“Shall I . . . take everything off?”
The monkey grunted.
“You don’t say much, do you?”
She shimmied out of her red skirt. Now she was naked but for a pair of knickers. She lay on the bed stretching again, luxuriating in her body and the welcome heat of the room, not even bothering to look at her admirer.
Wedged underneath Solal’s body, Lewis began to feel dizzy again. His lower limbs were now completely numb, and he had no feeling in his right arm, which was pressed against the back of the wardrobe, yet he didn’t dare move. The ape was capable of anything, he knew that. If he was discovered what might it not choose to do, to him and to the girl?
Every part of his body was now either nerveless, or wracked with pain. In his lap Solal’s seeping body seemed to become heavier with every moment. His spine was screaming, and the back of his neck pained him as though pierced with hot knitting-needles. The agony was becoming unbearable; he began to think he would die in this pathetic hiding place, while the ape made love.
The girl sighed, and Lewis looked again at the bed. The ape had its hand between her legs, and she squirmed beneath its ministrations.
“Yes, oh yes,” she said again and again, as her lover stripped her completely.
It was too much. The dizziness throbbed through Lewis’ cortex. Was this death? The lights in the head, and the whine in the ears?
He closed his eyes, blotting out the sight of the lovers, but unable to shut out the noise. It seemed to go on forever, invading his head. Sighs, laughter, little shrieks.
At last, darkness.
Lewis woke on an invisible rack; his body had been wrenched out of shape by the limitations of his hiding-place. He looked up. The door of the wardrobe was open, and the ape was staring down at him, its mouth attempting a grin. It was naked; and its body was almost entirely shaved. In the cleft of its immense chest a small gold crucifix glinted. Lewis recognized the jewellery immediately. He had bought it for Phillipe in the Champs Elysees just before the war. Now it nestled in a tuft of reddish-orange hair. The beast proffered a hand to Lewis, and he automatically took it. The coarse-palmed grip hauled him from under Solal’s body. He couldn’t stand straight. His legs were rubbery, his ankles wouldn’t support him. The beast took hold of him, and steadied him. His head spinning, Lewis looked down into the wardrobe, where Solal was lying, tucked up like a baby in its womb, face to the wall.
The beast closed the door on the corpse, and helped Lewis to the sink, where he was sick.
“Phillipe?” He dimly realized that the woman was still here: in the bed: just woken after a night of love.
“Phillipe: who’s this?” She was scrabbling for pills on the table beside the bed. The beast sauntered across and snatched them from her hands.
“Ah.. . Phillipe. . . please. Do you want me to go with this one as well? I will if you want. Just give me back the pills.”
She gestured towards Lewis.
“I don’t usually go with old men.”
The ape growled at her. The expression on her face changed, as though for the first time she had an inkling of what this john was. But the thought was too difficult for her drugged mind, and she let it go.
“Please, Phillipe. . .” she whimpered.
Lewis was looking at the ape. It had taken the photograph from the mantelpiece. Its dark nail was on Lewis’ picture. It was smiling. It recognized him, even though forty-odd years had drained so much life from him.
“Lewis,” it said, finding the word quite easy to say.
The old man had nothing in his stomach to vomit, and no harm left to feel. This was the end of the century, he should be ready for anything. Even to be greeted as a friend of a friend by the shaved beast that loomed in front of him. It would not harm him, he knew that. Probably Phillipe had told the ape about their lives together; made the creature love Catherine and himself as much as it had adored Phillipe.