Free Great Apes by Will Self

and then the others. ‘Hugging is a crime!’ They all cried. It was, Simon reflected, staring moodily at the distorting lens that was the bottom of his whisky glass, a ludicrously appropriate slogan for the clique, the members of which only ever touched one another on greeting or parting. For the rest of the time – especially when in this desert of white powder – touch was a mirage.
    Simon looked across at Sarah and felt this. Felt that he might never touch her again, might never hug her again, feel her bird-brittle ribs against his. There was an undulation in the air now, a distortion that pushed her still further away, across an acre of table, several furlongs of carpet. She sat, shiny-browed, blanched in chemical sweat, listening to Steve Braithwaite explain some detail of a new artwork. She was their agent, so this made sense. Indeed, the clique were really her friends, not his. George wasn’t a shiny happy person, he belonged to Simon, to Simon’s past, to his marriage to Jean. He was Magnus’s godfather. Seeinghim with the shinies felt wrong, uneasy. Like catching a favourite, jolly uncle coming down the seedy stairs from some whorish fuck pad.
    Not only that, his presence showed the clique up for what they were, spoilt children, playing viciously because unsupervised.
    â€œI’m going to walk,” said Steve Braithwaite, “from the nuclear power station at Dounreay, all the way to Manchester, staying right under the power lines for the entire distance. Ken will make a visual and aural record of the whole thing –”
    â€œWhat’s the point of that?” the girl broke in.
    â€œThe point, young – and ignorant – lady,” George Levinson went offensively on to the offensive, “is to experience various kinds of parallax. Isn’t that it, Steve?”
    â€œExactly. Both the parallax of vision derived from the pylons themselves – the way they march, girdered clefs stringing the notation of power across the land –”
    â€œQuoting from my – as yet unwritten – catalogue copy are we, Steve?” Figes donated his pennyworth.
    â€œAnd, of course, the parallax of power itself. As I absorb all of this incredibly damaging radiation, as my cells themselves begin to fission, so I will be gifted a true fusion, a proper perspective on the nature of power, raw power, in our society. D’you see?”
    â€œNo I don’t,” the girl slurred. “I think it sounds like a load of crap. All this stuff is just crap. It’s not art, it’s crap. Crappy crap. It’s toilet art, the sort of thing
anybody
might think of sitting on the bog, but it takes a real idiot to get up, wipe himself and then actually go out and do it. It’s crap.”
    â€œShe seems to think our idea’s crap,” Steve said to hisbrother. Ken sucked on his cigarette and squinted at the girl, who was sexy in an overweight sort of way. Long black hair, vaguely Eurasian features, lips that looked not so much bee-stung as swarmed upon.
    â€œShe could have a point,” he replied, eventually. “Mind you – it’s only at the ideas stage.”
    Simon felt a tinge of guilt, doubly so. He agreed with the girl about the Braithwaites’ stuff, it was toilet art. Suitable only for flushing away. And even after
that
the smears it left in the conceptual bowl would still need to be vigorously brushed, zapped with naturalistic Domestos. It was as terminally irrelevant as the photogravure silkscreens he and George had seen earlier that evening. He also felt guilty because he wouldn’t have minded fucking the girl. No, this was incorrect, he wanted to take the girl away somewhere quiet and sequestered. Find out all about her – her thoughts, aspirations, girlish memories – and then make love to her with a virtuosity so great as to be world-beating, a timeless exploration and elaboration on the fact of love. This very deep