Great Apes by Will Self Page A

grooved.
    â€œYou know how they get this?”
    â€œWassthat?”
    â€œYou know how they get this – get
this
…” Tony was holding up his cup.
    â€œN-no.”
    â€œThey take those teenage girls out back, strip them down, then they sponge them off and squeeze the sponges out into a vat. Then they re-bottle it.”
    â€œHa-ha,” Simon said – he couldn’t laugh, his throat wasa cement mixer, and so numb he couldn’t feel the viscid mortar blocking it up, choking it off.
    â€œSimon! Tony!” It was Tabitha, gesturing to them from the stairs. They went up to the room above, and found the others chopping out lines on some kind of shelf that was sticking out from the wall at an irrelevant angle.
    â€œLine?” Ken Braithwaite was holding up the credit card interrogatively. What a senseless go-round, thought Simon, but said, “Yeah, thanks, Ken.”
    â€œAnd that’s your last.” This from Sarah who looked now like Simon’s mother, or some long-left lover, not like herself.
    â€œIzzthatso?” He took the note from Ken, rammed it up to where he felt the paper edge snag and ground in bloody snot, like the keel of a miniature boat on granular shingle. He added a couple of milligrams of crap to this headborne midden. Simon swigged on the vodka, felt it jolt and ram down his throat, took a pull on his googolth Camel, but couldn’t sense its smoke. He could go on for …
ever.
    â€œRight – we’re off.”
    â€œAre we?”
    â€œWe are.”
    There weren’t even proper farewells, only glottal garbles and ape-like hoots. She had him by the elbow, and like some mahout who by subtle pressures and sotto commands can direct the amble of a vast, potentially truculent beast, goaded him down the stairs, through the long queues of youth, along the bulging corridor, past the two slick toughs in their string vests, black dungarees and holstered miniphones, then out into the pewter dawn of central London.
    â€œWhat about Tabitha?” asked Simon. The single questionhad been formulated so as to emerge unslurred, perhaps the only reason for saying it.
    â€œWhat about her?” Sarah wasn’t angry – she was in love. She wanted his body whether or not he could do anything with it. She wanted to lie in the angled crook of him and eventually sleep. She wanted sleep the way sun-worshippers long for an eclipse, piously, awe-fully, and with mounting fanaticism.
    Men recently arrived from Africa were touting for minicab trade along the curve of pavement fronting Charing Cross Road. Simon imagined himself Sarah’s pimp as she bent by a rolled-down window to strike a deal. Then they were heading west, the car radio keeping pace with them. A boxing match was being commentated on; Simon ducked and feinted with the stream of words, trying to avoid the knockout. They caromed down Park Lane. Funny, Simon thought, that London can be simultaneously vernal and venal, the park frothing green against its railings, the cabs and commercial vehicles bucketing along the roads at this hour conspicuously ignoring it.
    Then Harrods, a crenellated hunk of Babylonian commerce, a vertical souk. Simon turned to look at Sarah. She sat, mysteriously demure, unaffected by the night of booze and drugs, save for a puckering, a drying-out of the skin beneath her eyes. She sat, knees to one side, hands resting lightly in her lap. The toque was still poised on the lappet of hair. Did he want to stroke it? Hold the neat prettiness of it? He didn’t know. He was exhausted by this workout of his sensuality. It was as if his body had been taken from him while he slept and put through an extreme assault course, then returned to him as he awoke. His insides were liquidand his skin a scaly carapace. He shifted in his seat, felt the gusset of his pants pinch and grab at his sweaty perineum. Full circle, for this occurred as the cab was passing the top of Sloane Street.