Excerpts from
The Woman and the Ape
By Peter Høeg
PART 1
An ape was approaching London. It sat on a bench in the open cockpit of a sailing boat, on the lee side, all hunched up with its eyes closed and a blanket round its shoulders. Even in that position it made the man sitting across from it seem smaller than he actually was.
The man was presently going by the name of Bally, and there were just two things in this life he still had any time for: the moment when he arrived in a big city and the moment he left it again. Which was why he now got to his feet, crossed to the rail and stood there looking towards the city, and in so doing made the first and last mistake of the voyage.
His absent-mindedness transmitted itself to his crew. The helmsman switched over to autopilot, the deck hand worked his way aft from the foredeck, both gravitating to the rail. For the first time in five days the three men stood idle, lost in the sight of the electric lights of suburbia, dancing like fireflies past the boat and fading away astern.
The wind had risen during the night. The Thames was now overlaid with fluted bands of white foam and the boat, besides having the wind dead aft and a billowing mainsail, also had a large foresail hoisted. Carrying this much sail was verging on recklessness, but Bally had been hoping to make it in while it was yet dark.
He was not going to manage it, he could see that now. There was a change in the air, with the first light of this spring morning spreading like a grey pelt across the buildings. Reminded of the ape, Bally turned about.
It had opened its eyes and leaned forward. One hand rested on the little switch on the dashboard for adjusting the autopilot.
Bally had always brought up on deck the animals with whom he sailed because it lessened the risk of their dying of seasickness, and this strategy had never brought him anything but good results. They had been attached to lifelines, wrapped in blankets and given one milligram per kilo of body weight of an effective neuroleptic twice daily. Well secured and with no clear sense of their surroundings, they had dozed the voyage away.
This procedure would now, he thought to himself with the speed at which thought is occasionally possible within a span of time too short to allow for any physical reaction, have apparently to be altered.
Lagging - though only minutely so - behind the ape´s action, the autopilot turned the bow of the boat a few fatal degrees out of the wind. It pitched awkwardly on the choppy water. Then it gybed.
At that instant the ape was looking directly at the three men.
Many years before this, Bally had discovered that life consisted of a series of repetitions, each one savouring of less than its predecessor - an overall distastefulness in which man himself was but one more repetition. He was also perfectly aware that the reason he had sought, throughout his life, such close contact with animals had to do with the fact that amidst this general and instinctive loathing there was a kick to be got out of having power over automatons of a lower order than oneself. This notion of universal blandness was now being challenged. The ape´s movements were purposeful and studied, but that was not the worst of it. The worst thing, the thing which, though it lasted only for a fraction of a second, was to make itself felt throughout the rest of Bally´s life, was what he saw in its eyes.
For this he had no words - for this, at that point, no-one had any words. But it was in a way the opposite of automatic.
The vessel´s mast was seventeen metres tall, her mainsail had an area of more than forty-five square metres, so the swing when it came was quicker than the eye could follow. All that the three men had time to register was a slight list and a crack like a gunshot as the boom snapped two steel shrouds on the port side. Then they were swept into the Thames.
With a screech of overtaxed bearings the autopilot adjusted to the new tack and corrected course accordingly. At her own speed of twelve knots plus two knots from the incoming tide the boat - The Ark by name - carried on towards London, now with the ape as her sole passenger.
Fifteen minutes later the first call to the boat went out over the short-wave radio. This and the two subsequent calls went unanswered, and after that there were no more.
But behind the smoked glass of an observation window in a low tower near Deptford Ferry Road an officer of the River Police put down a microphone and lifted a pair of binoculars. Slowly but intently the city´s immune system was being activated to detect a breach of regulations.
Seaward of Tower Bridge, at the marina by the Pool of London, St Katharine´s Yacht Club has a cafe. Here, during the summer months, breakfast is served on an open-air terrace between the Thames and St Katharine´s Dock and on this morning, even at such an early hour, some dozen guests were already seated there.
The Pool is said to be the only point at which the Thames is blue. It is here that the royal yachts anchor. From here legations to London sail out to have lunch on their national training ships. Here, one September day in 1866, 100,000 people watched the famous race for the finish between the two tea clippers the Taeping and the Ariel.
Something of the expectancy of that earlier time was now aroused on the Yacht Club terrace at the sight of the Ark. Everyone there recognized the boat as an Ocean 71, built at Poole, a speedy but nevertheless classic English ketch. And by its casual approach and rash spread of canvas they could tell that here was a skipper of the old school, a traditionalist, heading into port under sail alone. A few minutes later, over the gilded dolphins on the bow, they caught a glimpse of the man himself wearing neither oilskins nor sunglasses, not even a cap. Just a sober grey overcoat. A hush fell over the terrace, everyone knew what was going to happen next because they had heard how the real pros did it, dropping anchor at the last minute, every inch of canvas brought down with a clatter and the boat gliding smoothly and neatly round the chain and into the quayside. As the Ark approached the pier they prepared to applaud, a few already had their hands in the air, but by then it was too late. With an apocalyptic screech of splintering timber the ketch ploughed into the outermost of the moored yachts, sliced it in half and sparked off a domino-style chain reaction along a serried rank of mahogany and rosewood hulls.
None of the breakfasters came to their senses fast enough to see how the grey overcoat leapt from the cockpit and across a foundering hull and then disappeared - swiftly, if haltingly - around the side of a building. But two others did. In the sluice-gate control room a lock keeper employed by Taylor Woodrow, the company which owns and runs St Katherine´s Dock, laid down his binoculars and lifted a telephone. And on the east side of the dock Johnny broke into a run.
Peter Høeg: The Woman and the Ape
Farrar, Straus & Giroux 1996
Translated by Barbara Haveland
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