Dark Eden

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 himself 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 answer 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.)

‘Take care, John,’ I called after him. ‘And don’t give up. We’ll sort something out.’

He stopped, turned one more time and raised one hand in a little half-wave, and then carried on.

Suddenly Bella screamed.

She’d been hiding in her shelter all this time while we’d been getting things ready for him, and no one had noticed her come out.

‘John!’ she cried out, ‘John! Wait for me!’

She ran after him, sobbing, and grabbed hold of his arm, begging him to let her go with him.

‘Don’t leave me, my sweet boy! Don’t leave me!’

No one had ever seen her like that, her of all people. For not only in Redlantern but all across Family, we relied on her to be one of those that keep calm and sensible and in control when other folk were getting upset.

‘I don’t want to lose you, John, my darling,’ she wailed, with tears pouring down her face. ‘I want to go on caring for you, my baby. This is all my fault.’

John didn’t say anything. He was pale, he was sunk into himself and, though he submitted himself to her clinging kisses, his face was turned away from her to the path ahead, as if he was simply waiting for the moment when this distraction was removed from him and he could continue on his way.

‘John, my sweetheart,’ Bella tried again, pawing at him, running her hand down his chest and his belly, like she was his lover and they were about to have a slip, ‘John, my dear sweet darling. I love you. I love you better than if you were my own child. I love you better than if you were my man. Let me come and look after you, my darling. Let me come with you and hold you and keep you warm.’

None of us really knew what to do, or what to think. She never talked like that. She was always sensible sensible. She was always reasonable and restrained. But when I went after her, and took her hands and tried gently to release her grip on John, she just shook me angrily away.

‘Let me come and look after you,’ she pleaded with him. ‘Please, John. Please, my pretty darling. Please!’

She kissed him again, and then rubbed her hand against the front of his wrap, like she was trying to make him hard.

He flinched and pushed her hand away.

‘No, Bella,’ I said, ‘that’s not fair. That’s not helping. Try and think of John and the position he’s in.’

‘I am thinking of John. No one thinks of him more than me. He knows that. I love him better than his own mum. What has Jade ever done for this boy of hers, that cold leopard-woman with her sweet empty song?’

‘Leave me alone, Bella, alright?’ muttered John. ‘I don’t need this. Just leave me alone.’

He said it two three times, and I backed him up as best I could.

‘He needs to go, Bella,’ I told her. ‘Let him be. He knows you love him. He does know.’

‘Let the lad deal with this, Bella my dear,’ said Old Roger, who’d come after me to help.

‘Let him be, Bella,’ called out Jade who’d come up behind Roger.

‘I don’t want this, Bella,’ John repeated, glancing down at her, and then looking away from all of us again at the path through the lanterntrees up ahead.

‘You don’t . . .?’

Suddenly Bella understood. She let go of him. She stood back. For a moment she looked like she’d seen one of the Shadow People. Then she let fly a dreadful scream that they must have heard all over Family right up to Blueside, and flung herself to the ground, which was sodden wet from all that fuggy rain like it was soaked in tears, and writhed about in the mud till she was covered all over with it.

No one in Redlantern knew what to do about her. But we did know that, right at that moment, John was the one we needed to concentrate on because he was the one that had to go. So all of us just sort of moved away from our old leader, and carried on with the business of saying goodbye to John.

‘Go on, John. We’ll sort this out. You get on your way, and remember that we’ll be working to get you back here as soon as we can.’

John nodded, gripped his bark of embers against his chest and walked on without another word to anyone.

But Jade, who of all people you’d think would want to concentrate on John, went over to Bella and squatted down beside her and comforted her. She’d finally found something useful she could do.

When John was out of sight, all of us except Jade and Bella walked back into the space round the fire between our shelters, where David was sitting on a log, fixing a leopard tooth spearhead on a shaft with strips of dried buck gut, and making a big show of being busy. I noticed that Met, that lump of a boy, went over and sat by him. And near them, with her eyes rolled upwards to the grey-black fuggy sky, sat Lucy Lu.

‘We’ll need a new leader, I suppose,’ I said. ‘A new leader to help sort out this mess.’

David snorted.

‘And preferably one that doesn’t slip with her own newhairs.’

‘I want to go after him, mum,’ sobbed Gerry. ‘He’s not just my cousin. He’s my best friend. They can’t expect him to be all alone forever.’

‘It won’t help him if you do,’ I said. ‘That will just confirm that he’s a bad influence on newhairs. Leave him be, and maybe we’ll be able to find a way of persuading Family to let him back, once things have calmed down.’

David looked up.

‘What? Have him back? Are you nuts? Do you really think we’re going to let him destroy our Circle, hurt whole Family, shame his own group, and then let him back in again with nothing but a telling off?’

‘Mother Angela herself is telling me he had to go,’ cried Lucy Lu suddenly in that hollow voice she put on, like she was talking in a cave far away. ‘He had to go, but now that he’s gone, she’ll help us put Circle back, and make things how they were. Oh sweet sweet Angela, our dear good mother. She’s telling me that if Council wants me to, she’ll guide my hand to find the stones that bad John threw in the stream, and put them back exactly where they were.’