Great Apes (3 page)

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.

“Fuck me sideways,” said Tabitha, coming up to Sarah and planting a Twiglety kiss on her pointy cheekbone, a kiss so Twiglety that a bit of Twiglet remained glued to the cheek, “here you are all on your lonesome.” She half hugged her older sister, digging her nails in under Sarah's breastbone.

Sarah struggled, slapped Tabitha, said, “Fuck off.”

“Fuck you.” Tabitha wasn't recoiling, she was leaning into Sarah, scrunging silk, cotton and flesh; she was hunting for a little nipple to tweak. The bag of Twiglets in her other hand waved about erratically.

“Fuck off!” She'd found it – she twirled away down to the end of the bar to say hello to Julius.

Tony Figes stepped forward and presented himself saying, “Good evening.” He took Sarah's hand in the most provisional of ways, then returned it. Tony Figes smiled, and the long, L-shaped scar that made a seam across cheek, between chin cleft and lower lip, furled up to become a second mouth. A queer, bent little man, brown all over like a sheet of parcel paper, with a browner label of hair pasted on his shiny brow, this evening he was gift-wrapped in a cream linen suit. Tufts of unfortunately grey hair struggled up from the open neck of his shirt. “Hmm.” He turned from Sarah, ran an eye over the room, its racks of suits, then turned back to her. “If I'd wanted an insurance quotation I'd have stayed in and called Freefone.” Sarah laughed and he took his twin-smiles to the bar, signed for Julius.

The Braithwaite Brothers moved up to Sarah. They were humming under their breath. She couldn't make out
the tune exactly, but it could have been ‘The Grapes of Wrath'. They stood either side of her, one thin, the other fattish. But both faces lean, yellow-black. They stuck their hands out in front of their chests, palms down. Like robots, Sarah thought, or humanoid fork-lift trucks. She looked from one to the other; both sets ofbrown eyes were turned in on themselves, or possibly turned in on the other's. Then, without any signal being given, all four hands began to dart around her head, as if the brothers were playing a game of conceptual patty-cake, or signing for the partially sighted deaf. They boosted the humming, then let it fade, the four hands fell to their sides. They moved off without saying anything, heading for the toilets.

“Body space,” Tony Figes said while lighting a Camel Filter; he was by way of being their exegetist. “They're doing something on the space the body occupies.”

“I see.”

“They've said that they intend to use their bodies from now on solely to define the space that other bodies occupy, in order to draw attention to the way modern existence destroys our faculties of extroception.” Tony held his head cocked to one side and his martini cocked away from it. Sarah didn't think he could tell himself any more whether he was being ironic.

“How long do you think they'll keep it up?”

“This evening?”

“Yeah.”

“Hoo, an hour maybe. They're holding some excellent coke. Fucking excellent. A couple more lines and they'll hopefully give the whole thing a rest.”

Tabitha gambolled back from the other end of the bar.
More drinks were ordered from Julius. The Braithwaites returned, eyes and noses wet, as if they had been doggily retrieving some cocaine which had been shot down in the gents'. Sarah sat and appreciated the warm bicker about her, the sarcasm and irony, the satire and ridicule, the delightful, cosy inwardlookingness of it all. Each snide aside she felt as a light caress, each barbed remark as a hortatory pat.

But it wasn't always thus. This brittleness had once been nothing but brittle, thin social ice failing to support her flailing sense of herself. Only … what? As little as six months ago this early evening in the club, this prelude to her own abandonment of her child's body, would have been purgatory, a recrudescence of loathing. Now everything about it was redefined by the fact of Simon. More specifically by the fact of his body.

If she concentrated, honed down the sound, cut out the shards oflight from glasses, mirrors and spectacle frames, she could imagine his approaching body as a low thrum of tangible solidity winging towards her through the shades of evening. A bomber group of a body in close formation, collarbone, rib cage, hips, penis. Feet, calves, thighs, penis. Hands, shoulders, elbows, penis. ‘Sarah Loves Simon's Penis'. She should carve it on the bar with her hatpin, it was such a true, romantic belief.

The fade from neck stubble to chest hair, the long hardnesses of muscle, like flexible splints. And the paradoxical softness of his pale skin. Like a boy's skin, a skin that would always be sensual, always cry out to be touched. A skin that smelt wholly of him, him boiled up in the unpuckered bag of it. Sarah wanted to slash this skin of
his, have him gush into her. She chafed her thighs together at the thought of this and wished he were there already. Why did they bother with going out at all? Why did she want to drag him out this evening? She didn't really. She would have far rather stayed in and let him peel her and peel her and peel her again. He could get her going, crank up the galvanic heart ofher so that she came and came and came, each dizzy orgasm more vertiginous than the one that preceded it.

Why did they go out? Why did they do drugs? Because this was
too
much for both of them, because, Sarah sensed, this was something that could be atrophied rather than toned by exercise. Something that might be worked out of them in the working out. She had not read Lycurgus, but had she done so she would have recognised the beauty of the Spartan law on adultery. In Sparta adultery was without sanction, but woe betide the man caught making love to his wife, for certain death would ensue for both parties. This imparted a dangerous tension to marital relations, kept them forbidden, truly sexy. So it was for Simon and Sarah, the Sealink, the drugs, the gaping lacuna was their Laconia.

There was this, but more locally there were his ex-wife and his ex-girlfriends. The many many ex-girlfriends. Unpack Simon and there wasn't just Simon there, there was also a series of Russian dolly-women, his reified memories of lovemaking with them packed each inside the other. He was a cyclopaedia of clitrubs, a compendium of cunt-sucks, and a Britannica of breast-caresses. If Sarah caught herself thinking of this as they made love it was enough to make her cry, burst out crying with him inside her. Sometimes she thought of this on the very brink of
coming, the very teetering edge. Then she would be wracked by two kinds of sobs. As she subsided, Simon would hang on to her, bewildered by this perturbation he had wittingly produced.

Where was he? Why wasn't he there already, so she could grab hold of the mast of him, hang on in the watery flux of the Sealink? Once Simon was there the whole evening would become a tipping deck, the two of them sliding down it towards bed, like a pair of hands entwined in practical prayer, then clenched in pleasure. Where was he?

He was in Oxford Circus, standing outside Top Shop sucking on an unfiltered Camel, looking across the arena of tar towards the reef of Regent Street, which curved away to the south. He was standing back from the pavement, against the plate-glass window. His temples thrummed and he felt claustrophobic. The tube had been bad enough, had been, in two words, a mistake. Or rather the joint he had smoked in Sloane Square before getting the tube had been a mistake. He had hoped for a little respite from his body, a mental excursion whilst it was transported into the West End. But instead the hash with its heavy predictability, like a bulky butler, ushered in more unpleasantness, more bad feeling.

It began on the escalator down, which was packed with a commuter crowd. I have been looking at these descending ranks of people all my life, it occurred to Simon, robotic, not touching, but moving in tight formations along tunnels and up stairways. They are like the proles in Lang's
Metropolis
. Exactly like the proles in Lang's
Metropolis. This
glancing observation, quite slight, nonetheless pulled up a deeper memory, depth-charged it, so that it shot up into Simon's consciousness streaming bubbles. He had seen
Metropolis
as a child, been appalled by Lang's vision of an inhuman, urban future, ruled by the Moloch of machinery, but had not, aged seven, seen it as dark fantasy at all. Simon thought it was a documentary – of sorts.

And it had been. A fly-on-the-tube-wall report of shuffling anonymity, every body reduced by the Frankensteinian future to no more than the sum ofits fellows' parts. And by the vending machine Simon blanched, and under the train indicator Simon sweated; he felt the ridging of sweaty cloth cut into his perineum –
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