‘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.
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 fabri-cation. 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 Hene-ssey’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.’