The daily grind

"Stevens."

The bundle of bedsheets rises, like a ghost ready for its rounds, and you hear something between a grunt and a moan emerge from within. Throw in a ball and chain and you've got yourself a B horror movie right there. The man under the sheets mumbles a succession of curses, like a primary school kid reciting the times tables with no understanding of them, and gropes at the linen until it is a pile on the floor. Only at this point does he realise he was facing the wall at the end of the room all along, instead of the bars through which you just called out his name.

The gormless look of puzzlement in his face is comical – even after so many years in here you find it hard to believe a mere wall can confuse a man this much –, but you know better than to laugh out loud. The lights up there may be dim, but they're enough to let him remember such a slight, especially when laying his eyes on you on the yard. Your shoulder reminds you of this fact every day, still grinding unpleasantly from that first – and last – time you didn't contain your laughter when you should have almost thirty years ago now.

Thirty years? Jeez, that's hard to believe. But you know it's true, because you've been counting. Counting down rather than up lately, with only a few weeks to go. If I'd had a son just before being thrown in here, he would have graduated and would be working by now. If it had been twins, they'd both be fifteen by now. You make a note to laugh when you're out of Stevens' sight.

The mass of muscles and growls at the end of the room lifts himself out of the pitiful bed, its rusted springs chittering like an army of mice, and turns around to look at whoever it is that woke him up from his slumber. Anger spits out from his eyes, mixed in with the drowsiness from his very recent sleep still holding onto him and all shaken up with a generous dollop of mental unhinging. The kind of unhinging that leads a man to strangle a whole family with his bare hands before hiding their valuables somewhere only he will be able to find them. The kind of unhinging that holds onto the promise of this small treasure, not fully understanding the meaning of forty years behind bars. The kind of unhinging that could rationalise breaking someone's arm for waking you up.

You gulp. A fresh bead of sweat tickles your skin as it trickles down the side of your face. You dare not wipe it, in case the movement will somehow trigger this half-beast, half-monster into breaking through the bars that separate you from him and pummelling the sweat back into your pores. But all he does is scratch his stained underwear, revealing in the process more than you ever wanted to see. You don't know it yet, but it will haunt your sleep for the next few days. Now, though, you only shudder. At least he's wearing the underwear. That's more than some of the others. Small consolation.

"What the hell do you want?" he asks as he trudges over to the metal bars that you suspect are currently saving your life.

"L-, library service."

He lets out a calm chuckle with a tinge of madness as he looks down at you, making you feel like you're two inches tall and facing a grizzly bear. "L-, library service?" A roaring laughter erupts from his throat and he presses his thick hairy hands against the sinewy wall of muscles that is his belly, making you flinch, but you manage to suppress the urge to hide behind the little trolley piled with books. As he stops laughing, he looks at you once more and then down at the books. "Can I see that one?" He points at one of the thicker ones at the bottom. You grab it with a trembling hand and let him take it from you. Within seconds, though, his face contorts from an open smile into a menacing snarl. His tattooed hands get a grip on the book transversal to the spine, his biceps bulge until they are almost twice their resting size and he rips it in half, tearing through every single of its more than eight hundred pages in a single move. Flinging the two halves onto the grimy floor, he looks back up at you and you fear that he might as easily slam the door down. "Do I look like the kind of person who gives a damn about books?! Huh?!" The spittle flies in every direction, some of it landing on your glasses, but your jaw won't respond to any instructions you try to give it and the little sound you manage to produce can only be labelled as a whimper.

After half a minute of menacing stares, his shoulders sink back down, his biceps deflate to their usual disproportionately large size and he turns around to walk back to his cot. Before he reaches it, though, you manage to regain control of your paralysed body and remember your reason for stopping at his cell in the first place. "Wait!" You immediately regret raising your voice at him, but you're also quick enough to correct it before he has a chance to unleash his rage on you once more. "Wait, please. I have a letter for you."

"A letter? For me?"

You nod, picking the envelope out from the tote bag hanging from one of the trolley's corners.

"Who the hell would write to me?"

You lift it up closer to your glasses, pretend to look at both sides in detail and shrug. "Doesn't say."

"Gimme here!" He rushes up to the bars and snatches the envelope out from your hands, making you wince momentarily before you realise it wasn't you he was making the grab at.

He rips the envelope open, taking a corner of the letter inside in the process, and folds out the contents in front of him. As he begins to read, the tattoos on the back of his hands become readable from your perspective, the two names on them shouting at you in their upper case writing. LAURA. GEMMA. Past girlfriends? Or just present ones? You snicker inside, missing the irony that you are as lonely as he is, probably more.

"What the hell are you looking at?!" You realise you were staring at his hands with your head cocked and hear at least a couple of vertebrae crack as you snap it back into an upright position. Blinking in surprise, you find yourself unable to take your eyes off the vein as thick as your wrist perched on his temple, threatening to pop any minute now. "Get out of here!" Looking down at the floor, you mumble an apology and push the trolley along, its irregular wheels squeaking with every step you take. A new cold sweat begins to rush down your spine, pulling the prison uniform into its clammy stickiness.

You did it. It's in that oaf's hands now. Despite the odds, you have managed to get the letter to him. Even better: he's reading it.

The next day, Lambert Wright is still conveniently – for you, anyway – too sick to carry out his librarian and postal duties, so you take command of the trolley once again with a blend of excitement and anxiousness over arriving at Stevens' cell. You do your best to look positively bored as you rush through the other inmates' letters and requests – more Playboys than Platos, the uncultured swines – and finally reach the reason you spiked Wright's food two days earlier.

"Anything from the library?" you ask.

The questions sounds like a taunt, given the previous day's encounter, but luckily Stevens is not asleep this time, nor does he seem to care for the two halves of the book still on his floor. In fact, he is fully dressed (a bit too late now, pal) and sitting on the edge of his cot with the letter held out in front of him, LAURA and GEMMA staring into your eyes as a look of confused interest takes over his. He looks up at you, back down at the sheet of paper, then back up at you. One of his eyebrows begins to rise. Probably more muscle in that eyebrow than in my entire body. Pity he has now brains to back it up. A smile etches itself slyly on his lips.

"Hey, you, hang on a minute."

"Who, me?" you say innocently.

"Yeah you, idiot." Oh, the irony. "This letter you delivered to me yesterday, it had a return address inside. I wrote a reply. You also take letters to be delivered outside?"

"I sure do. You got a stamp?"

He frowns. "No."

"Not to worry, I'll sort that out for you."

He smiles, not realising how terrifying it looks on him, produces the same envelope you handed to him the previous day and thrusts it out through the bars. The words "RETURN ADRESS" have been added in clumsy block letters above his name and cell number, the original delivery address in your own handwriting. A separate address written in the same awful squiggles has been added to the other side as the new delivery address. He's even managed to misspell it when copying it over, the imbecile.

Taking the letter from him, you put it into the tote bag and smile back at him before continuing your rounds.

Who would have thought it would be this simple? Convince someone that you can help them to get out early and get them to reveal the location of their rich haul. I can't believe he's fallen for it! Now at a safe distance from his cell, you let out a hearty chuckle, daydreaming of what you will do in a few weeks' time with your newly acquired wealth and freedom.

Unable to contain your excitement, you stop at the small passage leading to the next row of cells and pick the envelope back out of the bag, licking your lips as you unfold the reply. It's quite a simple reply, but very powerful. Enough to dry out the lips you just licked, as well as the inside of your mouth, which now feels like sandpaper. Enough to turn your excitement into pure, unfiltered stress, and your legs into warm jelly.

See you in the yard.

The letter slips through your fingers and drifts down to the floor, gliding from side to side like a pendulum on its way and taking your hopes with it. Your shoulders drop and you feel it. The grinding in one of them. Still there, almost thirty years later.