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wrong reasons but there were those, not so shallow, who were ready to show him some human sympathy despite his giftless appearance and character. One of these kind people was Headman Nurse Gromek. If he’d never met Meatyard and felt sorry for him then he would have carried on being the blandly good man that he’d been all his life: harmless, competent, pleasant enough, a little blank.
    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 theawkward 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