Free Cryers Hill by Kitty Aldridge Page A

that they were designed for child-rearing and sewing animal skins. Nowadays, he said, they all wanted jobs and driving licences and equal pay. Next thing you knew they would be sticking their noses into politics and the armed forces. It was a slippery slope. Married women were now demanding credit cards. Imagine the debt we'll be in, he gasped. Sean tried to imagine.
    There was a whole language that went with women. There were women who would give you the brush-off and the cold shoulder; there were others who would give you the come-on and the once-over. Women were birds and chicks and tarts. Older ones were hags, bats and biddies. If you were a bloke you had to chat up birds or else you wouldn't get one. It was important to have good lines or else you'd never pick up a looker. You had to chat them up properly, they expected it, you couldn't just slide up and go Wur. Women were comparable to other things – cars and horses mainly. They had mileage and chassis and bodywork and go.
    'If I, as a male, approach a woman, she will be curious but intimidated,' Gor mused. Sean had seen his dad reading The Naked Ape. Sean had been shocked to see that it featured men and women without a stitch of clothing on the front cover and all across the back too.
    'The male, Sean, is superior, the female submissive.' Gor shook his head in amazement at some of the complex things he came up with.
    Sean stared straight ahead at a speck on the windscreen and wondered if it was a dead ant. He was glad, in a way, that his dad knew so much.
    'A rich, varied, mysterious world, son. A rich and mysterious world.'
    'Watch the ball.' This is maybe good advice for life in general, or perhaps it is not. Sean watches the ball anyway. He will not look away now, not even if there is a nuclear attack or a streaker. He does not even blink. Gor throws the ball. The ball leaves Gor's hand and arcs upward.
    'Watch it.'
    Sean watches it. Out of the corner of his eye he sees the sky and the yellow cranes and the orange-red brick towers, but mostly he sees the ball, turning in space, spinning towards him. Why do curved objects spin in space? Perhaps it is not a question for a spaz. The ball has already begun its descent. This is a crucial time. Sean is watching it and watching it. Who exactly is the naked ape? He must not take his eye off it. He will not take his eye off it – though his eye wants very much to look somewhere, anywhere else. How can an ape be naked?
    'Move your feet!' A new instruction. He does not want to move his feet; if he does he will take his eye off the ball. The ball is coming. It rushes up to meet him, parting the air. The ball is here. Sean closes his eyes. Too late he realises some facts: he cannot see anything; the ball has arrived; he has taken his eye off it. He hears the ball thwack as it lands behind him. It ricochets, gedang, off the metal garage door before it spins away, travelling across five or six not-yet gardens and beyond, into the dust and debris of advancing progress.
    You didn't watch the ball, you blockhead! You're a twit, Sean. What are you?'
    Gor liked the heroes on TV. He empathised with them, their jump-cut black-and-white lives, the pressure, the temptations, the problems they had to solve within a thirty-minute episode; never a word of thanks from anybody either; all that effort, nil appreciation. He understood this. He watched them all, Danger Man, The Saint, Adam Adamant Lives! His muscles twitched as they sprinted and sprang and cornered villains; as they detained for questioning the haughty girls in zip-up boots – the ones with lustrous mink-coloured fringes and snappy answers – the ones he would never get to meet, though in his mind he had put them over his knee and spanked them all.
    'Two wheels on my wagon, but I'm still rolling along, Those Cherokees are after me, but I'm singing a happy song.' You heard Gor before you saw him. The songs were always the same; a consolation to a blameless victim. 'Raindrops