Blacklands: A Novel

by Belinda Bauer

  A big gun.

  A gun he could call his own. A gun he would not even have to steal. A gun he could—possibly—fire at real people with minimal repercussions.

  The British Army beckoned loudly, and Gary Lumsden was far from deaf.

  He picked up leaflets, he called Freephone numbers; he learned that a criminal record would bar him from recruitment—and he cleaned up his act.

  For seven years Gary Lumsden had talked and dreamed of little other than achieving that gun. He joined the army cadets and was the only boy who attended every week, come rain or shine. Intellect that had not been exercised in English or history classes was suddenly stretched by signals, rule books, drill patterns, boot polishing, and uniform pressing. He hated it all, but every shined button, every measured turnup, every jealous insult hurled by other blue-eyed boys on the estate—each brought him a few seconds closer to the gun.

  And everything he’d been through—the pain, the hard work, the humiliation, the fear, the poverty—everything had become worth it the second he pulled that trigger and felt the rush of holding death in his hands.

  Although his turn to shoot was over for now, Gary Lumsden did not join his mates in shuffling into a more comfortable position on the wet grass, or in turning to watch his fanned-out companions pull their own triggers.

  Instead, he drew another bead on his target and relaxed his breathing. His finger hardened on the trigger and—with difficulty—he took it away entirely, fearing a reflexive squeeze that would mean an unauthorized discharge of his weapon and all kinds of shit pouring down on his head once they were back in Plymouth.

  He lined his sights up with one of the four small targets on the card, knowing he could hit it, waiting, waiting for his turn to come round again.

  A crack, a zing, and scattered laughter to his left meant someone had hit something so off target that it merited derision. Gary Lumsden didn’t bother taking his eye off his card. Both eyes open—the way they’d been taught. Ignoring the left, using the right.

  Something moved in his blurred eye’s vision. Lumsden refocused and saw a man walking across the firing range—a long way behind the targets, maybe a quarter of a mile away, heading north.

  Lumsden frowned, lifted his head minutely, and glanced left and right to see whether anyone else had spotted the man. His nearest colleague, Private Hall, was twenty yards to his right, facing his own target, so he was turned slightly away from Lumsden. Hall was black, which meant he suffered at the hands of the bigots in the platoon. To his left he could see only the boots and wet camouflage fatigues of Private Gordon, who had red hair and so suffered at the hands of pretty much everyone else. Neither was looking towards the man.

  Lumsden swung his SA80 so he could look at the man through the sights, but even then he was too far away to fill them. The man was walking but didn’t look like a walker. Lumsden could see no stick, no backpack. Instead the man was carrying what looked like a plastic bag! Like he’d just popped down to Tesco’s! The man didn’t even have a waterproof jacket on—just a shirt that looked blue from this distance, and jeans. Jeans were the worst thing a walker could wear. Hot in the sun and cold, heavy and slow to dry in the much more frequent mist and rain. It confirmed Lumsden’s first opinion that the man was out of his depth on the moor. For a start, he couldn’t have checked the firing notices that were bread and butter to every experienced walker on Dartmoor. With a single call on their mobile phones they could find out when live firing was taking place on the ranges that covered the northeast quadrant of the moor. This man couldn’t have checked. And if he’d seen the red and white warning signs, then he’d either ignored them or been stupid enough to cross them into the Danger Range.

  Private Lumsden’s finger slid gently back over the trigger of his own personal SA80A2.

  The guy was just asking to get hit by a stray bullet. Or a not-so-stray one.

  Lumsden followed the man’s progress under the crosshairs, his hands steady, his breathing calm.

  If he were to pull the trigger now, he might even hit him, he realized with a thrill. He wasn’t going to shoot, but the sensation of holding the man in his sights while the cold steel warmed itself under his finger was almost dizzying.

  Off to his left, another crack and he heard Private Knox say “Fuck” quite loudly, but he didn’t flicker for a moment.

  Every cell of his body was focused on the walker. Every ounce of his self-control kept his finger from squeezing the trigger the way it wanted to.

  Discharging a round without authority was serious trouble. Discharging it in the direction of another person outside a war situation was grounds for court-martial. Deliberately firing on a civilian out for a stroll on Dartmoor would almost certainly mean prison. And he’d battled so hard and so long not to follow his father and Mark down that road. There was no way he was going to blow it now—not now he’d finally got the gun.

  Lumsden sighed inwardly—to sigh outwardly would have made his aim waver.

  Four hundred yards. That was the range of his weapon. The walker was probably beyond that. Despite the ease with which he held the man in his sights, Lumsden knew that the chances of hitting him, if he were to fire, were slim. Although the weather was good by Dartmoor standards, there was rarely less than a stiff breeze to contend with. After four hundred yards, the round would begin to lose thrust, lose direction, become unpredictable.

  The man disappeared behind some rocks and Lumsden gently moved his gun to anticipate his reappearance, feeling another thrill as the man walked straight back into his sights.

  He was approaching a small tor about fifty yards ahead of him. If he reached it, Lumsden would lose him.

  A sense of urgency made his finger tighten on the trigger and he had to make a conscious effort to relax it again. His breath hissed between his ears and, although the platoon were still firing at their targets, the shots sounded thick and distant to him.

  Lumsden admired his own self-control. He was still young, but the basic training had knocked the remaining child clean out of him, hardened him up, shaped him into a man. He knew he was already a better person than his father or brother or any of his half brothers would ever be.

  Here in his hands he held the power of life and death. Gary Lumsden, the boy, would have fired; Private Gary Lumsden, the soldier, was tougher than that. He felt an unaccustomed swell of pride.

  The man walked on, head down, through a patch of sunlight and Gary Lumsden held him in his sights, steady and careful. The tor was approaching, the kill shot would be lost, but it wasn’t about the kill shot, he told himself; it was about being in control, doing the right thing, growing up and being a man.

  The walker clambered onto the first of the big grey rocks. Two more and he’d be lost from view behind the tor.

  For less than two minutes, Private Gary Lumsden had been in possession of the power to inflict instant death, but had chosen instead to allow life to continue. It was godlike.

  Lumsden’s angelic blue eyes stung with heat at the thought of how far he’d come as he watched the distant, stupid man reach to pull himself onto the next rock. So small, so vulnerable, so oblivious to how close it had been …

  Private Lumsden’s entire being thrummed with the knowledge that this meant something; that this was pivotal; that he’d remember this moment forever.

  And then—in a sudden, sneaky triumph of nature over nurture—he pulled the trigger anyway.

  Arnold Avery opened his eyes to a blank white sky, a wet back, and a sharp ache in his left arm.

  His first fuzzy thought was that a bird had flown into him. A big bird. All he remembered was clutching at the fresh Devonshire air as he fell off the rock he’d been standing on.

  He turned his head creakily to one side, and sharp grass pricked his cheek. There was a disc of pure white something with two red dots in it beside his head; it took him several blinking seconds to work out it was a Mr. Kipling cherry Bakewell tart, spilled from his bag of stolen shopping. One red dot in th
e white icing was the cherry, the other was blood.

  Avery groaned as he sat up and saw his left sleeve dark and red. He winced as he moved his arm. It hurt, but it wasn’t broken.

  He looked around and could see nothing and nobody. But then, nothing and nobody could see him; he’d fallen into a shallow dip behind the tor. He had no idea how long he’d been unconscious for, or what had happened to him. His bird theory was shit, he already knew, but he had no others. The moor stretched around him for miles, looking yellow grey now under the lowering clouds.

  He pulled his arm from his sleeve, wiping away blood with the tail of his shirt, and saw the gory crease through the top of his biceps, as though someone had dragged a forefinger through the flesh of his arm, removing the skin and leaving a bloody groove in its place.

  It looked as though he’d been shot, although he knew that wasn’t possible. This was England, after all, and the screws they sent to hunt down escapees were likely to be armed with little more than expense vouchers for their petrol costs.

  He shook his head to clear it, and slowly started to gather his stolen goods together. There was no point in hanging about trying to solve the mystery of what had happened to him. He doubted it was relevant anyway. If it had been an armed, overenthusiastic screw, then he’d be back in custody by now; if it had been a bird, there would be feathers. It didn’t matter. What mattered was keeping going. He tried to find the sun behind the clouds but couldn’t. It wasn’t getting dark yet, but that meant nothing; it was June, and would stay light until well after ten at night.

  Although he didn’t know it, Arnold Avery had been unconscious only long enough to miss the very faint, outraged shouts of Private Gary Lumsden’s military career coming to an abrupt but almost inevitable end.

  Chapter 33

  STEVEN STARED AT THE BLACK CEILING HE COULDN’T SEE, AND listened to Uncle Jude and his mother arguing.

  He couldn’t make out words, but the tones alone made him stiff with tension and his ears prickled with effort.

  She was cross. Steven didn’t know what she had to be cross about. His mind raced, trying to assess the previous day, prodding it to shake loose the moment when things had changed. Something. Something. Something had happened. Must have! Because last night, he’d lain just like this, gazing into blackness, and heard them having sex. He recognized the sounds from a DVD he and Lewis had watched last school holidays. Something with Angelina Jolie in it. It had been under some sheets, so hadn’t shed any useful light on the mechanics of the whole sex thing. He and Lewis had stared, flame faced, at the screen, not daring to speak or look at each other while the scene played out. When it was over, Lewis had said, “I’d give her one,” in a triumph of redundancy.

  But the sex between Uncle Jude and his mother had been last night. Tonight was the row. Uncle Jude mostly silent, occasionally defensive; his mother sharp and cold. He felt a rush of pure fury at her; wanted to run next door and scream at her to stop. Stop fighting, stop hurting, stop being such a … such a … fucking bitch!

  His fingers ached and he realized they were gripped too tightly around the top of his duvet, rigid and trembling—like the rest of him. He let his breath out and tried to relax.

  “Is Uncle Jude leaving?”

  Steven jumped. “Shut up, Davey.”

  “You shut up!”

  Steven did shut up, wanting to hear how the row ended, but there was no more.

  “I don’t want Uncle Jude to go.” Davey’s voice was whiney and tight with snot but instead of making him angry it infected Steven with the same feeling, so he said nothing, biting his lip and squeezing his hot eyes closed until he opened them and found that it was morning.

  And that sometime during the night, Uncle Jude had left.

  Steven slouched downstairs on heavy legs and cold feet, despite the season.

  Halfway down the stairs, he saw the purple oblong on the doormat.

  By the bottom of the stairs his eyes realized it was a postcard and picking it up he confirmed it was a picture of purple heather.

  When Steven turned it over, his heart jumped into his throat and started pumping there instead, making his whole neck throb.

  Compared to their previous communications, there was a cornucopia of information on the six-by-four-inch postcard.

  There was the edge of Exmoor, reduced by familiarity to a single dashed line. DB was where it should be. SL was where he’d shown Avery. Between them was a strange circle of short radiating lines, like an aerial view of Friar Tuck’s haircut, enclosing the initials WP, and the single word:

  Steven couldn’t eat. He’d never have thought such a thing was possible. It wasn’t because he wasn’t hungry; it was because his head was so full of thinking that the thoughts overflowed and pounded into his mouth, down his throat, into his chest, and even as far as his guts—a raging river of swirling hopes and white-water fears that left no room for food.

  His first thought on seeing Avery’s directions was how quickly his own quest had faded from his mind. Uncle Jude’s return, the vegetable patch, Lewis, the real Mars bar. These things—these normal things—had squeezed Uncle Billy out of his day-to-day consciousness and into a corner in the back of his mind.

  But the postcard brought Uncle Billy bursting out again in a rush of old guilt and new anticipation.

  In an instant, he was recharged, reinvigorated, focused.

  He did not remember washing or dressing or doing his teeth, but they must have happened, because he arrived at the breakfast table without eyebrows being raised.

  Davey was miserable; his mother cut their sandwiches with a hard hand and a tight mouth, and Nan was uncharacteristically quiet on the subject of her daughter’s love life. But Steven was only aware of these things in the most peripheral, hazy way.

  I know where Uncle Billy is buried!

  He almost thought he’d shouted it out loud when his nan fixed him with a neutral stare.

  “Pass the butter to your brother.”

  Steven passed the butter and was gripped with a sudden certainty that someone else would find Uncle Billy first.

  Now that he had Avery’s map, it seemed so obvious! Blacklands! Of course! So close he could almost see it from his own bedroom window!

  Even Lewis had worked it out. Next time I come, I’m digging up at Blacklands…

  What was to stop someone else working it out too?

  Someone who didn’t have to go to school today?

  Someone who would beat him to it?

  Someone who would push open the door of opportunity and whose life would be transformed by the discovery instead of his, leaving him trapped forever between his nan and his mother and the dim, undersea room where his own piss still stained the carpet. Steven went cold and felt his middle empty as everything inside him pressured out towards his throat and his bowels.

  He got up from the table with a loud scrape.

  “Where are you going?”

  “School.”

  “You haven’t eaten.”

  “I’m not hungry.”

  Lettie looked as though she was going to make an issue of it, then bound his sandwiches viciously in clingfilm and banged them into his lunch box without even caring about a chocolate bar.

  Steven didn’t care either. Chocolate bars were for children, and today he would become so much more than that. He might not know how sex or relationships worked, but by nightfall he hoped his family would be a whole thing, instead of this cracked, crumbling half-thing that left him nervous and sad.

  Steven glanced round at his mother, Davey, and Nan—all of them unaware of how he was about to change their lives.

  He turned to go, but only got two steps before his mother said sharply: “Wait for your brother.”

  And so instead of digging up the body of a murdered boy, Steven had to wait for his brother and walk him to school and then go straight to double history, where Mr. Lovejoy made them draw cross sections of the pyramids, showing all the dark, secret ways the Egyptians
employed to ensure that their ancestors remained undiscovered and undisturbed for thousands of years.

  Steven had still not been taught the meaning of irony, but once more he could hardly fail to understand it when it reared up in front of him and smacked him in the face.

  All day long, he felt like screaming.

  Chapter 34

  ARNOLD AVERY’S ARM BLED ON AND OFF ALL DAY LONG ON FRIDAY.

  Now and then he felt dizzy, but wasn’t sure if it was because of the blood loss or the ebbing sugar rush of the cherry Bakewells.