Dark Eden

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.

PAAAAAaaaaaaaaaarrp! PAAAAAaaaaaaaaaarrp!

BOOM BOOM BOOM, went the tiny Secret Ree on her great big drum, and then she stopped and put her hands on the tight buckskin to silence it, and Caroline stood up and did the Funeral Speech about what fine people they both had been in spite of their faults, and how Bella’s and Stoop’s bones would now rest here peacefully until Earth finally came.

‘And then at last they will be taken home to Earth,’ she said, ‘and buried there to rest peacefully under the bright bright Sun in the world where human beings were meant to be.’

She paused, and looked around at all of us. The fug was still pressing in on us, and the sweat was pouring down our faces.

‘And let us all remember,’ she said, ‘that even if we die here on Eden before Earth comes, we will all still return, just so long as we do what we were asked to do, and stay here together in Family, next to Circle of Stones.’

That was the end of the funeral, and we all picked our way through the heaps of stones and hurried away from that horrible place with that stale and musty smell of death that crept out through the gaps between the stones.

On the way back to Family I caught up with Gerry Redlantern and his weird little brother Jeff. Gerry was in a bad bad state. He’d barely slept or eaten since John went away.

‘I can’t stand this,’ he muttered. ‘I’m going to go out and find him. I know where he’ll be. He’ll have gone out Cold Path way. There’s a place just inside main valley, Alpway from Cold Path Neck, near where he did for that leopard. He said it would be a good place to live. And he’s been on about Cold Path since we went up there. He’s been on about how the woollybucks get up and out of the valley that way, and over Dark, and how if they can do it so could we.’

‘If you go you’ll be chucked out of Family, same as he was,’ I said.

‘I don’t bloody care,’ he began, ‘I’ll . . .’

Then he broke off because we heard a familiar sound coming from Peckhamway: a sound like women singing, like beautiful beautiful women’s voices singing a sad sad song. It was leopards of course, and not just one leopard this time, but two three of them, singing in harmony. They don’t often hunt together, but once in a while they do, usually when there’s a specially good catch. And of course Peckhamway is the direction of Cold Path Neck.

David Redlantern came by with a couple of newhairs trailing behind him. All three of them had blackglass spears.

‘Sounds like those leopards have found something yummy to eat,’ said David, grinning his horrible cold batfaced grin at us. ‘What can it be, I wonder? Not by any chance our old friend Juicy John, do you think? What do you reckon? He did for one leopard, alright — credit where it’s due — but how would he cope if three of them came at him at once?’

The boys with him laughed loudly.

‘I reckon that’d be a bit much even for John, Dave,’ said one of them. ‘Looks like poor old Juicy John might have ended up as a leopard’s dinner.’

It was Met Redlantern, a stupid big empty-headed kid I’d often seen out with John and the other Redlantern newhairs, scavenging or hunting in forest.

‘You piece of shit, Met!’ Gerry hissed at him. ‘John was your friend. Only a few wakings ago he let you get the glory for that slinker when he could have had the glory himself!’

Met looked sort of uncomfortable but he laughed that same loud laugh that he’d done before.

‘Glory for a slinker?’ he said. ‘I don’t think so, Gerry. What glory does anyone get for a lousy slinker?’

‘He’d have let you be the one to do for it even if it had been a buck,’ said Gerry hotly. ‘You know he would.’

‘What? Like he shared that leopard glory with you?’ said Met.

‘He let me have one of the hearts!’

‘Well, who wants to eat two?’

‘You three are arseholes,’ I told David and his little friends. ‘John is better than all of you put together, and what’s more you know that yourselves, if only you had the guts to admit it.’

They laughed again, that horrible laugh. And all this time those leopards were singing that beautiful dreamy song. And of course for all we knew it really could be John out there, trapped between them, not knowing which one of them to face while they circled round him.

‘Arseholes, eh?’ said David, still grinning, and he looked straight at me. ‘That’s good good, coming from a silly little girlie who likes it up the arse as everyone knows. You’re going to have to change your tune one of these wakings, Tina Spiketree, and it won’t be so long now. It won’t be so long at all.’

I looked into his eyes and I could see the rest of his thoughts as surely as if he spoke them aloud. A time was soon coming, he was thinking, when I would have to call him whatever he told me to call him, and treat him however he wanted to be treated: a time when he would do to me whatever he pleased and whenever he felt like it, with whichever bit of my body he chose.

The time of men was coming, I could see. Women had run things so far, when there was just one Family, but that was over now, and in this new broken-up world it would be the men that would get ahead.

And right there and then I finally made up my mind. I didn’t want to be in Family any more, not this Family, not with the likes of David rising up to the top.

‘Let’s go out and find John,’ I said to Gerry, when David and his two little shadows had moved away.

I said it to Gerry and not to his little brother Jeff. Jeff had always made me feel uneasy, and anyway he was a clawfoot and I didn’t reckon he could walk that far.

Gerry looked at me like I’d saved his life. He’d been longing to go after John ever since John left, and talking about going after him too, but he was one of those people that just can’t do a thing all on their own, but need someone to follow, someone to give them permission, someone to show the way. His whole face changed and he laughed out loud.

‘Harry’s dick,’ he said, ‘I so want to do that.’

Then he glanced guiltily at his little brother.

‘You’ll have to tell mum,’ he said. ‘Tell her I love her and that, and that I’ll be alright.’

Jeff looked up at him with his big naked eyes.

‘But I’m coming too.’

Probably me and Gerry could have done the walk in one long long waking, but with his little brother hobbling along with us, we took three wakings and had to stop every hour to let him rest. Towards the end of each waking, we carried him between us, Jeff holding on with an arm round each of our necks, or me or Gerry would take a turn carrying him on our backs.

We didn’t have any proper hunting stuff, no bags or string or bows or anything, only the simple spiketip spears we’d had with us when we went to Stoop and Bella’s funeral, so all we could get to eat were a few bits of fruit and stumpcandy and one grey old groundrat. (It had made a tunnel into an ant’s nest, and I got Gerry to dig with his hands on the opposite side to where it had gone in until it panicked and scuttled back out of its hole, all covered in flashing red ants. Then I did for it with my spear.) We couldn’t even cook the rat properly, only scorch it in a hollow in a spiketree, like hunters do when they don’t want to take fire with them on a trip.

Most of the time the fug stayed down. Sometimes it moved away a bit, and we could see twenty thirty yards of space under the trees. Sometimes it was like we were stuck in a tiny world a few yards wide, with nothing in it but us and a few trees and the odd starflower, and nothing beyond but white shining fug. And then it was sticky and hot, and it was hard hard to walk and carry Jeff.

Once, we heard the hollowbranch horns back in the camp, like the sound of another world: parp parp paaaaarp, parp parp paaaaarp. Two short one long: it was the special sound for getting wanderers to return, when there wasn’t a Strornry or an Any Virsry. They were ordering the three of us to come back. We heard it again at the end of that waking when we were trying to get some sleep. And a couple of times we heard hunters in forest around us, talking and grumbling as they looked for us.

‘Bloody newhairs. Why can’t we just let them go?’

‘Leopards might have done for them already for all we know.’

But we kept still and quiet and waited, and they passed on.

Third waking, the fug lifted and, quite unusually, there was a dip again straight away. Starry Swirl was bright in a black black sky, the air was cold and sharp, and ahead of us we saw the lights of forest rising up into Peckham Hills, the great black shadow of Snowy Dark looming up against the stars behind them.

‘Do you two realize what we’ve done?’ I said. ‘Have you actually got it through your heads? We’ve left behind our mums and our sisters and our brothers. We’ve left our friends and our aunties and our uncles, maybe for good.’

I stopped and looked back into forest we’d come through, though all there was to see was branches and lanterns and starflowers and flutterbyes.

‘And we’ve left the warm fires in our groups,’ I said, ‘and the old blokes playing chess, and the kids kicking footballs, and the grownups acting out the old stories like Hitler and Jesus and Angela’s Ring and The Big Row, and boats fishing out on Great Pool, and one-legged Jeffo boiling up redlantern glue, down there by Dixon Stream. We’ve left behind Family, maybe forever. Think of that. Maybe we’ll never lie in our shelters again and hear other groups getting up and coming home. Maybe we’ll never eat with our groupmates again around the fire.’

Jeff stopped. His twisted feet were all cut up with walking and, even now the dip had come and the air was cool, his face was still pouring with sweat. It was from pain as much as anything, I reckoned, but there was a bit of fever in there too.

He stood there looking round, taking it all in. Starry Swirl shone down above us, so bright bright that it gave a faint light of its own on the branches and the forest floor, over and above the light from the flowers. All round us birds were squawking and squeaking and peeping and pooting like they do when a fug ends, and flutterbyes were everywhere, and bats were coming down from the hills in big flocks, swooping and diving to catch the feast. And it was like Starry Swirl had called them all out of their hiding places, like Starry Swirl ruled over us all.

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

‘You’re a nutter, aren’t you, Jeff?’ I said, and I swiped him across the head, not hard enough to hurt, but hard enough to show he was annoying me. ‘Why do you have to keep saying that all the time? Don’t you know how weird it sounds?’

He shrugged and rubbed his head.

‘I say it to remind myself,’ he said, and started to hobble forward again. ‘Otherwise I’d forget.’

On we went with our slow slow walk. Two three hours later we came to Neck of Cold Path Valley, where Cold Path Stream comes out between two spurs of the mountains into Circle Valley.

Gerry and me were supporting Jeff between us, but now Gerry released himself from Jeff’s arm and began to run ahead, leading the way to the bottom of left hand spur of Cold Path Neck.

‘John!’ he called out. ‘Hey John! John! It’s me. It’s Gerry. It’s Gerry and Tina and Jeff!’

Tom’s dick, Gerry,’ I told him, ‘come back here and help me with Jeff. I can’t carry him up there all by myself.’