Dark Eden

9 John Redlantern

When Genda was set, that was the end of the first waking of Any Virsry, and everyone could go back to their groups to eat and sleep. The next waking Council would meet and talk about the Genda and then we’d all sleep again, and then there would be the final waking when we’d all be called back in and be told what Council had decided. After that Oldest would do the Earth Things, and we’d have the Show.

I was going to sneak off with Tina again, but David was still standing right behind me.

‘No you don’t, boy. You’re coming back to group with me. Bella needs to talk to you.’

‘What about?’ said Tina. ‘Is she going to tell him off for talking sense?’

David turned his angry red batface on her.

‘You keep out of Redlantern business, Tina Spiketree.’

I shrugged and pulled a face for Tina and followed David back to Redlantern, where the grownups were stirring up the embers of our fire and feeding it branches so we could cook. Everyone looked at me as I arrived in our clearing. People stopped halfway between the woodpile and the fire with firewood in their arms. People came out of their shelters.

‘I’m ashamed of you, John,’ began Old Roger. ‘People will say Redlantern can’t bring up their newhairs properly.’

Lucy Lu said that I hadn’t just shamed the living members of our group but the ones who’d died as well.

‘The Shadow People are crying,’ she said, ‘they’re begging me to make sure that Family is never broken up.’

Bella came out of her shelter.

‘You were rude rude there, John. Rude to Family and rude to me. What do you think other people will think if someone in my own group talks out like that without even letting me know that’s what they are going to do? If you had something you wanted saying, you could have raised it with me beforehand. We all knew Any Virsry was coming. As it is, you’ve made me look like a complete fool.’

Everyone watched her and watched me. How would I react? How would she follow on from what she’d said?

‘I’m sorry,’ I said humbly. ‘I just thought it needed to be said. I hadn’t thought about it before. It just came out.’

I liked Bella. I was close close to her. And I respected her too. She wasn’t just our group leader, she was one of the cleverest people in whole Family.

Bella nodded. I thought I could see a tiny smile.

‘Alright, John. I’m tired and hungry. We all are. So we’ll eat now, and then afterwards you can come to my shelter for a proper talk about this. I want to know exactly what’s on your mind and I want your reassurance that you won’t show me up like that again. But we’ll talk later.’

Presently Fox and Lucy Lu, who were organizing the cooking, handed round smoked fish and whitefruit and crushed starflowers and bits of muddy, chewy slinker, and we all began to eat together round our fire. And all around us, all over the camp, we could hear the sounds of other groups eating too. (People’s talking sounds different when they’re eating. It rises and falls in a different way. More gently, more steadily.) You never normally heard that sound coming from all over Family at the same time because one group would be sleeping, one getting up, one returning from a waking’s scavenging. The only time we experienced it was when an Any Virsry was on.

Somewhere out over Peckhamway a leopard was singing to its prey.

‘What are you going to say to Bella in there?’ Gerry asked. ‘Are you going to tell her to stuff it, then, or what?’

I looked at him, meaning to answer him but all the time listening to the lonely deadly sound of the leopard out there, and how it sounded alongside the friendly gentle sound of Family eating and talking all around. And I was thinking, thinking, thinking, about Family and about how things were. Before I’d even begun to think of an answer to Gerry’s question, I’d already forgotten it. In fact I’d completely forgotten he was there.

Bella’s shelter was bigger than everyone else’s, and taller too, so that people could sit in there with her and have meetings. She had a pile of sleeping skins in the far right corner opposite the entrance hole, and more skins piled all round the edges for folk to sit on when she had meetings and talks. The shelter was built up against the warm trunk of a big whitelantern tree, and one branch of the whitelantern had been pulled down and held in place with ropes and rocks, so the branch was inside the shelter, with two or three lanterns usually shining at any one time. If she didn’t want light she’d cover over the lanterns with skins.

She was squatting over on the sleeping skins when I came in, thin bony Bella, with her narrow hips and tiny breasts and her clever weary shadowy face.

‘You are a silly boy, John Redlantern,’ she told me, ‘and I’m going to have to shout at you for a bit.’

I nodded.

‘Never, never speak out of turn at a meeting again, alright?’ she yelled. ‘Do you understand that, John? Do you understand? You’ve shamed me, you’ve shamed Redlantern, you’ve shamed yourself. And you’ve achieved nothing. Nothing at all. Do you really think Council’s view will be changed by a silly little newhair just because he got lucky with one bloody leopard out Cold Path way? Does that make you the big man of whole Family, do you think? Does that make you more important than your group leader or your Family Head? I don’t bloody think so, John. And don’t think I don’t know it was you and Tina Spiketree that started up that nasty laugh when Mitch forgot himself. Don’t imagine I didn’t notice that too.’

The funny thing was that she was yelling at me, but it was like she was acting in one of those story-plays that people put on. Like the story of Angela’s Ring, when Angela loses the ring her mum and dad gave her, and she cries and screams and tells Tommy he’s worse than shit, and how she hates him and she hates Eden and she hates the kids and she wishes she was dead. Or like Hitler and Jesus, where Hitler yells at Jesus he’s going to kill all his group, the Juice, kill them like they were slinkers (‘Over my dead body!’ goes Jesus, and Hitler says, ‘It will be over your dead body, mate, because I’m going to nail you up to a hot spiketree till your skin’s all burned off.’) Often when people act these things you can see they’re not really in them. They might be shouting but their eyes aren’t angry like their mouths are. And it was like that now. We were in a story-play — Bella and me — and we didn’t have to pretend with our faces, only with our voices, because the play wasn’t for us really at all but for the rest of group who were outside listening and couldn’t see us.

‘Don’t speak out of turn again, John, alright?’

‘I’m sorry I shamed you.’

‘And if you want something said at Any Virsry, talk to me, not to whole Family without me even knowing about it, alright?’

‘Yes, Bella.’

She looked at me, staring hard hard into my eyes, then she smiled her little tight smile and relaxed a little bit (as much as she ever relaxed) and nodded, as if to say: okay, the play was over now.

‘So why did you do it, John?’ she asked me in her normal voice, low enough so that no one outside would hear the words (not unless they came right up outside the shelter and put their ear to the bark, and no one would dare do that with whole group there to see them). ‘If you wanted it said why didn’t you talk to me about it?’

‘I only thought of it then and that’s the truth. It just came into my mind when Tom said that thing about how we’d given up School already and now we’d have to give up something else. Gela’s tits, I thought, what’s the point of that? Why can’t we see that there just isn’t enough in this valley for us?’

Bella studied my face carefully. Then she nodded.

‘Actually, I agree with you, John,’ she finally said. ‘Something needs to give and we need to start preparing people for that. But you know there’s more to it than just yelling things out at Any Virsry. You’ve got to work round people, win them over, meet them halfway, do things gradually. That’s what Council is all about.’

‘So how many people in Council apart from you agree with me?’

She considered this.

‘Not one. Not yet. But I’m working on people, John. I’m working towards the idea that we may need to spread out a little.’

‘It’s not just a matter of spreading out a little. We’ve got to get past Snowy Dark.’

Bella shook her head.

‘Right over the top of Dark? I can’t see it. I mean it’s a few wombs now since I was up by Dark, but I do know what it’s like up there. You think you’ve been there, John, but you haven’t. Furthest you’ve been to is up to the top of Cold Path. That’s barely the beginning of Snowy Dark. Barely the beginning. It’s so cold cold and so dark dark up beyond there that I don’t see any way we can ever get over it.’

‘Well, we’ll go down Exit Falls then.’

‘Oh John! Do you have any idea what that would be like? It might have been possible before the rockfall, but now the only gap is where the water drops down from Fall Pool between massive cliffs, down, down, down into darkness. And think of the weight of all that water. All the water from Greatpool, all the water from all the snowslugs that come down into forest from Snowy Dark.’

‘Suppose there’s another rockfall one waking that fills up the gap completely. Whole of Circle Valley could end up as one big pool. What will we do then?’

‘Well, we’ll just have to hope that doesn’t happen.’

‘Why just hope? Why not try and find a way out?’

‘No one could get across Dark.’

‘So Tommy and Angela and the Three could go up into sky from Earth and cross Starry Swirl and come down to Eden, but we can’t even hope to cross the lousy mountains?’

Bella laughed.

‘Dearest John. You can’t do everything at once. At the moment Family isn’t even ready to spread itself out right here in Circle Valley, let alone try to cross Dark. Let’s work on spreading out a bit first, eh?’

‘How long will that take?’

‘I don’t know. Maybe in two three Any Virsries’ time we can talk about setting up a new group down the river a bit, or over by Lava Blob. Right now it isn’t even on the Genda. You’ve got to be patient about these things.’

‘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 me 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.