He dressed in his favorite clothes. His best socks were ruined—although he hadn’t been able to bring himself to throw them away—but everything else was his favorite. The Levi’s his mother had got in the charity shop, still dark blue with lack of wear, and the perfect weight on his hips; the red Liverpool shirt with the number 8 on his back and his own name in white over the top of that. It had been a birthday present two years ago. Nan had bought the shirt and Lettie had paid for it to be printed when they went to Barnstaple, ten pounds for the number, two pounds for each letter. She had joked it was lucky that they weren’t called Lambinovski and they’d all laughed—even Davey, who didn’t know what he was laughing at.
As he dressed (clean underwear and everything), Steven was a little embarrassed to admit even to himself that these were the clothes he wanted his photo taken in for the newspapers when he revealed his find.
This was how he wanted himself to be for posterity.
He looked out of the window. The mist was down but he could tell that behind it the sun was shining. By midmorning it would have chased the gloom away. Probably. He tied the sleeves of his new boot-sale anorak around his waist anyway. It was the moor; you just never knew.
Downstairs he made a raspberry jam sandwich, clearing up after himself with precision. He put the sandwich and his water bottle into his anorak pockets, feeling them swing against the backs of his thighs.
Outside in the garden, the air was thick, white, and still. Steven could hear Mr. Randall’s shower and, seeming closer than he knew she was, Mrs. Hocking singing something soft and off-key—the sound dampened by the moisture in the air but still carried easily to him over the hedges, fences, and shrubberies of five gardens.
Picking up his spade made a musical scrape against the concrete that seemed clangingly loud in the motionless air.
Steven had planned to take his spade and go, but instead he went up to the vegetable patch. Walking up the garden made him sad as he thought of Uncle Jude being gone, but once he got there he felt better. Only a few days ago they had repaired the damage, and repaired it well. He could still see Uncle Jude’s footprints in the soil’s edges, still see the marks his fingers had made where he pressed the dark earth back down on the rescued seedlings. The evidence of Uncle Jude was still here, even if he himself was not.
Steven realized the evidence of Lewis’s betrayal now lingered only in his heart. He glanced automatically towards the back of Lewis’s house—to Lewis’s bedroom window—and saw movement there, as if a face had been rapidly withdrawn beyond the dark reflection of the glass. Lewis? Maybe. The mist made everything doubtful. Steven watched but nothing reappeared. He shouldered his spade with the practiced ease of an old soldier and turned away from the vegetable patch.
As he walked back through the house, he could hear his nan stirring upstairs—the little cough she tried to quell behind her old-lady fingers, the creak of boards under her pale, slippered feet. The thought of leaving her like this—the way she had been for as long as he had known her—and returning to somebody new and wonderful made him ache anew for it soon to be over.
Careful not to bang anything with his spade, Steven left the house and pulled the front door quietly shut behind him.
He was almost at the stile when Lewis caught up to him.
Lewis was out of breath, and Steven was at a loss for what to say to him, so for several seconds they just stood and faced each other silently, squirming a little at the awkwardness of it.
Then Lewis glanced at the spade and said: “Want a hand?”
Part of Steven wanted to shout “No!” very loudly and with feeling. But when he opened his mouth, he said: “I didn’t think digging was your thing.”
Lewis’s blush deepened and spread to the tips of his ears and down under the neck of his T-shirt. For Steven it was a confirmation and an apology, and he accepted both with a shrug. “You got something to eat?”
Lewis nodded eagerly and pulled a carrier bag from the pocket of his waterproof. It was folded around some squarish thing that was probably a sandwich. Steven didn’t ask what was in it and Lewis didn’t volunteer; they both understood they’d have to work their way up to that again.
“Okay, then.”
Steven climbed over the stile, which was slippery from the mist, and Lewis followed.
The promise of the dawn faltered as the boys trudged up the hill onto the moor. Fifty yards above the village they broke through the mist briefly, then were enveloped again as the little breeze dragged more off the sea and over the sun.
It wasn’t bad. Steven estimated they could see twenty or thirty feet ahead of them. He could tell that the air beyond the mist was warm. It had been an uncommonly clement season and heather and gorse were blooming early in slow drifts of mauve and yellow.
