Chris Beckett - Dark Eden

The boys with him laughed loudly.

‘I reckon that’d be a bit much even for John, Dave,’ said one of them. ‘Looks like poor old Juicy John might have ended up as a leopard’s dinner.’

It was Met Redlantern, a stupid big empty-headed kid I’d often seen out with John and the other Redlantern newhairs, scavenging or hunting in forest.

‘You piece of shit, Met!’ Gerry hissed at him. ‘John was your friend. Only a few wakings ago he let you get the glory for that slinker when he could have had the glory himself!’

Met looked sort of uncomfortable but he laughed that same loud laugh that he’d done before.

‘Glory for a slinker?’ he said. ‘I don’t think so, Gerry. What glory does anyone get for a lousy slinker?’

‘He’d have let you be the one to do for it even if it had been a buck,’ said Gerry hotly. ‘You know he would.’

‘What? Like he shared that leopard glory with you?’ said Met.

‘He let me have one of the hearts!’

‘Well, who wants to eat two?’

‘You three are arseholes,’ I told David and his little friends. ‘John is better than all of you put together, and what’s more you know that yourselves, if only you had the guts to admit it.’

They laughed again, that horrible laugh. And all this time those leopards were singing that beautiful dreamy song. And of course for all we knew it really could be John out there, trapped between them, not knowing which one of them to face while they circled round him.

‘Arseholes, eh?’ said David, still grinning, and he looked straight at me. ‘That’s good good, coming from a silly little girlie who likes it up the arse as everyone knows. You’re going to have to change your tune one of these wakings, Tina Spiketree, and it won’t be so long now. It won’t be so long at all.’

I looked into his eyes and I could see the rest of his thoughts as surely as if he spoke them aloud. A time was soon coming, he was thinking, when I would have to call him whatever he told me to call him, and treat him however he wanted to be treated: a time when he would do to me whatever he pleased and whenever he felt like it, with whichever bit of my body he chose.

The time of men was coming, I could see. Women had run things so far, when there was just one Family, but that was over now, and in this new broken-up world it would be the men that would get ahead.

And right there and then I finally made up my mind. I didn’t want to be in Family any more, not this Family, not with the likes of David rising up to the top.

‘Let’s go out and find John,’ I said to Gerry, when David and his two little shadows had moved away.

I said it to Gerry and not to his little brother Jeff. Jeff had always made me feel uneasy, and anyway he was a clawfoot and I didn’t reckon he could walk that far.

Gerry looked at me like I’d saved his life. He’d been longing to go after John ever since John left, and talking about going after him too, but he was one of those people that just can’t do a thing all on their own, but need someone to follow, someone to give them permission, someone to show the way. His whole face changed and he laughed out loud.

‘Harry’s dick,’ he said, ‘I so want to do that.’

Then he glanced guiltily at his little brother.

‘You’ll have to tell mum,’ he said. ‘Tell her I love her and that, and that I’ll be alright.’

Jeff looked up at him with his big naked eyes.

‘But I’m coming too.’

Probably me and Gerry could have done the walk in one long long waking, but with his little brother hobbling along with us, we took three wakings and had to stop every hour to let him rest. Towards the end of each waking, we carried him between us, Jeff holding on with an arm round each of our necks, or me or Gerry would take a turn carrying him on our backs.

We didn’t have any proper hunting stuff, no bags or string or bows or anything, only the simple spiketip spears we’d had with us when we went to Stoop and Bella’s funeral, so all we could get to eat were a few bits of fruit and stumpcandy and one grey old groundrat. (It had made a tunnel into an ant’s nest, and I got Gerry to dig with his hands on the opposite side to where it had gone in until it panicked and scuttled back out of its hole, all covered in flashing red ants. Then I did for it with my spear.) We couldn’t even cook the rat properly, only scorch it in a hollow in a spiketree, like hunters do when they don’t want to take fire with them on a trip.

Most of the time the fug stayed down. Sometimes it moved away a bit, and we could see twenty thirty yards of space under the trees. Sometimes it was like we were stuck in a tiny world a few yards wide, with nothing in it but us and a few trees and the odd starflower, and nothing beyond but white shining fug. And then it was sticky and hot, and it was hard hard to walk and carry Jeff.

Once, we heard the hollowbranch horns back in the camp, like the sound of another world: parp parp paaaaarp, parp parp paaaaarp. Two short one long: it was the special sound for getting wanderers to return, when there wasn’t a Strornry or an Any Virsry. They were ordering the three of us to come back. We heard it again at the end of that waking when we were trying to get some sleep. And a couple of times we heard hunters in forest around us, talking and grumbling as they looked for us.

‘Bloody newhairs. Why can’t we just let them go?’

‘Leopards might have done for them already for all we know.’

But we kept still and quiet and waited, and they passed on.

Third waking, the fug lifted and, quite unusually, there was a dip again straight away. Starry Swirl was bright in a black black sky, the air was cold and sharp, and ahead of us we saw the lights of forest rising up into Peckham Hills, the great black shadow of Snowy Dark looming up against the stars behind them.

‘Do you two realize what we’ve done?’ I said. ‘Have you actually got it through your heads? We’ve left behind our mums and our sisters and our brothers. We’ve left our friends and our aunties and our uncles, maybe for good.’

I stopped and looked back into forest we’d come through, though all there was to see was branches and lanterns and starflowers and flutterbyes.

‘And we’ve left the warm fires in our groups,’ I said, ‘and the old blokes playing chess, and the kids kicking footballs, and the grownups acting out the old stories like Hitler and Jesus and Angela’s Ring and The Big Row , and boats fishing out on Great Pool, and one-legged Jeffo boiling up redlantern glue, down there by Dixon Stream. We’ve left behind Family, maybe forever. Think of that. Maybe we’ll never lie in our shelters again and hear other groups getting up and coming home. Maybe we’ll never eat with our groupmates again around the fire.’

Jeff stopped. His twisted feet were all cut up with walking and, even now the dip had come and the air was cool, his face was still pouring with sweat. It was from pain as much as anything, I reckoned, but there was a bit of fever in there too.

He stood there looking round, taking it all in. Starry Swirl shone down above us, so bright bright that it gave a faint light of its own on the branches and the forest floor, over and above the light from the flowers. All round us birds were squawking and squeaking and peeping and pooting like they do when a fug ends, and flutterbyes were everywhere, and bats were coming down from the hills in big flocks, swooping and diving to catch the feast. And it was like Starry Swirl had called them all out of their hiding places, like Starry Swirl ruled over us all.

‘We’re here!’ he said. ‘This is happening. We really are here!’