It wasn’t even as if I was a proper grownup yet. I was only a newhair of twenty wombs. And I could easily have cried like a kid. But then I thought, No, this is one of those leopard moments if there ever was one.
I began to talk to myself out loud. It calmed me down and helped me concentrate.
‘Get a bloody grip, John Redlantern,’ I said. ‘What are the odds of Earth coming right now when they haven’t come for a hundred and sixty-three years? And even if they did come, I’d see the Landing Veekle from here, wouldn’t I, with all those lights on it? Yes, and anyway they wouldn’t go without me. Sue wouldn’t let them. Gerry wouldn’t, nor would Jeff, or Bella or Old Roger or Janny or Tina . . .’
It helped a lot, saying the names of people that wouldn’t agree to go back to Earth without me.
‘Or Jade,’ I added, as an afterthought.
Then I reached into that little pocket sewn on the bottom edge of my wrap, and took out the metal ring, and I turned it over in my hand, and slipped it on and off my finger, and held it near a whitelantern so I could see the tiny words: To Angela with love from Mum and Dad. I thought about Angela Young all on her own by the edge of Deep Pool, scrumpling up that lanternflower and throwing it into the water: kind, strong, lonely Angela, the mother of us all, who’d never wanted to come to Eden.
I pressed the ring to my lips and tears came into my eyes. I wiped them quickly away.
‘Tom’s dick, pull yourself together,’ I said. ‘If push came to shove, I could even trade my way back into Family with this ring. I could tell them I’d just found it and it was a present for all of them, to make up for Circle. They’d all think I was great.’
I squeezed the ring in my hand.
‘But I’m not that bloody desperate, am I? Not even close to it. Things won’t go on like this forever. I won’t always be on my own. One way or another, I’ll have people around me again, and I’ll bloody make things change, just like I planned.’
I nodded firmly to myself and slipped the ring back into its little pocket.
‘So what’s the plan?’ I asked myself.
I noticed that I sounded like Caroline Brooklyn running a Council meeting, and that made me smile.
‘What’s happening next?’ I said. ‘What’s on the Genda?’
I stood up and stretched myself. Sky was still grey-black and starless. Down to my left was the narrow opening of Cold Path Valley, with the hills rising up again on the other side. In front of me whole of Circle forest stretched out, half-buried in fug, but still shining shining all the way to Blue Mountains, and still, as ever, going hmmmmmmmm.
‘I’ll have a dip in that little pool first,’ I decided, ‘and then I’ll hide away my stuff, and then I’ll have a hunt and a scavenge, and get some fruit and some starflowers and maybe some fresh meat. I’ll concentrate on all that for a bit, and then I’ll eat, and then I’ll start thinking about the next step. How to get across Dark. How to make wraps warm enough. What I’ll do for light. How to find my way through.’
19
Tina Spiketree
Horrible Lucy Lu Redlantern went from group to group with her weepy eyes and her fake echoey voice, saying that she’d heard from Angela herself, the mother of all of us, and Angela had promised to help her pick out the stones at the bottom of the stream that came from Circle and put them back exactly where they were before. Council pretended to think about it carefully, and pretty soon the groups heard from their leaders that they’d all decided to accept Lucy Lu’s proposal and let her do it. Oldest had agreed as well, apparently, though how Council got any sense out of them I don’t know, what with them quivering and whimpering and weeping over by Circle Clearing, and old Stoop gulping and gasping to get enough air to breathe.
So then Council got a bunch of newhairs together, one from each group, and a length of rope to make a circle, and Lucy Lu made a big thing out of reaching down into the water, and touching this stone and that stone, and shaking her head again and again, and then trembling and rolling her eyes and moaning when she sensed which stone was the ‘right’ one for each position in Circle. Afterwards everyone pretended they thought Circle was all mended and back to how it was before, but no one really believed it. It didn’t look the same, and I could tell for certain they weren’t the same stones, because when I was a kid I’d noticed that one of the stones on Blueside of Circle had a black line going right through it, like it was made of two halves, but now there wasn’t one stone there that wasn’t a pure white.
It was a fake Circle and everything in Family felt fake. We went scavenging, we ate our meals round our fires, we pretended life was going on just like it normally did, but each of us secretly knew it would never go back to how it was, no matter how many times Lucy Lu came round rolling her eyes and speaking in that fake dreamy voice.
‘Mother Angela says we’ve done well. We’ve driven evil out of Family and made it whole whole again! Better even than it was before.’
John evil? I could have hit that lying tubeslinker Lucy Lu. John was stupid and selfish, yes. But he’d done a braver thing than she had ever done in her life. In fact the braveness of what he’d done was so far beyond her reach, that she couldn’t even begin to see how brave it was. All she could see was an advantage to her in ganging up on him with the likes of Caroline and Council and David, and in helping them out by bringing precious dead Mother Angela in on their side. A lot of people are like that. They don’t think about what’s really true at all, only about what it would suit them best to say.
‘I thought Angela was the mother of all of us,’ I said to her. ‘I thought she was John’s mother as much as yours.’
‘Oh Tina, Tina, Tina Spiketree,’ she cried, rolling those bulgy weepy eyes, ‘you want to watch your ways, our sweet Mother says, or you’ll be the next to go. Bad John has filled you up with his juice and his poison, and Mother Angela weeps and weeps for the harm he’s done you, my darling, harm that you can’t even see.’
She didn’t look at me whole time she was saying this. She was looking up at sky, to make us think she could see Angela looking down at her, but she kept peeping round at leader Liz and at the other people round the Spiketree fire, trying to work out if what she was saying was going down alright, or if she needed to swap it for something else.
I spat on the ground and walked away. I missed John and I worried about him too. I didn’t like to think of him all alone out there. I wondered what that would be doing to his proud proud heart and, in a way, I felt bad that I hadn’t gone with him, like I’d let him down. But at the same time I was annoyed with myself for feeling that, because he was there by his own choice, and it was his own choice too that I hadn’t been a part of it.
My little batface sister Jane came running after me. She took my hand and we walked together to Greatpool, and sat there side by side on the bank.
‘Don’t worry, Tina,’ she said, ‘none of us believes what Lucy Lu says.’
Out on the water log boats were moving slowly through the shining fug, trailing their nets behind them.
‘No one believes it, but everyone half believes it, or she’d have shut up long ago.’
Swish. One little jewel bat had come out on its own in spite of the fug, and it swooped down over the water, trailing its right hand across the surface. But it didn’t catch anything and, after one more run, it gave up and turned back into forest.