MURDER OF A SAVAGE

No, it's not fiction but a look at the way things have changed since our species started evolving...

If you wanted to give a stone-age man a heart attack your best bet would be to invite him into your house.




Yes, it could be as simple as that, the murder of a primitive from long ago using only an introduction to the things we take for granted today. Assuming you met him wandering lost and confused down a lonely lane in the heart of the country after some sort of unnatural schism to the space/time continuum, trying to find his bearings without realising they've been lost inexplicably in a hundred thousand years of slipped time, and bearing in mind you wouldn't know what to do when he tapped you on the shoulder and said something along the lines of “glug-glog-glig-glag”, a deep well of sympathy might rise up inside you and you might well conclude you ought to help him.




Of course, you would think he was an escaped inmate from an institution for the permanently smelly. After all, he's probably naked and because of that simple fact alone you'd probably be praying that a representative of the local constabulary came along post haste, but there's nobody near, neither with nor without a flashing blue light. So you decide to take him home and offer him a spare pair of your underpants. You’ve got plenty spare. It’s almost a fetish with you every time you go to the shops and see a new and exciting range of colours/patterns.




So, in all innocence you lead him home, trying to ignore the smell. And I'll bet you give very little thought to what changes might have occurred in the affairs of man since he last cast his eyes on things back in his own neck of the woods. After all, I'd be prepared to bet that you don't live in a crudely natural cave with a sabre-toothed tiger sniffing around the entrance and a charred space just outside where you light a bonfire most nights. But he does, and that's the kind of gaff he's looking for as you lead him onwards. Just pray the road is uncharacteristically quiet and there's no traffic around �" and be grateful that it's too dark to see things clearly. Maybe there's a power cut. Maybe some glitch in the space/time continuum has put the lights out, maybe the same glitch has brought your smelly friend across the millennia to visit.





But it's when you open the front door and lead him in that he might start feeling an almost panful stiffening in his chest. He looks around him and what does he see? Not the roughly-hewn stone table with the remnants of last night's supper attracting the flies pushed against one wall that is fetchingly dribbling with a kind of green slime. And look as he might he can't see the half-cured bearskin and its accompanying army of maggots adorning the uneven rocky floor, the one he's so proud of because he speared it himself and might have finished curing it had the rains not set in.





No, look as he might he doesn't see those wonderful familiar items. Instead he sees your stuff. Ugly and hopelessly meaningless stuff, like the telephone, the staircase, a nicely polished wooden floor, a couple of chairs with their leather seats pushed against one wall �" and he sees mind-bogglingly confusing things, like doors. Mind you, he doesn't know they're doors because he hasn't got a clue what a door is, and when one of them suddenly opens, pushed from the other side, and a third human being walks through, a spouse perhaps, male or female dependant on your own gender or sexual preference, his heart lurches.




“Look who I found,” you say to the newcomer. “He seems lost and frightened. I think he needs a bath and a pair of pants. He can have some of mine. I've got enough spare.” (You're clearly a male, then, so the third person is your wife/girlfriend/partner.)




“He's got a big you-know-what,” the newcomer smirks, and exits back through the door.




It's then you compound the assault on the man's heart by introducing him to the concept of “stairs”. You invite him up your stairs with manya friendly gesticulation and grunt. He seems to understand grunts. He follows nervously, almost cowering, struggling with the putting-one-foot-higher-than-the-other problem. It doesn't come easy. He's climbed trees before, in fact he find trees quite easy, but stairs?




The bathroom is at the top of the stairs and it's what you keep in there that sends that old heart of his into overdrive. There's a shower and a bath and a sink and a nice shiny clean loo, and you turn the shower on and smiling like a manic axe-murderer, you invite him to step into it.




It might have been okay, but he's never met warm water before, and you always keep the shower set at the perfect temperature for you. And when it cascades onto his trembling flesh (you pushed him in, gently but firmly) he gives up the ghost and has that massive coronary and collapses in a prehensile heap on the shower floor.




And that's that. You bury him in the garden, of course: you know that you couldn't begin to explain who he was and where he came form and what in the name of all that's smelly he was doing in your shower.




And then you get to thinking. If a simple thing like a shower confused him to death, what would he have made of your stereo, your television, your computers, all of them, laptop, tablet and phone, and all the other gadgetry you couldn't live without? How would he have coped with fish and chips? And what about a late summer ride in the country in your car?




And by the way, I wrote this because I reckon the generation two before my own would have difficulties if they stepped into my life and tried to live it with me. I mean, who, a century ago, would have dreamed of a phone that has the capacity of the Encyclopedia Britannica and what looks like a gigantic picture frame but with images in glorious colour than are true to life as they move around in a corner of the room? Or just about any of the gadgets that I take for granted? See what I mean?




© Peter Rogerson 31.08.10, revised 21.01.17

Author's Note

I've rediscovered some things I wrote about a decade ago and thought I'd share them before they disappear into the digital ether....