Blacklands

Chapter 4

MR. LOVEJOY DRONED ON AND ON AND ON ABOUT THE ROMANS, 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.