As they moved towards him, Cale called out to them. ‘Be careful. Make sure you’ve got him tight. Don’t let him get to his feet.’
But why pay attention to the warnings of a boy who’d done nothing but lie on his bed and retch for a couple of hours a day? They moved on Meatyard. The six lunatics who had a hold on him pulled him to his feet and, knowing this was his one chance, Meatyard took advantage of the momentum of the lift and with all his lumpen strength shook them free. Then he grabbed the astonished Little Brian in his arms and ran up the ward using the boy as a battering ram. He got to the door and turned to face them as the lunatics began edging around him in a semi-circle. He squeezed the boy around the throat and made him cry out in fear and pain. ‘Stay where you are or I’ll break his bloody neck.’ Then he backheeled the door, making it rattle and thud as if a giant was trying to get out. ‘Help!’ he shouted as he kicked it over and over. ‘HELP!’
Now the lunatics were scared – if Meatyard got away they were done for. They’d planned to say the pair of them got into a fight over who’d have the girl first and that they’d killed Meatyard while trying to save Gromek.
With Meatyard free and only the word of murderous lunatics against him they’d be shunted off to the madhouse in Bethlehem, where the lucky ones died in the first year and the unlucky ones didn’t.
‘Put him down.’ Cale pushed through the men surrounding Meatyard.
‘I’ll break his neck,’ said Meatyard.
‘I don’t care what you do to him, as long as you put him down.’
It’s a truism that isn’t true that all bullies are cowards – and it was certainly not true of Kevin Meatyard. He was afraid, as he had every reason to be, but he was in control of his fear as much as any brave man might be – although his kind of courage was not bravery. Neither was he a fool and he was at once alert to the peculiarity of Cale’s insolence. Cale was one of his victims and he knew how victims behaved, but for the second time that night they weren’t behaving as they ought to and, to be fair to Meatyard, as they usually did. Cale was behaving oddly and in an odd way.
‘We can all come away from this,’ Cale lied.
‘How?’
‘We say that it was Gromek who took the girl and that all of us, you included, ashamed to let such a thing take place, were forced to drag him off her and he died in the struggle. The girl will back that up.’ He looked over his shoulder, still moving forward slowly. ‘Won’t you?’
‘No, I fucking won’t!’ the girl shouted back. ‘I want him hanged.’
‘She’ll see reason, she’s just upset.’ All the time Cale was closing in on the suspicious but hopeful Meatyard, his mind fizzing as he tried to think what to do next.
‘They nearly squashed his neck off,’ said Meatyard. ‘No one will believe he got killed by accident. I’ll take my chances.’
He backheeled the door again and the first syllable of a scream for help was already out when Cale hit him in the throat with all his strength. Unfortunately for Cale and the lunatics, all his strength didn’t amount to much. It was the precision of the blow that hurt Meatyard, that made him jerk to the left and caused the back of Little Brian’s head to knock the rusty blade sticking out of his chest. In agony from the knife, he dropped Little Brian. Cale hit the heel of his hand into the middle of Meatyard’s chest. When he was ten years old either blow would have dropped Meatyard as if he were standing on a trap door, but he was not ten any more. Meatyard lashed out and missed, but the follow-on landed a clout on the side of Cale’s head. He fell as if he’d been hit by a bear. The blood pounded in his ears and what little strength he had in his arms was draining away to pins and needles. Meatyard took two steps and would have given Cale a kick big enough to land him in the next world, but there was still some brawn left in Cale’s legs so he kicked away Meatyard’s standing foot and he went down with a wallop on the wooden floor. Luckily for Cale, Meatyard was winded and this gave him time to get to his feet. His head was full of wasps, his arms shaky. He had one punch left in him, but not a good one.
In the struggle the lunatics had backed away, as if Cale emerging to take charge had robbed them of the collective will that had brought them this far. It was the girl who saved them. ‘Help him,’ she shouted, rushing forward and leaping on top of Meatyard. This decided Meatyard on his most desperate plan, one he’d thought up while his flesh was crawling as he was made to watch poor Gromek choke to death. He grabbed hold of the girl and swung her like a club at the three men barring his way to the large window on the other side of the room. They let him go because it was keeping him away from the door that mattered. Anywhere else he moved was a trap – so they let him back away to the window and shaped up to surround him for the last time. Earlier, desperation and a lack of anything to lose had given them a reckless courage but now none of them wanted to get their neck broken when more caution would see this to its end. So they gave him more time to back away than they might otherwise have done.
‘Quickly,’ said Cale, on the verge of fainting as the blood swirled in his ears. He felt as if his very brains would burst. Most of them didn’t hear him. Meatyard made his way to the window and the lunatics stood and watched. He was, after all, going nowhere. The window was nailed down but it wasn’t barred because it was on the fourth floor and some sixty feet from the ground. Meatyard knew this, but he also knew, from his voluntary efforts to get on Gromek’s good side by cleaning the ward, that there was a rope anchored to the wall and coiled out of the way behind an old tallboy cupboard. It had been put there many years before as a cheap way of escaping a fire.
The lunatics watched him back off towards the window, then stirred as he reached behind the tallboy and pulled out the long rope. It took them a few seconds to realize what he was going to do and then they moved forward together. Meatyard pulled the tallboy over with an enormous crash and, holding onto the end of the rope, he ran to the window, turning his back at the last moment. The entire frame, much of it rotten, gave way and Meatyard vanished into the night, the rope trailing behind him. It snapped tight for a second then it went loose.
Never tested, the rope was too short. The result was that Meatyard, after falling headlong through the air, had come to a jerking stop twenty feet above the ground, flinging him into a tree which broke the fall that otherwise might have killed him. Good luck, vicious nerve and immense physical strength saw Meatyard limping off painfully to freedom. Cale watched from the shattered window as Meatyard merged into the darkness. He turned away and called the lunatics to him.
‘What happened tonight was that the two of them brought the girl here and got into a fight over her. Isn’t that right?’ Cale said.
The girl nodded.
‘Meatyard killed Gromek and when you tried to take hold of him he smashed through the window – and that’s all you know. Now each one of you is going to walk past me and repeat what I just said. And if you get it wrong, now or later, you won’t need Kevin Meatyard to chew off your plums and shove them up your winker.’