5. A Woman’s Work...

STEPPING BACK IN TIME Part 5

“Where dad go?” asked Owongo when his mother was down by the stream beating the daylights out of his entire wardrobe, which consisted of a loin cloth that he wrapped round his naughty bits when it seemed likely that a stranger with eyes on beanstalks was likely to come his way. It was his mother, the caring single parent Mingey who was careful to make sure that her handsome son remained chaste and unsullied by the wicked world and its more wicked ways. At least that’s how she saw it.

“Dead,” she replied, struggling with a particularly nasty stain, “Owongo must wipe bottom more,” she added, “a woman’s work never done!”

Owongo blushed, but persisted with his questioning because he really wanted to know the answer.

“Where dead?” he asked.

She shrugged. She knew all about the level plateau near the top of the hill where the dead were lain to rest for eternity or until they were gobbled up by any one of a host of wild creatures on the look out for an easy meal. But how could she explain that to her son, who was still too young to understand such things as mortality and the mysteries in the stars at night or the way she really, really missed Faceache when parts of her south of her stomach rumbled like they so often did?

“On hillside,” she muttered, aware that he knew all about where the boy’s father had been lain after the pandemic took him from them. After all, Owongo had trailed along with them. He and Pretty, the new sister who was showing all the best signs of high intelligence when she gurgled.

“But then?” he persisted. But she was unaware that he’d secretly returned to the burial ground (well, burial isn’t the right word because the dead were merely lain on the grassy surface and arranged to mimic life even to the way some of them were made to grin rather than look despairingly miserable like the dead can). And she didn’t know he’d tottered up to the very spot where his father had been rested, and discovered that the man had somehow been magicked away. There was just a handful of bones and a most unlifelike skull which didn’t look anything like Faceache had looked, though if he squinted and put his head on one side he could imagine that there was a sort of likeness.

“Owongo not ask!” snapped his mother, and she pointed at his sister who was squatting on a molehill and giggling as her steaming stream of urine soaked into the dry soil. Most of the soil in those balmy days was dry until Pretty came along because it didn’t rain very often, though when it did there could be quite a downpour. “Go sort out Pretty!” she ordered, “while Mingey tackle these stains!”

She battered away at Owongo’s loincloth with a large rounded stone and using considerable violence until she was sure that what she was trying to obliterate was on its way to perdition rather than the ragged hole that her eyes told her was newly there, and she uttered a rather naughty word under her breath because loincloths weren’t easy to replace. Meanwhile Owongo went to his sister and kicked her leg so that she toppled over.

“That mucky,” he said scornfully.

“Goo goo goo,” replied Pretty, using a language of her own that managed to convey quite a lot of different things despite it only having the one word. This time it meant if you kick me again I;ll scream until mum beats you.

“Owongo take Pretty for walk down river,” he said, eyeing Mingey carefully because he knew two things for sure. One was that she loved the girl child more than she loved him and the second was that she had quite a spiteful way of slapping naughty boys and where best to do it, and he was always a naughty boy in her eyes.

“Owongo watch Pretty, not wet her,” warned his mother, and he nodded. He would, of course, contrive to wet the wretched creature. What primeval boy wouldn’t? But that would be a consequence of a quite forgivable accident and he would be praised for saving her if he was clever enough, and not even her protests of goo, goo, goo would be heard or understood.

Owongo had things sorted in his mind.

The accident, when it came, was nothing to do with Owongo, though, but it did result in Pretty becoming very, very wet.

He’d paused and picked up a creature that was either alive or dead and he was curious to discover which. In fact, it was a variety of small tortoise that was taking a nap under the blistering sun and well on its way to becoming dead due to dehydration and over-cooking. Anyway, it took exception to being woken by a boy while it was slumbering en route to paradise, and nipped him savagely with its gummy mouth, causing him to yelp and unthinkingly throw the poor tortoise up in the air so that hurtled away from him in a sort of parabolic arc.

That tortoise was too small to cause much commotion on its own, but the large sabre-toothed cat it landed on wasn’t, and the first thing that cat did was spot Pretty explaining to a passing fish something about goo,goo,goo.

The fish probably didn’t understand. But the cat decided that the human child (remember, Pretty was part Neanderthal genetically) was -responsible for the game of throw-the-tortoise-at-the-cat and reacted accordingly.

Pretty must have seen it coming, either that or her reaction was superhuman, for with the skills of her mixed heritage she grabbed it by a foreleg, carefully avoiding a vicious white sabre tooth, and slung it into the stream.

“Goo, goo, goo” she explained to Owongo, and continued to empty her bladder into the molehill .

And that’s when she became a very wet primeval toddler. With a yowl and quite a few other feline swear words the cat struggled out of the water and deciding that it had met its match, raced off, filling the air with enough of the stream to soak the child and even dampen Owongo.

The commotion didn’t go unnoticed, and Mingey looked up to see what the trouble was.

“What happened?” she demanded of both children and any other sentient being that might want to answer, excluding the cat.

“Goo, goo, goo” replied Pretty, and much to Owongo’s relief the baby’s words were translated as “Owongo save Pretty” by his mother.

“Oh, you darling little boy!” exclaimed Mingey, “when we get home you can stay up for five extra minutes before mum pops next door to have carnal relations with Willyscab while silly Bumtidy at bingo!”

She never did explain what she meant by bingo, but Willyscab’s woman Bumtidy must have known what she was doing because she went most evenings at about the same time, leaving, she thought, Willyscab all on his own.

© Peter Rogerson, 15.02.22

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