No Planet B - Part Twelve

or, The History of the World Backwards

July 2006

The Creation Myth of the Neanderthals

Our ancestor began like this:

We drove all night starting back when years went up not down, 2000 and more, as the road would take us and beyond. Once clear of the benzene belt at the thick end of the eighties a magic wand of bio-diversity is waved upon the land, and we had to stop every few miles to brush hundreds and thousands of crunchy, dead bugs and insects off the car. Smearing the windscreen, splattered red and juicy were squashbug, daddy long-legs, bloody-nosed beetle. Piled high along the wipers were honeymoth and double dart. Hedge rustic and hoverfly blocked the air vents. Encrusting the headlights thrips, lacewing, alderfly; sizzling on the radiator grill redbrown skipjack, weevil, devil’s coach horse and longhorn beetles whose horns weren’t long enough to see my Morris Oxford’s approach. All these I brush from the car’s hot body.

As dawn comes up we hit the sixties. Traffic thins. Lucky heather sprouts on the dash.

By late afternoon with the turn of the century coming up on the right, the road’s too bumpy, so we ditch the motor, and get into a horse and cart full of straw and fall asleep. When we wake up the cart is full of Travelling Players. We tell them that if they don’t explain how the Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme fit into the song, we’re getting out.

Standing by the side of the road, we carved a walking staff from a branch of ash, before trudging along with bandaged feet for the next few centuries. One afternoon we looked up and at the end of a long stretch of dead straight road we saw a Centurion uproot the last chestnut tree from England and carry it off in one of those trolleys they give you at the Garden Centre (only made out of material appropriate to the time. Wood and that. Or bronze. Iron maybe.)

Then the road got smaller and smaller and more and more winding until after a while we were forced to admit that we were lost in an endless woodland of elms, oaks, hawthorn and blackthorn. And the trees are all talking to each other: ash and hazel, crack willow and white willow whispering, juniper conspiring with beech, aspen muttering to all its suckers, a devil’s orchard of yew in its own clearing, save for a few trails of ivy, a powerful magic here that we wanted to escape.

Then it gets cold, it starts to sleet and we hide in a cave drawing the little boy in the boat leaving the dying mother in the dry land to sail to the lost man in the wet country, while there’s a big snowstorm outside that goes on for ages and ages and when it clears there’s no more trees only snow and ice. And...

...There was a land bridge to the Continent! A land bridge as young as the hills. And thanks to the cliffs of Dover the land bridge was on a slight incline, and so we were able to toboggan the whole way there. We just started to slow up as we got to the lip of Cherbourg but luckily these Cro-Magnon women came out with brooms and gave it plenty of that on the ice and we were off again! Down to Lascaux, and beyond, walking when slush gave way to savannah.

Kept walking and walking. I kept walking and walking until the sense of loss was too heavy to carry and then I sat down and wept. All those things we had, all the things we could do. No-one has ever lost so much. No-one.

I’m losing my memory, too. I had hoped I would no longer feel this loss when I no longer remember what we once had. But just as trees carry in their trunks a memory of strong gales twenty winters ago, so I find find the pain of loss still with me when everything else has gone.

I have good days and bad, but I mustn’t deceive myself. I am losing it. One day last week I couldn’t even remember how to use a flint-head until the sun went in. But since I am only going to get worse I must lay up stores and provisions. I have spent this last fortnight piling a trove of nuts and berries, maize and gourds-of-water into a hole in the ground next to a long flat slab of granite for when I can no longer remember where to get these things, or what they are. I crushed the red dye from a hundred cochineals and with a stick I paint a big red arrow on the long slab of granite pointing at the hole in the ground where I will find the food store which alone will will get me through the winter.

I tried to speak today but it took me ages to remember how. I am determined that my last word will not be UG or anything so cliched. Please God, not OOGA OOGA! And so as a little personal ceremony and testament to the people we once were, I have just climbed onto a rocky ledge by a stream to say the last words that air shall ever hear issue from the thorax of human being. But I stubbed my toe on the way up and swore and screamed. I will try again tomorrow.

Wake up. Cold sun. Hungry. Find red spear on ground. Cannot pick it up. Angry. So angry I will show the spear how little it scares me. I shit in a hole at the tip of the spear. I then start sobbing violently and I don’t know why.

Walked to the sea. So tired I’m crawling on all-fours. I swam out to sea. I prefer to bask though. Looking back at the shore I saw some sarcastic Mastodons who, having raised themselves on their hind legs, were wading into the water after me, holding out virgin segments of unpolluted coral and shouting ‘Oh, you forgot these!’.

It’s getting easier to breathe underwater than in thin air. I can see a woman on the waves and she is singing to me, the closer I swim the more I hear her. I didn’t realize I was so good at swimming. I can hold my breath underwater for ages. In fact it is getting easier to breathe underwater than in thin air, but I must be wary of lethal hallucinations.

SONG: All The Good Things Of The Earth

In summer rain,
we dammed the river
we cut down trees
we built a fire
how rich we were!
The corn was fat,
the hen was laying
and what we had was
all the good things of the earth

when winter came,
the corn was rotten
the field stank
the river sank
just like a curse.
My woman died,
the trees caught fire,
for what we’d had was
all the good things of the earth

THE BEGINNING