Dark Eden

shrugged and carried on.
    ‘A bloody great leopard,’ he yelled out again excitedly, turning away from Mehmet. ‘John says I can share the hearts. And it’s fully grown, not just a little one. It sang at him and everything. Sang like a woman, even when it was running towards him. You should have heard it. You should have heard. Like a lovely gentle woman it was, even when it was running at him with its jaws wide open. Fully grown it is. Have you ever seen such a big one? Biggest one ever, I’d say. John says I can have one of its hearts, because I was there too when the leopard came.’
    We passed on through the group and into Redlantern group area, which came before Spiketree. And Redlanterns got out some fruit beer and passed it round in dried whitefruit shells for all us to drink and celebrate the double kill.
    ‘John, you idiot,’ said John’s mother Jade, with that smile of hers that was supposed to send men crazy. ‘Why couldn’t you climb a bloody tree like any normal person?’
    I looked at her and wondered why men couldn’t see the emptiness inside her. It was like she was acting being a person, she was moving her pretty body around to make it seem alive, but inside she was lost lost.
    ‘Jade, Jade,’ said her sister Sue, laughing. ‘Your only son kills a leopard by himself and
that’s
all you can say?’
    Sue Redlantern was Gerry’s mum and she was a batface, like David, and like my own sister Jane. She was as ugly ugly as John’s mum was beautiful, but she was kind and giving and everyone knew it, not only in Redlantern but across whole of our side of Family.
    ‘He’s a bloody fool,’ said Jade.
    I looked at John. His face was still still, but Gerry was upset on his behalf.
    ‘Your son John is
brilliant
brilliant,’ he told Jade hotly. ‘He’s bloody brilliant. How many kids of twenty wombtimes have ever . . .?’
    ‘You should say
years
,’ said Old Roger. ‘You should say
fifteen years
, not twenty wombtimes. You know what Oldest say: the world doesn’t come from a woman’s belly.’
    ‘How many kids of fifteen
years
,’ Gerry said, ‘have ever done for a leopard on their own?’
    ‘He
is
a brave boy,’ said Roger, ‘even if he is rude to his elders.’
    ‘He’s a bloody
lucky
boy,’ said sour David, pursing his ugly batlips that split open right up into where his nose ought to be.
    Little kids were crowding round with toy spears cut from whitelantern twigs.
    ‘How did you kill it, John? What was it like?’
    There weren’t only kids from Redlantern around us now, but from my group Spiketree and from Brooklyn and even from London and Blueside, right across the other side of Family. Grownups had come over too.
    ‘Right down the throat, I hear,’ said an old Fishcreek guy called Tom. He was another batface and he had clawfeet too, poor bugger, so he couldn’t ever have been a hunter. But he was clever with making things out of wood and stone – spears, saws, axes, knives, boats – and he liked to
talk
about hunting. He liked to show that he knew about it.
    ‘That’s the best way, of course,’ he said. ‘A good clean kill. But it’s far from easy.’
    ‘Too damn right,’ Gerry said. ‘It’s hard hard. John only had a . . .’
    ‘It’s not that hard,’ John interrupted. ‘It just
seems
hard because it’s dangerous. It’s like balancing on a branch at the top of a tree. Really, when you think about it, that’s no harder than balancing on a branch near the ground, which anyone can do. The only difference is that you’re done for if you don’t get it right, and that makes it
seem
harder.’
    I smiled. I liked what John had said, and I liked that he didn’t say it to pretend to be modest, but because he was annoyed with the smallness of Family that got so excited about a little thing like someone killing one lousy animal. But Gerry looked at him in dismay. Why was John cross that people were making a fuss of him? Why didn’t he like it that everyone said he was great? Poor Gerry, who no one noticed much at all, he just couldn’t figure it out.
    ‘John only had a second to get it right,’ he repeated. ‘Too early or too late and he’d have been done for.’
    After they’d cut out its two big hearts, grownups tied wavyweed ropes round the leopard’s front legs and hauled it up into the meeting tree in middle of Redlantern group for everyone to see. They’d take its skin off later, and pull out its long black teeth and claws for knives, and