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that’s not my cousin John. He faced it all by himself with an ordinary kid’s buck-spear. Imagine that! Just an ordinary spear with a spiketree tip.’
    And Gerry looked around at the impressed Batwings, and the people from other groups who’d started to appear: Fishcreek, Spiketree, Brooklyn. He was thrilled, because no one had ever been so interested in what he had to say. (He wasn’t a boy that was particularly funny or clever or interesting. He didn’t really even have opinions of his own. I’d hardly even noticed him until now.)
    ‘ And he killed it cleanly in one go,’ Gerry told them all. ‘One single stab.’
    ‘Well, he wouldn’t be here to tell about it if he hadn’t, would he?’ said a Batwing boy about mine and John’s age. ‘It’s not like a leopard’s going to stand there and let you have a second go.’
    The boy was called Mehmet. He was named, like a lot of people were, for Mehmet Haribey, who was one of the Three Companions. But, though the True Story said that Mehmet Haribey was friendly and kind, Mehmet Batwing didn’t look all that friendly. He had a narrow clever face and a little pointy yellow beard, and he was a sarky bugger who liked to find fault with people.
    Well, I can be pretty sarky myself when I want to be, and I can deal with sarky people, no trouble, but Gerry didn’t know how to handle them at all. I saw him look at Mehmet and frown, but he really couldn’t work out what exactly Mehmet was getting at, so he shrugged and carried on.
    ‘A bloody great leopard,’ he yelled out again excitedly, turning away from Mehmet. ‘John says I can share the hearts. And it’s fully grown, not just a little one. It sang at him and everything. Sang like a woman, even when it was running towards him. You should have heard it. You should have heard. Like a lovely gentle woman it was, even when it was running at him with its jaws wide open. Fully grown it is. Have you ever seen such a big one? Biggest one ever, I’d say. John says I can have one of its hearts, because I was there too when the leopard came.’
    We passed on through the group and into Redlantern group area, which came before Spiketree. And Redlanterns got out some fruit beer and passed it round in dried whitefruit shells for all us to drink and celebrate the double kill.
    ‘John, you idiot,’ said John’s mother Jade, with that smile of hers that was supposed to send men crazy. ‘Why couldn’t you climb a bloody tree like any normal person?’
    I looked at her and wondered why men couldn’t see the emptiness inside her. It was like she was acting being a person, she was moving her pretty body around to make it seem alive, but inside she was lost lost.
    ‘Jade, Jade,’ said her sister Sue, laughing. ‘Your only son kills a leopard by himself and that’s all you can say?’
    Sue Redlantern was Gerry’s mum and she was a batface, like David, and like my own sister Jane. She was as ugly ugly as John’s mum was beautiful, but she was kind and giving and everyone knew it, not only in Redlantern but across whole of our side of Family.
    ‘He’s a bloody fool,’ said Jade.
    I looked at John. His face was still still, but Gerry was upset on his behalf.
    ‘Your son John is brilliant brilliant,’ he told Jade hotly. ‘He’s bloody brilliant. How many kids of twenty wombtimes have ever …?’
    ‘You should say years ,’ said Old Roger. ‘You should say fifteen years , not twenty wombtimes. You know what Oldest say: the world doesn’t come from a woman’s belly.’
    ‘How many kids of fifteen years ,’ Gerry said, ‘have ever done for a leopard on their own?’
    ‘He is a brave boy,’ said Roger, ‘even if he is rude to his elders.’
    ‘He’s a bloody lucky boy,’ said sour David, pursing his ugly batlips that split open right up into where his nose ought to be.
    Little kids were crowding round with toy spears cut from whitelantern twigs.
    ‘How did you kill it, John? What was it like?’
    There