Finders Keepers (32 page)

‘HOW DO YOU
do?’ Charlie asked Jonas through the chain link. ‘How old are you? I’ve got a mouse in my house. He’s white. His name is Mickey. You can play with him if you want. Have you got any biscuits? I’m hungry.’

Charlie wiggled his fingers through the fence and touched Jonas, resting his pinkie on his shoulder, or stroking his hair like a child with a loved toy.

Jonas ignored him, just as he ignored Steven and the bones that thudded over the gate. It was food and he was hungry. But the thought of eating meat made him feel sick. He thought about Sunday lunchtimes, staring at the bloodied flesh on his plate while his mother cleared the table around him and his father became increasingly red-faced at the waste.

You liked meat a month ago
.

But he didn’t like it now.

There are children starving in Africa
.

Jonas didn’t care. Africa was welcome to his meat.

Every day the faceless man came into the kennel to clean it,
and
Jonas squeezed his eyes shut and curled up small so the man wouldn’t notice him.

It worked.

Since that first night of those cold hands, the huntsman hadn’t even come close to him. He carried a single key in his pocket that opened every padlock. He let himself into the kennel each day, scraped up shit with a short-handled shovel and sluiced the cement with milky disinfectant. Then he unwound a thick brick-coloured hose and sprayed any remaining mess into the little drain hole, refilled the water bucket and moved on.

Once he’d finished, Jonas could breathe again. Feel his ribs press down on to the ground again like long chill fingers cupping his torso, reminding him that he was still alive.

He was not let out into the meadow with the children. He could not even stand upright because he was never let off the short chain. He didn’t know why, but he also didn’t care about the lack of movement. Moving would only draw attention to himself, when he wanted to be invisible.

Only his stomach seemed aware of the time that had passed.

‘I heard your tummy!’ Charlie said beside him. ‘Grrrrrrr. Grrrrrrr. Like that.’ His smile faded and he added a plaintive, ‘I’m hungry.’

‘Give him your meat if you’re not going to eat it,’ said Steven Lamb.

Jonas didn’t look at Steven and tried not to look at anything else either.

Cages filled with children, with no one to protect them.

This problem was too big and he was too small to do anything about it.

People hurt children. He’d had no answer when he was a child up at Springer Farm and he had no answer now that he was a child again.

All he could do was to close his eyes curl up tight, and hope it was all over quickly.

*

‘Hey,’ said Steven. ‘Mr Holly?’

No answer. The man had barely moved since they arrived. He hadn’t eaten at all. A few times Steven had seen him drink from the steel bucket, and he had pissed into the drain at the front of the cage. Once he’d cried in the night, like a baby.

It was embarrassing and it was bloody annoying.

Mr Holly was an adult. And a policeman. And he was doing nothing to help them – or even himself.

Unless he was playing some sick game. Trying to
pretend
to be one of them, when really he was in on it with the huntsman … Steven knew it was unlikely but he was still loathe to give the man the benefit of any doubt.

‘Hey!’ he said more sharply. ‘Charlie’s talking to you.’

Jonas Holly slowly closed his eyes.

Steven kicked the fence. ‘Hey!’

Nothing.

Behind him, Jess started to sing quietly. ‘
Waltzing Matilda, waltzing Matilda
…’

Charlie twisted his fist back through the fence.

‘C’mon, Charlie!’ said Kylie, and she and Maisie started to sing along. ‘
You’ll come a waltzing Matilda with me
…’

Charlie clapped and joined in. ‘
We all sing Matilda, we all sing Matilda
…’

Steven got up and ran his eyes and his fingers around his tiny prison, seeking escape.

Not for the first time.

The ends of the wire that folded over the steel struts were too stiff to unwind by hand; he could climb up and poke his head through the twelve-inch gap between the plastic roof and the top of the gate, but it was too narrow to do more. And although the grey block wall at the back of the kennel was crumbling around the edges, it was solid in all the important places. He had sat and kicked it repeatedly with his heel – and achieved nothing but a blister.

‘You can’t get out,’ Jess Took had told him the first time he’d
made
this circuit, but he was still reluctant to concede the point.

He’d had to concede every
other
point. He’d had to sleep on the straw bed, drink from the steel bucket, pee down the drain, and – after three agonizing days desperate for rescue – he had finally shat on the cold cement floor. The full house of humiliation.

They were exercised every morning and every afternoon. Everyone but Jonas Holly was led out of their cages and clipped to each other by short coupling chains that meant they could walk but not run or climb – although ballroom dancing would probably have been an option, as long as it was a slow tune. The huntsman led them to a small fenced meadow in pairs roughly according to height, which meant that Steven was always with Charlie, who often forgot that he was restrained and would wander off to pick up grit or stop suddenly to watch a cloud – each time jerking on Steven’s neck.

While the other children walked or sat together, Steven ran a hand along the perimeter. The fence was high – maybe twelve feet – and its base was sunk in a kerb of concrete, so there was no burrowing under it. The gate was secured with a large, rusted padlock. Beyond the meadow was a small cottage. Once it had been whitewashed, but now it was grey-green with age. While they were locked in the meadow, the huntsman went to the cottage. Sometimes – like now – Steven could see him standing a little way back from the window with a mug of tea, watching them.

Always watching them.

Steven was a resourceful boy but, dogged though he was, he could see no way of escape – especially with Charlie hanging off his neck.

He stood for a moment and watched the huntsman, who shuffled backwards into the darkness where Steven could no longer see him.

He was a rubbish kidnapper.

But a good enough guard.

‘Butterfly!’ shouted Charlie, and yanked Steven sideways.

EM COULDN’T BELIEVE
what was happening.

Steven had disappeared before her eyes and yet for a week her mother insisted that she get up every day and continue to go to school.

As if the sky hadn’t fallen.

At first she refused. At first she wanted to saddle up Skip and spend the rest of the summer – the rest of her
life
– searching for Steven. Instead she was expected to put on her uniform, pick up her sandwiches and get in the car to be driven to school like a five-year-old.

‘But I
love
him!’ she’d told her mother, who’d looked at her father, who’d raised his eyebrows the same way he had when she’d said she wanted to do Chemistry instead of History. As if he didn’t believe she was capable of such a thing.

She’d got an A in Chemistry though – and it was the thought of that which made her get out of the Range Rover at the school gates every day, wave her mother goodbye, then – once she’d been to registration – walk back down Barnstaple Road to Steven’s house.

His nan was in a terrible state. Who could blame her? The doctor came often and gave her pills to add to the pills she already had for angina. He was a young, modern doctor who wore chinos, deck shoes and a pale-pink Ralph Lauren polo shirt, and his tanned presence made the Lambs’ little front room seem even dingier than it was. It took a good half-hour after he’d gone for it all to seem quite cosy again.

Steven’s mother, Lettie, took pills too. She sat on the sofa next to Nan, crying at
Homes under the Hammer
, with an old Spiderman pyjama top crumpled in her hands. Once – when Lettie left it on the sofa while she went to the bathroom – Em picked it up and pressed it to her nose. To her it smelled only of sleep, but then she was not Steven’s mother.

Ten times a day, Nan would cover Lettie’s hand with hers and say, ‘God will take care of him.’ And Lettie would swear and make a cup of tea, or nod and burst into fresh tears.

Steven’s Uncle Jude came often. He weeded the garden and brought in shopping and left with the unopened bills. He sat on the sofa with his arm around Lettie, and kissed Nan’s cheek when he arrived and when he left. Em gathered he was the kind of uncle who slept with your mother – not the kind you were related to by blood.

Davey got himself up and he made himself toast. He did his homework and made his own sandwiches and left the house quietly – sometimes before Lettie and Nan were even out of bed. Em usually passed him on his way to school, but when she tried to ask whether he was OK, Davey avoided her eyes and sidled around her. When Shane came round now, they made little noise, and Davey quickly tired of the PlayStation. At the ramp, Em had seen Davey frowning while Shane skated. It was as though Davey had become an older person swapped into a boy’s body, and Em imagined that somewhere in this universe or the next, there might be a middle-aged woman wondering why her husband had suddenly become obsessed with
Grand Theft Auto
and laughed at his own farts.

Em cooked and washed up, she cleaned the bathroom. She answered the door to the doctor or reporters or police or neighbours with flowers and cakes, and she made sure there was always change for the electricity meter. The Piper Parents came round and Em made tea for everyone while they broke down in relays.

While her own family wouldn’t acknowledge her loss, nobody here questioned it. It was assumed.

She learned to ignore the photographers calling her name as she arrived each day, and to say ‘No comment, thanks’ to reporters who asked outrageous questions to try to provoke her. ‘Are you and Steven lovers?’, ‘Are you pregnant?’, ‘Do you pray for Steven?’, ‘Do you think he’s dead?’.

School was a forgotten past and her own home was a mere interruption to her industrious vigil. Sometimes she went upstairs and lay on Steven’s bed and thought about being there together. How scared she’d been; how excited. It was hard to remember, when being there now was just so sad. Sometimes she went through his things. She pulled on the Liverpool shirt with his name on the back; she didn’t know why he kept it, it was way too small for him. She went through his school bag and read his essays – neatly written and neatly constructed. She browsed his odd collection of books –
Five Have Plenty of Fun, The Cucumber Pony
and
The Methodology of Serial Killing
. Talking animals and psychopaths nestling side by side on the shelf.

Sometimes Lettie and Nan mentioned Uncle Billy – the boy whose picture was in Steven’s room.

He hadn’t been hit by a car; he had been murdered.

At first Em was angry that Steven had lied to her. But by asking nothing and listening to everything, she learned the family’s story. A story of loss, terror and survival. A story where Steven had very nearly been a victim, but was instead the hero, and which made sense of his bookshelf. It made her own family’s stories – a great-grandfather’s medal on the beaches, an aunt who’d met the Queen – seem hopelessly humdrum.

For no reason she could have verbalized, Em had always believed Steven was special.

In his absence she learned how right she was.

*

Steven came out of sleep through a rushing tunnel of noise and fear. He awoke sitting bolt upright, with one hand clutching his chest like an old man having an attack.

The screaming was coming from Charlie Peach. Usually so calm and easygoing, Charlie was hurling himself around his cage in a blind panic.

Even Jonas Holly was watching Charlie – his eyes wide and wary.

Charlie knew he was making a fuss and that making a fuss was a bad thing to do, but for once he didn’t care. He covered his ears, squeezed shut his eyes and tried to run away from the sound, hurling himself blindly against the mesh of his cage, staggering back to his feet and running headlong into the wire once more. Again and again, his mouth wide, hardly drawing breath between raw, high-pitched howls.

‘No meat! No meat!’

Steven pointed at the bones in Charlie’s cage and tried to draw his attention. ‘There’s your meat, Charlie. It’s OK. It’s right there.’

Charlie was too upset to hear him.

The huntsman ran down the walkway with the flatbed trolley rumbling and clunking before him, and fumbled for the key – his green woollen gloves making it harder than usual. Pressed by the stocking, his face was as blank as always, but his body gave away his urgency.

He strode into the kennel and Charlie shrank back on his bed. The huntsman grabbed him, and Charlie kicked and flailed.