Dark Eden by Chris Beckett Page B

he’s dead but he drops back down the tube to Underworld, to rot or be eaten up by whatever it is that lives down there. Three, you get him with the string but not the club, so he’s still alive and threshing and biting like crazy and you have to hold tight and hope the string doesn’t break or he’ll get you with those vicious spiny teeth. This time, though, they got all of it right. The string caught the slinker round the neck, the club mashed its head so that, if that slinker wasn’t dead straight off, it certainly near enough was, and Gerry and Jeff pulled it out of the hole, its body still twitching and its little claws still waving about and clicking and grabbing at the air.
    ‘Got yer!’ yelled Met delightedly, giving it another whack with the club.
    Gerry ran forward to trample on it. Met hit it again.
    But Jeff, he was a strange little boy. He had been part of all this up to that moment, but now suddenly he was standing back from what was going on, like he was looking in from outside.
    ‘We’re here,’ he said. ‘This is happening. We are really here.’
    ‘Of course we’re bloody here, you dork!’ exclaimed Met, giving the quivering slinker another whack.
    But Gerry regarded his brother with a concerned expression. He was protective of Jeff, and at the same time he looked up to him, even though Jeff was the younger of the two of them. He knew there was something strange and special about Jeff while he, well, he was just Gerry.
    Jeff squatted down by the slinker, touched its mangled head as gently as if it was a baby, ran his fingers along its hot scaly body.
    ‘Poor old thing. Poor old tubeslinker.’
    ‘What are you talking about?’ snorted Met, looking at me and Gerry to see if we’d have a laugh with him, but we wouldn’t.
    ‘It’s just a bloody slinker !’ Met said.
    ‘I wonder what it’s like to be a slinker?’ Jeff said.
    ‘What do you mean, what’s it like to be a slinker?’ exclaimed Met, once again looking at me and Gerry. Surely we could see that was funny?
    ‘What does a slinker think about, I mean,’ Jeff persisted.
    I think kids like him – I mean clawfeet, batfaces, the ones who are left on the outside of things – can go in different ways. Most of them are desperate to please and to get in with the other kids. Some turn into bullies and try and control people, like David Redlantern. But a few choose just to stay outside and think their own thoughts. Jeff was one of that kind. He was smart smart, much smarter than Gerry. He had much much more going on in his head. And he had his own angle, his own way of seeing things that he wasn’t going to set aside to please anyone else. I liked him for that. I was on the outside of things too in my own way. Not that I was a clawfoot or anything but I just felt different. Different different. So in a way I felt a connection with Jeff. In some ways we were alike, though in other ways gentle little Jeff wasn’t like me at all.
    Met rolled up the dead slinker and tied it up with string while Gerry and Jeff went to the air-tube and pulled out all the candy they could reach. When we got back to Family we found out that our old slinker was the best catch of that waking and everyone told Met what a great hunter he was. Yet time had been – not generations ago, but even just when I was a little kid – when people would kill a slinker and just leave it out in forest for the tree foxes and starbirds because they didn’t think the meat was good enough to be worth carrying back.

     
    When we’d eaten in group, and after I’d let Old Roger beat me at a game of chess, I walked across to Spiketree again and looked for Tina.
    ‘You two are getting on well, aren’t you?’ said the Spiketree people, giving each other knowing looks, like there’s something clever about being able to spot when a boy and a girl fancy each other, like it doesn’t happen all the bloody time.
    Tina and me went back up past Brooklyn and London and Blueside –