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.’