That’s what I was thinking while I swam up and down Deep Pool, swimming really hard, to wear myself down and to make the water wash over me and clean my skin. ‘It’s bad, it’s bad, it’s bad. I’m bad, I’m bad, I’m bad.’ Then I pulled myself out of the water onto the bank where Tina and I had sat. I pulled a whitelantern flower from a tree and turned it round in my hand: a shining sphere of whiteness, with just a little opening in it for the flutterbyes to go in and out. I held it up close to my eye and looked inside. A tiny flylet was crawling in there, surrounded on all sides by beautiful bright white light. There was no darkness in there. That little flylet didn’t have to see a black sky above, or dark trunks of trees. All it could see was light. Just thinking about it brought tears up into my eyes.
And then a strange feeling came over me, a feeling that this same thing had happened here before, long ago, but in this exact same place. Someone else had sat here beside Deep Pool and looked into a lanternflower and cried. And that someone, well, it was Gela herself. I don’t mean bloody old Gela Oldest. I mean first Gela. I mean Angela Young, my great-great-grandmother, the mother of us all. She’d come here and sat in this exact place all on her own, so as to be where Tommy and the children wouldn’t find her. And she’d plucked a lanternflower and looked inside it, remembering her far-off world full of light and all the people in it. She’d cried and cried and cried until she had no tears left, and then she’d scrumpled the lanternflower and tossed it into the pool.
They say that Angela and Tommy didn’t get on so well. It’s said he got angry when he didn’t get his way. It’s said she was full of bitterness for what he’d done to her, because it was his fault she’d come to Eden, his fault and the fault of his friends Mehmet and Dixon. She’d never have come here at all of her own choice, and she’d never have been with a man like him either.
‘No wonder she cried,’ I said to myself.
But then I thought, Tom’s neck, what is this crap? I’m starting to talk like bloody Lucy Lu. Muttering to shadows. Communicating with the dead. How could I know what Angela felt? How could I know that she came to this same place? I’m just doing what everyone else does, wake-dreaming, playing with silly stories and pretending they’re true, grieving over bloody Earth, feeling sorry for myself because I can’t have everything given to me that I want.’
I scrumpled up the lanternflower and tossed it into the pool, just like she had.
‘Tom’s dick and Harry’s!’ I said out loud, after I’d splashed water on my face. ‘We’re in Eden. Maybe no one will ever come to take us back to Earth. And anyway that isn’t “back”, it wouldn’t be going back, because none of us has ever been there.’
‘You talking to yourself now, John?’ said Tina.
She’d crept down the rocks, quiet quiet as a tree fox. I didn’t know how long she’d been there or what she’d seen.
‘Shall we see if we can find some more oysters?’
‘Yeah okay, but don’t think we’re going to carry on with that slide we started, because we’re not. I’m not in the mood, okay?’
‘Because . . .?’
‘I don’t feel like that now.’
‘I went looking for you in Redlantern, and Gerry told me that Bella had you in her shelter and that everyone reckoned that . . .’
‘Just leave it, alright?’
For a moment she looked like she was going to get angry, but she saw something in my face that stopped her. She nodded and shrugged and gave me a little strained smile.
10
Gerry Redlantern
I felt sad sad. I felt scared. I felt sorry sorry for John. I felt sort of sorry for Bella too, sorry and angry all at once.
I liked things best when everyone was getting on with each other. I liked it when everyone thought that John was great. I liked it when I met people from other groups and they said John was brave brave or Bella was the best group leader in whole Family. And I hated it that John and Bella had upset people and made them angry. I think I hated it worse than I would have done if they were angry and upset with me. But I didn’t blame John or Bella for that. I knew that people who were stronger than me didn’t mind so much what other people thought. I knew they sometimes had other reasons for doing things that seemed important to them, even more important than being liked, even more important than being kind. In fact that was why I admired them: because they had something I didn’t have — a will of their own, I suppose. So I didn’t blame them, but I wished wished that everyone would go on liking John as much as I did, and go on saying what a great great group leader Bella was, and not whisper and hiss any more.
Secrets were another thing I hated; secrets and people not saying what they meant. Gela’s heart, it was hard enough to make sense of anything without all that!
‘Why’s no one talking?’ I whispered to Fox when John was in Bella’s shelter and everyone around had gone quiet quiet.
He winked and ruffled my hair like I was a little kid, then got up and moved away from me.
I went to my mum.
‘Is John’s slipping in there with Bella?’ I asked her. ‘Why is everyone so quiet?’
Sue squeezed my hand, but wouldn’t say anything.
Even Jeff wouldn’t talk about it.
And when at last he came out of Bella’s shelter, John didn’t want to talk to me either. He waved me away, walked off out of group, and didn’t come back until four five hours later when we were all sleeping or trying to sleep.
‘You okay, John?’ I whispered as he crawled into the shelter he shared with me and Jeff.
But he didn’t answer me, just crawled between his sleeping skins and lay still.
I didn’t sleep hardly at all before the next waking. It was always hard anyway when an Any Virsry put your sleeping and waking times back to front, but it was harder still when the world was all turned upside down. There was so much weird weird stuff going on. Everyone had thought John was great, but now whole Family was angry with him. Everyone in Family said Bella was the best group leader, but now even her own group were thinking thoughts about her so bad bad that they wouldn’t speak them aloud.
Yet both John and Bella seemed to have chosen this. They’d done things on purpose that they knew would cause upset. They were like smart smart people playing chess who suddenly throw away a queen and you can’t see the reason, but you know they must have done it on purpose, for some reason they’ve spotted three four moves away.
‘Are you going to try and speak out again, John?’ I whispered. ‘When Family comes back together in Circle Clearing, are you going to do it again?’
John didn’t answer, but Jeff whispered across to me from his side of shelter.
‘Let him sleep, Gerry. Let him sleep.’
Paaaaarp! Paaaarp! Paaaarp!
I was wide awake when they blew the horns for second waking of Any Virsry.
Paaaaarp! Paaaarp! Paaaarp!
I hated that noise all of a sudden. It was like everything that is bad about Family, like watching eyes, like tongues telling secrets and spreading stories in that way that people have, using words they don’t really mean so you have to try and guess.
Paaaaarp! Paaaarp! Paaaarp!