On our way out of the zoo, we were drawn by the shouts of schoolchildren towards the chimpanzees. It was a cage in the style of an enormous aviary, a mean parody of the animals forgotten past. Between rhododendron bushes a jungle track curved, an irregular system of bars for swinging spanned the cage and there were two stunted trees. The shouts were for a powerful, bad-tempered male, the cage patriarch, who was terrorizing the other chimpanzees. They scattered before him, and were disappearing through a small hole in the wall. Now all that remained was what looked like an elderly mother, perhaps she was a grandmother, around whose belly clung a baby chimpanzee. The male was after her. Screaming, she ran along the track and swung onto the bars. They flew around the cage. He was inches behind her. As her trailing hand left one bar, so his forward hand reached it.
The delighted children danced and screamed as she climbed higher and went faster. The baby clung, its small pink face, half buried in tit and fur, described wide trajectories in the air. Now the two raced across the ceiling of the cage, the female jabbering as she flew and spattering the bars below with her bright green excrement. Suddenly the male lost interest and permitted his victims to escape through the hole in the wall. The schoolchildren moaned in disappointment. The cage was silent and still, chimpanzees appeared comically at the hole and looked out. The patriarch sat high in one corner gazing with bright, abstracted eyes over his shoulder. Slowly the cage filled and the mother returned with her baby. Glancing warily at her pursuer, she gathered up as much of her excrement as she could find and withdrew to a treetop where she could eat in comfort. From the end of her finger she fed small amounts to the baby. She looked down at the human spectators and stuck out her bright green tongue. The infant huddled against its protectress, the schoolchildren dispersed.
We lay in silence for many minutes after our reminiscences. The bed was small but comfortable, and I felt drowsy. My eyes were already closed when Diane said, “Memories like that don’t bother me anymore. Everything has changed so much I can hardly believe it was us who were there.” I heard her clearly but I could do no more than grunt in assent. I believed myself to be saying goodbye to Diane.
Outside the day was sunny and warm. I leaned out of my car and waved to her where she stood at the window. I found I knew the controls perfectly, of course, I had always known. The car moved forward silently. I felt hungry and drove past restaurants and cafés but I did not stop. I had a destination, a friend in some distant suburb, but I did not know who. What I was driving along was called the Circle Road. The afternoon was warm, the traffic around me swift and agile, the landscape dehumanized and utterly comprehensible. Place names were illuminated on clinical road signs. A glaring tunnel tiled like a urinal swung from left to right through parabolic curves and pitched violently upwards into daylight. Men and women gunned their engines at traffic lights, faulty machines or incompetent drivers would not be tolerated. Through an open window ringed fingers drummed against the side of a car. Before a towering bra advertisement a man scrutinized his watch. Behind him the colossus tugged at her straps with frozen insouciance. The lights changed and we all leapt forward, content and contempt pressed into the set of our lips. I saw a sad boy astride a supermarket horse while his father stood by and smiled.
It was bitterly cold and growing dark. Diane was on the other side of the room lighting a candle. I lay in her bed watching her search for warmer clothes to put on. I felt sorry for her, living alone with all her antiques. We had such easy intimacy but my visits were rare, it was a long walk from south to north and back again, and a little dangerous.
I did not mention my dream. Diane pined for the age of machines and manufacture, for automobiles were once part of the texture of her life. She often spoke of the pleasure of driving a car, of traveling within a set of rules. Stop… Go… Fog Ahead. I was an indifferent passenger as a child and in my teens I watched their dwindling numbers from the pavement. Diane longed for rules. I said, “I suppose I’d better go,” and began to get dressed. We stood shivering by the door.
“Promise me something,” said Diane.
“What is that?”
“That you won’t leave for the country without coming to say goodbye.” I promised. We kissed and Diane said, “I couldn’t bear you both to leave without me knowing.”
As usual in the early evening there were a lot of people about. It was cold enough for street-corner fires to be lit and people stood around them and talked. Behind them their children played in the darkness. To make quicker progress I walked in the middle of the street, down long avenues of rusted, broken cars. It was downhill all the way into central London. I crossed the canal and entered Camden Town. I walked to Euston and turned up the Tottenham Court Road. Everywhere it was the same, people came out of their cold houses and huddled around fires. Some groups I passed stood in silence, staring into the flames; it was too early yet to go to sleep. I turned right at Cambridge Circus into Soho. At the corner of Frith Street and Old Compton Street there was a fire and I stopped to rest and get warm. Two middle-aged men on either side of the fire were arguing passionately through the flames while the rest listened or stood dreaming on their feet. League football was a fading memory. Men like these would beat their brains out, or each other’s, attempting to recall details that once came easily to mind. “I was there, mate. They scored before half-time.” Without moving his feet the other pretended to walk away in disgust. “Don’t talk like daft,” he said. “It was a goal-less draw.” They began to talk at the same time and it became difficult to listen.
Someone behind and to my right made a movement towards me and I turned. A small Chinaman stood just within the circle of light. His head was onion-shaped, he was smiling and beckoning with large sweeps of his arm, as though I stood on a distant hilltop. I took a couple of paces towards him and said, “What do you want?” He wore the upper part of an old gray suit, and bright new drainpipe jeans. Where did he get new jeans? “What do you want?” I said again. The little man breathed and sang at me. “Come! You come!” Then he stepped out of the ring of light and disappeared.
The Chinaman walked several feet ahead and was barely visible. We crossed Shaftesbury Avenue into Gerrard Street and here I slowed to a shuffle and stretched my hands in front of my face. A few upper-story windows gleamed dully, they gave a sense of the direction of the street but they shone no light into it. For several minutes I edged forwards, then the Chinaman lit a lamp. He was fifty yards ahead and stood holding the lamp level with his head, waiting. When I reached him he showed me a low doorway blocked by something square and black. It was a cupboard and as the man squeezed past it I saw by his lamp that beyond it there was a steep flight of stairs. The Chinaman hung the lamp inside the doorway. He lifted his end of the cupboard. I lifted mine. It was unnaturally heavy and we had to take it up one step at a time. To coordinate our efforts, the Chinaman exhorted “You come” in his breathing, singing voice. We developed a rhythm and left the lamp far below. A long time passed and the stairs seemed to be without end. “You come… you come,” the Chinaman sang to me from inside his cupboard. At last a door opened ahead and yellow light and kitchen smells trickled down the stairwell. A taut, tenor voice of indeterminate sex spoke Chinese and somewhere further beyond a child cried.