Dark Eden

were all brothers and sisters anyway. All of us, every one us, had the same mother and father, Tommy and Angela, so whenever
any
of us slipped together it was
always
bad slip in a way. And Bella might not be my mother, but she was my cousin, like everyone else in whole Family. And in a way she
was
my mother too because she looked out for me when I was little. She told me things. She listened to me. She was more of a mother to me than Jade, because Jade never wanted to be a mum. (She didn’t fancy staying behind in group with the littles and oldies and clawfeet.) So it was
double
bad slip me doing it with Bella, or letting her do it with me. It was bad bad, even if we didn’t do the full slip.
    That’s what I was thinking while I swam up and down Deep Pool, swimming really hard, to wear myself down and to make the water wash over me and clean my skin. ‘It’s bad, it’s bad, it’s bad. I’m bad, I’m bad, I’m bad.’ Then I pulled myself out of the water onto the bank where Tina and I had sat. I pulled a whitelantern flower from a tree and turned it round in my hand: a shining sphere of whiteness, with just a little opening in it for the flutterbyes to go in and out. I held it up close to my eye and looked inside. A tiny flylet was crawling in there, surrounded on all sides by beautiful bright white light. There was no darkness in there. That little flylet didn’t have to see a black sky above, or dark trunks of trees. All it could see was light. Just thinking about it brought tears up into my eyes.
    And then a strange feeling came over me, a feeling that this same thing had happened here before, long ago, but in this exact same place. Someone else had sat here beside Deep Pool and looked into a lanternflower and cried. And that someone, well, it was Gela herself. I don’t mean bloody old Gela Oldest. I mean
first
Gela. I mean Angela Young, my great-great-grandmother, the mother of us all. She’d come here and sat in this exact place all on her own, so as to be where Tommy and the children wouldn’t find her. And she’d plucked a lanternflower and looked inside it, remembering her far-off world full of light and all the people in it. She’d cried and cried and cried until she had no tears left, and then she’d scrumpled the lanternflower and tossed it into the pool.
    They say that Angela and Tommy didn’t get on so well. It’s said he got angry when he didn’t get his way. It’s said she was full of bitterness for what he’d done to her, because it was his fault she’d come to Eden, his fault and the fault of his friends Mehmet and Dixon. She’d never have come here at all of her own choice, and she’d never have been with a man like him either.
    ‘No wonder she cried,’ I said to myself.
    But then I thought, Tom’s neck, what
is
this crap? I’m starting to talk like bloody Lucy Lu. Muttering to shadows. Communicating with the dead. How could
I
know what Angela felt? How could I know that she came to this same place? I’m just doing what everyone else does, wake-dreaming, playing with silly stories and pretending they’re true, grieving over bloody Earth, feeling sorry for myself because I can’t have everything given to me that I want.’
    I scrumpled up the lanternflower and tossed it into the pool, just like she had.
    ‘Tom’s dick and Harry’s!’ I said out loud, after I’d splashed water on my face. ‘We’re in
Eden
. Maybe no one will ever come to take us back to Earth. And anyway that
isn’t
“back”, it wouldn’t be
going back
, because none of us has
ever been there
.’
    ‘You talking to yourself now, John?’ said Tina.
    She’d crept down the rocks, quiet quiet as a tree fox. I didn’t know how long she’d been there or what she’d seen.
    ‘Shall we see if we can find some more oysters?’
    ‘Yeah okay, but don’t think we’re going to carry on with that slide we started, because we’re not. I’m not in the mood, okay?’
    ‘Because . . .?’
    ‘I don’t feel like that now.’
    ‘I went looking for you in Redlantern, and Gerry told me that Bella had you in her shelter and that everyone reckoned that . . .’
    ‘Just leave it, alright?’
    For a moment she looked like she was going to get angry, but she saw something in my face that stopped her. She nodded and shrugged and gave me a little strained smile.

10

Gerry Redlantern

    I felt sad sad. I felt scared. I felt sorry sorry for John. I felt sort of sorry for Bella too, sorry and angry all at