‘You’ll like this when we get there. I think. They do very good work, though, and the chimps … I mean, the chimps don’t work — quite the reverse. They have all retired. Most of the chimpanzees have just had these hellish lives beforehand — forced to work, perform — and you’ll see them being better now … Well, being themselves and … they seem to …’
Sounding not unlike a man upon whom no one should rely, a man unequal to the rigours of motorway navigation and with uncontrollable weeping in his inevitable future.
But she fiddled with the radio and I didn’t fuck up — I let her — and somewhere, at some point, at some wonderful point between London and Wareham the fucking Piri-Piri’s speakers kicked out ‘Lola’.
That horrible, horrible car threw me the Kinks.
Ringing big chords to open and then that rolling, tumbling, running lick.
And then she was singing. Really. Beside me, leaning and beating out four-to-the-bar on the possibly libidinous glove compartment and letting it out — I only sing that way alone — singing along with Ray Davies — that cleversexy, playing-it-dumb, man-baby voice.
I’d kill to have that voice …
Those six, kiss-mouthed syllables in the refrain….
Dave, the other brother, singing it raw and John Dalton there and John Gosling — that was Gosling’s first record with the Kinks …
I think that’s right.
Glancing over to see her lips as they would be in an opened kiss, a kiss that could taste cherrysweet and American exotic.
And wanting her to be happy.
And glad I’m a man.
I held back from telling her everything she’d never want to know about Dobro resonator guitars, as used in …
She knew the words. This girl in the silly car that is not one’s own — she knows all the words and she likes them.
Bloody lovely.
And I took her to my favourite place. A little world full of outrage on behalf of the weak. To hell with the humans and rescue the innocent: there’s a sense of that being the ethos when you visit and I see their point.
Wise old chimp sitting high on the level top of a telegraph pole, folded in round himself like a neat thought, like a netsuke, and I could feel him watching me, and hope he’d be wishing me well — ‘Never seen you here with a friend. Go careful. Not too much about the psychiatric problems of marmosets people have locked up in birdcages and maybe just mention with charity the ugliness of the macaques and how the lemurs would be sunning their long bellies if only it wasn’t drizzling and apologies for that and for the — now and then — stench of excrement and best of luck with her, my cousin, my clumsy, weak, small-handed cousin.’
‘I know pretty much fuck all … sod all … about primates. We’ve never had them at the farm.’
I didn’t know why she self-corrected. As if I wouldn’t want her to say ‘fuck’. As if I wouldn’t have asked her to repeat it, if that might not have seemed peculiar.
‘I’m not really swotted up about primates, or monkeys, beyond the obvious. I do enjoy understanding things. The trouble is, I’d rather know them already. I want all the facts transplanted in advance, just there. Being told them irritates me.’
‘Oh.’
I know a number of other people with that issue. I work near a palace full of them — and more.
She nodded. ‘I want to be well informed, this well-informed person at a dinner party — I hate dinner parties — in the pub — don’t go to pubs any more — but anyway … I mean, I want to know to things … Mr August, he knows lots of things …’
And the touch of that name, my name, it makes me tell her, ‘Fuck dinner parties.’
And kissing her, I’m kissing her — cherrysweet — heart at four beats to the bar … St Cecilia, care for me, I am like music. And I tell Meg again.
‘Fuck dinner parties and people who go to dinner parties. And the ones in pubs and everyone who isn’t us, frankly. Fuck the fucking lot of them.’
So that she’ll hear me saying it — fuck — and the chimps watching. Showing off in front of my cousins. Because, St Cecilia, what would you know? You’re a virgin.
We were in the observation area for the chimps: indoors in the animal funk and the big, broad windows, there to let us see and see and see.
In there it’s always got this tang of nearly-human mayhem: it’s what would happen if we shat and pissed neatly and casually on to the floor, if we were untidy and unashamed, if we never washed and always touched and held and patted and stroked and held and groomed and smoothed and fucking held each other, if we never let go and we always knew exactly where we are — even when we set off raging, flailing, screaming, we’d still know … I think we would.
‘They’re serious animals, aren’t they. Look at the muscles in that one’s arms.’ Meg murmuring because anything else would seem rude, with the chimps so close through the sturdy glass — which is sturdy glass, which is their living-room window — and they’re sitting about and not concerned that I understand in my spine, in my balls, in my kind of a soul, that this is her early-morning voice, up-out-of-sleeping voice, the one I would have all to myself — sheets and cherrysweet and coffee and nonsense.
‘They’d do you harm if they didn’t know you, or took offence.’ Look at them directly and they’re creatures, beasts. Keep them just at the edge of your awareness and they show the forms and shifts and habits of a person, of yourself, of a more naked beast.
‘They don’t seem to be in the mood to take offence.’
And I can hear my own early-morning voice, saying — slow, pleased, low — saying to my treasure, ‘That’s Simon, the silvery chap who seems studious. And that’s Hananya — the bustly, broad one with the startled fur. He’s in charge, poor bastard. The two together over there are Jess and Arfur, they like each other, but not that way, because Hananya — he’s the boss — would stop them from liking each other that way. He gets the executive position and the girls. Mostly.’
And Jess and Arfur touching and checking and touching — thick-nailed fingers and their fat-soled, clever-thumbed feet. Arfur kind of dusty, an oldness about him, although he’s not so very old. White-bearded Simon with his bald forearms — showing his muscle, his crinkling skin. Thelma the jug-eared baby, tenderpinky Thelma who was born here, born safe, who is unscarred — incautious eyes and climbing around her mother.
‘One chimp — that’s maybe her — was rescued and kept for a while by royalty in Dubai. She arrived at the park once she got too old and too big, too adult to be cute — turned up with luggage, apparently, a selection of outfits … I can’t imagine being around humans, growing up against yourself and then you arrive here and you take off your dress.’
Fuck.
Jon slowed on the quiet Knightsbridge street, looked up at the London sky, the dirty yellow roof it gave one instead of stars, and heard himself telling his love, ‘And you never put clothes on again. You’re just yourself. And you’re with family, like a family.’
Hananya had slipped along, quite mellow and afternoony, and hugged some female or other and — dab — just slightly fucked her. Chimp sex being unimpressive but just … it truly is … it’s carefree, it seems carefree. It happens and is all of a piece with them.