Blacklands

The voice observing him demanded an answer. Steven didn’t have one, just a buzzing jumble of words and images like the pieces of a jigsaw when the box was first opened. He knew that those random pieces made a picture—a country garden, sailing ships, puppies in a basket—but the pieces in his head were fragments and some were turned facedown and it would take more than a demanding voice to assemble them into something coherent. Something useful.

Avery stood so close to him now that Steven had to look up into his face.

“What was that all about?”

His voice was kind and his expression was sympathetic. His features were making all the right moves, but his eyes were elsewhere, thinking other things.

He put a cold hand on Steven’s shoulder.

Lewis could not remember running; he could only remember being on the moor and suddenly being off it.

He had eaten the good half of too many sandwiches to be a fit boy, but adrenaline filled his lungs and squeezed his heart more efficiently than any conditioning that could have gone before or would ever come again.

The stile at the bottom of the track scraped his shins and tore his knee as he barely broke stride to clear it.

He turned left onto the narrow, still-misty street—the only one of any note through Shipcott—and wondered at the way his frantic footfalls smacked sharply and echoed off the canyon of bright, bow-walled cottages.

Lewis had no idea why he was scared, and so he worried about how to impart his fear to anyone who could help him. But he knew he would have to try, because instinctively he knew this was not a job for a secret agent or a sniper, or even a famous footballer.

This was a job for a grown-up.

It was early on a Saturday morning but the mist gave Shipcott a dead, eerie feeling and the street was unusually empty. He rounded the short curve in the road and saw why.

There was a little knot of people outside Steven’s house, spilling off the narrow pavement and into the road.

Grown-up people. Thank god.

Lewis almost cried with relief.

Lettie was in the bathroom when the knock came on the door. At the first rap she frowned, wondering who it could be so early on a Saturday. But then she frowned because it wasn’t really knocking; it was pounding. Pounding of the type Lettie had only ever seen on TV where the drunken husband goes round to confront his errant wife’s new lover. Pounding like police.

It scared her, angered her, and galvanized her all at the same time.

She hurried downstairs and opened the door a crack, her left hand holding her robe closed, not because she was afraid it would swing open but to let the pounder know that she disapproved of his rudeness.

It was Mr. Jacoby. Holding a newspaper.

Lettie experienced a second of complete disorientation during which she wondered whether they now had a newspaper delivered and, if so, why they had ordered the Daily Mail, and—even stranger—why Mr. Jacoby was making the deliveries himself instead of leaving it to Ronnie Trewell, who seemed to have spent at least ten of his fourteen years trudging up and down in the rain with a DayGlo sack pulling him so badly off center that, without clearly marked pavements, he would have wandered around in circles all day.

“Mr. Jacoby,” she said neutrally so that she could smile or frown as the ensuing occasion required.

To her surprise, Mr. Jacoby held up the paper in shaking, newsprint-blackened hands, opened his mouth as if to tell her something of great importance—and burst into tears.

Davey was surrounded by legs. It was nothing new; when you’re five, legs are your constant companions. When you’re five your whole experience of gatherings consists of pulled seams, rubbed crotches, bulging thighs, scuffed knees, trailing hems.

But this was extreme. He was on the pavement outside his house trying to stay at his mother’s side as people pressed all around them to see the Daily Mail. Legs nudged him, bumped him, propelled him this way and that.

Now and then a hand would reach out to steady him and apologize, but nobody spoke to him or looked at him—everything in this jungle of legs was going on in the canopy over his head. He gripped Lettie’s ratty blue towelling robe and felt her warm thigh under his knuckles.

His mother wasn’t crying but Mr. Jacoby was. Davey had never seen a man cry before—never imagined that such a thing was possible—and found it so disturbing that he tried not to see or hear it but couldn’t stop looking. Big Mr. Jacoby in his green Spar shirt and his wobbly chest and his hairy arms, crying. Davey laughed nervously, hoping it was a joke—but nobody joined in. He gripped more tightly onto his mother.

People were talking grown-up talk very forcefully but very secretly and Davey could only catch fragments. The fragment he heard most often was “It’ll kill her.”

Kill who? thought Davey desperately. What will kill who?

“Can’t keep it secret … has to know sometime … don’t show it … it’ll kill her …”