Dark Eden

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.
    But Oldest had got bored of the Models, and now they were arguing between themselves, while Caroline Brooklyn, the tall grey woman who was Family Head, squatted beside them and tried to soothe things down.
    ‘Each Any Virsry was supposed to be three hundred and sixty-five days after the last one,’ old Mitch was saying.
    ‘I
know
that, you stupid old man,’