‘I’ve left him. He’s a monomaniac.’
Immense changes in Stella’s attitudes were reflected in her body language, more subdued, more contrite, than I had ever seen.
‘You know what I think—he hasn’t given up vivisection at all. This is one huge vivisection. The biggest of them all.’
‘You were part of it,’ I reminded her.
She knelt beside me on the grass, as if penitent.
‘Is it legal to smoke in here?’
‘You name it, we smoke it.’
She took a pack from her bag, I held out my hand. ‘Let me.’
I found it difficult to remain angry. I put a cigarette between my lips, lit it, passed it across. She managed a feeble smile, remembering. I lit a second cigarette myself, and inhaled deeply, a pleasure I had begun to appreciate in recent weeks.
‘I was more than part of it, J.J. It’s my fault it went that far. I gave him the idea.’
If she was seeking contradiction, and therefore absolution, I wasn’t prepared to offer it—yet.
‘Yes, you did.’
‘He was always going to use Wish. I should have seen it.’
It would have been too easy to sit there and make common cause against Clive, a lynch mob of two.
‘Yes, you should have.’
‘I’ve thought about it a lot, J.J. You were right. You gave her more, ah, affection, than any of us. You loved her, in your way. It was just so difficult for me to accept.’
A lump clogged my throat, I turned away. Bound up in her apologies, Stella didn’t notice.
‘I’ve written some poems about Wish—would you like to hear one?’
I was too surprised to answer. I felt myself harden against her again—the sheer egotism of it. She read my face and smiled apologetically. ‘Maybe some other day.’
We sat in silence, smoking. I lit another pair, we smoked those. The sun was shining, a premature spring day, misplaced at the tail-end of winter. Various family clumps were scattered about the lawns and beneath the big river gums. Fathers in their prison Sunday best kicked footballs with their sons, cuddled their daughters and wives. It looked like a church picnic in the park.
‘Clive is withdrawing his complaint, J.J. His dream was to have Wish in the witness box—testifying, through a Sign translator.’
An image came to me of Miss-The-Point translating the hand-shapes of a gorilla, in a court of law. I almost smiled.
‘He saw it as a huge publicity stunt. Of course it’s not over. He wants to try other avenues.’
‘The Federal Court?’
She nodded. ‘I’ll have nothing to do with it. We had a furious argument.’ She paused, corrected herself. ‘I was furious. Clive argued that Wish was dead—and that was sad—but the work must go on. We have to make use of her death.’
I lit another cigarette, and kept it myself, this time leaving her to light her own.
‘I need to know where she is, Stella.’
‘I tried to reclaim the body. I had in mind some sort of burial. A ceremony at home.’
‘Your graveyard?’
She nodded, then shook her head, almost simultaneously, her signals confused, tears filling her eyes.
‘They wouldn’t return her body?’
‘There wasn’t anything to return, J.J. There was an autopsy to confirm the cause of death.’
‘Suicide?’
She took a long suck on her cigarette, then laughed with some bitterness, a series of smoky explosions. ‘That possibility wouldn’t have entered their tiny minds. An animal committing suicide?’
‘Tiddy would have known.’
‘If he does, he’s keeping quiet. Bad publicity for the zoo.’
‘So where is she?’
‘Some of her is in the Institute of Medical and Veterinary Science—next to the hospital on Frome Road. Her brain. Various organs.’
‘Her hands?’ I asked, horrified.
She didn’t seem capable of answering this.
‘The rest was burnt.’
‘Cremated?’
‘Burnt. In the hospital furnace. Behind the Institute.’
11
I visited the hospital the day the charges against me were dropped, after my release. A security guard refused me entry to the carpark, another STAFF ONLY precinct. I parked outside in Frome Road, and passed unhindered through the checkpoint on foot. The furnace room behind the main complex was easily found: a tall chimney rising like a beacon above a square red-brick windowless bunker. The metal double-doors were locked; there were no windows. I stood outside, trying to compose my mind. Grief had drawn me to the place, but for what? To seek some sign of her passing? Something tangible, some last memory I could take away? Less this, perhaps, than an obsession to know, and see, everything that I could. A worker in blue overalls arrived pushing a train of linked green garbage bins: BIOLOGICAL HAZARD. He gave me a quizzical look, then unlocked the door and entered the blockhouse. Smoke shortly began to issue from the high chimney. Perhaps it was human smoke: burning gallbladders, tonsils, amputated limbs, the superfluous flesh of surgery, by-products from the manufacture of health. Perhaps it was animal. Perhaps it was merely the unbiological waste of hospital administration offices.
I sat on a nearby postage-stamp of lawn and watched the slender filament of smoke rising in the cold morning air. I remembered the first and last conversation I had shared with Wish on the subject of death, the heaven-euphemisms I had brandished about, her blunt insistence on pinching her nose, the shape of ‘stink’.
‘Maybe heaven,’ I had signed, ‘maybe stink.’
She had watched my hands, sceptical.
‘But to find out—what an adventure.’
Adventure was my own invention, a mix of the meandering path of journey, the winged hands of flight. Another euphemism? At the time I had toyed with the idea of taking her to Deaf Church on Sunday mornings. I soon rejected the plan. The congregation would have tarred and feathered me, not so much for the blasphemy of taking an animal to Church—the notion that animals might have souls reaches back at least as far as the original St Francis—but for the crime of debauching their beautiful language by teaching it to an ape, a far greater sacrilege.
What could Wish have learnt in a church—even in a Sign church? Sign, the most natural of languages, seems as lost as English in the world of the unnatural, and supernatural. The inbuilt tenses, the structural optimism that sees the future as an endless road—such notions can only lead to grief. I lay back on the soft winter grass and tried again to imagine a different language, a truly religious language which might allow more resonant concepts of past and future, life and death. Could I put the future behind me? Could someone who had lived and died in the past always be with me, ahead of me, facing me? It seemed a shallow consolation, another euphemism, but better than none. Perhaps religious belief is beyond the grasp of language, by definition. Perhaps that’s what faith is.
At least I could hope—fingers tightly crossed—that her last thoughts might have been softened by her own consolations, by some sense, however implausible, of making a fresh start.
A breeze stirred somewhere; I heard the shiver of the treetops, the sweepings of approaching debris across the carpark, then saw the wind catch and embroider and then divide the rising column of smoke, two fingers which briefly tangled, as if crossing index and middle, before joining again in a single smooth column rising upwards into the blue.
HAND SIGNS
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I would like to thank Trevor Johnston of the Department of Linguistics, University of Sydney, for his invaluable advice and assistance. His Auslan Dictionary: A Dictionary of the Sign Language of the Australian Deaf Community (published by Deafness Resources Australia Ltd) is a classic of its kind.
I would also like to thank my Basic Auslan teacher at the Royal South Australian Deaf Society, Barry Priori, for his wonderful lessons. He bears no responsibility for the monster those lessons have created.
Christ
opher Pearson gave editorial shape to this book. Clare Forster, Lisa Mills and Angelo Loukakis of HarperCollins, together with Bernadette Foley, supplied further invaluable advice and fine tuning. Thanks to Steven Bray for the illustrations which add poetry to the text.
Andrew Male, Michael Jacobs and Lindy Powell, QC, acted as interactive reference ‘works’. Sandy McFarlane alerted me to the work of Rachel Yehuda on enhanced rat intelligence.
Invaluable criticism as always came also from my family—Helen, Anna, Daniel and Alexandra.
Those readers interested in pursuing some of the issues at the core of this novel might choose to consult more standard reference works. An initial list would include the following: Douglas Keith Candland, Feral Children and Clever Animals, OUP, 1993; Paola Cavalieri and Peter Singer (eds), The Great Ape Project, Fourth Estate, 1993; Jared Diamond, The Rise of the Third Chimpanzee, Vintage, 1991; Francine Patterson, The Education of Koko, Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1981; Dale Peterson, The Deluge and the Ark, Vintage, 1989; Oliver Sacks, Seeing Voices, Picador, 1990.
A concise criticism, from a post-Chomskian perspective, of the various Sign language projects involving great apes is to be found in Steven Pinker’s The Language Instinct, Penguin, 1984.
P.G., 1994
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