I remember you, Dallmin signed to him. You spoke like a child, but now I know why.
The woman took a step back, looking sheepish. Dallmin’s sign language and affectionate behaviour seemed to have made her think twice. Even the angry bald man shuffled to an uncertain stop, possibly because Tim had also arrived and was standing shoulder to shoulder with Bane, the two of them looking fully prepared to stop an invading army.
Noah gave the small crowd of onlookers one of the apologetic smiles that had once made Mrs Carpenter cancel an entire week’s worth of detentions—not even just the day he was down for, but everyone who had been down for the whole week.
‘His behaviour can sometimes be a bit … confronting, but he doesn’t mean any harm, I promise you.’
‘Is he … autistic?’ the woman asked, looking him up and down as if that would help her diagnosis somehow.
Noah glanced at me but I was still too shaken up to be of any help. ‘Listen,’ he said to the crowd. ‘Not everyone who thinks on a different wavelength to the rest of us is necessarily autistic,’ he chided, ‘but he does need someone to keep an eye on him. I’m sorry for any trouble he’s caused. I won’t let it happen again.’
Now the other onlookers were all frowning at the woman and the two men. How quickly the tide could turn.
Dallmin opened his mouth to speak, but I signed to him to let Noah handle it. Then I glanced at Tim. How were we going to explain Dallmin’s behaviour to him?
Actually, Dallmin, I want you to just use sign language for a little while. No speaking out loud.
If that is what you want, I will do that.
The nice thing about Eden was that no one ever questioned anyone else’s motivations.
Time to get you home, I said, backing away while Noah continued to sweet-talk the locals. Dallmin smiled and didn’t move. Don’t you want to come home? This place is not like Eden, I tried.
No, it is not! They have no Living Fruit here. And yet they fly. What do they do when they don’t fly well?
He was not going to let this go. Perhaps I could satisfy his curiosity another way.
Come to the place where I shelter and I will show you some things about flying.
Copying me, he took hold of Bane’s other hand, which made me laugh, as we were led like toddlers back to the car.
‘I’m so sorry, Dallmin. I’ve never done this before,’ Noah apologised the next morning, reaching for the towel. He dabbed at the blood running down Dallmin’s chin. ‘Shaving someone else is a lot harder than shaving yourself. He’s going to have to manage on his own tomorrow. It’ll be safer,’ Noah said as he tried again, tongue sticking out in concentration.
I wasn’t so sure that was such a good idea. I had seen some of the things Dallmin could do to himself. He wasn’t afraid enough of pain to be trusted with a razor. In fact I was astounded that we had found him with only a few minor bruises given how many dangers he was oblivious to. It was also clear that someone had been feeding him more than just what he’d scavenged from people’s gardens. I would be eternally grateful to whoever that had been.
‘Why do you want to shave it off anyway?’ I enquired.
It’s itchy, Dallmin signed to me. Long chin hair for so many seasons, and now, after Annie helped me remove it, it returns itchy. And no one else in your shelter place has long chin hair so I will do what the people here do.
I looked at his reflection in the mirror. He did look good. Tessa had cut his curly hair and now with his clean chin he looked very young, even though I knew he was hundreds of years old. His reflection smiled back at me briefly before he remembered to keep still. He was still mesmerised by the mirror. He had only seen himself in pools of still water before, and since puberty he had always had a beard.
Bane’s head peered in through the door. ‘Lainie, can I talk to you for a minute?’
I followed him out to the backyard where he turned and drew me into his arms, drawing in a deep contented breath as our skin touched. My heart, as usual, began to beat faster.
‘I was thinking maybe I could take you and Dallmin into Nalong this afternoon to do some shopping. My clothes fit him okay but I didn’t bring a lot with me, and he can’t stay in that old T-shirt and those baggy jeans he arrived in. And if he sleeps on the couch again, it would be better if we at least bought him something to sleep in.’ His smile was wry. ‘Lily suggested you might want some new clothes too.’
I looked down at my tattered dress. I had rummaged through a box of my old clothes and most of them had looked way too constricting and uncomfortable. I’d only owned a couple of dresses and only one had been warm enough to wear. After two days of traipsing through the bush and around the towns it was looking a bit dirty. It seemed like such a ridiculous thing to pay any attention to, but apparently necessary if I was going to fit in again, so I nodded. Besides, he was right about Dallmin. Apparently he’d given Tessa a heck of a fright when she’d raided the fridge during the night.
As we headed to town after lunch, we passed a familiar car coming the other way towards the farm. I peered through the window to see who was driving. It was Liam, with Nicole in the passenger seat.
‘Bane, turn around. I want to see the Ashbrees.’ I couldn’t believe I hadn’t remembered to ask after them. I had been too focused on finding Dallmin. Bane kept driving, looking a little wary.
‘We’ll see them soon enough. I’d like to get to the shops before they close.’
Dallmin looked at me with an amused expression. Only very young children didn’t want what someone else wanted, so he probably thought Bane was playing a game of some sort.
‘If you choose to go into town now, then that’s good,’ I told Bane. It was true. I wasn’t submitting to his will, I was naturally aligning myself with it. It felt right. His hands relaxed on the steering wheel. Still, as more houses came into view I began to feel nervous. What if I had to talk to people I had known before? I felt normal, but I knew I was still making mistakes. I looked down. Yes, I had remembered to wear a bra. Check. Knickers, check. Shoes … never mind, they weren’t that important, were they? I began to hum under my breath.
Bane noticed and reached across to squeeze my hand. ‘You used to love shopping, don’t you remember?’
I did, and it seemed so weird now. I wanted to be playing, dancing, singing, climbing trees—not walking around looking at clothes. I peered sideways at Dallmin who was staring out the window, drinking in the sights. Hopefully we could get him in and out before he found any other things to become obsessed with.
It took less than an hour for me to decide I’d had enough. We had found some jeans, boots, shirts and a coat for Dallmin as well as a few other essential items. He shook his head when he tried on his boots and asked me how he was supposed to speak properly when his toes were hidden. When I relayed his comment to Bane his face looked like a bulb had suddenly switched on, which made me laugh, but then it took ages for him to be satisfied with the fit and I got bored again. Then we had to buy socks for Tim, who had been complaining a bit. By the time we got around to looking at things for me I was completely disinterested until Bane turned it into a game. He told me to find which dresses were the most fun to dance in so I played with that for a while—it was a good excuse to teach him some of what I had learnt. I could see people pointing at us but Bane ignored them, so I did too. At my suggestion Dallmin sang for us as we spun through the aisles. Eventually I chose a simple dress in bright colours, and a new Batman T-shirt—Aunt Lily had apparently ‘misplaced’ my old one with the holes in it. Once I worked out the right size, Bane went and selected a few other things for me as well. He even asked a sales lady to help me find some new underthings. I was grateful even though it felt a bit silly. Luckily she took her job very seriously and didn’t think it strange at all. Finally he agreed that we had finished, which was good because I was struggling to be patient. He used the word ‘want’ a lot.
Then he bought us ice cream and I spent the whole trip home worrying that lemon gelati might end up being the reason Dallmin might never choose to go home.
There was no sign of the Ashbrees’ car when we pulled up to the house. They had gone home and it was time to start the evening chores.
‘We didn’t get as far as shoes,’ Bane told Aunt Lily as we brought in all the bags and dumped them on the kitchen table on top of Noah’s text books.
She looked me over, shaking her head. ‘She’ll freeze in that.’
‘I know, but she won’t wear anything else. I was lucky to get this much.’
Why was my aunt so bothered? I was sure she used to tell me off for buying too many clothes. Besides, if I got cold I could always snuggle up to Bane—I was certain he wouldn’t mind.
‘Where’s Tim? I got him his socks so he can stop whining now,’ Bane said as he rummaged around in the bags.
‘Tim managed to get himself an invite to the Ashbrees’ for dinner,’ Aunt Lily said.
He glanced up at her, questioning.
‘Apparently he’s always been interested in Border Leicester-Merino crosses. Nicole offered to show him around the farm.’
Bane laughed. ‘Nicole, huh? Good for him. Just don’t be surprised if he comes back tonight insisting on a crash course in sheep farming.’
‘You think Tim might be interested in Nicole?’ I asked. ‘Isn’t she a bit young for him?’
‘She’s seventeen now, Lainie,’ Noah said, reminding me how out of touch I was.
Dallmin came in and kissed Aunt Lily on the lips. She blushed.
Ask her first, I reminded him.
He asked. In sign. Which didn’t work.
‘Oh, sorry, Dallmin. I forgot. You can speak out loud if you want.’
Noah looked up from his study notes. ‘Maybe just not in front of Tim?’ he suggested.
‘So many rules!’ Dallmin said, looking frustrated as he grabbed a banana from the bowl on the table and sat down.
I sucked in a quick breath. How had he learnt that word? And since when did he get frustrated? We were running out of time. He was adapting too quickly to this place.
‘It’s fine, Dallmin, I don’t mind being kissed,’ Aunt Lily said, giving him a quick one-armed hug, but she was looking worried too. ‘Here, I want to show you something.’ She led him to the desk in the lounge and switched on the computer, and his dark eyes widened at the wonders on the screen. ‘I’ll show you some pictures of flying.’
She searched for some images of hang gliders, trying to avoid letting the screen linger too long on other forms of flight. The last thing we needed was for him to discover aeroplanes and hot air balloons … or sky diving.
He touched the screen longingly as she played a YouTube video for him.
‘More. I want to see more,’ he pleaded when the clip finished. She found a couple more and played them each a few times for him.
‘What happens when they fall and hit the ground too fast?’ he enquired, smacking his fist against the desk to demonstrate. Aunt Lily looked at me with bewildered blue eyes.
‘You can tell him. It won’t freak him out, he’s done it enough times himself,’ I advised.
She shuddered and then tucked her hair behind her ear and leant against the corner of the desk to face him. ‘Things don’t go wrong very often because people follow the rules. The rules are there to keep people safe. If things do go wrong, people get injured or even die.’
Dallmin looked thoughtful. ‘But what if they don’t want to die? How do they start again?’
I turned his shoulders to face me and looked him directly in the eye. I needed him to understand this. ‘There is no Living Fruit here. If you stop here, you do not start again, even if you choose to. If you fly here, and it goes wrong, you will not start again. None of us would be happy with that. Annie won’t be happy.’
There was a tangle of confusion in his eyes. ‘She wants me to fly, but not get dead,’ he said, tilting his head at me for confirmation.
I groaned at the ceiling. There were arguments galore I could use to convince him to go home, and yet using them would lead to disagreement, which was the one thing I needed to avoid him experiencing. With all the powers of the universe at my disposal, I still had nothing that I could use to convince him to return to Eden without impacting on his free will.
Everyone was waiting for me to come up with something clever, but I was stuck. ‘Book him in for a flight please, Noah,’ I called out to the kitchen. ‘The sooner the better,’ I capitulated.
Dallmin beamed.
Chapter 22
‘The people of Eden at Telassar,’ Tessa announced, jiggling around in her chair. Dinner was finished and I was teaching Dallmin how to stack the dishwasher, which was tricky while he had his head inside it trying to work out where the water came from.
‘Where’s Telassar?’ Noah peered over her shoulder at the computer screen and began to massage her neck. Everyone was gathered around the kitchen table yet again. Tessa said she had read something back in the early days when she’d first found out about Eden, and thought it could be relevant now. We’d all tried to research as much as we could from biblical and other ancient texts, but my opportunities for research had been cut short. I hoped the others had done better because I needed to know if any other Eden residents had come across, and if they’d made it home again. Had I broken some sacred rule, allowing Dallmin to leave the Garden? Perhaps history had some clues for me.
‘It was a city in Mesopotamia, somewhere in the middle of the Euphrates river region near the Persian Gulf. It’s mentioned briefly in the account of the prophet Isaiah 37, 9-13, and also in the book of Kings. The king of Assyria was trying to get Jerusalem to surrender by bragging about these other nations that had fallen to Assyria in the past:
… he sent messengers to Hezekiah with instructions to deliver this message: ‘Don’t let your God, on whom you so naively lean, deceive you, promising that Jerusalem won’t fall to the king of Assyria. Use your head! Look around at what the kings of Assyria have done all over the world—one country after another devastated! And do you think you’re going to get off? Have any of the gods of any of these countries ever stepped in and saved them, even one of these nations my predecessors destroyed—Gozan, Haran, Rezeph, and the people of Eden who lived in Telassar?
We were all thoroughly entranced. Aunt Lily couldn’t help herself. ‘So what happened? Did they surrender?’ she queried, scratching her old grey cat under its chin as it snuggled on her lap. Inara purred as a tuft of grey fur floated away.
‘Of course not. King Hezekiah prayed to God who basically told him to chillax, then not long after that, 185,000 Assyrian soldiers were killed in the night by an angel of God, which sent the Assyrian king retreating back home where he was killed by two of his sons who then ran away. Another of his sons became the next king.’
Wow. The Old Testament was harsh! Noah stared at me with a horrified expression and I understood why. There could be an awful lot at stake depending on our actions. We were biblical creatures, after all. It was a terrifying thought.
‘And the people of Eden who lived in Telassar?’ Noah prompted.
‘It doesn’t say anything else. Let me look into it.’ Tess pursed her lips thoughtfully. ‘It does open the possibility that there were others who may have come out of Eden at some point, or it could have nothing to do with it. Either way it sounds like it didn’t end well for them, so I’m not sure how that helps.’
‘It helps,’ I assured her. ‘At least I know I might not be the only Cherub who allowed Eden citizens to wander over here. You have no idea what that means to me.’ A whole city of elf-like Edenites in ancient Mesopotamia. What a thought. I wasn’t surprised that the peaceful race had been conquered. My hand sought Bane’s for comfort. ‘I suppose the solution is fairly obvious,’ I said, glancing at Noah.
‘No way,’ he said. ‘Bad idea.’
‘We can’t risk this happening again.’
‘I know, but there are other options,’ he argued, looking like he’d just been told he had to give away his autographed Sherrin. I knew how he felt. My mouth had gone dry and my stomach churned.
Bane squeezed my hand. ‘You’re considering collapsing the cave once Dallmin returns home?’ He gave his head a quick shake. ‘Don’t decide anything yet. Not if you don’t have to. Give yourself time to get some more perspective,’ he advised.
I leant my head against his shoulder in relief and gratitude. It was a decision I wasn’t ready to make, especially if Noah was against it, and Bane knew it.
Dallmin pulled his head out from studying the inside of the dishwasher, and came to sit next to Tessa. He couldn’t seem to stay away from her for long unless she told him she wanted time alone. He’d been hovering incessantly, trying to think of things he could do for her. I’d been doing it too. The culture I had been immersed in for the last few years would have held Tessa as by far the most important person in the community. She was to be waited on hand and foot. Anything she desired was automatically our top priority. Dallmin started carving her an apple flower, in case she felt like one, while I poured her some water because I didn’t want Noah to glare at me like he did when I’d tried to comb her hair with my fingers. Unable to think of anything else to do for her, I sat and watched her as she studied the screen, intent on her research. So did Dallmin.
Eventually we heard Tim arrive back from the Ashbrees’ farm and I glanced at Dallmin to remind him not to speak out loud. He threw me a quick smile—he didn’t mind at all.
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