Dark Eden

thing old Juicy Johnny here has ever been good for.’
    There were a few cold little titters of laughter, but Caroline told him off.
    ‘This isn’t a time for jokes,’ she said.
    ‘I’m not joking,’ David said. ‘Spike him up.’
    And he stayed there, out in the open space on his own, standing with his muscly arms folded and his thick stumpy legs apart. He wasn’t a group leader. He didn’t really have any more right to speak out than John did, other than the fact that he was a grownup. But he didn’t go back to the edge of the clearing with everyone else, and Caroline didn’t tell him to. She just turned her attention away from him, like she couldn’t face another fight.
    And the thought came to me – well, I didn’t properly
think
it through, but I sort of glimpsed it in my head – the thought came to me that up to now it had been the women in Eden that ran things and decided how things would be, but now a time was coming when it would be the men. Some of them might be good men and some would be bad like David. But it would be men rather than women for the next bit. Something had changed, and it would never be how it was before.
    ‘We need to discuss this,’ Caroline said. ‘Let’s decide who ought to speak first.’
    ‘How about his mother?’ murmured Candy Fishcreek.
    ‘Yes,’ agreed Caroline, scanning the crowd surrounding her, out round the edge of this stuffy little cave of cloud. ‘His mother. Jade Redlantern. Where are you, Jade?’
    A rustling came from the place where most of the Redlantern people were standing, and you could see which one was Jade because hers was the only face that was still looking forward.
    ‘I’m here,’ she said in a small wavery voice.
    And it was an odd thing. Jade wasn’t just pretty, she was a great beauty. She knew how to stand and how to hold herself and how to move herself, so as to command envy and desire and love. If men spoke or came up to her – and women too – she could dismiss them, or tease them, or give them their heart’s desire just by the way she moved her face and her body. But now she was lost, she had no idea how to speak or to compose herself. It sounds harsh but what she reminded me of was a whitelantern fruit that looks all ripe and lovely till you turn it round and you see the hole where the ants have got into and hollowed it out inside.
    ‘Well, um, he’s not all bad, John isn’t . . .’ she began.
    It was like she was talking about someone she didn’t even know that well.
    I looked at John. He was watching her. You couldn’t read the expression on his face, but his eyes were sort of hard and shiny. Not shiny with tears but with something like the
opposite
of tears, I thought, though I suppose it didn’t make a lot of sense.
    ‘ . . . but it’s a bad thing he’s done,’ Jade said lamely, and she sort of made a face, like it really wasn’t all that much to do with her, and didn’t say anything else.
    ‘Can I speak, Caroline?’ said Bella Redlantern.
    Caroline turned round to her.
    ‘Go on,’ she said coldly.
    ‘I didn’t know what he was going to do, and I haven’t talked to him about it,’ she said, ‘but he’s a boy who feels passionately about things, feels passionately about the future of Family especially. I don’t really understand why he did this, but he will have done it because he thought it would help.’
    ‘Help?’ asked Caroline. ‘
Help?
’
    She looked around at us all, making an incredulous face, trying to get a reaction out of us. Some people tittered, some shouted out ‘Shame on you Bella! Shame!’, which was just what Caroline wanted.
    ‘I may be getting too old for this,’ Caroline said, ‘I may be missing something obvious. But if you take something that is dear and precious to other people and calmly destroy it, how can you call that
helping
them?’
    She didn’t wait for an answer.
    ‘Who else wants to comment?’
    ‘Make him put Circle back again!’ called out a fat dim woman called Gela Blueside.
    ‘But it can never be what it was!’ Caroline said. ‘Think about it. We could make another circle. We could use a rope to measure it out and make something that looked pretty much the same. And I daresay that
is
what we’ll do. But it’ll never again be the stones that Angela and Tommy chose, never the stones they laid in place with their own hands.’
    Gela Blueside began to cry like she’d been scolded.
    ‘And I’ll tell you something,’ Caroline went on. ‘If