Dark Eden

by Chris Beckett

  ‘It’s nothing to do with that,’ he said. ‘That’s different. That’s just a Family thing. It’s just . . .’

  He stopped to think. In fact he ended up spending so long thinking about it that he seemed to have forgotten me entirely. Certainly, when he did speak, he didn’t show much sign that he knew why it bothered me.

  ‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘Maybe it’s not such a good idea, going with oldmums whenever they suggest it. Maybe it’s one of those things that I was talking about: the things we do because it seems easier at the time, and we don’t . . .’

  ‘Yeah, whatever, but coming back to my question . . .?’

  ‘Well, it’s . . .’

  ‘Don’t you want me?’

  ‘Yes I do, but . . .’

  He laughed.

  ‘Come on, you know I want you. You’ve just had your hand on my dick! I could hardly keep it inside my wrap when we were walking over here. But just now I want to eat oysters and talk about things. Is that so weird? There’s loads of things I want to talk about and not many people who would know what I meant. We could have a slip, but that would be the easy thing, the obvious thing, and maybe it would be more interesting if . . .’

  ‘Talk to me then,’ I said. ‘Tell me something you think only I will know what you mean.’

  He pulled open another oyster, ripped out the fizzing pink meat and tossed the empty shell back into the water.

  ‘Well, you know what I said about why I did for the leopard. I’ve been thinking a lot about that. I’ve been thinking that that’s what we always get wrong in Family. It’s like whenever we get a choice like that, we always run to the tree, and we’ve been doing that so long that it’s become what Family is: a thing that hides away from anything scary and waits for help to come.’

  ‘So what would we do if we were different?’

  ‘Well . . .’ He hesitated here, like he himself was in two minds about what he was going to say next. ‘Well, I don’t think we’d live in a huddle round Circle of Stones, waiting for Earth to come and fetch us back.’

  ‘Don’t you think Earth will come, then?’

  He looked at me sharply.

  ‘No, I’m not saying that. Of course not. They’ve got to come sooner or later. I’m just saying that we shouldn’t just spend our lives waiting for them in the same spot, and dreaming about going back to Earth. People say we must be good good, and make sure that Earth will like us when they come, so that they’ll want to take us back. But they’d like us better, wouldn’t they, if we tried to live like Earth people? Finding stuff out, trying new things, making things better. What’s there to like about a Family that huddles up in one place wake-dreaming, and won’t budge even if that means starving or drowning?’

  I laughed at that idea.

  ‘Not much,’ I agreed.

  ‘And anyway,’ he said, ‘it’s not as if there’s any reason to think Earth will come any time soon. Okay, we know the Three Companions went back to Defiant, and we reckon they’d have taken Defiant back through Hole-in-Sky. But there was something wrong with Defiant, wasn’t there? It was damaged when Angela and Michael tried to catch it in the Police Veekle. And the True Story tells us that the Three Companions knew the chances were against Defiant getting back in one piece, or them getting back alive. I mean, that’s why Tommy and Angela stayed, isn’t it? So that at least some life would carry on?’

  I nodded. ‘And it’s been two hundred wombtimes, so something must have gone wrong or they could have mended Defiant and come back long ago. But even if the Three Companions died and Defiant was too damaged to be mended, it still might well have got back to Earth. You know, like a boat drifts back to the shore. And . . .’

  ‘And Earth would have found out what happened from the Rayed Yo and the Computer. Yes, I know all that. But it would take them a long time to build a new starship. They say that first one took them thousands of years.’

  ‘Years,’ I teased him. ‘Who says “years” except oldies?’

  He shrugged.

  ‘Thousands of wombtimes, then. And that’s why we shouldn’t live like waiting for Earth was the purpose of everything. And we shouldn’t just huddle up like this in one place and do the same things over and over and over again.’

  ‘But the True Story says that Earth will come to Circle of Stones, and if we aren’t there, they won’t find us.’

  ‘I know,’ John said. ‘I know.’

  He thought for a long time, and twice he started to speak and then stopped again.

  ‘But surely,’ he said at last in a small quiet voice, like he almost didn’t want to hear himself say it. ‘Surely, if they can get a boat all the way across Starry Swirl, they’ll still be able to find us if we’re a few miles away from Circle? Isn’t that a chance worth taking? I mean, there’s not much point in us all waiting here if we’re going to run out of food and starve, is there? Otherwise all Earth will find is a pile of bones.’

  I kissed him.

  ‘Now do you want a slip, John?’

  ‘No, not now. Another time. There’s too much in my head.’

  I wasn’t offended this second time. In fact I quite liked that he had things going on in his head that were big enough to drive out that one thought. Not many other boys in Family would have had anything but slippy in their heads. Not if they’d been up here beside me by Deep Pool, with no wraps on, and no one else there, and me telling them I was up for it. In fact I couldn’t think of one that would say no. Except for the ones that preferred other boys, of course.

  ‘It would be easier in a way,’ I said, ‘if we knew for sure they weren’t coming from Earth. We’re a bit like a mum whose kid’s been lost in forest. She can’t get on with anything until they find the bones.’

  John thought about this.

  ‘But it would be lonely lonely, if we knew that,’ he said. ‘It would be sad sad sad.’

  7

  John Redlantern

  Old Lucy Lu said that every living thing had a shadow hiding away inside its body, waiting to get out. It was crap, but in a way it was true of a lot of people. Take Gerry: he might laugh and shout and play the bloody fool, but there was a shadow looking out of his eyes that was different from what he showed the world, a worried worried shadow peeping out that was always afraid of being left alone, or being laughed at, or even just being seen. Or take Bella: she was clever and wise, but she was half shadow. More than half. So much of her was shadow that it was like she hardly knew her own body at all.

  But Tina had no shadow like that. Her face and her body weren’t hiding places, they were her, and she knew it, and that was why men and boys couldn’t take their eyes off her. They could tell that what was pretty pretty about Tina went all the way through her. It was all of her.

  I had wanted to slip with her badly badly as we walked up to Deep Pool. And at the end of that waking, when I crawled into that little shelter I shared with Gerry and Jeff, I couldn’t sleep for ages, thinking about how badly I wanted her again. And I wondered why I didn’t have a slide with her while I had the chance, and I knew the reason was more than what I’d told her, but I didn’t know what it was.

  And when I did sleep, I had that dream that everyone had in Family, that dream of Earth, coming down from Starry Swirl in a shining Veekle to take everyone home. But I was far far away when the Veekle came. I saw it come down from sky in the distance and I ran and ran towards it, but things kept getting in my way, and I couldn’t move forward, and I knew that pretty soon it would lift up again into sky, and return to Earth without me, and never come back.

  Next waking Bella sent me out scavenging. It wasn’t a proper hunt and I had to stay just outside Family Fence because I was with big Met and Gerry and Jeff, and Jeff can’t walk far with his clawfeet. Of course there weren’t many pickings just outside the fence because everyone scavenged there, but we were lucky, sort of, because pretty soon Met spotted the tail end of a slinker disappearing down the air-tube of a whitelantern tree.

  It was the grey
kind, the thickness of a man’s arm and maybe two three times as long, with thirty forty pairs of little claws and glittery eyes and an ugly mouth full of vicious little spiny black teeth. That was the kind you had to watch out for if you were looking for candy in stumps and air-tubes. Littles sometimes got excited about candy and forgot to check for slinkers, and then slinkers came up and bit them in the face – there were quite a few in Family with scarred faces or missing eyes or noses – so grownups always told us to kill any slinker we found near Family. And lately we’d taken to eating the creatures too. There was a fair bit of meat on one of them, when you picked it out of the shelly bits and the bones, even though it tasted of mud and it gave some people bellyache.

  Anyway when we saw it go down the tube, we backed off for a bit to give it time to turn itself round in there. Meantime we took out some wavyweed string that we had in our bag and made a loop in it. I had a club with me. It was a good one, made of a whitelantern branch with two big stones shoved into the hole at the bigger end and sealed in there with buckfoot glue. I gave it to Met, who was tall and clumsy and not too bright.

  ‘Don’t you want to do for it, John?’ he asked, like it was my right, since I’d done for the leopard, to kill any animal I liked.

  Met was one of those many people who look to others to tell him what to do and what to think.

  ‘No, you saw it, Met, you do for it.’

  The flutterbyes had fluttered off when the slinker appeared, but flutterbyes don’t have much memory, and, now the slinker was out of sight, they’d all started coming back again after the candy. And pretty soon there was a bat there too, a tar bat, leopard-black, swooping and diving like a scrap of darkness in the glittery forest, snatching up the flutterbyes as they came up from the tubecandy.

  Silly bat didn’t know what was coming. Snap! Out shot the head of the slinker and got it with one crunch, along with a couple of flutterbyes. Click click, went its feet as it backed down the tube again.

  I looked at Met. He’d have preferred me to take charge really, but he could see from my face that I was leaving it up to him.

  ‘Er . . . You two ready with that string then, Gerry and Jeff?’ he asked.

  The three of them crept forward quietly and Gerry and Jeff stood each side of the tree trunk with the loop dangling over the hole. Met stood in front of them with the club ready.

  Another bat came looping down. Whoosh, went its wings as it dived through the flutterbyes, snatching up a big fat blue one with its little hands. Then up it swooped again, up through the shining branches, up, up, up, gobbling down the flutterbye as it went. Up, up, up, then round and down it came again, right down, right next to the tube hole.

  ‘Now!’ yelled Met as the slinker’s head came out. Jeff and Gerry pulled tight. Met brought his club down smack. The bat swerved away with a little shriek.

  Three things could easily go wrong at this moment. One, the slinker pulls back too quick and you don’t get him. Two, you get him with the club but not the string, so he’s dead but he drops back down the tube to Underworld, to rot or be eaten up by whatever it is that lives down there. Three, you get him with the string but not the club, so he’s still alive and threshing and biting like crazy and you have to hold tight and hope the string doesn’t break or he’ll get you with those vicious spiny teeth. This time, though, they got all of it right. The string caught the slinker round the neck, the club mashed its head so that, if that slinker wasn’t dead straight off, it certainly near enough was, and Gerry and Jeff pulled it out of the hole, its body still twitching and its little claws still waving about and clicking and grabbing at the air.

  ‘Got yer!’ yelled Met delightedly, giving it another whack with the club.

  Gerry ran forward to trample on it. Met hit it again.

  But Jeff, he was a strange little boy. He had been part of all this up to that moment, but now suddenly he was standing back from what was going on, like he was looking in from outside.

  ‘We’re here,’ he said. ‘This is happening. We are really here.’

  ‘Of course we’re bloody here, you dork!’ exclaimed Met, giving the quivering slinker another whack.

  But Gerry regarded his brother with a concerned expression. He was protective of Jeff, and at the same time he looked up to him, even though Jeff was the younger of the two of them. He knew there was something strange and special about Jeff while he, well, he was just Gerry.

  Jeff squatted down by the slinker, touched its mangled head as gently as if it was a baby, ran his fingers along its hot scaly body.

  ‘Poor old thing. Poor old tubeslinker.’

  ‘What are you talking about?’ snorted Met, looking at me and Gerry to see if we’d have a laugh with him, but we wouldn’t.

  ‘It’s just a bloody slinker!’ Met said.

  ‘I wonder what it’s like to be a slinker?’ Jeff said.

  ‘What do you mean, what’s it like to be a slinker?’ exclaimed Met, once again looking at me and Gerry. Surely we could see that was funny?

  ‘What does a slinker think about, I mean,’ Jeff persisted.

  I think kids like him – I mean clawfeet, batfaces, the ones who are left on the outside of things – can go in different ways. Most of them are desperate to please and to get in with the other kids. Some turn into bullies and try and control people, like David Redlantern. But a few choose just to stay outside and think their own thoughts. Jeff was one of that kind. He was smart smart, much smarter than Gerry. He had much much more going on in his head. And he had his own angle, his own way of seeing things that he wasn’t going to set aside to please anyone else. I liked him for that. I was on the outside of things too in my own way. Not that I was a clawfoot or anything but I just felt different. Different different. So in a way I felt a connection with Jeff. In some ways we were alike, though in other ways gentle little Jeff wasn’t like me at all.

  Met rolled up the dead slinker and tied it up with string while Gerry and Jeff went to the air-tube and pulled out all the candy they could reach. When we got back to Family we found out that our old slinker was the best catch of that waking and everyone told Met what a great hunter he was. Yet time had been – not generations ago, but even just when I was a little kid – when people would kill a slinker and just leave it out in forest for the tree foxes and starbirds because they didn’t think the meat was good enough to be worth carrying back.

  When we’d eaten in group, and after I’d let Old Roger beat me at a game of chess, I walked across to Spiketree again and looked for Tina.

  ‘You two are getting on well, aren’t you?’ said the Spiketree people, giving each other knowing looks, like there’s something clever about being able to spot when a boy and a girl fancy each other, like it doesn’t happen all the bloody time.

  Tina and me went back up past Brooklyn and London and Blueside – with people in all those bloody groups as well looking at us and looking at one another, as if to say ‘Do you see what I see?’ – and we went up over the rocks to Deep Pool, shining down there in its own hiding place, with rocks and bright trees all around it, like a world inside a world inside a world. And we scrambled back down to the place on the bank where we’d been last time. A single jewel bat was swooping low over the water in a series of long runs. A couple of small ducks sat in middle of a mass of lilies and cooed and rattled to one another, smoothing down their wings with their hands and flashing their little green headlights. Far off in forest out Blueside, a female starbird called Aaaah! Aaaah! Aaaah! . . .

  And suddenly a male starbird answered right up beside us: Hoom! Hoom! Hoom! It made us jump because we’d not even noticed it up in the tree there, hidden in a mass of bright whitelanterns. It rustled its golden wings and rattled its blue tail feathers so that the coloured stars glittered. It tipped its head and looked at us with one of its flat black eyes, the little lights glinting inside like secret thoughts, and its black hooked beak opened and closed, as if it was about to say something and then changed its mind. Then its scaly ar
ms came out from under its wings and it touched the tips of its fingers together, so we could just hear the clack of its long black claws.

  Tina untied her waistwrap and dived straight down into the warm water. Whoosh! Off went the starbird over the water and away into forest with a clatter of wings and whitelantern branches, and a series of loud cries: Raa! Raa! Raa! I followed Tina. We didn’t bother with oysters. We’d taken the easy ones last time anyway. Instead we raced across to the far side of the pool and back again, pushing through the floating streamers of the water lanterns when we could, or diving under them when they were too thick. Down there under the surface it felt like we were flying over those pinnacles of rock that went down and down, and over shining water lanterns and wavyweed, with green and red tiger fish and tiny bluefish swimming through it in shoals. Down and down, shoals below shoals: Deep Pool wasn’t like Greatpool or Longpool where you could dive and touch the bottom. In Deep Pool you couldn’t make out where it ended.

  ‘So have you thought of some more things for us to talk about?’ she asked me, after we’d climbed out again.

  She threw me half a bunch of water lantern nuts.

  ‘We’re here,’ I said, after munching for a bit. ‘Have you ever heard our Jeff say that? We’re here. We’re really here.’

  Tina didn’t laugh at this like Met did. She narrowed her eyes. She thought carefully about what I might mean. Then she nodded.

  ‘Yeah,’ she said. ‘I’ve heard him. We’re here. And . . .?’

  ‘Most people in Family never think about it. You do your chores, you have something to eat, you have a bit of a gossip and a moan, you have something else to eat, you have a slip, you go to sleep . . . and they never think once about where they are, or where they might be.’

  ‘I’d say they dream a lot about where they might be.’

  ‘They wish they were back on Earth, you mean? They wish they were with the Shadow People. They wish a boat would come down from sky and take them away from all their sorrows. Is that what you mean?’