Dark Eden

mountains? Skyscrapers? Walking underneath those things must be a bit like walking under these trees.’
    John didn’t say anything for several minutes. He didn’t even show that he’d heard me. In that way that he had, he was completely sunk down inside his own thoughts. But later, when I’d pretty much forgotten what I’d said, he spoke.
    ‘Yeah. They were made of metal and rock, plus a kind of glass you could see through like water.’
    ‘What?’
    ‘Those giant shelters.’
    He looked
tired
tired. He was so worn down I could see quite clearly how he’d look when he was a trembly blind old man. I suppose I didn’t look much better.
    ‘You did do well, John,’ I said.
    I reached for his hand, but he didn’t respond to this in any way, so I dropped it again.
    ‘I did well, you reckon?’ he said. ‘I lost Suzie, didn’t I? And her baby. If it wasn’t for Jeff I’d have lost all of us. Gela’s eyes, Tina, when we were up there in the blackness . . .’
    His voice was getting shaky and he broke off.
    ‘When we were up there,’ he began again, ‘I thought about how I’d taken all these people away from Family, from their mums and their uncles and their brothers and sisters and all that and for what . . .?’
    He glanced round at me, but I looked away. I didn’t want to see him like that. It was just like the time he began to cry up there in Dark when that giant slinker nearly got the bat. I don’t know why, but I just couldn’t bear that side of him.
    Off under the great trees to our left, where the ground began to slope up towards Dark, a herd of six seven woollybucks were grazing on starflowers. That was one good thing: we were
not
going to go short of meat.
    ‘Do you really believe that Angela stuff, John?’ I asked him after a bit. ‘Really and truly? Only it doesn’t sound like the sort of thing that you’d . . .’
    ‘I saw Angela,’ he said in a stubborn voice, not looking at me. ‘Over by Deep Pool. I saw her sitting there by herself, crying. She didn’t want to be in Eden. She never wanted to leave Earth. But she knew there was no point in going on about it. Eden was where she was now, and she’d have to make the best of it. And that’s what she did: hope that Earth would come and get her back, of course, but meanwhile make the best of it. And she was right, wasn’t she? If she’d just sat and pined for Earth, she’d have wasted her life, wouldn’t she? Because she died before Earth came.’
    ‘But you actually
saw
her?’
    ‘Yeah.’
    He glanced sideways at me and looked quickly away again, like a kid expecting to be challenged.
    Well, there were lots of questions I
could
have asked him. Was he saying that he’d
really
seen her, like a real person, or was he just saying he’d imagined her in his mind? Was he saying that Gela really
talked
to him? Was he saying that she was really with us now? But I knew how it was when people start to talk about the Shadow People and all of that. You just can’t pin them down. They talk like a thing can be true and not true at the same time, or both there and not there. I couldn’t be bothered with it, and I’d always thought John couldn’t either.
    ‘Well, you never told me about it at the time,’ was all I said.
    ‘Gela’s eyes!’ he burst out. ‘Make up your mind what it is you want from me. To share things with you or to bloody hide them?’
    Well, I could sort of see that he might have a point there, but I was too tired to think about it, so I didn’t say anything.
    Haaaark! Haaaark!
A bird was looking down at us from a branch high above us. We’d never seen a bird like it. It was a bird with no name, a bird that Michael Name-Giver had never seen. It was right beside a whitelantern flower so we could see the long shiny green wings it was smoothing down with pale long-fingered hands. Its hands and feet had long long red claws.
Haaaark! Haaaark!
It flew off through the trees.
    ‘People need things like the ring,’ John said after a time. ‘They need a story. They need to have something from the past to hold onto when they go forward into the future. Like when you’re climbing high up in a tree, you need to hold tightly onto the branch you are already on until you’re sure you’ve got a tight grip on the next.’
    ‘Well, some people might say that’s exactly what Circle was for. Most people, in fact.’
    ‘Circle was different. Circle was
stopping
us from going forward. It was making us stay in the past.