Great Apes by Will Self

last they left – last. Samantha was shunting the dregs of the crowd out through the main door. They revolved in its revolution and found themselves still spinning in D’Arblay Street. In the group that trolled off through the mountainous streets of London were the shiny happy people plus George, the irritating girl, her boyfriend, Gareth the hack, and three other nameless but recurring minor characters. A tall vampish woman, wearing a black corset over a grey dress – she’d taken a shine to George, presumably unaware of his orientation, but then, looking at the way she was heading it was perhaps wrong to presume anything; a show-business lawyer with a coke problem, who talked of nothing but scams scammed and scummy money skimmed; and a girl Simon had noticed many times in the club before, a very very pretty girl, silky hair, slight figure, girlie dress which twirled from the hips. She was, he thought, too young to be here, or anywhere other than tucked up in bed, next to a nightlight with a Disney shade.
    The cavalcade headed down Wardour Street, wordsfluttering around them. Simon tasted his own metallic cud and began fully to regret the evening, regret it with deep, passionate loathing. They could have been in bed. They could have been sober. They could have made love without him having to be a poor workman, once again blaming his tool. As it was his resistance to more drink, more crap cocaine, more of everything, was all but departed. He would – he realised with the shock of the old – do almost anything, or
anyone.
    Tabitha and Sarah walked arm in arm shouting at one another. The squat machines were moving along the dawn gutters, their automatic revolving brushes and jets of water stir-broiling the trash. Fat black whores stood on the corners. ‘Business?’ they enquired with third-mondial weariness of the revellers passing by, as if they were Wabenzi hustling the IMF. We’re a caparisoned horde of enlightened fun seekers! Simon said to himself one instant. We’re a sad trickle of dysfunctional debauchees, he took on board the next. Julius’s goatee was out in front. A pointless point, walking point.
    The shebeen was up four flights and had as many more oddly shaped rooms stacked up stairs with too-steep treads. They got in with a Julius’s say so and a clutch of notes. The crowd inside was more densely packed than that at the Sealink, and far more polyglot. Big black guys, slab-sided, grey-sheened, were holding intense conversations with each other in huddled colloquy. Elsewhere they danced with young white girls, who were tightless, short-skirted and wearing white sling-backs. The colourist in Simon appreciated the fact that even here, even with the violet, pink and blue flashing lighting, he could still make out thestippling of brown goose pimples on the backs of their calves. He considered how he might depict this. The music was needling, thudding, reverberant ragga. “Ya-ya-ya-Hi’-ya-ya-ya-Inna side you like / Inna way you like / Thass the way you like / Me to show you / Ya-ya-ya-Hi’!” Again and again and again. To Simon the music’s repetitiveness might have been its actual subject: “Ya-ya-ya-Hi’-ya-ya-ya-Annagain an’again / Thass the way you like it / Again annagain …”
    Faces moved towards Simon and passed him by. Each one seemed to contain the outline of a possible intimacy. A set of coordinates and congruencies from which five, ten or twenty years of conversations and cuddles might have been extrapolated by some computer modelling, a morphing of relationships. Sarah had been holding his hand, but she seemed to have faded now, been absorbed into the shebeen’s lurid ochre. Simon struggled to the bar and managed to secure four tumblers of warm, rank vodka. Tony Figes appeared at his shoulder and took one. His stamp of hair had been peeled off in a corner that exposed the pate of an older man; his scar was deeply