Great Apes (19 page)

‘A classic baboon delusion is always focused on canines, pseudo-mating displays and so forth –'

‘I read them, Whatley.'

‘Quite so, quite so, none of that here, is there “huu”?

‘No.'

‘It's all rather fumbled, isn't it. He signs that he thinks he's in Charing Cross, and yet the questions were on headed paper. And this business of humans. Are the that attack him human “huu”? Is he seeing chimps as humans “huu”?'

‘He signs that
he
is human –'

‘He thinks he's human “huu”?'

‘That's what I took it to mean. ' Bowen was getting frustrated. She deliberately cut through one of the miniature cortices in the leucotomy toy, setting off the electronic death tone.

‘Well, I don't know what to make of it. Do you have any ideas “huu”?'

‘Keep on as we are for a couple more days, try and draw him out, then suggesture that we need to do neurological tests. We aren't going to get much further like this, Whatley. And his chimps may want to get him out of here. We don't necessarily have the grounds for a full twenty-eight-day section, you know – and this chimp has influential allies. His dealer and his doctor in Oxfordshire have been pant-hooting twice daily, asking about progress.'

‘And the ex-alpha “huu”?'

‘Not interested.'

‘His consort “huu”?'

‘Out of the picture at the moment. Gone to see her natal group in Surrey –'

‘Yes, she looked like a Surrey female. I can just imagine her riding hounds, wearing a Barbour and a quilted “gru-nn” swelling-protector –' He grinned, tooth-clacked.

‘Spare us your mating fantasies, Whatley. Please.'

So it was Bowen who went on with the programme of communication with Simon Dykes, and it was Bowen who kept Bohm and Levinson at bay when they pant-hooted for more news on his condition.

‘I think we're making some progress,' she showed the latter that afternoon.

‘What sort of progress “huu”? Is there any likelihood that he'll be out next week “huu”? I postponed the private view for his new show until then – but we're going ahead whatever. The canvases are stretched, the invitations sent, wine bought … Obviously it would be good if he were there –'

‘Good for who “huu”?'

‘For him, of course. This is a very important show for Simon. Very important. Could be the one that puts him right up there among the best contemporary painters in England. You know that the Tate bought his
World of Bears
last year “huu”?'

‘I am aware of that, yes. Tell me, what are the paintings like in the new show “huu”?'

‘Is it relevant to his condition “h'huu”? I don't like to preview in this fashion. ' Levinson fiddled ostentatiously
with his bow tie; Jane Bowen could just make out the signs ‘tiresome, bloody tiresome' in amongst the flicks.

‘I saw that “wraaa”!' She was horripilating furiously and displayed at the screen a little, throwing paper clips, biros, whatever desk clutter came to hand. ‘ “Wraaaa”! I'd like to remind you, Mr Levinson, that you are dealing with a physician, not some bloody little gallery female. Do I make myself understood “h'huuu”?'

‘Of course, of course. Please, please, don't trouble yourself – your basal eye is a pink loveliness to me –' Jane Bowen nearly laughed. The timorous old poof was half presenting to her, his angular rump pushed up above the level of his desk. ‘I have to be a bit cautious, I know you'll understand … the media … What with this breakdown, they could make a lot out of it … and “hoo” the paintings themselves are very graphic. Very graphic indeed.'

‘How so “huu”?'

‘They're essentially paintings of bodily disintegration, destruction … as it were …' He manipulated a pair of gold-rimmed bifocals on to his nasal bridge, still signing. ‘dfscorporation. Quite shocking really. He's taken Martin's apocalyptic paintings as a starting point and produced a series of canvases that depict both imaginary and historical scenes of bodily destruction with a kind of tortured graphicism …' The dealer's hands fell still. The bifocals slid down his nasal bridge, he pushed them back up again.

‘I see.' Jane Bowen was mollified, charmed even by the dealer's description. ‘You know “grnn”, perhaps they do have a bearing on this breakdown. He is exhibiting symptoms of some kind of bodily confusion, scrambling of proprioception –'

‘What's that “huu”?'

‘His ability unconsciously to gauge the disposition of his own body. This is normally the result of organic damage, but it does dovetail rather neatly with what has obviously been preoccupying him – it could be what we denote hysterical conversion. Watch, Mr Levinson, thank you for your confidence in this “grnn” matter. I do hope to have some positive news for you soon, but I certainly wouldn't count on him being well enough to attend the private show –'

‘How about interviews “huu”?'

‘I very much doubt it, he's still incredibly confused.'

After finishing the pant-hoot George Levinson pivoted himself through a hundred and eighty degrees and squatted, motionless, regarding one of the canvases he had been describing to the psychiatrist. To suggesture there was something pathological about it was on the one hand an understatement, and on the other – as far as Levinson himself was concerned – an irrelevance. The debate about madness and creativity appeared otiose when it came to Dykes's work and the work of most truly talented artists that he represented. They did what they did – that was all.

But these paintings, this one in particular which imprisoned in a thick layering of oils the very instant when the horrific King's Cross fire of 1987 had begun, was the stuff of nightmare. The commuters, mouths gaping open, tumbling backwards down the escalator as the fireball erupted from the booking hall. Two or three chimps at the head of it combusting already, their clothing and fur in a white-orange efflorescence; and an infant – actually in mid-air, falling towards the viewer. George Levinson shook his
head wonderingly, for he knew that wherever a viewer positioned herself the infant was still falling in that direction – threatening the passive with the most active of requirements – to catch the mite. The infant was Dykes's equivalent of the eyes of
The Laughing Cavalier.
In the context of this painting it added worse than insult to inconceivable injury. Levinson thought back to the evening before Simon's breakdown, remembering that odd gesticulation at the opening in Chelsea. Was this the lack of perspective he had signed about? Or had the artist, even then, sensed himself sliding into the abyss? But whatever the answer there is, George mused, going to be a riot when the critics get sight of this stuff.

Surrey summers, thought Sarah to herself, leaning on the fence surrounding her parents' tiny paddock; do I miss them? Maybe, or maybe I simply miss the young female I was, obsessed by gymkhanas, the teachers at school, playing at mating.

Massy yew trees mounted up beyond the end of the paddock and between their hard green strokes of foliage Sarah could glimpse the knapped flint wall of the Reverend's church, St Peter's. ‘Handy that. ' She remembered Peter signing this so many times during her childhood. ‘Being the Reverend Peter from St Peter's “huu”?' One of the hounds bounded over to where she leant. Her father's old hunter, Shambala, a grey-streaked Alsatian some fifteen hands high. The dog yapped and extended a forearm's length of pink tongue, slopping with drool. Sarah stroked and massaged the beast's scruff, while Gracie neighed and snuffled at the dog's ankles. ‘No more hares to course,
“huu” Shammy, “grnn” Shammy old fellow?' Sarah in-parted his scruff.

She was interrupted by her mother who pant-hooted from the conservatory door. Pant-hooted ‘Sarah' and ‘Food', and also wreathed those two meanings in a sonority of reproach, “H'h'oooGraa!”

“H'hoooo!” Sarah responded. Although having called that she was coming, she felt no great desire to make her way back across the sculpted garden, with its kidney-shaped beds of delphiniums, poppies and chrysanthemums.

It was always the same after the first two days, the visits to relatives – and now, of course, because she was in oestrus the almost hourly cavalcade of mating – Sarah felt trapped in her parents' comfortable house, trapped in their comfortable world. Her parents' little turns of phrase, ‘Just coming, dear' from her alpha, almost always calling forth a ‘Time means nothing to him' from her mother. And their worn idiosyncrasies. Her alpha's old horn-rimmed spectacles tied round his balding pate with a length of garden twine; her mother's ludicrously unfashionable padded swelling-protectors, which must – Sarah felt – make the sweat course unpleasantly in this heat, as well as providing a hot-bed for tics and lice.

‘I need them for the dogs, y'know,' Hester Peasenhulme would sign absent-mindedly, giving that impression of not really showing to Sarah, which her daughter almost always felt. ‘They take it amiss if I haven't got the old familiar swelling-protector. ' She had been signing this for all the years since Sarah left the natal range for college in London. For all the years since Sarah was a barely receptive female, her first swellings matching her own awkwardness about
them; until now, when only the two hounds remained in the paddock at the bottom of the garden, Shambala, and her last show dog, Sugarlump, with whom Sarah had swept the board at the kennel-club gymkhana for year after year.

And if the swelling-protector was an issue between them, it was because it concealed more than her mother's now infrequent, prune-wrinkled swellings. No, it concealed a deep trauma about mating, Sarah and the Peasenhulmes in general. A trauma Sarah had felt so confused about during sub-adulthood.

‘Did your alpha mate you this morning “huu”?' Mrs Peasenhulme signed, trembling as Sarah crawled in through the back door from the garden.

‘ “Hooo” you know he did, Mother – you were there. ' She tried to keep the cramp out of her fingers, but without success.

‘I'll thank you not to sign “euch-euch” like that to me, young lady, you'll never be old enough – as far as I'm concerned – to stop being respectful to your mother.'

‘Mother “hooo” …' Sarah wanted her to get wound up, wanted her to lash out, wanted to feel the slash of old nails, chipped from weeding, against her cheek, but they didn't come now – just as they had hardly ever come during Sarah's infancy.

Instead Hester Peasenhulme merely pouted and threw a dishcloth at Sarah, waving, ‘Help me with this drying up. ' As ever, Sarah found it hard to believe that her mother really cared about her, so infrequently did she attack, or otherwise practically enforce the hierarchy.

For years Sarah had wondered about this, wondered if it had anything to do with the infrequency with which her
alpha mated her. While her infancy was ostensibly nurturing and secure, when she left the natal range feelings long sensed – but unacknowledged – had swum, unpleasantly, to the surface.

At college in London, doing foundation and laterly illustration and design, she had had the same kind of work crises as her peers, and the same kind of disruptive, if exploratory, consortships. She had sat up late at night, revising with the assistance of speed, then come down with the ad-dabs – just as her allies had. And like them, she had felt that her psyche was plunging into the deep end of life.

But for Sarah everything had been that bit worse, the consortships more destructive, their fissions more histrionic; the sadnesses more global, the depressions more intransigent.

When at last she could take no more and found herself sobbing for days on end, unable to attend lectures or classes, Sarah sought out the counsellor whose task it was to deal with the emotional and psychological problems of the students. He was reassuringly straightforward. Sarah had been fearing a lot of psychofiddle, a damning diagnosis, kinky therapies and the mapping of her dreamscape.

‘Point out to me,' signed Tom Hansen, blond, upright, strong of nasal bridge and commanding of lip, ‘did your alpha mate you when you were younger “huu”?'

‘Of – of course.'

‘Often “huu”?'

‘I suppose it depends what you mean by that –'

‘As frequently as the other natal group males did “huu”?'

‘No, he didn't. More like once during each oestrus “euch-euch”. I always wondered about that. And I suppose
I was jealous of my sister Tabitha, who he seemed to prefer. He began mating her when she was eight – and barely showing.'

Up until this interview Sarah would have been incredulous and even angry to learn that she was what was denoted ‘an abused infant', but once Tom Hansen began inparting her quite how potentially damaging her alpha's neglect had been, other pieces of the jigsaw began to fall into place. Her mother's chronic diffidence, hardly ever taking Sarah on solo patrols – that surely was a function of her own guilt over the way Harold Peasenhulme had neglected his eldest daughter, refused to give her the good mating every female requires from an alpha if she's to grow up happy, well adjusted, comfortable with her very sense of femininity and simiousness.

Sarah's first inclination on confronting this hard, hurtful fact about herself was to abandon her natal group altogether, and become a lone female dedicated to pleasure seeking. But Tom Hansen coaxed her round. ‘They may not fuck you – your mum and alpha,' he paraphrased Larkin, ‘but perhaps you need to consider whether or not they were fucked by their parents.'

‘What do you mean “huu”?'

‘This kind of “euch-euch” abuse tends to run in groups, Sarah. It may well be that if you have the courage to work on this thing with me, and work at the same time to form a better relationship with your parents, that you can stop the rot, stop it going on down through the generations.'