Anyway when we saw it go down the tube, we backed off for a bit to give it time to turn itself round in there. Meantime we took out some wavyweed string that we had in our bag and made a loop in it. I had a club with me. It was a good one, made of a whitelantern branch with two big stones shoved into the hole at the bigger end and sealed in there with buckfoot glue. I gave it to Met, who was tall and clumsy and not too bright.
‘Don’t you want to do for it, John?’ he asked, like it was my right, since I’d done for the leopard, to kill any animal I liked.
Met was one of those many people who look to others to tell him what to do and what to think.
‘No, you saw it, Met, you do for it.’
The flutterbyes had fluttered off when the slinker appeared, but flutterbyes don’t have much memory, and, now the slinker was out of sight, they’d all started coming back again after the candy. And pretty soon there was a bat there too, a tar bat, leopard-black, swooping and diving like a scrap of darkness in the glittery forest, snatching up the flutterbyes as they came up from the tubecandy.
Silly bat didn’t know what was coming. Snap! Out shot the head of the slinker and got it with one crunch, along with a couple of flutterbyes. Click click, went its feet as it backed down the tube again.
I looked at Met. He’d have preferred me to take charge really, but he could see from my face that I was leaving it up to him.
‘Er . . . You two ready with that string then, Gerry and Jeff?’ he asked.
The three of them crept forward quietly and Gerry and Jeff stood each side of the tree trunk with the loop dangling over the hole. Met stood in front of them with the club ready.
Another bat came looping down. Whoosh, went its wings as it dived through the flutterbyes, snatching up a big fat blue one with its little hands. Then up it swooped again, up through the shining branches, up, up, up, gobbling down the flutterbye as it went. Up, up, up, then round and down it came again, right down, right next to the tube hole.
‘Now!’ yelled Met as the slinker’s head came out. Jeff and Gerry pulled tight. Met brought his club down smack. The bat swerved away with a little shriek.
Three things could easily go wrong at this moment. One, the slinker pulls back too quick and you don’t get him. Two, you get him with the club but not the string, so he’s dead but he drops back down the tube to Underworld, to rot or be eaten up by whatever it is that lives down there. Three, you get him with the string but not the club, so he’s still alive and threshing and biting like crazy and you have to hold tight and hope the string doesn’t break or he’ll get you with those vicious spiny teeth. This time, though, they got all of it right. The string caught the slinker round the neck, the club mashed its head so that, if that slinker wasn’t dead straight off, it certainly near enough was, and Gerry and Jeff pulled it out of the hole, its body still twitching and its little claws still waving about and clicking and grabbing at the air.
‘Got yer!’ yelled Met delightedly, giving it another whack with the club.
Gerry ran forward to trample on it. Met hit it again.
But Jeff, he was a strange little boy. He had been part of all this up to that moment, but now suddenly he was standing back from what was going on, like he was looking in from outside.
‘We’re here,’ he said. ‘This is happening. We are really here.’
‘Of course we’re bloody here, you dork!’ exclaimed Met, giving the quivering slinker another whack.
But Gerry regarded his brother with a concerned expression. He was protective of Jeff, and at the same time he looked up to him, even though Jeff was the younger of the two of them. He knew there was something strange and special about Jeff while he, well, he was just Gerry.
Jeff squatted down by the slinker, touched its mangled head as gently as if it was a baby, ran his fingers along its hot scaly body.
‘Poor old thing. Poor old tubeslinker.’
‘What are you talking about?’ snorted Met, looking at me and Gerry to see if we’d have a laugh with him, but we wouldn’t.
‘It’s just a bloody slinker!’ Met said.
‘I wonder what it’s like to be a slinker?’ Jeff said.
‘What do you mean, what’s it like to be a slinker?’ exclaimed Met, once again looking at me and Gerry. Surely we could see that was funny?
‘What does a slinker think about, I mean,’ Jeff persisted.
I think kids like him — I mean clawfeet, batfaces, the ones who are left on the outside of things — can go in different ways. Most of them are desperate to please and to get in with the other kids. Some turn into bullies and try and control people, like David Redlantern. But a few choose just to stay outside and think their own thoughts. Jeff was one of that kind. He was smart smart, much smarter than Gerry. He had much much more going on in his head. And he had his own angle, his own way of seeing things that he wasn’t going to set aside to please anyone else. I liked him for that. I was on the outside of things too in my own way. Not that I was a clawfoot or anything but I just felt different. Different different. So in a way I felt a connection with Jeff. In some ways we were alike, though in other ways gentle little Jeff wasn’t like me at all.
Met rolled up the dead slinker and tied it up with string while Gerry and Jeff went to the air-tube and pulled out all the candy they could reach. When we got back to Family we found out that our old slinker was the best catch of that waking and everyone told Met what a great hunter he was. Yet time had been — not generations ago, but even just when I was a little kid — when people would kill a slinker and just leave it out in forest for the tree foxes and starbirds because they didn’t think the meat was good enough to be worth carrying back.
When we’d eaten in group, and after I’d let Old Roger beat me at a game of chess, I walked across to Spiketree again and looked for Tina.
‘You two are getting on well, aren’t you?’ said the Spiketree people, giving each other knowing looks, like there’s something clever about being able to spot when a boy and a girl fancy each other, like it doesn’t happen all the bloody time.
Tina and me went back up past Brooklyn and London and Blueside — with people in all those bloody groups as well looking at us and looking at one another, as if to say ‘Do you see what I see?’ — and we went up over the rocks to Deep Pool, shining down there in its own hiding place, with rocks and bright trees all around it, like a world inside a world inside a world. And we scrambled back down to the place on the bank where we’d been last time. A single jewel bat was swooping low over the water in a series of long runs. A couple of small ducks sat in middle of a mass of lilies and cooed and rattled to one another, smoothing down their wings with their hands and flashing their little green headlights. Far off in forest out Blueside, a female starbird called Aaaah! Aaaah! Aaaah! . . .
And suddenly a male starbird answered right up beside us: Hoom! Hoom! Hoom! It made us jump because we’d not even noticed it up in the tree there, hidden in a mass of bright whitelanterns. It rustled its golden wings and rattled its blue tail feathers so that the coloured stars glittered. It tipped its head and looked at us with one of its flat black eyes, the little lights glinting inside like secret thoughts, and its black hooked beak opened and closed, as if it was about to say something and then changed its mind. Then its scaly arms came out from under its wings and it touched the tips of its fingers together, so we could just hear the clack of its long black claws.