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Don’t know if I were happy before. Never rightly thought of it. But this makes me feel something like happy again.

It’s good to get back in the old routine.

Good to have something to love.

38

THE INCINERATOR IGNITED with a soft whump and made Steven’s mouth fill with saliva. It angered him, and he resisted the urge to rise and move to the front of the kennel to await feeding like the other children did. It made him think of the polar bears he’d once seen at Bristol Zoo – pacing tirelessly, staring up at the crowds, waiting for feeding time.

Instead he lay on the straw that was his bed and looked up through the yellowing corrugated plastic. Strips of dead flies and bird shit and little bits of grit. That had been his sky for six days now. His new horizons were close and diamond-meshed.

Steven wiped the drool off his lips and got to his knees.

The crumbling grey block wall at the back of the kennel had chinks that allowed him to see straight across the yard to the row of empty stables. If he leaned to one side, a chink showed him the ramp and partly inside the big shed – and the huntsman going about his work.

Today his work was a cow.

Steven watched the black-and-white beast walk cautiously off the trailer. It stopped at the bottom and gazed around with empty eyes. Steven had been to the new supermarket in Barnstaple once and seen old people doing the same thing, standing in the cheese aisle, looking for the tea.

‘Hup! Hup!’

The huntsman touched her hip and the cow moved down the rutted ramp into the big shed, skidding a little and leaning back to maintain her balance, her giant udders swinging.

The huntsman followed her down in his green overalls, boots and flat cap. He didn’t wear his stocking mask in the big shed and Steven could see the years of wrinkles and creases, the small blue eyes, the lipless mouth and the yellowing teeth.

‘He doesn’t know we can see him,’ whispered Jess beside him, and he nodded. It was a small thing, but it was worth noting. Maybe they could use it one day. He didn’t know how, but most things were useful, he’d always found.

The gunshot cracked loudly in the shed, and Steven jumped. Two cages away, Charlie sucked in a shocked breath and then started to howl like a child who’s fallen off a bicycle – with a wide mouth and uninhibited lungs.

Jess turned away and sat down on her raised straw bed. ‘It’s hot,’ she said dully.

Steven didn’t answer. They all knew it was hot. It hadn’t rained for ever.

He felt the collar around his neck. It was not uncomfortable, but it was annoying and confusing. The little padlock that held it shut lay in the hollow at the base of his throat like a cold pendant, but if he lay too long in the sun it grew hot enough to hurt. The collar itself was old leather, soft and tactile. There was a flat metal strip on it, perhaps two inches long; Steven imagined that it was where a dog’s name might be engraved. He ran his fingernail over it carefully but could feel nothing that might indicate that his own name – or another’s – had been marked there. He took some comfort in that; the collar had not been waiting for him. He was not chosen for this. Not special.

He thought of Em, who was.

Too special for him.

She probably would have realized it soon anyway, but now that he was gone, what was there to keep her true?

Was she already with someone else? Maybe even one of his friends? Lewis or Lalo Bryant. Lewis was definitely capable of turning comfort into copping a feel. The thought made Steven’s lips thin, and he thumped the wall with the side of his fist.

‘What’s up?’ said Jess Took.

‘Nothing,’ he said. ‘Shut up.’

She stuck her tongue out at him but not with any great feeling.

Steven put his eye back to the best chink in the wall. He watched the huntsman sharpen his knife in a series of sibilant swipes, and swallowed the resulting saliva. His stomach rumbled. He turned away before the cuts were made but soon there was the clink of chains as the winch was attached, and then the rising ssssssssss that was the hide separating from the flesh it had protected since birth.

‘Sorry, Jess,’ said Steven.

She stuck her tongue out at him again – but this time she smiled.

Down the row, Maisie and Kylie and Pete were playing I Spy. The game had limited scope – I spy a fence; I spy a gate; I spy concrete – but the three youngest children often played it anyway. Sometimes they played ‘Shout for Help’, in which one of them counted down from three and they all screamed ‘Help.’ Charlie usually joined in, but Jess never did; when Steven asked why, she just shrugged and said, ‘They build kennels where people won’t be bothered by the dogs howling. Nobody’s going to hear us.’

‘Somebody might,’ said Steven, and shouted with the rest of them. But the huntsman never seemed perturbed by the game, so Steven guessed Jess was probably right.