Gatherers and Hunters Read online

  The Red Hat

  It wasn’t that he feared his aunt, far from it. She moved swiftly and he had to keep up with her, no lagging. On the few times he stayed at her cottage overnight she was up so early it was indecent. That didn’t bother his uncle, though. Nothing bothered Uncle Pat. Mark still remembered the first time, when he was woken – and to wake in a strange bed was a sort of dislocation anyway – and somewhere outside the thin window with its ancient brittle glass he heard a scratching sound. On and on.

  Finally he could not bear the suspense. He raised his head and shoulders, glad for the thick flannelette pyjamas Aunt Olga had found for him (almost certainly a pair of Uncle Pat’s), and then he peered out. His aunt was just below, weeding the garden bed along that side of the house – planting petunias, as it turned out. It must have been 5 a.m.

  When he asked her at breakfast – boiled eggs and toast soldiers – why she had been up so early, she laughed and swiped her long, strong fingers through his tousled hair. ‘I’ll beat you up any day, boyo. Best time is early. Beat the sun to it, that’s the idea. Want to join me tomorrow? There’s that whole front bed needs planting.’

  Only Aunt Olga could have dragged him out like that. Of course he was up and dressed and hovering on the little front verandah in time for her to sweep past like a rocket. She threw him a trenching tool (which he caught clumsily but without letting it clatter to the tiles) and was out and in action already. Uncle Pat always loafed in bed and waited for his morning cup at seven.

  Aunt Olga was always there. So when his father remarked in passing, like that, without even a change in tone from the way he read the newspaper headlines like any other Tuesday morning, that Olga must be approaching the airport in KL at this minute, Mark was caught by surprise. ‘Where is KL?’ was his first question, but that was only a front, as it were. Nobody had told him.

  When his mother explained that KL stood for Kuala Lumpur, in Malaysia, Mark already had dredged up that fact from his memory bank of TV travel features and that assignment he did; but the insult remained. ‘How long is she going for? And Uncle Pat, did he go too?’ He knew not to add, ‘And why didn’t they tell me?’ He had been over there just two weeks before and had helped Aunt Olga harvest the last of the tomatoes, as well as bottling them. She had been in her most chatty mood. Now, he guessed why.

  Uncle Pat was in Sydney for the week that Olga was off gallivanting, Mark’s father explained, with one of those smiles to his mother that was beginning to get to Mark. He felt left out. There were codes and signals everywhere that were either new, or he had not noticed them before. His parents had included him in everything. As a kid he had been encouraged to speak up and ‘dob in his pennyworth’, as his dad used to say. Aunt Olga, in particular, listened and often as not dragged him into long arguments over something that really got him going, like Monkey or the game of Trivial Pursuit – in the days when Trivial Pursuit was a novelty of course. Before.

  Before Grammar and before he overheard the reference to ‘chatterbox’ (though Aunt Olga had pounced on his dad for saying that; still, it had hurt). In the last year so many things had changed. It was crazy: the older he was growing, the more his parents treated him like a child; it was as if they could not see the changes in him.

  It was as if he was neither the one thing nor the other. He was himself.

  Last week his father barged into the bathroom and caught him examining under his armpits for hair. ‘A razor for your next birthday, eh, boy?’ he had said, but no joking could hide the put down. Mark started to lock doors. Aunt Olga would have made a joke of it, and he would have laughed.

  Or the time his mother dragged him around after her, holding the material for the new dining room curtains while she tucked and measured, her mouth full of pins. He felt like a dumbo, and it took so long! He was draped in the floral stuff from head to toe as his mother dropped the second last curtain all over him. She said later she was being playful. Playful! Well, Aunt Olga swept in at that moment and, quick as a flash, she cried out, ‘It’s the Sheik of Araby, Jennifer, you dark horse! Why didn’t you tell me you had your Oriental Lover helping you out so gallantly?’

  The women giggled but Mark did not. He scrambled out from under the heavy drapes and shot through, not to his room, but outside where he found the soccer ball and kicked it viciously for half an hour, deliberately aiming at his ­mother’s dahlia bed. Aunt Olga came down in the end and got him out of his mood; she threatened to put lipstick on him, and her rouge – ‘though you don’t need that with your lovely ­colouring’, she said, just to taunt him. He kicked the ball right at her midriff but she deftly leapt and deflected it sideways with her shoe. He was actually impressed and couldn’t help showing it. So they had both ended up in a tussle as she gave him a bearhug and what she called a beating. He loved her more than anyone else in his family.

  Why sneak away, then? And to Malaysia? What was she doing there? He could have told her lots of stuff about it, if she had asked him. He had done that project on rubber plantations last year, he still had his assignment book.

  And there had been that TV doco on Sabah. He’d wished he had recorded it on video but you never think of that in time and without the opening credits everything would be lost. Still, he remembered the images of those slender, beautiful Kalantan girls who made even roadwork and hot tar and gravel seem somehow effortless. There had been a sequence with them bathing under a waterfall, too, and with bare breasts. It had been breathtaking and it had stayed in his mind ever since, though it was only a few moments, really. His mother had remarked on what a shame it was to make those girls do all that heavy manual labour, that was a job for men, what were they thinking of? His father had made some comment about the Kalantans being looked down by the Malays, it was all territorial. ‘Perhaps it is because the Kalantan are so beautiful?’ his mother had said, and Mark agreed.

  Would Aunt Olga be going to Sabah? No one told him anything. He could have urged her to go to Kota Kinabalu if she was making a trip to Malaysia. He could have told her about the Kalantans. Sabah was where the main rubber plantations were, too. He would have urged her to go there.

  The explanation, when it did come, had been that Olga made the trip on a sudden impulse. She was like that. She had seen a special discount airfare with Malaysian Airlines because of the economic situation and one of her paintings had been sold, the first one in two years, so she decided to splurge on the flight. Uncle Pat hated air travel and besides, he was obsessed with Y2K and all that.

  Her flight was on 9.9.99 and Uncle Pat was convinced all planes would drop out of the sky on that day. In fact, dad said, that increased Aunt Olga’s fascination with the idea. ‘My sister was always like that,’ he said. ‘She was born on Friday the 13th and I think that made her think she had an affinity with witches and wiccas and wizards. She used to scare me shitless – hmmph – when I was a bit younger than you are, Marcus.’

  ‘Mark,’ he murmured, but under his breath.

  And he did remember the Friday the 13th party just after his own 13th birthday, last year. Aunt Olga had insisted he come over, alone, no parents, no friends, just himself. And as soon as he opened the door to their cottage he had been bombarded with the full Addams Family stuff, there were even cobwebs, real cobwebs that he had to somehow push through to get inside once he opened the front door. He still felt them tangled in his hair sometimes. And later that evening, after the blood-coloured cakes and the black teeth and the skull that he had to drink black cordial out of and Uncle Pat dressed as a corpulent skeleton in luminous bones, and when he had thought everything was over, and he had gone to the bathroom to clean his teeth, Aunt Olga had insisted he take a bath.

  Okay, he said, and when he turned the tap on in the bath the water had come out dark red too. How did they manage that? He had laughed and crowed and Uncle Pat had come in to giggle with him then and had manhandled him out of the last of his clothes and dropped him into the red bath. It turned out to be a bubble bath and the bu
bbles rose and frothed almost immediately, though the water still felt oily and rather invasively slippery all over his body. Aunt Olga, too, had come in for a laugh at his Hollywood Sex Bath, as she called it. It had been sort of close and intimate but also a bit embarrassing and he was afraid to show what his body was doing down there under the bubbles. He was not like some of the kids at school who swanked round showing their horn in the dressing sheds. ‘Stiffie! Stiffie!’ they would boast and everybody would laugh. When Aunt Olga laughed at him in the bath he had to join in but rather wished they would leave him alone. When they did, somehow he did not enjoy it that much anyway. The water had grown cold and the bubbles were flattening and only the oily feel all over him remained. Uncle Pat was the last to go and he made much fuss about leaving the big towel for Mark to dry himself on. ‘When you are ready.’

  That had been the real shock of the night. That towel had been half covered with cobwebs too. Mark had hopped out of the bath and he grinned at the size of it: until he wrapped it round and began drying his genitals. That was when the cobwebs stuck. It was horrible.

  He had let out a shriek (and he only realised, later, that his aunt and uncle were just outside the door, waiting for just that moment). He had dropped the big towel instantly, of course, and began rubbing himself hard with the ordinary one that had the blue stripes.

  ‘Just you wait!’ he had called, ‘I’ll put spiders in your bed!’ but the very thought of that, and of the possible spiders in his own bed, were enough to stop his gob instantly. He dried himself quickly and dressed again. But he could not lose the sensation of those cobwebs sticking to him, down there, and all over his parts, especially his testicles. He took down his pants once more and rubbed again carefully. No, there was nothing visible. But it felt like it. It was ages before he was able to relax and forget that sensation down below.

  They had called him a spoilsport when he said he would go home that night, not stay at their place. Aunt Olga promised on her bended knees that there would be no spiders or cobwebs in his bed or in the bedroom. Uncle Pat brought a hot mug of Milo and promised to sit down by his bed and read him a calming story, like he did once when Mark was a little boy. The story would not be about ghosts and monsters, it would be a fairy story, but an adult fairy story. Mark was an adult now. Uncle Pat had seen that and was sorry he hadn’t realised. Aunt Olga said she would paint him, lying in bed and tucked up and wonderful.

  He had been appeased.

  The story was, it turned out, sort of magical. It was from one of Uncle Pat’s own books about a prince who was born grown up and who had to learn how to be a child, which he had never been. The prince did not actually grow smaller or lose those special grown-up things like his body hair and the smell under his armpits, but he realised what he had never had since birth was his innocence. He had been born knowing everything and that had made him unable to love, not even his parents, who were old when he was born and who died soon after. He had grown knowing everything and not feeling anything much because he knew what everything felt like. But one day he saw this beautiful dusky maiden bathing under a waterfall in the forest and for the first time he fell in love, though he knew all too well how love ended up most of the time and he knew what sex was all about, putting his thing in her thing and all that, but he saw this beautiful girl under the waterfall and for the first time he felt that sex was only a small part of what he was feeling. What he was really feeling was the onset of innocence.

  ‘You’ve got to keep that as long as possible,’ his uncle said, and Aunt Olga, who was also sitting alongside the bed, put in, ‘innocence means you can still laugh.’ She was stroking Uncle Pat’s shoulders as he was telling the story so that for the first time Mark felt they had a real closeness together not just the usual joking and sparring and play-acting. He had forgiven them their Friday the 13th silliness and he realised he was not just a victim of their cruel jokes, but had been expected to join in the fun. It was almost as if they had been trying to reinvent their own innocence. Hah! Some innocence! Sticky cobwebs were not Mark’s idea of ­innocence.

  When he had come out of the bathroom, still half wet from the haste with which he had dressed himself after the cobweb towel, Aunt Olga had burst into a sort of motherly concern and had insisted he dry himself properly or he would catch a cold. She had stripped off his shirt before he had a chance and had mopped him down. As she rubbed his chest and lifted up his arms she had murmured at how he was developing and he knew instantly she might want to rub the towel vigorously into the crease of his buttocks and mop him all over the tender front parts, but he pulled the towel from her hands and, laughing at last (if secretly out of embarrassment), he said, ‘I can do that.’ He let her button his shirt again, though. That was when Uncle Pat had gone off to the kitchen for the Milo.

  After that new sort of intimacy, things had changed, that was true. He went over to Aunt Olga less often, but when he did he was freer. It was as if they had shared a secret, and it was exciting and very private. His parents would never have understood this newfound intimacy. It was not innocence – it was experience, or the promise of experience.

  That was why Aunt Olga’s sudden secret flight to Malaysia was so hurtful and so surprising. The intimacy had been ruptured, it was like an assault. Even Uncle Pat, scurrying over to Sydney, seemed part of the conspiracy. Uncle Pat had never been more than a sort of shadow to Aunt Olga, really, but his story telling had opened something up. Mark knew what it was: it had been the first time anyone had told him things about his own body and the grown-up future of his own body in a way that made sense. That preserved the innocence as well as took for granted a great deal about knowingness, and did not make it somehow secret or shameful.

  Mark’s own father had spoken about sex and masturbation and all that, but the kids at school were there long before that so it was no news. The bits about women and their bleeding and eggs and the pain of having babies, his father had been good on that and it was more urgent, somehow, than the video at school had been. It was as if his dad were confiding real feelings and Mark had asked about his own birth and if it was painful for his mother.

  ‘It was painful for us all,’ his father had said, and that had set them both back. It was a new angle on things. ‘But I tell you this, son. It was worth it.’ And he had given Mark one of his rare cuddles.

  Over the next week, while his aunt was overseas, Mark dug up his old essay and assignment book on Rubber Plantations in Sabah. He had forgotten that there was one picture of Kalantan girls working on a stretch of roadwork in the tall forest. He had not noticed before that some of them wore their sarongs so as to free the breasts. Why had he missed that? Not even his teacher had remarked on it. Now that he looked at it again, though, it was quite obvious. He searched out the magnifying glass just to make sure.

  And then Aunt Olga was home again. Everything was the same. ‘She sweeps everyone before her,’ his father said, but he laughed and Mark could see that brother and sister were very close. It came as a jolt. Aunt Olga and his father were so different.

  She promised him photographs when they were printed. She had a swathe of batik. She had some little carved wooden figurines and couple of shadow puppets that she was going to save for herself: printed red and gold and with long jointed arms and legs and elongated faces with no upper lips. Mark thought they were just the sort of thing Aunt Olga would go for, both spooky and ridiculous. The male figure was like a cross between a spider and a butterfly. Wayang Kulit, she had said.

  But she had brought Mark back a special present. ‘I found it in a small village outside Kinabalu,’ she said, ‘where there was a village madman and those delicate limbed Kalantan girls you’ve got the hots for, Mark, you randy little monkey. But this is a musical instrument. I think it is called a Selah.’

  She handed him a smallish gourd, with a panpipe stuck into it, and a handful of pipes with finger holds. ‘You have to puff until you make enough air to fill the gourd and then more so; then you can play sev
eral notes at the same time, with those little pipes. I couldn’t manage it. But then I could never play the bagpipes either.’ She made him try. After the third or fourth attempt he managed to create a small wail on the instrument. That had been enough for both of them.

  He took it to school and not even the music master had seen one of these before. Mark did not try playing it again, but it was hung on his bedroom wall, a real trophy. It was only some weeks later that he noticed the telltale signs of some insect infestation. Aunt Olga had smuggled it in past customs.

  His father insisted it be destroyed immediately. He snatched it from Mark and took it away to burn, himself.

  When Mark went round to tell Aunt Olga of this tragedy, that was when he first saw her latest painting. It was a self-portrait.

  ‘Woman in a red hat,’ she called it. It was also the first time Mark noticed how like his own father Aunt Olga really looked. Indeed, when he walked into her studio, which was really the living room of their small cottage, she was eager to show it to him, though often enough she hid her paintings or tore them up. If they were on hardboard she was known to get at them with the axe. She said she could not afford canvas. This one was on paper.

  ‘Wow!’ Mark had said. And he meant it.

  But he could not get the image out of his mind: it was a picture of his father. Only the floppy red hat made it seem Aunt Olga. It was her hat, he recognised it. That was not sufficient disguise. And the eyes kept staring at him as if they knew. He had never really noticed his father’s eyes, but they were his. They were following him and what was really spooky was that the look Aunt Olga had brought into the painting was the sort of look she had that night on the Friday the Thirteenth party. It was the look that seemed to be wanting him to grow up. More, it seemed to be wanting him to take off his clothes so she could reach out and touch him all over. It was Uncle Pat, at the time, who had said ‘What a man you are growing, lad.’ Aunt Olga, though, had really made him feel how he had changed, in his body, in his mind. It was almost a look of envy, as well as of appraisal. In her painting both his aunt and his father were expecting something of him, something he could not give.