Blacklands

Steven was so surprised that he bit down painfully on the bowl of his spoon. Davey looked up from his cereal, but was immediately intimidated back to it by Nan’s furious glare.

Breakfast passed in silence. Steven washed up his bowl and spoon and left for school with the killer’s letter in his pocket.

The hoodies caught him at the school gates. They came out of nowhere, twisting his arms up behind his back and pushing his head down so that he stumbled and nearly fell. Vaguely he heard Chantelle Cox say, “Leave him alone,” compounding the humiliation of the assault.

“Get his lunch money.”

“I don’t have lunch money. I bring sandwiches.”

“What, Snuffles?” Someone pulled his head up by the hair so they could hear him, another was patting him down like a police academy graduate.

“I bring sandwiches.”

The boy holding his hair shook him; Steven gritted his teeth. He felt his backpack being unzipped and was tugged off balance as they rummaged inside. He felt like an antelope brought down by wild dogs, feeling the pack starting to eat him alive. Books, papers, pens—all scattered at his feet as they tore at this thing still attached to him—still part of him. He felt sick.

Suddenly his lunch box was under his chin, the lid peeled back. He could smell the fish paste and his eyes pricked with humiliation.

“No cake?”

They all laughed. Steven said nothing.

“Hungry?”

“No.”

“He’s hungry.”

A grimy hand picked up a sandwich and rammed it at his mouth. He tried to twist away from them and keep his mouth shut, but a sharp pain in his leg made him cry out, and the sandwich filled his mouth like a fish-flavored sponge, expanding, choking.

Steven coughed.

“Fucking hell!!” The boy with the grimy hands wiped wet bread off his face while his mates laughed at him.

“It’s not fucking funny!” He ground the lunch box into Steven’s face—the apple hitting him in the eye, the other fish paste sandwich forcing its way up his nose and crushing his lip, with the fake-Tupperware edges a surprisingly painful follow-up.

And suddenly the box clattered to the ground and they were gone, melting into the stream of children in their black and red jumpers as the vague figure of a teacher moved towards Steven.

He winced as the blood rushed back into his arms.

“Are you all right?”

Blood leaked saltily into Steven’s mouth from his broken lip.

“Yes, miss.”

Mrs. O’Leary regarded Steven. She knew he was in one of her classes, but she couldn’t for the life of her remember his name. The boy looked like a fool. He was red in the face, with deep purple marks squared on his skin by the lunch box. Half a sandwich stuck to his forehead and his cheeks were smeared with butter. He had a black eye coming and smelled of fish. It was this that made the connection for her. This was the boy who smelled like mildew. Any sympathy she’d had for him was now replaced by slight distaste. Mildew and fish. She became brusque.

“Pick your things up, then, Simon. The bell’s gone.”

“Yes, miss.”

She didn’t know him.

It cut him to the core.

He was the boy who wrote authentic letters! My grandmother choked on your fillit! The Nintendo you sent was the best present ever! I won a trophy for being the most curteus soccer player!

Steven wondered fleetingly whether Mrs. O’Leary would remember him if he told her that he’d written to a serial killer for help in finding the corpse of his dead child-uncle. He swallowed the words miserably. She’d only remember him then as a liar—a macabre fantasist. Or worse, she’d believe him and call a halt to his correspondence. It was a no-win situation.

“Hurry now, the bell’s gone.”

“Yes, miss.”

She stood over him impatiently while he picked his books and papers off the dirty wet tarmac. He was pleased to see his sandwiches had all but disintegrated, saving him the embarrassment of picking them up. His apple, having blacked his eye, had rolled into the gutter, where he left it to rot.

It took him a couple of minutes to find the lid of his lunch box under a car. He stood up again, his knees muddied, to see Mrs. O’Leary holding the letter from Arnold Avery. He went cold.

“Thank you for Your Great letter.”

Steven said nothing. What could he say? He watched her face scan the scrap of wet paper, a little frown line appearing between her eyes.

Mrs. O’Leary’s mind turned slowly like the barrels on a rusty combination lock, and finally clicked into place. She looked at him and Steven felt his stomach drop.

“So you write great letters in your spare time too?”

For a split second he thought he’d misheard. But he hadn’t. He felt the heat rising from his collar and creeping up his face.

“Yes, miss.”

She smiled, relieved to be able to muster some interest in the boy; she needed these little reminders that she had not wasted her life going into teaching. She held out the letter and he took it tentatively.

“Run now, Simon!”

“Yes, miss.”

Steven ran.

Geography.

Steven traced a map of South Africa. He transferred it to his exercise book and started to fill in the mineral wealth. Gold. Diamonds. Platinum. Such exotica. He snorted quietly as he thought of his home country’s mineral wealth: tin, clay, and coal were the only things that had ever been worth digging for on this tiny peak of sea- mountain called Britain.

Tin, clay, coal—and bodies. Bodies buried in the dirt, in the soil, in the turf. Bodies that had fallen asleep and quietly died, bodies of butchered Picts and Celts and Saxons and Romans; Royalists and Roundheads put to the sword in the sweet English grass. And as the coal and the tin and the clay industries died, so the industry of bodies had taken hold. Now the bones of Saxon peasants were pored over on prime-time TV as they emerged in careful relief from the earth. A rude awakening from centuries of hidden rest.

Bodies were as much a mineral wealth of Britain as gold was in Africa. The declined empire, shrunk to tiny pink pinpricks, had become withdrawn and introspective—tired and surrendered in conquest, now discovering itself like an old man who sits alone in a crumbling mansion and starts to call numbers in a tattered address book, his thoughts turning from a short future to a long and neglected past.

Britain was built on those bodies of the conquered and the conquerors. Steven could feel them right now in the earth beneath the foundations beneath the school beneath the classroom floor, beneath his chair legs and the rubber soles of his trainers.

So many bodies, and he only wanted one. It didn’t seem a lot to ask.

As he carefully pressed the graphite into the clean page, Steven wondered how many of those ancient bones were in the ground because of serial killers. When Channel 4’s Time Team prized femurs and broken skulls from the holding planet, were they contaminating a two-thousand-year-old crime scene? Was the Saxon boy or the Tudor girl a victim? One of many? Would archaeologists a hundred years from now be able to link six, eight, ten victims and