James Lever - Me Cheeta - The Autobiography

The tension between Cary and Kirk was a constant scream in our nerves. And every flare-up had to be followed by the long reconciliations we needed, reconciliations that increasingly ended in fresh fights that had to be reconciled. Everyone was either fighting or reconciling all the time. (We used to have some neighbours like that in Palm Springs until, thank Christ, she kicked him out.) Spence had had a finger broken by Cary, who had a wound in his shoulder from Kirk, who was carrying a fractured ankle after a tangle with Lon and Cary. And Mama couldn’t help because she was the flashpoint. Her sumptuously taut vaginal swelling, twice the size of her head, was a blazing beacon of division. When Mama presented for young Spence, Kirk clamped Spence’s foot between his teeth and hurled him away with a wrench that ripped off a toe. He out-ranked him, so fair enough, I guess.

Around the time that Mama’s swelling was approaching its height, Cary killed a pair of colobus monkeys, and with the others occupied by the feast, Mama slipped away with us down to the stream to drink. Archie knuckled out of the trees with a greeting of quiet pant-grunts and Mama, he and Victoria groomed each other for a while, then Archie crossed the stream, shaking a branch to make us follow. Mama swung me on to her and we set off behind him: I lay straddled on her back, looking out for the many-coloured bird or marmosets or turacos in the canopy. Victoria knuckled along quietly after us, holding a termite-stick she’d made out of a msuba twig, and Archie led the way, impatiently shaking branches at us if we lagged behind.

When we tried to turn back, he came hoot-screaming and charging out of the shadows, and I tumbled off Mama’s back as she went sprawling under his impact. He grabbed her by the leg and dragged her down the slope, kicking and pummelling her, then stalked back past us with his hair bristling and sat down, waiting for her to stop screaming and come to him, which she did. She had to: she had us to look after, you see. He apologized with kisses and caresses, and groomed her for a while before we set off again. This was the beginning of what National Geographic refers to as a ‘consortship period’. Discovery calls it ‘Honeymoon in the Trees!’

Where did Archie take us? Over the hills and far away. Past the place where we’d met Alfred, through strange forests of moss-covered trees to the higher ground beside the escarpment, where the clouds clung and little groups of banded mongooses scurried around, carrying frogs in their mouths. We nested in a giant msuba beside a termite mound, and Archie kissed Mama’s wounds and groomed her and apologized for hours and mated her again and again. Next day Mama and Archie took Victoria and me termite-fishing, and as a special treat Archie showed me how to make a termite-fishing stick.

Mama hardly played with us because Archie was all over her, and if we tugged at her fur while she was being penetrated, she’d wave us off to play elsewhere. Victoria taught me how to climb. Archie on the other hand was having a ball—constantly either guzzling termites, in his horrible lip-smacking way, or mating. I tried a bit of mongoose and didn’t like it. It rained all the fucking time.

I remember, too, one evening near the end of the honeymoon, how we were surprised by the cries of a strange animal from far, far away. The distant hoots of the hostiles had died away at dusk, and then came these other cries—sudden pops, like sharp thunderclaps. Little sequences of these long-echoing thunderclaps, out of a stormless sky, far away but loud. Pop, pop, pop. Pop pop. In six months, I’d be sucking on a Lucky Strike and making prank phone-calls in a tavern in the Lower East Side of Manhattan. So. What happened was this.

We were on our way back to our old territory when we came across Kirk, lounging between the roots of a msuba in a shaft of sunlight that illuminated a haze of golden flies. He’d been stuffing himself with passion-fruit and his front was matted with juice and seeds. And then I saw the white bars of his ribs and all the turmoil in there and understood that the seeds were flies and the juice was Kirk’s blood. Archie darted towards him, then away, and Mama barked feverishly at the air and pounded the earth on all fours. Victoria raced back and forth, blindly, very fast, cheeping, and I realized that something very bad was happening. Archie darted up to Kirk in his cloud of flies, lifted his hand and let it drop. He recoiled and did it again. Kirk’s hand did nothing—and still I didn’t really make the connection that he was dead, like a bushpig or a blue-tailed monkey could be dead. It was too hard to grasp: Kirk, our heroic rain-dancer, our thunder-conquering king!

We moved on, quickly, without grooming, and Mama’s hair wouldn’t stop bristling beneath me. Death was still sticking to us: I became frightened because I thought I’d done something very wrong and was going to be punished for it. It hadn’t been me, I wanted Mama to understand. It was a leopard—or maybe he’d fallen out of a tree, like Stroheim! We crossed the stream back to where we’d been when Mama’s swelling started, and the feeling of Death forded the water with us. It climbed up among the empty nests of our old roosting-tree and slept beside us too, and when we woke we saw another adult male, whose name I didn’t know, caught in a tangle of branches high above, gnawed by the baboons or leopard that had left him where he was hanging and much more dead than Kirk.

Even Victoria and I knew it then, I think. What else could have done this if not the hostiles? All we knew about hostiles was that they were hostile. In fact, it was absolutely typical hostile behaviour, if you thought about it. Mama climbed to the crown of a custard-apple tree and pant-hooted in four directions, but got no answer: the whole forest seemed to be teeming with death. At a fast trot she led us up one of the deep-grassed ridges that spoked off from the escarpment and gave a view of the canopy below. But there were no black blobs moving in the tree-tops, no chains of dots leaving a wake through the long-grassed slopes; neither friends nor enemies. And then, where the ridge flattened and was reabsorbed by the forest, at last we heard a long, low hoot from ahead, and though Archie bristled, I recognized the voice as Spence’s.

Poor Spence was limping. Fucking hostiles, I remember thinking (my translation). He gave another weak hoot and tried to move towards us out of the trees and down the ridge, but wasn’t really able to. He whimpered and tried to lift his arm to show us, and Mama set me down in the tall grass and scampered up towards him, followed, after a nervous grin, by Archie. Victoria pitter-pattered after them, through the skeins of mist that scudded over the ridge. She caught up, and just as the three of them got to the edge of the trees, Spence suddenly disappeared and the hostiles came screaming out of the long grass towards them. I saw Cary drop down from the dark interior of the forest-edge, followed by more adults, and Stroheim.

Archie was engulfed in a tide of bristling black and that was the last I saw of him. I never saw Victoria again: the last I remember of my sister is the sight of her catching Mama up. I fled back down the ridge the way we’d come, suddenly capable of running, and when I fell, I looked back up the ridge and saw Mama running towards me, and a couple of hostiles—except they weren’t hostiles, of course, but Cary and Spence, who used to feed me bits of moonfruit—running shoulder to shoulder with her. She fell, or was tripped, and then Cary was stamping on her, and others were catching up. From the tall grass I watched her try to rise. Stroheim nipped in and out, capering with excitement, but I didn’t see him strike. It didn’t even occur to me to try to rescue her. I just took off down the side of the ridge where the slope was so steep I could almost fall down it into the upper canopy of the trees below.