Dark Eden

even though his last name was Haribey. I don’t why.)
    So, yes, London were different from Blueside, Blueside were different from Batwing, Batwing were different from Redlantern. Each Family group woke at a different time, slept at a different time, had its own particular way of doing things and deciding things, its own little things they were proud of about themselves (like London and Brooklyn being the names of groups on Earth), its own particular combination of strong people and weak people, kind people and selfish people, batfaces and clawfeet. But the differences were so small, I thought, and so dull dull dull. Really we were all alike. In fact, we were so on top of one another, so in each others’ lives and in each others’ heads, we were hardly separate from one another at all. Like Oldest always banged on and on about, we were
all one
. It was really true: one Family, all together, all cousins, all from one single womb and one single dick.
    ‘I’ve got some milk if you want some,’ Martha said, cupping her hands under her breasts.
    ‘Yeah, okay,’ I said, and I bent down while she held one of them for me to kneel and suck the warm sweet stuff.
    ‘That’s better,’ she said after a bit. ‘They were beginning to hurt.’
    She stroked my hair briefly, without much interest.
    ‘Had a new baby die on me,’ she explained. ‘Twenty thirty sleeps ago. Little batface baby. Really bad batface, poor little thing. His little face was practically split open from top to bottom, and he couldn’t suck, no matter how hard I tried to help him. In the end he just . . .’
    I felt her shaking as she began to cry. That was the reason she’d been awake. She couldn’t sleep. She couldn’t think of anything else but the dead baby. That was what it was like for mums when a baby died. They couldn’t think of anything except the gap where the baby had been. Martha London didn’t know how to fill up the time. She didn’t know how to let the baby go.
    ‘Ten kids I’ve had in all,’ she said. ‘All but two of them were batfaces. And, well, you love them anyway, but . . .’
    She released the breast she was holding and scooped up the other one for me.
    ‘Only three of my kids are still alive,’ she said. ‘Three girls. All the rest died. All my boys died. Last three all died as babies.’
    I sat up.
    ‘Well, maybe your luck will turn now.’
    She nodded, lying there under the flickering starflowers, her face all smeary with tears. The flowers were so bright that their stems made little lines and shadows, always moving and changing, all over her body. Her hand was still cupped between her legs to hold in my lucky juice.
    ‘If I have another boy a wombtime from now,’ she said, ‘I’ll call him after you.’

    Those slips with oldmums were funny things. When you thought about it later, you got hard all over again and you remembered your dick going in and out of her, and you wanted to do it some more. And when you heard other boys boasting to each other about the grownup women that had asked them for a slide, you worried that maybe they were getting more of it than you, or maybe that they were getting something better than you’d had. And the batface boys who oldmums never wanted to slip with, they listened to rest of us and thought to themselves, It’s not fair. Why can’t that happen to me? (But they didn’t
say
it, because they knew us smoothfaces would just laugh at them and say, ‘It’s because you’re
ugly
, Einstein. Ugly
ugly
. The clue’s in the name. It’s because you’ve got a face like a bloody bat.’)
    But straight afterwards, you felt sort of empty, like the spark had been taken out of you along with your juice, and nothing meant anything at all. That was what it
actually
felt like afterwards, but that feeling didn’t last long, and seeing as that part of it wasn’t fun to think about or talk about, you soon pushed it out of your mind, you forgot about it till next time, and no one ever spoke about it at all.
    I didn’t want to walk through Circle Clearing and maybe get tangled up with bloody Oldest, so I walked along by Dixon Stream where it flows down towards Stream’s Join and the log bridge. The only trouble with going that way was there was a place down along the stream where that one-legged London bloke Jeffo made boats, and he was boring boring and hard to get away from.
    ‘Hey! Who’s that? Aren’t you that John Redlantern that did for that leopard?’
    Damn. I’d