Great Apes by Will Self Page B

The visceral updates were keeping their own rhythm, their own counsel.
    I’m lying down within the impress of all his other bedmates’ bodies, thought Sarah, watching the now lemon beams of morning light pass across her lover’s brow.
    When I touch her I think only of my children, Simon thought, caught up once more in the winsomeness of her, the smallness of her.
    If only there were some preparation, Sarah thought, some embrocation he could give me, rub into me, to eliminate these memories. A kind of Ret-Gel RM , which would burn at first but then sink in deeper, removing the impress of their touch and its influence on his.
    â€œWipe my bum, Daddy … Wipe my bum!” High tones of culpable imperiousness, the small blond head bent forward, pressed between his thighs. The curvature of the buttocks and beyond their arcs of perfection the rim of the toilet seat in a plastic bow. He tugs at the holder, tears off a couple of sheets, feeling their dryness, their rasping dryness. Bends down himself and passes fold through crack: “Ow! That hurts, Daddy, that hu-urts …” Where are my children? Simon thought. Where
are
they? They’re not here. They’re in Oxfordshire, at the Brown House, with their mother. They’re OK, absolutely all right. And I’ll see them soon, all three of them, I’ll subside under them, they’ll use me as their climbing frame. I’ll see them soon, two days at most.
    The minicab sped along the Cromwell Road, Simon’s finger-clamped Camel burned uselessly in the slipstreamfrom the window the driver insisted on being open. In the west of London the Middle East was already awake, pallid men in sacks of khaki cotton unworriedly flicked worry beads as they wafted past their hotels. Sarah looked absently at the house-sized billboard on the junction with Warwick Road. It had an electronic display that showed the numbers of Windows computer programmes IBM had sold worldwide. As she blanked it, it blinked, recording another transaction in Seoul or Syracuse. Sarah thought: What if those were the numbers of women he has imagined penetrating? The seas of muff he’s considered diving into? The mounds he’s mounted? ‘2,346,734’ the billboard proposed, and Sarah thought: Not enough, not nearly enough.
    The minicab neared Barons Court. Simon could see the glass hull of the Ark, the vast, new office block that dominated the Hammersmith Flyover. Sarah’s flat was in the knot of small streets behind it. They would be home soon. Home by the Ark, with its fifteen storeys ofplate glass and concrete, rising up, then swelling above the tangled roofs. The Ark, with its crest of aerials and satellite dishes connecting it to the ether, ready to receive the information that a dove bearing an olive branch had been sighted on the other side of the world. The Ark, an entirely suitable vessel to sail a menagerie away from the inundation of the city. Ground it again on a greenfield shore, where evolution could begin anew.
    â€œCome on, monkey,” Simon said, but then noticed that he was too late, she was already paying the man. He was young and his long arms protruded stick-like from the wide, short sleeves of his patterned shirt.
    â€œShe’m no monkey, man,” he threw over his shoulder, fixing Simon’s bloodshot eyes with his own in the rearview mirror.
    â€œWha-ss-that?” Simon was hunching his way out on the off side.
    â€œShe’m no monkey.”
    â€œIt’s just a pet name,” Simon replied – he was half out of the minicab.
    â€œWhere I come from monkeys ain’t pets, they’re meat, man. Meat or dead.”
    â€œOh.” Why am I being polite, Simon thought as he replied. “Where’s that then?”
    â€œTanzania, man. Thass where. Where I’m from, by the big lake, we hunt the monkeys, their meat … we like it. Tasty, innit. Specially the chimps, yeah, specially dem. They eat our