Blacklands: A Novel

by Belinda Bauer

  Avery withdrew his hand and licked the butter off his forefinger with a quick pink tongue.

  “What happened to your arm?”

  Lewis was staring at the blood on Avery’s torn shirtsleeve, which he’d exposed by taking off the cardigan. Avery looked down at it and felt another pang of self-loathing. He was so careless! What was he thinking? Being reminded of his arm also made him feel woozy and tired. He hadn’t lost a lot of blood but the arm throbbed more now than it had yesterday. Perhaps it was becoming infected. It was bad, bad luck. Just when he wanted—needed—to be at the top of his game physically as well as mentally. And now the freckled boy was staring at it—only curious right now, but Avery knew that curiosity was a microstep from suspicion and fear and flight.

  Or attempted flight.

  Inwardly he grinned at a slew of memories of attempted flight and gathered inner strength from those.

  “Got it caught on barbed wire coming up here,” he told Lewis.

  Lewis nodded slowly. The sandwich had made him forget that he’d felt uneasy about Avery, but now that his mouth had done its work his brain was re-engaging—and something about the barbed wire story didn’t ring true. Not least the fact that there was no barbed wire on the moor. Surrounding farms had barbed wire, sure, but he couldn’t think of a nearby route onto the moor where anyone would have to negotiate anything more than a stone or wooden stile.

  He got up and wiped his hands on his jeans.

  “Thanks, mate,” he said. Then he looked at Steven: “We should go.”

  Steven chewed, hating every second, then swallowed big chunks, his eyes watering.

  “You go,” he said.

  “Huh?”

  “You go,” he said quickly, before he could lose his nerve. “I’ll stay.”

  Lewis gave a confused laugh and glanced at Avery, who was looking at Steven with an odd expression on his face.

  Steven was white, with two burning patches high on his cheeks, his eyes fixed on his sandwich. Lewis noticed he was trembling. He also noticed that the sandwich Steven was eating had tomato in it. As he watched, Steven took another bite and sloppily sucked a bit of errant tomato into his mouth.

  Something was very wrong with his friend.

  “C’mon, Steve!” He laughed again but it sounded so odd to his own ears that he cut it short, leaving a strained silence in its wake.

  He’d been engrossed in his own sandwich but now he saw that Avery was squeezing the green cardigan between his hands, twisting and crushing it, his knuckles white with tension. His vague sense of unease became an ache in his belly.

  “C’mon, you divvy. I got to be back soon.” It wasn’t true, of course, but Lewis suddenly felt the overwhelming need to be at home.

  Steven hurled what was left of his sandwich at Lewis, hitting him in the chest.

  “Just fucking go, will you! Just fucking go!”

  Lewis’s eyes were round with surprise. He took a step backwards.

  Steven got up, shaking, and closed the gap between them.

  “I know what you did to the garden.”

  Lewis flushed deep red. “W-what?”

  “You heard me. I know what you did. Now fuck off!”

  Steven shoved Lewis in the chest with the shaft of the spade, making him stumble backwards down the mound. Steven came after him and shoved again. Lewis fell onto his backside in the heather, and panic burst on Steven’s face. He grabbed Lewis by the shoulder, trying to lift him and push him away at the same time. Lewis stumbled once, twice; Steven screamed over him: “I hate you! I fucking hate you! Just piss off home! Just go!”

  Bits of sandwich and spittle fell onto Lewis from Steven’s furious mouth. He scrambled to his feet and Steven came at him again. This time Lewis skipped out of the way down the track.

  “Are you nuts?” he yelled at Steven. “Are you pigging crazy?” Again he glanced at the man—as if for support.

  “He’s nuts!” Lewis yelled, but the man was not looking at him. He was looking at Steven; his red, red lips had drawn back to reveal his sharp white teeth in a grimace of concentration. More than Steven’s sudden attack, that sight made Lewis’s insides lurch dizzily and suddenly he had to get away. Had to. Couldn’t stay another second. Primeval fear gripped him and he cried out as if struck—then turned and ran.

  Steven watched him go, feeling the thread of his life unravelling and trailing down the track behind his friend as if caught on his heel, leaving him with nothing but a black, hollow chest and bits of bloody tomato free-floating in his rolling gut.

  He felt Avery swishing slowly down the hill behind him, wet heather stroking his ankles, a knife, a rope, a gun at the ready.

  A shudder passed through him and he spun round on a sob.

  Avery hadn’t moved.

  For a long moment they regarded each other. Steven pushed tears of panic out of his eyes with the heel of his hand, feeling how strange was the disconnection that allowed him to think that Avery would attribute them to his row with Lewis. It was almost as if his mind had unravelled a bit too far and was now able to consider his own actions from a little way off. The coldness of that scared him but he clung to it nonetheless—it was almost like having someone else in his head, someone else to make decisions—and it was the only thing keeping him from curling into a ball of pissing terror in the heather to await the inevitable.

  “You okay?”

  Steven nodded, biting his lip. There was more silence.

  Avery stood up and brushed the seat of his pants carefully, then made his way down the mound.

  Steven saw that the man’s jeans were soaked to the knees and it made him aware that his own were the same, cold and stiff against his shins.

  His nerve endings twitched, jumped, screamed to turn and run.

  But he just stood there and waited for the killer to come to him.

  Why?

  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 doo
r. 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 …”

  And through it all, Mr. Jacoby cried his strange, wheezing, blubbery cry, while Lewis’s dad patted his shoulder, looking cross, but not with Mr. Jacoby. To Davey it looked like Mr. Jacoby was a giant toddler that someone had bullied off the swings and Lewis’s dad was taking care of him while trying to spot the culprit to give him a good telling-off.

  “Don’t tell who what?”

  They all looked up guiltily at Nan. Davey couldn’t see her through the legs but knew it was her. No one said anything.

  “Don’t tell who what?” she said again, a little more suspiciously.

  Davey thought someone was clapping. A slow, sharp slapping sound getting closer and closer, and suddenly the sound skidded to a halt as the people around him surged and parted to reveal a red-faced, wild-eyed Lewis.

  Lewis could barely speak. He saw his father.

  “Dad!”

  “Quiet, Lewis. We’re talking.”

  “But Dad!”

  “Lewis, go home!”

  His father looked away from him and the gathering turned its back on the boy and reshaped itself, nudging him to its edge like an amoeba egesting waste.

  Mr. Trewell, Skew Ronnie’s dad, was holding the Sun and Lewis saw the face on the front of it. It wasn’t right, but somehow he recognized it. Those red, red lips gave it away. Lewis sucked air into his depleted lungs and shouted “FUCK!” as loudly as he could.

  The word skittered off the walls and everyone turned and looked at him angrily. He just jabbed the picture.

  “That’s him! That’s the man who’s on the moor!”

  There was a stunned silence while anger turned to confusion, so he took advantage to explain further.

  “With Steven.”

  Chapter 39

  STEVEN FLINCHED WHEN AVERY PUT A HAND ON HIS SHOULDER but he turned it into a shrug and thought he got away with that.

  He answered Avery’s question with “Nothing.” Then he turned away so he wouldn’t have to look into Avery’s strangely flickering eyes.

  Instead Steven looked longingly back down the moor to where he knew Shipcott was hiding in the mist. Not being able to see even the church spire made him feel very alone.

  As he stood with his prickling back to the killer, the jigsaw pieces in Steven’s mind whirled and spun. Bits he recognized: a slice of Uncle Billy’s wide grin; a shakily traced map; a dent made in the moor by the blade of a blunt spade; on the box it said it was a fillit. He wrote a good letter. The pieces floated and scattered; he didn’t know where to start with them. So, like all good jigsaw builders, he started by finding a corner.

  And that corner—to his utter surprise—was anger.

  He’d thought his fear was all-embracing, but the anger was good. It anchored him and trumped fear for a moment and made him feel stronger.

  Lewis was gone. Safe. Steven felt a pang that the last words he’d said to his friend had been harsh but shoved the pang aside. He’d done what he had to. This was his mess and so he’d taken care of Lewis.

  Now all he had to do was escape the clutches of the psychopath who had baited his own little trap and then—in some crazy, nightmarish way—magicked his way out of prison and come here to kill him.

  Harry Potter with a chain saw.

  Steven laughed and shuddered at the same time, and felt bile sour his throat.

  He swallowed hard and felt weak. He knew that if escape was all he wanted, he’d have taken his chance by now. He’d started this thing; he’d set it in motion. Now it was moving too fast and out of control, but Steven still felt a burning, jealous need to keep hold of it. All the thinking, all the digging, all the planning, all the good letters he wrote. He was so close that the thought of letting go now was at once unconscionable and so alluring that it made him think of tongues and Chantelle Cox. It would be so easy to let go, feel his cramped fingers creak open and release the burden he’d picked up so casually and carried for so long without ever really having a good grip on it.

  But the stubborn streak that had kept him soaked, sunburned, and callused on the moor for three long years elbowed its way to the fore, trampling the dizzy panic Steven felt at overriding every instinct he possessed.

  Now that it was just him and the killer alone, one thread of thought separated itself and pulsated more urgently than any other: He’d tried so long. He’d come so far. He’d done so much. He was so tired and he wanted to know. He needed to know. He had to know.

  Which meant that—instead of hitting him with the spade and running for his life—he smiled at Avery.

  “Fuck him.” He shrugged. “You got any more sandwiches?”

  Steven watched the mist creep up the heather towards them. It was only forty or fifty feet below them now, moving so sluggishly it was almost imperceptible. By ten, it would be summer.

  Avery had put down a second plastic bag for him to sit on—so close that their hips and shoulders were touching and he could feel the warmth of the man through his jeans and bloody shirt. It made him itch to move away, but he didn’t.

  Now Steven stared at the last bit of Avery’s sandwich and knew that if he didn’t speak soon, his chance would be gone.

  “You live around here?
”

  “No. Do you?”

  “Yeah. Down in Shipcott. Over there.” He waved a vague hand at the sluggish mist.

  Avery made a grunt of noninterest, then looked round at Steven. “I heard there’s bodies up here.”

  A jolt of pure electricity pulsed through Steven. His heart flared with it and he felt the tingles and crackles all over his skin.

  Avery smiled with his mouth. “You okay?”