Dark Eden

given on Earth by her mother and father, like it was nothing more than a nice stone or a pretty bit of shell.
    ‘If we were there on Earth,’ he said, ‘then we’d call Earth
here
, and it would be the ordinary dull place we were stuck in, and Eden would be the strange wonderful place that was far far away.’
    ‘I don’t get you.’
    ‘I mean, wherever you are, that’s here, and that’s the only place you can be. Here or nowhere.’
    I put the ring back on my finger.
    Another monkey pushed a stone to the edge of the hole and dropped down through the steam.
    ‘Are you with me, Jeff?’ I asked.
    Jeff laughed.
    ‘Yeah, of course I am.’
    ‘No, I mean are you on my side?’
    ‘Your
side
?’
    I could see straight away that it wasn’t the right question to ask him. I always wanted to narrow things down, shut things out, concentrate all my effort on one point so as to get things done, but Jeff was the opposite of that. He was always reminding himself to lift his eyes from the things we all got absorbed in, and to see the wide world beyond. He’d never settle for seeing only one side of a thing.
    ‘I mean, are we friends?’ I finally asked lamely.
    This made him laugh and laugh.
    Then we heard a scared cry from back where the others were. We hurried back to find that Julie Blueside’s baby was on its way.

37

Gela Brooklyn

    It took two whole wakings for Julie’s baby to be born. It seemed to be stuck inside her, no matter how hard she pushed, and she screamed and screamed, and we all thought she was going to die. There were oldmums back in Family who knew how to help with things like that, but none of us did. None of us had any idea. Everyone cowered down inside themselves while Julie screamed and screamed and screamed, and even while I tried to comfort and reassure her, I felt my own baby growing inside me, and wondered if this was going to be how I died too.
    And then something shifted somehow, and the baby came out. It was a tiny tiny little batfaced boy and it was dead and blue and shrivelled up. Another death to add to Suzie’s and her baby’s and make Tall Tree seem even more like a place of loneliness and sadness, however much we all tried to tell each other that it was fine.

    After we’d buried the baby under stones, we stayed up by that stream at the edge of forest for a couple of wakings. Then Tina and me persuaded everyone to move further down into forest and we all built shelters and a new fence down there next to a small pool.
    Me and Tina pretty much ran things after that, just like we’d done back at Valley Neck. John might have been the one that brought us here, but now he was busy busy again with his own things: trips up to edge of Dark, sewing new wraps and greasing them and storing them in logs, cutting new snowboots from bark, drying wavyweed and twisting ropes, trying out new kinds of footwrap with different mixtures of grease and sap and buckfoot glue.
    We’d been living there for some time – two three periods – when we heard the lookouts calling out during a sleep, and crawled out of our shelters to find snow falling. It fell and fell and fell all across Tall Tree Valley, until the ground was white with snow everywhere, and the lanterns on the trees shone out through lumps of snow, and icy water came drip-drip-dripping from every branch as the snow melted on the warm bark. Even when snow had covered everything, it still kept falling falling from the black sky, until it lay two three feet deep, and our shelters were smooth white heaps. A couple of them collapsed under the weight.
    ‘Snow! Snow! I hate cold snow,’ whimpered Harry Spiketree. ‘Why won’t it stop? I’m scared. Why won’t it go away?’
    As usual people yelled at him to shut up, but really all Harry ever did was say out loud what everyone felt inside. It
was
scary. I thought so too. It was like we’d come down here to this dismal bloody place to get away from Snowy Dark, but now Dark was following after us.
    We built up our main fire quickly, before the snow could put it out, dragging logs out from under the snow that had covered our big log pile, and then we huddled round the flames with greased buckskins over our heads, trying to keep as warm and dry as we could.
    I felt something squirm inside me. It was the little baby in my womb. My first baby.
    ‘Hey!’ I said. ‘It’s started to . . .’
    But I never finished telling them. A cry had come from somewhere on the slopes above us.
    Aaaaaaaah!