Chris Beckett - Dark Eden

I wasn’t happy. I wasn’t at ease. But I gave her a kiss on the cheek and emerged out of her shelter into group. People who’d been listening outside when she was shouting at me had moved onto other things now, like fixing shelters, or scraping skins, or playing chess. It was like they were doing the opposite of listening, like they were trying their best to notice everything else but the fact that my telling-off had taken a funny turn into something else. No one said anything. Jade, my mother, busied herself with scraping a skin so hard that it was like she was angry with it. Only my aunt Sue and her boys Gerry and Jeff looked at me kindly. Gerry got up and came towards me with a worried worried face but I signalled to him I wanted to be on my own.

And David glared over at me, his eyes like cold fire in his raw batface. He was refastening a new blackglass head onto the end of his best hunting spear, using resin glue and buck sinews. He thought he knew perfectly well what had happened with Bella in there and he hated me for it. He glared at me and then looked away and spat onto the ground beside him. I’d humiliated Bella and the entire group in front of Family but she’d still taken me into her shelter and slipped with me (or so he thought). He did whatever she asked of him and she left him outside, and didn’t seem to want to get close to him at all. It would be no good me telling him that I didn’t like what Bella did with me. No good at all. He was a batface, and batfaces always hated the way that oldmums would slip with the rest of us but not with them.

I went over to Spiketree but I didn’t get a welcome in Spiketree either. You wouldn’t believe that only a few wakings previously everyone was fussing over me and telling me how great I was for killing that leopard. Now it was ‘Here comes trouble’ and ‘Don’t think Tina’s coming out to play, John, because she’s in there talking to Liz.’ (Liz was the Spiketree leader: a fat, tetchy, self-important woman, not a patch on our Bella.) ‘Liz wants all our newhairs to stay in group till Any Virsry ends.’

So I went round the edge of Brooklyn towards Stream’s Join, trying to keep out of the way of other people. A bat looked down at me from a branch, a little jewel bat with its trembling wings spread out to cool, rubbing its wrinkly face with its little black hands.

Sometimes I hated Eden. Eden was all I knew, all my mother knew, all my grandmother knew, but sometimes I longed and longed for the bright light that shines on Earth — as bright everywhere as the inside of a whitelantern flower — and for the creatures that lived there, with red blood and four limbs and a single heart like us, and not the green-black blood and two hearts and six limbs of bats and leopards and birds and woollybucks. And sometimes I felt that if I ate another mouthful of greenish Eden meat I would vomit out my guts. And yet I’d never tried anything else, never would try anything else, unless I ate the meat of another human being. And no one in Eden had ever done that.

I crossed over the log bridge by Stream’s Join — in my head I was begging the shadows of Tommy and Angela to fix it for me that boring bloody old one-legged Jeffo wouldn’t be there on the path by Dixon Stream — and I headed up to Deep Pool, clambering down the rocks and diving straight into its warm warm water, down among those bright canyons of wavyweed with all those little shining fish darting away from me.

They said men shouldn’t slip with their sisters, or their mothers, or their daughters — they said that was bad bad slip — but then they told you that Harry did just that, slipping with his sisters, and then with their children, and how it was a good job he did, and that we should honour him for it, because if he hadn’t we wouldn’t be here. Yes, and really we were all brothers and sisters anyway. All of us, every one us, had the same mother and father, Tommy and Angela, so whenever any of us slipped together it was always bad slip in a way. And Bella might not be my mother, but she was my cousin, like everyone else in whole Family. And in a way she was my mother too because she looked out for me when I was little. She told me things. She listened to me. She was more of a mother to me than Jade, because Jade never wanted to be a mum. (She didn’t fancy staying behind in group with the littles and oldies and clawfeet.) So it was double bad slip me doing it with Bella, or letting her do it with me. It was bad bad, even if we didn’t do the full slip.

That’s what I was thinking while I swam up and down Deep Pool, swimming really hard, to wear myself down and to make the water wash over me and clean my skin. ‘It’s bad, it’s bad, it’s bad. I’m bad, I’m bad, I’m bad.’ Then I pulled myself out of the water onto the bank where Tina and I had sat. I pulled a whitelantern flower from a tree and turned it round in my hand: a shining sphere of whiteness, with just a little opening in it for the flutterbyes to go in and out. I held it up close to my eye and looked inside. A tiny flylet was crawling in there, surrounded on all sides by beautiful bright white light. There was no darkness in there. That little flylet didn’t have to see a black sky above, or dark trunks of trees. All it could see was light. Just thinking about it brought tears up into my eyes.

And then a strange feeling came over me, a feeling that this same thing had happened here before, long ago, but in this exact same place. Someone else had sat here beside Deep Pool and looked into a lanternflower and cried. And that someone, well, it was Gela herself. I don’t mean bloody old Gela Oldest. I mean first Gela. I mean Angela Young, my great-great-grandmother, the mother of us all. She’d come here and sat in this exact place all on her own, so as to be where Tommy and the children wouldn’t find her. And she’d plucked a lanternflower and looked inside it, remembering her far-off world full of light and all the people in it. She’d cried and cried and cried until she had no tears left, and then she’d scrumpled the lanternflower and tossed it into the pool.

They say that Angela and Tommy didn’t get on so well. It’s said he got angry when he didn’t get his way. It’s said she was full of bitterness for what he’d done to her, because it was his fault she’d come to Eden, his fault and the fault of his friends Mehmet and Dixon. She’d never have come here at all of her own choice, and she’d never have been with a man like him either.

‘No wonder she cried,’ I said to myself.

But then I thought, Tom’s neck, what is this crap? I’m starting to talk like bloody Lucy Lu. Muttering to shadows. Communicating with the dead. How could I know what Angela felt? How could I know that she came to this same place? I’m just doing what everyone else does, wake-dreaming, playing with silly stories and pretending they’re true, grieving over bloody Earth, feeling sorry for myself because I can’t have everything given to me that I want.’

I scrumpled up the lanternflower and tossed it into the pool, just like she had.

‘Tom’s dick and Harry’s!’ I said out loud, after I’d splashed water on my face. ‘We’re in Eden . Maybe no one will ever come to take us back to Earth. And anyway that isn’t “back”, it wouldn’t be going back , because none of us has ever been there .’

‘You talking to yourself now, John?’ said Tina.

She’d crept down the rocks, quiet quiet as a tree fox. I didn’t know how long she’d been there or what she’d seen.

‘Shall we see if we can find some more oysters?’

‘Yeah okay, but don’t think we’re going to carry on with that slide we started, because we’re not. I’m not in the mood, okay?’