Ellis stared at a chosen point on the curved window reveal, high up on the wall. Prison bunks are not the most comfortable places for deep meditation but with practice travel in space and time is easy when you learn how to make it so and the confinement of the prison walls can seem totally irrelevant for a while and can actually help to focus the attention.
His father had left when he was very young with a stern message, "No matter how big or how mean you are, there'll always be someone bigger and meaner." one of the few things Doug remembered of him. Also a favourite starting point for his meditations, a mantra which not only helped at times of provocation and there were plenty of those inside this institution, but helped to ground him when the testosterone rush of the gym created it's feelings of invulnerability and invincibility.
He'd seen big men, mean men and seen all of them take a fall sooner or later. Even in prison, they would try their strength or their nerve against each other for some kind of supremacy. There was always this need for challenge and confrontation. The inmates, the staff, the whole place was a complex web of precariously balanced power relationships. Doug took it all on and focussed it into his training routine. It's what gave him that extra rep.
For days, weeks after the event, the "Interview" with Frank Singleton the Chief Security Officer, had been turning over in Ellis' mind. He had been bound and brutally raped, first by Singleton himself and then by his mutt, Lee Dursley. Only he and they knew any real detail about the incident and thanks to his remarkable detachment from the violence of the situation, Doug had been spared serious injury. Ellis' body mended quickly and he was back in his routine with the gym crowd, he never mentioned the business or why he'd come back via the hospital.
No one could imagine where Ellis had come from. No known associates here and no one could imagine where he travelled while he lay in his bunk, focused intently on a tiny patch of institutional beige paintwork. Many of the guys on the wing would have used the afternoon lockdown for a quiet wank, while his cellmate was snoring.
For most men, with such a violent assault so fresh in his mind, revenge would be a burning ambition, some would go clean out of their minds with frustration in such a powerless position but Ellis could see that Singleton was a recidivist, a career criminal, operating under the cover of the criminal justice system, his domination only worked if those he intimidated felt themselves helpless under his power. Singleton had failed to break Ellis, failed to elicit the pain and shame and misery he had hoped for. Perhaps they had wanted him whimpering and pleading. How they could have trampled him.
In a sense Doug had won. In their arrogance, Ellis knew, lay the seeds of their destruction. However high Singleton climbed, he was surely due a fall. There was no flicker of a smile on his distant expression, to Ellis, it was a matter of fact not pleasure. Right now, they had the power but Singleton was overconfident and his chosen assistant, however strong, was rash and unthinking. They would make mistakes, over-reach themselves, Ellis knew it and that was satisfaction enough.
What actually puzzled Ellis was why Singleton had chosen to act. As a teenager, finding his own masculine power growing in a rush of hormones and confined in youth custody, perhaps Ellis had admired Singleton too earnestly and as Singleton had to assert his authority over the would-be hard men in his charge at that time as part of the systematic re-making of them, Ellis had become, for a while, Singleton's reward. Him, the one boy who'd genuinely respond to the framework offered, the one in twenty, the one in fifty who would not end his days rotting in long term institutions or become just another blood spatter pattern in a police data base. The one success in the system.
Had Singleton really remembered him for what he was or as just another piece of trash off the street that he had to try to break down and re-model as a useful, productive member of society?
Ellis hadn't known that Singleton was here in this prison, in a different place of power and now with significantly more seniority, otherwise his anticipation of an 'interview' with the head of security would have taken a different direction. All those years ago, as now, Ellis had kept himself, his personal feelings, to himself. He learnt early on to walk the walk and talk the talk. It had taken the imposition of inescapable restraint, the threat of violent punishment for no apparent reason and the isolation from formal rules to make Ellis remember who this tyrant, with almost 20 years between then and that recent assault, really was.
Ellis had learned about weights from Singleton had learned exercises, breathing and the rush of that adrenaline, under his own control, which had given him such fulfilment and pleasure in hard, self-imposed physical exercise. Everything about the transformation his body had made from stocky kid into the magnificent beast people admired, often feared, had started there under that man's instruction. Singleton had been a rigorous and positive instructor and had shown him he wanted to be that big man, that he wanted that respect but that it came with responsibility. Ellis had witnessed Singleton's brutality before and could tell that the man got off on the punishments he administered to the ones who would not conform. Oddly, he never persecuted the weak, he wanted to destroy the arrogant and disobedient ones who challenged his authority.