Will Self - Great Apes

The other noteworthy aspect of the books had been the dedication with which Busner had attached himself to his unusual patients. He had hit upon an observational and expository method that synthesised the objectivity and rationalism of his medical training at Edinburgh in the sixties, the imaginative flare and creative discipline imparted by his analytic training under the legendary Alkan, [2] For a full discussion of Alkan’s analytic method see his ‘Implied Techniques in Psychoanalysis’ (British Journal of Ephemera , March 1956). and the existential phenomenology of his work at the Concept House he had run in Willesden during the seventies. His patients were thus both studied under clinical conditions and also taken out into the wider world by Busner himself.

‘The important thing,’ Busner would sign his students and acolytes, ‘is to achieve an inter-subjective “chup-chupp” approach, somehow to enter the “euch-euch” morbid consciousness of the patient and see the world with his eyes. It is no longer sufficient to adopt a hard physiological attitude to certain disorders, or to view them as motivationally based, and therefore solely within the purlieus of “hooo” psychiatry…’

While this ‘inter-subjective approach’ had obvious and sound credentials, both intellectual and ethical, certain wags couldn’t help noticing, and remarking upon, the bowdlerising tendencies of the practice. Like morbidly ebullient chimpanzee interest stories, Busner’s case histories made great copy and highly entertaining television. In pursuit of his patients’ distorted phenomenologies Busner would go waterskiing with paraplegics, to the opera with chronic epileptics, to acid-house raves with hebephrenics. It had even become somewhat de rigeur in publishing circles to have Busner and one of his protégés present at parties.

Thus chimps who barked involuntarily as they succumbed to the tics and spasms of Tourette’s syndrome, or Parkinsonian chimps whose arms and legs undulated weirdly from the effects of L-dopa, or brain-damaged chimps whose gesticulatory sallies were imprisoned within the tape loop ofacute amnesia, became a familiar social sight beside more conventionally behaved agents, authors and literary journalists, jostling for canapés and free drinks. ‘It is,’ Busner would sign to the little groups who congregated around him at such events, ‘a practical demonstration of the “gru-nn” chimpunity of my approach to these disorders. By bringing these chimps into such settings’ — and at this point he would usually have to break off and adminster some emergency grooming to the chimp in question — ‘I am “chup-chupp” actively deconstructing the ideological categories that surround our notions of disease.’

Busner finished dressing and jumped up to pull the rearview mirror down on its retractable arm from the ceiling. Is my anus clean? he mused, sending one exploratory hand round his broad back to grope in its folds and pleats of yellow-pink ischial skin, then bringing it up to his flared nostrils and waggling lip. But despite the ghastly bout of the shits that had afflicted him when he got back from L’Escargot the previous evening, everything about his rear looked well sluiced. Gambol can go over it again on the way to the hospital, he decided, and straightening his jacket to ensure that the hem was above his magnificently effulgent arsehole, Busner snapped off the bathroom light, took a sprightly swing off the handhold at the side of the door, and bounded off down the corridor, his big balls swinging this way and that.

Busner’s reappointment as Consultant at Heath Hospital had come midway through this popular renaissance in his career. And although he was still required to do some of the day-to-day grind of actually treating patients, it was more or less understood by the Trust that his presence there was as an elder stateschimp of the psychiatric fraternity, adding lustre to the hospital’s reputation. He was allowed Gambol as a researcher, could pick and choose which patients he decided to concentrate on, and further, was able to cruise the intakes of other hospitals in the area, seeking out the kind of cases that would make good copy for his books.

Between projects at the moment, Busner was not looking forward to the day. A grindingly dull departmental meeting was scheduled for that morning, and in the late afternoon he was due to go into Univerity College to deliver the second of his public lectures on autism. This series, entitled ‘Chimpanzees Who Groom Alone’ was set to be immensely popular. Vaulting on to the podium to commence the first lecture, Busner was pleased to see that as well as the gaggle of — mostly bonobo — foreign students he had expected, there were a lot of lay chimps, as well as psychology and primatology students from the university faculty.

Nonetheless the whole subject of autism had rather palled. He had expressed most of what he wanted to in his book A Primatologist Recounts , and the prospect of going over it all again, even to a large and receptive audience, was not particularly exciting. What I need, he reflected as he bounded down the stairs, alternating between the handholds at different levels, is some new case history, exhibiting a syndrome or symptomatology never before encountered in psychiatry or neurology. Something unprecedented that hints at broad reevaluations of the very nature of chimpunity!

He paused before the door to the kitchen and summoned himself for the fray of his group, before leaping up to grab the lintel and swinging in.

The sight that met the distinguished doctor as he dropped to his feet and stood erect in the doorway was much as he expected. The Busners were a large group, and advancedly traditional as befitted their medical and academic bent. They were more subject to flux than most middle-class professional groups, with a core ofsome ten to fifteen members in residence at the Redington Road group home at any given time.

Zack Busner put great emphasis on the virtues of patrolling in the young, and would often physically eject sub-adult male members of the group from the house, occasioning raised eyebrow ridges and enquiring pant-hoots from their lippy neighbours in the treelined environs of Hampstead. Sub-adult females could get into trouble as well — if their alpha thought they were wasting an oestrus solely on endogamous mating, he would go up to Hampstead and round up some suitors for them himself.

But by the same token, as his reign as alpha male had extended, first to five, then to ten and now to almost fifteen years, so the fusion of the group had come to seem as important to him as its fission. At times, such as now, when two and possibly even three of the Busner females were in oestrus simultaneously, Zack accepted the influx of male group members with good grace. Even though he would find himself having to stump up for air fares for those of his adolescent wards who insisted on flying back to London from Bali, or the Côte d’Azur in order to mate endogamously.

When this happened the house would be packed to the seams with chimps of all ages, perhaps thirty in all, squabbling, scrapping, grooming and copulating. But it all made for the kind of good-natured rambunctiousness that Busner associated with his group, and he took it in his stride — even early in the morning.

The first chimp Busner noticed was Charlotte, the alpha Busner female, who was crouched on the flight of three stairs that separated the eating from the cooking area of the room, being mated by David, the gamma male, with his characteristic extreme nonchalance. David hadn’t even troubled to discard the morning paper before effecting penetration, and Busner saw that he had it folded open on the ledge of Charlotte’s back, and was scanning the leader page whilst thrusting. A gaggle of infants was trying to get in the way, leaping on David’s back and shoulders.