Great Apes Read online

  For Madeleine,

  And with thanks

  to D. J. O.

  Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Author’s Note

  Footnotes

  About the Author

  By the Same Author

  ‘An ape, a most ill-favoured beast.

  How like us in all the rest?’

  Cicero

  ‘When I come home late at night from banquets, from social gatherings, there sits waiting for me a half-trained little chimpanzee and I take comfort from her as apes do. By day I cannot bear to see her; for she has the insane look of a bewildered half-broken animal in her eye; no one else sees it, but I do and I cannot bear it.’

  Kafka, A Report to the Academy

  Chapter One

  Simon Dykes, the artist, stood, rented glass in hand, and watched as a rowing eight emerged from the brown brick wall of one building, slid across a band of grey-green water, and then eased into the grey concrete of another building. Some people lose their sense of proportion, thought Simon, but what would it be like to lose your sense of perspective?

  “Disastrous for a painter –”

  “I’m sorry,” Simon blurted, imagining for a second that he had spoken aloud.

  “They’re disastrous for a painter,” reiterated George Levinson, who had come up by Simon’s elbow and now stood beside him, looking out of the plate-glass window that faced on to the river.

  “By that I take it you mean they’re disastrous for the painter.” Simon half turned towards George’s ruminant profile and swept an arm to encompass the white space of the gallery, the big oblong canvases, and the posing private openeers, who stood about in loose groups, arms cocked, as if they were some tableau vivant intended to exhibit human social interactions.

  “Hardly.” George slurped some Chilean wine out of his rented glass. “Sold the lot. Sold the lot, every one shot with a little red dot. No, I mean the technique could be disastrous for a painter such as yourself, this idea of silk screen laid over photogravure. I mean, I know it isn’t that – um – remarkable in and of itself, but you have to admit that the finished result does have something … something of the heft –”

  “Of oils? Of painting in oils. Fuck off, George. I’ll fire you if you say another word.” And painter turned away from dealer to resume staring out through the ravine of buildings, across at the mélange of modernist apartment blocks and Victorian mansion blocks on the Battersea side of the river.

  The outer eddies from the opening reached the two men, a skirl of chamber music nouveau, a waft of Marlboro smoke, a couple of youngsters, who leant against a nearby pillar, the girl’s sateen-hosed thigh gently rubbing her companion’s corduroy crotch, while sheep-like they cropped on one another’s faces. Islanded, Simon and George stood together with the quiet assurance of men who have stood thus many times before, the mood that held them unforced.

  Another rowing eight nosed out from the brown brick building, hovered on its glaucous cushion in the masonry frame, the cox at the back clearly visible – baseball hat, loudhailer – and then slid into the grey concrete like a vast hypodermic powered by eight hearty junior doctors. “No,” said Simon. “No, I was thinking when you came up … thinking, looking at this” – he poked a finger at the square of Thames, the oblongs of building, the garnishes of green to the side – “what a terrible thing it would be for a painter to lose his sense of perspective.”

  “I thought that was the whole point of a great swathe of abstract art this century, the attempt to view without preconceptions, cubism, fauvism, vorti –”

  “– That’s loss of perspective as an intellectual assumption. I’m talking about real loss of perspective, a sort of perspective blindness where all depth of field is eradicated, where all that can be grasped is form and colour mutating within a single plane.”

  “You mean like some sort of neurological disorder? What do they call it, agnopho –”

  “– Agnosia, yeah, I suppose … I’m not quite sure what I mean, but I’m not talking about a Cézanne-inspired viewing-of-the-world-anew, but a diminution. It’s perspective that provides the necessary third continuum for vision and maybe consciousness as well. Without it an individual might no longer be able to apprehend time, might … might have to relearn time in some way, or be left in a sliver of reality, imprisoned like a microbe in a microscope slide.”

  “It’s a thought,” Levinson replied after some seconds had elapsed, including himself out of it.

  “Simon Dykes?” A woman had approached during this speech and stood, hovering between diffidence and assertiveness, hand forward, body leant back and away, as if the latter were the appendage.

  “Yes?”

  “I’m sorry to interrupt –”

  “It’s OK, I was just –” and George Levinson was gone, heading back across the lack-of-industry white floor-covering, an adipose wader of a man, dipping his bill into knots of people as he went, dropping one name here and picking up another over there, amply justifying a recent glossy magazine article which had described him as ‘the most proficient room-worker in the London art world’.

  “That’s George Levinson, isn’t it?” the woman said. She was round-faced with wavelets of black hair tossed about on the top of her head. Down below her clothing encased rather than draped her small, gibbous body.

  “Yes, that’s right.” Simon didn’t want to sound as off-putting as he knew he did, but the opening fatigue was upon him and he didn’t want to be there.

  “Does he still handle you?”

  “Oh no, no no, not any more, not since we were at prep school together in fact, then he would often handle me in the locker room after games. Nowadays he just sells my paintings for me.”

  “Ha-ha!” The woman’s laugh wasn’t forced – it wasn’t a laugh at all, more an allusion to the possibility of humour. “I know that, of course –”

  “Then why did you ask?”

  “Look.” The woman’s face puckered, and Simon could see in that instant that petulant resentment was her natural cast of mind, all the rest a tremendous effort of will. “If you’re going to be rude –”

  “No, I’m sorry, really …” He raised a hand, fingers outstretched, and then tamped down the thickening atmosphere between them, patted it into the shape of niceness, patted it and even patted her wrist a little. “I didn’t mean to sound so sharp, I’m tired and …” He had felt her wrist, the band of her watch, steel, the edge of her wrist bone sharp as his tone, bird bones, sparrow bones, splintered bones.

  His eyes slid to the window even as he patted, and there in the notch of river swirled a thrown handful of birds – swallows presumably – fusing into flock then fissioning back into individuals, like thoughts in a disordered mind. Simon thought of Coleridge, and then drugs. Funny that, like a synaesthesia of concepts, some people ‘hear’ the doorbell as green, I think Coleridge as drugs, or birds as Coleridge, or birds as drugs … And Simon thought then of Sarah, her pubic hair specifically, and only then of the woman walking into his mind, under his very eyes, in through his very eyes – no perspective, you dig? – and looking over its contents to see if the
re was anything to use. “I don’t mean to be so rude. I’m tired, ope –”

  “You must be, what with your new show opening soon. Are you good on deadlines?”

  “No, not really. I tend to be painting the day before an opening, and then stretching and framing most of the ni –” He faltered. “I’m going to be rude again. Before I say anything more I ought to know who I’m talking to.”

  “Vanessa Agridge, Contemporanea,” She flipped her birdlike claw under his hand and didn’t so much shake it as scratch the palm. “I came to this, but I don’t think there’s much I can write about her, so it’s a bit of a result for me … seeing you here. … out and about – so to speak – in the week before the new show …” Like a faltering engine, she died. The pause hunched between them in unequal space.

  “Her?” queried Simon after a decent while.

  “Manuella Sanchez,” Vanessa Agridge replied, tapping him on the arm with a rolled-up copy of the catalogue in a way she imagined to be flirtatious. Simon looked at her with his new perspectiveless vision: blob-shaped muzzle, slashed red, topped with blackish fur, blackish fur below. It swelled some, slash gaped to show canines, and she continued. “She’s meant to be so outré– anyway, that’s what her people said – but she isn’t. Just dull. Nothing to say for herself.”

  “But the work, isn’t that what you’re here to write about, her work?”

  “Hngfh”’ she snorted, “no, no, Contemporanea is more of a featuresey thing, artists’ lives, lifestyles and so forth. My editor calls it ‘Vasari for the venal’.”

  “Catchy.”

  “Isn’t it.” She lifted her rented glass to her lips, sipped, and viewed him over the rim. “So, your show, figurative work? Abstracts? A return to your conceptual stuff like World of Bears? What can we expect?”

  Simon put on his perspective again and looked afresh at Vanessa Agridge. Her thickly applied pancake was almost friable when zoomed in on; her face not blobby, beaky in fact, her eyes rather on the raw, ducty side. Simon made weird assessments of volume, mass, weight, alcohol-by-volume, then flared his nostrils and caught primitive whiffs of her, then with remote sensors traced the webbing beneath the pouching of her clothes, sent one psychic probe into her anus, the other into her left nostril. He turned her anatomy inside out, sockwise, and in the process quite forgot who the fuck she was, what the fuck she had said up until now, and so told her.

  “Certainly not abstract. I think non-representational painting has finally gone the way Lévi-Strauss predicted, ‘a school of academic painting in which the artist strives to represent the manner in which he would execute his paintings if he were by any chance to paint some.’ “

  “That’s very good,” said Vanessa Agridge, “very … witty. Could I use it, do you think – credited, of course.”

  “Credited to Lévi-Strauss, it’s his observation, as I said.”

  “Of course, of course …” a Dictaphone had appeared in her, bird-like, prestidigitated, on. Simon hadn’t noticed. “So, they’re portraits then, still lifes –”

  “Nudes.” He remembered smoking a stolen cigarillo in a marsh, his mother’s world-girdle, his father’s penis, stubby, circumcised –

  “Are they sort of Bacon-y, or maybe” – she tittered – “Freud-y. You know, peeling away the bloom from a woman’s body, externalising her anatomy, sort of –”

  “They’re love paintings.” Piss-in-pants, piss-on-floor. That very bilious bead. Piss lives with lino. Or maybe Piss Lives With Lino. Titlewise that is “Sigh”.

  “They’re what?” Vanessa Agridge had the Dictaphone up by her pig-like – crushed, flat, bristly – the way some other jerks held cellular phones.

  “Love paintings. They’re paintings that in a quite straightforward, almost narrative way describe my love for the human body. My thirty-nine-year affair with the human body.”

  In the minutes they had been at contraflow with one another the opening had begun to close. The openeers swam towards the doors of the gallery, sluiced here and there into little whirlpools of further sociability. George Levinson floated by them and slowly revolved to face Simon. “Are you coming on, Simon?”

  “Excuse me – where?”

  “To Grindley’s first, then maybe the Sealink later.”

  “I may see you at the Sealink, I have to see what Sarah’s doing first.”

  “Right-o.”

  Levinson disappeared downstream, flirting with a youth he’d picked up, a boy like a puma, with slim hips, violet eyes and a black coat. And, in the wake of seeing-George-and-him-go, bobbed the recognition of what had preceded it. Simon straightened up, pulled himself into the present. In a life where every third person he met assumed an expression that showed they recognised him, was it any wonder that he constantly found himself talking to strangers as if they were friends?

  All ofthis, and then Simon said to Vanessa Agridge, who had a Dictaphone – as he now saw – in threatening evidence, “You must excuse me –”

  “I just did.” She was catching his style – it happened.

  “No, I mean now. I must go. I have to work.”

  “To meet Sarah?”

  “She’s my girlfriend –”

  “Model?”

  “Girlfriend. Look, I’m going.” And he started off, out of the trap.

  “One thing…” she called. He turned, she was a shadow now, exiguous, wavering against the summer evening.

  “Yes?”

  “This Lévi-Strauss fellow.”

  “Yes?”

  “You haven’t got a number for him, have you? It’s just that I thought I’d run that quote by him – if I do the piece, that is.”

  * * *

  There was a small rank of pay phones by the main doors of the gallery. Simon levered his phonecard out of his cardholder and fed it into the slot. He punched Sarah’s number at the artists’ agency where she worked and waited in a virtual aviary with the chirrupings and tweetings of connection. Then her lips grazed his cheekbone, her voice breathed into his ear: ‘I’m not available to take your call right now, so …’ Not her voice. As close to her voice as the voice of Hal in 2001 was to a human voice. Not her sparky tone either, but horrifically measured, every word a spondee.

  “Are you there?” he queried after the peep, knowing that she would be.

  “Vetting, yeah, I’m call-vetting.”

  “Why?”

  “I dunno,” she sighed. “I just don’t feel like talking to anyone. Anyone except you, that is.”

  “So, what’s the plan?”

  “A few of us are meeting up –”

  “Where?”

  “At the Sealink.”

  “Who?”

  “Tabitha, Tony, I guess – though he hasn’t confirmed. Maybe the Braithwaites.”

  “Shiny happy people.”

  “Yeah.” She laughed, very briefly, their shared laugh, a kind of lipsmacking hiss. “Shiny happy people. When will you get there?”

  “I’m en route now.” He hung up without further ado, then negotiated a flurry of final ‘Catch you later’s, ‘We must get together’s and ‘Next week’s – that ought to have been ‘Next year’s – before taking the cast-iron stairs down to the street.

  Summer London on the far cusp of the rush hour. The gallery wasn’t in Chelsea Harbour, but it might as well have been, for all the relevance that the opening had to the world outside. Simon set off along the Embankment, occasionally peering back over his shoulder to look at the golden ball atop the central tower of the development. Someone had once told him that it rose and fell with the tide, but as he couldn’t tell whether it was low or high tide he was unable to make sense of the balls.

  He felt tired and his chest slopped with the sweet phlegm that comes either at the onset or the demise of a lung infection. Simon couldn’t decide which as he gurgled and gobbed his way past the cars crammed in the crook of road leading up to Earls Court. The Braithwaite brothers. Shiny happy people. The Sealink Club. It all meant a late night of sh
outing, laughing and flirting. A production mounted with a shifting cast of nameless but recurring minor characters. And it all implied getting in at three, or four, or past five, dawn coming in prismatic beams, the world’s furniture haphazardly rearranged by the clumsy removal men of narcotics.

  Drugs, he sighed, drugs. Which drugs? The crap London barroom cocaine that managements turned a blind eye to the sale of, knowing that the only effect it had on its snorters was to make them buy more marked-up booze? Yeah, definitely some of that. He could already picture himself chopping and crushing, crammed into some dwarfish toilet stall. And he could already see how it would end up, Sarah and he fucking with the dismal end-of-the-world feel that the crap cocaine imparted. Like two skeletons copulating in a wardrobe, their bones chafing and stridulating. And tomorrow morning, disembodied, ghost-like, he would find himself at the cashpoint, a rime of white powder worked into the embossed numerals on his credit card.

  Or perhaps there would be some of the ecstasy that Sarah got hold of, presumably from Tabitha although Simon hadn’t asked. Ecstasy had initially seemed a fraudulent description for the drug, as far as Simon was concerned. The first couple of times he had taken it he’d said to Sarah, “If this is ecstasy, then a drug which produces mild pique could justifiably be called ‘rage’.” But he’d got the hang of it. Learnt to stop regarding it as a psychedelic, akin to the acid and mushrooms he had – more or more – taken as an art student at the Slade, and understand that it only worked on the interfaces of people’s minds, their relationships with one another. It was a drug of vicariousness, of using another person’s emotions as a prop, a route to abandonment. All conversations on E acquired an adolescent intensity, a titivation of the very possibility of intimacy.

  It also had other weird effects. Even with a gut full of liquor and a few honks of crap cocaine on board, a white dove still made Simon feel like penetrating every body in sight. Male, female, whole, crippled, it hardly mattered. What he desired was a flesh pit full of writhing naked bodies, smeared with glycerine; or better still a conga-line of copulation, where a cock-thrust here would produce a cunt-throb way over there.