As to the big woollybuck that we’d done for at about the same time John and Gerry met the leopard, well, like I said, any other time people would have been pretty excited about that too. It would be good eating for many wakings, after all. It had a good big skin that would make a lot of wraps, feet you could melt down for a glue that was as good as boiled sap, and teeth you could use for seedgrinders (the best kind, which didn’t leave grit in the flour like stone seedgrinders do). Most times we could all have expected a bit of praise for getting it, and a few questions about who had done what in the hunt, but this time no one cared. Redlantern just settled down without any fuss at all to skin it, and cut off the tasty lantern on its head, and slice up its body into the Redlantern group portion and the portion that we Spiketrees would take back for our share. (One leg for us, five for them: that had been the deal.) But, all the time they were stripping down the buck, they were talking talking about the leopard whose useless meat was hanging in the tree above them.
‘How did you do it, John?’
‘Weren’t you scared?’
‘What did it feel like?’
‘Well done, our John,’ said Bella, the Redlantern group leader, who’d just come back from a meeting right over in Starflower. ‘Well done, our John. This will do us good at the next Any Virsry, my hunter boy. This will be to the credit of Redlantern among all the other groups.’
She was a clever woman, wiry and always a little bit weary-looking, who people from right across Family came to with problems and arguments. Lots of people said she was the best group leader in whole Family. She worked away waking after waking, not a bit like our lazy old Liz Spiketree, keeping things going, sorting things out, holding all kinds of boring stuff in her head that most people couldn’t be bothered to think about at all.
And John was close close to her, so I’d heard, though I’d heard other, weirder, things as well.
Then Lucy Lu spoke up.
‘The shadow of John’s grandmother was in that leopard,’ she told everyone in her sing-song voice, as if there could be no doubt about it at all, if you only could see the world through her special special eyes. ‘She wanted him to kill the leopard that she was trapped inside of and release her back to Starry Swirl.’
She never liked it when someone else was getting too much attention. She always wanted to make herself the one who knew best about whatever was going on.
‘I thought you said the Shadow People lived on the far side of Snowy Dark,’ John muttered.
I don’t think Lucy Lu heard him, but it made me laugh, and John glanced round at me and smiled.
‘And she’s at peace now,’ cried Lucy Lu, ‘she’s at peace. And she won’t ever have to . . .’
But then a London boy called Mike came running over from Circle Clearing.
‘Hey, where’s John? Oldest want to see him. Oldest have heard about the leopard.’
Poor John. I could see he wasn’t going to get any time to himself for some while yet, so I drank down my drink, and picked up some of the meat to take back to Spiketree.
‘Never mind, John,’ I told him, before I headed off. ‘It’ll blow over in one two wakings, and then maybe we’ll meet up Deep Pool, yes?’
3
John Redlantern
And so we hauled that bloody old leopard down from the tree again and off we went, virtually all forty-odd of Redlantern group, with more joining in from other groups as we passed through them. People who’d normally be sleeping came out of shelters to look at us. Even people in boats on Long Pool waved as we went past.
‘It’s my cousin!’ Gerry kept calling out. ‘Only fifteen years old and he killed a big leopard. I saw him do it.’
He was pleased pleased about the glory I was getting. He was smiling smiling and kept looking round at me to check that I was smiling too.
I didn’t want to disappoint him, and I did my best to look pleased, but truth was I was getting tired tired of it, and fed up with this silly little world we lived in, where one boy doing for one animal could be the most exciting thing that happened for wakings and wakings. I mean, okay I took a risk, but it wasn’t that big a risk really, not if you kept your nerve and concentrated on what you had to do. It wasn’t such a small target, after all, a leopard’s gaping mouth.
You’re all of you hiding up in trees like Gerry did, I said in my head to all those friendly smiling people, and that’s the trouble with bloody Family. You eat and you drink and you slip and you quarrel and you have a laugh, but you don’t really think about where you’re trying to get to or what you want to become. And when trouble comes, you just scramble up trees and wait for the leopard to go away and then afterwards giggle and prattle on for wakings and wakings about how big and scary it was and how it nearly bit off your toes, and how so-and-so chucked a bit of bark at it and whatshisname called out a rude name. Gela’s tits! Just look at you!
And the thing was, the meat was starting to run out in Circle Valley. It was no good just hiding up a tree and giggling. Something was going to have to happen or a waking would come in the end when people in Family would starve. That’s assuming that there wasn’t another rock fall down by Exit Falls, in which case we might all drown instead.
Never mind drowning or starving from lack of food, though. I was going to starve inside my head long before that, or drown in boredom, if I couldn’t make something happen in the world, something different, something more than just this.
That’s what I was thinking about; but Gerry, who loved me so dearly, he didn’t see all this going on inside me at all. He was happy happy. I put on a smile and that was enough for him. It was enough for everyone else too.
Well, nearly everyone. Tina understood, and Jade could have seen I was faking it too, not because I was close to her — I wasn’t — but because I was like her. I was restless like she was. Restless and empty inside and hungry for something more than just ordinary things.
And there was one other person too that saw what was really going on for me. It was Gerry’s little clawfoot brother Jeff, who shared a sleeping shelter with Jeff and me. He was only fourteen fifteen wombtimes old, not even a newhair, a weird little kid with a gentle face and great big eyes, like Gerry’s big gentle eyes, but with something completely different going on inside them. He’d been hobbling along after us ever since I got to Redlantern area, and it was only when we reached Circle Clearing and stopped by the edge of it that he finally got close enough to speak to me.
‘You’re sad, aren’t you, John?’ he said to me.
I just shrugged, and stood there, and waited to be told when Oldest were ready to see me. And half of bloody Family stood there and waited with me.
They were sitting side by side on the edge of Circle Clearing like three empty skin bags: Gela, Mitch and Stoop. Their backs were propped up against a big old whitelantern trunk with several layers of bark and a woollybuck hide wedged in between them and it to stop them getting burnt by its heat. And, like always, women were fussing round them with food and wraps and scoops of water.
Beside Oldest was the hollow log in which they kept the Mementoes, and someone had opened it up for them and taken out the Model Sky-Boats, which Tommy Schneider, the father of all of us, is supposed to have made himself: the big starship Defiant, the little Landing Veekle, and the Police Veekle, in which Angela and Michael chased after Defiant when Tommy, Dixon and Mehmet tried to take it away from Earth. The three Models now lay at their feet, dark and shiny with the buckfat that had been rubbed into them for generations to stop the old wood from shrinking and cracking.