‘I’m sorry,’ I said humbly. ‘I just thought it needed to be said. I hadn’t thought about it before. It just came out.’
I liked Bella. I was close close to her. And I respected her too. She wasn’t just our group leader, she was one of the cleverest people in whole Family.
Bella nodded. I thought I could see a tiny smile.
‘Alright, John. I’m tired and hungry. We all are. So we’ll eat now, and then afterwards you can come to my shelter for a proper talk about this. I want to know exactly what’s on your mind and I want your reassurance that you won’t show me up like that again. But we’ll talk later.’
Presently Fox and Lucy Lu, who were organizing the cooking, handed round smoked fish and whitefruit and crushed starflowers and bits of muddy, chewy slinker, and we all began to eat together round our fire. And all around us, all over the camp, we could hear the sounds of other groups eating too. (People’s talking sounds different when they’re eating. It rises and falls in a different way. More gently, more steadily.) You never normally heard that sound coming from all over Family at the same time because one group would be sleeping, one getting up, one returning from a waking’s scavenging. The only time we experienced it was when an Any Virsry was on.
Somewhere out over Peckhamway a leopard was singing to its prey.
‘What are you going to say to Bella in there?’ Gerry asked. ‘Are you going to tell her to stuff it, then, or what?’
I looked at him, meaning to answer him but all the time listening to the lonely deadly sound of the leopard out there, and how it sounded alongside the friendly gentle sound of Family eating and talking all around. And I was thinking, thinking, thinking, about Family and about how things were. Before I’d even begun to think of an answer to Gerry’s question, I’d already forgotten it. In fact I’d completely forgotten he was there.
Bella’s shelter was bigger than everyone else’s, and taller too, so that people could sit in there with her and have meetings. She had a pile of sleeping skins in the far right corner opposite the entrance hole, and more skins piled all round the edges for folk to sit on when she had meetings and talks. The shelter was built up against the warm trunk of a big whitelantern tree, and one branch of the whitelantern had been pulled down and held in place with ropes and rocks, so the branch was inside the shelter, with two or three lanterns usually shining at any one time. If she didn’t want light she’d cover over the lanterns with skins.
She was squatting over on the sleeping skins when I came in, thin bony Bella, with her narrow hips and tiny breasts and her clever weary shadowy face.
‘You are a silly boy, John Redlantern,’ she told me, ‘and I’m going to have to shout at you for a bit.’
I nodded.
‘Never, never speak out of turn at a meeting again, alright?’ she yelled. ‘Do you understand that, John? Do you understand? You’ve shamed me, you’ve shamed Redlantern, you’ve shamed yourself. And you’ve achieved nothing. Nothing at all. Do you really think Council’s view will be changed by a silly little newhair just because he got lucky with one bloody leopard out Cold Path way? Does that make you the big man of whole Family, do you think? Does that make you more important than your group leader or your Family Head? I don’t bloody think so, John. And don’t think I don’t know it was you and Tina Spiketree that started up that nasty laugh when Mitch forgot himself. Don’t imagine I didn’t notice that too.’
The funny thing was that she was yelling at me, but it was like she was acting in one of those story-plays that people put on. Like the story of Angela’s Ring, when Angela loses the ring her mum and dad gave her, and she cries and screams and tells Tommy he’s worse than shit, and how she hates him and she hates Eden and she hates the kids and she wishes she was dead. Or like Hitler and Jesus, where Hitler yells at Jesus he’s going to kill all his group, the Juice, kill them like they were slinkers (‘Over my dead body!’ goes Jesus, and Hitler says, ‘It will be over your dead body, mate, because I’m going to nail you up to a hot spiketree till your skin’s all burned off.’) Often when people act these things you can see they’re not really in them. They might be shouting but their eyes aren’t angry like their mouths are. And it was like that now. We were in a story-play — Bella and me — and we didn’t have to pretend with our faces, only with our voices, because the play wasn’t for us really at all but for the rest of group who were outside listening and couldn’t see us.
‘Don’t speak out of turn again, John, alright?’
‘I’m sorry I shamed you.’
‘And if you want something said at Any Virsry, talk to me, not to whole Family without me even knowing about it, alright?’
‘Yes, Bella.’
She looked at me, staring hard hard into my eyes, then she smiled her little tight smile and relaxed a little bit (as much as she ever relaxed) and nodded, as if to say: okay, the play was over now.
‘So why did you do it, John?’ she asked me in her normal voice, low enough so that no one outside would hear the words (not unless they came right up outside the shelter and put their ear to the bark, and no one would dare do that with whole group there to see them). ‘If you wanted it said why didn’t you talk to me about it?’
‘I only thought of it then and that’s the truth. It just came into my mind when Tom said that thing about how we’d given up School already and now we’d have to give up something else. Gela’s tits, I thought, what’s the point of that? Why can’t we see that there just isn’t enough in this valley for us?’
Bella studied my face carefully. Then she nodded.
‘Actually, I agree with you, John,’ she finally said. ‘Something needs to give and we need to start preparing people for that. But you know there’s more to it than just yelling things out at Any Virsry. You’ve got to work round people, win them over, meet them halfway, do things gradually. That’s what Council is all about.’
‘So how many people in Council apart from you agree with me?’
She considered this.
‘Not one. Not yet. But I’m working on people, John. I’m working towards the idea that we may need to spread out a little.’
‘It’s not just a matter of spreading out a little. We’ve got to get past Snowy Dark.’
Bella shook her head.
‘Right over the top of Dark? I can’t see it. I mean it’s a few wombs now since I was up by Dark, but I do know what it’s like up there. You think you’ve been there, John, but you haven’t. Furthest you’ve been to is up to the top of Cold Path. That’s barely the beginning of Snowy Dark. Barely the beginning. It’s so cold cold and so dark dark up beyond there that I don’t see any way we can ever get over it.’
‘Well, we’ll go down Exit Falls then.’
‘Oh John! Do you have any idea what that would be like? It might have been possible before the rockfall, but now the only gap is where the water drops down from Fall Pool between massive cliffs, down, down, down into darkness. And think of the weight of all that water. All the water from Greatpool, all the water from all the snowslugs that come down into forest from Snowy Dark.’
‘Suppose there’s another rockfall one waking that fills up the gap completely. Whole of Circle Valley could end up as one big pool. What will we do then?’
‘Well, we’ll just have to hope that doesn’t happen.’
‘Why just hope? Why not try and find a way out?’
‘No one could get across Dark.’