Dark Eden

by Chris Beckett

  ‘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.’

  18

  John Redlantern

  I walked and walked and walked, straight past Lava Blob with its funny shy hoppers waving their mouth feelers at me and wringing their hands, past the little pool where Tina first gave me that pink oyster. The bundle that Redlantern group had given me was heavy heavy, the fire-bark was hot, and the going was hard hard in that sticky fuggy air, but even so it was much easier to keep walking than to stop, however weary I was, because while I walked there was a rhythm, but when I stopped there would be nothing to do but think about what I’d done, and what I was going to do next.

  I walked without a rest for the time of a whole waking and a whole sleep, all the way to that place up the slope by Neck of Cold Path Valley, with the caves and the warm pool. I climbed up the slope, crawled into one of those caves, spread out sleeping skins under the little shiny rocklanterns, lay down and fell asleep at once. I’d worn myself down so much with that long long walk that even my worries couldn’t keep me awake, so sleeping took up a bit more time before I had to think about what I was going to do next.

  But when it did come, waking up was hard hard. It was like having a cold stone pressed down on my chest. I was completely alone. Everyone in the world was more than a waking’s walk away from me and forbidden to talk to me forever. I was cut off from Family like Family was cut off from Earth.

  What if Earth comes now? I thought. What if that Landing Veekle finally comes down from sky after all this time and I’m not there?

  It was scary scary thinking of being left in a world with no one else there at all. I’d always been the kind of person that tries not to rely on anyone. I’d always kept myself separate. You didn’t need to be chitter-chattering to other people all the time, was what I always thought. You don’t need to take all your problems to other people to fix, or tell other people every single little thought that comes into your head. But now I could see, easily easily, that everyone needs other people. People needed other people like they needed air. And for a while I felt so lonely I could barely breathe.


  And all the scary scary things that had happened came back and filled up my head, so that it almost felt that they were all still happening. Over and over again I was standing by myself in front of whole Family. Over and over I was telling Tina what I’d done and seeing the icy anger on her face. Over and over I was walking away from Redlantern and hearing Bella wailing while the rest of them tried to make things seem okay. Over and over I heard her final dreadful scream.

  It wasn’t even as if I was a proper grownup yet. I was only a newhair of twenty wombs. And I could easily have cried like a kid. But then I thought, No, this is one of those leopard moments if there ever was one.

  I began to talk to myself out loud. It calmed me down and helped me concentrate.

  ‘Get a bloody grip, John Redlantern,’ I said. ‘What are the odds of Earth coming right now when they haven’t come for a hundred and sixty-three years? And even if they did come, I’d see the Landing Veekle from here, wouldn’t I, with all those lights on it? Yes, and anyway they wouldn’t go without me. Sue wouldn’t let them. Gerry wouldn’t, nor would Jeff, or Bella or Old Roger or Janny or Tina . . .’

  It helped a lot, saying the names of people that wouldn’t agree to go back to Earth without me.

  ‘Or Jade,’ I added, as an afterthought.

  Then I reached into that little pocket sewn on the bottom edge of my wrap, and took out the metal ring, and I turned it over in my hand, and slipped it on and off my finger, and held it near a whitelantern so I could see the tiny words: To Angela with love from Mum and Dad. I thought about Angela Young all on her own by the edge of Deep Pool, scrumpling up that lanternflower and throwing it into the water: kind, strong, lonely Angela, the mother of us all, who’d never wanted to come to Eden.

  I pressed the ring to my lips and tears came into my eyes. I wiped them quickly away.

  ‘Tom’s dick, pull yourself together,’ I said. ‘If push came to shove, I could even trade my way back into Family with this ring. I could tell them I’d just found it and it was a present for all of them, to make up for Circle. They’d all think I was great.’

  I squeezed the ring in my hand.

  ‘But I’m not that bloody desperate, am I? Not even close to it. Things won’t go on like this forever. I won’t always be on my own. One way or another, I’ll have people around me again, and I’ll bloody make things change, just like I planned.’

  I nodded firmly to myself and slipped the ring back into its little pocket.

  ‘So what’s the plan?’ I asked myself.

  I noticed that I sounded like Caroline Brooklyn running a Council meeting, and that made me smile.

  ‘What’s happening next?’ I said. ‘What’s on the Genda?’

  I stood up and stretched myself. Sky was still grey-black and starless. Down to my left was the narrow opening of Cold Path Valley, with the hills rising up again on the other side. In front of me whole of Circle forest stretched out, half-buried in fug, but still shining shining all the way to Blue Mountains, and still, as ever, going hmmmmmmmm.

  ‘I’ll have a dip in that little pool first,’ I decided, ‘and then I’ll hide away my stuff, and then I’ll have a hunt and a scavenge, and get some fruit and some starflowers and maybe some fresh meat. I’ll concentrate on all that for a bit, and then I’ll eat, and then I’ll start thinking about the next step. How to get across Dark. How to make wraps warm enough. What I’ll do for light. How to find my way through.’

  19

  Tina Spiketree

  Horrible Lucy Lu Redlantern went from group to group with her weepy eyes and her fake echoey voice, saying that she’d heard from Angela herself, the mother of all of us, and Angela had promised to help her pick out the stones at the bottom of the stream that came from Circle and put them back exactly where they were before. Council pretended to think about it carefully, and pretty soon the groups heard from their leaders that they’d all decided to accept Lucy Lu’s proposal and let her do it. Oldest had agreed as well, apparently, though how Council got any sense out of them I don’t know, what with them quivering and whimpering and weeping over by Circle Clearing, and old Stoop gulping and gasping to get enough air to breathe.

  So then Council got a bunch of newhairs together, one from each group, and a length of rope to make a circle, and Lucy Lu made a big thing out of reaching down into the water, and touching this stone and that stone, and shaking her head again and again, and then trembling and rolling her eyes and moaning when she sensed which stone was the ‘right’ one for each position in Circle. Afterwards everyone pretended they thought Circle was all mended and back to how it was before, but no one really believed it. It didn’t look the same, and I could tell for certain they weren’t the same stones, because when I was a kid I’d noticed that one of the stones on Blueside of Circle had a black line going right through it, like it was made of two halves, but now there wasn’t one stone there that wasn’t a pure white.

  It was a fake Circle and everything in Family felt fake. We went scavenging, we ate our meals round our fires, we pretended life was going on just like it normally did, but each of us secretly knew it would never go back to how it was, no matter how many times Lucy Lu came round rolling her eyes and speaking in that fake dreamy voice.

  ‘Mother Angela says we’ve done well. We’ve driven evil out of Family and made it whole whole again! Better even than it was before.’

  John evil? I could have hit that lying tubeslinker Lucy Lu. John was stupid and selfish, yes. But he’d done a braver thing than she had ever done in her life. In fact the braveness of what he’d done was so far beyond her reach, that she couldn’t even begin to see how brave it was. All she could see was an advantage to her in ganging up on him with the likes of Caroline and Council and David, and in helping them out by bringing precious dead Mother Angela in on their side. A lot of people are like that. They don’t think about what’s really true at all, only about what it would suit them best to say.

  ‘I thought Angela was the mother of all of us,’ I said to her. ‘I thought she was John’s mother as much as yours.’

  ‘Oh Tina, Tina, Tina Spiketree,’ she cried, rolling those bulgy weepy eyes, ‘you want to watch your ways, our sweet Mother says, or you’ll be the next to go. Bad John has filled you up with his juice and his poison, and Mother Angela weeps and weeps for the harm he’s done you, my darling, harm that you can’t even see.’

  She didn’t look at me whole time she was saying this. She was looking up at sky, to make us think she could see Angela looking down at her, but she kept peeping round at leader Liz and at the other people round the Spiketree fire, trying to work out if what she was saying was going down alright, or if she needed to swap it for something else.

  I spat on the ground and walked away. I missed John and I worried about him too. I didn’t like to think of him all alone out there. I wondered what that would be doing to his proud proud heart and, in a way, I felt bad that I hadn’t gone with him, like I’d let him down. But at the same time I was annoyed with myself for feeling that, because he was there by his own choice, and it was his own choice too that I hadn’t been a part of it.

  My little batface sister Jane came running after me. She took my hand and we walked together to Greatpool, and sat there side by side on the bank.

  ‘Don’t worry, Tina,’ she said, ‘none of us believes what Lucy Lu says.’

  Out on the water log boats were moving slowly through the shining fug, trailing their nets behind them.

  ‘No one believes it, but everyone half believes it, or she’d have shut up long ago.’

  Swish. One little jewel bat had come out on its own in spite of the fug, and it swooped down over the water, trailing its right hand across the surface. But it didn’t catch anything and, after one more run, it gave up and turned back into forest.

  ‘Bloody John Redlantern, why should I feel bad about him?’ I said. ‘He didn’t consult me about what he was going to do. He didn’t tell me a bloody thing. So why should I feel
bad that I’m not out there with him, tossed out by Family, sharing the punishment for what he did?’

  But then we heard a wail from Blueside across the water. It was that long low sound that people made when someone died.

  ‘Gela’s heart,’ I cried, jumping to my feet. ‘Not John. Surely not John?’

  A bunch of Starflower grownups had had a nasty surprise out on a hunting trip. They’d found a dead body hanging from a tree by a rope, already half-eaten by starbirds. It wasn’t John, though. It was Bella Redlantern. She’d killed herself in the same way that Tommy did, the father of all of us, when he was old old and blind and couldn’t bear living with it all any more.

  But we hadn’t even got all the stones ready to bury her when there was another death. Little old Stoop finally couldn’t get the air inside him quick enough any more and he keeled over and died with his skin turned blue and his eyes bulging out of his head like a frogbird’s. So they wrapped him in buckskins and laid him along with Bella, over in Burial Grounds, out in forest on the far side of Long Pool. And whole Family filed past each of them and each of us laid down the stones we had brought, first around them and then over them, until they were quite covered up. And then Caroline took two big flat stones that Secret Ree had scratched their names on, and laid on top of these two new heaps, squeezed in among all those hundreds of other heaps, with ‘Tommy Schneider, Astronaut’ and ‘Angela Young, Orbit Police’ side by side right in middle.

  ‘Bella Redlantern, Group Leader’, Secret Ree had written, ‘Stoop London, Oldest’, and now she beat slowly slowly on the big funeral drum – it was the other special duty of Secret Ree – while four five people blew on hollowbranch horns to make that special lonely funeral sound that begins loud and falls away.