Blacklands

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.

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