Blacklands

Chapter 5

LEWIS 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.

Steven’s uncle Billy—the very boy whose hands had constructed the space station—had been murdered!

Lewis had felt the hairs stand up on his arms when Steven said it. Even better, he’d been murdered by a serial killer and—best of all—his body was most likely still buried somewhere on Exmoor! On the very moor which he, Lewis, could see from his bedroom window!

At the time Steven was still cowed by the tellings-off and the tears in his household, and the sadness which came with the sudden shocking understanding of his own family’s suffering. But safely ensconced three doors down, Lewis was merely drunk with the gruesome thrill of it all.

It was—naturally—Lewis’s idea to find Billy’s body, and he and Steven spent the summer of their tenth year tramping across the moor looking for lumps under the heather or signs of disturbed ground. Snipers and Lego lost their charms in the face of the real possibility of the corpse of a long-dead child. They called the new game Bodyhunt.

But when the evenings grew short and the rain grew cold, Lewis inexplicably tired of Bodyhunt and rediscovered his passion for small colored bricks and beans and chips.

Surprisingly, Steven did not. Even more surprisingly, that winter he acquired a rusty spade and an Ordnance Survey map of the moor and started a more systematic search.

Sometimes Lewis would accompany him but more often he did not. He covered his guilt at this abandonment by loyally maintaining the secrecy of Steven’s operation, and by demanding frequent and fulsome reports of where Steven had been and what he had found. Then he would pore over the map and decide where Steven should dig next. This gave the impression that Lewis was not only involved but in charge, which both of them felt comfortable with and neither believed.

At first, when Lewis became bored by the search and was trying to get Steven to be bored by it too, he had asked his friend why he wanted to continue.

“I just want to find him, that’s all.”

If he had been put on a rack and stretched, Steven could not have been any less vague about why he continued to dig when Lewis had decreed that they should desist. He only knew that digging had become an itch he needed to scratch.

Lewis could only sigh. His best efforts were met with friendly but determined shrugs and finally he decided to let Steven be. They were still best friends at school but Lalo Bryant became his main after-school friend, even though Lalo had a lot of his own ideas about snipers and Lego, which made their relationship more difficult for Lewis.

And so Lewis and Steven developed a new, less perfect routine: one in which they hung out at school, compared—and sometimes swapped—sandwiches, and avoided the hoodies. Then Lewis went home to play with his Lego, and Steven went out onto the moor to search for the corpse of a long-dead child.