Dark Eden

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.’

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.