Blacklands

His spade bit into the ground and hit something hard. Steven bent and picked the soil aside with his hands. Usually what he hit was a rock or a root, but this sounded different.

Steven’s stomach flipped as he saw the pale bone smoothness exposed in the rich dark earth. He knelt and scratched at the thick, root-enmeshed dirt of the moor. He had no other tools, just the brute spade, and he felt the soil pressing up painfully under his nails.

He could get his finger under it now, and tried to lever it out. It budged only millimeters, but enough to expose a tooth.

A tooth.

With his breath stuck somewhere hard in his chest, Steven leaned down and touched the tooth.

It wobbled slightly within the jawbone.

He sat back on his heels. The sky and the heather swirled around him. He looked to one side and retched into the gorse. Strings of mucus ran from his mouth and nose to the ground and, for a vivid second, he felt his own fluids tying him to the moor, tugging him downwards face-first into the soil, pulling him under so that his nose and mouth became clogged with dirt and roots and mulch and small biting insects.

He jerked his head up and scrambled backwards to his feet.

Steven wiped his nose and mouth on his bare arm, and spat several times to clear his throat. The acid taste of sick lingered in the back of his mouth.

From a dozen feet away, he peered gingerly into the shallow hole. He had to take two steps forward before he could see the jawbone, then he stood still.

He had done it.

He had done what the police with their heat-seeking rays and their sniffer dogs and their fingertip searches could not do with all their manpower and technology.

He had found Billy Peters.

And he had touched his tooth.

His stomach heaved again at the thought, but he swallowed it.

Suddenly Steven felt weak. He sat down heavily on a cushion of heather and cotton grass.

His sense of relief was palpable.

He was better!

And now his nan would see that and everything would change. She would stop standing at the window waiting for an impossible boy to come home; she would start to notice him and Davey, and not just in a mean, spiteful way, but in ways that a grandmother should notice them—with love, and secrets, and fifty pence for sweets.

And if Nan loved him and Davey, maybe she and Mum would be nicer to each other; and if Nan and Mum were nicer to each other, they would all be happier, and be a normal family, and … well … just everything would be … better.

And this was what it all came down to—this smooth, cream-colored curve of bone and the boy-tooth within it. Steven thought about Uncle Billy’s toothbrush sweeping over that yellowing molar and had to quickly push the image away.

He shuffled back to the exposed jawbone slowly, but determined, and with excitement starting to bubble inside him.

New possibilities burst open in Steven’s mind like fireworks illuminating a door to a future that he’d barely dared hope existed. He would be a hero! He would be in the newspapers. Mrs. Cancheski would make an announcement in assembly and everybody would be astonished at this ordinary boy who had done an extraordinary thing. Maybe there’d be a reward, or a medal. Mum and Nan would be so proud and grateful. They would offer him the world but he would only ask for a skateboard so that he could go to the ramp with the bigger boys and learn to be a teenager with baggy jeans and keychains and battle scars. Even better, a plaster cast—but it wouldn’t stop him skating. Of course, he would fall off at first, but soon he’d be flying and he’d be the best in the village. He’d teach Davey how to skate and he’d be patient with him and grip his hand to help him up when he fell. And girls would giggle at each other and follow him with their eyes as he walked home with his custom deck under his arm, drinking a Coke. Maybe with a baseball cap. And with white earphone cables running across his bare chest as the evening sun sank in the blue green sky. Everybody would want to be his friend, but he’d stay loyal to Lewis; Lewis was a true friend, even if he wouldn’t swap a Mars bar for a two-fingered Kit Kat.

The open door scared him. If he thought too much about those things, the potential for disappointment was vast. Better to expect nothing and get a bit, his mum always said. So he allowed the fireworks to pop and fizzle out, smoking like sparklers in a bucket of water. He could almost smell that smell of wet flames on a dry November night. He was conscious of breathing again for the first time in minutes.

And he was back on Exmoor.

A chilling wind had sprung up and rain clouds were gathering over his shoulder, so Steven knew he had to work fast if the glory was to start.

He found his hands were shaking, the way Uncle Roger’s used to before a drink.

Trying to clear his head of the school picture of Billy with his wide grin showing lots of his small white teeth, Steven worked around the jawbone until finally he was able to pull it from the soil.

He stared at it stupidly for long minutes.