Chris Beckett - Dark Eden

The funny thing was that she was yelling at me, but it was like she was acting in one of those story-plays that people put on. Like the story of Angela’s Ring , when Angela loses the ring her mum and dad gave her, and she cries and screams and tells Tommy he’s worse than shit, and how she hates him and she hates Eden and she hates the kids and she wishes she was dead. Or like Hitler and Jesus , where Hitler yells at Jesus he’s going to kill all his group, the Juice, kill them like they were slinkers (‘Over my dead body!’ goes Jesus, and Hitler says, ‘It will be over your dead body, mate, because I’m going to nail you up to a hot spiketree till your skin’s all burned off.’) Often when people act these things you can see they’re not really in them. They might be shouting but their eyes aren’t angry like their mouths are. And it was like that now. We were in a story-play — Bella and me — and we didn’t have to pretend with our faces, only with our voices, because the play wasn’t for us really at all but for the rest of group who were outside listening and couldn’t see us.

‘Don’t speak out of turn again, John, alright?’

‘I’m sorry I shamed you.’

‘And if you want something said at Any Virsry, talk to me, not to whole Family without me even knowing about it, alright?’

‘Yes, Bella.’

She looked at me, staring hard hard into my eyes, then she smiled her little tight smile and relaxed a little bit (as much as she ever relaxed) and nodded, as if to say: okay, the play was over now.

‘So why did you do it, John?’ she asked me in her normal voice, low enough so that no one outside would hear the words (not unless they came right up outside the shelter and put their ear to the bark, and no one would dare do that with whole group there to see them). ‘If you wanted it said why didn’t you talk to me about it?’

‘I only thought of it then and that’s the truth. It just came into my mind when Tom said that thing about how we’d given up School already and now we’d have to give up something else. Gela’s tits, I thought, what’s the point of that? Why can’t we see that there just isn’t enough in this valley for us?’

Bella studied my face carefully. Then she nodded.

‘Actually, I agree with you, John,’ she finally said. ‘Something needs to give and we need to start preparing people for that. But you know there’s more to it than just yelling things out at Any Virsry. You’ve got to work round people, win them over, meet them halfway, do things gradually. That’s what Council is all about.’

‘So how many people in Council apart from you agree with me?’

She considered this.

‘Not one. Not yet. But I’m working on people, John. I’m working towards the idea that we may need to spread out a little.’

‘It’s not just a matter of spreading out a little. We’ve got to get past Snowy Dark.’

Bella shook her head.

‘Right over the top of Dark? I can’t see it. I mean it’s a few wombs now since I was up by Dark, but I do know what it’s like up there. You think you’ve been there, John, but you haven’t. Furthest you’ve been to is up to the top of Cold Path. That’s barely the beginning of Snowy Dark. Barely the beginning. It’s so cold cold and so dark dark up beyond there that I don’t see any way we can ever get over it.’

‘Well, we’ll go down Exit Falls then.’

‘Oh John! Do you have any idea what that would be like? It might have been possible before the rockfall, but now the only gap is where the water drops down from Fall Pool between massive cliffs, down, down, down into darkness. And think of the weight of all that water. All the water from Greatpool, all the water from all the snowslugs that come down into forest from Snowy Dark.’

‘Suppose there’s another rockfall one waking that fills up the gap completely. Whole of Circle Valley could end up as one big pool. What will we do then?’

‘Well, we’ll just have to hope that doesn’t happen.’

‘Why just hope? Why not try and find a way out?’

‘No one could get across Dark.’

‘So Tommy and Angela and the Three could go up into sky from Earth and cross Starry Swirl and come down to Eden, but we can’t even hope to cross the lousy mountains?’

Bella laughed.

‘Dearest John. You can’t do everything at once. At the moment Family isn’t even ready to spread itself out right here in Circle Valley, let alone try to cross Dark. Let’s work on spreading out a bit first, eh?’

‘How long will that take?’

‘I don’t know. Maybe in two three Any Virsries’ time we can talk about setting up a new group down the river a bit, or over by Lava Blob. Right now it isn’t even on the Genda. You’ve got to be patient about these things.’

‘ That patient and we’ll all bloody starve.’

She smiled.

‘There’s a little time, I think, before that happens. You need to give people time. And you need to remember that, after all, everyone is concerned that we shouldn’t go against what Mother Angela taught us: to wait here and care for each other, until Earth comes back.’

I remembered the dream I’d had — the dream that everyone had — where the Veekle came down from sky and I was far away.

‘Yes, but she didn’t want us to starve, did she?’ I said stubbornly, driving my own fear away.

‘John, my dear, I do love you. And it might sound strange to say after I’ve told you off, but I’m proud of you too. Come over and sit with me.’

I moved over to sit next to her on her sleeping skin, tense tense because I knew what was coming next. She kissed my cheek. She ran her hands over me. She took my own hand and placed it between her legs. Older women would ask young guys for a slide and no one thought anything about it. But Bella didn’t do it like, say, that Martha London did it. She’d never had a baby and she wasn’t looking for one now. That wasn’t what it was about. In fact she didn’t really go for whole slip thing much at all, just a rub with fingers.

And the other thing that was different about what she did was that she only did it with me, a boy in her own group. That wasn’t the usual thing, not women with boys that they’d cared for since they were little. Women were allowed to do it with whoever they liked, of course, but that wasn’t the usual way it happened. Women did the mum thing with boys and they did the slip thing with boys, but they did them with different boys.

‘I’m tired and I’m tense, darling,’ she said, ‘and there’s such a hard waking ahead of me tomorrow in Council.’

Well, I loved Bella. She was good to me. Of all the grownups in Family, she was the one that really knew me. And I admired her too. She was clever, one of the cleverest in whole Family. But I didn’t like doing this and I wanted to stop. I just didn’t know how to get out of it. So I did what she asked of me while she held my arm and pressed my hand down exactly where she wanted it, so hard sometimes that it hurt me, shutting her eyes and screwing up her face as if it was hard hard work she was doing and not pleasure at all.

And I’ll tell you something: it was hard work for me, not just this time but every time. It was like her body was shut away in some tiny little place in middle of her shadow — her live happy body, long-lost, hidden under all her cares — and she needed me to let it out for her just for a moment, to release the tension for a moment of being squeezed away in there so she could relax and go to sleep. It was hard work. But at last she gave a little gasp, pressed my hand down extra hard and then released it and I knew she was done.

‘Thankyou, John, and now I need to sleep.’