Free Blacklands by Belinda Bauer Page B

fears, but he knew this was something he had to keep to himself. Nobody else would understand what he’d done. In fact, Steven could see himself getting into some awkward conversations if he revealed anything about the correspondence.

    He had already taken pains to make sure he was always there when the post came. Their post came early—around 7 A.M .—and Steven had started setting his alarm for quarter to so as to ensure he was at the top of the stairs when Frank Tithecott walked up the path. The last thing he needed was his mum or nan picking up a letter addressed to him. Steven had never had anything personal come through the letter box—not even a Christmas card—and he imagined questions would be asked. But the anticipatory moments spent with cold toes at the top of the stairs were more than outweighed by mounting disappointment.

    He started on another hole but had only made one stab at the fibrous ground before he flung the spade down, and himself disconsolately after it.

    Almost instantly the wet started to seep through his cheap waterproof trousers. The chill earth gripped him below and the wet heather curled over him in a dripping shroud. The sweat he’d worked up dried all too fast and he started to shiver.

    A sea mist crept silently over the land in a damp blanket smelling of rotten kelp.

    Steven felt himself shrinking under its blind vastness. The image of the galaxy came back to him. He was an atom on a microbe on a speck on a mote on a pinprick in the middle of nowhere. Moments before he’d been upright and strong and emanating heat. Now, just seconds later, he was a corpse-in-waiting adrift in space. Avery was right. It all meant nothing.

    Steven’s eyes became superheated and—with no further warning—he started to cry. At first it was just his eyes but his body soon followed and he started to sob and bawl like an abandoned baby stretched out in the heather, his chest heaving and hitching, his stomach muscles tensing with effort, his white-cold hands curled into loose, upturned fists of hopelessness.

    For a few minutes he lay there weeping, not understanding what this feeling was or where it had come from; his only coherent emotion was a vague, detached concern about whether he had gone mad.

    His crying slowed and stopped and his hot eyes were cooled by the mizzle swirling soundlessly from the nothing-white sky. He blinked and found the effort almost beyond him. Tiredness seeped from his heart and through every part of him like lead, pressing him down onto the moor, and then there was nothing left for his body to do but lie there and await instructions.

    Inside his complete physical stillness, Steven’s mind came back to him from a long way off, a bit at a time. At first he felt very sorry for himself; he wished his mother would come and find him and wrap him in a fluffy white towel and carry him home and feed him stew and chocolate pudding. A little after-sob escaped him at the knowledge that this wasn’t going to happen—not just now, but ever again. And another, colder stab in his heart told him that this memory-wish had probably
never
happened. He had no real recollection of fluffy towels, or of stew, or of his mother enveloping him in safe, warm arms when he was wet and cold. He had plenty of memories of her roughly stripping wet socks off his feet, of shouting about the filth in the laundry basket, of drying his hair too roughly with one of their mismatched, thinning towels that were hung up at night but were always still damp in the morning. That made him think of the stained bathroom carpet, which played host to big reddish fungal growths behind the toilet in winter, as if the outside was slowly seeping inside their house, filling it with cold and creeping things. Davey cried when he first saw the fungus, and wet the bed rather than go near it. But now, like all of them, he ignored it. Sometimes they even joked about the mushrooms and the mildew, but more often, when Steven came