James Lever - Me Cheeta - The Autobiography

He looked like a guy who’d just lost two thousand ‘quid’, to utilize a little Limey-speak. But he was only a weakling and a bully and a near-murderer, scumbag, self-pitier, miser, liar, ass and oaf on the outside—who isn’t? Somewhere on the inside there was a decent human being. Oh, all right: Rex Harrison was an absolutely irredeemable cunt who tried to murder me—but still, you have to try to forgive people, no matter what. Otherwise we’d be back in the jungle.

I forgive you, Rex.

Anyway, I was unsurprised and quite relieved when I found out that evening that they didn’t need me any more. Rex had had a word. And that, folks, was the end of that.

Once upon a time in a land far, far away…or quite far away, anyway. It’s eighteen hours even if you get a direct flight from Vegas. And there’s nothing much there now anyway except some farms and red mud. Don Google-Earthed it. Once upon a time I was a little prince in a magic kingdom. I can’t remember anything before my memory of Stroheim, as if that was the thing that shook my consciousness awake. He fell out of a fig-tree chasing after a blue-tailed monkey. Thump went Stroheim, and I was off and running, once upon a time—but let me tell this straight, dearest humans. You must know how it ends…

There was Mama and me and my sister, and we lived in the forest below an escarpment with about twenty others, whose names I’ll have to change. I slept high up in a nest of leaves that Mama would prepare in the crook of a branch, with Victoria curled round me and Mama round her. In the mornings Mama would take us across the stream to fish for termites. Victoria would ride on her back and I would cling underneath. The water was cold and fast-flowing and pressed against me as we crossed but I always felt safe. And when we climbed into the trees and moved through the canopy, Victoria would climb behind us on her own, following Mama’s soft hoots.

When we got to the termite mounds, Mama would strip a twig and insert it into one of the holes, leaving it in long enough for the termites to clamp their mandibles on to it. You were supposed either to crunch them off one by one or slide them through your mouth in one go, or just mop them up with the back of your wrist. You’ve seen it on National Geographic. Me and Victoria were too young for termites and I liked it very much when she copied Mama and groomed me, or held me up by one leg to dangle upside down.

What else did I like? Figs, moonfruit, a big yellowy-green fruit that fizzed when you ate it, passionflower buds, Victoria, Mama, holding on to Mama’s hair to ride her, being suckled by Mama, playing with Frederick, Gerard and Deanna, the taste of the leaves that Mama would chew into a little sponge to dab up fresh rainwater, the flashing orange on the heads of the turacos, dreams of the escarpment and, most of all, rain dances. I didn’t like termites, palm-nuts, the faces of baboons, the tree that had killed Clara, the smell of the python we chased after, Marilyn, whom Mama had to fight, young males charging at Mama if we were on our own, nightmares, the mewling of leopards, Stroheim.

You’ve never seen a rain dance, have you? They were us at our best. For hours beforehand you’d feel the electricity building in the air. You’d climb up into the lower canopy to escape the humidity, and it would slither up the trunk behind you. So you’d climb higher, until finally you’d be perched in the topmost branches, high over the rest of the forest, panting and sticky with moisture, too tired even to reach for one of those fizzing yellowy-green fruits whose name, dammit, escapes me.

From across the forest you’d hear the low coughs given out by other tree-climbers. No birds. No insects. Only our low, muffled coughs, echoless in the wet air. Then the first pant-hoots: the long low hoots, the shorter higher breaths. Mama and the others in our tree would respond with their own hoots, counting themselves in, and then the pants would climb higher, flowering into screams, and the screams would link into a continuous long chorus, and as the rain began to leak a few drops Mama would start pounding on the trunk, shaking the branches, like she was trying to wake the tree up too, and you could hear us all through the forest, drumming up the storm. And over it all, our alpha, Kirk, summoning us to gather for the dance.

We’d climb down from our tree and follow his call through the forest. In my memory it’s always dusk as we sight Kirk, walking upright at the apex of a long-grassed ridge and howling in the strengthening rain, looking terrifying up close, twenty times my own size. He seems to be coaxing the thunder towards us, reeling it in. The other grown-ups, like Cary and Archie, are quieter but also in a trance and visibly shaking. The thunder swings through the upper canopy, approaching in huge, looping leaps until finally it’s upon us, above us, all over us, and the air suddenly turns into rain.

The mothers clear themselves and us children away into the sloe trees to watch. We’re absolutely rapt. Kirk, illuminated by lightning, charges down the ridge at an astonishing speed. Then Cary, who’s clever, discovers rocks can be made to bounce up and smack satisfyingly into the foliage. Cary can always do certain things Kirk can’t. Archie is smaller than the others and finds a branch to whack against a tree-trunk, leaving a series of white scars. They are our heroes, and Victoria and I are too enthralled by it all to eat our sloes. And soon, as it always is, the wicked thunder is faced down and slinks off, cowed by our vigour, sent on its way with a kick by the youngsters, like Stroheim and Spence, who are pelting down the charge-route in imitation of Kirk. The rain falls as applause and we drink it up. Mama and Victoria and I share out sloes between us.

I love rain dances. When I grow up, I think, I’m going to be in them.

We were the only ones in the forest who made art or fashioned tools, the only ones who co-operated, the ones with the most sophisticated and highly evolved culture. We thought there was nobody like us. And our queen was Mama. My mother was the queen of the world.

She was extraordinarily beautiful, and not only in her children’s eyes. I know now how to describe her coat: it was the colour of Coca-Cola refracted through ice, a deep black harbouring a secret copper, and yet there was also, especially when she sparkled with rain, a faint blue nimbus around her as if she were coolly on fire. Broad-backed and not tall, she had a low centre of gravity and huge hands and feet, which meant that even the way she moved was serene. Her eyes were direct and emitted a soothing amber light. She’d lost only a few teeth and the tatter in one of her ears she wore kind of rakishly, a concession to imperfection, like the abscess on her upper lip. Kirk held sway over us, but it was Mama who shored him up, and calmed Cary and the other rivals, did the grooming and reconciling and generally stopped everyone killing each other.

Forgive the boasting but it’s true. She was respected and loved where Kirk was merely feared. It was Mama to whom both Kirk and Cary came screaming for reassurance. She was always two steps ahead. She could figure out how a squabble between Cary and Archie over Marilyn would lead to Veronica being battered by Kirk. She gave Marilyn a real dressing-down when she ate Veronica’s baby, Jayne. We even used to visit with Stroheim’s crippled mother Ethel, since Mama realized it would do the nervous Stroheim good if his mother could rise a little up the hierarchy. She endured the beatings she had to take with grace and was pretty handy in a ruck.

I remember riding her on our patrols, led by Kirk across the stream and through the ravine guarded by Clara’s tree, six or seven of us in single file through the deep grass—so deep only I, sitting on Mama’s back, could see above the blades—and down again into the forest of moonfruits and figs where our territory overlapped with that of the hostiles who roamed the other side of the escarpment. We would fall silent, grinning nervously, and I’d feel my mother’s hair bristle scratchily erect beneath me. Here, the thrashing of a branch might mean a baboon or a battle. I’ve never seen a hostile properly—I find it difficult to believe in them. Hostiles to me are black blobs who answer our calls from the ridge on the horizon. We listen an enormous silence into existence. Above us white-faced monkeys pitter-patter through the canopy; turacos flash their orange crests. Now there’s something in the silence. Everyone touches each other. We’re all here. Phew! Keep calm, everyone. We certainly do seem to need to give each other a hell of a lot of reassurance all the time. Everyone OK? And immediately there’s a pant-hoot from ahead of us and a tree quivers and a male hostile drops to the ground with a crack of branches.