by Clive Barker
‘Not exactly wholesome, Lacey,’ she said cryptically, almost by way of explanation; and that was all. So much for compassion.
Redman glanced back as they tucked the red blanket around Lacey’s still form. Two things happened, almost simultaneously.
The first: Somebody in the group said, ‘That’s the pig’. The second: Lacey’s eyes opened and looked straight into Redman’s, wide, clear and true.
Redman spent a good deal of the next day putting his workshop in order. Many of the tools had been broken or rendered useless by untrained handling: saws without teeth, chisels that were chipped and edgeless, broken vices. He’d need money to re-supply the shop with the basics of the trade, but now wasn’t the time to start asking. Wiser to wait, and be seen to do a decent job. He was quite used to the politics of institutions; the force was full of it.
About four-thirty a bell started to ring, a good way from the workshop. He ignored it, but after a time his instincts got the better of him. Bells were alarms, and alarms were sounded to alert people. He left his tidying, locked the workshop door behind him, and followed his ears.
The bell was ringing in what was laughingly called the Hospital Unit, two or three rooms closed off from the main block and prettied up with a few pictures and curtains at the windows. There was no sign of smoke in the air, so it clearly wasn’t a fire. There was shouting though. More than shouting. A howl. He quickened his pace along the interminable corridors, and as he turned a corner towards the Unit a small figure ran straight into him. The impact winded both of them, but Redman grabbed the lad by the arm before he could make off again. The captive was quick to respond, lashing out with his shoeless feet against Redman’s shin. But he had him fast.
‘Let me go you fucking —‘‘Calm down! Calm down!’
His pursuers were almost there. ‘Hold him!’
‘Fucker! Fucker! Fucker! Fucker!’
‘Hold him!’
It was like wrestling a crocodile: the kid had all the strength of fear. But the best of his fury was spent.
Tears were springing into his bruised eyes as he spat in Redman’s face. It was Lacey in his arms, unwholesome Lacey.
‘OK. We got him.’
Redman stepped back as the warder took over, putting Lacey in a hold that looked fit to break the boy’s arm. Two or three others were appearing round the corner. Two boys, and a nurse, a very unlovely creature.
‘Let me go ... Let me go ...‘ Lacey was yelling, but any stomach for the fight had gone out of him. A pout came to his face in defeat, and still the cow-like eyes turned up accusingly at Redman, big and brown. He looked younger than his sixteen years, almost prepubescent. There was a whisper of bum-fluff on his cheek and a few spots amongst the bruises and a badly-applied dressing across his nose. But quite a girlish face, a virgin’s face, from an age when there were still virgins. And still the eyes.
Leverthal had appeared, too late to be of use.
‘What’s going on?’ The warder piped up. The chase had taken his breath, and his temper.
‘He locked himself in the lavatories. Tried to get out through the window.’
‘Why?’
The question was addressed to the warder, not to the child. A telling confusion. The warder, confounded, shrugged.
‘Why?’ Redman repeated the question to Lacey. The boy just stared, as though he’d never been asked a question before.
‘You the pig?’ he said suddenly, snot running from his nose.
‘Pig?’
‘He means policeman,’ said one of the boys. The noun was spoken with a mocking precision, as though he was addressing an imbecile.
‘I know what he means, lad,’ said Redman, still deter-mined to out-stare Lacey, ‘I know very well what he means.’
‘Are you?’
‘Be quiet, Lacey,’ said Leverthal, ‘you’re in enough trouble as it is.’
‘Yes, son. I’m the pig.’
The war of looks went on, a private battle between boy and man.
‘You don’t know nothing,’ said Lacey. It wasn’t a snide remark, the boy was simply telling his version of the truth; his gaze didn’t flicker.
‘All right, Lacey, that’s enough.’ The warder was trying to haul him away; his belly stuck out between pyjama top and bottom, a smooth dome of milk skin.
‘Let him speak,’ said Redman. ‘What don’t I know?’
‘He can give his side of the story to the Governor,’ said Leverthal before Lacey could reply. ‘It’s not your concern.’ But it was very much his concern. The stare made it his concern; so cutting, so damned. The stare demanded that it become his concern.
‘Let him speak,’ said Redman, the authority in his voice overriding Leverthal. The warder loosened his hold just a little.
‘Why did you try and escape, Lacey?’
“Cause he came back.’
‘Who came back? A name, Lacey. Who are you talking about?’
For several seconds Redman sensed the boy fighting a pact with silence; then Lacey shook his head, breaking the electric exchange between them. He seemed to lose his way somewhere; a kind of puzzlement gagged him.
‘No harm’s going to come to you.’
Lacey stared at his feet, frowning. ‘I want to go back to bed now,’ he said. A virgin’s request.
‘No harm, Lacey. I promise.’
The promise seemed to have precious little effect; Lacey was struck dumb. But it was a promise nevertheless, and he hoped Lacey realised that. The kid looked exhausted by the effort of his failed escape, of the pursuit, of staring. His face was ashen. He let the warder turn him and take him back. Before he rounded the corner again, he seemed to change his mind; he struggled to loose himself, failed, but managed to twist himself round to face his interrogator.
‘Henessey,’ he said, meeting Redman’s eyes once more. That was all. He was shunted out of sight before he could say anything more.
‘Henessey?’ said Redman, feeling like a stranger sud-denly.
‘Who’s Henessey?’
Leverthal was lighting a cigarette. Her hands were shaking ever so slightly as she did it. He hadn’t noticed that yesterday, but he wasn’t surprised. He’d yet to meet a head shrinker who didn’t have problems of their own. ‘The boy’s lying,’ she said, ‘Henessey’s no longer with us.’
A little pause. Redman didn’t prompt, it would only make her jumpy.
‘Lacey’s clever,’ she went on, putting the cigarette to her colourless lips. ‘He knows just the spot.’
‘Eh?’
‘You’re new here, and he wants to give you the impres-sion that he’s got a mystery all of his own.’
‘It isn’t a mystery then?’
‘Henessey?’ she snorted. ‘Good God no. He escaped custody in early May. He and Lacey ...‘ She hesitated, without wanting to. ‘He and Lacey had something between them. Drugs perhaps, we never found out. Glue-sniffing, mutual masturbation, God knows what.’
She really did find the whole subject unpleasant. Distaste was written over her face in a dozen tight places.
‘How did Henessey escape?’ ‘We still don’t know,’ she said. ‘He just didn’t turn up for roll-call one morning. The place was searched from top to bottom. But he’d gone.’
‘Is it possible he’d come back?’
A genuine laugh. ‘Jesus no. He hated the place. Besides, how could he get in?’
‘He got out.’
Leverthal conceded the point with a murmur. ‘He wasn’t especially bright, but he was cunning. I wasn’t altogether surprised when he went missing. The few weeks before his escape he’d really sunk into himself. I couldn’t get anything out of him, and up until then he’d been quite talkative.’
‘And Lacey?’
‘Under his thumb. It often happens. Younger boy idolizes an older, more experienced individual. Lacey had a very unsettled family background.’ Neat, thought Redman. So neat he didn’t believe a word of it. Minds weren’t pictures at an exhibition, all numbered,
and hung in order of influence, one marked ‘Cunning’, the next, ‘Impressionable’. They were scrawls; they were sprawling splashes of graffiti, unpredictable, unconfinable. And little boy Lacey? He was written on water.
Classes began the next day, in a heat so oppressive it turned the workshop into an oven by eleven. But the boys responded quickly to Redman’s straight dealing. They recognized in him a man they could respect without liking. They expected no favours, and received none. It was a stable arrangement.
Redman found the staff on the whole less communicative than the boys. An odd-ball bunch, all in all. Not a strong heart amongst them he decided. The routine of Tetherdowne, its rituals of classification, of humiliation, seemed to grind them into a common gravel. Increasingly he found himself avoiding conversation with his peers. The workshop became a sanctuary, a home from home, smelling of newly cut wood and bodies.
It was not until the following Monday that one of the boys mentioned the farm.
Nobody had told him there was a farm in the grounds of the Centre, and the idea struck Redman as absurd.
‘Nobody much goes down there,’ said Creeley, one of the worst woodworkers on God’s earth. ‘It stinks.’
General laughter.
‘All right, lads, settle down.’
The laughter subsided, laced with a few whispered jibes.
‘Where is this farm, Creeley?’
‘It’s not even a farm really, sir,’ said Creeley, chewing his tongue (an incessant routine). ‘It’s just a few huts. Stink, they do sir. Especially now.’ 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 compart-ments, 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. Henes-sey 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 antici-pation, 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.