Blacklands

Chapter 33

STEVEN STARED AT THE BLACK CEILING HE COULDN’T SEE, AND listened to Uncle Jude and his mother arguing.

He couldn’t make out words, but the tones alone made him stiff with tension and his ears prickled with effort.

She was cross. Steven didn’t know what she had to be cross about. His mind raced, trying to assess the previous day, prodding it to shake loose the moment when things had changed. Something. Something. Something had happened. Must have! Because last night, he’d lain just like this, gazing into blackness, and heard them having sex. He recognized the sounds from a DVD he and Lewis had watched last school holidays. Something with Angelina Jolie in it. It had been under some sheets, so hadn’t shed any useful light on the mechanics of the whole sex thing. He and Lewis had stared, flame faced, at the screen, not daring to speak or look at each other while the scene played out. When it was over, Lewis had said, “I’d give her one,” in a triumph of redundancy.

But the sex between Uncle Jude and his mother had been last night. Tonight was the row. Uncle Jude mostly silent, occasionally defensive; his mother sharp and cold. He felt a rush of pure fury at her; wanted to run next door and scream at her to stop. Stop fighting, stop hurting, stop being such a… such a… fucking bitch!

His fingers ached and he realized they were gripped too tightly around the top of his duvet, rigid and trembling—like the rest of him. He let his breath out and tried to relax.

“Is Uncle Jude leaving?”

Steven jumped. “Shut up, Davey.”

“You shut up!”

Steven did shut up, wanting to hear how the row ended, but there was no more.

“I don’t want Uncle Jude to go.” Davey’s voice was whiney and tight with snot but instead of making him angry it infected Steven with the same feeling, so he said nothing, biting his lip and squeezing his hot eyes closed until he opened them and found that it was morning.

And that sometime during the night, Uncle Jude had left.

Steven slouched downstairs on heavy legs and cold feet, despite the season.

Halfway down the stairs, he saw the purple oblong on the doormat.

By the bottom of the stairs his eyes realized it was a postcard and picking it up he confirmed it was a picture of purple heather.

When Steven turned it over, his heart jumped into his throat and started pumping there instead, making his whole neck throb.

Compared to their previous communications, there was a cornucopia of information on the six-by-four-inch postcard.

There was the edge of Exmoor, reduced by familiarity to a single dashed line. DB was where it should be. SL was where he’d shown Avery. Between them was a strange circle of short radiating lines, like an aerial view of Friar Tuck’s haircut, enclosing the initials WP, and the single word:

Steven couldn’t eat. He’d never have thought such a thing was possible. It wasn’t because he wasn’t hungry; it was because his head was so full of thinking that the thoughts overflowed and pounded into his mouth, down his throat, into his chest, and even as far as his guts—a raging river of swirling hopes and white-water fears that left no room for food.

His first thought on seeing Avery’s directions was how quickly his own quest had faded from his mind. Uncle Jude’s return, the vegetable patch, Lewis, the real Mars bar. These things—these normal things—had squeezed Uncle Billy out of his day-to-day consciousness and into a corner in the back of his mind.

But the postcard brought Uncle Billy bursting out again in a rush of old guilt and new anticipation.

In an instant, he was recharged, reinvigorated, focused.

He did not remember washing or dressing or doing his teeth, but they must have happened, because he arrived at the breakfast table without eyebrows being raised.

Davey was miserable; his mother cut their sandwiches with a hard hand and a tight mouth, and Nan was uncharacteristically quiet on the subject of her daughter’s love life. But Steven was only aware of these things in the most peripheral, hazy way.

I know where Uncle Billy is buried!

He almost thought he’d shouted it out loud when his nan fixed him with a neutral stare.

“Pass the butter to your brother.”

Steven passed the butter and was gripped with a sudden certainty that someone else would find Uncle Billy first.

Now that he had Avery’s map, it seemed so obvious! Blacklands! Of course! So close he could almost see it from his own bedroom window!

Even Lewis had worked it out. Next time I come, I’m digging up at Blacklands…

What was to stop someone else working it out too?

Someone who didn’t have to go to school today?

Someone who would beat him to it?

Someone who would push open the door of opportunity and whose life would be transformed by the discovery instead of his, leaving him trapped forever between his nan and his mother and the dim, undersea room where his own piss still stained the carpet. Steven went cold and felt his middle empty as everything inside him pressured out towards his throat and his bowels.

He got up from the table with a loud scrape.

“Where are you going?”

“School.”

“You haven’t eaten.”

“I’m not hungry.”

Lettie looked as though she was going to make an issue of it, then bound his sandwiches viciously in clingfilm and banged them into his lunch box without even caring about a chocolate bar.

Steven didn’t care either. Chocolate bars were for children, and today he would become so much more than that. He might not know how sex or relationships worked, but by nightfall he hoped his family would be a whole thing, instead of this cracked, crumbling half-thing that left him nervous and sad.

Steven glanced round at his mother, Davey, and Nan—all of them unaware of how he was about to change their lives.

He turned to go, but only got two steps before his mother said sharply: “Wait for your brother.”

And so instead of digging up the body of a murdered boy, Steven had to wait for his brother and walk him to school and then go straight to double history, where Mr. Lovejoy made them draw cross sections of the pyramids, showing all the dark, secret ways the Egyptians employed to ensure that their ancestors remained undiscovered and undisturbed for thousands of years.

Steven had still not been taught the meaning of irony, but once more he could hardly fail to understand it when it reared up in front of him and smacked him in the face.

All day long, he felt like screaming.