Chris Beckett - Dark Eden

‘I’ll give you one thing, John,’ Janny said, as we moved on through the trees. ‘You’re a bloody idiot and you pissed Caroline off something rotten, but you really couldn’t have made Any Virsry any worse than it already is.’

She laughed. She was a batface like my mum and ugly as anything, but she was always cheerful cheerful.

Up ahead of us, two Blueside oldmums were kneeling in front of a small pond, their bony bums sticking up as they picked out pondsnails.

‘Carry on like that, John Redlantern, and you’ll break Oldest’s hearts,’ said one of them, called Lucy.

‘Worry too much about breaking old Mitch’s heart, and we’ll all starve,’ John told her. ‘Which would probably break his heart too, don’t you think?’

‘What do you know about things like that, you silly newhair?’ Lucy Blueside said. ‘You should hear yourself. You should hear what rubbish it sounds.’

‘He’s not talking rubbish,’ I said hotly. ‘This is my cousin John you’re talking about, the one that did for that leopard by himself. He’s smart smart, way way cleverer than you.’

The other woman, Mary, laughed angrily at that.

‘Harry’s dick, boy, look at him!’ she said. ‘Your precious cousin’s just a newhair kid that hasn’t even managed to grow a proper beard yet. Do you really think that doing for one old leopard means that he knows better than Caroline and all of Council, with all their wombs of experience?’

Our Janny laughed.

‘You’re wasting your breath, girls,’ she told the Blueside women. ‘John could say up was down and black was white and Gerry’d still stand up for him.’

‘More fool him,’ said Mary Blueside. ‘And by the way, what’s this I hear about young John there and B . . .’

‘So what is your suggestion as to how we’re going to feed ourselves when there are two three times as many of us?’ John interrupted her.

‘Like I said,’ said Mary Blueside stubbornly, ‘that’s for Caroline and Council to sort out, not the likes of you. Now if you’ll excuse us, some of us are trying to find some food for our group right now.’

‘Yeah, I can see that,’ John sneered. ‘Pondsnails. So tell me honestly, did you ever think of eating pondsnails when you were kids?’

‘What I did when I was a kid is none of your business, newhair!’

‘Yes,’ I broke in, ‘but John means that . . .’

‘Leave it, Gerry, leave it,’ said John in a tired tired voice, and he walked on again, leaving the rest of us to catch up with him.

‘So are we actually going to do some scavenging ourselves?’ asked Candice. She was pretty pretty, but she was always finding fault with everything, and I was a bit scared of her sharp tongue. ‘Or are we just going to wait around while John has his own personal Any Virsry out here?’

‘Yeah,’ said big slow Met. ‘I don’t like having all these people moan at us. It wasn’t us that spoke out in Circle. It’s not our fault.’

I felt sorry for John, with everyone complaining about him. And I kept remembering how he’d looked when he came out from Bella’s shelter last night: lonely lonely, and waving me away so he could stay alone.

But not everyone moaned at him. Once we came upon a group of newhairs from Brooklyn — Mike, Dixon, Gela and Clare — and they were full of praise for him.

‘Good for you, John. Why shouldn’t we newhairs have a say if we want one?’ Mike Brooklyn said. ‘We have to scavenge and hunt like grownups, we have to help look after littles and oldies, so why can’t we have a say as well?’

‘Yeah, what you said was right, John,’ Dix Brooklyn said. ‘It’s all fine fine for Oldest to say we should keep everything like it’s always been but they’ll be dead soon. We’ve got to think about how it’s going to be when we’re grownups and Family’s bigger.’

‘So how big will Family be when we’re old then, John?’ asked Gela Brooklyn, and it wasn’t in a sneering way to make fun of John, but because she really wanted him to explain.

That made me pleased pleased for John.

‘You mean when we’ve had kids and our kids have had kids?’ John said. ‘Well, it’ll be thousands, won’t it? Think about it. There were just two people here once, one hundred and sixty-three years ago, and now we’re five hundred and thirty-two. That’s — what? — more than two hundred times what it was. And in another hundred and sixty years . . .’

‘What? Will it be two hundred times what it is now?’ Gela laughed nervously. ‘Tom’s neck, I don’t even know the name of that number.’

‘It would be,’ said John. ‘Except that most people would starve before then.’

He was about the only newhair I knew who ever thought about anything except what was happening for them now. And that was what was good about John, and why I stuck by him, but it was also what was scary about him, and about people like him. He would take risks and he would do things that would make people turn against him, if he thought that would work out best in the long run. I just didn’t have that in me.

But I did have it in me to follow someone no matter what.

After we’d spoken to those Brooklyn newhairs, we spread out a bit and started looking properly for stuff to eat. There wasn’t much to find, what with all of Family milling around, and all we got was a few lousy little bats and some dirty scraps of stumpcandy — but after about four five hours Candice spotted a little stonebuck grazing in a clump of starflowers. She knew better than to go straight in after it because, once it spotted us, it could run two three times as fast as any of us — we’ve only got two legs, it has six — but she crept back to rest of us and signed to us with her hands where it was so we could spread out around it. I was crawling slowly through the flickering starflowers when I put my hand on what I thought was a funny shaped stone. But when I glanced down at it I could see straight away that it wasn’t a stone at all. It was a ring, like the rings some people carve out of wood and polish up with buckfat to put on their fingers.

But this one wasn’t made of wood, it was hard and smooth, and it reflected the light of the flowers like water does. I knew then it was made of metal , that hard smooth shiny stuff that comes from Earth. (It was said you could find it in Eden too, hidden in the rocks, mixed up with the rock in some way, but no one knew where to look.) And if it was made of metal, it must have belonged to one of the First Five, to Angela or Tommy or one of the Three Companions.

And then I had a thought that sent a chill going right through me and made my head spin.

Tom’s dick! This could be the ring, the Lost Ring, Angela’s ring that they sometimes do that play about! It could be that actual one.

Anyway, whether it was that ring or another one, it was a Memento, and if I told anyone about it, they’d make me hand it over to Oldest to keep with the other Mementoes — the Boots, the Belt, the Backpack, the Sky-Boat Models, the Earth Models, the plastic Kee Board with its rows of squares with letters, and the blank square that once showed pictures that could move and talk . . .

Bam! The stonebuck bowled straight into me, knocking all the wind out of me and sending me flying, back onto a big ant’s nest.

All the others laughed.

‘He kills a bloody leopard,’ Janny teased me, ‘and then he doesn’t notice a stonebuck when it comes right at him.’

‘You idiot, John,’ said Candice. ‘That would have been a good waking’s kill for us. What in Harry’s name did you think you were doing?’