Blacklands
him home, but there were drawbacks.

    For a start, Lewis always arrived with the words “Want some help?” but no help was ever forthcoming. Lewis never brought his own spade or offered to relieve Steven of his.

    What’s more, Lewis’s very presence—far from helping Steven—actually hindered him. Lewis talked and asked questions, which Steven felt compelled to answer. Lewis pointed things out too—things which Steven, with his head bent over the heather, would never have seen, much less cared about—and wanted to discuss them.

    “Shit! Look at that!”

    “What?”

    “That. There!”

    And Steven would have to look up and lean on his spade.

    “What is it?”

    “I don’t know. I think it was an eagle.”

    “Buzzard, most like. There are tons of them around here.”

    “What do you think I am? Some kind of moron? I know a buzzard and this wasn’t a buzzard.”

    Steven would shrug and turn back to his hole. Lewis would sit and look around, or pick up the Ordnance Survey map with its blue biro crosses, denoting where Steven had dug, scattered like a constellation.

    “This is a bad place to dig.”

    “It’s as good as anywhere.”

    “No, it’s not.” Long silence. “You know why?”

    “Why?”

    “You don’t think like a murderer.”

    “Yeah?” Steven would wrestle with a knot of vegetation, grunting and twisting.

    “Yeah. What you got to do, see, is think: If I murdered someone, where would I bury them?”

    “But he buried them all between here and Dunkery Beacon.”

    Lewis would be silent, but only for a moment.

    “Maybe that’s where everybody’s gone wrong. See, if I killed six people and buried them here, maybe I’d start somewhere else after that. Over there. Or up at Blacklands. Reduce the chances of anyone finding them, see?”

    Long silence.

    “Steven? See?”

    “Yeah. I see.”

    “Next time I come up to help, I’m digging at Blacklands.”

    The other thing that Lewis did was eat his sandwiches. Steven had tried lying about what was in them, but Lewis always checked and then ate them anyway. And then Steven would have to eat Lewis’s sandwiches immediately, whether he was hungry yet or not, otherwise Lewis would eat them too and he’d be left with nothing.

    And Lewis got bored. Rare was the day when he did not start demanding that they go home by four o’clock, when there was still a good three hours’ digging to be done.

    Steven couldn’t remember ever digging more than three holes while Lewis was with him. Even so, when Lewis said he was coming to help, Steven always encouraged him. Having his friend there made Steven feel less weird—as if digging up half of Exmoor for a corpse was quite normal, as long as one had a companion.

    Now he threw down the spade and pulled the Spar bag open.

    “You took the good half!”

    “I didn’t!”

    “You did! You took the half with the top crust!”

    A look of astonished innocence passed over Lewis’s broad, freckled face. “You call that the good half? Sorry, mate.”

    Steven sighed. What was the point? He and Lewis had discussed the good half of a sandwich on at least six occasions. Lewis knew the good half as well as he did, but in the face of such blatant denial, what could he do? Was the good half of a peanut butter sandwich worth losing a friend for?

    Of course, Steven knew the answer was no—but he felt dimly that at some point in the future, the moment might come when all the bad-half sandwiches he’d had to swallow exploded out of him and washed Lewis away on an unstoppable tide of resentment.

    He ate his own sandwich quickly, then picked the tomato out of the half of egg sandwich Lewis had left him—the bad half again, he noticed wearily—and ate that too.

    Steven had not told Lewis about the letter. He was embarrassed by it, as if he’d written a letter to Steven Gerrard asking for an autograph.

    Of course, if he had Steven Gerrard’s autograph, every boy in the school would have wanted

Similar Books

Frozen Teardrop

Lucinda Ruh

8 Weeks

Bethany Lopez

Garan the Eternal

Andre Norton

Trust Me, I'm a Vet

Cathy Woodman

Rage

Kaylee Song

Angel of Mine

Jessica Louise

Working_Out

Marie Harte

Love and Sleep

John Crowley