Dark Eden

by Chris Beckett

  ‘We’ll help you move the Blueside fence further out,’ said London leader Julie. ‘We’re not expecting you to do it all on your own. But our group is getting bigger.’

  ‘You’ve been helping with that, haven’t you, eh, John?’ I whispered to John. ‘You’ve been helping London get bigger. You and that woman Martha.’

  He pulled a face at me and stuck out his tongue. I laughed.

  ‘We’ll help you pull down the fence and move it, Blueway,’ Julie repeated.

  ‘No chance,’ said Blueside leader Susan, who was round and solid and stubborn, like Lava Blob. ‘We’ve worked hard to get our group all nice with shelters and everything. Why would we want to hand it all over to you lot?’

  ‘Yes, but we can’t help that we’re in middle of Family. We haven’t got any new forest to move into.’

  ‘Maybe you should split your group into two. Start a new group beyond Blueside, like we did when Starflower started at hundred and fortieth Any Virsry . . .’

  But Caroline stopped the discussion.

  ‘This is for Council, not for now. Right now we are just deciding on the Genda. What other things are going to be on it?’

  Some little kids near to where me and John were standing started a silly playfight, chasing round and round the grownups’ legs.

  ‘Not enough meat any more,’ said old blind Tom from Brooklyn. He was the only group leader that was a man. ‘Not enough meat, not enough fruit and seeds and stumpcandy.’

  ‘So what are we going to do about it?’ Caroline said. ‘What do you want us to discuss?’

  ‘Last useful thing we did was back at Any Virsry hundred forty-five,’ Tom said, ‘when we stopped School.’

  What he was talking about was that up to hundred and forty-fifth Any Virsry, there was School for kids between six years and twelve. Every waking, all the kids came together in Circle Clearing and a grownup called Teacher told them about writing and counting and the lost things from Earth and all that stuff. But at hundred and forty-fifth they’d decided they couldn’t spare kids from hunting and scavenging. So now most kids couldn’t write and Family relied on the remembering that happened at Any Virsries to pass on the old stories. There was a big argument in Council back then, apparently, when they finished with School, one of the biggest arguments ever.

  ‘We got more food in after that,’ Tom Brooklyn said, ‘with the kids to help, and no grownups tied up with being Teacher. Life was easier for a bit.’

  ‘So what should we give up now?’ asked Caroline.

  ‘That’s what we need to talk about.’

  And then, Harry’s dick, John joined in the discussion!

  ‘It’s not a matter of giving something else up,’ he called out.

  Well, everyone looked at him, every single person in whole Family. Even the little kids mucking around the legs of the grownups stopped and stared, because every single person in Family that was old enough to talk knew that, when the Genda was being agreed, the only ones who spoke out were the group leaders. Okay, maybe once twice in the past at an Any Virsry, a group leader had asked a grownup in their group to comment on something, but there was no way a kid or a newhair would ever have said anything, no way that they’d even have been asked. And no one, newhair or grownup, had ever ever just shouted something out.

  So now everyone was looking at John. But they all looked in different ways. His mum Jade was looking across at him with a funny puzzled face, like she didn’t know what to feel. Gerry was looking at him like he was some kind of hero. David Redlantern, that hard batface, was glaring at him like he was a piece of buck shit. Bella Redlantern, standing out there with the other leaders by Circle, looked embarrassed but also a little bit proud.

  And that, I suppose, is how I felt too. Embarrassed but a bit proud.

  ‘It’s not a matter of giving something up any more,’ John went on. ‘We haven’t got anything else to give up now anyway. We all scavenge and hunt every waking anyway, don’t we? What else are we going to do without? Sleep?’

  Caroline looked at Bella Redlantern as if to tell her: ‘He’s one of yours. You sort him out.’

  ‘I think what John’s trying to say . . .’ Bella began.

  ‘We need to find a way of getting past Snowy Dark,’ John called out, ‘find new places for people to live.’

  Tom’s dick and Harry’s, that settled it for me! John wasn’t one of those people who only do one brave thing.

  ‘Past Snowy Dark?’ exclaimed Caroline. ‘Past Snowy Dark? Oh come on, boy, everyone knows that’s impossible.’

  She looked firmly away from him.

  ‘Anyway,’ she said briskly, ‘that’s enough time wasted. Let’s move on to . . .’

  But John still hadn’t finished!

  ‘How do we know it’s impossible?’ he said. ‘How do we really know? We’ve never tried, have we? Not for a long time anyway. You should talk in your Council about having another go at it. Trying somehow to get across Dark. Or down Exit Falls. Or something.’

  ‘We certainly should not. For one thing you’re just a newhair boy and you can’t tell us what to talk about, and for another it’s a stupid idea. We’ve just talked now about how we had to give up School to have more time for hunting and scavenging, and how the hunting has got hard again. How could we possibly spare people for trips up onto Snowy Dark when we need all the grownups and newhairs and big kids to find food? It makes no sense at all.’

  ‘It makes no sense not to,’ John said. ‘There’s going to be more and more people and less and less for us to eat. We’ve got to find more to eat somewhere else.’

  Everyone was embarrassed and uncomfortable by now. Quite a few people shouted out to John to shut up.

  ‘Leave it, boy, we need to get on with the Genda.’

  ‘Shut up, newhair! It’s not your place to talk.’

  But he still kept on.

  ‘Well, if we don’t try and get past the mountains, then why don’t we at least spread ourselves out a bit across forest? Send one group over to Cold Path Valley maybe. One up by Dixon Snowslug.’

  Now Caroline lost her temper.

  ‘Be quiet, boy!’ she snapped. ‘Be quiet now. Whole Family is here, whole Family, and it’s not the business of one silly newhair to stand up and tell us what we should discuss.’

  With a mighty effort, and the assistance of two helpers, old Mitch rose up to his feet.

  ‘What’s the newhair saying?’ he demanded to know.

  ‘He says we should send groups over to different parts of the valley,’ said Bella, ‘so as to make it easier to find food.’

  ‘No!’ blind Mitch cried out into the pitch darkness around himself. ‘No, no, no, no!’

  Stoop and Gela were also getting up now, staggering to their feet with their helpers fussing round them.

  ‘We must stay here,’ Stoop cried, and then gasped for air. ‘This is where they’ll come to find us! This is where they’ll come! And we must remain one, one Family, that’s what Angela taught us. One Family that does things together.’

  ‘Don’t worry,’ Caroline said, putting a hand on Stoop’s shoulder. ‘No way are we going to ever break up Family. We have one mother and one father. We always have been one Family and we always will be. If we break up then things will turn bad, one group against another, that’s what Angela said. But it is not going to happen and that’s final. So no discussion. No argument. We – all – stay – here.’

  David Redlantern was pushing grimly towards John through the Redlantern people.

  ‘But Family can’t go on growing and growing,’ called out John, ‘and . . .’

  David grabbed his shoulder.

  ‘Enough!’ he hissed.

  Caroline pretended she hadn’t heard.

  ‘So what other things do we have to put on the Genda?’ she asked briskly.

  9

  John Redlantern

  When Genda was set, that was the end of the first waking of Any Virsry, and everyone could go back to their groups
to eat and sleep. The next waking Council would meet and talk about the Genda and then we’d all sleep again, and then there would be the final waking when we’d all be called back in and be told what Council had decided. After that Oldest would do the Earth Things, and we’d have the Show.

  I was going to sneak off with Tina again, but David was still standing right behind me.

  ‘No you don’t, boy. You’re coming back to group with me. Bella needs to talk to you.’

  ‘What about?’ said Tina. ‘Is she going to tell him off for talking sense?’

  David turned his angry red batface on her.

  ‘You keep out of Redlantern business, Tina Spiketree.’

  I shrugged and pulled a face for Tina and followed David back to Redlantern, where the grownups were stirring up the embers of our fire and feeding it branches so we could cook. Everyone looked at me as I arrived in our clearing. People stopped halfway between the woodpile and the fire with firewood in their arms. People came out of their shelters.

  ‘I’m ashamed of you, John,’ began Old Roger. ‘People will say Redlantern can’t bring up their newhairs properly.’

  Lucy Lu said that I hadn’t just shamed the living members of our group but the ones who’d died as well.

  ‘The Shadow People are crying,’ she said, ‘they’re begging me to make sure that Family is never broken up.’

  Bella came out of her shelter.

  ‘You were rude rude there, John. Rude to Family and rude to me. What do you think other people will think if someone in my own group talks out like that without even letting me know that’s what they are going to do? If you had something you wanted saying, you could have raised it with me beforehand. We all knew Any Virsry was coming. As it is, you’ve made me look like a complete fool.’

  Everyone watched her and watched me. How would I react? How would she follow on from what she’d said?

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said humbly. ‘I just thought it needed to be said. I hadn’t thought about it before. It just came out.’

  I liked Bella. I was close close to her. And I respected her too. She wasn’t just our group leader, she was one of the cleverest people in whole Family.

  Bella nodded. I thought I could see a tiny smile.

  ‘Alright, John. I’m tired and hungry. We all are. So we’ll eat now, and then afterwards you can come to my shelter for a proper talk about this. I want to know exactly what’s on your mind and I want your reassurance that you won’t show me up like that again. But we’ll talk later.’

  Presently Fox and Lucy Lu, who were organizing the cooking, handed round smoked fish and whitefruit and crushed starflowers and bits of muddy, chewy slinker, and we all began to eat together round our fire. And all around us, all over the camp, we could hear the sounds of other groups eating too. (People’s talking sounds different when they’re eating. It rises and falls in a different way. More gently, more steadily.) You never normally heard that sound coming from all over Family at the same time because one group would be sleeping, one getting up, one returning from a waking’s scavenging. The only time we experienced it was when an Any Virsry was on.

  Somewhere out over Peckhamway a leopard was singing to its prey.

  ‘What are you going to say to Bella in there?’ Gerry asked. ‘Are you going to tell her to stuff it, then, or what?’

  I looked at him, meaning to answer him but all the time listening to the lonely deadly sound of the leopard out there, and how it sounded alongside the friendly gentle sound of Family eating and talking all around. And I was thinking, thinking, thinking, about Family and about how things were. Before I’d even begun to think of an answer to Gerry’s question, I’d already forgotten it. In fact I’d completely forgotten he was there.

  Bella’s shelter was bigger than everyone else’s, and taller too, so that people could sit in there with her and have meetings. She had a pile of sleeping skins in the far right corner opposite the entrance hole, and more skins piled all round the edges for folk to sit on when she had meetings and talks. The shelter was built up against the warm trunk of a big whitelantern tree, and one branch of the whitelantern had been pulled down and held in place with ropes and rocks, so the branch was inside the shelter, with two or three lanterns usually shining at any one time. If she didn’t want light she’d cover over the lanterns with skins.

  She was squatting over on the sleeping skins when I came in, thin bony Bella, with her narrow hips and tiny breasts and her clever weary shadowy face.

  ‘You are a silly boy, John Redlantern,’ she told me, ‘and I’m going to have to shout at you for a bit.’

  I nodded.

  ‘Never, never speak out of turn at a meeting again, alright?’ she yelled. ‘Do you understand that, John? Do you understand? You’ve shamed me, you’ve shamed Redlantern, you’ve shamed yourself. And you’ve achieved nothing. Nothing at all. Do you really think Council’s view will be changed by a silly little newhair just because he got lucky with one bloody leopard out Cold Path way? Does that make you the big man of whole Family, do you think? Does that make you more important than your group leader or your Family Head? I don’t bloody think so, John. And don’t think I don’t know it was you and Tina Spiketree that started up that nasty laugh when Mitch forgot himself. Don’t imagine I didn’t notice that too.’

  The funny thing was that she was yelling at me, but it was like she was acting in one of those story-plays that people put on. Like the story of Angela’s Ring, when Angela loses the ring her mum and dad gave her, and she cries and screams and tells Tommy he’s worse than shit, and how she hates him and she hates Eden and she hates the kids and she wishes she was dead. Or like Hitler and Jesus, where Hitler yells at Jesus he’s going to kill all his group, the Juice, kill them like they were slinkers (‘Over my dead body!’ goes Jesus, and Hitler says, ‘It will be over your dead body, mate, because I’m going to nail you up to a hot spiketree till your skin’s all burned off.’) Often when people act these things you can see they’re not really in them. They might be shouting but their eyes aren’t angry like their mouths are. And it was like that now. We were in a story-play – Bella and me – and we didn’t have to pretend with our faces, only with our voices, because the play wasn’t for us really at all but for the rest of group who were outside listening and couldn’t see us.

  ‘Don’t speak out of turn again, John, alright?’

  ‘I’m sorry I shamed you.’

  ‘And if you want something said at Any Virsry, talk to me, not to whole Family without me even knowing about it, alright?’

  ‘Yes, Bella.’

  She looked at me, staring hard hard into my eyes, then she smiled her little tight smile and relaxed a little bit (as much as she ever relaxed) and nodded, as if to say: okay, the play was over now.

  ‘So why did you do it, John?’ she asked me in her normal voice, low enough so that no one outside would hear the words (not unless they came right up outside the shelter and put their ear to the bark, and no one would dare do that with whole group there to see them). ‘If you wanted it said why didn’t you talk to me about it?’

  ‘I only thought of it then and that’s the truth. It just came into my mind when Tom said that thing about how we’d given up School already and now we’d have to give up something else. Gela’s tits, I thought, what’s the point of that? Why can’t we see that there just isn’t enough in this valley for us?’

  Bella studied my face carefully. Then she nodded.

  ‘Actually, I agree with you, John,’ she finally said. ‘Something needs to give and we need to start preparing people for that. But you know there’s more to it than just yelling things out at Any Virsry. You’ve got to work round people, win them over, meet them halfway, do things gradually. That’s what Council is all about.’

  ‘So how many people in Council apart from you agree with me?’

  She considered this.

  ‘Not one. Not yet. But I’m working on people, John. I’m working towards the idea that we may nee
d to spread out a little.’

  ‘It’s not just a matter of spreading out a little. We’ve got to get past Snowy Dark.’

  Bella shook her head.

  ‘Right over the top of Dark? I can’t see it. I mean it’s a few wombs now since I was up by Dark, but I do know what it’s like up there. You think you’ve been there, John, but you haven’t. Furthest you’ve been to is up to the top of Cold Path. That’s barely the beginning of Snowy Dark. Barely the beginning. It’s so cold cold and so dark dark up beyond there that I don’t see any way we can ever get over it.’

  ‘Well, we’ll go down Exit Falls then.’

  ‘Oh John! Do you have any idea what that would be like? It might have been possible before the rockfall, but now the only gap is where the water drops down from Fall Pool between massive cliffs, down, down, down into darkness. And think of the weight of all that water. All the water from Greatpool, all the water from all the snowslugs that come down into forest from Snowy Dark.’

  ‘Suppose there’s another rockfall one waking that fills up the gap completely. Whole of Circle Valley could end up as one big pool. What will we do then?’

  ‘Well, we’ll just have to hope that doesn’t happen.’

  ‘Why just hope? Why not try and find a way out?’

  ‘No one could get across Dark.’

  ‘So Tommy and Angela and the Three could go up into sky from Earth and cross Starry Swirl and come down to Eden, but we can’t even hope to cross the lousy mountains?’

  Bella laughed.

  ‘Dearest John. You can’t do everything at once. At the moment Family isn’t even ready to spread itself out right here in Circle Valley, let alone try to cross Dark. Let’s work on spreading out a bit first, eh?’

  ‘How long will that take?’

  ‘I don’t know. Maybe in two three Any Virsries’ time we can talk about setting up a new group down the river a bit, or over by Lava Blob. Right now it isn’t even on the Genda. You’ve got to be patient about these things.’