Blacklands (4 page)

The open door scared him. If he thought too much about those things, the potential for disappointment was vast. Better to expect nothing and get a bit, his mum always said. So he allowed the fireworks to pop and fizzle out, smoking like sparklers in a bucket of water. He could almost smell that smell of wet flames on a dry November night. He was conscious of breathing again for the first time in minutes.

And he was back on Exmoor.

A chilling wind had sprung up and rain clouds were gathering over his shoulder, so Steven knew he had to work fast if the glory was to start.

He found his hands were shaking, the way Uncle Roger’s used to before a drink.

Trying to clear his head of the school picture of Billy with his wide grin showing lots of his small white teeth, Steven worked around the jawbone until finally he was able to pull it from the soil.

He stared at it stupidly for long minutes.

It was wrong.

It was all wrong.

Steven touched the point of his own jaw to feel how it moved and connected. Here was the bit that went up the side of the face to the ear. That looked all right, but this was where it wasn’t right. The jaw was too long. And the teeth were wrong too. They were not neat boy-teeth—they were long and flat and yellow. Steven ran his finger across the teeth in his own lower jaw. The molars gave way at the broad front to sharp incisors. But the jawbone in his hand held big fat molars and only a couple of long incisors at the narrow front. Everything was wrong.

Steven felt sick again, although this time he did not vomit. He felt sick and tired and as if this life of waiting and disappointment would never be over. That he was a fool to think it ever could be.

This jawbone belonged to a sheep.

Of course it belonged to a sheep. There were sheep and deer and ponies all over the moor and they died out here just as they lived—all the time. Their bones must outnumber those of murdered children a thousand—a million—to one.

How could he be so stupid? Steven glanced around to make sure nobody was witnessing this humiliation. He felt the pain of failure and, more deeply, the pain of the loss of the future that he’d glimpsed so briefly, yet so gloriously.

He dragged himself upright and let the jawbone fall from his slack fingers back into the miserable patch of earth it had taken him two hours to scuff out of the moor. He picked up the spade and rained blows on the jawbone until exhaustion made him stop. It was in four pieces, and most of the teeth had been knocked out. He kicked soil over it.

Tears burning his eyes, Steven shouldered his spade and walked home.

Chapter 4

M
R
. L
OVEJOY DRONED ON AND ON AND ON ABOUT THE
R
OMANS
, but Steven’s mind was elsewhere. Strangely, he was thinking not about football or dinner but about Mrs. O’Leary’s English class.

The writing of letters. An ancient art.

Steven did not have a computer at home—or a mobile phone, much to his embarrassment—but Lewis had both, so Steven knew how to email and how to text, although he was so slow at texting that Lewis would often growl in frustration and snatch his phone back to complete the message for him. It kind of destroyed the whole point of letting Steven practice, but when Steven saw how quickly Lewis’s fingers flickered over the keys he understood how irritating it must be for him to watch his own feeble efforts.

But letters were different. He was good at letters, Mrs. O’Leary had said so. His letters were authentic.

Mrs. O’Leary might have already forgotten that Steven wrote a good letter and resumed her near ignorance of his existence, but Steven had not forgotten her praise. He rarely experienced it, and now he sat in Mr. Lovejoy’s history class and rolled that nugget of praise around in his head, examining it from every side, watching the light reflect off it and—like any prospector—wondering what it might be worth.

Almost by accident, he had stumbled on this talent for letters. It was not a talent he would ever have chosen—skateboarding or playing bass guitar would have been better—but he was not a boy to discard a thing without first determining its potential value.

When he was ten, he remembered suddenly, he’d found a child’s buggy twisted out of shape and dumped in a lay-by. Everything about it was ruined, as if a car had rolled over it. Everything except the three wheels. They were good wheels, with proper rubber tires and metal spokes. It was one of those posh all-terrain buggies, as if the parents who’d bought it were planning an ascent of Everest with their infant in tow.

Steven had taken the wheels home and kept them. And kept them. Until, almost a year later, Nan’s shopping trolley had broken on the way home from Mr. Jacoby’s. Her trolley was an embarrassing tartan box on two stupid metal wheels with hard rubber rims, but she had had it a long time and when a wheel broke she was upset. She would have to buy a new one now and they were ridiculously expensive, just like everything else nowadays.

Steven worked on the trolley in the back garden. Mr. Randall lent him a few old tools and even showed him how to use washers to keep the bigger, wider all-terrain wheels from brushing the sides of the shopping bag itself.

When Steven presented the rejuvenated trolley to his nan, she pursed her lips suspiciously and jerked it roughly back and forth across the floor as if she could make the wheels fall off this instant if she only tried hard enough. But Steven had been careful—so careful—to tighten and retighten every nut, and the trolley remained whole.

“Looks silly,” said Nan.

“They’re all-terrain wheels,” Steven ventured. “They’ll bounce over stones and curbs and stuff much better.”

“Hmph. That’s all I need—some kind of cross-country shopping trolley.”

Petulantly she bounced it up and down a few more times and Steven held his breath but the wheels stayed put.

“We’ll see” was all she said.

But she did see. And so did Steven. He saw how much easier it was for Nan to pull the trolley along behind her. It never got jammed on stones and fairly leaped up and down curbs. Other old women stopped and admired it and, on one unforgettable occasion, he saw Nan actually touch one of the tires with her walking stick with an unmistakable sense of pride.

She never said thank you, but Steven didn’t care.

He didn’t know why he’d thought of the shopping trolley while he was trying to think about his letters, but suddenly another thought led on from it, which made him sit up a little.

He had shown Uncle Jude the trolley and Uncle Jude had examined it carefully, turning it this way and that—taking it seriously. Finally he’d said: “Good job, Steven,” and Steven thought he’d burst with joy inside, although outside he just nodded and said nothing.

Then Uncle Jude had stood up and said, “That’s the secret of life, you know.” Steven had nodded solemnly, as if he already knew what Uncle Jude was going to say, but he was all ears to hear the secret of life.

“Decide what you want and then work out how to get it.”

At the time Steven had been a little disappointed that the secret of life according to Uncle Jude was not something more spectacular, or at least mysterious. But now he sat in the hot classroom, not hearing about the mosaics in Kent, and thought it through properly for the first time.

He already knew what he wanted.

Now he just needed to work out how this new weapon in his limited armory might be used to get it for him.

Chapter 5

L
EWIS WAS A GARRULOUS BOY WITH A WIDE CIRCLE OF FRIENDS
but he considered Steven to be the best of them. The two boys had been born just three doors and five months apart.

Lewis was as robust as Steven was bony; as freckled and ginger as Steven was pale and dark haired; as bumptious as Steven was shy. And yet somehow the two had always rubbed along in the same way that can make lifelong friends of strangers thrown together by chance. As the elder, Lewis had always taken the lead but he would have anyway, they both knew.

Until three years ago, Lewis had also decided everything. Where to play, what to play, whom to play with, when to go home, what to eat for tea, what was cool to have for packed lunch and what was not, whom they liked and whom they hated.

After some trial and error they had got into a routine of perfection which saw them do pretty much the same thing every day. They played snipers in Steven’s garden; football in Lewis’s; Lego or computer games in Lewis’s house. Anthony Ring, Lalo Bryant, and Chris Potter were acceptable playmates and Chantelle Cox was on the fringes if they were desperate and she agreed to be the sniper target or the goalie; they went home when Lewis got bored; they ate beans or fish fingers and oven chips. Sandwiches containing peanut butter, cheese and pickle, or red jam were acceptable, as was any kind of chocolate, although a two-fingered Kit Kat was deemed to be the lowest rung of the chocolate ladder. Sandwiches containing egg, salad, or any other color of jam were frowned upon, and fruit was grounds for derision and only good for throwing. They liked Mr. Lovejoy and Ms. McCartney at school and Mr. Jacoby in the shop; they hated the hoodies. Once Lewis suggested they hate Steven’s nan too as she was such a grumpy old cow, but Steven did not immediately fall into line, so Lewis made it into a joke and they never mentioned it again.

Then Steven found out—and things changed forever.

When they were nine they were caught in Billy’s room.

They knew they weren’t supposed to be in there and weren’t allowed to touch anything, but Lewis’s Lego had run out before they’d finished the terrorist headquarters and he was desperate for bricks.

“I know where we can get some,” said Steven.

Lewis was skeptical. He was the solver of problems in this partnership and he thought it unlikely that Steven would be able to conjure Lego from nowhere when he didn’t even own a set himself. Still, it wouldn’t hurt to see what he had in mind.

Steven steered Lewis quietly past the living room where the TV was blaring cartoons for Davey and where Steven’s nan stared out of the window, and led him up the stairs.

They went past the small, messy room with the big, messy bed that Steven shared with Davey, and Steven cracked open the door at the end of the hallway.

Lewis knew this was Uncle Billy’s room and he knew Uncle Billy had died young. Furthermore, he knew that no one was allowed in Uncle Billy’s room. That was all either of them knew right then, although things were about to change.

With more furtive glances downstairs, they entered Uncle Billy’s room, made subaqua by the blue curtains drawn across the window.

Lewis squeaked when he saw the space station.

“We can’t take it all,” warned Steven. “Nan comes in here all the time. She’d notice.”

“Still, we can take bits off the back and sides,” and Lewis started to do just that.

“Not so much!”

Lewis’s pockets were bulging with half the docking station.

“He’s not going to play with them, is he? He’s dead!”

“Sssh.”

“What?”

Steven never got a chance to answer. There was a creak on the floorboards right outside the door and they looked at each other in alarm. Too late to hide …

Then the door opened and Nan was looking down at them.

Lewis still felt uncomfortable when he remembered that afternoon. He tried not to think of it but sometimes it popped into his head unbidden. When it did, it knocked all the stuffing out of him—and there was plenty to knock.

Nan had not shouted and she hadn’t hit them. Lewis couldn’t remember quite why it was so frightening; he only remembered rebuilding the docking station with hands that shook so hard he could barely hold the bricks, while Steven stood and sobbed loudly beside him, his socks wet with piss.

Lewis squirmed as he recalled that sudden dizzy fall from anti-terror sniper agents to little boys bawling and peeing like babies as the old woman loomed over them.

He had not seen Steven for two days afterwards but when he did, Steven had a story to tell which was the best story he’d ever heard in his whole life and which—to a very great extent—made up for the humiliation and fear they’d suffered in Billy’s bedroom.