‘So Tommy and Angela and the Three could go up into sky from Earth and cross Starry Swirl and come down to Eden, but we can’t even hope to cross the lousy mountains?’
Bella laughed.
‘Dearest John. You can’t do everything at once. At the moment Family isn’t even ready to spread itself out right here in Circle Valley, let alone try to cross Dark. Let’s work on spreading out a bit first, eh?’
‘How long will that take?’
‘I don’t know. Maybe in two three Any Virsries’ time we can talk about setting up a new group down the river a bit, or over by Lava Blob. Right now it isn’t even on the Genda. You’ve got to be patient about these things.’
‘That patient and we’ll all bloody starve.’
She smiled.
‘There’s a little time, I think, before that happens. You need to give people time. And you need to remember that, after all, everyone is concerned that we shouldn’t go against what Mother Angela taught us: to wait here and care for each other, until Earth comes back.’
I remembered the dream I’d had — the dream that everyone had — where the Veekle came down from sky and I was far away.
‘Yes, but she didn’t want us to starve, did she?’ I said stubbornly, driving my own fear away.
‘John, my dear, I do love you. And it might sound strange to say after I’ve told you off, but I’m proud of you too. Come over and sit with me.’
I moved over to sit next to her on her sleeping skin, tense tense because I knew what was coming next. She kissed my cheek. She ran her hands over me. She took my own hand and placed it between her legs. Older women would ask young guys for a slide and no one thought anything about it. But Bella didn’t do it like, say, that Martha London did it. She’d never had a baby and she wasn’t looking for one now. That wasn’t what it was about. In fact she didn’t really go for whole slip thing much at all, just a rub with fingers.
And the other thing that was different about what she did was that she only did it with me, a boy in her own group. That wasn’t the usual thing, not women with boys that they’d cared for since they were little. Women were allowed to do it with whoever they liked, of course, but that wasn’t the usual way it happened. Women did the mum thing with boys and they did the slip thing with boys, but they did them with different boys.
‘I’m tired and I’m tense, darling,’ she said, ‘and there’s such a hard waking ahead of me tomorrow in Council.’
Well, I loved Bella. She was good to me. Of all the grownups in Family, she was the one that really knew me. And I admired her too. She was clever, one of the cleverest in whole Family. But I didn’t like doing this and I wanted to stop. I just didn’t know how to get out of it. So I did what she asked of me while she held my arm and pressed my hand down exactly where she wanted it, so hard sometimes that it hurt me, shutting her eyes and screwing up her face as if it was hard hard work she was doing and not pleasure at all.
And I’ll tell you something: it was hard work for me, not just this time but every time. It was like her body was shut away in some tiny little place in middle of her shadow — her live happy body, long-lost, hidden under all her cares — and she needed me to let it out for her just for a moment, to release the tension for a moment of being squeezed away in there so she could relax and go to sleep. It was hard work. But at last she gave a little gasp, pressed my hand down extra hard and then released it and I knew she was done.
‘Thankyou, John, and now I need to sleep.’
I wasn’t happy. I wasn’t at ease. But I gave her a kiss on the cheek and emerged out of her shelter into group. People who’d been listening outside when she was shouting at me had moved onto other things now, like fixing shelters, or scraping skins, or playing chess. It was like they were doing the opposite of listening, like they were trying their best to notice everything else but the fact that my telling-off had taken a funny turn into something else. No one said anything. Jade, my mother, busied herself with scraping a skin so hard that it was like she was angry with it. Only my aunt Sue and her boys Gerry and Jeff looked at me kindly. Gerry got up and came towards me with a worried worried face but I signalled to him I wanted to be on my own.
And David glared over at me, his eyes like cold fire in his raw batface. He was refastening a new blackglass head onto the end of his best hunting spear, using resin glue and buck sinews. He thought he knew perfectly well what had happened with Bella in there and he hated me for it. He glared at me and then looked away and spat onto the ground beside him. I’d humiliated Bella and the entire group in front of Family but she’d still taken me into her shelter and slipped with me (or so he thought). He did whatever she asked of him and she left him outside, and didn’t seem to want to get close to him at all. It would be no good me telling him that I didn’t like what Bella did with me. No good at all. He was a batface, and batfaces always hated the way that oldmums would slip with the rest of us but not with them.
I went over to Spiketree but I didn’t get a welcome in Spiketree either. You wouldn’t believe that only a few wakings previously everyone was fussing over me and telling me how great I was for killing that leopard. Now it was ‘Here comes trouble’ and ‘Don’t think Tina’s coming out to play, John, because she’s in there talking to Liz.’ (Liz was the Spiketree leader: a fat, tetchy, self-important woman, not a patch on our Bella.) ‘Liz wants all our newhairs to stay in group till Any Virsry ends.’
So I went round the edge of Brooklyn towards Stream’s Join, trying to keep out of the way of other people. A bat looked down at me from a branch, a little jewel bat with its trembling wings spread out to cool, rubbing its wrinkly face with its little black hands.
Sometimes I hated Eden. Eden was all I knew, all my mother knew, all my grandmother knew, but sometimes I longed and longed for the bright light that shines on Earth — as bright everywhere as the inside of a whitelantern flower — and for the creatures that lived there, with red blood and four limbs and a single heart like us, and not the green-black blood and two hearts and six limbs of bats and leopards and birds and woollybucks. And sometimes I felt that if I ate another mouthful of greenish Eden meat I would vomit out my guts. And yet I’d never tried anything else, never would try anything else, unless I ate the meat of another human being. And no one in Eden had ever done that.
I crossed over the log bridge by Stream’s Join — in my head I was begging the shadows of Tommy and Angela to fix it for me that boring bloody old one-legged Jeffo wouldn’t be there on the path by Dixon Stream — and I headed up to Deep Pool, clambering down the rocks and diving straight into its warm warm water, down among those bright canyons of wavyweed with all those little shining fish darting away from me.
They said men shouldn’t slip with their sisters, or their mothers, or their daughters — they said that was bad bad slip — but then they told you that Harry did just that, slipping with his sisters, and then with their children, and how it was a good job he did, and that we should honour him for it, because if he hadn’t we wouldn’t be here. Yes, and really we were all brothers and sisters anyway. All of us, every one us, had the same mother and father, Tommy and Angela, so whenever any of us slipped together it was always bad slip in a way. And Bella might not be my mother, but she was my cousin, like everyone else in whole Family. And in a way she was my mother too because she looked out for me when I was little. She told me things. She listened to me. She was more of a mother to me than Jade, because Jade never wanted to be a mum. (She didn’t fancy staying behind in group with the littles and oldies and clawfeet.) So it was double bad slip me doing it with Bella, or letting her do it with me. It was bad bad, even if we didn’t do the full slip.