So, yes, London were different from Blueside, Blueside were different from Batwing, Batwing were different from Redlantern. Each Family group woke at a different time, slept at a different time, had its own particular way of doing things and deciding things, its own little things they were proud of about themselves (like London and Brooklyn being the names of groups on Earth), its own particular combination of strong people and weak people, kind people and selfish people, batfaces and clawfeet. But the differences were so small, I thought, and so dull dull dull. Really we were all alike. In fact, we were so on top of one another, so in each others’ lives and in each others’ heads, we were hardly separate from one another at all. Like Oldest always banged on and on about, we were all one. It was really true: one Family, all together, all cousins, all from one single womb and one single dick.
‘I’ve got some milk if you want some,’ Martha said, cupping her hands under her breasts.
‘Yeah, okay,’ I said, and I bent down while she held one of them for me to kneel and suck the warm sweet stuff.
‘That’s better,’ she said after a bit. ‘They were beginning to hurt.’
She stroked my hair briefly, without much interest.
‘Had a new baby die on me,’ she explained. ‘Twenty thirty sleeps ago. Little batface baby. Really bad batface, poor little thing. His little face was practically split open from top to bottom, and he couldn’t suck, no matter how hard I tried to help him. In the end he just . . .’
I felt her shaking as she began to cry. That was the reason she’d been awake. She couldn’t sleep. She couldn’t think of anything else but the dead baby. That was what it was like for mums when a baby died. They couldn’t think of anything except the gap where the baby had been. Martha London didn’t know how to fill up the time. She didn’t know how to let the baby go.
‘Ten kids I’ve had in all,’ she said. ‘All but two of them were batfaces. And, well, you love them anyway, but . . .’
She released the breast she was holding and scooped up the other one for me.
‘Only three of my kids are still alive,’ she said. ‘Three girls. All the rest died. All my boys died. Last three all died as babies.’
I sat up.
‘Well, maybe your luck will turn now.’
She nodded, lying there under the flickering starflowers, her face all smeary with tears. The flowers were so bright that their stems made little lines and shadows, always moving and changing, all over her body. Her hand was still cupped between her legs to hold in my lucky juice.
‘If I have another boy a wombtime from now,’ she said, ‘I’ll call him after you.’
Those slips with oldmums were funny things. When you thought about it later, you got hard all over again and you remembered your dick going in and out of her, and you wanted to do it some more. And when you heard other boys boasting to each other about the grownup women that had asked them for a slide, you worried that maybe they were getting more of it than you, or maybe that they were getting something better than you’d had. And the batface boys who oldmums never wanted to slip with, they listened to rest of us and thought to themselves, It’s not fair. Why can’t that happen to me? (But they didn’t say it, because they knew us smoothfaces would just laugh at them and say, ‘It’s because you’re ugly, Einstein. Ugly ugly. The clue’s in the name. It’s because you’ve got a face like a bloody bat.’)
But straight afterwards, you felt sort of empty, like the spark had been taken out of you along with your juice, and nothing meant anything at all. That was what it actually felt like afterwards, but that feeling didn’t last long, and seeing as that part of it wasn’t fun to think about or talk about, you soon pushed it out of your mind, you forgot about it till next time, and no one ever spoke about it at all.
I didn’t want to walk through Circle Clearing and maybe get tangled up with bloody Oldest, so I walked along by Dixon Stream where it flows down towards Stream’s Join and the log bridge. The only trouble with going that way was there was a place down along the stream where that one-legged London bloke Jeffo made boats, and he was boring boring and hard to get away from.
‘Hey! Who’s that? Aren’t you that John Redlantern that did for that leopard?’
Damn. I’d hoped he’d be out on the water in one of his boats but he wasn’t. He was sitting on a bit of log below a whitelantern tree, working on a new one. He was a big man of about sixty wombtimes with a soft weak face, no teeth, and that one leg of his missing below the knee. He’d got a three-yard length of split trunk from a redlantern tree that he was working on. He’d already scraped the dried old tubes out of it, cut the ends straight with a blackglass saw and smoothed off them off with roughstone. He’d got a special fire place for boiling down redlantern sap into glue. There was a deep hole in middle full up with a hot sticky sludge of boiled sap, and round it a circular trench filled with redhot embers. He was scooping the sludge out with a bark spoon and smearing it onto the pieces of buckskin he’d stretched tight over the open ends of the log. The skins had dried hard hard from when he first glued them on, and now he was spreading more glue all over them, ready to stick on another layer of skins.
‘How long you’ve been working on that one, Jeffo?’
‘Oh twenty wakings at least, I’d say.’
‘How many boats you reckon you’ve made?’
‘Oh thirty, forty. They don’t last that long, you know, boats. It doesn’t matter how much glue you use, sooner or later the ends come off and then down they go and it’s, “Jeffo! Jeffo! Can you glue the ends back on this one?”. “No I can’t,” I tell them. “You’ll need new soft skins that can be stretched, and if the wood’s soaked at the ends at all, you’ll need to start again with a new log.” And then of course it’s “Jeffo! Jeffo! Can you make us a new one then?”’
‘Don’t you get bored?’
‘Well, if I do, I can go fishing in my own boat. That’s like going for a walk for me, going out on my boat. Move as fast on the water as you can with your legs on the ground, I can. Faster, in fact. No one beats old Jeffo in a boat. And anyway I like making boats. It’s good work. Tommy and Gela themselves taught it to us. Make boats, they said, and a waking will come some time when you’ll figure out how to build a boat like the one that brought us here with the Three Companions. And then you’ll get back to Earth.’
‘Tom’s dick and Harry’s,’ I thought, that’s the trouble with us! That’s what’s wrong with the way we are. We live as if Eden wasn’t where we really lived at all but just a camp like hunters make when they stay out in forest for a few wakings. We’re only waiting here to go back to where we really belong.
‘Don’t you think we’d need something a bit more than an old tree-trunk with skins glued onto it, Jeffo, to get to Earth?’ was what I said aloud. ‘I mean, think about it. Things that fly aren’t heavy like your boats, are they? Bats and flutterbyes and birds, they hardly weigh a thing. But your boats take two or three people just to carry them down to the water.’
‘Do you think the Landing Veekle was light like a flutterbye? It was as big as Circle of Stones, remember,’ Jeffo snorted. ‘And it was made of metal that’s heavy like stone. Nah, they found a way to make heavy things fly, like heavy things can float on water.’
I guessed it was true. Somehow the Earth people must have found a way of making heavy things fly. But how? Well, I had no more idea than Jeffo or anyone else. I was no different from the rest. We knew so little, and Earth knew so so much. We might as well be blind for all we understood about things. No wonder we longed for Earth. No wonder we pined and pined for that waking when Earth would finally come. No wonder old Jeffo told himself he’d make a sky-boat one waking out of a bloody old log so we wouldn’t even have to wait for them. No wonder Lucy Lu with her big weepy eyes could get blackglass and skins from all over Family with her stories about how our own shadows would fly off to bright bright Earth when our heavy old bodies had died.
‘You got lost on Snowy Dark once, didn’t you?
’ I said. ‘We were up the edge there two wakings back, up on Cold Path, and Old Roger told the story of it. But what I don’t get about it is how did you get lost?’
He looked away and I thought at first he was going to refuse to answer me.
‘Bloody woollybucks led me on, didn’t they?’ he said after a bit. ‘I kept following their headlanterns and then when I lost them, there was nothing left to see at all. I mean nothing. Couldn’t even see my own hand if I held it up in front of my face. Tom’s neck, it was cold cold. There was nothing to see, nothing to touch, nothing at all but coldness. It’s an evil place up there, boy. They say all Eden was like that until life came up from Underworld and we came down from sky. Just darkness and ice and rock everywhere. All I can say is if that really is so then it doesn’t bear thinking about. It’s bad bad.’
He shook his head.
‘Anyway I didn’t know where I was. I didn’t know why I couldn’t hear the others yelling for me. Of course I yelled myself, but all I could hear was the echoes coming back from high up there above me. Echoes, and echoes of echoes, and echoes of echoes of echoes, so I could tell there was more and more of it up there, more ice and rock, colder and higher, and . . . and . . .’
Ugh. He sounded like he might start crying like a kid if he carried on like that, so I butted in quickly.
‘So how could we ever hope to survive in a boat that went all the way up to Starry Swirl, Jeffo, if it’s so cold and dark even just up above the edge of forest? Think how cold it must be right up out there among the stars.’
He looked at me resentfully.
‘They had a way, didn’t they? Tommy and Angela and the Companions, they had a way. They knew stuff that we don’t know about, like metal and plastic and lecky . . .’ he stumbled on the word, ‘and lecky-tricktity. They knew how to fly and they knew how to keep warm. If we keep on building boats, we’ll find a way too.’
So he said, but meanwhile he was angrily smearing glue onto an animal skin at the end of a log, exactly as he’d done with every other boat he’d ever made. He wasn’t trying anything new, and he never had done, not once in all those thirty forty boats he’d made.
‘How did they get your leg off?’ I asked.
‘Sawed it off with a blackglass knife, the bastards. Didn’t Roger tell you that? You ask a lot of questions, young man, I must say. A lot of rude questions. I don’t want to talk about it, alright? It’s not a thing I like remembering. Would you, if you were me? You get on now, John, and leave me to finish this boat off in peace.’
Smiling a little bit to myself for my cleverness in getting away, I made my way back through Brooklyn and Spiketree and finally back to Redlantern, where the hunters and scavengers were just coming back from forest with a chewy old starbird and a couple of bags of fruit. Not enough, nothing like enough for forty-odd people. If we hadn’t still had three legs of that woollybuck left over, we’d have all been hungry that sleep.
6
Tina Spiketree
At the end of a waking, two sleeps after he did for that leopard, me and John Redlantern walked up along Dixon Stream. We climbed the rocks beyond London and Blueside fence until Deep Pool was there below us, shining with wavyweed and water lanterns and bright beds of oysters.
‘It’s like there’s another forest down there, isn’t it?’ I said. ‘Another little Circle Valley, with the rocks around it like Snowy Dark. Only difference is that this forest is under water.’
It even had a narrow little waterfall at its lower end, where the water poured down on its way to Greatpool, just as all the water of Circle Valley poured out down that narrow gap at Exit Falls.
‘Yeah,’ said John, with a snort. ‘And if there’s ever another big rockfall over Exit Falls, whole of Circle Valley forest could end up under water too.’
People didn’t come up to Deep Pool much and there was no one else there. We climbed down to the edge of the water, took off our waistwraps and dived in. The water was clear like air and warm warm as mother-milk. The stream that fills Deep Pool comes down icy cold straight off Dixon Snowslug over in Blue Mountains, but the tree roots and water lanterns heat it up.
‘So that was pretty brave of you,’ I said, when we’d come up to the surface by the water’s edge, ‘killing a leopard all by yourself.’
We grabbed hold of warm roots and faced each other, close close, with the warm warm water up to our shoulders.
‘Most people tell me that,’ John said, with a little laugh, ‘but you make it sound like a question.’
I nodded. It was a question. I was trying to get the measure of him. He looked nice, no doubt about it, he looked beautiful, and it was obvious obvious why he was a favourite with oldmums looking for baby juice. Plus he was quick and clever, and other kids respected him. And he was a big name in Family too now, one of the names that everyone knew. It was all good good, but I still didn’t completely get him. No one did. There was something about himself that he held back.
‘Well,’ I said, ‘I think sometimes people just do one brave thing, and then that’s it. Or sometimes people are brave in just one way.’
He shrugged.
‘Yeah, it’s true. One brave thing doesn’t mean much. And sometimes people do brave things when they just haven’t got time to think.’
‘Is that what happened with you?’
He thought about this.
‘It’s true I didn’t have much time to think when the leopard was circling round us. But I knew I had a choice, and I knew no one would blame me if I ran. So, no, I didn’t just stand there because I couldn’t think of anything else.’
‘Why then? It was only a bloody leopard. It’s not even as if we can eat the things.’
‘I did it because . . . Well, I’d never really understood about those moments before and I reckon a lot of people never really do get to understand them, but what I realized then was that I wasn’t just deciding what I wanted to do, I was deciding what kind of person I wanted to be. So I made my choice on that basis. And from now on, whenever I have a decision to make, I’m always going to make it in that same way.’
‘What, you mean always doing the dangerous thing?’
He snorted.
‘No, of course not. That’d be nuts. I’d be dead in no time. What I mean is I’m always going to think about where I’m trying to go and what I’m trying to be, not just about what I want right then at that moment.’
I smiled and kissed him. I liked what he said. It was how I saw things too. I’d not done for any leopards, and I had no leopard-killing plans, but when I did a thing, I was always careful to check that I wasn’t just doing it because it was easier, or just doing it to avoid upsetting other people.
‘Good plan,’ I told him. ‘And I’m the same.’
‘Yeah? In what way?’
‘Well, I’m a Spiketree, and I cut my hair in spikes, and I’m spiky spiky spiky. I tell people what I think and I don’t let other people put me off doing what I think I should do. And if something scares me, I think, Yeah, but should I do it anyway?’
He smiled and nodded, and I kissed him quickly again, then pulled away.
‘Okay, Mr Leopard Killer,’ I said, ‘let’s see how long you can hold your breath then. I bet I can get more oysters than you.’
I plunged down into the bright blurry water, looking for the pinnacles of rock where the oysters clung onto ledges six seven feet below the surface, opening and closing their shining pink mouths. I grabbed handfuls from three different pinnacles and burst up to the surface again. I was flinging the oysters onto the rocky bank, when John bobbed up right next to me.
‘Ha ha! I’ve got more than . . .’ he gasped, but I’d already dived down again before he’d finished speaking, down through a big glittering shoal of tiny fish.
We built up a whole pile of oysters on the bank, then lay on the soft ground under droopy yellowlantern trees and tore them open. The oysters wheezed and fizzed as they died and we pulled out bits of the shining flesh, sometimes feeding
them to each other, sometimes playfighting over them, sometimes stealing the juices from one another’s mouths and tongues.
‘Do you want some slippy, Mr Leopard Killer? Do you want a slide?’ I whispered, kissing him and putting my hand down to feel his dick. ‘You’ll have to do it the back way, though, because I don’t want a baby on my hands. I’m really not cut out for being a youngmum, stuck in Family with the blind oldies and the clawfeet and a bunch of little kids.’
I didn’t think there’d be any doubt about how he’d answer me, but I was wrong.
‘Let’s leave that for now,’ he said. ‘Let’s leave that for later on.’
Well, I was surprised surprised. Yeah and offended too. What was the matter with him? What did he think we’d come here for? There weren’t many boys in Family that would turn down an offer of a slip from me, and not many men either, judging by the way they looked at me, though Family rules said grownup men shouldn’t do that with newhair girls.
‘You been going with too many old women, John,’ I told him. ‘Like that Martha London you went with on your no-work waking. Old Martha who lost her little baby not long ago. Looks like she and the others have worn you out.’
John looked surprised that I knew. More fool him. You can’t do anything in Family without everyone knowing about it, and weighing it up, and picking it over, and making their bloody minds up about what they thought about it. I’d heard about John and Martha London from four five people and I wasn’t too pleased about it. Okay, all the boys go with oldmums when they get the chance, but I’d let him know he could have me, hadn’t I? And you’d have thought that would have been enough to keep him going a waking or two, wouldn’t you? You’d have thought he’d have saved himself for me.
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