Stripes and Stone

STRIPES AND STONE1

The sun was back by popular demand, having reappeared a few decades ago and achieved overnight success by melting away all that bloody ice. This particular morning, perhaps a little too enthusiastically, it bounced up into the sky like a huge yellow beach ball, and abruptly turned night into day.2

The tiny village of From-The-Edge-Of-The-Lake-To-Roughly-Halfway-Through-The-Rather-Scary-Woods (population 1031 1019 984 784 762 757) was as close to paradise as it was possible to get without having to go through all that messy business of dying and stuff. The lake was as blue as blue could be, as clear as clear could be and as full of large tasty easily-caught fish as full of large tasty easily-caught fish could be. The grass, so to speak, was greener on both sides of the fence. It rained just enough to water the plants and keep the trees healthy-looking. The mostly happy people of From-The-Edge-Of-The-Lake-To-Roughly-Halfway-Through-The-Rather-Scary-Woods lived together in almost perfect peace and harmony. 3

Mostly happy.4

Almost perfect.5

They say that every silver lining surrounds a thundercloud (well okay, they don’t really. But they ought to), and the small village’s particular thundercloud was known amongst the rapidly diminishing inhabitants as ‘The Invisible One’. It was a name that was only spoken of in hushed undertones, and only during the day. Mothers used it to scare naughty children into good behaviour. Grown men told tall tales about The Invisible One as they sat in huddled groups at the side of the lake getting slowly drunk on pints of Yuck. Everyone claimed to have seen The Invisible One, apparently unaware of the contradictory nature of this statement. The Invisible One was as tall as the tallest trees. It had a mouth full of teeth as long as spears. It could move through the woods like the wind, and the only proof of its passage was the rustling of leaves and the scratch-marks of its claws in the trunks of the trees that had gotten in its way. Some said that The Invisible One was the world’s last remaining dinosaur, who had missed the misguided ‘Extinction – The Pros and Cons’ meeting. Others said that it was the collective restless spirits of all their dead ancestors, although the people who said this always pretended not to hear or very quickly changed the subject when questioned on why the collective restless spirits of all their dead ancestors would want to eat their children and their children’s children. Some said that The Invisible One was an angry god. 6

All of them were wrong.7

***8

The Oggy Clan were the most modern of all of From-The-Edge-Of-The-Lake-To-Roughly-Halfway-Through-The-Rather-Scary-Woods’s denizens. So modern were they that their caves not only had windows, but those windows were tastefully decorated with black and white cow-hide curtains. With tie-backs. Which were held in place by carefully carved stone hooks that jutted out of the wall on each side of the windows. There was no glass in the windows, of course, because it hadn’t been invented yet, but the Oggy Clan had put up mosquito nets, which they had made from thin strips of woven reed. A lot of people thought that this was just taking the whole window thing a step too far.9

The Oggy Clan also had a pet dog called Ploppy. Ploppy was one of those small annoying yappy dogs with bulging eyes and short pointy ears and no tail that get under your feet and nip at your ankles. Every single member of the Oggy Clan intensely disliked Ploppy – even Little Mags, who was three summers old and could even, after some deep thought, find something nice to say about Cousin Fibs, who was seventeen winters old and so obnoxious that the rest of the clan secretly hoped The Invisible One would come and eat him. And then have Ploppy for dessert.10

The only reason that Ploppy was still as much a part of the clan as Big Papa himself was because every member of the clan thought that every other member quite liked Ploppy. It was against Oggy Clan lore to cast bad light on any other member, and whoever voiced a single word against a fellow Oggy was exiled to the other side of the lake, where the grass was not so green and the sky not so blue, and where the fish was not quite as easy to catch and tasted of burnt rubber. As a result, the whole clan feigned affection towards the ratty little dog, often taking time to stop and pat its bullet-shaped head and getting nipped in the process. Had the truth been known, Ploppy would have nipped no more and yapped even less.11

You will be pleased to hear that Ploppy will very soon be swallowed whole by The Invisible One.12

Cousin Fibs, unfortunately, had slouched off somewhere earlier that morning, and therefore lived to tell the tale. You may console yourself with the knowledge that no one believed a word he said, and in the years that followed, the expression ‘telling fibs’ became synonymous with ‘telling lies’.13

***

The arrival of the sun woke The Invisible One, who, as it happens, was not invisible at all. Just incredibly sneaky.14

It stretched its paws out in front of it and yawned, opening its gaping jaws wide enough to swallow, say, a small much-disliked dog. Its orange and black tail flicked from side to side as it rose slowly to its feet. Its bright green eyes glowed in the dim light of the woods. It shook its huge head, as if to clear it from a good night’s sleep, and sniffed the air. It was hungry.15

It was always hungry.16

The Invisible One slunk towards the village. Golden shafts of sunlight penetrated through the treetops, creating a rather beautiful ripple effect of alternating shine and shade, shine and shade. The orange and black stripes of the beast blended in perfectly, rendering it… well… practically invisible.17

***18

All thirty-six members of the Oggy Clan, except for Cousin Fibs, who had slouched off early to torture some squirrels, were crowded outside Big Papa’s cave. They were having a Clan Meeting, and like most Oggy Clan meetings, it wasn’t going very well.19

Big Papa himself sat cross-legged at the mouth of his cave, huge arms folded across an even huger chest. The meeting had been in progress for forty-five minutes already, and he had yet to say a single word. Big Papa had long ago learned to keep the two small holes in the side of his head wide open and the big one in the middle tightly shut. It was this kind of wisdom that had enabled him to hold on to his post as Head Clansman for so many years. That, and the fact that he had a habit of absent-mindedly crushing small boulders to dust in his mighty hands whenever someone approached him with complaint or criticism, all the while nodding and smiling and, worst of all, actually paying attention to what they were saying, which they thought was extremely unfair and not the way a Head Clansman should behave at all.20

The young woman who was speaking nineteen to the dozen in the centre of the amassed Oggys, while simultaneously punctuating every syllable with wild hand gestures and stabbing index fingers, had obviously never heard of Big Papa’s small holes / big hole maxim. So quickly and emphatically was she talking that it was quite possible that she wasn’t even listening to herself. Undoubtedly, there was a point being made here, but no one had the slightest idea what it was. There are quite a few people like this, and they should be avoided at all costs.21

The young woman’s name was Twiggy, and she was not of the Clan. She came from the Wizziwigg Family, a small tribe who lived just over the hill and named their children after the first thing the mother laid eyes on after giving birth. Twiggy’s brother’s name, who had been their firstborn, was known as Your Wussy Father Passed Out On The Floor.22

Twiggy had married into the Clan. She was married to a young Oggy called, almost prophetically as it turned out, Hennpekt. Hennpekt wasn’t exactly the brightest Oggy in the Clan. On a scale of one to ten of bright things, where a star going supernova would be ten and a firefly’s bum in a downpour would be one, Hennpekt would have scored a one point five, somewhere between a recently extinguished cigar and an age-tarnished soup ladle. He had been by the lake, spear in hand, hunting parsley, when he had spotted Twiggy washing her hair at the water’s edge. Unaware that she was being watched, she was singing a song. She had a voice that sounded like a pine cone would sound if it were rubbed up and down against a rusty cheese grater, but Hennpekt found that it touched a special place deep within his soul, and immediately fell head over heels in love with her. Not watching where he was going, he also, rather ironically, fell head over heels over a clump of wild parsley, and landed in the lake with a splash, startling her. He, soaking wet and dripping, looked up at her; she looked wide-eyed down at him; their eyes met; and they both smiled; she because he looked cute; he because she was smiling at him. To cut a long story short, the usual holding of hands and likening of various body parts to a summer’s day kind of stuff followed on from this first meeting, and the rest, as they say, was pre-history. 23

But Twiggy wasn’t an Oggy, and she was having problems fitting in.24

Oggys, as has already been hinted at, were a reserved and introverted people who preferred to think first and then speak, with deliberate and measured tones, later. Wizziwiggs, on the other hand, tended to speak their minds first, and then do it again later, cutting out all that tiresome thinking malarkey completely. Most of the Oggys were tolerant of the differences between the seven main Clans in From-The-Edge-Of-The-Lake-To-Roughly-Halfway-Through-The-Rather-Scary-Woods of which they were one, but this time, Twiggy had gone too far. 25

By miles. 26

This time, she had called Clanmother Sharpie a ‘sourpuss’. To her face.27

If the truth be told, Clanmother Sharpie was, in fact, a sourpuss. She was the oldest member of the Clan and this status, in her view, gave her the unilateral right to disapprove of absolutely everything in the known universe without having to justify her views in any way, form or manner. If she said it was so, then it was so. End of discussion.28

Unless, apparently, you were discussing herbs with a Wizziwigg.29

“I mean, what kind of wazzock don’t know that you don’t never plant no mint nex’ to no other herbs, don’t you know?” demanded Clanmother Sharpie from her rocking chair, which had been dragged out of her cave, with her still in it, for the Clan Meeting. (Rocking chairs, incidentally, hadn’t actually been invented yet. Clanmother Sharpie’s chair was called a rocking chair because it was made of rock).30

There was a long pause as all the Oggys present tried to work their way through the multiple negatives and came up blank. All, that is, except for Hennpekt, who was a bit of an idiot savant when it came to multiple negatives, and Twiggy, who had been interrupted in mid-outburst by the old bat and therefore didn’t even bother giving it a try.31

“Y’see!” she cried, stabbing a finger at the hunched old crone in the rocking chair. “Y’see! She called me a wazzock!”32

Clanmother Sharpie went ‘harrumph’ dismissively, and rolled her eyes skywards in the universal facial expression of ‘give me patience’.33

“Wizziwigg, wazzock. Same difference”, she muttered under her breath. Unfortunately, Clanmother Sharpie was slightly deaf, and her muttering under her breath echoed around the village.34

“Y’see!” Twiggy repeated accusingly, glaring at the old woman, outstretched finger quivering with self-righteous indignation. “That’s a pre… pre-thingummy that is!”35

“Predicament?” suggested a nearby Oggy helpfully.36

“Don’t be daft”, said the Oggy standing next to him. “A predicament is a trying or unpleasant situation”.37

“Well, this is a trying an’ unpleasant situation. In’t it?”38

“Well, yeah”, said the other hesitantly. “But it in’t what she meant”.39

“So what did she mean then, Einstone?”40

“Um… preposterous, innit?”41

“But that’s an adjective”, said the first speaker, who was turning out to be a closet intellectual and not the complete plonker that his companion had previously believed him to be, “and she made use of the indefinite article prior to floundering on this unknown word that we are currently attempting to gain an understanding of. Therefore, the next lexical item would have to be either a noun or an adjective immediately followed by a head noun. Ergo, your claim of ‘preposterous’ does not grammatically fit within the sentence stem provided”. He paused for a breath, then added, “innit?”42

“I think you’ll find”, started another, very short and rather weedy Oggy who was standing behind them, “that the word she was looking for was ‘prestidigitation’”. Having said his piece, he stepped back again with a self-satisfied smile on his face. Spectacles with inch-thick lenses hadn’t been invented yet, and neither had side-partings or great big polka-dot bowties, but if they had then this short Oggy would’ve had all three.43

“I’m sorry, but I think that’s pretty preposterously presumptuous and pretentious”, said the first Oggy politely but pointedly.44

“And you sir”, said Shorty, drawing himself to his full height and clenching his fists, “are a troglodyte!”45

There was a pause.46

“In’t that a cave-dweller?” said the second Oggy, after a while.47

“Um. Yes. Yes it is, as a matter of fact”.48

“So what’s your point then?”49

“Um…”50

“Do you bloody mind?” interrupted Twiggy, looking daggers at all three of them . “I’m trying to have an outburst here.”51

Big Papa had had enough. He cleared his throat loudly. It sounded like he was gargling gravel. Then he majestically raised one mighty outspread hand in the air, demanding the attention of his people with the dignity of years of leadership.52

Silence fell.53

Well, almost. From somewhere in the middle of the crowd, a small whiny voice could be heard saying, “She means prejudice, innit? An’ what on earth is prestidigitation when it’s at home anyway?”54

“Shut up!” boomed Big Papa, having taken a stroll along his tether and come to the end of it.55

This time, even the birds stopped singing.56

The Clan looked down at their feet nervously.57

Big Papa began to lower his hand in slow motion for dramatic effect. He looked around equally slowly at his Clan, including all of them in his regal gaze. A cool breeze added to the effect, causing his long hair and longer beard to float out behind him in waves. The sunlight accentuated his high cheekbones and chiselled features. He inhaled deeply and his mouth opened to speak and said,58

“Whu???”59

This was not the fount of wisdom the Clan had expected. One by one, they looked up at him.60

Big Papa’s mouth was hanging open like a trapdoor on a faulty hinge, replacing the expression of majesty and dignity with one that could only be described as gormless. His hand had frozen halfway through its downward sweep. His forehead was creased in confusion and his wide eyes were staring at a fixed point beyond the crowd.61

The Oggys followed his gaze.

At the back of the crowd, someone screamed. Almost instantaneously, Ploppy started yapping. It had a sort of frantic quality to it.62

The Invisible One had arrived.63

***64

The gigantic mutant tiger padded out of the woods and into the clearing like a hallucination out of a cheese and pickled onion nightmare. It was in no particular hurry, knowing that it had pure mind-boggling terror on its side. Its mighty shoulders brushed against the treetops as it strode towards the petrified Oggys with spine-chilling deliberation.65

Ploppy, like most small dogs (and most small people too), made up for his lack of size by having an inversely proportionate amount of naked aggression, bitterness and pure hatred bristling through every inch of his being. The fact that he was roughly the size of one of the huge tiger’s smaller teeth never entered his mind. He saw the monster, through his beady eyes, as an assembly of separate components, and each component was as big as him. With this horribly misguided reasoning behind him, and a growl which may have sounded quite impressive had it not been so high-pitched, the little dog flew at the tiger’s eyes like a small, hairy, ugly bullet.66

The Invisible One opened its mouth, and Ploppy, with an amazing lack of occasion, disappeared down its throat, still growling.67

The Clan watched all this in horrified silence, except for Little Mags, who clapped her hands excitedly and shouted ‘hooray’. Then, as the tiger burped and took another step forward, their survival instinct kicked in. They scattered and ran like the clappers. 68

Again, all except for Little Mags, who thought that the tiger was much more fun than Ploppy had ever been.69

The Invisible One was thinking, insofar as a gigantic mutant tiger can think, on pretty much the same lines. It loomed over her like… well, like a great big bloody tiger… blocking out the sun.70

“Hooray?” said Little Mags again doubtfully.71

The tiger roared. It was not a ‘fun’ sound. It echoed around the village like thunder with laryngitis, bouncing off cave walls and bending trees in a force 9 gale of halitosis. 72

Little Mags blinked, and burst into tears.73

The tiger lowered its colossal head, and bared its teeth…74

And Big Papa, screaming the bloodcurdling ancient battle cry of ‘Rattamuiy rattamuiy rattafernomuyi!’ - Lit. translation: ‘What am I doing what am I doing what the hell am I doing!’ - leapt like a lunatic onto its shoulders. In his hand he held a crudely shaped stone knife, which had been handed down from father to son for sixteen generations, and it was this hand that plunged now into the tiger’s neck with all of Big Papa’s weight behind it.75

The tiger roared again. Not so much in pain as in surprise.76

Big Papa’s hand rose and fell, rose and fell.77

The Invisible One leaped upwards and twisted in mid-air. Big Papa buried his free hand into the deep orange and black hair and held on as if his life depended on it. 78

Which, of course, it did.79

It was a spectacle worth watching; a pre-historic rodeo with the tiger bucking and writhing in the air like it had a monkey on its back, and Big Papa bouncing on his back with the knife still stabbing, still stabbing.80

Something just had to give.81

Something did.82

The Invisible One gave one final almighty corkscrew, spinning an incredible full three hundred and sixty degrees in mid-air, and Big Papa flew off in a windmill of arms and legs. He hit the floor bone-breakingly hard, skidded a few feet in a cloud of dust, and stayed down. His hand twitched open, and the knife rolled onto the ground.83

All was motionless.84

Eventually, The Invisible One got to its feet, panting heavily, tongue out, foaming at the mouth. It wasn’t hurt – Big Papa’s best efforts had been the equivalent of mosquito bites – but it was out of breath, and more than a little surprised. In fact, on the international one to ten scale of surprise, it registered somewhere in the area of fifteen, which translated as ‘absolutely, totally and completely jaw-droppingly eye-poppingly flabbergasted’. It had never encountered resistance before.85

Big Papa still hadn’t moved.86

The tiger padded towards him, growling under its breath.87

Big Papa’s hand twitched. Then, as the tiger looked on, less than three feet away, Big Papa struggled slowly to his feet. The tiger narrowed its eyes and growled a little louder.88

Big Papa, hand on knee, stooped and picked up the knife. Then he straightened up, narrowed his eyes. And growled.89

For an eternity of seconds, man and beast looked each other in the eye. Had a good artist passed by at that very moment, carrying a palette of paints and a folding stool and an easel, and if he could have painted fast enough, he could have made a fortune in years to come with his portrayal of ‘The Stripes And The Stone-age Man’. But he didn’t and he wasn’t and he couldn’t so he didn’t, and died a poor man.90

The tiger turned its enormous sleek head to look at the village. It sniffed the air.91

“Oh no you don’t”, Big Papa said quietly. He swayed on his feet, and then somehow managed to steady himself.92

The tiger turned back to him. 93

Big Papa looked at his twin reflection in the emerald pools of the tiger’s eyes.94

Time went by slowly to increase the tension.95

And then the tiger blinked, turned on its heel, and walked slowly back to the woods.96

Time stopped mucking around and resumed its normal pace.97

Big Papa watched until The Invisible One disappeared into the foliage. Then he bent at the knees and collapsed.98

And Little Mags said ‘hooray’.
99