Pepsi Bears and Other Stories Page 13

  It is not until the young gentleman in the waistcoat with the side-levers has had eleven rums and is safely drunk enough to be thrown out that he tells the barman, ‘You are gorilla yourself, Sir. And ignorant enough to take offence at the suggestion, I warrant.’ The barman is ignorant enough to take offence at the suggestion and the young Englishman is thrown out. In the dusk he staggers down among the harbour warehouses to the docks where he weaves up the gangway to his ship the HMS Beagle, and her smiling sailors turn away out of deference for their naturalist while he ricochets his way through his many boxed and labelled specimens to his hammock and fights his way aboard the treacherous thing, cursing it as an evil-minded beast with no hippocampus minor.

  Owen’s evening did not go so well. No eleven rums followed by a pendulous slumber for him. The great man is high in triumph, his heart beating loud in his ears, a thrill of achievement coursing through his body. His hands are slick with Nusuzu’s cerebral sap and he is holding them aloft taking congratulation. Beneath him the dead gorilla. He has just proven that Man stands alone in nature, in a special sub-class. Glorious, glorious news. For if this gorilla lying dead upon the table were a relation to man then man’s dignity is undone, his special place in the firmament dashed, and his status as God’s chosen life form disproven. What would follow from this? Depravity. Total immorality as God’s law lay in ruin. This might seem too much threat to take from one exiled ape exuding eucalyptus airs, but it is a threat civilised society has felt keenly of late. These last years, evolutionists have made free with much ungodly balderdash.

  But now, the gorilla, Owen is ecstatic to announce to the waiting world, has … no … hippocampus … minor …

  As the crowd calls his glory and thanks him for saving the Lord and His law and civilisation as it exists, a young bounder in a burgundy vest jumps up and compares Owen’s own brain to a porker’s left nut. Ye gods! The blood pounds in Owen’s temples. Someone bludgeon this young heretic with a wooden cross or a metal table leg.

  As the fool is ejected Owen slowly lowers his glistening hands. The pounding in his ears and throbbing in his temples is a curious loud thing. Ohh … Ohh … Owen drops down dead beside the table. The colony’s surgical notables rush to his aid and in this emergency they lie him on the table beside Nusuzu, much as married deceased might lie side-by-side in eternity. They work at his heart and they massage his vital points. But it is no use. The Great Owen is gone. He has performed a crucial task for God, and God has called him home for his reward. Indeed. Perhaps.

  The colony’s surgical notables decide to toast his life with rum.

  ‘To Owen,’ they raise their glasses, ‘a great explorer. A navigator in God’s mysterious realm.’

  ‘Hear, Hear.’ They drink.

  ‘To Owen,’ they raise their glasses, ‘the Hammer of Evolution.’

  ‘Hear, Hear.’

  They toast Owen into the night.

  There they lie; the great anatomist and his specimen, gone their separate ways. But what killed Owen? The leading medical men of the colony begin a speculation. What on earth can have felled this Titan? A strapping fellow, seemingly in the pink.

  Perhaps the brain of a gorilla gives off a toxin into the air that wreaks a dreadful revenge on its attacker.

  Bollocks, Sir. His manservant would be dead as he.

  Then perhaps it was cholera, tuberculosis, influenza.

  No symptoms of any illness, Sir. The man dropped dead in harness while standing over his prize.

  An aneurism. Some torrid internal disturbance of the emotions that grasped the capillaries of his brain and squeezed them until the brain was desiccated of its vital fluids.

  I should say so.

  It would be my conjecture the emotions wrought this upon the physic. The man’s brain swooped from the height of victory to the depths of outrage in the blink of an eye and the pressure drop in such a vast fall ruptured a blood vessel. In short, gentlemen, crushed by a sudden and extreme anxiety.

  Possibly that.

  Yes. A mighty and justifiable outrage, sparked by that young man in his coloured waistcoat, caused a vicious turbulence inside Owen.

  That brash atheist with the showy side-levers turned the wave of Owen’s triumph into a cesspool of spleen and poisoned his brain.

  A provocative and dangerous act if it were proven.

  That young fellow’s rank heckling was a virtual act of manslaughter and he must be brought to account.

  Who is he?

  Where is he?

  Where is this young atheist who killed Owen?

  A consensus is reached: it was the young man and his talk of pig’s privates that swept Owen from his peak of triumph unto death. For the genius mind is a delicate thing and might well be dashed and torn by an effrontery that would leave a dullard merely musing.

  The scientific men form a posse. They find a policeman on Pitt Street and engage him by telling him a deadly chemical transformation has been performed in the cerebrum of a visiting dignitary by a fancy-pants upstart with a foul mouth. The policeman says ‘Oh’ and ‘Aye’ as if he is familiar with this style of depravity. The perpetrator must be run to ground.

  By morning the perpetrator in the claret waistcoat is located aboard his ship and spilled from his hammock aplunk onto the deckboards of his cabin. Those parts of him that do not ache with this rude awakening ache with drink. He moans and rubs his stomach. A summons is presented to Captain Fitzroy for his detention at the Governor’s Pleasure until a post-mortem is carried out on Owen and his cause of death established. The young man is chivvied up Pitt Street by the scientific men, who have been up all night celebrating, with rum, Owen’s triumph over evolution, and mourning, with rum, Death’s triumph over Owen. The young man is given cause to regret again, through his buttocks, the contemporary penchant for sharp-nosed Spanish footwear. Once, after he is kicked, a scientist makes a joke: ‘Careful, Sir, for his ship’s captain says he is a Wedgwood and passing fragile.’

  Back in the operating theatre the young man is shocked to see Owen lying alongside the gorilla on which he had operated. ‘Owen. Dead. But … dead of what?’

  ‘Well may you ask, you China-rich blackguard. Dead of outrage, if we can only prove it. Dead of you and your rank interjection.’

  Forcing the young man to sit and watch so he might be witness to whatever wound they find he has inflicted upon Owen’s mind, the surgeons begin a cranial post-mortem. No need to search elsewhere, for the cause of death will be found in the brain. Onfray, Surgeon to the Governor, takes up the handsaw that was used to open the gorilla and prove it no child of God. He flips the top off Owen’s head like it were his breakfast egg and brings Owen’s yolk forth, and the surgeons coo over it because it is the very most beautiful brain they have ever seen and nothing at all like a boar’s left one.

  When the learned men get done admiring it they begin to examine it for the wound the young man inflicted. But what do they hope to find? Do they expect to see some goo pooled in his cranium like the afterbirth of a very nasty insult? A vessel ruptured by a rudeness? A clot of bile formed by this young fellow’s blasphemy? Some cooked lobe where alkaline triumph soured into acidic outrage? What sort of evidence would an insult of this magnitude leave on the brain? They examine the thing by gaslight and under microscope, and they turn it this way and that, and they bathe it in a litmus bath, and they massage it desperately that it might give off some hint. But no examination reveals it anything but a normally expired brain; bulbous vessel from which a world has ebbed.

  As enthusiastic with rum as they have been, they are now sobering and beginning to doubt their ability to prove their diagnosis. They stare at the young murderer. The young blackguard. The young atheist. Sitting there with his shoulders drooping under yesterday’s excess. They are sure he killed Owen with his jibe, but perhaps he will get away with it.

  ‘Constable,’ Onfray says to the officer seated alongside the young fellow, ‘watch him while we confer.’

  Onfr
ay places Owen’s brain back in its skull and the learned men retire to a chamber attached to the operating theatre, and the hungover young man in the claret waistcoat and the policeman are alone. The young man gets to his feet and rubs his poor stomach through his waistcoat. ‘Have you any idea of what I am accused?’ he asks the policeman.

  ‘To tell the truth, Sir, I haven’t the faintest suspicion about what it is you done or even if you’re guilty of the doin’ of it.’

  ‘And, Officer,’ the young man wanders to the operating table, ‘here we have a dead ape and a dead man. And those gentlemen who sawed the dead man’s head off, if my nose is not as ignorant as they, smell of strong drink.’

  The policeman nods, ‘I caught a whiff, Sir. I seen the signs.’

  ‘You are sharp, Constable.’

  ‘I been a long time a constable, and if it wasn’t for whiffin’ of drink occasional meself I’d be sergeant.’

  ‘You should be.’ The young Englishman nods.

  ‘Thank you, Sir.’

  ‘Not at all, Sergeant.’ The policeman smiles and a blush comes to his weathered face.

  The young Englishman suddenly snatches Owen’s and Nusuzu’s brains from their gaping skulls and brandishes them at the policeman and whispers urgently, ‘It seems unnatural, Sergeant, wrong that they are opening the heads of men and apes side-by-side and ogling their brains like crystal balls. It seems … well, is there evil afoot here, Sergeant? With your long time in the game, can you tell me, do you whiff skulduggery here?’

  The policeman’s face is bafflement. ‘Sir …?’

  ‘Do you not think, Sergeant, that these … scientists … might be about switching the brains of these two deceased?’

  ‘Oh, Lord, Sir. Please put them brains back.’

  ‘I will, Sergeant. But being … scientists … do you think they might be about putting this gorilla’s brain in this man’s head?’ The young man places Owen’s brain back in his skull. ‘And this man’s brain here,’ he waggles Nusuzu’s brain before placing it back in her skull, ‘in the gorilla’s head. So as to bring the man back as a rapist and the gorilla back as a scientist? Could it be that, Sergeant? Is that what this is? An … experiment?’

  ‘Ohh …’ the policeman moans. ‘Ohh … science. Sure God would have commanded against it if it was afoot in Moses’ time. Sure he would have throwed over that silly one about coveting thy neighbour’s wife and bid Moses chisel Thou Shalt Not Experiment instead.’ And thinking the young man has swapped the two brains, he tells him, ‘Now put them brains back in their rightful heads, Sir. It’s almost certain a sin, swappin’ brains.’

  ‘I don’t like the feel of them,’ the young man folds his arms. ‘They are squishy.’

  ‘My God. Then you shouldn’t’ve played with ’em in the first place, if you got no stomach for it.’ The policeman leaps forward and taking a deep breath plunges his hands into the open skulls and winkles out both brains and crossing his arms thrusts Nusuzu’s brain into Owen’s skull and Owen’s brain into Nusuzu’s skull and rubs his hands up and down his woollen trouser legs, murmuring, ‘Urgh … urgh …’ and shaking his head from side to side to keep the feel of their squishiness from settling on his own mind.

  ‘I told you,’ the young man says. ‘Squishy.’

  There are sounds at the door and the young man rushes to sit down and the policeman is left standing near the cadavers as the learned men enter the room. Onfray, at the head of the sobering posse, tells the policeman, ‘He is fortunate. We cannot prove his crime to a level a court would require. You may dismiss him.’ He flicks his fingers, dismissing the young man and the policeman.

  The policeman takes a breath and twitches his nose like a rabbit, letting the learned fellows know he is awake to the whiff of rum. ‘That’s very good, Sir. That’s very well. But what is this here with this ape and this other dead un in the finery? You wouldn’t be thinkin’ to shuffle their selves and turn about their natures so the man’s a ape and the ape’s a man, would you? ’Cause if you were it would be a rank ungodly … experiment. And the law couldn’t stand for it.’ He has his hands on his hips and his head tilted to a serious degree, risking his very career to talk to these men this way.

  ‘Oh, oh.’ Onfray’s face breaks into a broad grin and he lays his hand on Owen’s cold chest to steady himself. ‘This policeman has notions of metamorphosis, gentlemen. He thinks we are wizards.’ The gentlemen laugh and slap each other’s backs and one or two make claws of their hands and they grimace and advance on the policeman playing at being vampires. ‘You dumb brute,’ Onfray says to him. ‘You poor, dumb fellow.’ He takes the brain from Owen’s skull and holds it before the eyes of the policeman.

  ‘Do you not think if we brought Owen back as an ape, a female ape at that, he might not have harsh words to say to us while he learnt afresh how to pass water without hosing his toes?’ He thrusts the gorilla’s brain beneath the policeman’s nose. ‘This, Sir, is the mind of a great genius. Behold its beauty – its fullness of size, its convex rampancy, its many chapels and intricacies – truly it is to cerebra what the Notre Dame is to churches. It is a jewel.’ He places it gently back in Owen’s skull and takes Owen’s brain from the gorilla’s skull. ‘The gorilla’s brain,’ he scowls at it, ‘is, as you may note, an organ with the consistency and intelligence of tripe. The two are not interchangeable, my good fellow.’ He places Owen’s brain back in the gorilla’s skull. ‘The two are alike as chalk and stilton. However …’ Onfray eyes the policeman up and down, ‘perhaps your own brain placed in a gorilla might empower the beast to walk the beat and deliver a buffeting to a gang of scoundrels. A new super-constable. Yes …’

  The policeman begins to edge toward the door. ‘Quite so. Get out, you ox, before I have you in chains and you are given thirty licks of the governor’s cat.’ He is out the door and gone when Onfray turns toward the young man in the claret waistcoat. ‘Begone yourself, Sir. Back to Blighty and let’s never hear of you again. And should you ever pass Westminster Abbey you might drop in and say a prayer over Owen’s tomb and beg forgiveness for what you have done.’ The young man in the claret waistcoat nods as if he might indeed kneel before Owen’s tomb in the glorious Abbey. He smiles as if the idea were agreeable, and looks set to laugh aloud, but contains himself, nods to the learned gentlemen and is out the door and gone.

  Onfray is assisted by two surgeons as he sews Owen’s skull back together. It is not easy. Considerable force must be brought to bear. Owen’s brain would seem to have swelled with rigor mortis and they are forced to poke it and prod it and cajole it and finally slam the lid on it as one does on a jack-in-the-box.

  Onfray has an assistant place the gorilla’s brain in a large glass specimen jar filled with clear spirits and he marks it himself: Gorilla Gorilla. Cerebrum, Professor Owen’s gorilla Nusuzu, his dissection of which proved epochal in the denunciation of evolution. (No hippocampus minor.)

  And though the London Zoo paid for Nusuzu, and she rightfully belongs to that institution, Onfray asks for a show of hands from the learned gentlemen and they agree to donate her brain to the Sydney School of Surgery.

  The brain floats yet at Sydney’s Powerhouse Museum. And as an important artifact in the debunking of evolution it is often visited by classes from theological schools. Busloads of Christians smile at it distractedly. Their fingers smudge the glass of the jar, for usually they have been force-feeding themselves sticky confections or masturbating on the bus in their pilgrimage.

  The jar sits on a pedestal and the brain marked Gorilla Gorilla floats therein and the theological students circle it ogling its bulbous yellowing significance. And if there is thunder in the air it might rotate slowly clockwise in its chemical bath, under the spell of some continental magnetism … Africa calling her home.

  It is Owen’s brain and it thought itself a genius. But is now derided as the dull tool of an ape and mocked for aspiring to greater office … for once pretending to be a relative.

  Poet Laure
ate of Cats.

  It’s not an attribute much lauded any more, but when I was young I took great pride in being known as a good shot. I was the best marksman among my friends and could knock a crow off a fence a block away. The fact that the .22 bullet usually travelled on at 340 metres-per-second through our town at eye-level was not a concern that could be raised above the din of exultation as the black feathers spun on the air.

  Until I shot out the one good eye of Sally Monteith. Sally was a woman made eccentric by the Japanese shooting her husband in the war, and was angry as hell to be gunned down herself while shopping for the lavender-scented hair-oil with which she flattened her locks. I fired the rifle. I hit the crow. And at the edge of my vision I hit Sally Monteith. They went down together and there was never any doubt they were on two ends of the same event. She dropped so fast it looked like God had stuck his hand down her throat and snatched out her backbone. I’d killed her. Until she came up out of the rye grass holding her bloodied head screaming about invasion and the yellow peril and the end of our way of life. For a moment then, as my friends helter-skeltered for elsewhere, I thought I might be able to get away with it. Blame the Japs and let them take the rap. They had form with the Monteiths.

  But good Samaritans began to gather around Sally Monteith and talk up the Japanese as businessmen in suits and bring her back to the here-and-now. Which was boys running wild, out of control, discharging firearms within city limits. Down there at the gate of the Ibis Butter Factory I could see them pointing at me, explaining to her; there stands a boy with a gun. They began waving their arms, shaking their fists, calling me come hither. But I couldn’t see any point in coming hither. I knew from one or two other involvements I was a key ingredient for turning a gaggle of good Samaritans into an angry mob.

  I went home and ate dinner without discolouring that meal for my parents with any news on Sally Monteith. Feeling pretty sick I pushed at my corned beef and stared at my father’s hands, knowing the world could turn black any moment and not wanting to hurry that blackness along. My mother wondered at my health. Was I coming down with something? Well, wrath, I think. Her corned beef, usually a favourite, had been made unpalatable by the hovering wrath of the people. And just as it was cleared away and bowls of ice cream were placed on the table, I heard tyres on our gravel drive and here it was. My dad looked up and I looked up and said, ‘I shot Sally Monteith in a shooting accident today.’