Will Self: Great Apes

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.

Simon sighed. “It’s a lack of perspective…” and then coughed as a face inclined towards him, for he had involuntarily spoken aloud. He thought of Lucozade, but lacked the energy to broach the shop. He thought of sending the kids a postcard, but all there was on display were cards depicting chimpanzees in humiliating poses, dressed up in tweed jackets, carrying briefcases, with captions underneath reading ‘In London, thinking of you’. So, instead, he fingered out the joint he had rolled earlier from the breast pocket of his jacket. Simon held the thing in the palm of his hand; it was wrinkled and curved like the penis of a paper tiger. Then he lit it, hoping to fumigate his mind, send the visions scuttling away.

Sarah sat at the bar of the Sealink Club being propositioned by men. Some men propositioned her with their eyes, some with their mouths, some with their heads, some with their hair. Some men propositioned her with nuance, exquisite subtlety; others propositioned her with chutzpah, their suit as obvious as a schlong slammed down on the zinc counter. Some men’s propositioning was so slight as to be peripheral, a seductive play of the minor parts, an invitation to touch cuticles, rub corns, hang nails. Other men’s propositioning was a Bayreuth production, complete with mechanical effects; great flats descending, garishly depicting their Taste, their Intellect, their Status. The men were like apes — she thought — attempting to impress her by waving and kicking things about in a display of mock potency.

She sat, a small blonde eye to this storm of impersonality. A young woman who believed, when it suited her, in defying expectation. This evening she was dressed in a little black suit, little black toque, little black veil, black heels, black tights, cream silk blouse with long pointed collar. She shifted a little and sensed silken surfaces move around her, accommodating her in a sheeny embrasure. She felt very much present on the barstool. Beamed down to it, the molecules of her still fizzing, delighted to play a part in assuming her form.

Perhaps, Sarah thought, it’s this that really whistles up the men, this call of the urbane. But she knew that more likely it was the feline physicality, the blonde kittenishness of her. Nose, fine-bridged, tipped up at the end to expose nostrils pink and veined, advertisements for less random access. Mouth narrow, but full-lipped, especially the bottom which would be described as pouting in a more flippant face. The chin vulpine, sharp, a chin for delving with. The eyes, violet, truly so, a startling colour for eyes to be, their points ofpale fire lustrous above cheekbones with a point. These features introduced a mineral cast to what would otherwise be an animal face. A mineral hint that would become an adamant certainty if she would only remove the toque, show the way her narrow forehead mounted to a widow’s peak.

Women’s faces are all too often described as heart-shaped, but Sarah’s face wasn’t heartshaped, it was diamond-shaped, top triangle formed by peak and cheek, bottom by chin and cheek. And like a real diamond it was a face that contained faces, subsidiary countenances, depending on who was observing it.

The choppy, force-six sociability of the Sealink Club whirled around the stool this jewel sat on and crashed against the bar itself, allowing time in the undertow between waves for Sarah to sip her cocktail, light her Camel Filter, swap remarks with Julius the barman, watch herself multiplied and bisected in the facets of the mirror-backed shelves.

“Simon coming in?” asked Julius, pirouetting with a shaker, rattling the chunked concoction, pouring off the essence in a spiritous stream.

“Yeah, he’s been at some opening… I expect he’ll be here soon—” She broke off, a handsome young man was approaching the bar. He stared at Sarah, raked her pillbox hat with his gaze, and said to Julius, “Um.”

“Um what? Umbongo?” the barman replied.

“Um… err…” He was definitely flustered. Flustered in canvas trousers, something not quite right there, thought Sarah. Flustered and sweating under the high noon of his own good looks.

“I’m not sure I know that one, sir, is it grenadine-based?” Before the young man could answer, Julius was gone, transporting his tall, lithe body to the other end of the bar in a kind of shuffle that made it appear as if he were atop a concealed conveyor belt.

“He’s… he’s very witty, isn’t he?” said the young man to Sarah. It was a proposition that for once wasn’t a proposition.

“Yes,” she sighed, “and wasted here, wasted. Wasting his life away, and he could have been a real contender, really, a contender.” She sighed again, shook her head dolefully, stirred her drink with her finger.

“Why’d jew say that then?” the young man asked; but before Sarah could answer, draw him a little tighter into her ridiculous noose, the swing doors to the barroom did their bit and Tabitha, Sarah’s younger sister, sashayed in.

With her were Tony Figes the art critic and the Braithwaite brothers, an unholy pair of non-identical twins who regarded all of their life together — which was all their life — as a living, breathing, moving artwork. Needless to say this introduced an axiom: the closer the Braithwaites were to a performing context the less interesting they became. Whereas in social circumstances they were spontaneous and often downright bizarre.