6. Be Nice to Mirumda

STEPPING BACK IN TIME Part 6

It’s never been recorded when parties with lots of booze and intimate behaviour, mostly between the sexes, were invented, but they were well under way when Owongo was a boy. I know this because on the wall of his cave and available for all to see if they have the wisdom to interpret his few scratches, are a few simple notes inscribed by his very hands. I assume he used a shard of flint because his notes are quite sharp still. It’s hard to believe they’re the work of so young a child! But then, Owongo was a far distant relation of mine, and genius will out, so to speak.. He lived well over thirty thousand years ago, which is eye-wobbling when you consider that the inventor of Christianity only lived two thousandish years ago! But less of him. My mission is solely to record Owongo’s boyhood.

But before I leave my mention of Christianity let me point out that Christmas is one of that faith’s most stirring celebrations and note that Owongo so predates the first one of those knees-ups that it would still be well over thirty thousand years before his progeny actually heard of it. Yet don’t be depressed. There were parties, even in prehistoric times, because evidence left on the wall of an ancient cave tells us so.

I have mentioned more than once before how balmy the weather was when Owongo lived and where he played in the sands that bordered the river that ran down the valley past his cave, but that is not to suggest it was without seasons. And although the winter may not have been as cold as those we experience in more northern climes today, there was a chill in the air and Owongo had to make sure he wore his best loin cloth because his second best had holes in it and the draft got in and would threaten mischief to his wedding tackle should weddings be invented in his life-time, which they weren’t.

In the cave next door, where Willyscab and Bumtidy, man and woman (not wife because wives hadn’t been invented eithet, remember?) lived, a great deal of the year was spent in quiet labour because he brewed the booze whilst she wiped his brow, neither activities making much in the way of noise.

During the summer the two of them would go out into the wilds picking things. They picked fruits, they picked nuts and they picked noses (hay fever would have been around even then, leading to irritating nasal problems). And when they had picked enough wild fruits and nuts (but not noses) they brewed it up with quantities of water from the river. Somehow, yeasts got to be involved, but then there have always been particles of yeast blowing in the breeze, ready to annoy asthmatic noses or start fermentation in anything they might chance to land on.

So there was booze. No bottles to store it in, though and Owongo merely mentions vast vats of the stuff which made the people start the party off by singing in tune, then degenerate to out of tune and end up lying down where they’d been singing and sleeping it off after telling their friends just how much they loved them. He even added one little scratch mark that I interpret as a suggestion that some of the adults did private things with each other, but in the open where nothing’s actually private and voyeurs have a great time voyeuring. They were people, we must remember, and people have always been people and done people-ish things together.

It was at one of these winter celebrations that Owongo first lay eyes on Mirumda. He wasn’t to know it at the time, of course, but in the future he and Mirumda were to form a life-long and very loving friendship which would guarantee his genes being passed into the far future. So good for him!

Mirumda lived in the same village, but on the other side of the river where the classiest caves were set back so far that until the telescope was invented those from the two sides had all on seeing each other, and that invention lay, of course, over thirty thousand years in the future.

“Who you?” he asked when he saw her for the very first time. He was smitten even though he was only six (or seven … he might have been seven, he was never sure about ages and birthdays and specific stuff like that.) But there was something about her face that fascinated him. For starters it was clean, and that wasn’t always the first thing you noticed about a lass because not all were. Then there were her eyes. A beautiful dark blue at a time when anything but brown in the eyes was a rarity. Then her teeth. For a start, they were white and startlingly evenly spaced with none turning black and none missing. Then he took in her legs and the way her thighs were just right for a girl, and he was smitten.

“Me Mirumda,” she said in a sweet voice.

“And me Owongo,” he said, trying to make his own voice sound as if it had broken ages ago.

“Seems Owongo a nice boy,” she whispered with a seductive smile which made Owongo’s mouth water. It also added a smidgen of mystery to a girl he’d only just met.

“You lovely girl,” he breathed, “nice teeth.”

Then Mirumda cracked a very famous joke for the very first time in human history, which fully completed the extent to which he was smitten.

“Is that stick in loincloth or are you pleased see me?” she asked with a brilliant smile.

He knew what she meant, and blushed, maybe for the first time in his life.

“Me only six or seven,” he told her sadly.

“Me nearly woman,” she replied in a slightly superior voice even though she can’t have been much older than him.

“Me kiss you?” he suggested.

“If you like,”

He’d never kissed anyone before and certainly not a pretty girl, but he made up for it right there and then, and he did it with a verve and a thoroughness that even he found hard to believe. And it sent on well past any normal kiss would be drawn to an end. Yes, Owongo was smitten all right.

“What Owongo doing?” barked a familiar voice before his kiss was anywhere near finished. It was Mingey his mother, and it sounded very much as if she was scowling. But he was nowhere near ready to bring the kiss to an end, and it was Mirumda who pulled away from him and scowled at the interloper.

“He good kisser,” she said, “and he very pleased to see me!”

“I sort him out when come home!” snapped Mingey. “I single mum and need strong boy at cave!”

“Then,” whispered Mirumda with a huge cube of ice in her voice, “single mum best be nice to Mirumda … or else!”

© Peter Rogerson, 16.02.22