The Beating of His Wings

by Paul Hoffman

  Sensing Gromek’s open-mindedness about him, Meatyard began to make himself useful, making cups of tea, cleaning tables, fetching and carrying, listening and watching for any occasion to lighten Gromek’s considerable load. Gromek began to realize that mealtimes, always an occasion for the awkward among the patients to kick up a fuss, became much easier when Kevin Meatyard was helping him with the serving-up. How was he to know that Meatyard was issuing threats to his fellow lunatics (‘I’ll tear off your head and remove your bollocks through the hole’) and backing them up at night, most successfully, using a twelve-inch piece of twine and the smallest of stones? Whatever pain you’ve ever felt was unlikely to compare with that inflicted by Meatyard putting a tiny pebble between your two smallest toes, wrapping string around them and squeezing tight. He liked best of all to do this to Little Brian in the bed next to the one he had instructed Thomas Cale to sleep in.

  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 t
errible 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.

  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.’

  While the well-intenti
oned people who ran the asylum were shocked at the terrible violence of the death of Headman Nurse Gromek, brutal attacks by deranged patients were not unknown. What caused more shock was that Gromek was abusing his patients in such a revolting manner. Patients who could pay for their treatment – a small number that should have included Cale – were taken into the asylum in order to provide money to pay for the care for those who could not. It was as kindly a place as such an institution can reasonably hope to be and Gromek had been rightly regarded, at least until the arrival of Kevin Meatyard, as an uninspired but trustworthy overseer. Cale’s warning to the lunatics to stick to the story he had outlined taught him subsequently to be more careful when making jokes to people he did not know, particularly those who were not quite right in the head and who were prone to deal with the terrible confusion that existed in their minds by grasping with a grip of iron onto anything they were told with a clear and unambiguous determination. So it was that the unusual repetition of learnt phrases about the incident began to make the superintendents suspicious. Initially the story had been generally accepted – after all, Gromek had raped a number of female patients with the help of Kevin Meatyard and he had been murdered and the person accused had run away and in a desperate manner – but now they were preparing to mine for the truth and would undoubtedly have succeeded in finding out what had really happened had not events turned in Cale’s favour. Vague Henri and IdrisPukke arrived expecting to find him lying in the comfort for which they’d paid and hoping he was on the way to being cured.

  ‘Must you always,’ said IdrisPukke to Cale when he was brought down to the private room kept solely for important visitors, ‘prove your detractors so unerring in their view that wherever you go calamities follow?’

  ‘And,’ said Vague Henri, ‘another funeral.’

  ‘And how is,’ said Cale to Vague Henri, ‘one of God’s greatest mistakes?’