Belinda Bauer - Blacklands

Help yourself, Mrs. Harrison always said. Of course, she didn’t mean to the wild-mushroom tartlets or the chicken in crème fraîche with baby corn and sugar snap peas. She meant to the snacks and biscuits she kept in what she called “the children’s cupboard.” Lettie had spent long minutes looking for something to eat in that cupboard but had never summoned up the courage to tear into the gift-wrapped chocolate biscuits, or to sully the foil on a pack of mature-cheddar and cracked-pepper savouries. Instead she took custard creams with her and ate them over the sink so as not to leave crumbs.

But she’d seen nuts in the larder—jars of Brazils and walnuts and almonds and macadamias. The Brazils were of such good quality that she couldn’t even find a broken one; she had to cut one in half.

She rubbed the Brazil-half over the water ring, watching it fade.

That letter Steven had got. That was why she’d been thinking about him. She felt a little bad about reading it when it was so obviously private, but dammit, she’d been yelling herself hoarse for fifteen minutes! Didn’t the boy have ears? Steven’s ears stuck out at odd angles, always red at the tips, not like Davey’s pretty, velvety little things.

The letter was curious. She’d wanted to ask him who it was from, but at the last second she hadn’t. Some small, sleeping part of her had remembered being twelve and having Neil Winstone write “Your hair looks nice” on the back of her English exercise book, and so she’d bitten her tongue.

Steven seemed too young, too detached—too bloody miserable —to have a girlfriend. But he’d obviously written at least one letter first. Thank you for your great letter . Lettie wondered what passed for a great letter in these days of text and email. More than two lines? Correct spelling? Or declarations of undying love?

Lettie was not happy for Steven. It was just another thing for her to worry about: How long would it be before some fouteen-year-old slag’s mother was at her door demanding a paternity test? Lettie frowned, seeing a future where she and the slag’s mother took turns to look after the baby while the slag tried vainly to pass her GCSEs; a future where she, Lettie Lamb, was a grandmother at thirty-four. Lettie suddenly felt physically ill and had to hold on to the hall table for support. She felt a sucking vortex tugging her towards death before she’d ever properly lived.

When was her turn?! When did she get a turn? How dare that little shit ruin her life. Again.

And then the guilt and self-pity ran together.

Her eyes burned and she jammed the heels of her hands into them before the tears could spoil her mascara. She still had two other houses to do before picking Davey up; she couldn’t arrive looking a mess, dragging everybody else’s day down along with her own.

She breathed deeply and waited for that crazy dizzy feeling to pass.

She was still holding the two Brazil nut halves in her hands. Seized by sudden defiance, she ate them both.

SL WAS GETTING IMPATIENT. ARNOLD AVERY SMILED IDLY AND held the letter over his face once more as he lay on the lumpy bunk that woke him ten times a night with its sharply shifting springs.

The letter was Zen-like in its simplicity.

SL wanted to know what he wanted to know. It amused Avery. And it also informed him. SL thought he’d been so clever keeping his identity secret, but here he was clumsily letting Avery know—or at least make educated guesses about—the kind of person he was.

For a start, thought Avery, SL was not a person who’d ever been in prison. If he had, then he’d have understood that in prison almost everything happens very, very slowly. The days pass slowly, the nights slower. The time between breakfast and lunch is an age; between lunch and dinner, an aeon, between lights-out and sleep, an eternity. So the six or seven weeks since his first letter that obviously meant so much to SL meant nothing to Avery. To Avery, the longer this pleasurably mnemonic correspondence went on, the better.

He was surprised and a little disappointed by SL’s weakness. He had thought of SL as an intellectual equal, but now he realized he was less than that—far less. To recklessly show his impatience like this was the mark of someone who had not thought things through properly.

Avery got a pang as he remembered the day he’d waited for Mason Dingle to return with his car keys. If only he’d been patient. If only the second child had not skipped into the playground and clambered onto a swing right next to him. If only he could have mustered the control…

Of all the thoughts he held about his career, these thoughts of Mason Dingle were the ones that plagued him like chicken pox scabs. They came unbidden and unwanted once, twice a week, and made him feel stupid and feeble.

He was a different man now. Stuck in this echoing stone-andiron tomb he understood the meaning of patience. Polite conversation with Officer Finlay could only be achieved through the utmost patience. Standing in the line for food for almost an hour, just for a smirking ape to tell him that the only lasagne left was the burnt bits from the bottom of the pan, took patience and control.

But it was all too late. The dagger twisting in his guts was that now, finally, when he had mastered patience and control, he had nothing over which to exercise his mastery.

That was why this petulant, demanding letter gave him more pleasure than anything since SL’s first careful missive. It showed a chink in SL’s armor. A clumsy revelation of desire that gave Avery something he had not felt in a very long time.

It gave him power.

ARNOLD AVERY HADN’T WRITTEN BACK AND STEVEN FELT THE absence of a letter like something physical. Sometimes he got an itch in his ear—or in his throat. Between his ear and his throat. And it didn’t matter how far he stuck his finger in his ear, or how many times he made a coarse, rasping sound in his throat, neither could reach that point that made him want to cry with frustration. No reply from Avery was like that—an itch so deep inside him that he wanted to throw himself to the ground and roll and squirm like a fleabag dog in a senseless bid to scratch it.

It had been more than four weeks, and the heather on the moor had already started to bud.

Steven was a wiry boy, but those weeks had seen his features sharpen further, and little bruised hollows of insomnia darken under his tired brown eyes. The vertical frown-crease that had no place on the face of a child deepened on his forehead.

He had stopped digging.

The thought made him feel sick and weak every time he looked out of the bathroom window at the moor rising behind the houses. It crowded him, nudged him, stood over him in judgement at his puny efforts—and frowned at their cessation.

He had felt close—so close—to finding out the truth from Arnold Avery that his own random scratchings on the moor seemed increasingly laughable.

There was a man who knew where Uncle Billy was buried. Steven had made contact with that man.

That man had understood the rules Steven had created for them to play by and had joined the game.

And so Steven had given up his other game—a game that had no other players, no rules, and no realistic prospect of being won.