The Secrets of Hats

It involved a hat, after all this time I can’t really remember all the details. We were young, though, and we knew little of the secrets of the universe, the secrets of hats in particular.

When you are young like that, and as involved with yourself and those around you of the same age, you tend not to really notice the rest of the world. It is just there, a background against which the high dramas of your young lives are played out in all their tragic-comic intensity.

And… well… hats are just hats.

Or, at least we thought so.

Some hats are special… we know that now.

After all, no magician is really a magician unless he has the hat to pull things from, no wizard is a wizard without the hat that denotes his status and we all know about witches and their hats.

Natalie’s family invited me on holiday with them. I was surprised; I thought they didn’t like me. After all, what parents ever really likes their daughter’s boyfriend; especially in the teenage years when to them she is still their baby girl?

They had a house down by the coast. There was some entangled family tale of just how they had ended up owning this house that I listened to them telling each other without taking much of it in.

Anyway, this was supposed to be half-holiday, half sorting this house out, getting it ready for some locals to do it up over the following winter, ready for it to be hired out as a summer holiday place from the next summer onward.

So, one day while the rest of the family were out, Natalie and I were exploring the house, stopping every now and then to explore each other in that typical frantic teenage way whenever we could.

Then we were in a gloomy attic, lit only by a dusty skylight and Natalie was naked, motes of dust dancing around her body as she found this hat and put it on, turning to pose for me to admire her….

Then, everything changed.