Blacklands

Chapter 15

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.