Dark Eden

by Chris Beckett

  ‘I don’t wish to hear, do you understand?’

  ‘I did it because I . . .’

  Well, Caroline stepped right up to him and slapped him across the face so hard that he nearly fell over. You could see that she’d hurt her hand as well.

  ‘Those stones were laid here by your great-great-grandparents,’ she hissed into his face, ‘laid here to mark the special place where our Family arrived in this world, and the place we’re to wait for Earth to return. We’ve honoured them and kept them safe and clean for six generations, the special stones that Tommy and Angela chose and touched with their own hands and laid out in the exact spots where they’ve been ever since. And you, at twenty wombs old, you arrogant sneaky little tubeslinker’ (her voice went all ugly and twisted and choked up when she said that), ‘you think you know better than everyone else alive or everyone who’s ever lived.’

  ‘Don’t be too hard on him, Caroline,’ muttered Bella behind her. ‘Remember he’s only a kid.’

  ‘Only a kid?’ called out David Redlantern, striding out from the crowd into the clearing.

  Oh boy, what an ugly, evil brute he was with his thick short limbs and his red batface always oozing, always quivering. Not that all batfaces are like him. My own sister Jane was a batface, and she was as sweet-natured as anyone could be, but David, he was cruel and cold and hard, and his batface just made him seem crueller and colder and harder still.

  ‘Only a kid, you say, Bella,’ he sneered in his spluttery voice, ‘but that didn’t stop you from getting him to slip with you in your shelter, did it? It didn’t stop you having a little slide with him on the exact same waking he insulted Council here in front of whole Family. We thought you were calling him in to tell him off, but no, you got him in and slipped with him, with whole group awake all around you. We knew what was going on. We heard the silence. We heard your breathing getting fast. We heard you gasp. What kind of group leader is that?’

  ‘Is this true, Bella?’ demanded Caroline, turning round.

  Bella’s head was hanging down.

  ‘We didn’t slip but we did, well, touch. I did tell him off but I wanted him to know also that he was valued and that his concern was . . .’

  ‘What nonsense,’ Caroline said, and we’d never in our lives heard Head of Family talking to a group leader like that. ‘I’ve never heard such total garbage. We’ll need to reconsider the leadership of Redlantern, because you obviously aren’t fit to lead anything. But we’ll sort that out later. For the moment . . .’ She turned back to John. ‘For the moment the business of Strornry is this. How do we deal with this selfish, stupid, arrogant little slinker of a boy, who has defiled the memory of Mother Angela and of Father Tommy and of the Three Companions? How do we deal with a silly boy who has deliberately broken something that was precious to every single one of us?’

  ‘Hang him up from a spiketree like we hang a buckskin out to dry,’ said David. ‘Spike him up to burn, like Hitler did to Jesus.’

  He gave a hard laugh.

  ‘They say Jesus was the leader of the Juice,’ he said. ‘Which sort of fits when you think about it, because juice is about the only thing old Juicy Johnny here has ever been good for.’

  There were a few cold little titters of laughter, but Caroline told him off.

  ‘This isn’t a time for jokes,’ she said.

  ‘I’m not joking,’ David said. ‘Spike him up.’

  And he stayed there, out in the open space on his own, standing with his muscly arms folded and his thick stumpy legs apart. He wasn’t a group leader. He didn’t really have any more right to speak out than John did, other than the fact that he was a grownup. But he didn’t go back to the edge of the clearing with everyone else, and Caroline didn’t tell him to. She just turned her attention away from him, like she couldn’t face another fight.

  And the thought came to me – well, I didn’t properly think it through, but I sort of glimpsed it in my head – the thought came to me that up to now it had been the women in Eden that ran things and decided how things would be, but now a time was coming when it would be the men. Some of them might be good men and some would be bad like David. But it would be men rather than women for the next bit. Something had changed, and it would never be how it was before.

  ‘We need to discuss this,’ Caroline said. ‘Let’s decide who ought to speak first.’

  ‘How about his mother?’ murmured Candy Fishcreek.

  ‘Yes,’ agreed Caroline, scanning the crowd surrounding her, out round the edge of this stuffy little cave of cloud. ‘His mother. Jade Redlantern. Where are you, Jade?’

  A rustling came from the place where most of the Redlantern people were standing, and you could see which one was Jade because hers was the only face that was still looking forward.

  ‘I’m here,’ she said in a small wavery voice.

  And it was an odd thing. Jade wasn’t just pretty, she was a great beauty. She knew how to stand and how to hold herself and how to move herself, so as to command envy and desire and love. If men spoke or came up to her – and women too – she could dismiss them, or tease them, or give them their heart’s desire just by the way she moved her face and her body. But now she was lost, she had no idea how to speak or to compose herself. It sounds harsh but what she reminded me of was a whitelantern fruit that looks all ripe and lovely till you turn it round and you see the hole where the ants have got into and hollowed it out inside.

  ‘Well, um, he’s not all bad, John isn’t . . .’ she began.

  It was like she was talking about someone she didn’t even know that well.

  I looked at John. He was watching her. You couldn’t read the expression on his face, but his eyes were sort of hard and shiny. Not shiny with tears but with something like the opposite of tears, I thought, though I suppose it didn’t make a lot of sense.

  ‘ . . . but it’s a bad thing he’s done,’ Jade said lamely, and she sort of made a face, like it really wasn’t all that much to do with her, and didn’t say anything else.

  ‘Can I speak, Caroline?’ said Bella Redlantern.

  Caroline turned round to her.

  ‘Go on,’ she said coldly.

  ‘I didn’t know what he was going to do, and I haven’t talked to him about it,’ she said, ‘but he’s a boy who feels passionately about things, feels passionately about the future of Family especially. I don’t really understand why he did this, but he will have done it because he thought it would help.’

  ‘Help?’ asked Caroline. ‘Help?’

  She looked around at us all, making an incredulous face, trying to get a reaction out of us. Some people tittered, some shouted out ‘Shame on you Bella! Shame!’, which was just what Caroline wanted.

  ‘I may be getting too old for this,’ Caroline said, ‘I may be missing something obvious. But if you take something that is dear and precious to other people and calmly destroy it, how can you call that helping them?’

  She didn’t wait for an answer.

  ‘Who else wants to comment?’

  ‘Make him put Circle back again!’ called out a fat dim woman called Gela Blueside.

  ‘But it can never be what it was!’ Caroline said. ‘Think about it. We could make another circle. We could use a rope to measure it out and make something that looked pretty much the same. And I daresay that is what we’ll do. But it’ll never again be the stones that Angela and Tommy chose, never the stones they laid in place with their own hands.’

  Gela Blueside began to cry like she’d been scolded.

  ‘And I’ll tell you something,’ Caroline went on. ‘If and when we do restore that Circle, no way will this wicked boy have the honour of coming anywhere near it.’

  ‘Do like David said,’ called a big dark gloomy Starflower man called Harry. ‘Spike him up. Like Hitler did to Jesus. That will repay Mother Angela for the hurt that’s been done her. Otherwise we’ll all bear the burden of it, on and on and on.’

  ‘Yeah, that’s right,’ called out a sha
rp little woman called Lucy Fishcreek. ‘If he doesn’t pay the price for it, we all will. Us and our children and our children’s children too.’

  ‘That’s true,’ said Julie the London leader, with the authority of Council in her voice, ‘that’s true true. He’s shamed all of us, not just himself.’

  ‘Angela is crying,’ wailed that horrible wet-eyed Lucy Lu from Redlantern. ‘Angela is crying out for our help.’

  Harry’s dick, I thought, it could really happen. They really could spike John up like Jesus.

  But Candy, the Fishcreek group leader, whispered: ‘Remember the Laws, remember the Laws on the trees. We mustn’t kill.’

  Caroline nodded.

  ‘Who else that knows him wants to speak? He’s got no brothers or sisters, has he? How about his cousins?’

  Gerry stood up. Poor kid. He was white white as anything but he wanted desperately to do right by his hero John.

  ‘John’s brave, don’t forget. He does stuff no one dares to do. Remember how he did for that leopard!’

  Tears came from his eyes. How brilliant everything had seemed to him back then, when he’d been the one to witness John do for the leopard. How happy he’d been for John when whole Family praised him.

  ‘He’s braver than just about everyone in Family,’ Gerry said. ‘Maybe the bravest one of all.’

  He looked round at his little brother, weird little clawfooted Jeff, who was younger than him, yet in a way much older. I think Gerry was hoping Jeff would think of better arguments than he could. And Jeff did speak, but all he would say was that weird phrase he came up with at the weirdest times, for no obvious reason at all.

  ‘We are here,’ he said. ‘We really are here.’

  Some people laughed, some yelled out that if he wasn’t going to talk sense, he should shut up his bloody gob.

  ‘He means this isn’t a dream,’ Gerry tried to explain. ‘He means that this isn’t just some kind of story.’

  ‘You don’t say!’ someone called out sarcastically. ‘I never would have known that.’

  But it was like a dream, in that gaping space, with the mist shutting us away from forest and from sky. It was like an evil dream. Either that, or everything else had turned out to be a dream and the only true thing in the world was this: Family, our miserable, bitter, lonely Family, full of stupid people, full of hateful, disappointed people, full of sour people, full of ignorant people who never thought anything through for themselves.

  ‘Why don’t you let John speak!’ I called out.

  David turned on me. He was still out in front there, like he was another centre, separate and apart from Caroline and Council. Hateful hateful man, I’d often seen him secretly looking at me, longingly, knowing quite well that I’d never let him near me. But now he felt power on his side.

  ‘Oh-ho! I wondered when his little slippy girl would speak!’

  ‘Bella is right,’ I said. ‘He did it for a reason and you ought to hear what he has to say.’

  Caroline frowned.

  ‘Why should we let him tell us his silly ideas, just because he’s done something wrong?’

  But she was wavering and several people in the crowd called out.

  ‘Yeah, let him have his say.’

  ‘It’s only fair.’

  Caroline nodded.

  ‘Alright then, John. You have two minutes.’

  And she turned and looked at Secret Ree, who nodded and laid down the bark that she’d been scribbling on, and put her finger on her own wrist to count out one hundred and twenty pulses.

  ‘You said I’ve offended Mother Angela,’ John said. ‘But I don’t think I have. She wanted the best for all of us, it’s true. But we all know that she sometimes felt trapped and stifled here and longed to break out. Remember the story of Angela and the Ring? Remember how she cried for nine whole sleeps and nine whole wakings? Remember how she said she hated Eden, and even hated her own . . . ?’

  ‘You’re calling Angela to your defence?’ interrupted Caroline, furious. ‘How dare you? If Angela cried for nine wakings when she lost a ring, think how she’d be crying now!’

  ‘She is crying,’ wailed Lucy Lu, in that fake dreamy voice of hers. ‘She’s crying like she’s never cried before.’

  ‘You said you’d give him two minutes,’ I yelled.

  ‘What I mean is this,’ said John. ‘Angela told us to wait by the stones because she didn’t know how long it would be before Earth came back. But she wouldn’t have wanted Family to stay huddled up in this little place for all this time, using up all the food, getting tired and bored, starting to hate one another. She’d have wanted us to find new places, new air, spread out, explore, make the best of things. That’s why . . .’

  ‘Two minutes is up!’ snapped Caroline briskly, though I could see that Secret Ree was still counting. ‘You’ve had your say and Council has heard enough evidence. Council will consider its decision. Except you, Bella, you can go back to your people over there.’

  So Bella had the shame of crossing the clearing to where the Redlantern people were, and squatting down among them as an ordinary person, while Council huddled together without her and conferred in whispers. It was like we were watching some kind of play, bunched up together under the trees. There was Council in the centre; there was John standing just out from the centre on his own, his face pale and blank, not looking at anyone; and then, to one side, and a bit further out, there was David, arms still crossed, legs still apart, scanning the crowd with hard hard eyes, as if he was checking each one of us out to see who was with him and who wasn’t.

  Pretty soon the huddle broke up. Caroline stepped away from the rest of Council.

  ‘We’ve made our decision,’ she said. ‘We’re all agreed. John Redlantern can’t stay in Family. He must leave within two hours. After that he won’t be part of Family any more. The Laws won’t apply to him, and if he’s found near here, he can be treated as we’d treat a troublesome animal. Like a tree fox or a slinker.’

  Then she looked around the crowd, searching for people that she knew had a connection with John – Gerry, Jeff, Bella, Jade, me.

  ‘And listen carefully to this. Redlantern group can give him whatever it wants to let him take with him, but after he’s left, no one is to give him anything any more – no food, no blackglass, no buckskins, nothing – and no one is to talk to him or look for him or spend time with him, or they too will be thrown out of Family.’

  She gave a firm little nod and a little sideways glance at John.

  ‘That’s our decision about John Redlantern. And that’s the end of Strornry.’

  17

  Sue Redlantern

  We made our way back through the fug to Redlantern clearing. It was a dreadful time, a time that was neither waking nor sleeping, neither real nor a dream, and it seemed as if it could never reach an end, but only sink downwards deeper and deeper into itself, until it swallowed up all memory of happiness, or fun, or anything else except this fuggy nothingness. We were exhausted and hopeless. Sweat and rain ran down our faces and we were too tired to wipe it off. Out of all of Redlantern group, only David seemed untouched by the misery, just as he’d been untouched by fun and happiness in the past. While we crept back with our shoulders hunched, he strode along beside us with a satisfied look that was almost a smile. But even David knew to keep his mouth shut, and hardly anyone else spoke at all, though many wept silently, including me. Even the littlest of littles must have understood that our safe familiar world had been torn in two. And some of them cried, and some were beyond crying.

  We had no leader to guide us. Bella normally got hold of any problem that faced our group and helped us see what we had to do – ‘This is the thing we need to concentrate on; this is what we need to do first; these are the questions we need to answer . . .’ – but now she walked silently among us, looking at no one. Old Roger wrung his hands together. Fox and the other young men and women trudged along in a little group of their own.

  John him
self was in a daze. Jade, my sister, trailed along on one side of him and a little behind, but as ever she had no idea what to say to him, or how to approach the business of being his mum. My Gerry walked on his other side, weeping and pestering him with questions.

  ‘What are you going to do, John? Where are you going to go? I don’t want you to go. Haven’t you got a plan?’

  And my boy Jeff, the sharpest and gentlest of us all, walked silently next to me, watching everything.

  We ran into our shelters and felt inside our skin bags and storage logs for things for John to take with him: blackglass, spearheads, rope, skins, a net, some dried meat. There was no one else taking charge so I did my best to organize things, keeping an eye on Gerry all the time to make sure he left John alone and didn’t pester him when he needed to be able to think.

  ‘Let him be, Gerry. He knows you love him, but he can’t look after you as well as himself just now . . . Come on, Roger, you can spare him a couple of decent spearheads, for Gela’s sake . . . Tom, can you see if there’s some more string over there that he could take? Janny dear, I know you’re sad, but can you just wrap up that meat in a clean bit of skin?’

  Meanwhile my pretty sister Jade stood helplessly and watched as we brought things to her son and he bundled them up together, as if she was waiting for instructions on how a mother should behave.

  We said goodbye to him. Gerry hugged him. Jeff hugged him. Old Roger hugged him. I hugged him and told him to take care and be patient and not do anything else that would cause upset to Family. And meanwhile, I said, we’d work on Council to change its ruling, and let him come back again. After all, Council were the ones who kept telling us we had to keep whole Family together.

  ‘It won’t go on forever, John,’ I told him. ‘You’ve upset everyone badly badly, but when people have calmed down a bit, we can look at it all again, and try and find another way through.’

  He didn’t anwer me. He didn’t speak at all. He shouldered his bundle, picked up the fire-bark with its smouldering embers, turned and and nodded to us, and then set off along a little path that went between Batwing and Fishcreek clearings and out into forest. (He didn’t want to have to walk through someone else’s group area.)