Chris Beckett - Dark Eden

It was a fake Circle and everything in Family felt fake. We went scavenging, we ate our meals round our fires, we pretended life was going on just like it normally did, but each of us secretly knew it would never go back to how it was, no matter how many times Lucy Lu came round rolling her eyes and speaking in that fake dreamy voice.

‘Mother Angela says we’ve done well. We’ve driven evil out of Family and made it whole whole again! Better even than it was before.’

John evil ? I could have hit that lying tubeslinker Lucy Lu. John was stupid and selfish, yes. But he’d done a braver thing than she had ever done in her life. In fact the braveness of what he’d done was so far beyond her reach, that she couldn’t even begin to see how brave it was. All she could see was an advantage to her in ganging up on him with the likes of Caroline and Council and David, and in helping them out by bringing precious dead Mother Angela in on their side. A lot of people are like that. They don’t think about what’s really true at all, only about what it would suit them best to say.

‘I thought Angela was the mother of all of us,’ I said to her. ‘I thought she was John’s mother as much as yours.’

‘Oh Tina, Tina, Tina Spiketree,’ she cried, rolling those bulgy weepy eyes, ‘you want to watch your ways, our sweet Mother says, or you’ll be the next to go. Bad John has filled you up with his juice and his poison, and Mother Angela weeps and weeps for the harm he’s done you, my darling, harm that you can’t even see.’

She didn’t look at me whole time she was saying this. She was looking up at sky, to make us think she could see Angela looking down at her, but she kept peeping round at leader Liz and at the other people round the Spiketree fire, trying to work out if what she was saying was going down alright, or if she needed to swap it for something else.

I spat on the ground and walked away. I missed John and I worried about him too. I didn’t like to think of him all alone out there. I wondered what that would be doing to his proud proud heart and, in a way, I felt bad that I hadn’t gone with him, like I’d let him down. But at the same time I was annoyed with myself for feeling that, because he was there by his own choice, and it was his own choice too that I hadn’t been a part of it.

My little batface sister Jane came running after me. She took my hand and we walked together to Greatpool, and sat there side by side on the bank.

‘Don’t worry, Tina,’ she said, ‘none of us believes what Lucy Lu says.’

Out on the water log boats were moving slowly through the shining fug, trailing their nets behind them.

‘No one believes it, but everyone half believes it, or she’d have shut up long ago.’

Swish . One little jewel bat had come out on its own in spite of the fug, and it swooped down over the water, trailing its right hand across the surface. But it didn’t catch anything and, after one more run, it gave up and turned back into forest.

‘Bloody John Redlantern, why should I feel bad about him?’ I said. ‘He didn’t consult me about what he was going to do. He didn’t tell me a bloody thing. So why should I feel bad that I’m not out there with him, tossed out by Family, sharing the punishment for what he did?’

But then we heard a wail from Blueside across the water. It was that long low sound that people made when someone died.

‘Gela’s heart,’ I cried, jumping to my feet. ‘Not John. Surely not John?’

A bunch of Starflower grownups had had a nasty surprise out on a hunting trip. They’d found a dead body hanging from a tree by a rope, already half-eaten by starbirds. It wasn’t John, though. It was Bella Redlantern. She’d killed herself in the same way that Tommy did, the father of all of us, when he was old old and blind and couldn’t bear living with it all any more.

But we hadn’t even got all the stones ready to bury her when there was another death. Little old Stoop finally couldn’t get the air inside him quick enough any more and he keeled over and died with his skin turned blue and his eyes bulging out of his head like a frogbird’s. So they wrapped him in buckskins and laid him along with Bella, over in Burial Grounds, out in forest on the far side of Long Pool. And whole Family filed past each of them and each of us laid down the stones we had brought, first around them and then over them, until they were quite covered up. And then Caroline took two big flat stones that Secret Ree had scratched their names on, and laid on top of these two new heaps, squeezed in among all those hundreds of other heaps, with ‘Tommy Schneider, Astronaut’ and ‘Angela Young, Orbit Police’ side by side right in middle.

‘Bella Redlantern, Group Leader’, Secret Ree had written, ‘Stoop London, Oldest’, and now she beat slowly slowly on the big funeral drum — it was the other special duty of Secret Ree — while four five people blew on hollowbranch horns to make that special lonely funeral sound that begins loud and falls away.

PAAAAAaaaaaaaaaarrp! PAAAAAaaaaaaaaaarrp!

BOOM BOOM BOOM , went the tiny Secret Ree on her great big drum, and then she stopped and put her hands on the tight buckskin to silence it, and Caroline stood up and did the Funeral Speech about what fine people they both had been in spite of their faults, and how Bella’s and Stoop’s bones would now rest here peacefully until Earth finally came.

‘And then at last they will be taken home to Earth,’ she said, ‘and buried there to rest peacefully under the bright bright Sun in the world where human beings were meant to be.’

She paused, and looked around at all of us. The fug was still pressing in on us, and the sweat was pouring down our faces.

‘And let us all remember,’ she said, ‘that even if we die here on Eden before Earth comes, we will all still return, just so long as we do what we were asked to do, and stay here together in Family, next to Circle of Stones.’

That was the end of the funeral, and we all picked our way through the heaps of stones and hurried away from that horrible place with that stale and musty smell of death that crept out through the gaps between the stones.

On the way back to Family I caught up with Gerry Redlantern and his weird little brother Jeff. Gerry was in a bad bad state. He’d barely slept or eaten since John went away.

‘I can’t stand this,’ he muttered. ‘I’m going to go out and find him. I know where he’ll be. He’ll have gone out Cold Path way. There’s a place just inside main valley, Alpway from Cold Path Neck, near where he did for that leopard. He said it would be a good place to live. And he’s been on about Cold Path since we went up there. He’s been on about how the woollybucks get up and out of the valley that way, and over Dark, and how if they can do it so could we.’

‘If you go you’ll be chucked out of Family, same as he was,’ I said.

‘I don’t bloody care,’ he began, ‘I’ll . . .’

Then he broke off because we heard a familiar sound coming from Peckhamway: a sound like women singing, like beautiful beautiful women’s voices singing a sad sad song. It was leopards of course, and not just one leopard this time, but two three of them, singing in harmony. They don’t often hunt together, but once in a while they do, usually when there’s a specially good catch. And of course Peckhamway is the direction of Cold Path Neck.

David Redlantern came by with a couple of newhairs trailing behind him. All three of them had blackglass spears.

‘Sounds like those leopards have found something yummy to eat,’ said David, grinning his horrible cold batfaced grin at us. ‘What can it be, I wonder? Not by any chance our old friend Juicy John, do you think? What do you reckon? He did for one leopard, alright — credit where it’s due — but how would he cope if three of them came at him at once?’