Our conversations had thinned Stink out of them by the time his letter arrived. It was the first contact from his two years in prison so far. Our happy gabbles in pubs and on the streets had turned from him to matters of sex, beer and music. On the rare occasions we mentioned him it was more to make a silence worthy than to think of him in any tangible way. He was gone from us – out meanings had become utterly detached. Two years of being a teenager carves more differences than twenty as an old man.
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It arrived on my doormat in a tough blue envelope, with a scarred letter locked inside it. It was hard to open and the message that needed prying from it was on thick, oppressive blue paper with regimented blocks of black censoring Stink’s words.
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Hi Ruk
It’s been two years now since I got put in this ████. I have no idea what two years is now. I don’t know what your two years are, but know they must be different from mine. You got a girlfriend? Are you a ████?
It’s ████████████████ in here. The other guys are all older than me and ████████ me a lot. I ████████ it.
Anyway, the ███████censors will ████████ with this letter so I’ll get to my point. Do you want to come and visit me? I’m ready for visitors now, so why don’t you and the guys come over? I have to issue an invitation or you can’t get in, so I’ve issued one in this letter for three weeks time on a Saturday.
Don’t bother writing as some ████████████████ around and I might not get it in time. Just turn up – I’ll be waiting because there’s nothing else to do.
Bye
Donny
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I read the letter thinking how dull and ordinary it seemed, how it had Stink’s reality ripped out of it. It made no sense because it was so straightforward, nothing about how he was feeling really. It said nothing, absolutely nothing. Stink had reached the pinnacle of places he could go, so I thought. Of all the places he’d been, this one was the most open, the most obvious, the one which used no graces chopping his words, his thoughts – his tyrannical cell writing the letters for him.
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Three of us got together to go and visit him. For the other guys it was a visit to a zoo, prepared on giggles and packed in anticipation. For me, it was to check he was still a person. We bought several slices of what we thought freedom must be when you’ve got none on the way there: porno mags, loads of chocolate, cigarettes – we didn’t even know if he smoked. Come to think of it, we didn’t even know if he wanked or ate chocolate.
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The prison gate was truly built to hold people. The huge fortress door, looked like it protected those inside, rather than us outside. All it was doing was stirring a crowd of criminals into a brew of something more hateful, something even less human. When we got out of the car we stared at the gate for a few seconds, quiet, truly realising, perhaps for the first time, that Stink still existed, somehow, and he really was in prison.
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After queuing for forty minutes we showed our document to the guard.
‘Wait here – bit funny this one.’
We waited, not knowing this might not be normal, thinking the problem might be us.
‘You’re not seeing him today.’ He instructed on his return.
‘Why not?’
‘You’re just not seeing him today.’
‘When can we see him?’
‘I don’t know lads – end of story, go home.’ He sounded a little annoyed, but in a way which didn’t bother him.
‘I don’t understand why not though.’
The guard looked at me, in the face for the first time, and his teeth seemed to do all the talking.
‘The silly bastard dragged a kitchen knife right down his arm yesterday. He’s in the infirmary – so fuck off home like good lads – alright?’
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On the way home I stayed silent and flicked vacantly through porn, chewed tasteless chocolate. The guys worked out dozens of synonymous phrases which said they were shocked and didn’t get it. I knew then that me and the life I was having couldn’t be further from his. I saw us together tearing into a plastic giraffe, smiling with pie in our mouths and figured that was the last time we were resolutely together, before I saw him start sliding. Nowadays I was thinking about how to spend money, which woman my cock might be in next, how much I might drink at the weekend – Stink was deciding where to put a knife into his body.
I just couldn’t work out why he’d done it just before our visit.
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