Dark Eden

Roger and Bella and my mum Sue were toasting starflower stems and dried fish for everyone to eat.
    ‘Hello John,’ Bella called out, and I could see her trying to catch his eye so she could try and find out what was going on in his head.
    But John took the food she gave him without looking at her face.
    ‘Hello, Gerry darling,’ said my mum Sue, giving me my food. ‘You look tired, my dear. All you newhairs are to go scavenging today. Don’t go more than an hour’s distance from here, okay? You’re going with John and Met again, plus Candice and Janny. Jeff will need to rest his feet this waking, so we’ll find him jobs to do back here in group.’
    Paaaaarp! Paaaarp! Paaaarp!

    Me, John, Met, Candice and Janny headed out Lava Blob way with spears, ropes, bags and a stone-headed club, looking for stuff to eat. All the time I was watching watching John to try and figure out what was going on inside him, but it was no good: his face was still still like a mask.
    Of course, with everyone staying near Family for Any Virsry, and everyone awake at the same time, we ran into other people much more than normal: grownups and newhairs and little kids from different groups, all scavenging together and disturbing each other’s prey. That’s one reason why groups don’t usually all keep the same wakings: so as not to get under each other’s feet all the time. But they were all out there now, Blueside, Batwing, London, Starflower . . . all the groups together, even the ones whose sleeps and wakings were the other way round to ours. And, when they saw John, a lot of them had things to say.
    ‘Rude little slinker,’ said a man about forty fifty wombs called Tom Fishcreek (poor bloke had clawfeet
and
a batface). ‘What you think you’re doing spoiling Any Virsry for everyone?’
    Him and a couple of other Fishcreek men had hung up an old torn fishing net made of wavyweed string. The other two were up in a whitelantern tree and they’d tied threads to the legs of flutterbyes and were jerking them up and down to try and lure bats into the net.
    ‘Yeah,’ called down one of the others in the tree. ‘If you want to be rude to grownups, John Redlantern, stick to the ones in your own bloody group next time, alright? Leave the rest of us out of it.’
    And he leaned out right over a whitelantern flower, so that its light shone up into his face, and then he spat down from the tree. John had to step out of the way to stop it from landing on his head.
    I was angry angry.
    ‘Tom’s dick! You’d better . . .’
    But John put his hand on my arm at once and shook his head to tell me to leave it, he didn’t want any fuss.
    ‘I’ll give you one thing, John,’ Janny said, as we moved on through the trees. ‘You’re a bloody idiot and you pissed Caroline off something rotten, but you really couldn’t have made Any Virsry any worse than it already is.’
    She laughed. She was a batface like my mum and ugly as anything, but she was always cheerful cheerful.
    Up ahead of us, two Blueside oldmums were kneeling in front of a small pond, their bony bums sticking up as they picked out pondsnails.
    ‘Carry on like that, John Redlantern, and you’ll break Oldest’s hearts,’ said one of them, called Lucy.
    ‘Worry too much about breaking old Mitch’s heart, and we’ll all starve,’ John told her. ‘Which would probably break his heart too, don’t you think?’
    ‘What do you know about things like that, you silly newhair?’ Lucy Blueside said. ‘You should hear yourself. You should hear what rubbish it sounds.’
    ‘He’s not talking rubbish,’ I said hotly. ‘This is my cousin John you’re talking about, the one that did for that leopard by himself. He’s
smart
smart, way way cleverer than you.’
    The other woman, Mary, laughed angrily at that.
    ‘Harry’s dick, boy, look at him!’ she said. ‘Your precious cousin’s just a newhair kid that hasn’t even managed to grow a proper beard yet. Do you really think that doing for one old leopard means that he knows better than Caroline and all of Council, with all their wombs of experience?’
    Our Janny laughed.
    ‘You’re wasting your breath, girls,’ she told the Blueside women. ‘John could say up was down and black was white and Gerry’d still stand up for him.’
    ‘More fool him,’ said Mary Blueside. ‘And by the way, what’s this I hear about young John there and B . . .’
    ‘So what is your suggestion as to how we’re going to feed