She wrote the letter and he replied to it by letter, knowing that the guard who looked after the mail room was a nasty piece of work. By that, I don’t mean a piece of work of some sort that was carried out by someone lacking the skills to do the job properly, thereby producing something horrible. This is notwithstanding the distinct possibility that he would be most likely to bring such a thing about. Still, knowing that he read all the mail, both coming and going, fully served the prisoner’s purpose. The warder would certainly read it. The prisoner had seen him at his desk, pouring over the letters and stroking his ugly little goatee beard. Well, not quite a goatee; it was more of a cross between a Norse Skipper and a Chin Puff. Whatever it was, he didn’t like it.
When it came right down to it, he didn’t like the rest of his face either. It had splotches, revolting puce coloured patches. Not a bright and cheerful puce, like the dress his mother altered for a neighbour who was pregnant and wanted to wear it to a do being put on by the local Rugby Club. The do she never actually went to on account of her fiancé’s younger brother, who she was really fond of, came off his motorbike that afternoon and was in an intensive care unit in the local hospital. The prognosis was touch and go and they both spent that particular evening at his bedside. Whereas he recovered shortly after, the prisoner’s mother had a great falling out with the woman who refused to pay for the work she’d done, on the basis that she hadn’t worn the dress, and wasn’t likely to in the near future.
Be all that as it may, the man’s facial markings were no way near that attractive. They were not that kind of puce at all, more of a foreboding greyish red-violet, mixed with brownish-purple. Despite this, he must have read it because the police became involved and the prisoner received another letter from his wife. This one saying that a group of police officers had been there with shovels and had dug up the entire back garden. Of course, when she said they had completely dug up the whole of the back garden, this had to be a gross exaggeration, obviously. They wouldn’t have lifted all the paths or dug under the shed. On the other hand, all of the soil in the garden had been dug over very thoroughly.
The upshot of all this was that his reply to her request to plant vegetables, read, ‘Please don’t do any digging in the back garden’.
While the letter he was writing now, reads, ‘Now, would be a good time to plant vegetables.’