‘That patient and we’ll all bloody starve.’
She smiled.
‘There’s a little time, I think, before that happens. You need to give people time. And you need to remember that, after all, everyone is concerned that we shouldn’t go against what Mother Angela taught us: to wait here and care for each other, until Earth comes back.’
I remembered the dream I’d had – the dream that everyone had – where the Veekle came down from sky and I was far away.
‘Yes, but she didn’t want us to starve, did she?’ I said stubbornly, driving my own fear away.
‘John, my dear, I do love you. And it might sound strange to say after I’ve told you off, but I’m proud of you too. Come over and sit with me.’
I moved over to sit next to her on her sleeping skin, tense tense because I knew what was coming next. She kissed my cheek. She ran her hands over me. She took my own hand and placed it between her legs. Older women would ask young guys for a slide and no one thought anything about it. But Bella didn’t do it like, say, that Martha London did it. She’d never had a baby and she wasn’t looking for one now. That wasn’t what it was about. In fact she didn’t really go for whole slip thing much at all, just a rub with fingers.
And the other thing that was different about what she did was that she only did it with me, a boy in her own group. That wasn’t the usual thing, not women with boys that they’d cared for since they were little. Women were allowed to do it with whoever they liked, of course, but that wasn’t the usual way it happened. Women did the mum thing with boys and they did the slip thing with boys, but they did them with different boys.
‘I’m tired and I’m tense, darling,’ she said, ‘and there’s such a hard waking ahead of me tomorrow in Council.’
Well, I loved Bella. She was good to me. Of all the grownups in Family, she was the one that really knew me. And I admired her too. She was clever, one of the cleverest in whole Family. But I didn’t like doing this and I wanted to stop. I just didn’t know how to get out of it. So I did what she asked of me while she held my arm and pressed my hand down exactly where she wanted it, so hard sometimes that it hurt me, shutting her eyes and screwing up her face as if it was hard hard work she was doing and not pleasure at all.
And I’ll tell you something: it was hard work for me, not just this time but every time. It was like her body was shut away in some tiny little place in middle of her shadow – her live happy body, long-lost, hidden under all her cares – and she needed me to let it out for her just for a moment, to release the tension for a moment of being squeezed away in there so she could relax and go to sleep. It was hard work. But at last she gave a little gasp, pressed my hand down extra hard and then released it and I knew she was done.
‘Thankyou, John, and now I need to sleep.’
I wasn’t happy. I wasn’t at ease. But I gave her a kiss on the cheek and emerged out of her shelter into group. People who’d been listening outside when she was shouting at me had moved onto other things now, like fixing shelters, or scraping skins, or playing chess. It was like they were doing the opposite of listening, like they were trying their best to notice everything else but the fact that my telling-off had taken a funny turn into something else. No one said anything. Jade, my mother, busied herself with scraping a skin so hard that it was like she was angry with it. Only my aunt Sue and her boys Gerry and Jeff looked at me kindly. Gerry got up and came towards me with a worried worried face but I signalled to him I wanted to be on my own.
And David glared over at me, his eyes like cold fire in his raw batface. He was refastening a new blackglass head onto the end of his best hunting spear, using resin glue and buck sinews. He thought he knew perfectly well what had happened with Bella in there and he hated me for it. He glared at me and then looked away and spat onto the ground beside him. I’d humiliated Bella and the entire group in front of Family but she’d still taken me into her shelter and slipped with me (or so he thought). He did whatever she asked of him and she left him outside, and didn’t seem to want to get close to him at all. It would be no good me telling him that I didn’t like what Bella did with me. No good at all. He was a batface, and batfaces always hated the way that oldmums would slip with the rest of us but not with them.
I went over to Spiketree but I didn’t get a welcome in Spiketree either. You wouldn’t believe that only a few wakings previously everyone was fussing over me and telling my how great I was for killing that leopard. Now it was ‘Here comes trouble’ and ‘Don’t think Tina’s coming out to play, John, because she’s in there talking to Liz.’ (Liz was the Spiketree leader: a fat, tetchy, self-important woman, not a patch on our Bella.) ‘Liz wants all our newhairs to stay in group till Any Virsry ends.’
So I went round the edge of Brooklyn towards Stream’s Join, trying to keep out of the way of other people. A bat looked down at me from a branch, a little jewel bat with its trembling wings spread out to cool, rubbing its wrinkly face with its little black hands.
Sometimes I hated Eden. Eden was all I knew, all my mother knew, all my grandmother knew, but sometimes I longed and longed for the bright light that shines on Earth – as bright everywhere as the inside of a whitelantern flower – and for the creatures that lived there, with red blood and four limbs and a single heart like us, and not the green-black blood and two hearts and six limbs of bats and leopards and birds and woollybucks. And sometimes I felt that if I ate another mouthful of greenish Eden meat I would vomit out my guts. And yet I’d never tried anything else, never would try anything else, unless I ate the meat of another human being. And no one in Eden had ever done that.
I crossed over the log bridge by Stream’s Join – in my head I was begging the shadows of Tommy and Angela to fix it for me that boring bloody old one-legged Jeffo wouldn’t be there on the path by Dixon Stream – and I headed up to Deep Pool, clambering down the rocks and diving straight into its warm warm water, down among those bright canyons of wavyweed with all those little shining fish darting away from me.
They said men shouldn’t slip with their sisters, or their mothers, or their daughters – they said that was bad bad slip – but then they told you that Harry did just that, slipping with his sisters, and then with their children, and how it was a good job he did, and that we should honour him for it, because if he hadn’t we wouldn’t be here. Yes, and really we were all brothers and sisters anyway. All of us, every one us, had the same mother and father, Tommy and Angela, so whenever any of us slipped together it was always bad slip in a way. And Bella might not be my mother, but she was my cousin, like everyone else in whole Family. And in a way she was my mother too because she looked out for me when I was little. She told me things. She listened to me. She was more of a mother to me than Jade, because Jade never wanted to be a mum. (She didn’t fancy staying behind in group with the littles and oldies and clawfeet.) So it was double bad slip me doing it with Bella, or letting her do it with me. It was bad bad, even if we didn’t do the full slip.
That’s what I was thinking while I swam up and down Deep Pool, swimming really hard, to wear myself down and to make the water wash over me and clean my skin. ‘It’s bad, it’s bad, it’s bad. I’m bad, I’m bad, I’m bad.’ Then I pulled myself out of the water onto the bank where Tina and I had sat. I pulled a whitelantern flower from a tree and turned it round in my hand: a shining sphere of whiteness, with just a little opening in it for the flutterbyes to go in and out. I held it up close to my eye and looked inside. A tiny flylet was crawling in there, surrounded on all sides by beautiful bright white light. There was no darkness in there. That little flylet didn’t have to see a black sky above, or dark trunks of trees. All it could see was light. Just thinking about it brought tears up into my eyes.
And then a strange feeling came over me, a feeling that this same thing had happened here before, long ago, but in this exact same place. Someone else had sat here beside Deep Pool and looked into a lanternflower and cried. And that someone, well, it was Gela
herself. I don’t mean bloody old Gela Oldest. I mean first Gela. I mean Angela Young, my great-great-grandmother, the mother of us all. She’d come here and sat in this exact place all on her own, so as to be where Tommy and the children wouldn’t find her. And she’d plucked a lanternflower and looked inside it, remembering her far-off world full of light and all the people in it. She’d cried and cried and cried until she had no tears left, and then she’d scrumpled the lanternflower and tossed it into the pool.
They say that Angela and Tommy didn’t get on so well. It’s said he got angry when he didn’t get his way. It’s said she was full of bitterness for what he’d done to her, because it was his fault she’d come to Eden, his fault and the fault of his friends Mehmet and Dixon. She’d never have come here at all of her own choice, and she’d never have been with a man like him either.
‘No wonder she cried,’ I said to myself.
But then I thought, Tom’s neck, what is this crap? I’m starting to talk like bloody Lucy Lu. Muttering to shadows. Communicating with the dead. How could I know what Angela felt? How could I know that she came to this same place? I’m just doing what everyone else does, wake-dreaming, playing with silly stories and pretending they’re true, grieving over bloody Earth, feeling sorry for myself because I can’t have everything given to me that I want.’
I scrumpled up the lanternflower and tossed it into the pool, just like she had.
‘Tom’s dick and Harry’s!’ I said out loud, after I’d splashed water on my face. ‘We’re in Eden. Maybe no one will ever come to take us back to Earth. And anyway that isn’t “back”, it wouldn’t be going back, because none of us has ever been there.’
‘You talking to yourself now, John?’ said Tina.
She’d crept down the rocks, quiet quiet as a tree fox. I didn’t know how long she’d been there or what she’d seen.
‘Shall we see if we can find some more oysters?’
‘Yeah okay, but don’t think we’re going to carry on with that slide we started, because we’re not. I’m not in the mood, okay?’
‘Because . . .?’
‘I don’t feel like that now.’
‘I went looking for you in Redlantern, and Gerry told me that Bella had you in her shelter and that everyone reckoned that . . .’
‘Just leave it, alright?’
For a moment she looked like she was going to get angry, but she saw something in my face that stopped her. She nodded and shrugged and gave me a little strained smile.
10
Gerry Redlantern
I felt sad sad. I felt scared. I felt sorry sorry for John. I felt sort of sorry for Bella too, sorry and angry all at once.
I liked things best when everyone was getting on with each other. I liked it when everyone thought that John was great. I liked it when I met people from other groups and they said John was brave brave or Bella was the best group leader in whole Family. And I hated it that John and Bella had upset people and made them angry. I think I hated it worse than I would have done if they were angry and upset with me. But I didn’t blame John or Bella for that. I knew that people who were stronger than me didn’t mind so much what other people thought. I knew they sometimes had other reasons for doing things that seemed important to them, even more important than being liked, even more important than being kind. In fact that was why I admired them: because they had something I didn’t have – a will of their own, I suppose. So I didn’t blame them, but I wished wished that everyone would go on liking John as much as I did, and go on saying what a great great group leader Bella was, and not whisper and hiss any more.
Secrets were another thing I hated; secrets and people not saying what they meant. Gela’s heart, it was hard enough to make sense of anything without all that!
‘Why’s no one talking?’ I whispered to Fox when John was in Bella’s shelter and everyone around had gone quiet quiet.
He winked and ruffled my hair like I was a little kid, then got up and moved away from me.
I went to my mum.
‘Is John’s slipping in there with Bella?’ I asked her. ‘Why is everyone so quiet?’
Sue squeezed my hand, but wouldn’t say anything.
Even Jeff wouldn’t talk about it.
And when at last he came out of Bella’s shelter, John didn’t want to talk to me either. He waved me away, walked off out of group, and didn’t come back until four five hours later when we were all sleeping or trying to sleep.
‘You okay, John?’ I whispered as he crawled into the shelter he shared with me and Jeff.
But he didn’t answer me, just crawled between his sleeping skins and lay still.
I didn’t sleep hardly at all before the next waking. It was always hard anyway when an Any Virsry put your sleeping and waking times back to front, but it was harder still when the world was all turned upside down. There was so much weird weird stuff going on. Everyone had thought John was great, but now whole Family was angry with him. Everyone in Family said Bella was the best group leader, but now even her own group were thinking thoughts about her so bad bad that they wouldn’t speak them aloud.
Yet both John and Bella seemed to have chosen this. They’d done things on purpose that they knew would cause upset. They were like smart smart people playing chess who suddenly throw away a queen and you can’t see the reason, but you know they must have done it on purpose, for some reason they’ve spotted three four moves away.
‘Are you going to try and speak out again, John?’ I whispered. ‘When Family comes back together in Circle Clearing, are you going to do it again?’
John didn’t answer, but Jeff whispered across to me from his side of shelter.
‘Let him sleep, Gerry. Let him sleep.’
Paaaaarp! Paaaarp! Paaaarp!
I was wide awake when they blew the horns for second waking of Any Virsry.
Paaaaarp! Paaaarp! Paaaarp!
I hated that noise all of a sudden. It was like everything that is bad about Family, like watching eyes, like tongues telling secrets and spreading stories in that way that people have, using words they don’t really mean so you have to try and guess.
Paaaaarp! Paaaarp! Paaaarp!
John sat up and rubbed his little beard with both hands, and yawned. He looked tired tired.
Paaaaarp! Paaaarp! Paaaarp!
Jeff was sitting up too now, rubbing his twisty feet and watching John with his eyes slightly narrowed. My little brother was another one like John, who played his own particular game and didn’t care what other people thought, and I guess that meant he could understand John in a way that I couldn’t. They were like chess players, and people like me were more like pieces on the board.
Paaaaarp! Paaaarp! Paaaarp!
We didn’t have to go to Circle Clearing, because Council always spent second waking of Any Virsry going through the Genda by itself, but the horns were to tell whole Family it had to get up and get on with doing stuff, and not fall back into our own group waking and sleeping times until Any Virsry was over.
We crawled outside our shelter, John first, then me, then Jeff. Old Roger and Bella and my mum Sue were toasting starflower stems and dried fish for everyone to eat.
‘Hello John,’ Bella called out, and I could see her trying to catch his eye so she could try and find out what was going on in his head.
But John took the food she gave him without looking at her face.
‘Hello, Gerry darling,’ said my mum Sue, giving me my food. ‘You look tired, my dear. All you newhairs are to go scavenging today. Don’t go more than an hour’s distance from here, okay? You’re going with John and Met again, plus Candice and Janny. Jeff will need to rest his feet this waking, so we’ll find him jobs to do back here in group.’
Paaaaarp! Paaaarp! Paaaarp!
Me, John, Met, Candice and Janny headed out Lava Blob way with spears, ropes, bags and a stone-headed club, looking for stuff to eat. All the time I was watching watching John to try and figure out what was going on inside him, but
it was no good: his face was still still like a mask.
Of course, with everyone staying near Family for Any Virsry, and everyone awake at the same time, we ran into other people much more than normal: grownups and newhairs and little kids from different groups, all scavenging together and disturbing each other’s prey. That’s one reason why groups don’t usually all keep the same wakings: so as not to get under each other’s feet all the time. But they were all out there now, Blueside, Batwing, London, Starflower . . . all the groups together, even the ones whose sleeps and wakings were the other way round to ours. And, when they saw John, a lot of them had things to say.
‘Rude little slinker,’ said a man about forty fifty wombs called Tom Fishcreek (poor bloke had clawfeet and a batface). ‘What you think you’re doing spoiling Any Virsry for everyone?’
Him and a couple of other Fishcreek men had hung up an old torn fishing net made of wavyweed string. The other two were up in a whitelantern tree and they’d tied threads to the legs of flutterbyes and were jerking them up and down to try and lure bats into the net.
‘Yeah,’ called down one of the others in the tree. ‘If you want to be rude to grownups, John Redlantern, stick to the ones in your own bloody group next time, alright? Leave the rest of us out of it.’
And he leaned out right over a whitelantern flower, so that its light shone up into his face, and then he spat down from the tree. John had to step out of the way to stop it from landing on his head.
I was angry angry.
‘Tom’s dick! You’d better . . .’
But John put his hand on my arm at once and shook his head to tell me to leave it, he didn’t want any fuss.
‘I’ll give you one thing, John,’ Janny said, as we moved on through the trees. ‘You’re a bloody idiot and you pissed Caroline off something rotten, but you really couldn’t have made Any Virsry any worse than it already is.’
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