Chris Beckett - Dark Eden

And there were differences, I thought, kneeling above her but looking away across Family towards Batwing on the far side, and thinking about the groups between here and there. For example, the names. Blueside just means the group that’s furthest over Blueway, the side nearest Blue Mountains, Redlantern just means we’ve got a big bunch of Redlantern trees (which we’re slowly cutting down and replacing by chucking whitelantern seeds down the stumps). But London and Brooklyn were proud proud of the fact that their names came from across Starry Swirl, from Earth. The Earth folk had a big big Family, with many many groups in it. Angela’s group was called London and the people there had black faces like Angela did. Tommy’s group was called Brooklyn, though some people called them the Juice. (As for the Three Companions, who took Defiant back across Starry Swirl, leaving Tommy and Angela in Eden, we don’t know the group names of Dixon and Michael, but they say Mehmet’s group was called Turkish, even though his last name was Haribey. I don’t why.)

So, yes, London were different from Blueside, Blueside were different from Batwing, Batwing were different from Redlantern. Each Family group woke at a different time, slept at a different time, had its own particular way of doing things and deciding things, its own little things they were proud of about themselves (like London and Brooklyn being the names of groups on Earth), its own particular combination of strong people and weak people, kind people and selfish people, batfaces and clawfeet. But the differences were so small, I thought, and so dull dull dull. Really we were all alike. In fact, we were so on top of one another, so in each others’ lives and in each others’ heads, we were hardly separate from one another at all. Like Oldest always banged on and on about, we were all one . It was really true: one Family, all together, all cousins, all from one single womb and one single dick.

‘I’ve got some milk if you want some,’ Martha said, cupping her hands under her breasts.

‘Yeah, okay,’ I said, and I bent down while she held one of them for me to kneel and suck the warm sweet stuff.

‘That’s better,’ she said after a bit. ‘They were beginning to hurt.’

She stroked my hair briefly, without much interest.

‘Had a new baby die on me,’ she explained. ‘Twenty thirty sleeps ago. Little batface baby. Really bad batface, poor little thing. His little face was practically split open from top to bottom, and he couldn’t suck, no matter how hard I tried to help him. In the end he just . . .’

I felt her shaking as she began to cry. That was the reason she’d been awake. She couldn’t sleep. She couldn’t think of anything else but the dead baby. That was what it was like for mums when a baby died. They couldn’t think of anything except the gap where the baby had been. Martha London didn’t know how to fill up the time. She didn’t know how to let the baby go.

‘Ten kids I’ve had in all,’ she said. ‘All but two of them were batfaces. And, well, you love them anyway, but . . .’

She released the breast she was holding and scooped up the other one for me.

‘Only three of my kids are still alive,’ she said. ‘Three girls. All the rest died. All my boys died. Last three all died as babies.’

I sat up.

‘Well, maybe your luck will turn now.’

She nodded, lying there under the flickering starflowers, her face all smeary with tears. The flowers were so bright that their stems made little lines and shadows, always moving and changing, all over her body. Her hand was still cupped between her legs to hold in my lucky juice.

‘If I have another boy a wombtime from now,’ she said, ‘I’ll call him after you.’

Those slips with oldmums were funny things. When you thought about it later, you got hard all over again and you remembered your dick going in and out of her, and you wanted to do it some more. And when you heard other boys boasting to each other about the grownup women that had asked them for a slide, you worried that maybe they were getting more of it than you, or maybe that they were getting something better than you’d had. And the batface boys who oldmums never wanted to slip with, they listened to rest of us and thought to themselves, It’s not fair. Why can’t that happen to me? (But they didn’t say it, because they knew us smoothfaces would just laugh at them and say, ‘It’s because you’re ugly , Einstein. Ugly ugly . The clue’s in the name. It’s because you’ve got a face like a bloody bat.’)

But straight afterwards, you felt sort of empty, like the spark had been taken out of you along with your juice, and nothing meant anything at all. That was what it actually felt like afterwards, but that feeling didn’t last long, and seeing as that part of it wasn’t fun to think about or talk about, you soon pushed it out of your mind, you forgot about it till next time, and no one ever spoke about it at all.

I didn’t want to walk through Circle Clearing and maybe get tangled up with bloody Oldest, so I walked along by Dixon Stream where it flows down towards Stream’s Join and the log bridge. The only trouble with going that way was there was a place down along the stream where that one-legged London bloke Jeffo made boats, and he was boring boring and hard to get away from.

‘Hey! Who’s that? Aren’t you that John Redlantern that did for that leopard?’

Damn. I’d hoped he’d be out on the water in one of his boats but he wasn’t. He was sitting on a bit of log below a whitelantern tree, working on a new one. He was a big man of about sixty wombtimes with a soft weak face, no teeth, and that one leg of his missing below the knee. He’d got a three-yard length of split trunk from a redlantern tree that he was working on. He’d already scraped the dried old tubes out of it, cut the ends straight with a blackglass saw and smoothed off them off with roughstone. He’d got a special fire place for boiling down redlantern sap into glue. There was a deep hole in middle full up with a hot sticky sludge of boiled sap, and round it a circular trench filled with redhot embers. He was scooping the sludge out with a bark spoon and smearing it onto the pieces of buckskin he’d stretched tight over the open ends of the log. The skins had dried hard hard from when he first glued them on, and now he was spreading more glue all over them, ready to stick on another layer of skins.

‘How long you’ve been working on that one, Jeffo?’

‘Oh twenty wakings at least, I’d say.’

‘How many boats you reckon you’ve made?’

‘Oh thirty, forty. They don’t last that long, you know, boats. It doesn’t matter how much glue you use, sooner or later the ends come off and then down they go and it’s, “Jeffo! Jeffo! Can you glue the ends back on this one?”. “No I can’t,” I tell them. “You’ll need new soft skins that can be stretched, and if the wood’s soaked at the ends at all, you’ll need to start again with a new log.” And then of course it’s “Jeffo! Jeffo! Can you make us a new one then?”’

‘Don’t you get bored?’

‘Well, if I do, I can go fishing in my own boat. That’s like going for a walk for me, going out on my boat. Move as fast on the water as you can with your legs on the ground, I can. Faster, in fact. No one beats old Jeffo in a boat. And anyway I like making boats. It’s good work. Tommy and Gela themselves taught it to us. Make boats, they said, and a waking will come some time when you’ll figure out how to build a boat like the one that brought us here with the Three Companions. And then you’ll get back to Earth.’