Belinda Bauer - Blacklands

His admission that, alone, his was a hopeless task was the most shocking and painful moment he could remember in his young life. It left him reeling and apathetic to the point where even Lettie had noticed.

“Not off with Lewis today?” she’d finally asked, and he’d just shaken his head mournfully. Lettie didn’t ask any more. She hoped his newly pinched features were because he’d fought with Lewis, and not because he’d got her hypothetical slag up the duff. Thank you for your great letter . The words swirled uneasily about in Lettie’s mind—too disturbing to mention, too disturbing to forget.

She hoped it was Lewis. Anything else, she didn’t have the time to care about.

Now, while the rest of the class took turns to read a page each from The Silver Sword, Steven frowned into the middle distance of the whiteboard and wondered what would happen if Arnold Avery never wrote back. Could he accept it and go on as he had before? In his head, Steven insisted yes, but immediately blushed at the lie he was telling himself. The truth was, he’d come to rely on Avery. He’d hung every hope he had on the hook of the cat-and-mouse game they were playing.

For only about the millionth time in his short life, Steven wished he had someone to confide in. Not Lewis, but someone older and wiser, who could tell him where and how he’d gone wrong and how to put it right.

He cursed himself silently, hesitantly using the worst word he knew, which was “fuck.” He was a fucking idiot. Somehow his last letter had pissed Avery off to the point where he’d picked up his ball and gone home—and Steven was sharply reminded that it was Avery’s ball. With a sinking feeling he realized that if he—Steven—wanted to continue to play, he’d have to be the one to make the effort to be friends again, even if he didn’t mean it. The stubborn streak, which had kept him at his gruelling task through three long years, made him bristle at the idea of making overtures of peace to the killer who’d very likely murdered his uncle Billy.

But—like a rat trained to behave by the application of electric shocks—the stubbornness was instantly curtailed by the horror of possibly never knowing. The jolt was so intense that his whole body spasmed and his wrist jerked against his desk with a loud, painful bang, propelling him back into the classroom with dizzying speed.

“Lamb, you bloody spazmoid!”

Everyone laughed except Mrs. O’Leary, who admonished the hoodie weakly—too afraid of failing to eject him from her class to even attempt it. Instead she demanded that he read the next page and the boy glowered and started to stumble painfully through the text.

Steven sighed, and wiped a sheen of sweat from his forehead. He knew he couldn’t go on alone anymore. As with the Sheepsjaw Incident, he’d glimpsed the pinprick of light at the end of the tunnel and without the help that only Avery could give him he knew he was lost in the darkness. This was not a momentary fantasy sparked by a false hope; this was real progress he’d made over months of careful planning and execution. Avery was a one-shot deal. Steven knew that if he blew this, he’d never get another chance. Either he would permanently have to stop the search that gave his life meaning, or he’d go on ad nauseam, possibly until he was old, like the tattered old man who dug about in other people’s rubbish—but with Uncle Jude’s rusty spade his companion instead of a stolen Tesco trolley.

Steven sighed as he realized he had no choice.

He was not a boy who had ever had much to take pride in, so swallowing a bit of pride now would be sour, but not impossible.

Just like Uncle Jude, he’d worked out what he wanted and the only way he knew how to get it.

Now—just like Davey—he’d have to be Frankenstein’s friend.

ARNOLD AVERY LIKED TO THINK OF THE BENCHES HE MADE AS HIS tickets to freedom.

From the first day of his incarceration, Avery had had a single goal in mind, and that was to be released as soon as was legally possible.

Life did not mean life anymore. The petulant cry of Daily Mail readers everywhere was sweet music to Arnold Avery. He’d known life did not mean life when he was arrested and he reminded himself of it again in Cardiff. Still, he’d been surprised at the sick sucker-punched feeling in his gut when the judge actually said the word.

But by the time he’d reached Heavitree, he had already determined to be a model prisoner so that he could get out while he still had hair and teeth to speak of. While he was still young enough to enjoy himself.

In whatever way he saw fit.

Anyway…

Model prisoners wanted to be rehabilitated, so Avery had signed up for countless classes, workshops, and courses over the years. He now had assorted diplomas, a GCSE in maths, A-levels in English, art, and biology, a bluffer’s knowledge of psychiatry, and a certificate of competence in first aid.

And it was all paying off. Two years earlier his first parole review had approved his transfer from the high-security Heavitree to Longmoor Prison on Dartmoor. Even Avery had been surprised. He had hoped but never really expected that his apparent devotion to rehabilitation would achieve the desired aims. It was shocking really, thought Avery at the time. If he’d been anyone but himself, he’d have been up in arms about it. Of course, a recommendation that he could be trusted not to escape from a lower-security prison was not the same as the parole board actually approving his release after his twenty-year tariff had been served. But it was a very good start.

Compared to Heavitree, Longmoor was a holiday camp. The Segregation Unit was freshly painted, the guards noticeably less oppressive, and the opportunities for reintegration activities were even better, so he’d done a course in plumbing too.

He’d really surprised himself, though, with a natural aptitude for carpentry.

Avery found he loved everything about wood. The dry smell of sawdust, the soft warmth of the grain, the near-alchemic transformation from plank to table, plank to chair, plank to bench. Most of all, he loved the hours he could spend sanding and shaping with relatively little input from his brain, which therefore left him free to think, even while he earned kudos for working his way to rehabilitation, parole, and nirvana.

In the two years that Arnold Avery had been taking carpentry, he’d made six benches. His first was an uninspiring two-seater with ugly dowel joints; his most recent was a handsome six-foot three-seater with bevelled struts, curved, figure-hugging backrest, and almost invisible dovetails.

Now, as he worked on his seventh bench, sanding patiently, Avery let his mind drift gently off to Exmoor.

Avery could almost smell the moor. The rich, damp soil and the fragrant heather, combined with the faint odor of manure from the deer and ponies and sheep.

He thought first of Dunkery Beacon, where all his fantasies centered, before spreading like bony tendrils across the rounded hills. From there he would almost be able to identify the individual gravesites—not from prurient newsprint graphics but from actual memory, the memory that had sustained him throughout his imprisonment and which still held the power to feed his nighttime fantasies. The thought alone brought saliva to his mouth, and he swallowed audibly.

Dartmoor was very different. This moor was grey—made hard and unyielding by the granite which bulged under its surface and frequently broke through the Earth’s thin skin to poke bleakly up at the lowering sky.

The prison itself was an extension of the stone—grey, blank, ugly.