit of a result for me… seeing you here.… out and about — so to speak — in the week before the new show…” Like a faltering engine, she died. The pause hunched between them in unequal space.

“Her?” queried Simon after a decent while.

“Manuella Sanchez,” Vanessa Agridge replied, tapping him on the arm with a rolled-up copy of the catalogue in a way she imagined to be flirtatious. Simon looked at her with his new perspectiveless vision: blob-shaped muzzle, slashed red, topped with blackish fur, blackish fur below. It swelled some, slash gaped to show canines, and she continued. “She’s meant to be so outré – anyway, that’s what her people said — but she isn’t. Just dull. Nothing to say for herself.”

“But the work, isn’t that what you’re here to write about, her work?”

“Hngfh”’ she snorted, “no, no, Contemporanea is more of a featuresey thing, artists’ lives, lifestyles and so forth. My editor calls it ‘Vasari for the venal’.”

“Catchy.”

“Isn’t it.” She lifted her rented glass to her lips, sipped, and viewed him over the rim. “So, your show, figurative work? Abstracts? A return to your conceptual stuff like World of Bears? What can we expect?”

Simon put on his perspective again and looked afresh at Vanessa Agridge. Her thickly applied pancake was almost friable when zoomed in on; her face not blobby, beaky in fact, her eyes rather on the raw, ducty side. Simon made weird assessments of volume, mass, weight, alcohol-by-volume, then flared his nostrils and caught primitive whiffs of her, then with remote sensors traced the webbing beneath the pouching of her clothes, sent one psychic probe into her anus, the other into her left nostril. He turned her anatomy inside out, sockwise, and in the process quite forgot who the fuck she was, what the fuck she had said up until now, and so told her.

“Certainly not abstract. I think non-representational painting has finally gone the way Lévi-Strauss predicted, ‘a school of academic painting in which the artist strives to represent the manner in which he would execute his paintings if he were by any chance to paint some.’ “

“That’s very good,” said Vanessa Agridge, “very… witty. Could I use it, do you think — credited, of course.”

“Credited to Lévi-Strauss, it’s his observation, as I said.”

“Of course, of course…” a Dictaphone had appeared in her, bird-like, prestidigitated, on. Simon hadn’t noticed. “So, they’re portraits then, still lifes—”

“Nudes.” He remembered smoking a stolen cigarillo in a marsh, his mother’s world-girdle, his father’s penis, stubby, circumcised –

“Are they sort of Bacon-y, or maybe” — she tittered — “Freud-y. You know, peeling away the bloom from a woman’s body, externalising her anatomy, sort of—”

“They’re love paintings.” Piss-in-pants, piss-on-floor. That very bilious bead. Piss lives with lino. Or maybe Piss Lives With Lino. Titlewise that is “Sigh”.

“They’re what?” Vanessa Agridge had the Dictaphone up by her pig-like — crushed, flat, bristly — the way some other jerks held cellular phones.

“Love paintings. They’re paintings that in a quite straightforward, almost narrative way describe my love for the human body. My thirty-nine-year affair with the human body.”

In the minutes they had been at contraflow with one another the opening had begun to close. The openeers swam towards the doors of the gallery, sluiced here and there into little whirlpools of further sociability. George Levinson floated by them and slowly revolved to face Simon. “Are you coming on, Simon?”

“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.