Gatherers and Hunters Read Free Page A

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.