Gatherers and Hunters Read Free

already part of him, of his new present, and he realises that to remould this space will not be a task, it will be a discovery.
    He laughs out loud so that the baby gives a startled cry and Marie reaches out her hand – not to Emre. Six months, he thinks. I will write this down, this room. No, I will get a camera and photograph it. In six months time we will look back and see how far we have come.
    Has he even had such a thought before?
    Carefully, he wheels the bicycle down the bumpy stairwell, careful not to scratch the walls. The cold air outside stings his eyes, but he wonders why he should be weeping.

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;