Something sly and clever in Meatyard drove him to provoke Cale by making him witness cruelty against the weak – and there was no one weaker than Little Brian. Meatyard, along with the grosser pleasure of causing pain, enjoyed the cries of the boy reaching out to Cale as he lay impassively on his back, neither turning away from nor towards the horror happening next to him. Meatyard could sense Cale’s weakness: a certain compassion for the frail. It was this weakness that had forced him, however reluctantly, to kill Redeemer Picarbo as he was about to slaughter the beautifully plump Riba.
But he’d been strong then; now he was weak and he had no choice but to endure Little Brian’s agony. The trouble was that he could not endure it. What gave Meatyard so much pleasure was that he could feel Cale’s soul eroding in front of him. Meatyard’s coarser appetite for physical suffering was regularly satisfied, and this place was like a sweetshop to a greedy boy, but he also liked to enjoy the more subtle suffering he got from his awareness of Cale’s soul wasting away.
Soon, with Meatyard in charge of the handing out of medicines, even this worst of all occasions for calamity and distress became hushed and orderly.
At night, in Headman Nurse Gromek’s little workroom off the ward, Meatyard would talk to him and listen carefully to all his woes. Over days and weeks Meatyard nourished all the nurse’s many resentments in life, and one in particular. That Nurse Gromek was an ugly man it would be unkind but not untrue to say. This was partly what drew the two of them together: Gromek felt sorry for Meatyard because he was so unprepossessing in the way he looked. This pity was a way in for Meatyard, and soon he found the weakness in Gromek that lay under his decent qualities and ruled over all the others: he was a man with a loving disposition yet not loved by anyone. He cared for women but they did not care for him. When Meatyard cottoned onto this it showed him at his sharpest best. He could feel the disappointment and resentment in Gromek’s apparent resignation to the fact that no one loved him. He could see how angry he really was.
‘It’s wrong,’ said Meatyard, drinking tea and eating toast in the little room, ‘that women don’t mind you looking at them if they think you’re handsome. But if they don’t like your face then all of a sudden you’re a dirty man – a who-do-you-think-you-are-to-look-at-me skank. They put their tits on display for everyone – except for you or me. We’re not worthy to look.’ After a few weeks of this, Gromek was puffed up with rage and as easy for Meatyard to play with as a ball. Soon Gromek, a man who’d had enough of being shit upon by girls, was bringing in women from the ward next door. Used to being treated with kindness in the Priory, these women were trusting and were left unsupervised at night because they were among the milder cases of insanity. Meatyard persuaded Gromek to bring them into his little room knowing he could keep shut the mouths of the patients listening outside. Besides, the patients here were often raving mad and full of stories of the terrors of hell that happened solely in their tortured minds. Now Meatyard brought them experience of the real thing. Wherever he went was hell, but in that hell he made a heaven for himself. There was no angry despair involved in being Kevin Meatyard, no torment in his soul acting out revenge against an unkind world. It was bliss: inflicting pain, tormenting of souls, rape. He delighted in being himself.
At night the lunatics listened to the girls whimpering softly – Meatyard liked a bit of crying but it must be quiet. There was the occasional loud cry of pain, and an answering yelp from a madman in the ward thinking it was the call of his own devils coming at last to drag him down. From time to time Meatyard would pop out to have a smoke, playfully swinging the pebble knotted in his piece of string, and chat to Cale as he lay in his bed, staring at rafters and the black beyond.
‘You take it easy,’ said Meatyard to Cale. ‘And if you can’t take it easy, take it anyway you can.’
It was during one such break, as Kevin Meatyard, having left Gromek in his little room to take his turn with a girl alone, puffed on a snout and gave Cale the benefit of his opinions, that events took an unexpected turn.
‘You have to have the right attitude,’ Meatyard was saying to Cale, who was as usual staring up into the void above. ‘You’ve got to make the best of things. There’s no point just lying back and feeling sorry for yourself in life. That’s your problem. You just have to get on with it, like me. If you can’t do that then you’re a non-runner. This world is a pig – but you just have to get on with it, like me, see.’ He did not expect a reply, nor did he get one.
‘What do you want, Gibson?’
This question was addressed to a man in his late forties who had appeared at Meatyard’s shoulder. The man didn’t reply but stabbed him in the chest with a blade about ten inches long. Meatyard jerked to one side in agony as Gibson tried to wrench the blade free, snapping it off in Meatyard’s chest in the process. It was a cheap kitchen knife that one of the men in the ward had found rusting away at the back of an old cupboard in the cookhouse. Horrified and astonished, Meatyard fell and in a moment half a dozen lunatics were on top of him and holding him down. Cale, meanwhile, rolled off his bed and away from the fight, shaky and kitten-weak after a recent visit from Nanny Powler and the rest of his devils. He watched as four other men piled into the annexe and dragged Headman Nurse Gromek out into the main body of the ward, his struggles much restricted by the trousers around his ankles from which he was trying to free himself.
The lunatics had decided to kill Gromek first in order to give Kevin Meatyard a chance to appreciate properly what was to come and to give him a brief taste in this life of what he could expect for all eternity in the next.
Terror can either make men weak or miraculously strong. Freeing one leg from the trousers around his ankles, Gromek managed to get enough purchase, despite the men holding him, to stagger down the ward and get to the locked door, shouting for help as he went. The lunatic with his arm around Gromek’s neck immediately shifted it to his mouth, stifling his cries enough to make anyone passing think it was just a patient kicking off. As if they were wading upstream in fast water, the five of them lurched down the ward, then two more grabbed Gromek’s legs until his panic-strength gave out and he collapsed onto the floor. Determined to get him away from the door and back to where Meatyard was being held they started to pull Gromek down the central aisle. While this was going on, Kevin Meatyard was loudly but calmly listing what he was going to do to his captors when he got free:
‘I’ll shove you back up your mother’s crack. I’ll piss down your throat. I’ll fuck you in the ear.’
Once they’d dragged Gromek in front of Meatyard, he was pulled upright with his back against the wall so he could get a good view of Gromek’s death.
Without the kitchen knife the lunatics needed to think again. Naturally, anything in the ward that could be used as a weapon had been removed – but even though the bed legs were carefully bolted into place, they had managed to unscrew one. As he was still struggling, grunting and gasping one of the lunatics grabbed Gromek under the chin and yanked his head up to expose his throat so that two of the others could press the bed leg across his neck. A terrible muffled scream erupted from deep in Gromek’s chest as he realized what they were going to do. Terror again gave him unnatural strength and this, combined with the sweat pouring off his face, meant the man holding his chin lost his grip. Two more attempts followed as the watching Meatyard kept up his threats of hideous revenge – ‘I’ll chew off your plums and shove ’em up your winker’ – but even he fell silent when Gromek’s neck was arched back and the leg of the bed held across his windpipe with a man kneeling on each side. It wasn’t quick. The sounds were from out of this world – a wet choking and a crushing of breathing flesh. Cale was transfixed by Gromek’s hands, fluttering and quivering in the air, one of his fingers pointing and shaking as if telling off a child. After an age the shivering hands became taut for a moment, then dropped suddenly to the floor. The kneeling lunatics stayed as they were for a full minute and then slowly stood up. They looked at Kevin Meatyard lying pinned down with his back to the wall.