Dark Eden

enough trouble to deal with already, you’ve come over here to the one person that’s made an enemy of everyone, and caused all the trouble in the first place. And he’ll cause more and more, you know he will, because he can’t leave a thing alone, he can’t bear anything that hasn’t got his personal mark on it.
    And then I thought of cruel cruel David back in Family, and cold Caroline, who refused even to consider whether John had a point, and bloody old stupid bossy Liz Spiketree and the creepy Secret Ree, and I thought, I hate this whole world. I hate Eden, this miserable dark place we’re all trapped in for bloody ever. We shouldn’t
be
here, that’s the real problem: it wasn’t the world we were made for. We were meant to live in light.’
    Pretty soon John started to snore and I couldn’t stand it in that lousy cave for a minute more.

    There was more air outside, but of course not the bright light of Earth. It was dark like Eden always is, darker even than in the cave: dark except for the lanterns and the stars. In fact, I thought, it was
still
a cave really out there, still a cave, only with stars instead of rocklanterns. That was what Eden was like. We were trapped inside a dark little cave with no way out of it. And even though I’d never known anything else, and probably never
would
do, I longed and longed for that different world that was full of light. I don’t mean just longed for it in a sad wistful way. I longed for it like a blind person must long to see. I longed for it like you’d long for air if you couldn’t breathe. I had to stop myself from screaming out.
    ‘What’s keeping you, Earth?’ I muttered. ‘When are you going to bloody come for us?’
    ‘Hello Tina, are you alright?’
    Weird Jeff was out there, sitting on a rock. He’d been looking out over forest of Cold Path Valley with the dark shadows of mountains all around it. A couple of starbirds were calling out to each other across it.
Hoom! Hoom! Hoom!
came from some way off and then, quite near,
Aaaah! Aaaah! Aaaah!
Two three monkeys were chasing through the trees below us, making their funny clicking noises, and flashing their bright blotchy skins.
    ‘Why are
you
up?’ I asked him, and it came out almost like I thought he’d done something wrong.
    He looked at me with his big round eyes.
    ‘My feet hurt,’ he said. ‘They hurt too much for me to sleep.’
    He wasn’t crying or anything – that wasn’t what Jeff was like – but he lifted up one of his twisted old feet to show me. It was all bloody and raw.
    ‘Michael’s names! That must hurt.’
    I looked around to find some water. Streams in the hills could be really cold because they came fresh down from Snowy Dark, but I found a small pool just a bit below the caves that was warmed by hot spiketree roots. Water came into one side of it cold cold from Dark, and trickled out the other side warm warm, as it made its way down to Cold Path Stream. I led Jeff down there and helped him bathe and get all the dirt off. Then I mashed up some starflowers, which they say help a bit with raw wounds like that, and smeared the mixture onto his twisted old clawfeet.
    I’m not someone who likes to look after people all that much. I never played mummies when I was a kid. I never wanted to help look after the littles back in group like some young girls do. I never looked forward to the time when I’d have kids of my own. But it felt good to have something to do. And after I had dried his feet off as best I could, I put my arm round him and we lay down by the pool there and pretty soon, what with the trickling trickling water and everything, we both went off to sleep.

    ‘What are you doing?’
    I was really scared for a moment. Someone was standing over us with a spear.
    Then I saw it was John.
    ‘Oh, it’s you.’
    Jeff was still asleep but I released my arm from around him, rubbed it a bit because it had gone numb, and sat up. I don’t know how long we’d been there, but the dip had passed and sky was grey-black again like it normally was, with Starry Swirl hidden away again until the next dip. I didn’t want to wake up. I’d been having that lovely dream that everyone has, the dream about Earth, where there isn’t darkness behind everything but only light, light, light.
    ‘I don’t want women slipping with young boys in my new family.’
    What?
Gela’s
eyes
, there were so
many
different things wrong with that single statement that it was hard to know