‘Here you are. For teatime. I hope they find your brother soon. You give my best to your mother and gran, all right?’
Davey had pilfered industriously from Mr Jacoby’s shop for years and now felt a bit embarrassed as he took the offerings and mumbled his thanks.
Life had been so simple and suddenly everything was just so wrong. How had it happened? Davey had no idea, but as he walked away with the Mars bar melting in his jeans pocket, images kept crowding into his head. Images of the money he and Shane had failed to spend, of the piece-of-shit cardboard bird he’d made for Nan – and of Steven’s skateboard nose-diving gently into the silt.
He never had any luck, however hard he tried.
He carried on to Shane’s, where they ate the Dundee cake with their fingers in the back garden and threw what was left into Shane’s neighbour’s pond.
40
‘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.
41
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.