The Beating of His Wings by Paul Hoffman Read Free Book Online Page A

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 holdof 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-intentioned 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. VagueHenri 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?’
    ‘Speak for yourself,’ replied Vague Henri.
    Cale resentfully explained that not only had he gone to humiliating
extremes to avoid trouble, he had been too sick to do anything even if he had wanted to. The details of Meatyard’s bullying he kept to