Chris Beckett - Dark Eden

‘Don’t be too hard on him, Caroline,’ muttered Bella behind her. ‘Remember he’s only a kid.’

‘Only a kid?’ called out David Redlantern, striding out from the crowd into the clearing.

Oh boy, what an ugly, evil brute he was with his thick short limbs and his red batface always oozing, always quivering. Not that all batfaces are like him. My own sister Jane was a batface, and she was as sweet-natured as anyone could be, but David, he was cruel and cold and hard, and his batface just made him seem crueller and colder and harder still.

‘Only a kid, you say, Bella,’ he sneered in his spluttery voice, ‘but that didn’t stop you from getting him to slip with you in your shelter, did it? It didn’t stop you having a little slide with him on the exact same waking he insulted Council here in front of whole Family. We thought you were calling him in to tell him off, but no, you got him in and slipped with him, with whole group awake all around you. We knew what was going on. We heard the silence. We heard your breathing getting fast. We heard you gasp. What kind of group leader is that?’

‘Is this true, Bella?’ demanded Caroline, turning round.

Bella’s head was hanging down.

‘We didn’t slip but we did, well, touch . I did tell him off but I wanted him to know also that he was valued and that his concern was . . .’

‘What nonsense,’ Caroline said, and we’d never in our lives heard Head of Family talking to a group leader like that. ‘I’ve never heard such total garbage. We’ll need to reconsider the leadership of Redlantern, because you obviously aren’t fit to lead anything. But we’ll sort that out later. For the moment . . .’ She turned back to John. ‘For the moment the business of Strornry is this. How do we deal with this selfish, stupid, arrogant little slinker of a boy, who has defiled the memory of Mother Angela and of Father Tommy and of the Three Companions? How do we deal with a silly boy who has deliberately broken something that was precious to every single one of us?’

‘Hang him up from a spiketree like we hang a buckskin out to dry,’ said David. ‘Spike him up to burn, like Hitler did to Jesus.’

He gave a hard laugh.

‘They say Jesus was the leader of the Juice,’ he said. ‘Which sort of fits when you think about it, because juice is about the only thing old Juicy Johnny here has ever been good for.’

There were a few cold little titters of laughter, but Caroline told him off.

‘This isn’t a time for jokes,’ she said.

‘I’m not joking,’ David said. ‘Spike him up.’

And he stayed there, out in the open space on his own, standing with his muscly arms folded and his thick stumpy legs apart. He wasn’t a group leader. He didn’t really have any more right to speak out than John did, other than the fact that he was a grownup. But he didn’t go back to the edge of the clearing with everyone else, and Caroline didn’t tell him to. She just turned her attention away from him, like she couldn’t face another fight.

And the thought came to me — well, I didn’t properly think it through, but I sort of glimpsed it in my head — the thought came to me that up to now it had been the women in Eden that ran things and decided how things would be, but now a time was coming when it would be the men. Some of them might be good men and some would be bad like David. But it would be men rather than women for the next bit. Something had changed, and it would never be how it was before.

‘We need to discuss this,’ Caroline said. ‘Let’s decide who ought to speak first.’

‘How about his mother?’ murmured Candy Fishcreek.

‘Yes,’ agreed Caroline, scanning the crowd surrounding her, out round the edge of this stuffy little cave of cloud. ‘His mother. Jade Redlantern. Where are you, Jade?’

A rustling came from the place where most of the Redlantern people were standing, and you could see which one was Jade because hers was the only face that was still looking forward.

‘I’m here,’ she said in a small wavery voice.

And it was an odd thing. Jade wasn’t just pretty, she was a great beauty. She knew how to stand and how to hold herself and how to move herself, so as to command envy and desire and love. If men spoke or came up to her — and women too — she could dismiss them, or tease them, or give them their heart’s desire just by the way she moved her face and her body. But now she was lost, she had no idea how to speak or to compose herself. It sounds harsh but what she reminded me of was a whitelantern fruit that looks all ripe and lovely till you turn it round and you see the hole where the ants have got into and hollowed it out inside.

‘Well, um, he’s not all bad, John isn’t . . .’ she began.

It was like she was talking about someone she didn’t even know that well.

I looked at John. He was watching her. You couldn’t read the expression on his face, but his eyes were sort of hard and shiny. Not shiny with tears but with something like the opposite of tears, I thought, though I suppose it didn’t make a lot of sense.

‘ . . . but it’s a bad thing he’s done,’ Jade said lamely, and she sort of made a face, like it really wasn’t all that much to do with her, and didn’t say anything else.

‘Can I speak, Caroline?’ said Bella Redlantern.

Caroline turned round to her.

‘Go on,’ she said coldly.

‘I didn’t know what he was going to do, and I haven’t talked to him about it,’ she said, ‘but he’s a boy who feels passionately about things, feels passionately about the future of Family especially. I don’t really understand why he did this, but he will have done it because he thought it would help.’

‘Help?’ asked Caroline. ‘ Help? ’

She looked around at us all, making an incredulous face, trying to get a reaction out of us. Some people tittered, some shouted out ‘Shame on you Bella! Shame!’, which was just what Caroline wanted.

‘I may be getting too old for this,’ Caroline said, ‘I may be missing something obvious. But if you take something that is dear and precious to other people and calmly destroy it, how can you call that helping them?’

She didn’t wait for an answer.

‘Who else wants to comment?’

‘Make him put Circle back again!’ called out a fat dim woman called Gela Blueside.

‘But it can never be what it was!’ Caroline said. ‘Think about it. We could make another circle. We could use a rope to measure it out and make something that looked pretty much the same. And I daresay that is what we’ll do. But it’ll never again be the stones that Angela and Tommy chose, never the stones they laid in place with their own hands.’

Gela Blueside began to cry like she’d been scolded.

‘And I’ll tell you something,’ Caroline went on. ‘If and when we do restore that Circle, no way will this wicked boy have the honour of coming anywhere near it.’

‘Do like David said,’ called a big dark gloomy Starflower man called Harry. ‘Spike him up. Like Hitler did to Jesus. That will repay Mother Angela for the hurt that’s been done her. Otherwise we’ll all bear the burden of it, on and on and on.’

‘Yeah, that’s right,’ called out a sharp little woman called Lucy Fishcreek. ‘If he doesn’t pay the price for it, we all will. Us and our children and our children’s children too.’

‘That’s true,’ said Julie the London leader, with the authority of Council in her voice, ‘that’s true true. He’s shamed all of us, not just himself.’

‘Angela is crying,’ wailed that horrible wet-eyed Lucy Lu from Redlantern. ‘Angela is crying out for our help.’