Blacklands

It was wrong.

It was all wrong.

Steven touched the point of his own jaw to feel how it moved and connected. Here was the bit that went up the side of the face to the ear. That looked all right, but this was where it wasn’t right. The jaw was too long. And the teeth were wrong too. They were not neat boy-teeth—they were long and flat and yellow. Steven ran his finger across the teeth in his own lower jaw. The molars gave way at the broad front to sharp incisors. But the jawbone in his hand held big fat molars and only a couple of long incisors at the narrow front. Everything was wrong.

Steven felt sick again, although this time he did not vomit. He felt sick and tired and as if this life of waiting and disappointment would never be over. That he was a fool to think it ever could be.

This jawbone belonged to a sheep.

Of course it belonged to a sheep. There were sheep and deer and ponies all over the moor and they died out here just as they lived—all the time. Their bones must outnumber those of murdered children a thousand—a million—to one.

How could he be so stupid? Steven glanced around to make sure nobody was witnessing this humiliation. He felt the pain of failure and, more deeply, the pain of the loss of the future that he’d glimpsed so briefly, yet so gloriously.

He dragged himself upright and let the jawbone fall from his slack fingers back into the miserable patch of earth it had taken him two hours to scuff out of the moor. He picked up the spade and rained blows on the jawbone until exhaustion made him stop. It was in four pieces, and most of the teeth had been knocked out. He kicked soil over it.

Tears burning his eyes, Steven shouldered his spade and walked home.

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.