Great Apes Read Free

haphazardly rearranged by the clumsy removal men of narcotics.
    Drugs, he sighed, drugs. Which drugs? The crap London barroom cocaine that managements turned a blind eye to the sale of, knowing that the only effect it had on its snorters was to make them buy more marked-up booze? Yeah, definitely some of that. He could already picture himself chopping and crushing, crammed into some dwarfish toilet stall. And he could already see how it would end up, Sarah and he fucking with the dismal end-of-the-world feelthat the crap cocaine imparted. Like two skeletons copulating in a wardrobe, their bones chafing and stridulating. And tomorrow morning, disembodied, ghost-like, he would find himself at the cashpoint, a rime of white powder worked into the embossed numerals on his credit card.
    Or perhaps there would be some of the ecstasy that Sarah got hold of, presumably from Tabitha although Simon hadn’t asked. Ecstasy had initially seemed a fraudulent description for the drug, as far as Simon was concerned. The first couple of times he had taken it he’d said to Sarah, “If this is ecstasy, then a drug which produces mild pique could justifiably be called ‘rage’.” But he’d got the hang of it. Learnt to stop regarding it as a psychedelic, akin to the acid and mushrooms he had – more or more – taken as an art student at the Slade, and understand that it only worked on the interfaces of people’s minds, their relationships with one another. It was a drug of vicariousness, of using another person’s emotions as a prop, a route to abandonment. All conversations on E acquired an adolescent intensity, a titivation of the very possibility of intimacy.
    It also had other weird effects. Even with a gut full of liquor and a few honks of crap cocaine on board, a white dove still made Simon feel like penetrating every body in sight. Male, female, whole, crippled, it hardly mattered. What he desired was a flesh pit full of writhing naked bodies, smeared with glycerine; or better still a conga-line of copulation, where a cock-thrust here would produce a cunt-throb way over there.
    E-ed up, Simon’s body, like some rain-swelled river, breached its banks and flowed all over the place, all over thepeople. But Sarah would take him in hand at this point. Like some proficient hydrologist she would enact lightning-quick embanking and canalising work, until he flowed into her.
    Yeah, ecstasy. And then they would get home to the Renaissance, home to the golden bower of her bed, where they would pluck and strum upon one another’s mandolin bodies, until they eventually, belatedly came. Eventually, belatedly slept.
    I don’t want to get loaded. Simon thought, turning into Tite Street. I don’t feel exactly
hot
at the moment and there’s a full day’s work to do tomorrow, no shirking. And in the contemplation of the night ahead, with its slalom of toxicities, he assayed his own body, its fit between mind and metabolism, metabolism and chemistry, chemistry and biology, biology and anatomy, anatomy and protective clothing. His toes scrunged in semi-sweat-stiffened hosing, and he felt their fungal deterioration, the gritting of their webbing. His hands felt numb at their finger ends. Simon thought about peripheral neuralgia, and thought of the half-bottle of whisky he skulled most nights, but then again considered it unlikely. Physical addiction to alcohol, that is.
    His stomach was inflated now – as if the Chilean wine were still fermenting – so that his walk was counterpointed not simply by the harrumphing and spitting – neat that, between the two front teeth, so that a dash of phlegm hit whichever paving stone he aimed at. He remembered learning it from lads at school, upsetting his fastidious older brother with demonstrations – but also by poot-pooting from between soft-clenched bum cheeks. Like some cartoon, Simon, thought, fart-powered, 2-D.
    Simon’s bum