Blacklands (12 page)

But she’d seen nuts in the larder—jars of Brazils and walnuts and almonds and macadamias. The Brazils were of such good quality that she couldn’t even find a broken one; she had to cut one in half.

She rubbed the Brazil-half over the water ring, watching it fade.

That letter Steven had got. That was why she’d been thinking about him. She felt a little bad about reading it when it was so obviously private, but dammit, she’d been yelling herself hoarse for fifteen minutes! Didn’t the boy have ears? Steven’s ears stuck out at odd angles, always red at the tips, not like Davey’s pretty, velvety little things.

The letter was curious. She’d wanted to ask him who it was from, but at the last second she hadn’t. Some small, sleeping part of her had remembered being twelve and having Neil Winstone write “Your hair looks nice” on the back of her English exercise book, and so she’d bitten her tongue.

Steven seemed too young, too detached—too bloody
miserable
—to have a girlfriend. But he’d obviously written at least one letter first.
Thank you for your great letter
. Lettie wondered what passed for a great letter in these days of text and email. More than two lines? Correct spelling? Or declarations of undying love?

Lettie was not happy for Steven. It was just another thing for her to worry about: How long would it be before some fouteen-year-old slag’s mother was at her door demanding a paternity test? Lettie frowned, seeing a future where she and the slag’s mother took turns to look after the baby while the slag tried vainly to pass her GCSEs; a future where she, Lettie Lamb, was a grandmother at thirty-four. Lettie suddenly felt physically ill and had to hold on to the hall table for support. She felt a sucking vortex tugging her towards death before she’d ever properly lived.

When was
her
turn?! When did
she
get a turn? How dare that little shit ruin her life. Again.

And then the guilt and self-pity ran together.

Her eyes burned and she jammed the heels of her hands into them before the tears could spoil her mascara. She still had two other houses to do before picking Davey up; she couldn’t arrive looking a mess, dragging everybody else’s day down along with her own.

She breathed deeply and waited for that crazy dizzy feeling to pass.

She was still holding the two Brazil nut halves in her hands. Seized by sudden defiance, she ate them both.

Chapter 15

SL
WAS GETTING IMPATIENT
. A
RNOLD AVERY SMILED IDLY AND
held the letter over his face once more as he lay on the lumpy bunk that woke him ten times a night with its sharply shifting springs.

The letter was Zen-like in its simplicity.

SL wanted to know what he wanted to know. It amused Avery. And it also informed him. SL thought he’d been so clever keeping his identity secret, but here he was clumsily letting Avery know—or at least make educated guesses about—the kind of person he was.

For a start, thought Avery, SL was not a person who’d ever been in prison. If he had, then he’d have understood that in prison almost everything happens very, very slowly. The days pass slowly, the nights slower. The time between breakfast and lunch is an age; between lunch and dinner, an aeon, between lights-out and sleep, an eternity. So the six or seven weeks since his first letter that obviously meant so much to SL meant nothing to Avery. To Avery, the longer this pleasurably mnemonic correspondence went on, the better.

He was surprised and a little disappointed by SL’s weakness. He had thought of SL as an intellectual equal, but now he realized he was less than that—far less. To recklessly show his impatience like this was the mark of someone who had not thought things through properly.

Avery got a pang as he remembered the day he’d waited for Mason Dingle to return with his car keys. If only he’d been patient. If only the second child had not skipped into the playground and clambered onto a swing right next to him. If only he could have mustered the control …

Of all the thoughts he held about his career, these thoughts of Mason Dingle were the ones that plagued him like chicken pox scabs. They came unbidden and unwanted once, twice a week, and made him feel stupid and feeble.

He was a different man now. Stuck in this echoing stone-andiron tomb he understood the meaning of patience. Polite conversation with Officer Finlay could only be achieved through the utmost patience. Standing in the line for food for almost an hour, just for a smirking ape to tell him that the only lasagne left was the burnt bits from the bottom of the pan, took patience and control.

But it was all too late. The dagger twisting in his guts was that now, finally, when he had mastered patience and control, he had nothing over which to exercise his mastery.

That was why this petulant, demanding letter gave him more pleasure than anything since SL’s first careful missive. It showed a chink in SL’s armor. A clumsy revelation of desire that gave Avery something he had not felt in a very long time.

It gave him power.

Chapter 16

A
RNOLD
A
VERY
HADN’T WRITTEN BACK AND
S
TEVEN FELT THE
absence of a letter like something physical. Sometimes he got an itch in his ear—or in his throat. Between his ear and his throat. And it didn’t matter how far he stuck his finger in his ear, or how many times he made a coarse, rasping sound in his throat, neither could reach that point that made him want to cry with frustration. No reply from Avery was like that—an itch so deep inside him that he wanted to throw himself to the ground and roll and squirm like a fleabag dog in a senseless bid to scratch it.

It had been more than four weeks, and the heather on the moor had already started to bud.

Steven was a wiry boy, but those weeks had seen his features sharpen further, and little bruised hollows of insomnia darken under his tired brown eyes. The vertical frown-crease that had no place on the face of a child deepened on his forehead.

He had stopped digging.

The thought made him feel sick and weak every time he looked out of the bathroom window at the moor rising behind the houses. It crowded him, nudged him, stood over him in judgement at his puny efforts—and frowned at their cessation.

He had felt close—so close—to finding out the truth from Arnold Avery that his own random scratchings on the moor seemed increasingly laughable.

There was a man who knew where Uncle Billy was buried. Steven had made contact with that man.

That man had understood the rules Steven had created for them to play by and had joined the game.

And so Steven had given up his other game—a game that had no other players, no rules, and no realistic prospect of being won.

His admission that, alone, his was a hopeless task was the most shocking and painful moment he could remember in his young life. It left him reeling and apathetic to the point where even Lettie had noticed.

“Not off with Lewis today?” she’d finally asked, and he’d just shaken his head mournfully. Lettie didn’t ask any more. She hoped his newly pinched features were because he’d fought with Lewis, and not because he’d got her hypothetical slag up the duff.
Thank you for your great letter
. The words swirled uneasily about in Lettie’s mind—too disturbing to mention, too disturbing to forget.

She hoped it was Lewis. Anything else, she didn’t have the time to care about.

Now, while the rest of the class took turns to read a page each from
The Silver Sword,
Steven frowned into the middle distance of the whiteboard and wondered what would happen if Arnold Avery never wrote back. Could he accept it and go on as he had before? In his head, Steven insisted yes, but immediately blushed at the lie he was telling himself. The truth was, he’d come to rely on Avery. He’d hung every hope he had on the hook of the cat-and-mouse game they were playing.

For only about the millionth time in his short life, Steven wished he had someone to confide in. Not Lewis, but someone older and wiser, who could tell him where and how he’d gone wrong and how to put it right.

He cursed himself silently, hesitantly using the worst word he knew, which was “fuck.” He was a fucking idiot. Somehow his last letter had pissed Avery off to the point where he’d picked up his ball and gone home—and Steven was sharply reminded that it
was
Avery’s ball. With a sinking feeling he realized that if he—Steven—wanted to continue to play, he’d have to be the one to make the effort to be friends again, even if he didn’t mean it. The stubborn streak, which had kept him at his gruelling task through three long years, made him bristle at the idea of making overtures of peace to the killer who’d very likely murdered his uncle Billy.

But—like a rat trained to behave by the application of electric shocks—the stubbornness was instantly curtailed by the horror of possibly never knowing. The jolt was so intense that his whole body spasmed and his wrist jerked against his desk with a loud, painful bang, propelling him back into the classroom with dizzying speed.

“Lamb, you bloody spazmoid!”

Everyone laughed except Mrs. O’Leary, who admonished the hoodie weakly—too afraid of failing to eject him from her class to even attempt it. Instead she demanded that he read the next page and the boy glowered and started to stumble painfully through the text.

Steven sighed, and wiped a sheen of sweat from his forehead. He knew he couldn’t go on alone anymore. As with the Sheepsjaw Incident, he’d glimpsed the pinprick of light at the end of the tunnel and without the help that only Avery could give him he knew he was lost in the darkness. This was not a momentary fantasy sparked by a false hope; this was real progress he’d made over months of careful planning and execution. Avery was a one-shot deal. Steven knew that if he blew this, he’d never get another chance. Either he would permanently have to stop the search that gave his life meaning, or he’d go on ad nauseam, possibly until he was old, like the tattered old man who dug about in other people’s rubbish—but with Uncle Jude’s rusty spade his companion instead of a stolen Tesco trolley.

Steven sighed as he realized he had no choice.

He was not a boy who had ever had much to take pride in, so swallowing a bit of pride now would be sour, but not impossible.

Just like Uncle Jude, he’d worked out what he wanted and the only way he knew how to get it.

Now—just like Davey—he’d have to be Frankenstein’s friend.

Chapter 17