Dark Eden

ring from the pocket at the edge of my wrap and I held it up close to a flower.
    It felt smooth smooth, but it wasn’t just smooth. On the outside was a little wavy line that ran right round it where the metal was a different colour, and on the inside, Gela’s heart, there was tiny tiny writing. Not many newhairs could read, but Bella had taught me the letter sounds and I knew how to put them together to make words. I could read a lot of the old names and words that were carved onto the trees round Family. And I could certainly read the name inside the ring, written in tiny tiny letters with a neatness no one in Eden, scratching on trees or stones or bits of bark, could ever hope to equal, and no one over about thirty forty wombs, with their fading eyes, could ever hope to read. It was just about the best-known name in all of Family.
    ‘
To Angela
,’ it said, ‘
with love from Mum and Dad
.’
    Well, there have been lots of Angelas – or Gelas or Angies as they usually get called – but this could only be the Angela that came here at the beginning. This
was
her ring. It really
was
the same one they told the story about, the ring her mother and father gave her back on Earth, the one she lost in forest when she was looking for stumpcandy and could never find again.
    Another shiver went through me, right through my body and my mind, almost like when you’re having a slip and you come. It was one of those moments when you wonder whether there is some kind of big misunderstanding and really this is all just a dream or a made-up story, and not the real world like you thought it was. It was
strange
strange to hold that same ring in my hand, and to know for certain that one part of the True Story really really
was
true. It was weird weird to be connected to that story myself, to be the ending of it in a way, to be the one in Family who finally found Angela’s ring for her. It was even stranger that it happened so soon after that weird feeling I’d had when I was by myself up by Deep Pool, and I’d felt that our mother Angela had been there too.
    Michael’s names! Lucy Lu would have
loved
this if it had happened to her. We’d never have heard the last of it! It was like Angela’s shadow really was here somehow, following me around. It was like she wouldn’t let me go.
    Squatting down there among the starflowers, pretending to be taking a crap, I went through the story in my head. How Gela lost the ring. How she screamed out to Tommy and the kids for help. There were no other people in the world then but Tommy and Gela and their kids. She screamed at them to come and help her, she screamed and screamed like she hated them all, demanding that they crawl round on forest floor for hours and hours, waking after waking, looking for the missing ring that her mum and her dad had given her.
    ‘It’s only a ring,’ Tommy says to her. ‘It’s just a
thing
, really, isn’t it? Like a stone or a bit of wood. You’ve still got us, honey. You’ve still got me and the kids.’
    ‘I don’t want your bloody kids,’ she says, ‘and I
certainly
don’t want you, you selfish shallow worthless man. I want my mum. I want my dad. I want my home that
you
stole from me.’
    And then she cried and cried and cried, it’s said for nine whole sleeps and nine whole wakings, while the kids blocked their ears and made silly noises with their mouths to shut out the cruel things she said, and the sad sad thoughts in their heads. Until that waking, the story says, the mother of us all had been warm and kind and a source of strength. But after it, she didn’t smile for a whole womb and she never again spoke to Tommy with any love in her voice: never ever again.
    I heard someone coming over to use the latrine. It was Old Roger – he’d be grunting and spluttering and stinking there for half an hour – so I slipped the ring back in its pocket and moved away.

12

Tina Spiketree

    So third waking of Any Virsry came, and we were all back together in Circle Clearing. Everyone in the world was squeezed into the space between Circle and trees (
really
everyone this time because all the hunters had returned by now), with jewel bats diving back and forth above us and forest humming all around. I stood with my sister Jane – bloody group leader Liz had made me stay with Spiketrees this time – and John stayed over with the Redlanterns, so I could only wave to him. He looked tired tired. I guess we all did, but he did more than