Blacklands

Chapter 22

UNCLE JUDE CAME BACK.

One day they were just four and the next they were five.

Steven was in his room struggling with 3x – 5y and all its mystifying variations, when he heard a creak in the passageway and Uncle Jude’s voice ask: “How’s the vegetable patch?”

Steven looked round in surprise, which he quickly tried to conceal. It wasn’t cool to look too happy to see someone.

“Tomatoes are rubbish,” he shrugged, “but the potatoes are great.”

Uncle Jude grinned. “Well, any fool can grow potatoes. Look at the Irish.”

“You’re Irish!”

“That’s how I know.”

He wandered into the bedroom, poking about at Davey’s things, the grin never leaving his face, and Steven realized that Uncle Jude wasn’t trying to hide how happy he was to see him, and that made him ashamed that he had. He swung his legs off the bed and threw his arms around Uncle Jude’s waist, feeling the big man’s hands on his back, patting him hello again after too long.

The sudden urge to tell Uncle Jude everything rose in him like a madness.

Let Uncle Jude take over the making of decisions; let Uncle Jude visit Arnold Avery in prison and beat a location out of him; let Uncle Jude dig up Billy and get all the glory—Steven didn’t care anymore, he just wanted it to be over.

He opened his mouth—

“I see your nan’s trolley’s still going strong.”

Steven nodded, suddenly unsure of his own voice.

“See her out and about with it. Pleased as punch.”

Steven hesitated, then nodded. He didn’t want to spoil this good subject. He knew Uncle Jude was not just being nice; Nan loved her trolley and took it out with her even when she wasn’t going shopping. Her hips played her up and the now-sturdy trolley was also a means of support for her odd, rolling gait.

“Look how tall you got.”

“Yeah. All my trousers are too short.”

“I hear ankle whackers are the next big thing.”

Steven snorted and they parted.

“Where have you been?” He tried to keep the accusation out of his voice, but it still came out whiney.

“About.”

“Why didn’t you come to see us?” Once again, Steven could have kicked himself. Uncle Jude was not his father. Why should he come to see them if he was no longer going out with his mother?

But Uncle Jude just spread his hands and sighed. “You know how it is, Steven. Relationships.”

Steven felt a little swell of pride that Uncle Jude would say that to him—as if he knew how relationships worked. Coming hot on the heels of his mother assuming he knew how sex worked, it made him feel like both a grown-up and a fake.

“I suppose so,” he said.

The question he was desperate to ask stuck in his throat, and he was grateful for that.

Asking Uncle Jude how long he’d be staying would only be tempting fate.

Nan was tight-lipped at supper, shooting disapproving glances at Uncle Jude’s nails, but Lettie was girlish and had released her captive ponytail, and Davey prattled on and on and on, bombarding Uncle Jude with his questions, opinions, and statements of semi-fact that made them all smile.

“I’m going to grow a sausage tree, Uncle Jude!”

“Why haven’t I got a beard?”

“Uncle Jude? Did you know hedges are made by hedgehogs?”

Steven sighed to himself. No wonder his mother preferred Davey; he was so entertaining.

By staying silent, Steven gathered the information that his mother had bumped into Uncle Jude in Mr. Jacoby’s shop and that he’d been invited for tea—although there was some teasing dispute about exactly how he’d been invited, or whether he’d asked himself to tea.

It didn’t matter. Uncle Jude was back at the kitchen table and as he softened Nan up, chaffed Lettie, and indulged Davey, Steven felt an unaccustomed sense of optimism settle on his shoulders.

He asked to be excused as soon as he’d hurried his baked beans, and ran hell-for-leather in his cheap new trainers to where he’d left his spade six weeks before.

It was there. It was the same.

He jogged back with it held loosely in one pale hand, and went round the back of the house. Just like Uncle Jude, his spade had come home.

Steven surveyed the back garden and in his ordinary boy’s mind he saw where the tomatoes should go, and the lettuce. The lettuce could be planted in pots and placed up high to deter slugs. The potatoes would take most of the room but there was space for a few strawberries to make his mother feel all upper-class come Wimbledon. Mr. Randall had grown melons last year. He’d given them one and even though it was bland and cork dry, Steven had been stunned that something so exotic could come out of the staid English soil. Maybe he could grow melons—the ones with orange flesh.

He hefted the spade better into his hand and thought of it biting into the earth to give life, rather than to seek death.

Out of nowhere, he was glad his mother had bought new knickers in Banburys. He hoped with all his heart that this time they would be enough.

Steven leaned the rusty spade against the back wall and smiled to himself.

This was what normality felt like, and it was good.