Chris Beckett - Dark Eden

‘No, you’re quite right, Mehmet,’ I said, as calmly as I could with my tight tight throat. ‘And you’re welcome to stay here or to go back to Family, Mehmet. All of you are welcome to stay or go back. Take what’s yours, if you like, and walk back to Family. Tell them it was John and Harry and Gerry who did for Dixon and his mates, and that it was nothing at all to do with you. Which is true. It’s perfectly true. So go on if you want to. Go on. No one’s stopping any of you. You all came to me, remember, all of you, every single one, out of your own choice. I didn’t force you to come and I certainly won’t force you to stay.’

I folded my arms and stood and waited. Mehmet looked around awkwardly, but all his support seemed to have disappeared.

‘No,’ he said, ‘I just meant . . .’

‘You just meant what?’

‘Oh nothing. It doesn’t matter.’

He was sort of smiling but under the smile he was ashamed, and under the shame he was angry angry. He was going to be trouble, I could see, and it would actually be better if he left. But if I tried to make him go, that would have been trouble too. That would have been even more trouble. It might have made whole plan fall apart.

‘I’m not making anyone do anything,’ I repeated. ‘Do you all understand?’

There was silence for a bit.

Then Lucy London spoke. She was a short plump girl with bulgy anxious eyes.

‘But if we go over Dark we won’t ever see our mums again, or our sisters and brothers. I mean, it’s okay not seeing them every waking like now, when we can still see them if we want to, up by Blob. But if we go over Dark that won’t happen any more. We’ll never see them, never never, and we won’t even get a chance to say goodbye.’

‘No, you won’t,’ I said.

‘But that’s not fair!’ said Lucy London, and several people murmured crossly in agreement.

‘I’m not making you do anything,’ I repeated, as patiently as I could. ‘You can go back to Family if you want. Or you can stay here at Cold Path Neck if you think you can make a go of it. It’s up to you.’

‘Yes, but Family is horrible now,’ complained Lucy London. ‘And staying here would be no good if there were only a few of us. We’d be lonely, wouldn’t we? It wouldn’t be any good at all.’

‘Mother Angela would say it was wrong to go over Dark,’ said Julie Blueside. ‘Okay we came over here, and didn’t stay right next to Circle, but we’re still in Circle Valley, aren’t we, and we’d still be able to see if a Veekle from Earth came down from sky. Plus our friends in Family would tell Earth where we were.’

‘Yeah,’ said her younger sister Candy. ‘And my mum told me that First Angela and First Tommy and First Harry all came to Lucy Lu in a dream and told her that if we go across Dark we’ll be lost forever. We won’t have the Shadow People to watch over us any more, and even after we die, we’ll never go back to Earth.’

‘Oh yeah?’ sneered Tina’s sister Jane. ‘So how come Lucy Lu used to say that beyond Snowy Dark was where the Shadow People lived ?’

‘Don’t bother, Jane,’ said Tina. ‘Once people start talking about messages from Mother Gela and the Shadow People, black can be white and white black and a thing can be true and its opposite true all at the same time.’

‘Well, you’ve got that wrong, Tina,’ shouted Julie. ‘You just don’t understand. Yes, in a way the Shadow People live beyond Dark, but not in that way . . .’

But then Harry started up again.

‘They did for Brownhorse!’ he yelled, sweating, redfaced, spit flying out of his mouth, and banging hard hard on the drum with every word. ‘They were bad bad. They did for Brownhorse! They nearly did for Harry’s sister too!’

‘Leave it, Harry!’ screamed Gerry. He was shaking shaking all over. ‘Just bloody leave it, alright?’

And now six seven people were all shouting at once.

‘Shut up, Harry!’

‘Brownhorse was just a woollybuck!’

‘Just because you don’t know anything about the Shadow People, Tina, doesn’t mean they don’t exist. I’ll talk about what I bloody want . . .’

‘Leave Harry alone. They did for Brownhorse, Jeff’s Brownhorse.’

‘Shut up , Harry!’

‘It matters to some of us what the Shadow People think, Tina, even if it doesn’t matter to you.’

‘Gela’s tits, can’t you see we haven’t got time for all that crap!’

‘They did for Brownhorse . . .’

‘Don’t you tell me what we’ve got time for!’

It was like a chess game when it gets stuck and won’t move forward. I needed to bring a new piece into play.

‘Everybody be quiet,’ I hollered. ‘Shut up now and I’ll show you something!’

We were in terrible danger. Three people were dead. Harry and Gerry and John were killers, and they were all three shaking shaking all the time because of their heads trying to get hold of what they’d done. And there was going to be more killing, and any one of us could easily end up dead in only a waking or two. This was one of the most important meetings that anyone on Eden had ever had, but it looked as if it was going to become a pointless shouting match, not about what we needed to do but about the Shadow People, or about Harry being too noisy, or about how a woollybuck had died. We were facing death yet we were fighting about nothing at all.

But then John silenced everyone. He absolutely silenced us. He took away our breath.

‘Angela has come to me ,’ he said. ‘She came to me over by Deep Pool. She told me she wants her children to spread out over Eden and not stay in one place pining for Earth. She wants us to be at home here in Eden, not just in this valley but at home all over Eden, just like people are at home all over Earth. She says Earth would expect that of us, and will come looking for us wherever we are. She says Earth will be disappointed with us if we stay only in one place.’

He looked round our dumbstruck faces. No one would have thought it possible. He was just about the last person in Eden that you’d expect to say a thing like that. I was scared scared someone was going to laugh and it would all fall apart. And I think someone would have done too if he hadn’t said something else that was even more weird and even more unexpected.

‘If you don’t believe me, have a look at this. Gela has given me a sign.’

He reached down, took something from the little pocket at the edge of his waistwrap and held it up between his finger and thumb. It was small small and at first I couldn’t think what it was.

‘You know the story of Gela’s Ring ? You remember it? Angela’s lost ring? Well, this is the ring. I found it, soon after she first came to me.’

I started shivering all over. Some of the others cried or laughed, like Angela herself might have done if someone had found the ring for her, long after she had given it up for lost. Some of them swore. Michael’s names! Harry’s dick! Tom’s neck! Even the two little babies picked up the strange feelings all around them and began to yell, first Clare’s little Fox and then Janny’s baby Flower. And after that, would you believe it, the two remaining horsebucks in their cave — Def and Whitehorse, Jeff called them — they started as well, like they could pick up the excitement too, and that made everyone laugh, even the ones who were crying, and even the ones who’d done for other human beings only a few hours before.

But as John moved round everyone showing them the ring, and how tiny and smooth it was, and how it was really made out of metal, and how it had tiny writing inside with Angela’s name, tiny writing that could only have been done on Earth, I started to feel angry.