4. The Primeval Pandemic

STEPPING BACK IN TIME Part 4

I have, of course, done a considerable amount of genetic research in the line that separates Owongo from myself. Now I know I won’t be believed and that there are several areas in my notes that are more vague than vague, but I’m the sort of genealogist who believes a little guesswork is no bad thing. Anyway you look at it something unpleasant happened when my early ancestor was still around six years old.

Or he might have been seven. Possibly eight. He didn’t know numbers and his attempts at scratching marks on the cave wall for me to read goodness knows how many thousands of years later have been, in part, obliterated by the normal processes of time. You know: floods and the like, earthquakes, the odd world war fought for no better reason than a huge mound of dead young men satisfies the ego of monstrous leaders, as does the sound of bombs blasting the homes of innocents into dust. Don’t let me get on to that subject or I’ll never get off it.

Back to Owongo, then. When he was still a nipper something happened that ravaged his community and what follows is my best interpretation of the evidence I have found. From a mere half dozen scratches on a cave wall in what is now central Africa I stumbled on the following saga.

Owongo was out and about. The weather was better than balmy, it was glorious, and after he’d wandered a few hundred steps (he didn’t use measurements like metres or yards, which is mean of him, but then he probably hadn’t invented them when he was only knee-high to whatever passed as a dung beetle back then.

Anyway, there he was out and in the wilds when he bumped into a dead stranger. He knew the stranger was dead on account of the amount decomposition that had been going on during the heat of what I have already described as a balmy day. I mean, according to the wiggle at the end of the first of his scratches Owongo recorded that the man had no eyes left, and his nose was actually detaching itself and dripping to the rocky earth. He was, to put it mildly both unpleasant to look at and smelling foul, and it was sheer carelessness that cause Owongo to actually bump into him and especially into various oozing parts of the man’s body, of which the less said the better.

“Urgh!” exclaimed Owongo.

“That’s my man,” croaked a voice in reply, a voice that turned out to belong to Sabreena who was well known in that corner of the valley floor for her excellent skills when it came to undertaking. Once her first man had passed away (she was his moll) she took his place in the scheme of things. Anyone who died was taken to her for the removal of scars and other obscenities so that the deceased could voyage to the great beyond in an unblemished state. From her parlour (a cave, really, but she liked posh words for ordinary things) the ex-person was taken up a long a winding path to the plateau at the top of a lowish hill and left for mother nature to consume. It was a really green funerary arrangement. Any bones left over when the flesh was gone were crushed and the subsequent powder mixed in the dry earth at the edge of the stream, where by the next turning of the year they turned into the sort of flowers Saint Valentine would have choked at.

“Why’s he dead, Sabreena?” asked Owongo, being fascinated by such things as ends and beginnings.

“He caught the pandemic,” sighed Sabreena, wiping an imaginary tear from the corner of her left eye.

“He caught what?” asked the boy, confused because the maximum number of syllables he liked in a word was two, and the strange word she had used had three, as did her name, which also troubled him.

“It’s a sickness that has swept across the word and kills people,” explained the weeping woman.

“It is?” gasped Owongo, “and your man has caught it?”

“Aye, laddie,” she replied, “caught it, coughed it up and suffered, and then died of it too. I’ll be cremating him this evening.”

Another three syllable word and Owongo’s head was spinning.

“What’s crem-what-you-said?” he asked.

“Bonfire. Flames. Heat. Roasting. Ashes and dust,” she explained, using the kind of sentences that Owongo was used to.

“Oh,” he replied, and a repulsive image of a human body resting in a cradle of fire and flames filled his inner vision and sizzled into dust, and all he wanted to do was stay there and watch the ceremony because there was something solemn about the way she explained it.

“Mind you,” she said with a beguiling smile, “what really confuses me is I haven’t caught it as well. Most people have, and they’re up on the plateau feeding the birds and whatever else fancies a piece of tasty flesh. It’s really crowded up there, which means that the Great Beyond where the souls go is at this moment a hellish crush. It’s bound to be, and smelly I wouldn’t wonder.”

The good things about that explanation was that Owongo barely understood a word of it, so he shrugged his shoulders, wished her a loving farewell, and made his way back to his own cave where he fell ill and got close to dying himself, before recovering.

All would have been well but Faceache caught it off him and died. Sabreena conducted a really moving funeral for him before succumbing to the primeval pandemic herself, meaning that from that moment on Owongo’s mother Mingey ruled the roost as a single mother, and got called names by the ignorant because of it.

But it all happened a long time ago, so that’s all right.

© Peter Rogerson 14.02.22

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