The God Hunter Read Online Free PDF Page A

heedless of the recent rains, the wet grass. I stretched. I reached . . .
    The bank just slid away.
    I’d gone in sideways, cartwheeling my arms. Couldn’t help it. Muck and sludge and goo all whirling up around me.
    Not a foot deep. Still, enough to ruin shirt, pants, and a brand-­new twenty-­five-­quid haircut.
    I felt water squelching in my boots, like they’d just been dredged up with the freight from the Titanic . My nose was running. My handkerchief was just a sodden, dirty rag.
    â€œI’m stinking like a toilet here,” I said.
    â€œYou’re stinking like a pond.”
    â€œSame difference.”
    As she led me back towards the house, she cast a look over her shoulder. “You know where the bathroom is. Just leave your clothes outside.”
    â€œYou’re laughing at me.”
    â€œNot a bit. No. Not me. Well . . . Just ’cause it’s funny, I suppose, that’s all.” She grinned, made to hug me, then thought better of it. “Take your shoes and socks off outside. Out -­side, right?”
    I sighed, a token protest. Then did as I was told.
    I sat, wrapped in Moira’s toweling robe, drinking Fairtrade coffee at the kitchen table, the washer humming with the promise of some clean clothes in an hour or two. It was a lovely kitchen, with a big, warm AGA and jars full of strange, edible items; a proper country kitchen, so different from my scruffy London cupboard.
    â€œGot a biscuit?”
    â€œI don’t buy that stuff now. You know I don’t.”
    â€œBread . . . ?”
    She gave me a banana. “I’m wheat intolerant. I told you.”
    â€œDid you?”
    â€œLast time you were here!”
    I searched my memory, drew a blank.
    â€œThat’s like . . . an allergy, yeah?”
    â€œ Intolerance, not allergy. You are, too, I ’spect. Most ­people are, they just don’t realize it.”
    â€œAh. Right.”
    And this, I suppose, was where it always started going wrong between us. She’d told me I was selfish, lazy in relationships, and maybe she was right. I held a lot of blame for why we’d split up, all those years ago.
    Moira, though—­Moira was a crank.
    Crank diets, crank therapy, crank science—­whole shelves filled with self-­help books, schemes to help you sleep or eat or just to cheer you up, formulae she’d share with evangelical enthusiasm, and though I listened with a good pretense of interest, inside I’d find myself just switching off, no matter how polite I tried to be. And we’d part company, in more ways than one.
    â€œYou’re in a Stone Age body, right? Old Stone Age. Human evolution’s slow. But what we eat—­that’s changed at a colossal speed. As soon as they invented farming –”
    I sipped my coffee. Checked my watch.
    â€œOur diet’s mostly grains now. But we can’t process them. We’ve still got Stone Age bodies. Physically, we’re hunter-­gatherers. Raw veg, fruit, nuts. A bit of meat. That’s our natural diet. See?”
    â€œUm.”
    â€œYou know how you feel tired after eating?”
    I’m not tired, I thought. I’m hungry. It’s not the same .
    I don’t believe in premonitions. You only see them looking back, once the mind’s had chance to make up shapes and patterns, and give form to random data. And yet now, in retrospect, it seems those days were full of omens, all trying to tell me something, circling me like softly-­whispered threats.
    The past, come back to haunt us. The ancient, Stone Age past.
    I should have paid her more attention, I suppose. From anybody else, I might have taken it and realized a basic truth: we can’t outrun the past.
    We can’t even outrun the present.
    Sometimes, though, we can make it smell a little sweeter.
    My clothes came out scented with lemon and vanilla. Nice. Better than pond water, at any