the baby go.
‘Ten kids I’ve had in all,’ she said. ‘All but two of them were batfaces. And, well, you love them anyway, but . . .’
She released the breast she was holding and scooped up the other one for me.
‘Only three of my kids are still alive,’ she said. ‘Three girls. All the rest died. All my boys died. Last three all died as babies.’
I sat up.
‘Well, maybe your luck will turn now.’
She nodded, lying there under the flickering starflowers, her face all smeary with tears. The flowers were so bright that their stems made little lines and shadows, always moving and changing, all over her body. Her hand was still cupped between her legs to hold in my lucky juice.
‘If I have another boy a wombtime from now,’ she said, ‘I’ll call him after you.’
Those slips with oldmums were funny things. When you thought about it later, you got hard all over again and you remembered your dick going in and out of her, and you wanted to do it some more. And when you heard other boys boasting to each other about the grownup women that had asked them for a slide, you worried that maybe they were getting more of it than you, or maybe that they were getting something better than you’d had. And the batface boys who oldmums never wanted to slip with, they listened to rest of us and thought to themselves, It’s not fair. Why can’t that happen to me? (But they didn’t
say
it, because they knew us smoothfaces would just laugh at them and say, ‘It’s because you’re
ugly
, Einstein. Ugly
ugly
. The clue’s in the name. It’s because you’ve got a face like a bloody bat.’)
But straight afterwards, you felt sort of empty, like the spark had been taken out of you along with your juice, and nothing meant anything at all. That was what it
actually
felt like afterwards, but that feeling didn’t last long, and seeing as that part of it wasn’t fun to think about or talk about, you soon pushed it out of your mind, you forgot about it till next time, and no one ever spoke about it at all.
I didn’t want to walk through Circle Clearing and maybe get tangled up with bloody Oldest, so I walked along by Dixon Stream where it flows down towards Stream’s Join and the log bridge. The only trouble with going that way was there was a place down along the stream where that one-legged London bloke Jeffo made boats, and he was boring boring and hard to get away from.
‘Hey! Who’s that? Aren’t you that John Redlantern that did for that leopard?’
Damn. I’d hoped he’d be out on the water in one of his boats but he wasn’t. He was sitting on a bit of log below a whitelantern tree, working on a new one. He was a big man of about sixty wombtimes with a soft weak face, no teeth, and that one leg of his missing below the knee. He’d got a three-yard length of split trunk from a redlantern tree that he was working on. He’d already scraped the dried old tubes out of it, cut the ends straight with a blackglass saw and smoothed off them off with roughstone. He’d got a special fire place for boiling down redlantern sap into glue. There was a deep hole in middle full up with a hot sticky sludge of boiled sap, and round it a circular trench filled with redhot embers. He was scooping the sludge out with a bark spoon and smearing it onto the pieces of buckskin he’d stretched tight over the open ends of the log. The skins had dried hard hard from when he first glued them on, and now he was spreading more glue all over them, ready to stick on another layer of skins.
‘How long you’ve been working on that one, Jeffo?’
‘Oh twenty wakings at least, I’d say.’
‘How many boats you reckon you’ve made?’
‘Oh thirty, forty. They don’t last that long, you know, boats. It doesn’t matter how much glue you use, sooner or later the ends come off and then down they go and it’s, “Jeffo! Jeffo! Can you glue the ends back on this one?”. “No I can’t,” I tell them. “You’ll need new soft
‘Ten kids I’ve had in all,’ she said. ‘All but two of them were batfaces. And, well, you love them anyway, but . . .’
She released the breast she was holding and scooped up the other one for me.
‘Only three of my kids are still alive,’ she said. ‘Three girls. All the rest died. All my boys died. Last three all died as babies.’
I sat up.
‘Well, maybe your luck will turn now.’
She nodded, lying there under the flickering starflowers, her face all smeary with tears. The flowers were so bright that their stems made little lines and shadows, always moving and changing, all over her body. Her hand was still cupped between her legs to hold in my lucky juice.
‘If I have another boy a wombtime from now,’ she said, ‘I’ll call him after you.’
Those slips with oldmums were funny things. When you thought about it later, you got hard all over again and you remembered your dick going in and out of her, and you wanted to do it some more. And when you heard other boys boasting to each other about the grownup women that had asked them for a slide, you worried that maybe they were getting more of it than you, or maybe that they were getting something better than you’d had. And the batface boys who oldmums never wanted to slip with, they listened to rest of us and thought to themselves, It’s not fair. Why can’t that happen to me? (But they didn’t
say
it, because they knew us smoothfaces would just laugh at them and say, ‘It’s because you’re
ugly
, Einstein. Ugly
ugly
. The clue’s in the name. It’s because you’ve got a face like a bloody bat.’)
But straight afterwards, you felt sort of empty, like the spark had been taken out of you along with your juice, and nothing meant anything at all. That was what it
actually
felt like afterwards, but that feeling didn’t last long, and seeing as that part of it wasn’t fun to think about or talk about, you soon pushed it out of your mind, you forgot about it till next time, and no one ever spoke about it at all.
I didn’t want to walk through Circle Clearing and maybe get tangled up with bloody Oldest, so I walked along by Dixon Stream where it flows down towards Stream’s Join and the log bridge. The only trouble with going that way was there was a place down along the stream where that one-legged London bloke Jeffo made boats, and he was boring boring and hard to get away from.
‘Hey! Who’s that? Aren’t you that John Redlantern that did for that leopard?’
Damn. I’d hoped he’d be out on the water in one of his boats but he wasn’t. He was sitting on a bit of log below a whitelantern tree, working on a new one. He was a big man of about sixty wombtimes with a soft weak face, no teeth, and that one leg of his missing below the knee. He’d got a three-yard length of split trunk from a redlantern tree that he was working on. He’d already scraped the dried old tubes out of it, cut the ends straight with a blackglass saw and smoothed off them off with roughstone. He’d got a special fire place for boiling down redlantern sap into glue. There was a deep hole in middle full up with a hot sticky sludge of boiled sap, and round it a circular trench filled with redhot embers. He was scooping the sludge out with a bark spoon and smearing it onto the pieces of buckskin he’d stretched tight over the open ends of the log. The skins had dried hard hard from when he first glued them on, and now he was spreading more glue all over them, ready to stick on another layer of skins.
‘How long you’ve been working on that one, Jeffo?’
‘Oh twenty wakings at least, I’d say.’
‘How many boats you reckon you’ve made?’
‘Oh thirty, forty. They don’t last that long, you know, boats. It doesn’t matter how much glue you use, sooner or later the ends come off and then down they go and it’s, “Jeffo! Jeffo! Can you glue the ends back on this one?”. “No I can’t,” I tell them. “You’ll need new soft
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