‘Talk to me then,’ I said. ‘Tell me something you think only I will know what you mean.’
He pulled open another oyster, ripped out the fizzing pink meat and tossed the empty shell back into the water.
‘Well, you know what I said about why I did for the leopard. I’ve been thinking a lot about that. I’ve been thinking that that’s what we always get wrong in Family. It’s like whenever we get a choice like that, we always run to the tree, and we’ve been doing that so long that it’s become what Family is: a thing that hides away from anything scary and waits for help to come.’
‘So what would we do if we were different?’
‘Well . . .’ He hesitated here, like he himself was in two minds about what he was going to say next. ‘Well, I don’t think we’d live in a huddle round Circle of Stones, waiting for Earth to come and fetch us back.’
‘Don’t you think Earth will come, then?’
He looked at me sharply.
‘No, I’m not saying that. Of course not. They’ve got to come sooner or later. I’m just saying that we shouldn’t just spend our lives waiting for them in the same spot, and dreaming about going back to Earth. People say we must be good good, and make sure that Earth will like us when they come, so that they’ll want to take us back. But they’d like us better, wouldn’t they, if we tried to live like Earth people? Finding stuff out, trying new things, making things better. What’s there to like about a Family that huddles up in one place wake-dreaming, and won’t budge even if that means starving or drowning?’
I laughed at that idea.
‘Not much,’ I agreed.
‘And anyway,’ he said, ‘it’s not as if there’s any reason to think Earth will come any time soon. Okay, we know the Three Companions went back to Defiant, and we reckon they’d have taken Defiant back through Hole-in-Sky. But there was something wrong with Defiant, wasn’t there? It was damaged when Angela and Michael tried to catch it in the Police Veekle. And the True Story tells us that the Three Companions knew the chances were against Defiant getting back in one piece, or them getting back alive. I mean, that’s why Tommy and Angela stayed, isn’t it? So that at least some life would carry on?’
I nodded. ‘And it’s been two hundred wombtimes, so something must have gone wrong or they could have mended Defiant and come back long ago. But even if the Three Companions died and Defiant was too damaged to be mended, it still might well have got back to Earth. You know, like a boat drifts back to the shore. And . . .’
‘And Earth would have found out what happened from the Rayed Yo and the Computer. Yes, I know all that. But it would take them a long time to build a new starship. They say that first one took them thousands of years.’
‘Years,’ I teased him. ‘Who says “years” except oldies?’
He shrugged.
‘Thousands of wombtimes, then. And that’s why we shouldn’t live like waiting for Earth was the purpose of everything. And we shouldn’t just huddle up like this in one place and do the same things over and over and over again.’
‘But the True Story says that Earth will come to Circle of Stones, and if we aren’t there, they won’t find us.’
‘I know,’ John said. ‘I know.’
He thought for a long time, and twice he started to speak and then stopped again.
‘But surely,’ he said at last in a small quiet voice, like he almost didn’t want to hear himself say it. ‘Surely, if they can get a boat all the way across Starry Swirl, they’ll still be able to find us if we’re a few miles away from Circle? Isn’t that a chance worth taking? I mean, there’s not much point in us all waiting here if we’re going to run out of food and starve, is there? Otherwise all Earth will find is a pile of bones.’
I kissed him.
‘Now do you want a slip, John?’
‘No, not now. Another time. There’s too much in my head.’
I wasn’t offended this second time. In fact I quite liked that he had things going on in his head that were big enough to drive out that one thought. Not many other boys in Family would have had anything but slippy in their heads. Not if they’d been up here beside me by Deep Pool, with no wraps on, and no one else there, and me telling them I was up for it. In fact I couldn’t think of one that would say no. Except for the ones that preferred other boys, of course.
‘It would be easier in a way,’ I said, ‘if we knew for sure they weren’t coming from Earth. We’re a bit like a mum whose kid’s been lost in forest. She can’t get on with anything until they find the bones.’
John thought about this.
‘But it would be lonely lonely, if we knew that,’ he said. ‘It would be sad sad sad.’
7
John Redlantern
Old Lucy Lu said that every living thing had a shadow hiding away inside its body, waiting to get out. It was crap, but in a way it was true of a lot of people. Take Gerry: he might laugh and shout and play the bloody fool, but there was a shadow looking out of his eyes that was different from what he showed the world, a worried worried shadow peeping out that was always afraid of being left alone, or being laughed at, or even just being seen. Or take Bella: she was clever and wise, but she was half shadow. More than half. So much of her was shadow that it was like she hardly knew her own body at all.
But Tina had no shadow like that. Her face and her body weren’t hiding places, they were her, and she knew it, and that was why men and boys couldn’t take their eyes off her. They could tell that what was pretty pretty about Tina went all the way through her. It was all of her.
I had wanted to slip with her badly badly as we walked up to Deep Pool. And at the end of that waking, when I crawled into that little shelter I shared with Gerry and Jeff, I couldn’t sleep for ages, thinking about how badly I wanted her again. And I wondered why I didn’t have a slide with her while I had the chance, and I knew the reason was more than what I’d told her, but I didn’t know what it was.
And when I did sleep, I had that dream that everyone had in Family, that dream of Earth, coming down from Starry Swirl in a shining Veekle to take everyone home. But I was far far away when the Veekle came. I saw it come down from sky in the distance and I ran and ran towards it, but things kept getting in my way, and I couldn’t move forward, and I knew that pretty soon it would lift up again into sky, and return to Earth without me, and never come back.
Next waking Bella sent me out scavenging. It wasn’t a proper hunt and I had to stay just outside Family Fence because I was with big Met and Gerry and Jeff, and Jeff can’t walk far with his clawfeet. Of course there weren’t many pickings just outside the fence because everyone scavenged there, but we were lucky, sort of, because pretty soon Met spotted the tail end of a slinker disappearing down the air-tube of a whitelantern tree.
It was the grey kind, the thickness of a man’s arm and maybe two three times as long, with thirty forty pairs of little claws and glittery eyes and an ugly mouth full of vicious little spiny black teeth. That was the kind you had to watch out for if you were looking for candy in stumps and air-tubes. Littles sometimes got excited about candy and forgot to check for slinkers, and then slinkers came up and bit them in the face — there were quite a few in Family with scarred faces or missing eyes or noses — so grownups always told us to kill any slinker we found near Family. And lately we’d taken to eating the creatures too. There was a fair bit of meat on one of them, when you picked it out of the shelly bits and the bones, even though it tasted of mud and it gave some people bellyache.