Free Great Apes by Will Self Page B

youth, but his face was mottled with the horrors he had witnessed. It was a collage of clashing colours, brushstrokes of green nausea, a wash of white fear, blotches of red anger and a tinge of blue death. His stubble had marched for ten days and was nearing beard. His breath reeked of some vile barn-distilled liquor. His eyes were loose in a string bag of veins. His brain was hot, swollen. “Can I assist you, sir,” Julius intoned, “to a refreshing beverage?”
    The freebooter was having none of this – he didn’t understand the question, for one thing. Perhaps if he had things would have turned out differently, a few quiet drinks, a little networking; a series of articles on the conflict for the Sundays. But as it was he grabbed the barman by his neat little goatee and yanked his head down on to the bar’s metallic surface so hard that Julius’s jaw shattered with a CRACK! that could only mean violence.
    This at last brought about silence – although slowly. Those clustered around the bar saw what had happened immediately and their jaws also fell. Others, further off, standing in the vacant spaces, heard this silence and matched it. But those in the clustered seats still further from the bar – including the clique and their hangers-on – remained oblivious, gabbing away for some seconds, until, in the stun-gap the words, “Like, what does
he
know about styling, he’s never even been on a shoot…” lingered and then died in the inspissating atmosphere.
    â€œSimon?” Sarah’s little paw was on his knee. He looked up from the glass ball of his glass, in which he had been scrying this alternative future. “Are you OK?”
    â€œYeah, yeah. Fucked – I guess.”
    â€œMe too,” she replied, and then, “Good stuff.”
    â€œMmm. Yeah … mmm.”
    â€œMaybe … maybe we should go on somewhere?”
    â€œGo on …?”
    â€œSomewhere.”

Chapter Five
    It took a series of phased withdrawals for Simon, Sarah and their clique to leave the Sealink. Each time they achieved a tittering quorum they discovered that a voter was absent. Someone would be sent out to scout the bogs, the telly room, the restaurant and recover the errant suspect. But by the time they’d been rounded up someone else would have gone missing. Figes kept on sliding off to try and pick up boys, as did George Levinson. Tabitha cantered up and down the bar, gathering ungentlemanly gnats around her seductive mane.
    Julius was going to join them. He knew of some shebeen or other. In Cambridge Circus – or wherever. Thought there might be crap coke. Knew there would be liquor. But there were further problems – not just gathering the right people but excluding the wrong ones. And the drugs made it all so difficult. The ecstasy made their sociable instincts break out along with the sweat. Everyone was worthy of their attention – inclusion in their lives.
    During this whole jump-cut episode of leaving-the-club, Simon had a fully formed interlude of near seduction, involving a girl he remembered talking to about Dada, at a party he couldn’t remember attending. “Think of me as your Dada,” he said to her on this occasion, on this half-landing. “I will care, protect and –”
    â€œMolest me?” She giggled, showing wine-stained teeth, flicked her hair back which he hated, but chose to ignore.
    â€œExactly.”
    He moved in on her like a landing module about to coyly retract its legs on impact with a porous, lunar surface, and … was snagged by the back of his jacket, turned to see Steve Braithwaite. “Tch-tch,” admonished the self-denigrating performance artist, “we’re all waiting for you in the reception.
Sarah
too.”
    â€œYou aren’t,” Simon replied. He was managing the strange feat of backing away from the girl without giving her so much as a backward glance.
    At