Books of Blood (12 page)

     
He pointed out of the window to the wilderness beyond the playing field. Since he’d last looked out at the sight, that first day with Leverthal, the wasteland had ripened in the sweaty heat, ranker with weeds than ever. Creeley pointed out a distant brick wall, all but hidden behind a shield of shrubs.

      ‘See it, sir?’

      ‘Yes, I see it.’

      ‘That’s the sty, sir.’

      Another round of sniggers.

      ‘What’s so funny?’ he wheeled on the class. A dozen heads snapped down to their work.

      ‘I wouldn’t go down there sir. It’s high as a fucking kite.’

      Creeley wasn’t exaggerating. Even in the relative cool of the late afternoon the smell wafting off the farm was stomach turning. Redman just followed his nose across the field and past the out-houses. The buildings he glimpsed from the workshop window were coming out of hiding. A few ramshackle huts thrown up out of corrugated iron and rotting wood, a chicken run, and the brick-built sty were all the farm could offer. As Creeley had said, it wasn’t really a farm at all. It was a tiny domesticated Dachau; filthy and forlorn. Somebody obviously fed the few prisoners: the hens, the half dozen geese, the pigs, but nobody seemed bothered to clean them out. Hence that rotten smell. The pigs particularly were living in a bed of their own ordure, islands of dung cooked to perfection in the sun, peopled with thousands of flies.

      The sty itself was divided into two separate compartments, divided by a high brick wall. In the forecourt of one a small, mottled pig lay on its side in the filth, its flank alive with ticks and bugs. Another, smaller, pig could be glimpsed in the gloom of the interior, lying on shit-thick straw. Neither showed any interest in Redman.

     
The other compartment seemed empty.

      There was no excrement in the forecourt, and far fewer flies amongst the straw. The accumulated smell of old faecal matter was no less acute, however, and Redman was about to turn away when there was a noise from inside, and a great bulk righted itself. He leaned over the padlocked wooden gate, blotting out the stench by an act of will, and peered through the doorway of the sty.

      The pig came out to look at him. It was three times the size of its companions, a vast sow that might well have mothered the pigs in the adjacent pen. But where her farrows were filthy-flanked, the sow was pristine, her blushing pink frame radiant with good health. Her sheer size impressed Redman. She must have weighed twice what he weighed, he guessed: an altogether formidable creature. A glamorous animal in her gross way, with her curling blonde lashes and the delicate down on her shiny snout that coarsened to bristles around her lolling ears, and the oily, fetching look in her dark brown eyes.

      Redman, a city boy, had seldom seen the living truth behind, or previous to, the meat on his plate. This wonderful porker came as a revelation. The bad press that he’d always believed about pigs, the reputation that made the very name a synonym for foulness, all that was given the lie.

      The sow was beautiful, from her snuffling snout to the delicate corkscrew of her tail, a seductress on trotters.

      Her eyes regarded Redman as an equal, he had no doubt of that, admiring him rather less than he admired her.

      She was safe in her head, he in his. They were equal under a glittering sky.

      Close to, her body smelt sweet. Somebody had clearly been there that very morning, sluicing her down, and feeding her. Her trough, Redman now noticed, still

brimmed with a mush of slops, the remains of yesterday’s meal. She hadn’t touched it; she was no glutton.

      Soon she seemed to have the sum of him, and grunting quietly she turned around on her nimble feet and returned to the cool of the interior. The audience was over.

      That night he went to find Lacey. The boy had been removed from the Hospital Unit and put in a shabby room of his own. He was apparently still being bullied by the other boys in his dormitory, and the alternative was this solitary confinement. Redman found him sitting on a carpet of old comic books, staring at the wall. The lurid covers of the comics made his face look milkier than ever. The bandage had gone from his nose, and the bruise on the bridge was yellowing.

      He shook Lacey’s hand, and the boy gazed up at him. There was a real turn about since their last meeting. Lacey was calm, even docile. The handshake, a ritual Redman had introduced whenever he met boys out of the workshop, was weak.

      ‘Are you well?’

      The boy nodded.

      ‘Do you like being alone?’

      ‘Yes, sir.’

      ‘You’ll have to go back to the dormitory eventually.’ Lacey shook his head.

      ‘You can’t stay here forever, you know.’

      ‘Oh, I know that, sir.’

      ‘You’ll have to go back.’

      Lacey nodded. Somehow the logic didn’t seem to have got through to the boy. He turned up the corner of a Superman comic and stared at the splash-page without scanning it.

      ‘Listen to me, Lacey. I want you and I to understand each other. Yes?’

     
‘Yes, sir.’

      ‘I can’t help you if you lie to me. Can I?’

      ‘No.’

      ‘Why did you mention Kevin Henessey’s name to me last week? I know that he isn’t here any longer. He escaped, didn’t he?’

      Lacey stared at the three-colour hero on the page.

      ‘Didn’t he?’

      ‘He’s here,’ said Lacey, very quietly. The kid was suddenly distraught. It was in his voice, and in the way his face folded up on itself.

      ‘If he escaped, why should he come back? That doesn’t really make much sense to me, does it make much sense to you?’

      Lacey shook his head. There were tears in his nose, that muffled his words, but they were clear enough.

      ‘He never went away.’

      ‘What? You mean he never escaped?’

      ‘He’s clever sir. You don’t know Kevin. He’s clever.’ He closed the comic, and looked up at Redman. ‘In what way clever?’

      ‘He planned everything, sir. All of it.’

      ‘You have to be clear.’

      ‘You won’t believe me. Then that’s the end, because you won’t believe me. He hears you know, he’s everywhere. He doesn’t care about walls. Dead people don’t care about nothing like that.’

Dead. A smaller word than alive; but it took the breath away.

      ‘He can come and go,’ said Lacey, ‘any time he wants.’

      ‘Are you saying Henessey is dead?’ said Redman. ‘Be careful, Lacey.’

      The boy hesitated: he was aware that he was walking a tight rope, very close to losing his protector.

      ‘You promised,’ he said suddenly, cold as ice.

     
‘Promised no harm would come to you. It won’t. I said that and I meant it. But that doesn’t mean you can tell me lies, Lacey.’

      ‘What lies, sir?’

      ‘Henessey isn’t dead.’

      ‘He is, sir. They all know he is. He hanged himself. With the pigs.’

      Redman had been lied to many times, by experts, and he felt he’d become a good judge of liars. He knew all the tell-tale signs. But the boy exhibited none of them. He was telling the truth. Redman felt it in his bones.

      The truth; the whole truth; nothing but.

That didn’t mean that what the boy was saying was true. He was simply telling the truth as he understood it. He believed Henessey was deceased. That proved nothing.

      ‘If Henessey were dead —‘

      ‘He is, sir.’

      ‘If he were, how could he be here?’

      The boy looked at Redman without a trace of guile in his face.

      ‘Don’t you believe in ghosts, sir?’

      So transparent a solution, it flummoxed Redman. Henessey was dead, yet Henessey was here. Hence, Henessey was a ghost.

      ‘Don’t you, sir?’

      The boy wasn’t asking a rhetorical question. He wanted, no, he demanded, a reasonable answer to his reasonable question.

      ‘No, boy,’ said Redman. ‘No, I don’t.’ Lacey seemed unruffled by this conflict of opinion. ‘You’ll see,’ he said simply. ‘You’ll see.’

      In the sty at the perimeter of the grounds the great, nameless sow was hungry.

      She judged the rhythm of the days, and with their

progression her desires grew. She knew that the time for stale slops in a trough was past. Other appetites had taken the place of those piggy pleasures.

      She had a taste, since the first time, for food with a certain texture, a certain resonance. It wasn’t food she would demand all the time, only when the need came on her. Not a great demand: once in a while, to gobble at the hand that fed her.

      She stood at the gate of her prison, listless with anticipation, waiting and waiting. She snaffled, she snorted, her impatience becoming a dull anger. In the adjacent pen her castrated sons, sensing her distress, became agitated in their turn. They knew her nature, and it was dangerous. She had, after all, eaten two of their brothers, living, fresh and wet from her own womb.

      Then there were noises through the blue veil of twilight, the soft brushing sound of passage through the nettles, accompanied by the murmur of voices.

      Two boys were approaching the sty, respect and caution in every step. She made them nervous, and understandably so. The tales of her tricks were legion.

Didn’t she speak, when angered, in that possessed voice, bending her fat, porky mouth to talk with a stolen tongue? Wouldn’t she stand on her back trotters sometimes, pink and imperial, and demand that the smallest boys be sent into her shadow to suckle her, naked like her farrow? And wouldn’t she beat her vicious heels upon the ground, until the food they brought for her was cut into petit pieces and delivered into her maw between trembling finger and thumb? All these things she did.

      And worse.

      Tonight, the boys knew, they had not brought what she wanted. It was not the meat she was due that lay on the plate they carried. Not the sweet, white meat that she had asked for in that other voice of hers, the meat she could, if she

desired, take by force. Tonight the meal was simply stale bacon, filched from the kitchens. The nourishment she really craved, the meat that had been pursued and terrified to engorge the muscle, then bruised like a hammered steak for her delectation, that meat was under special protection. It would take a while to coax it to the slaughter.

      Meanwhile they hoped she would accept their apologies and their tears, and not devour them in her anger.

      One of the boys had shit his pants by the time he reached the sty-wall, and the sow smelt him. Her voice took on a different timbre, enjoying the piquancy of their fear.

      Instead of the low snort there was a higher, hotter note out of her. It said: I know, I know. Come and be judged.

      I know, I know.

      She watched them through the slats of the gate, her eyes glinting like jewels in the murky night, brighter than the night because living, purer than the night because wanting.

      The boys knelt at the gate, their heads bowed in supplication, the plate they both held lightly covered with a piece of stained muslin.

      ‘Well?’ she said. The voice was unmistakable in their ears. His voice, out of the mouth of the pig.

      The elder boy, a black kid with a cleft palate, spoke quietly to the shining eyes, making the best of his fear:

      ‘It’s not what you wanted. We’re sorry.’

      The other boy, uncomfortable in his crowded trousers, murmured his apology too.

      ‘We’ll get him for you though. We will, really. We’ll bring him to you very soon, as soon as we possibly can.’

      ‘Why not tonight?’ said the pig.

      ‘He’s being protected.’

      ‘A new teacher. Mr Redman.’

      The sow seemed to know it all already. She remembered the confrontation across the wall, the way he’d stared at her

as though she was a zoological specimen. So that was her enemy, that old man. She’d have him. Oh yes.

      The boys heard her promise of revenge, and seemed content to have the matter taken out of their hands.

      ‘Give her the meat,’ said the black boy.

      The other one stood up, removing the muslin cloth. The bacon smelt bad, but the sow nevertheless made wet noises of enthusiasm. Maybe she had forgiven them.

      ‘Go on, quickly.’

      The boy took the first strip of bacon between finger and thumb and proffered it. The sow turned her mouth sideways up to it and ate, showing her yellowish teeth. It was gone quickly. The second, the third, fourth, fifth the same.

      The sixth and last piece she took with his fingers, snatched with such elegance and speed the boy could only cry out as her teeth champed through the thin digits and swallowed them. He withdrew his hand from over the sty wall, and gawped at this mutilation. She had done only a little damage, considering. The top of his thumb and half his index finger had gone. The wounds bled quickly, fully, splashing on to his shirt and his shoes. She grunted and snorted and seemed satisfied.

      The boy yelped and ran.

      ‘Tomorrow,’ said the sow to the remaining supplicant. ‘Not this old pig-meat. It must be white. White and lacy.’ She thought that was a fine joke.

      ‘Yes,’ the boy said, ‘yes, of course.’

      ‘Without fail,’ she ordered.

      ‘Yes.’

      ‘Or I come for him myself. Do you hear me?’

      ‘Yes.’

      ‘I come for him myself, wherever he’s hiding. I will eat him in his bed if I wish. In his sleep I will eat off his feet, then his legs, then his balls, then his hips —,

     
‘Yes, yes.’

      ‘I want him,’ said the sow, grinding her trotter in the straw.

      ‘He’s mine.’

      ‘Henessey dead?’ said Leverthal, head still down as she wrote one of her interminable reports. ‘It’s another fabrication. One minute the child says he’s in the Centre, the next he’s dead. The boy can’t even get his story straight.’

      It was difficult to argue with the contradictions unless one accepted the idea of ghosts as readily as Lacey. There was no way Redman was going to try and argue that point with the woman. That part was a nonsense. Ghosts were foolishness; just fears made visible. But the possibility of Henessey’s suicide made more sense to Redman. He pressed on with his argument.

      ‘So where did Lacey get this story from, about Henessey’s death? It’s a funny thing to invent.’

      She deigned to look up, her face drawn up into itself like a snail in its shell.

      ‘Fertile imaginations are par for the course here. If you heard the tales I’ve got on tape: the exoticism of some of them would blow your head open.’

      ‘Have there been suicides here?’

      ‘In my time?’ She thought for a moment, pen poised. ‘Two attempts. Neither, I think, intended to succeed. Cries for help.’

      ‘Was Henessey one?’

      She allowed herself a little sneer as she shook her head.

      ‘Henessey was unstable in a completely different direction. He thought he was going to live forever. That was his little dream: Henessey the Nietzchean Superman. He had something close to contempt for the common herd. As far as he was concerned, he was a breed apart. As far beyond the rest of us mere mortals as he was beyond that wretched —‘