‘I don’t want to lose you, John, my darling,’ she wailed, with tears pouring down her face. ‘I want to go on caring for you, my baby. This is all my fault.’
John didn’t say anything. He was pale, he was sunk into himself and, though he submitted himself to her clinging kisses, his face was turned away from her to the path ahead, as if he was simply waiting for the moment when this distraction was removed from him and he could continue on his way.
‘John, my sweetheart,’ Bella tried again, pawing at him, running her hand down his chest and his belly, like she was his lover and they were about to have a slip, ‘John, my dear sweet darling. I love you. I love you better than if you were my own child. I love you better than if you were my man. Let me come and look after you, my darling. Let me come with you and hold you and keep you warm.’
None of us really knew what to do, or what to think. She never talked like that. She was always sensible sensible. She was always reasonable and restrained. But when I went after her, and took her hands and tried gently to release her grip on John, she just shook me angrily away.
‘Let me come and look after you,’ she pleaded with him. ‘Please, John. Please, my pretty darling. Please!’
She kissed him again, and then rubbed her hand against the front of his wrap, like she was trying to make him hard.
He flinched and pushed her hand away.
‘No, Bella,’ I said, ‘that’s not fair. That’s not helping. Try and think of John and the position he’s in.’
‘I am thinking of John. No one thinks of him more than me. He knows that. I love him better than his own mum. What has Jade ever done for this boy of hers, that cold leopard-woman with her sweet empty song?’
‘Leave me alone, Bella, alright?’ muttered John. ‘I don’t need this. Just leave me alone.’
He said it two three times, and I backed him up as best I could.
‘He needs to go, Bella,’ I told her. ‘Let him be. He knows you love him. He does know.’
‘Let the lad deal with this, Bella my dear,’ said Old Roger, who’d come after me to help.
‘Let him be, Bella,’ called out Jade who’d come up behind Roger.
‘I don’t want this, Bella,’ John repeated, glancing down at her, and then looking away from all of us again at the path through the lanterntrees up ahead.
‘You don’t . . .?’
Suddenly Bella understood. She let go of him. She stood back. For a moment she looked like she’d seen one of the Shadow People. Then she let fly a dreadful scream that they must have heard all over Family right up to Blueside, and flung herself to the ground, which was sodden wet from all that fuggy rain like it was soaked in tears, and writhed about in the mud till she was covered all over with it.
No one in Redlantern knew what to do about her. But we did know that, right at that moment, John was the one we needed to concentrate on because he was the one that had to go. So all of us just sort of moved away from our old leader, and carried on with the business of saying goodbye to John.
‘Go on, John. We’ll sort this out. You get on your way, and remember that we’ll be working to get you back here as soon as we can.’
John nodded, gripped his bark of embers against his chest and walked on without another word to anyone.
But Jade, who of all people you’d think would want to concentrate on John, went over to Bella and squatted down beside her and comforted her. She’d finally found something useful she could do.
When John was out of sight, all of us except Jade and Bella walked back into the space round the fire between our shelters, where David was sitting on a log, fixing a leopard tooth spearhead on a shaft with strips of dried buck gut, and making a big show of being busy. I noticed that Met, that lump of a boy, went over and sat by him. And near them, with her eyes rolled upwards to the grey-black fuggy sky, sat Lucy Lu.
‘We’ll need a new leader, I suppose,’ I said. ‘A new leader to help sort out this mess.’
David snorted.
‘And preferably one that doesn’t slip with her own newhairs.’
‘I want to go after him, mum,’ sobbed Gerry. ‘He’s not just my cousin. He’s my best friend. They can’t expect him to be all alone forever.’
‘It won’t help him if you do,’ I said. ‘That will just confirm that he’s a bad influence on newhairs. Leave him be, and maybe we’ll be able to find a way of persuading Family to let him back, once things have calmed down.’
David looked up.
‘What? Have him back? Are you nuts? Do you really think we’re going to let him destroy our Circle, hurt whole Family, shame his own group, and then let him back in again with nothing but a telling off?’
‘Mother Angela herself is telling me he had to go,’ cried Lucy Lu suddenly in that hollow voice she put on, like she was talking in a cave far away. ‘He had to go, but now that he’s gone, she’ll help us put Circle back, and make things how they were. Oh sweet sweet Angela, our dear good mother. She’s telling me that if Council wants me to, she’ll guide my hand to find the stones that bad John threw in the stream, and put them back exactly where they were.’
18
John Redlantern
I walked and walked and walked, straight past Lava Blob with its funny shy hoppers waving their mouth feelers at me and wringing their hands, past the little pool where Tina first gave me that pink oyster. The bundle that Redlantern group had given me was heavy heavy, the fire-bark was hot, and the going was hard hard in that sticky fuggy air, but even so it was much easier to keep walking than to stop, however weary I was, because while I walked there was a rhythm, but when I stopped there would be nothing to do but think about what I’d done, and what I was going to do next.
I walked without a rest for the time of a whole waking and a whole sleep, all the way to that place up the slope by Neck of Cold Path Valley, with the caves and the warm pool. I climbed up the slope, crawled into one of those caves, spread out sleeping skins under the little shiny rocklanterns, lay down and fell asleep at once. I’d worn myself down so much with that long long walk that even my worries couldn’t keep me awake, so sleeping took up a bit more time before I had to think about what I was going to do next.
But when it did come, waking up was hard hard. It was like having a cold stone pressed down on my chest. I was completely alone. Everyone in the world was more than a waking’s walk away from me and forbidden to talk to me forever. I was cut off from Family like Family was cut off from Earth.
What if Earth comes now? I thought. What if that Landing Veekle finally comes down from sky after all this time and I’m not there?
It was scary scary thinking of being left in a world with no one else there at all. I’d always been the kind of person that tries not to rely on anyone. I’d always kept myself separate. You didn’t need to be chitter-chattering to other people all the time, was what I always thought. You don’t need to take all your problems to other people to fix, or tell other people every single little thought that comes into your head. But now I could see, easily easily, that everyone needs other people. People needed other people like they needed air. And for a while I felt so lonely I could barely breathe.
And all the scary scary things that had happened came back and filled up my head, so that it almost felt that they were all still happening. Over and over again I was standing by myself in front of whole Family. Over and over I was telling Tina what I’d done and seeing the icy anger on her face. Over and over I was walking away from Redlantern and hearing Bella wailing while the rest of them tried to make things seem okay. Over and over I heard her final dreadful scream.