She laughed. She was a batface like my mum and ugly as anything, but she was always cheerful cheerful.
Up ahead of us, two Blueside oldmums were kneeling in front of a small pond, their bony bums sticking up as they picked out pondsnails.
‘Carry on like that, John Redlantern, and you’ll break Oldest’s hearts,’ said one of them, called Lucy.
‘Worry too much about breaking old Mitch’s heart, and we’ll all starve,’ John told her. ‘Which would probably break his heart too, don’t you think?’
‘What do you know about things like that, you silly newhair?’ Lucy Blueside said. ‘You should hear yourself. You should hear what rubbish it sounds.’
‘He’s not talking rubbish,’ I said hotly. ‘This is my cousin John you’re talking about, the one that did for that leopard by himself. He’s smart smart, way way cleverer than you.’
The other woman, Mary, laughed angrily at that.
‘Harry’s dick, boy, look at him!’ she said. ‘Your precious cousin’s just a newhair kid that hasn’t even managed to grow a proper beard yet. Do you really think that doing for one old leopard means that he knows better than Caroline and all of Council, with all their wombs of experience?’
Our Janny laughed.
‘You’re wasting your breath, girls,’ she told the Blueside women. ‘John could say up was down and black was white and Gerry’d still stand up for him.’
‘More fool him,’ said Mary Blueside. ‘And by the way, what’s this I hear about young John there and B . . .’
‘So what is your suggestion as to how we’re going to feed ourselves when there are two three times as many of us?’ John interrupted her.
‘Like I said,’ said Mary Blueside stubbornly, ‘that’s for Caroline and Council to sort out, not the likes of you. Now if you’ll excuse us, some of us are trying to find some food for our group right now.’
‘Yeah, I can see that,’ John sneered. ‘Pondsnails. So tell me honestly, did you ever think of eating pondsnails when you were kids?’
‘What I did when I was a kid is none of your business, newhair!’
‘Yes,’ I broke in, ‘but John means that . . .’
‘Leave it, Gerry, leave it,’ said John in a tired tired voice, and he walked on again, leaving the rest of us to catch up with him.
‘So are we actually going to do some scavenging ourselves?’ asked Candice. She was pretty pretty, but she was always finding fault with everything, and I was a bit scared of her sharp tongue. ‘Or are we just going to wait around while John has his own personal Any Virsry out here?’
‘Yeah,’ said big slow Met. ‘I don’t like having all these people moan at us. It wasn’t us that spoke out in Circle. It’s not our fault.’
I felt sorry for John, with everyone complaining about him. And I kept remembering how he’d looked when he came out from Bella’s shelter last night: lonely lonely, and waving me away so he could stay alone.
But not everyone moaned at him. Once we came upon a group of newhairs from Brooklyn – Mike, Dixon, Gela and Clare – and they were full of praise for him.
‘Good for you, John. Why shouldn’t we newhairs have a say if we want one?’ Mike Brooklyn said. ‘We have to scavenge and hunt like grownups, we have to help look after littles and oldies, so why can’t we have a say as well?’
‘Yeah, what you said was right, John,’ Dix Brooklyn said. ‘It’s all fine fine for Oldest to say we should keep everything like it’s always been but they’ll be dead soon. We’ve got to think about how it’s going to be when we’re grownups and Family’s bigger.’
‘So how big will Family be when we’re old then, John?’ asked Gela Brooklyn, and it wasn’t in a sneering way to make fun of John, but because she really wanted him to explain.
That made me pleased pleased for John.
‘You mean when we’ve had kids and our kids have had kids?’ John said. ‘Well, it’ll be thousands, won’t it? Think about it. There were just two people here once, one hundred and sixty-three years ago, and now we’re five hundred and thirty-two. That’s – what? – more than two hundred times what it was. And in another hundred and sixty years . . .’
‘What? Will it be two hundred times what it is now?’ Gela laughed nervously. ‘Tom’s neck, I don’t even know the name of that number.’
‘It would be,’ said John. ‘Except that most people would starve before then.’
He was about the only newhair I knew who ever thought about anything except what was happening for them now. And that was what was good about John, and why I stuck by him, but it was also what was scary about him, and about people like him. He would take risks and he would do things that would make people turn against him, if he thought that would work out best in the long run. I just didn’t have that in me.
But I did have it in me to follow someone no matter what.
11
John Redlantern
After we’d spoken to those Brooklyn newhairs, we spread out a bit and started looking properly for stuff to eat. There wasn’t much to find, what with all of Family milling around, and all we got was a few lousy little bats and some dirty scraps of stumpcandy – but after about four five hours Candice spotted a little stonebuck grazing in a clump of starflowers. She knew better than to go straight in after it because, once it spotted us, it could run two three times as fast as any of us – we’ve only got two legs, it has six – but she crept back to rest of us and signed to us with her hands where it was so we could spread out around it. I was crawling slowly through the flickering starflowers when I put my hand on what I thought was a funny shaped stone. But when I glanced down at it I could see straight away that it wasn’t a stone at all. It was a ring, like the rings some people carve out of wood and polish up with buckfat to put on their fingers.
But this one wasn’t made of wood, it was hard and smooth, and it reflected the light of the flowers like water does. I knew then it was made of metal, that hard smooth shiny stuff that comes from Earth. (It was said you could find it in Eden too, hidden in the rocks, mixed up with the rock in some way, but no one knew where to look.) And if it was made of metal, it must have belonged to one of the First Five, to Angela or Tommy or one of the Three Companions.
And then I had a thought that sent a chill going right through me and made my head spin.
Tom’s dick! This could be the ring, the Lost Ring, Angela’s ring that they sometimes do that play about! It could be that actual one.
Anyway, whether it was that ring or another one, it was a Memento, and if I told anyone about it, they’d make me hand it over to Oldest to keep with the other Mementoes – the Boots, the Belt, the Backpack, the Sky-Boat Models, the Earth Models, the plastic Kee Board with its rows of squares with letters, and the blank square that once showed pictures that could move and talk . . .
Bam! The stonebuck bowled straight into me, knocking all the wind out of me and sending me flying, back onto a big ant’s nest.
All the others laughed.
‘He kills a bloody leopard,’ Janny teased me, ‘and then he doesn’t notice a stonebuck when it comes right at him.’
‘You idiot, John,’ said Candice. ‘That would have been a good waking’s kill for us. What in Harry’s name did you think you were doing?’
I stood up, hastily brushing off angry ants with their bodies flashing red in warning that they planned to sting. I felt a fool, but I could have completely explained myself and satisfied all of them – even miserable Candice – if I’d only shown them the ring. It was a find that Family would value more highly than ten stonebucks, and any one of the others would have admitted straight away that they’d have been just as distracted from the hunt as I’d been if they’d been the one that found it.
I would have liked to show it to them too. I didn’t want them to think of me as a wake-dreamer, or as someone that didn’t pay attention in a hunt: it wasn’t the idea of me I wanted people to have, and it wasn’t true either. But you’ve got to think about where yo
u are trying to get to in the future, that was my rule, that was my leopard rule, not just try and make things easy and comfortable right now, and I decided in that moment that it would be better not to show the ring to anyone just now. So I closed my hand around it – it had a lovely smooth cool feeling – and I smiled and shrugged and said nothing. I had sewed a little pocket on the edge of my waistwrap as a place to put small useful things like bits of blackglass and stumpcandy and whitelantern seeds, and I slipped the ring in there when no one was watching me, and kept quiet, and we carried on hunting and scavenging.
‘You’ve gone all weird since that leopard, I reckon,’ Candice said. ‘I mean, speaking out in Any Virsry, talking about going across Snowy Dark, what was that really all about? Don’t give me all that about not enough food, and Exit Falls and all that. That’s not for us to sort out, and you know it. I reckon you just like the attention.’
‘He’s been weird since he’s been slipping that Tina Spiketree, you ask me,’ Janny said.
Met looked at me. Gerry looked at me. Was I really going to let these two girls take the piss out of me like this? But I didn’t say anything. We walked on. Pretty soon we came across David, who was out with Fox. He had just killed a stonebuck with his long blackglass-tipped spear and was looking mighty pleased about it.
‘Hey, that was my buck!’ exclaimed Candice. ‘I spotted that and we would have killed it too if John had just been paying attention.’
David gave a bark of laughter and repeated the old saying: ‘It’s not your buck unless your spear’s in it.’
He looked at me.
‘Not paying attention, eh, John? Too much slip if you ask me. Slip with Martha London, slip with Tina Spiketree, slip with bloody Bella Redlantern herself. This boy must think that’s all he’s here for, making juice for women. Juicy John, that’s what we should call him. Juice is all he’s bloody good for.’
There was so much hate and envy in his ugly bitter batface. I remembered how he’d looked when I crawled out of Bella’s shelter and I thought to myself that, if he could have driven his spear into me now as he’d just driven it into that stonebuck, if he could have done it without being blamed for it, well, he could have done. He would have done it gladly.
On Earth that had sometimes happened, the stories said. One human being would sometimes do for another like we did for bucks and slinkers. In fact sometimes whole groups would turn on one another like when Hitler and the Jar Men turned on the Juice. It was said it had happened there because Family on Earth had split apart, with groups moving away from one another and acting like each one was a Family on its own. It was even said that the White people had once taken the London people – whose skins were black like Angela’s – and tied them up with ropes and traded with them like we in Family traded blackglass and buckskins and leopards’ teeth between the groups. (That was history, and it was one of the things that kids used to learn when we had a School.)
And when I saw that look on David’s face and saw what it was that he would like to do to me, I had a glimpse of what would happen to us if Family was broken apart. I had an image come into my mind of a big old tree being pulled down, a big old tree that gave warmth and light and fruit and bark for shelters, and I saw the deadly scalding sap that comes spurting up from Underworld when the trunk first breaks.
‘Making juice for women that should know better than go with a silly boy who’s got nothing to him but a pretty face,’ David said. ‘That, and trying to break up Family, that’s all John here is good for. Oh, and getting big ideas just because he was lucky enough to have some leopard run right onto his spear.’
He gave me a horrible smile.
‘Tell the truth, Johnny boy. You didn’t plan that at all, did you? You didn’t plan to do for the leopard. You were just so bloody scared you were frozen to the spot.’
Gerry stood up for me at once.
‘That’s crap, David. He could easily have run like I did, but he . . .’
Paaaaarp! Paaaarp! Paaaarp!
David broke off. We all broke off the ugly little play we were acting out to listen to the horns from over Circle Clearing. They weren’t calling us back to Circle, just telling us that the Council had finished the Genda and that we should finish what we were doing soon and go back to our groups and eat and sleep.
‘I’ll be watching you, John,’ David told me, ‘when Any Virsry starts again, so don’t try any more of your tricks.’
His speech was always a bit spluttery, like all batfaces’ speech, but his anger and his hate made it even more so. He was spitting his words out like they were poison. I had to wipe them off my face.
‘And don’t think you can get away with whatever you want just because you’re Bella’s little darling and her little slip-buddy, because you won’t. She may be group leader but that doesn’t mean the rest of group will go along with whatever she wants, nor the rest of Family. And anyway a waking will come soon when she sees through you too. Slippy might make people go silly and lovey-dovey, but lovey-dovey doesn’t last forever, Johnny boy. It doesn’t last long at all.’
Met had his stupid mouth wide open. Gerry had tears in his eyes. Candice looked sour. Janny looked like she was trying to see the funny side but couldn’t.
David pulled his spear out of the dead buck and transferred it to his left hand. Then with his right he took the animal’s back feet and slung the warm carcase over his muscly shoulder in one single move.
‘Anyway,’ he said, ‘if you’ll excuse me, I must be going. I’ve got some food to take back.’
‘Looks like you’ve met your match, Mr Leopard Killer!’ said Janny when he was out of hearing.
I shrugged. David scared me, it’s true, and I was scared by the thought of whole Family turning against me, with Bella no longer able to protect me. But David hadn’t told me anything I didn’t already know.
‘We’ll see about that,’ I said. ‘The play’s not finished yet.’
We went back to Redlantern with our scraps of food, and we accepted our small share of David’s buck. He smirked at us as we laid out our sorry little haul of bats and grubby stumpcandy.
Bella looked strained and distant. She wasn’t supposed to tell us what she’d been talking about in Council until we were all together again in Any Virsry, but there was more to her distantness than that. She avoided my eye and slipped off early to her shelter, after ordering us all to stay in group for that sleep and not go wandering.
But I went to the group latrines that we’d dug in middle of a clump of starflowers and I took out the ring from the pocket at the edge of my wrap and I held it up close to a flower.
It felt smooth smooth, but it wasn’t just smooth. On the outside was a little wavy line that ran right round it where the metal was a different colour, and on the inside, Gela’s heart, there was tiny tiny writing. Not many newhairs could read, but Bella had taught me the letter sounds and I knew how to put them together to make words. I could read a lot of the old names and words that were carved onto the trees round Family. And I could certainly read the name inside the ring, written in tiny tiny letters with a neatness no one in Eden, scratching on trees or stones or bits of bark, could ever hope to equal, and no one over about thirty forty wombs, with their fading eyes, could ever hope to read. It was just about the best-known name in all of Family.
‘To Angela,’ it said, ‘with love from Mum and Dad.’
Well, there have been lots of Angelas – or Gelas or Angies as they usually get called – but this could only be the Angela that came here at the beginning. This was her ring. It really was the same one they told the story about, the ring her mother and father gave her back on Earth, the one she lost in forest when she was looking for stumpcandy and could never find again.
Another shiver went through me, right through my body and my mind, almost like when you’re having a slip and you come. It was one of those moments when you wonder whether there is some kind of big misunderstanding and really this is all just a dream or a made-up
story, and not the real world like you thought it was. It was strange strange to hold that same ring in my hand, and to know for certain that one part of the True Story really really was true. It was weird weird to be connected to that story myself, to be the ending of it in a way, to be the one in Family who finally found Angela’s ring for her. It was even stranger that it happened so soon after that weird feeling I’d had when I was by myself up by Deep Pool, and I’d felt that our mother Angela had been there too.
Michael’s names! Lucy Lu would have loved this if it had happened to her. We’d never have heard the last of it! It was like Angela’s shadow really was here somehow, following me around. It was like she wouldn’t let me go.
Squatting down there among the starflowers, pretending to be taking a crap, I went through the story in my head. How Gela lost the ring. How she screamed out to Tommy and the kids for help. There were no other people in the world then but Tommy and Gela and their kids. She screamed at them to come and help her, she screamed and screamed like she hated them all, demanding that they crawl round on forest floor for hours and hours, waking after waking, looking for the missing ring that her mum and her dad had given her.
‘It’s only a ring,’ Tommy says to her. ‘It’s just a thing, really, isn’t it? Like a stone or a bit of wood. You’ve still got us, honey. You’ve still got me and the kids.’
‘I don’t want your bloody kids,’ she says, ‘and I certainly don’t want you, you selfish shallow worthless man. I want my mum. I want my dad. I want my home that you stole from me.’
And then she cried and cried and cried, it’s said for nine whole sleeps and nine whole wakings, while the kids blocked their ears and made silly noises with their mouths to shut out the cruel things she said, and the sad sad thoughts in their heads. Until that waking, the story says, the mother of us all had been warm and kind and a source of strength. But after it, she didn’t smile for a whole womb and she never again spoke to Tommy with any love in her voice: never ever again.
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