Belinda Bauer - Blacklands

He continued to work on the bars of his window at night—his oh-so-versatile toothbrush exposing ever-increasing inches of bar, but with no end in sight either literally or figuratively. Avery didn’t care. His prison-nurtured patience was refined and he continued to work on the window because every grain of grey mortar dust that coated his fingers symbolized potential progress to a goal so desirable that he finally understood what the hell Buddhism was all about.

Avery made a couple more forays into engaging other cons in conversation. Careful ventures which nonetheless earned him one swift “Fuck off, nonce,” and one kick so close to his balls as made no difference, in that it left him curled on the lino, hoarse with fear and hatred—before Andy Ralph stepped between him and his assailant.

So he returned to Ellis, but found there had been a change in the big man’s demeanor. From calm to twitchy; from open to brooding and irritable by turn.

Something had happened.

He had no time to waste waiting for Ellis’s fugue to be over, so he inquired and Ellis told him. Simple as that.

Hilly had been sending Ellis photos and he hadn’t been getting them. Now Hilly thought he didn’t love her anymore. And if Hilly thought he didn’t love her anymore then why would she wait for him? In Ellis’s mind, the chances of him getting those divorce papers had increased a thousandfold. And if Hilly divorced him there’d be nothing to hope for at the end of this soulless, harsh incarceration—no Hilly waiting for his return with a hot kiss, no surprising him at the door in the baby doll nightie she’d got from Ann Summers: no evenings in front of the telly with a bottle of white, no tasting the strawberry lip gloss she wore just for him. He’d never find another woman like Hilly and if she divorced him, they might as well hang him.

By the time he said it, he was close to tears: “They might as well hang me.”

Avery had to keep from laughing. Truly. The melodramatic twit. Hang him! Over lipstick and knickers! People like Ellis deserved hanging. He’d happily tighten the knot around the man’s neck himself just to be rid of the self-pitying, lovelorn whiner.

For a moment Avery indulged a sweet fantasy where he looked into those chimpy little eyes all shiny and brimming with monkey emotion, before springing the trapdoor and watching the big man’s dumb head pop off his shoulders.

He wanted to tell Sean Ellis that his whore of a wife wouldn’t have been sending him photos of her tits if she didn’t want them masturbated over by anyone who laid eyes on them.

Instead he told him conspiratorially: “He reads everything, you know. Steals whatever he likes too.”

“Who?” inquired a puzzled Ellis.

“Finlay.” He shrugged.

It never hurt to plant a seed of hatred.

Ryan Finlay had never had occasion to speak to Dr. Leaver. “Mollycoddling” was a word he and his fellow guards tossed about with practiced ease when speaking of their charges, and Finlay felt without thinking that what Leaver did fell neatly into that category along with television privileges and a vegetarian option at mealtimes.

So when Finlay passed Dr. Leaver outside his office door, staring down the corridor after Arnold Avery as the prisoner was led back to his cell one afternoon, it was with no small degree of sarcasm that he inquired: “Another one cured, Doc?”

Leaver flicked his eyes quickly at Finlay, then returned to watching Avery’s disappearing form—flanked as it was by Andy Ralph and Martin Strong, who were charged with keeping him alive on the short journey between blocks.

“Treatment is their right,” he said, a little stiffly.

Finlay snorted but Leaver didn’t look at him. This irritated Finlay. He was used to being listened to at work. Obeyed. Not ignored.

“Those kiddies he killed had rights too, didn’t they?”

Ralph and Strong had reached the barred door at the end of the block. Strong unlocked it while Ralph looked idly at his fingernails. Avery stood to one side—a slight, inoffensive figure beside the two beefy guards.

Leaver finally answered: “Those children were not my patients.”

Fucking bleeding heart! And still the man didn’t look at him! Finlay felt like shoving Leaver hard in his bony chest; roughing him up a little. Make Dr. High-and-Mighty Leaver give him the respect he deserved.

“So someone like that gets sent to a cushy nick like this and he does a bit of woodwork and you write your little reports and block up his window and he keeps his nose clean and says, ‘Yes, Dr. Leaver,’ and ‘No, Dr. Leaver,’ but at the end of the day it all means nothing because we’re like a fucking hospital. We just have to patch ‘em up and kick ’em out because we need the beds.”

Hoping to prod Leaver into a response, Finlay had only succeeded in getting all red in the face. He glared at Leaver now but the doctor calmly watched Avery until he’d disappeared from view through the double doors. Then for the first time Leaver turned and looked directly at Finlay—and for the first time the prison officer looked into the eyes that had sought light in the black souls of a thousand twisted killers, and felt a chill straight out of a bad horror film.

“Oh, we’ll always have a bed for Arnold Avery.” Leaver smiled emptily. “He’s going nowhere.”

FATHER’S DAY IN LEWIS’S HOUSEHOLD WAS NOT A BIG DEAL. Lewis often forgot and when he did, his mother would produce a random card for Lewis to scribble in and present along with a fumbled, jumbled mumble of awkward feelings. Sometimes she had to scribble in it herself because Lewis forgot. Sometimes she forgot too—and then when the day came round, it had to be enough that the thought counted. Even if that thought rarely came before midmorning when Radio 2 would start to play Father’s Day dedications and Lewis’s dad had to pretend it was enough for him just to be at home with his wife and son.

Lewis went straight to the magazines while Steven looked over the paltry selection of Father’s Day cards in Mr. Jacoby’s shop. If he were going to buy one—which he wasn’t, of course—which would it be? Racing cars? Pints of foaming beer? Dirty cartoons? There was one with a flowerpot, a spade, and a carelessly discarded pair of gardening gloves, but Steven thought it looked like an old man’s card and Uncle Jude was not an old man.

He also wasn’t Steven’s father.

The thought brought with it a sad pang, poorly concealed by a hurried jab of faked carelessness that felt tinny and hollow in his heart.

“You getting a Father’s Day card?”

Lewis looked up at him vacantly from BMX Monthly, even though he didn’t have a BMX and was an overcautious rider of the smart new bike he did have.

“Shit. Suppose so. Chuck one over, will you?”

“Which one?”

“Any one.”

Steven eyed the cards again more carefully. None of them seemed to suit Lewis’s dad. There wasn’t a card with a crossword or a cardigan on it. He finally decided on the foaming beer because he had once seen Lewis’s dad going into the Red Lion and because he could remember opening Lewis’s mother’s well-stocked fridge to get them each a Kit Kat, and seeing a six-pack of Bud Light. It had stuck in his mind because it had seemed a very American thing for Lewis’s dad to drink. Very sporty.

“This okay?”

“Yeah,” said Lewis, not looking at it. “Lend us two quid, will you?”

“I haven’t got two quid.”

Lewis looked at the price on the back of the card.

“One twenty, then. My mum’ll pay you back.”