Josh Machen told himself that jealousy was as much part of being in love as all the other demonstrable gestures, like twiddling your partner’s hair across a dinner table and giving her knowing glances on crowded tube trains, that it simply proved how much you cared. Kate teased him about it. ‘By your reckoning, Othello was a regular guy acting pretty much within his rights,’ she suggested. Being jealous meant that someone was always on your mind, which was desirable, so the subject remained a joke between them.
It stopped being a joke after Josh followed her to a hen night and accused a male stripper of touching her thighs. As they argued about the exact height of the young man’s teasing hands, Kate’s amused smile faded. After that, he questioned her movements, checked her mobile phone for unrecognisable addresses and her e-mail box for mysterious correspondents. Usually he apologised afterwards, but that didn’t make it better.
‘It’s living in London,’ Josh told her over a conciliatory dinner in his favourite Camden restaurant, the Cypriot joint he always used for making announcements. ‘Eight million people all on the make, lots of men looking at you with an eye on the main chance, it’s no wonder relationships don’t last in this city.’
‘Are you telling me this is why we never eat anywhere fashionable?’ she asked, only half teasing. The one-eyed owner slipped beadily between his patrons, making them uneasy.
‘How different could our lives be if we were living somewhere else? Somewhere warm and dry, where the streets aren’t covered in trash and every other shop isn’t a fried chicken outlet? London’s dying, it doesn’t have residents now, it has inmates. There’s more crime here than in New York, it’s got a Third World transport system, there are just too many people. I look at old photographs of half-deserted streets and think that’s the city I want back.’
‘You can’t stop the world, Josh. You have to keep pace with it.’
‘Maybe, but you can find a place that suits you better.’
‘You really think it would make a difference to us living somewhere else?’
‘Yes, I do.’
‘Do you have a place in mind?’
‘If I came up with an idea, would you at least consider it?’
‘I suppose so,’ she agreed vaguely. ‘This isn’t anything to do with getting me all to yourself on some island, is it?’
‘Of course not. I think it would be good for both of us to see a little more of the planet. I never took a gap year like you.’
She wondered whether it was the city he longed to run away from, or the fact that he could not trust himself to trust her here.
For a long time, Kate refused to get married. She had seen how marriage had crushed the life from her parents, and had no desire to follow in their carpet-slippered footsteps. Why else was it called wedlock? She finally relented because she thought it would answer the question of trust that hung between them once and for all. Josh centred his world too much around hers. He got under her feet. With the mutual trust engendered by their marriage vows, he might become free to find himself.
After a grimly nondescript civil ceremony which her parents boycotted, she moved in with him, shoving an extra bed into his tiny flat near Victoria Park. The wedding contract held an implicit promise, that Josh would learn to behave more like a husband. She wondered what had happened in his past to make him so scared of losing her.
She worried at first that life together in Victoria Park would become claustrophobic, but as they worked flexi-time in different parts of the city – she was a research scientist at the King’s Cross College of Tropical Medicine, he worked as an in-house designer for an ailing record company in Kensington – they didn’t see as much of each other as she had imagined. They were both Londoners, both had too many old friends, too many birthdays to celebrate, too many arrangements to squeeze into their free hours. There was never enough time.
Then Josh lost his job, and suddenly there were too many hours in the day.
After three months spent sitting around the flat waiting for companies to call back, he was becoming morose and frustrated. Cutbacks, retrenchment, the music business faring poorly, the same excuses were trotted out time and again. They were looking for cheap labour, and that meant buying young staff. Josh was thirty-one, and as a designer working to attract teenage sales, employers feared he was past his sell-by date. He maintained his old contacts and managed to keep some occasional freelance work, but it wasn’t enough to pay the bills. Kate often went out in the evenings with colleagues from her department. Josh had nothing in common with these intense biologists, and stayed at home, but always waited up so that he could discreetly question her when she returned.
It didn’t take either of them long to see how the strain of their new circumstances was damaging their relationship. Something, they knew, would have to be done. They loved each other very much, but too many things were getting in the way.
It was Kate who heard about the offer from a Malaysian lady who had recently joined the department.
‘You’re talking about a pretty severe change of lifestyle,’ said Josh, after she explained what the move would entail.
‘You said you wanted to get out of London,’ she reminded him, anxiously unfolding the map across the table.
‘London, yes, but giving up the whole western hemisphere seems a bit extreme.’
‘It would be perfect for my thesis. Look, Malaysia’s divided into two separate chunks, the west peninsula, and the northwest section of Borneo. Taman’s supposed to be somewhere off the west coast of the peninsular.’ Her finger traced the line of the sea. ‘Here it is. You have to look carefully.’
‘I thought she said it was tiny.’
‘You’re looking at Langkowi. Taman Island is a little further to the north. See?’
‘It’s a speck. What’s the scale of this thing?’
‘Flights go to Kuala Lumpur, then it’s an internal hop to Langkowi and finally there’s a short ferry ride.’
‘Dear God, that’s a long way off the map.’ They examined the emerald droplet together. The island was so small that there were no towns marked on it. Kate checked the map again, looking for something positive to remark upon.
‘It looks nearer to the coast of Malaysia than Langkowi Island. It’s just not been opened to tourism as much. The ferry only goes twice a week at the moment, but they’ll expand the service if more visitors come.’ She pressed her hand across his. ‘Think about it. One of the most futuristic cities on the planet will be just a few hundred miles away. From that point of view, it’s no more remote than, say, the Isle of Man.’
He ran his hand down through his hair, pressing a frown into place. ‘Exactly,’ he said gloomily.
After two meetings with the proprietors of the new hotel on Taman, Josh remained unconvinced that they should take the posting. They would be required to act as caretakers for a minimum period of four months, while the builders were finishing the rooms in the hotel’s main building. The owners were a pair of Swiss bankers, and wanted someone to keep an eye on the place until they were ready to open for business in the first summer season. The money they were willing to pay for a European couple to take the job was substantial. A suite had already been furnished in the hotel’s residential section, and the bankers were prepared to provide them with anything they wanted. Kate would be able to realise a cherished dream of writing up her toxicology research, something she could never find time to do in London. Josh would be able to reconsider his options, and maybe get around to the photographic career he had always wanted to pursue. But as their deadline for making a decision approached, he still refused to commit.
Then Kate ran into an old boyfriend who announced that he was single again and wished he had never broken up with her. He offered to take her to the Gordon Ramsey restaurant at Claridges for dinner on Saturday night, and try to make amends for what had once passed between them. While she was deciding whether to go or not, Josh announced that they were leaving for Malaysia.
They signed the papers, locked up the flat and transferred through Kuala Lumpur with a single large suitcase between them. Backpackers, package tourists and businessmen crowded the shuttle to Langkowi, but only a handful of locals continued on with them to the port. It was late October, a month before the start of the island’s rainy season, and the first guests on Taman were to be expected at the end of March. The sleek white ferry was more modern than anything Josh had travelled on in Britain. They cut through a smooth green sea that filled with a delicate aquamarine light where the sun hit it, and felt at once that they had made the right decision to leave behind the grey dome of London sky. All around them, improbably steep plugs of jungle rose from the glittering jade water.
At Taman’s jetty they were met by the works foreman, a smiling freckled Australian named Aaron Tunn, who pumped their hands hard and insisted on carrying their suitcase, hefting it onto his shoulder as though it weighed nothing. The hotel proved to be a drive away in a juddery jeep that threatened to tip over as it climbed the slippery red tyre ditches in the unlaid roads.
‘This area around you is ancient rainforest,’ Aaron explained, pointing to the white-legged eagles that dipped into rocky outcrops behind the greenery. A streak of orange as wide as the world was settling over the jungle, pointing to the close of day.
‘How old do you think it is?’ asked Kate, enchanted.
‘About three hundred million years, although much of it has been cut down recently. The government hasn’t got a very good environmental record, but this time they’re trying to get the balance right. We’re dry-walling with reclaimed stone, and barely touching the forest canopy except to bury pipes. The cut paths will have completely grown over by the end of the rainy season. You can expect a downpour every day soon, but plenty of hot sun, too.’
Josh clung to the side of the jeep and focussed his eyes on the green shadows of the forest. Dusty lianas looped between the trees like the arcs of a suspension bridge. Parasitic plants grew with the same thickness and strength as the trees they clung to. Something was jumping between bushy branches, shaking whole trunks and violently rustling treetops.
‘What about poisonous insects?’ he shouted to Aaron. ‘Is there anything we have to look out for?’
‘There are one or two bugs they don’t tell the tourists about,’ Aaron called over his shoulder, ‘and a very mean breed of jellyfish that turns up in lagoons when it rains hard, but generally speaking, the fauna’s safer here than it is back home in Perth. We’ve got about sixty men working on the site, a mix of locals and experts from Far East territories. They won’t talk to you much, they just get on with their work and go home when the bell rings. Me and three of the lads are on site overnight, but we go to the mainland at weekends. That’s the only time you’ll be alone here.’ Aaron laughed. ‘You’ll probably be glad of the peace and quiet by then.’
For a brief moment Josh wondered if he was entering a hell of his own making. Sixty sweat-stained men slyly watching the fragrant white woman who walked past them to her bedroom, smirking at the skinny London lad who couldn’t keep her satisfied. You’ve been watching too many old movies, he told himself.
The track led down toward the sun, and Josh realised they had reached the far northern tip of the island. The hotel was so well concealed in the undergrowth that he could not see it at first. As they drew nearer, angled stone walls could be glimpsed between the trees. It looked like an Incan city in miniature, a central block built low to the ground in natural materials that blended harmoniously with the dense olive landscape surrounding it. Set away from the main body of the building, a series of wooden-roofed villas could be discerned beneath the feathered leaves of the jungle’s primary growth.
‘It’s a beaut, isn’t it?’ said Aaron, with the pride of a man who knew he had achieved something special. He stopped the jeep and jumped out, pulling back the seats. ‘We had you marked down for a suite in the main building, but it got flooded, so we built you a villa. We only finished it this morning, so you may find some of the wood seals a bit sticky, but apart from that it’s ready to live in. They’ll be a dozen of them when we open.’
It was clear that the work whistle had just blown, because men were returning from the hotel’s staff room in white short-sleeved shirts and jeans, carrying holdalls. They nodded politely at Aaron as they passed, but barely seemed to notice the new arrivals.
‘They won’t bother you,’ Aaron explained. ‘They’re industrious and religious, only interested in getting paid and getting home. They don’t speak much English, only Malay, but they’re good men and won’t get in your way. You’ll enjoy it here. All you have to do is keep the site safe.’
‘Safe from what?’ asked Josh, his eyes searching the undergrowth for leaping shapes. ‘Are there any dangerous locals hanging about?’
‘Oh, nothing like that,’ Aaron replied airily, ‘it’s just a condition of the building’s insurance contract. But there are small problems. There’s been some stealing. Tools, clothes, stuff left lying around.’
‘You think it’s your workmen?’
‘No, they value their jobs too highly to touch anything.’
‘Then who do you suspect?’
‘We all know who the thieves are.’ Aaron set the case down on the step of their villa. ‘We’ll talk more when you’ve unpacked and had a chance to freshen up.’
‘This will be so good for us,’ said Kate, folding her legs beneath the silk kimono that had been left, folded, on the bed. ‘Look at this place, it’s incredible.’ The villa’s teak legs had been punched into the angled, loamy floor of the forest. The suite was basically one large polished hardwood room, divided by alcoves that extended into a pair of private bathrooms. White linen drapes hung in swathes across the shuttered windows. There was no glass in the villa; the seasonal winds were likely to draw them out.
‘I thought it would be quiet, but listen to all that noise outside.’ Josh looked uneasily at the swaying vegetation beyond the veranda. A long yellow stick suddenly sprouted legs and moved, running along the railing to jump into the bushes. The wildness of the forest would take some getting used to. Strange birds squealed like electric saws in the tops of the trees, while crickets and toads provided a low rolling trill that had begun the moment shadows fell on the leaves. Something hooted angrily near the shore, its upturned call answered by a mate or an enemy. The canopy of the forest was so close around them that it touched the roof of the villa.
‘I thought it would be quieter,’ repeated Josh, as he tipped the blinds shut.
Aaron’s helpers had set up a meal in the partially finished dining room. They sat on fat silk cushions sorting through dishes of chicken, banana-leaf wrapped rice and a splayed fried fish with hundred of small bones.
‘Two monsoons a year, nine major airstreams, a rainfall of a hundred inches, eighty-five per cent humidity, it’s a fantastic ecosystem for breeding unique plant species,’ said Aaron, crunching the fishbones in strong white teeth. ‘Birds, too. We’ve got hornbills, parrots, swifts, eagles. I can watch ’em for hours. The island used to deal palm-oil with the mainland, but the government protected the trees. The locals weren’t too happy until organic tourism came along.’
‘What about animals?’ asked Kate, nipping a chunk of tender chicken from its green bamboo splinter.
‘Mainland’s got the lot, elephants, tigers, the eastern half even has a few rhinos left. We’ve got pelandok, that’s kind of a small deer, dusky leaf monkeys, some small crocs, monitor lizards, and you have to keep an eye out for snakes, mostly cobras. Good news is that the mozzies are malaria-free, but you’ll still get bitten to buggery around the swamps. You get the best of both worlds here. Taman has its own natural selection patterns and its own micro-climate. The animals and plants grow up differently, behave differently. You won’t see stuff like this anywhere else. Zoological teams from all over the world come here. Kate tells me you’re into photography, Josh. You want to take pictures, this is the place to do it.’
‘I used to be good at it.’ Josh eyed the carcass of the bony fried fish with suspicion. ‘I don’t know whether I’ve brought the right equipment.’
‘No problem, mate. The ferry will bring in anything you order from the internet.’
It crossed Josh’s mind that Kate might find this plain-speaking blonde southerner attractive. ‘Doesn’t your wife miss you out here?’ he asked casually as Kate shot him a look.
‘I’m not a married man, Josh, not in that sense.’ He popped open beers and slid them across the table. ‘I’m afraid I had to put the wine stock on hold because we haven’t been able to drain the cellar yet. No, to answer your question, Josh, I’ve got a partner back on the mainland, but she runs a gardening centre and can’t get away often.’ Kate’s follow-up look to Josh warned him. Satisfied?
‘You were going to tell us about your thief,’ reminded Josh, anxious to move away from his clumsy display of insecurity.
‘Thieves, actually. We’ve got a troupe of macaques on the island, big green-haired bastards with muzzles like baboons, you can’t miss ’em. That howling noise? They head for the beach around sunset. They dig up crabs and eat ’em. The Malays train them to pick coconuts. They’ll take the washing from the lines, and won’t give it back until you feed ’em. They’re smart, but they’re mean-spirited fuckers. They’ll try to get you to join in with their games, but it’s best not to interfere. You really don’t want to get involved, believe me. So we let ’em steal a little, just not too much.’
The next morning, Josh saw the macaques, ten or twelve of them looping through the trees on long, muscular arms. As casually as waltzing around a maypole, their leader swung on his liana and dropped to the ground near the villa. Leaning on his forepaws, he raised a doglike whiskery head and sniffed the air through broad flat nostrils. After a few minutes, he scooted toward the verandah. The others held back, as if waiting for their leader to pass judgement. Josh realised that he was much larger than the rest, almost as big as a man. He had to weigh well over twenty kilos. His shaggy coat was, as Aaron had pointed out, a curious shade of brownish-green, his head framed by a centre-parted lion’s mane of straight, swept-back hair. Implacable silk-brown eyes stared at Josh. No, not at him – past him. He turned and followed the macaque’s gaze. Kate was standing in the doorway of the bedroom, pulling a white T-shirt above her breasts, over her head.
‘Don’t move,’ Josh warned her.
‘What is it?’ She snapped off the shirt.
‘One of the macaques.’
‘Where? Oh. My God, he’s enormous. Much bigger than I imagined.’
‘Stay where you are.’
‘It’s all right, he’s more scared of you than you are of him.’ Kate smiled and turned. ‘Would you put some sun-block on my back?’
‘Don’t let him see you like that.’
‘Like what?’
‘Without your top on.’
‘He’s an animal, Josh.’
‘That’s not the point.’
‘He doesn’t look at me in the same way.’
‘How do you know?’ Josh took a step forward. The macaque released a startling wide-mouthed howl and bounded off, followed by the rest of the troupe.
‘All right, you showed him who the man was,’ said Kate. ‘Come on, Alpha Male, put some cream on me, then let’s check out the beach.’
It was the perfect place to build a hotel; a crescent of cadmium yellow beach surrounded by heavy underbrush, the sand striped with stream outlets from the hills behind. Low rolling waves indicated the shallow slope of the bay, ideal for safe swimming. White birds fell from the sky, streamlining as they hit the water, to emerge with wagging fish in their beaks. Josh held Kate’s hand as they walked. In the distance he could hear Aaron’s men knocking hammers on posts. They had started at six that morning, and would continue until darkness.
Aaron took them on a tour of the property boundaries. Most of the hotel was finished. Only the rest of the outlying villas remained to be built. Gangs of Malays were digging out the foundations, but water filled the ditches as quickly as the earth was shovelled out. ‘It’ll be worse when the rains come,’ warned Aaron cheerfully. ‘Look, there’s Sinno.’ He pointed to the burly leader macaque they had seen near the verandah earlier. He was seated in a clearing near the water’s edge, cracking a large crab out of its shell by carefully prising apart its exoskeleton. The creature’s disembodied legs were still waving as he levered them into his pouting mouth. The other members of the troupe foraged for smaller pickings on the banks of a stream.
‘How did he get his name?’ asked Kate as they passed.
‘From his genus, Celebes “Cynomacaca”. He’s a moor macaque, a crab-eater, although they’ll eat anything in a push. He’s the most intelligent one I’ve ever seen, but fuckin’ bad tempered. I’ve a book on them if you’re interested.’
‘Yes, I’d like to see that,’ said Kate. ‘Josh, you could take pictures of them.’
‘Just don’t get too close,’ Aaron warned. ‘He’s capable of pulling your arms out of their sockets, although his shout is mostly for show.’
‘Listen to this.’ Kate flattened out the page and marked a passage. ‘They’re arboreal, diurnal, and love the company of others. They’re fast swimmers, climbers and runners. Some were used in studies that led to the development of the polio vaccine. Macaques provide the models for the Buddhist saying, “See No Evil, Hear No Evil, Speak No Evil”. Some people believe that they are human insofar as they embody the worst traits of man.’
‘He’s sitting outside right now,’ said Josh, who was shaving in the bathroom.
‘Who is?’
‘Sinno. The leader. Sitting in the branch of a tree. I can see him from the window.’
‘He’s probably getting used to having new neighbours.’
‘He’s sniffing the air like he did this morning.’
‘I bet he can smell my perfume. After all, no one else here wears any.’
Josh shaved bristles and foam from beneath his nose, but he could see the macaque in his mirror. The damned thing was sitting on its haunches calmly watching his wife. He studied the monkey’s face too intently; the razor slipped and the blade nicked him just below the nose.
After supper that evening Josh kept watch from the verandah, but the vast, slim trees were still and silent. The forest’s nocturnal residents crept silently through the undergrowth while, somewhere far above them, Taman’s troupe of monkeys dreamed away the star-filled night.
The next three weeks passed easily. As their lives decelerated into an elegance of relaxed motion, boredom became inconceivable. To hurry was to sweat and grow tired. During the mornings, Josh busied himself more than was strictly necessary with administrative chores around the hotel, where the floor tiles were being polished and relays of electric wiring were being discreetly added. Kate helped out in the main building, but spent most of the day working at her computer, mapping out a thesis on primate toxicology that remained incomprehensible and private to everyone but her. Late afternoons were passed in makeshift hammocks as the site lost its human sounds and all activity ceased. Shadows deepened, eye-searing yellows faded to cool greens, and small animals could be heard snuffling on the forest floor. Kate took languid baths while Josh lay face down on the bed reading.
When the tide turned, the macaques would return from the beach where they had been digging out crabs, led by Sinno, who would lope past the villa, pausing to check the verandah. Josh knew that he took small items of Kate’s from the deck, hairbrushes, hand-mirrors, combs, but never saw him do it. One day, the monkey left a neat pile of bulbous green fruit on Kate’s sunchair. The fleshy split pericarps were crimson and yellow, and oozed sweet-smelling juice onto the teak deck until Josh cleared it away.
‘He hangs around here like a lovesick suitor,’ Josh complained as they walked through the compound to the dining room. ‘And you’re doing nothing to discourage him. You hardly ever wear clothes in the villa. The way he looks at you, it’s not the way an animal looks at a person.’
‘Then how is it?’
‘The way a man looks at a woman.’
Kate laughed off the idea. ‘It’s too hot in the afternoon. What do you want me to do, dress as if I was in London? I’m just someone new to him, and I smell different. Besides, it helps me that he comes so close. So much of my writing is purely theoretical, he reminds me that the subjects are flesh and blood. But they don’t think like humans. For years scientists tried to teach primates the American Sign Language system, but they discovered their so-called “trained” monkeys used exactly the same signs in the wild. People have this idea of the noble savage. Everyone from Swift to Huxley has suggested that we can learn sensitivity from the apes, but the species simply don’t correspond at a sociological level.’ She touched his arm. ‘I thought you were going to concentrate on your photography. You haven’t taken any shots in days.’
‘I haven’t been in the mood. Besides, Aaron’s kept me busy with the inventory.’
‘You know he’s going to the mainland at the end of the week. You’d better make a list if you want him to pick up any supplies for you.’
Aaron knew that with the coming of the rains their drainage problems would increase, and was hoping to return with the spare parts he needed to keep his pumps working.
The next morning, Josh rose earlier than usual, and sat on the verandah leafing through a catalogue of photographic materials as Sinno’s troupe hooted and hollered through the branches on their way back from the beach. He tried to concentrate on the pages of sleek software options, but found his attention sliding to the shapes in the trees. Behind the hulking form of their leader he could see the troupe’s females. They had never come this close before. Josh slowly reached for the small digital camera he had left on the table. He quietly switched it on and studied the LCD monitor. Several of the females nursed small babies against their breasts, but one turned away whenever Josh focussed his camera on her. The other females seemed to shun her. Once or twice he caught her in the display panel, but by the time the light had adjusted to a level his equipment could read, she had sensed his attention and turned aside.
When the troupe passed in the evening, he called Kate out to the verandah. She tiptoed beside him and studied the females.
‘Her baby’s dead,’ she pointed out. Looking more closely, Josh could see now that the mother was nursing a dry furry corpse. The dessicated body was curled against a dark nipple. ‘She won’t let it go because she wants to be like the other mothers, but she knows you know that it’s dead, and she’s ashamed to let you see.’
‘You really think they can play those sorts of games?’ asked Josh, surprised.
‘They’re not games,’ said Kate, ‘it’s human nature. Shame is a natural instinct.’
‘I bet he’s the father.’ Josh glared at Sinno, who had wedged himself into his usual position overlooking the villa’s bedroom. ‘He’s waiting for you to undress again.’
Kate gave an angry sigh and went indoors.
By the end of the first month, both Kate and Josh looked physically different; leaner, blonder, shoulders as shiny as leather from working outside. Kate, at least, was more relaxed. Aaron offered to take them to the mainland, but they decided to wait until a desire for the noise and chaos of cities had returned to some degree.
The rains arrived in a deafening display of ferocity. Aaron’s men splashed through the building hauling portable pumps, hunting down floods and leaks in the first real test of the building’s durability. Sluices of rainwater appeared in dry alleys. Kate and Josh were increasingly confined to the villa, as getting to the main building involved crossing treacherous torrential slides. Between storms the sun blazed hard, filling the forest with steam. The air was laden with the smell of rotting vegetation. Kate worked, Josh read, and they got on each other’s nerves.
‘I’ve been watching the macaques,’ said Kate one morning in December. ‘The females are getting thinner. They don’t look well. Their fur – it’s changing, losing its gloss. I don’t know a great deal about their social behaviour patterns, but it looks as if they don’t forage, and the males provide for them. But lately the males have stopped.’
Josh knew why. Sinno was taking their supplies and daily dumping piles of fruit at the villa as some kind of votive offering. The monkey clambered into place on his branch and waited for her to appear, but raced off when Josh appeared. Every morning he cleared the verandah, throwing it all back into the jungle before Kate came out.
The next day Josh opened the door to find an enormous injured crab lying on its back, grasping at the air. Sinno sat motionless in the tree in the falling rain, his fur dripping over his implacable eyes. ‘I’m not going to play your game,’ Josh muttered, gingerly raising the crab by a waving leg and hurling it into the bushes. ‘You’re going to play mine.’
The next morning, he waited until the troupe had passed, then climbed out into the forest with the linen bag he had filled with scraps from the kitchen. The macaques were omnivores, and the females were clearly being starved. They kept to a secondary route behind the males, so this was where Josh laid the trail of food. He was still shaking the last scraps of fish from the bag when he heard the troupe returning. His heart thumped in his chest as Sinno and the other males passed within feet of him. The females followed, guiltily stopping at the trail of food and shoveling the delicacies into their cheek pouches. Sinno screamed at them and slapped at their heads as they passed, then caught sight of Josh. His inexpressive face, striped in leaf-stencilled sunlight, betrayed no emotion. He continued to stare for a full ten minutes, then swung sharply up into the trees as if scampering up a set of ladders.
Josh was frightened, but excited. He had shown the monkey who was really the boss. He had undermined Sinno’s command. Over the next few days, the piles of pungent fruit left on the balcony dwindled, but Sinno soon returned to his usual place, watching Kate.
When the refrigeration units arrived on Friday morning, Aaron needed help with the stock-orders and Josh rose early to help him, leaving Kate asleep in bed. He was more concerned about missing the troupe’s morning patrol.
‘We need the inventory pad,’ said Aaron, searching under the workbenches in the new wine cellar. ‘You didn’t take it with you last night?’
‘It’s my fault, you’re right,’ Josh admitted, ‘I took it back to the room. I shouldn’t have had that last bottle.’ They had been celebrating the arrival of the French wines by working their way through a crate of breakages. ‘I’ll get it.’ He picked his way back across the muddy paths, passing through scorched strips of sunlight. Ahead of him a battalion of centipedes, pillarbox red and each longer than a man’s hand, undulated over the dead wet leaves. He could hear water running as he approached the villa. Kate was using the outside shower, a slatted hardwood box on the verandah with a broad copper spray head. She had her back to him, and was soaping her thighs, her tanned stomach. White foam drifted down the channel of her back to her buttocks. She was humming as she washed, a song they had used to sing together as they drove across London to the apartments of friends, now a distant world away. High in the dark tree to the rear, Simmo sat in position watching her, his blank brown eyes unmoving, his arms hanging below the branch, the exposed tip of his penis like a furled scarlet orchid.
Bellowing, Josh ran at the tree with a rock in his hand and threw it as hard as he could. The rock hit Simmo squarely in the face. The macaque released a howl of pain and defiance, and vanished. Kate screamed. Josh’s eyes were wild. ‘You knew he was there!’ he yelled. ‘You saw him! What the hell did you think you were doing, leading him on?’
‘Are you insane?’ Kate shouted back, frightened by his sudden outburst. ‘I had no idea he was there. I never even thought to look. What kind of sick person do you think I am? What on earth is wrong with you?’
‘Remember what Aaron said, you play games with them, they’ll play games with you,’ said Josh, fighting to regain his breath in the heat-saturated air. ‘He’s the leader, your alpha male, the others will follow him anywhere, do whatever he tells them to.’
‘Whatever he tells them?’ Kate shut off the shower and grabbed a towel. ‘My alpha male? Listen to yourself. You did this in London, and you’re doing it again, when there aren’t even any humans around. These are animals you’re talking about, Josh, animals! You don’t even know you’re doing it any more, do you?’
Josh suddenly felt lost. He tried to take Kate in his arms, but she moved beyond reach. ‘Forgive me, Kate,’ he whispered, ‘it’s the way he looks at you, I know he wants you. I know it’s grotesque but you must see that you’re in danger. He studies you. He leaves gifts for you. He waits for me to leave so that he can spy on you alone. You once said some men have the souls of animals. Couldn’t an animal have the soul of a man?’
‘Not on a biological level, no.’
‘Perhaps this isn’t about biology but something deeper than blood and tissue. So much here comes from a time before there were demarcations between man and beast. How can we hope to understand? There are human needs, you said so yourself, and where there’s need there’s always deception. I love you, darling, I just don’t want you to get hurt.’
‘When we get back I think you need to get some professional help.’ Kate stomped back inside the villa and slammed the door in his face.
Josh knew it was beyond anything either of them could understand. They were far from their own social circle, away from the rules that controlled them. When he was a child, visiting the Regent’s Park Zoo, animals were something to be seen pacing behind bars, half-demented by their incarceration. Back then there had been little understanding and less respect for animal psychology; chimpanzees were dressed as humans and given tea parties each afternoon, as if their clumsy etiquette was intended to remind children of man’s superiority as a species. The very word ‘ape’ evoked mimickry of human action. But here, he and the primates were on equal footing, simply moving in different spheres.
He returned to work, but all day long his fear and anger grew.
On Saturday morning, Aaron caught the ferry to the mainland, promising to return that night, but in the afternoon rising monsoon winds put paid to any chance of his return. A storm-sky as grey and unbroken as the concrete walls Aaron’s men had built raced overhead. In the distance they heard the tumble of thunder. The air was so oppressively hot that it caught in Kate’s mouth and blocked her sinuses. Numb with headache, she lay on the bed in her underwear, listening to the colliding treetops, waiting for the storm to break and lower the temperature.
Josh prowled the main building with his camera, taking close-up test shots of butterflies drying their wings, as large as the pages of paperbacks. A sense of unease had settled on him in a suffocating caul. The thought of being away from his wife disturbed him, but he knew that she would be angry if she suspected that he was guarding her.
That was when he realised. He had not heard from the macaques all afternoon. He found himself at the far side of the compound. From here it was a twenty-minute walk back to the villa. He went to Aaron’s locker and took the keys to the jeep, the only motorised vehicle on the island.
The fat green Jeep was parked out front on the half-gravelled drive. He climbed in and tried the ignition, but the engine would not turn over. Leaning from his seat, he lowered his head over the side and followed the trail of petrol back to the external tank. He could see from here that the petrol canister had been punctured. Kneeling beside it, he touched the indentations left by rows of wide-set teeth. The acrid contents had drained away into the earth. Could a macaque do that, even one as large as Sinno? Could he somehow have evolved more quickly than his relatives? Josh studied the teethmarks again and felt a lurch of fear.
Aaron kept a loaded 12-gauge slide action shotgun in his locker. He had told Josh about it the first week he was here, had even shown him how to pump and fire the damned thing in case of an unspecified emergency. Josh ran toward the locker now, dragging it out by the stock and throwing it across his arm as he ran back into the forest.
The rain began just as he was within sight of the villa. He stopped for a moment to catch his breath, and heard lightning split a branch somewhere above him. The deluge fell in large hard pellets of water, hammering the leathery leaves around him, instantly churning the ground to mud. The noise was incredible. Suddenly he could no longer see the villa.
But he could see the macaques. They were pushing their way toward the verandah in a broad semi-circle, and at the centre rose the great green back of a single primate, twice as big as any of the others. He slipped on the muddy slope, his leg collapsing under him, and rolled into the undergrowth. Thick thorns jammed themselves into his arms and legs, tearing gouts of flesh as he hauled himself upright. In a fold of the rain he could see the macaques moving in.
‘Come on, you fuckers,’ he shouted, pumping the gun and firing it into the air, igniting a cacophony of bird screams around him. The kickback wrenched his shoulder, but he stumbled on toward the scattering monkeys, bearing down as the beast headed away toward the beach. This time he stopped and steadied the gun against a tree before he fired. There was an explosion of terrified parrots, flashes of red and blue in the downpour, a mad tumble of feathers and leaves, as he smashed his way through the thinning undergrowth toward the sea.
He wondered if he had managed to wound it, because the great monkey was moving more slowly now, so that the rest of the troupe quickly overtook their leader. The macaque was dragging his left leg. The forest cleared to rain-pocked sand and rock as Josh entered the farthest end of the beach, where the streams formed treacherous deep-sided pools. The rain was blinding him, making it hard to keep his eyes open, but he closed the distance.
‘Who’s got the balls now?’ he shouted through the downpour, closing in on the limping macaque. He needed to steady himself in order to take aim, and searched for a suitable rock. Sinno was trapped. All that stood ahead of him was a broad water pit filled by the rain-flattened sea. Still the creature had its back to him, as if unwilling to admit defeat. It hobbled to the far side of the pool and squatted heavily on the wet sand. Josh turned, searching for something stable on which to rest the shotgun.
It was then that he saw the others. Alarmingly close, they had drawn into a ring about him, and were moving quickly forward. He felt the sand softening beneath his feet and realised that he was sliding forward into the sand pool as the rain-soaked bank shifted with his weight. He tried to steady himself, but the weight of the gun overbalanced him.
On the other side, the great macaque slowly turned – or rather, he split in two, not one great primate at all but a pair of the troupe’s younger males, one spread across the other’s shoulders, their coarse green hair ratted together. They jumped apart and found their places in the circle, turning their calm brown eyes to him.
Josh sank swiftly into the pool. There was something odd about the water, a viscous texture he had seen before when it rained hard. As the first sting penetrated his shirt like an electric shock, he remembered Aaron’s warning about swimming in heavy rain; it was when the most dangerous jellyfish surfaced. The pool was alive with them, hundreds washed in by the tide and now rising like clear plastic bags as the rain drummed the surface of the water. Their purple stings trailed and wrapped about his limbs, sticking to his waist, his back, his neck, jolts flashing through his disrupted nervous system, ten, fifty, a hundred. He tore at the strips but they stuck to his flesh, needles burrowing like thorns. Paralysed by the strobing pain, the endless jabbing injections of venom, he thrashed and stilled, sinking into the deep green darkness, watched by the motionless members of the loyal troupe. The rain pattered and the monkeys watched, their souls ranged beyond human emotional response, their hearts obeying only the patterns of their communal life.
On the roof of the villa, Sinno scratched himself and waited until silence returned once more to the forest. Then he slid down onto the verandah and peered in through the window slats, to the bedroom where Kate lay uneasily sleeping. As quietly as Josh had ever moved, the great macaque opened the bedroom door and slipped inside, closing it ever so gently behind him.