Belinda Bauer - Blacklands

Avery seriously doubted that Billy Peters’s sister had ever got that letter. This conviction was strengthened by the fact that a day after he put it in the prison mail, he found himself led to the B-wing showers. The screws had told him that the Segregation showers were being replumbed. The issue of plumbing with its accompanying vocabulary of pipes, bores, and plungers seemed to amuse both the screws quite a lot on the way to B-wing, and once they’d left him in the showers—naked but for his shitty flannel-sized prison-issue towel—he’d understood why.

He’d been in the hospital for two weeks—the first of them facedown.

Ironically, just two years ago the showers in the Vulnerable Prisoners Unit here at Longmoor really had been renovated; Avery had declined to bathe for the twelve days the job took to complete.

And, for Avery, that was a serious decision.

Arnold Avery hated to be dirty. Hated it like the plague. Sometimes just being touched by another prisoner or screw could send him hurrying to the shower room to scrub his clothes and his skin.

After each murder—and each burial—he’d had to scrub and scrub.

Cleanliness was next to godliness.

Strangulation was as clean as he could make it, but still—some of them vomited, some of them pissed in terror, some of them did worse than that. And when they did, disgust doused his passion and made him hate them all the more for ruining the experience for him. On more than one occasion he’d had to hose them down before he could bear to finish them off.

And once they were dead, they repulsed him. Even the helpless tears that got him so hot while they were alive became slimy trails of disgust on their cooling faces.

Anyway.

He couldn’t be certain, but he thought it quite possible that the letter from WP’s sister had come from the same address: 111 Barnstaple Road, Shipcott.

So, SL was who? A crusading neighbor? WP’s mother? A cousin? A grandchild? Another, much later, son or daughter conceived in an effort to create a new family to fill the black hole which the last one had become? Avery mused momentarily, but they all seemed equally possible so he didn’t waste too much time.

“Dear Mr. Avery” was good. “WP” was good. The appeal for help was nice and to the point.

But what really impressed Arnold Avery was the word “Sincerely.”

The first letter Steven Lamb wrote to Arnold Avery had been returned to him so blotted by thick black felt tip that it was unreadable. The censor had finally given up three quarters of the way through and had not even passed it on to the prisoner. He had merely scrawled “Unacceptable” across the last quarter of the letter and sent it back to Shipcott.

Steven was humiliated. He felt like a little kid who had been caught sneaking into an 18 film in a false moustache.

It was days before he forgave himself and regained the confidence to make another attempt. He was only twelve, he reasoned; he couldn’t be expected to get stuff like writing to serial killers right the first time.

Over the next week he composed the letter again and again in his mind, each time paring and shaving and whittling until he decided to start from the other end of the scale of information required. That resulted in the first 90 percent of the letter.

What took him another two weeks to wrestle with was whether to use “Yours sincerely” or “Yours faithfully.”

Although this was a personal letter where the name of the intended recipient was known to him, “Yours sincerely” stuck in Steven’s craw. He just couldn’t do it.

And yet, Mrs. O’Leary would have quibbled over “Yours faithfully.”

It kept Steven awake at night and left him staring vacantly into space in history and geography classes. His preoccupation reached its climax when he sat next to Lewis the whole of one breaktime without saying a word. After three attempts to engage Steven in conversation, Lewis called him a “tosser” and stalked off.

Steven knew he had to commit to one or the other.

It was only when he actually put pen to paper—using his neatest block capitals—that he suddenly had the brainwave of writing “Sincerely” instead of “Yours sincerely.” It solved every problem he’d had. He was sincere in his request, but he sure as hell wasn’t Yours.

Steven posted the short letter with high hopes.

Ten days later, he received a reply.

“SCUM-SUCKING EGG AND TOMATO.” LEWIS GLARED AT HIS sandwich, then squinted up at Steven. “What you got?”

Steven leaned on his spade and wiped sweat off his face with his bare arm. He hesitated as if he might lie, but finally it was too much trouble.

“Peanut butter.”

“Peanut butter!” Lewis got up. “You want to swap?”

“Not really.”

Lewis knew he wouldn’t want to swap. Tomato made Steven sick. He knew that, and he knew Steven knew that he knew that, but the thought of peanut butter instead of egg and tomato made him selfish.

“Ah, bollocks; you can take it out. Half and half. Can’t say fairer than that.”

He was already rummaging in Steven’s Spar bag. Mr. Jacoby’s shop used to be Mr. Jacoby’s shop. Now it was a Spar and Mr. Jacoby had to wear a green Aertex shirt with an arrowhead logo on his ample bosom.

Steven looked helplessly at Lewis’s back.

“Don’t take the good half.”

He sighed inwardly. Having Lewis with him was a mixed blessing.

When he was on his own, Steven dug and dug and dug and ate his sandwiches and drank his water and dug some more. On a good Saturday he could dig five holes. Each was the length, depth, and breadth of an eleven-year-old boy, although Steven was not stupid enough to think that this gave him any advantage. He understood that he’d have stood a similar chance of success if he had dug a series of two-foot-wide, four-foot-deep holes shaped like elephants. But he was looking for a body of a particular size and shape, and the holes he dug were a constant reminder of that. It was an exhausting and usually solitary pursuit, but a strangely satisfying one.

But when Lewis made his occasional forays onto the moor everything changed. Certainly, it was more companionable and there was less chance of the hoodies chasing him home, but there were drawbacks.

For a start, Lewis always arrived with the words “Want some help?” but no help was ever forthcoming. Lewis never brought his own spade or offered to relieve Steven of his.

What’s more, Lewis’s very presence—far from helping Steven—actually hindered him. Lewis talked and asked questions, which Steven felt compelled to answer. Lewis pointed things out too—things which Steven, with his head bent over the heather, would never have seen, much less cared about—and wanted to discuss them.

“Shit! Look at that!”

“What?”

“That. There!”

And Steven would have to look up and lean on his spade.

“What is it?”

“I don’t know. I think it was an eagle.”

“Buzzard, most like. There are tons of them around here.”

“What do you think I am? Some kind of moron? I know a buzzard and this wasn’t a buzzard.”

Steven would shrug and turn back to his hole. Lewis would sit and look around, or pick up the Ordnance Survey map with its blue biro crosses, denoting where Steven had dug, scattered like a constellation.

“This is a bad place to dig.”

“It’s as good as anywhere.”

“No, it’s not.” Long silence. “You know why?”