Blacklands

Steven’s mother glared at his wetness. “Those trainers were only new at Christmas.”

“Sorry, Mum.” He looked crestfallen; it often worked.

She sighed. “Tea’s ready.”

Steven ate as fast as he dared and as much as he could. Lettie stood at the sink and smoked and dropped her ash down the plughole. At the old house—before they came to live with Nan—his mum used to sit at the table with him and Davey. She used to eat. She used to talk to him. Now her mouth was always shut tight, even when it held a cigarette.

Davey sucked the ketchup off his chips then carefully pushed each one to the side of his plate.

Nan cut little pieces off her breaded fish, inspecting each with a suspicious look before eating it.

“Something wrong with it, Mum?” Lettie flicked her ash with undue vigor. Steven looked at her nervously.

“Bones.”

“It’s a fillet. Says so on the box. Plaice fillet.”

“They always miss some. You can’t be too careful.”

There was a long silence in which Steven listened to the sound of his own food inside his head.

“Eat your chips, Davey.”

Davey screwed up his face. “They’re all wet.”

“Should’ve thought of that before you sucked them, shouldn’t you? Shouldn’t you?”

At the repeated question, Steven stopped chewing, but Nan’s fork scraped the plate.

Lettie moved swiftly to Davey’s side and picked up a soggy chip. “Eat it!”

Davey shook his head and his lower lip started to wobble.

With quiet spite, Nan murmured: “Leaving food. Kids nowadays don’t know they’re born.”

Lettie bent down and slapped Davey sharply on the bare thigh below his shorts. Steven watched the white handprint on his brother’s skin quickly turn red. He loved Davey, but seeing someone other than himself get into trouble always gave Steven a small thrill, and now—watching his mother hustling his brother out of the kitchen and up the stairs, bawling his head off—he felt as if he had somehow been accorded an honor: the honor of being spared the pent-up irritation of his mother. God knows, she’d taken her feelings for Nan out on him often enough. But this was further proof of what Steven had been hoping for some time—that Davey was finally old enough, having just turned five, to suffer his share of the discipline pool. It wasn’t a deep pool, or a dangerous one, but what the hell; his mother had a short fuse and a punishment shared was a punishment halved in Steven’s eyes. Maybe even a punishment escaped altogether.

His nan had not stopped eating throughout, although each mouthful was apparently a minefield.

Even though Davey’s sobs were now muffled, Steven sought eye contact with Nan and finally she glanced at him, giving him a chance to roll his eyes, as if the burden of the naughty child was shared and the sharing made them closer.

“You’re no better,” she said, and went back to her fish.

Steven reddened. He knew he was better! If only he could prove it to Nan, everything would be different—he just knew it.

Of course, it was all Billy’s fault—as usual.

Steven held his breath. He could hear his mother washing up—the underwater clunking of china—and his nan drying—the higher musical scraping of plates leaving the rack. Then he slowly opened the door of Billy’s room. It smelled old and sweet, like an orange left under the bed. Steven felt the door click gently behind him.

The curtains were drawn—always drawn. They matched the bedspread in pale and dark blue squares that clashed with the swirly brown carpet. A half-built Lego space station was on the floor and since Steven’s last visit a small spider had spun a web on what looked like a crude docking station. Now it sat there, waiting to capture satellite flies from the outer space of the dingy bedroom.

There was a drooping scarf pinned to the wall over the bed—sky blue and white, Manchester City—and Steven felt the familiar pang of pity and anger at Billy: still a loser even in death.

Steven crept in here sometimes, as if Billy might reach across the years and whisper secrets and solutions into the ear of this nephew who had already lived to see one more birthday than he himself had managed.

Steven had long ago given up the hope of finding real-life clues. At first he liked to imagine that Uncle Billy might have left some evidence of a precognition of his own death. A Famous Five book dogeared at a key page; the initials “AA” scratched into the wooden top of the bedside table; Lego scattered to show the points of the compass and X marks the spot. Something which—after the event—an observant boy might discover and decipher.

But there was nothing. Just this smell of history and bitter sadness, and a school photo of a thin, fair child with pink cheeks and crooked teeth and dark blue eyes almost squeezed shut by the size of his smile. It had been a long time before Steven had realized that this photo must have been placed here later—that no boy worth his salt has a photo of himself on his bedside table unless it shows him holding a fish or a trophy.