Belinda Bauer - Blacklands

“Steven.”

That was more like it.

Steven flickered his eyes to the right and found his mother bent over him in her old blue bathrobe.

Mum, he wanted to say, but couldn’t—just felt his lips open briefly as he tried silently. She was holding his right hand, which made Steven feel five years old again. Having his hand held like Davey. He almost smiled at the thought. Then didn’t bother. Tired. Too tired to bother. Maybe he’d sleep a bit.

But under the voices he became aware of a ticking whirr in his left ear. He made an effort and turned his head minutely and frowned. Right next to his face, an all-terrain wheel spun lazily against the sky, something dripping from it that was not water.

It was so out of context that he had to know more. Slow with pain and effort, he turned his head farther to the left and found himself looking at a maroon slipper with a stout ankle in it.

It was his nan, lying in the heather beside him—her trolley between them.

Lettie stroked his face, but all the voices were over Nan. All the activity was over Nan. Some men from the village were with her, one murmuring softly into her face and pressing his lips to hers like a public lover, another pumping at her chest with his arms straight, a third tucking his jumper around her legs.

The fourth—Lewis’s dad—just stood, staring sightlessly, his expression blank and his freckles oddly dark against the sickly white of his face.

A little way behind them all, almost hidden by the thick fog, was Lewis.

But his friend’s eyes didn’t meet his. Instead they flickered between Steven’s legs and his father’s face, wide with horror—and a jolt of panic made Steven jerk his head up to make sure his legs were still there.

They were. But in the two seconds that Steven could keep his head raised, he took a mental snapshot that would stay with him forever, however much he tried to erase it…

Avery lay on his back across Steven’s legs, his hands curled into loose fists beside his head. And what used to be his face.

Now it was just a face-shaped clot of blood and hair and splintered bone. Only the eyes gave a clue as to its previous form—dull green half-slits like those of a dead cat.

Steven’s head lolled back in the heather as he felt his childhood drop away behind him, winking out in the darkness of the past, and he burned with the tears of suddenly being a grown-up. He knew now what was dripping off the all-terrain wheel, and why the freckles on the face of Lewis’s dad looked so dark.

Steven watched the bloody sky pass bumpily overhead as the paramedics carried him off the moor.

He wanted to know how his nan was but speaking was beyond him. All he knew was that somehow she’d come up the track with his rescuers and that something had happened to her there because of it.

Because of him.

The thought brought red tears to his eyes and everything went kaleidoscopic.

He’d thought that him dying was as bad as this day could get, but he’d been wrong. Something had happened to his nan.

Because of him. Because of his plan. Because of his trap. Because of his good letters. On the box it said it was a fillit . Because he’d been a boy. Not a man, who would have done everything differently; everything better.

They were loaded into the same ambulance. His mother’s hand squeezed his and she said she’d see him in a mo, and she was gone.

Inside, Steven could only see that his nan had an oxygen mask on, but so did he, so it meant nothing. Gave him no real clues.

Nan, he said with his lips, but sound was still unable to squeeze through his swollen throat.

Nan .

It was hard to see through the blood in his eyes so he didn’t bother trying. He closed them and slipped away once more, still feeling sick because of the tomato sandwiches Avery had fed him.

STEVEN LAY IN UNCLE BILLY’S BED AND WATCHED HIS GRANDmother knit.

They had moved him in here so he could rest without Davey bothering him—and so Davey could sleep without Steven’s thrashing, weeping nightmares waking him up and making him grouchy all day.

The curtains were open, making everything strangely bright—even now when rain spat onto the window, blustered there by unseasonal little winds.

The bedroom looked wholly different from the bed. With his feet swelling the end of Uncle Billy’s blue duvet, it suddenly looked like a normal boy’s bedroom—as if a spell had been broken. Steven felt oddly at peace here, strangely completed.

The Lego space station had been pushed under the bed to allow the regular passage of feet bringing books, tepid soup, and Lucozade.

The photo of Billy had been pushed to the back of the bedside table, which now held an array of Steven-related items: half a dozen pill bottles, a glass with a bendy straw, a box of Milk Tray that Davey was assiduously working his way through, and a slew of get-well cards.

There was another Steven-related thing in the room now that only he knew about. At night—after his mother and his nan and Davey had all looked in on their way to bed—Steven would roll carefully onto his side and use the point of a compass to carve his name deeply into the wall behind the bed. He knew it was a bad thing to do on one level—and Lettie would be angry when she found it. But on another level he never wanted to venture out of this house—or any house—again without leaving some clue that he had once existed and that he understood the transitory nature of life.

Everybody should make his mark.

Steven let his mind drift to his most recent missive—contained in a card showing a flowerpot, a spade, and gardening gloves.

He had badly wanted to write “Love from” but finally didn’t. He didn’t want to scare Uncle Jude. He didn’t want to scare himself.

Now that Lettie had posted the card for him and it was too late, he wished he had.

But it would have to do. It would have to be good enough.

He sighed and looked away from the sky.

Nan knitted slowly in the chair at the end of the bed. Her fingers were gnarled and knotty and she stopped often to flex them. Steven blinked but said nothing.

She’d insisted. She was putting new feet on his best socks. Before she’d even left hospital she’d demanded Lettie bring the socks in, and painstakingly unpicked the old, ragged feet until by the time she came home—with new angina pills—the socks were just ankle-tubes with a lacy fringe of little loops around the bottoms.

“What color do you want?” she’d asked.

Steven had leaned back into Billy’s pillow with thought, and seen the Manchester City scarf over his head.

“Sky blue,” he’d answered.

Steven was living on the settee by the time Nan pressed the socks. She wouldn’t let him help with the ironing board, setting it up in the bay of the window where she used to stand, and placing a crinkled brown paper bag over the socks, to keep the wool from getting shiny.

Across the street, Steven could see the hoodies huddled, hands in pockets, shoulders hunched, and hoods shading their faces from the bright sunlight that had found its way back to Exmoor. They shuffled quietly and stared at the house but didn’t approach. Steven thought they probably wouldn’t ever again.

Things had changed.

Lewis had told him how they’d all come up the hill. The men running, Lettie keeping up with them in racing panic in her bathrobe and half-tied trainers—and his nan rolling and panting behind, the shopping trolley bouncing over the heather, keeping her upright when she should have fallen a dozen times, gripping Lewis’s sturdy biceps until he bruised.