Blacklands

Chapter 28

STEVEN PEELED OFF HIS SOCKS AND STEPPED GINGERLY INTO HIS cold, wet trainers outside the back door.

It was 5:30 A.M. and he felt stupidly as if he were six years old again and waking up to a Christmas he thought would never come.

Steven grinned to himself. Christmas in June. He’d felt this way every day for the past week—sliding out of bed over Davey, who was spread out like a starfish caught in sheets, stepping over the creaky board outside Billy’s room, holding on to the banister to control the fall of his feet on the stairs. Then shivering a little—partly as the warmth of sleep gave way to the cool new day on his skin, partly with excitement—as he padded quickly into the kitchen where sunlight scattered shafts of golden dust through the window.

And all because of the tiny green shoots that had started to appear like little emeralds sprinkled in the dark loam of the vegetable patch.

The carrots had come first and Steven’s throat had closed up to see them. He almost cried! Over stupid carrots! He didn’t even much like carrots!

He tried not to show his excitement when he told Uncle Jude about the carrots but Uncle Jude had been excited all by himself, and had immediately got up from his bacon to come and see. Steven had felt like a man showing off his new baby. He’d felt the need for a cigar. Instead Uncle Jude had put a hand on the back of his neck, which was even better.

After the carrots, the beans made an appearance at the foot of the poles they’d tied into wigwams. Right now it seemed impossible that the helpless little specks of green could ever scale the heights of wigwam-land. Steven was filled with amazement that they would even try.

He’d wondered what would be next.

It was the potatoes.

But before that—three days after the first carrots appeared—Steven had come in from school and Nan had not been in the window.

Terror had clutched his heart but he tried not to run through the house shouting her name.

“Nan?” he’d called up the stairs. No answer. He’d gone halfway up and seen the toilet door was half open. She wasn’t in there.

Nobody was home.

Steven hurried through to the kitchen and stood still in astonishment.

Nan was in the vegetable patch. She was peering at the shoots and poking the earth now and then with her stick. Not in a mean way, Steven realized, but in the same way he’d seen her poke at the all-terrain wheel on her trolley.

The same trolley that Nan now gripped for support as she rolled and swayed slowly back down the bumpy garden.

I’ll make her a path, Steven had thought, a smooth path.

Then he’d run, back through the house and out of the front door, grabbing his schoolbag on the way.

A short while later he’d waved hello to his tight-lipped grandmother, motionless in the window, and let himself into the house for the second time in ten minutes.

This memory made Steven sightless until he was halfway up the garden, and then he stopped suddenly.

The beanpoles had fallen down.

He hurried the rest of the way, tamping down the unease that had started in his stomach.

The beanpoles hadn’t fallen down. They’d been pulled up and scattered across the rest of the vegetable patch.

Or what was left of it.

Something large and heavy had trampled and gouged the soft black earth, kicking up little seedlings that now lay scattered like bodies on a battlefield, their bright green uniforms failing to cover the naked, spindly limbs beneath that should never have been exposed.

Steven wanted it to be a fox. Or a cow. He even looked about the garden for an escaped cow. A cow would be bad, but not as bad as the bald fact that a person had done this. Person or people.

The hoodies. The hoodies would do this. In his mind Steven could imagine them stomping and laughing as they mashed the tender shoots underfoot, their shadowed faces twisted with stupid humor.

But even as he tried to convince himself of that, Steven knew that the hoodies didn’t care enough to do this—or know him well enough to think he’d care.

In his plummeting heart, Steven knew it was Lewis.