Dark Eden

if I’d not spoken out or destroyed Circle,’ he said. ‘She’d still be group leader then, wouldn’t she? Still leader, still best leader of the bunch.’
    ‘It wouldn’t have happened either, John,’ I said, ‘if she’d kept her hands off you. She might have been a good leader but no other leader in whole Family would ask a boy to slip with her that she’d helped to raise. Not even the worst of them.’
    ‘I didn’t slip with her,’ John began. ‘She just . . .’
    But then he broke off.
    ‘They write something on a stone for her?’ he asked after a moment.
    ‘Yes. It said: “Bella Redlantern: group leader”,’ Gerry told him.
    John nodded and swept his hand over his chessboard, ending the game he’d been playing against himself.
    ‘You three hungry? I did for a little stonebuck the other waking, and I’ve still got a couple of legs. I’ll get this fire going a bit and you can eat.’
    So we ate, and then Gerry and Jeff went off to sleep in a cave about twenty yards off and John and I went into the cave where he’d been sleeping and kept his things. The walls and ceiling of all of these caves were covered in rocklanterns that glowed red, blue, green and yellow, so it was bright bright in there, brighter than outside in forest, and in all that light I saw his face in a different kind of way. I’d been intending to have a go at him for the way he treated me, but he looked so
weary
weary, and so worn down and wretched that I just didn’t have the heart for anything like that, though most probably I looked nearly as weary and worn down as he did.
    He didn’t seem to have the same problem with having a go at
me
, though.
    ‘You shouldn’t have brought Jeff,’ he said. ‘How can we cross Dark with him?’
    ‘What do you mean I shouldn’t have
brought
Jeff? According to whose plan? According to what agreement?’
    He looked up at me. He passed his hands over his face. I could see that we could go on and on with this or we could let it go, and I didn’t have the energy to go on and on. So, as a way of stopping things, I took his hand. Immediately he pulled me up against him and we were kissing and running our hands over each other, and ripping off each other’s bitswraps and pulling each other down onto the sleeping skins he’d got down there on the sandy floor. And then we were sticking our tongues and things into each other, and licking each other, and he was pushing into me like he’d die if he didn’t get in there quick enough, and I was pulling him up inside like he was still taking far too long. And we rolled over each other and pulled each other this way and that way into every possible angle and every possible way of tangling our bodies together we could think of. And it was
sort of
a way of getting close, but at the same time it was a way of keeping apart and not having to be close at all. And it was sort of a way of feeling we were alive and in the world, and at the same time a way of shutting the world away completely.
    I didn’t want babies and he didn’t want them either, but he needed so badly to have someone he could be inside and not be alone, and I needed so badly to have someone fill up my emptiness, that we forgot all about that. He came inside me two times, the first time with a soft little groan and the second time with a big loud lonely cry, like a cry of pain. Pretty soon after that he was fast fast asleep. I guessed that he hadn’t slept much since he was chucked out of Family, however calm calm he’d pretended to be when we arrived, however cool cool.
    Come to that I hadn’t slept much either, but I
still
couldn’t sleep now. I lay there for a long time looking up at the little shiny lumps of squishy rocklanterns on the roof of the cave with the little cave flutterbyes bumping and flapping around them, and I listened to John breathing and making little whimpering sounds in his sleep, and I wondered what would happen next.
    Gela’s eyes, I thought. Family might have been bad – it was too small, it made me feel like I couldn’t breathe – but look at me now! I’d got myself into a world with just three other people in it, a world consisting of me and three boys: one of them cold and distant, one with no will of his own, and one who was just weird. You try to get away from something bad, and things just get worse and worse.
    Well, they do get worse if you don’t think straight, I told myself. Look what you’ve bloody done. As if there wasn’t