Great Apes by Will Self Read Free Book Online Page A

“chup-chupp” dear one first. ’ Busner juddered and shuddered, panting, squealing and then loudly tooth-clacking with satisfaction as he felt the soft, damp cushion of Charlotte’s sexual swelling mush against his groin. But it took him almost a minute of thrusting before he achieved climax, one of Alexander’s feet banging into his forehead the whole while, and a couple of the older infants leaping up and down on his broad back, their little hands entwined in his scruff.
    Not like the old days, he reflected ruefully, withdrawing from Charlotte and wiping himself with a cloth that Frances, the epsilon female, had thoughtfully handed him. I remember mating Charlotte for the first time, I must have shot-off in less than ten seconds! Hoo how exquisite it was; truly youth is wasted on the young. He signed his gratitude to Frances and remained resting by Charlotte for a few minutes, grooming the fine auburn fur around her ears, while Henry mated her, his big yellow teeth chattering.
    He looked up to see that Cressida had finished with Kenzaburo and was presenting to him, a half-smile of encouragement on her gentle, liver-spotted muzzle. Busner laughed, panted, smacked his lips, and mated her in under thirty seconds, the pair of them squealing with delight. Cressida had always been his favourite daughter – although he couldn’t have pointed out quite why. She certainly didn’t have a swelling to match Betty or Isabel’s,but there was something deeply affecting about her joyful submissiveness and overprotective mothering. Busner, although by no means a crass male chauvinist, was nonetheless fond of signing to his colleagues on the infrequent occasions that he went to the Flask with them for a drink after work, ‘She’s the one of my seventeen offspring that I feel most tender towards … the seventeen “h’hee-hee” I know about, that is!’
    Busner was aware of Gambol signing to him under his right arm as he was mating Cressida, but he didn’t pay it much attention. Now, however, as he was wiping himself down again with a fresh cloth provided by another female, he did fully register Gambol’s enquiring pant-hoot.
    â€œH’huu,” Gambol called, then signed, ‘Something’s come up, Zack, something that sounds very interesting –’
    â€˜ “Euch-euch” can’t it wait, Gambol, I haven’t even had my second breakfast yet,’ Busner countersigned, leaping clear over the breakfast bar out of a mixture of post-coital high spirits and irritation. He settled himself on one of the chairs surrounding the big circular pine-topped table that dominated the eating area, and indicated for Isabel, the delta, to approach with the two laden bowls of custard apples and sloes.
    Busner picked up a copy of the
Guardian
that was lying on the table and began to leaf through the foreign news section, idly scanning the headlines: ‘More Bonobo Massacres in Rwanda’, ‘President Clinton Urges Ceasefire in Bosnia’, ‘Accusations of Bonobism in O. J. Simpson Jury Selection’. Misery, misery, all is misery and aggression, Busner hooed to himself as he read. Perhaps it is as Lorenz suggestures, and the current woeful condition of chimpunityis a maladaptive response to overcrowding, to the loss of our natural lifestyles?
    â€˜Boss. ’ Gambol had wormed his scrawny body under the kitchen table and was fingering Busner’s dangling left foot. ‘This really is something “gru-nn” exciting, something I feel we should ges –’ Busner cut him short by jerking his foot away. With an agility and strength that immediately accounted for his long reign over the group, he pushed himself back in the chair and directed an accurate and forceful cuff to the back of Gambol’s head. This blow temporarily stunned the hapless research assistant and he sprawled full-length on the sea-grass matting. Busner then