Daughter of Eden by Chris Beckett

Author:Chris Beckett [Beckett, Chris]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Corvus, an imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd
Published: 2016-10-06T04:00:00+00:00

Twenty-eight

That was me and Starlight, I thought. She’d gone off with the beautiful Headmanson of New Earth. I’d gone off with prickly old Mary with her square face and her small grey eyes.

And just for two heartbeats, even with all these other things that were going on, I went right back in my mind to a time when me and Starlight were maybe six years old – eight wombtimes we’d have said back then – and the two of us were alone by that big rock that stuck up out of the beach at Knee Tree Grounds. We’d found a piece of string that someone had dropped there, and we’d hunted round for small things to tie onto it: a stone, a piece of wood, a fish claw, a black bone from a fatbuck. Now the necklace was finished. Starlight held it round her neck while I stood behind her to tie it on, then we ran off together to show it to her uncle Dixon.

‘Look at my necklace, Uncle! Me and Angie made it by ourselves!’

Dixon was rubbing buckfat into a new boat. He looked round and laughed. ‘That pair!’ he said to Starlight’s brother Johnny. ‘Starlight and Angie! You just can’t separate those two, can you?’

I suppose there’s always a story about any friendship between two people. It doesn’t have to be mentioned out loud, but it’s still there every time they meet, tied up tight in a little bundle: a certain particular shape that neither one has to unwrap to know what’s inside it. The story about me and Starlight was well known on Knee Tree Grounds. Every one of the Kneefolk knew that the two of us had been best friends since we were babies, everyone knew we were always together. And though we loved each other, and I’m sure we would have been friends anyway, that story bound us even more tightly together. We’d started the story but now we were in it too.

‘Here come the two of them again!’ people would say. ‘Jeff’s ride, did you ever see two kids who were so close?’

Of course there were lots of other kids on Knee Tree Grounds who had a special friend, but we were the pair that people noticed the most. Would they have gone on about us so much if we’d been two pretty girls like Starlight? I don’t think so. Would they have gone on about us if we’d been two little batfaces like me? Certainly not. Stories catch on for a reason – we Kneefolk loved the story of Jeff’s Shining Ride, for instance, because it made our Jeff look good, and he was the many-greats granddad of pretty much all of us – and the reason people liked the story of me and Starlight was the huge difference between the two of us, which made our friendship seem sweet.

Yes, and that wasn’t just what made the story work for the Kneefolk. It was one of the things that made it work for me and Starlight too.

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