Chris Beckett - Dark Eden

‘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 arms 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?’

‘Yes. All that.’

‘That’s the same thing as not thinking about where they are or where they might be,’ I said. ‘That way they don’t even have to try.’

Tina frowned.

‘But wouldn’t you like to be on Earth? With the light in sky and everything?’

How we all longed for that bright light. How we’d always longed for it.

‘Yeah, of course,’ I said. ‘But there’s no point in going on about it, is there? I’m not on Earth, am I? I might never get there in my lifetime. I’m in Eden. We’re in Eden. This is what we’ve got.’

I waved my hand at the scene in front of us: that little jewel bat leaving a sparkly trail as it skimmed the surface of the water with the tips of its fingers; that whitelantern branch hanging down over its own reflection; those tiny shimmery little fish nipping in and out of the tangle of roots round the pool’s edge.

Hoom! Hoom! went the starbird off in forest.

Aaaah! Aaaah! came back the reply.