Read Online Great Apes by Will Self - Free Book Online

… Wittgenstein’s theory about private language.” Gareth took a pull on his glass of white wine and peered down at his interlocutor’s bald patch.
    â€œCertainly you quoted what you
thought
was Wittgenstein, but actually you misquoted him, because you lifted the quote from an article on exactly the same subject that appeared on Sunday, I think you know which one I mean.” And Tony snorted, realising too late that a glob of cocaine and mucus was poised on the very lip of his nostril. This shot down in a near-vertical trajectory and lodged on the rim of Gareth’s shoe. Fortunately the journalist didn’t notice. Although Tabitha did, and dissolved in giggles.
    â€œSo what if I did? I don’t think that goes to proveanything much. Why don’t you address yourself to the real questions, instead of trying to score points.”
    â€œHo-hoo! The real issue. Is that it? The real issue.” The critic was becoming agitated now. Animals were Tony’s first – perhaps only – love. He lived in a council flat in Camberwell with his mother, who looked like an ancient Labrador; and an ancient Labrador. “So, if that’s the case, under what circumstances do you feel it’s acceptable to raise veal calves in crates where they can’t move, where they can’t do anything but slam their heads against the planks until they’re bruised and bleeding? Perhaps if we could be certain that the beasts weren’t in any real distress it would be acceptable, hmmm?’
    Gareth was not to be humiliated. Or rather, he had been humiliated so long ago that everything which had followed was nothing but mint on the lamb of shame. He hated Figes and his little clique. The sexy girls, the two apparently mute blacks, the painter Dykes with his sniffy attitude. He looked down at his shoe and saw that a glob of whitish mucus was lodged on the rim of the toe. He discreetly smeared this off on the carpet – ten hours later this residuum was hoovered up by a Guatemalan cleaner, dressed in blue overalls – then came back at Tony: “That’s irrelevant. Whether I misquoted or not, the point I made still stands – we can’t know the animal’s state of mind.”
    â€˜Well, shrinks now apparently have the humility to admit that they don’t know anything about depression. They just hand out the drugs and if the patient responds then they say that they have a depression that is responsive to such-and-such a drug. So perhaps we should do that with the veal calves, give them Prozac and if they
seem
to behappier take it as read that they are. I can see quite a brisk trade being done in the flesh of calves raised on Prozac, can’t you?”
    â€œYou’re being idiotic. Very silly.” And Gareth contrived to notice someone on the far side of the bar, someone he needed to talk to urgently, right away. “Excuse me.” He rotated his figure on its axis and abstracted it.
    Tony called after him, “Or how about venison on Valium?”
    And Tabitha chimed in, “or ham on haloperidol?”
    The clique dissolved in forced laughter, which left them with the uneasy feeling of not-having-been-fair to the man.
    â€œBut seriously,” said Ken Braithwaite, the older of the brothers by three minutes, “if we eat the meat of animals who have been physically tortured, perhaps we should be more imaginative about it.”
    â€œWhaddya mean?” Tony was dipping one of his mouths in his martini, the other one nuzzled at the side of the glass.
    â€œWell, how about eating the flesh of animals who have been emotionally abused?”
    â€œHmmm, nice idea. You mean persistently sexually humiliate pheasants – and then shoot them?”
    â€œSomething like that.”
    â€œOr,” Tabitha said, clutching the little ball of humour and running with it, “chickens that have been socially ostracised, maddened by the fact that they