He told her about the day he discovered the power of using real violence, the kind that changed the very essence of your being. He was thirteen years old. He’d been in the foster home for four years, and it was unusual for him to have stayed somewhere for so long. Usually people had got fed up of him by then. He had been an insecure, needy, mixed-up kid for a while; he couldn’t imagine now that he was a picnic to be around. He would have loved to get out of there though. His foster dad, Malcolm, was an animal. Him and his wife, Shirley, had three kids of their own, all younger than Nathan. Malcolm would beat them on an almost daily basis, and Shirley would pretend it wasn’t happening. He didn’t beat Nathan often though. No, he reserved his other vile tendencies for him.

At first Nathan liked Malcolm, he was nice to him – bought him sweets, told him he was a good boy. He told Nathan that he loved him. No one had ever told him that before. But then it started. For almost four long years he was tormented, abused in the most heinous and sickening ways.

It was a sunny afternoon in August when it happened. Malcolm was in the kitchen eating his breakfast. Nathan remembered it vividly – Malcolm was eating bacon, sausage and beans. Beans and tomato sauce were dripping off his double-chin and onto his yellowed vest. No one was home except the two of them. Nathan was sitting at the table waiting for Malcolm to finish, as he’d been instructed to. Nathan hated that filthy bastard more than he had ever hated anyone, or anything, in his life.

Malcolm dropped his fork on the floor.

‘Pick that up,’ he ordered.

Nathan made his way around to the other side of the table and retrieved the fork. As he raised his head to stand up, Nathan saw that Malcolm’s trousers were unzipped, exposing his white, mottled flesh. Nathan knew what he expected him to do then: something he’d made him do countless times before. But this time something in the young Nathan snapped. He’d already become an angry little bastard, years of abuse had seen to that, but he’d never had anything more than the odd schoolyard fight before.

Nathan took that fork and he stabbed Malcolm right in the cock with it. Over, and over, and over again until he was writhing in pain. Howling like the animal that he was. Blood was spurting everywhere. Then the rest of his foster family came home. Nathan often wondered if he would have killed Malcolm if they hadn’t. Murdered him with a fork!