Easy Meat

by John Harvey

  “You don’t think that’s a little too cynical?”

  “How about realistic?”

  “And kids like Nicky, you don’t think there’s anything that can be done? Not with things as they stand?”

  He sighed. “If it can, I’m buggered if I know what it is.”

  “Locking them up, though? Prison. Short, sharp shocks. Boot camps, isn’t that what they’re called? Do you really think that’s the answer?”

  “I doubt it puts them on the straight and narrow; figures disprove that.”

  “But still you carry on, shutting them away.”

  Resnick shifted a little awkwardly on his seat. “No. The courts lock them up. Or they don’t, whatever. What we do, what I do, if I can, is arrest those who’ve broken the law. Not my laws, not my punishment either.”

  “But you must agree with them, the courts, what they do, or you wouldn’t carry on doing it.”

  Resnick pushed back his chair, crossed his legs. “Are we having a row?”

  Hannah smiled. “No, it’s a discussion.”

  “That’s all right, then.”

  “But is this your way,” she asked, “of avoiding the question?”

  Resnick grinned and shook his head. “Youths Nicky’s age and younger, persistent offenders, they might get arrested—what?—thirty or forty times in a year. More in some cases. They’re too young to be put in prison. Bail, supervision orders, none of that does a scrap of good.”

  “You think they should be shut away.”

  “I think society needs protecting, yes …”

  “And Nicky?”

  “Look.” Resnick was conscious of his voice being louder than it should, louder than the space allowed. “I saw that old woman after she’d been beaten about the head, the old man. I’m not saying what happened to Nicky, whatever the reasons, is right, of course I’m not. But he was accused of a serious crime, he had to be kept in custody. Surely you don’t think he should have been let back on the streets?”

  “If it were a choice between that and him ending up dead, yes, I do. Don’t you?”

  Resnick glanced around at the people at other tables, just about pretending not to listen to their conversation. The coffee was beginning to grow cold.

  “I’m sorry,” Hannah said, “I’m not trying to make you feel guilty.”

  “You’re not.” Resnick shook his head. “I’m sad about what happened. Sad for Nicky’s mother. Nicky himself. But what I don’t feel is guilt.”

  “I do,” Hannah said quietly. “I do.”

  “I don’t suppose I can give you a lift anywhere?” she asked. They were standing in front of the telephones, near the glass doors that opened out onto the Mansfield Road.

  “Thanks, no. I’m fine.”

  “Okay, ’bye then.” She started to walk away. “The flowers,” Resnick said, “shall you be taking them or not?”

  “Yes, I think so.”

  “Good. I think Norma’ll be pleased.” He stood his ground as she walked off in the direction of the lift, plastic bag of shopping swinging lightly from his fist.

  When Hannah turned round moments later, before the lift doors closed in front of her, he had gone.

  Sixteen

  A social worker from the Youth Justice Team had called twice and on each occasion the door had been slammed in her face. A reporter from the local BBC radio station had her DAT Walkman hurled back into the street and the crew from Central TV had buckets of water emptied down on them and a spade taken to one side of their van. Shane threw a punch at a stringer for several national tabloids when he came across the man quizzing neighbors in the local pub. “We’d not said a thing to him, had we, duck?” Hard-eyed, Shane had stared them in the face, smashed an empty bottle against the bar and slammed out: all that rage and nowhere, so far, to bleed it out.

  Norma’s friend Rosa arrived mid-afternoon with a bottle of white port and a dozen roses, convinced Norma to go into the bathroom and wash her face, put on some makeup, and change her clothes. With the afternoon racing from Market Rasen as whispered commentary, the two of them sat on the settee while Rosa plied her friend with glass on glass of port, seizing Norma’s wrists in her sudden, flailing fits of anger, holding her tight whenever she gave way to tears. Norma’s body shaking inside Rosa’s stubborn arms. “The stupid, stupid geck! Why ever did he want to go and do a thing like that?”

  Sheena hovered at the edges of the room, watching the two women, riven by the force of her mother’s tears, which she could not hope to replicate. She went into the kitchen and made tea she never drank, smeared slices of bread with jam she never ate. In her room, she turned her radio up high to drown the sounds of mourning: Lisa I’Anson in the afternoon. Blur. Oasis. Nirvana. Pulp. Take That.

  As the racing gave way to Terrytoons and All American Girl, Norma slept in Rosa’s arms, twitching suddenly with the vividness of her dreams. “Michael. Oh Michael,” she moaned.

  “Ssh, now.” Rosa gently stroked her head. And then, as Norma opened her eyes, “Who’s Michael? You kept saying Michael.”

  “The baby I lost.”

  Rosa squeezed her hand. “That was Nicky, sweetheart. You’re confused, that’s all.”

  But Norma knew what she had meant. “No, it was Michael. My little Michael.” And felt again the final thrust and tear, saw him small and bloodied in the midwife’s hands.

  When Hannah arrived outside the Snape house there were twenty bunches of flowers lining the pavement, others leaning beside the front door. She hesitated, thinking it through, uncertain what she might actually say; she was bending to place her bouquet with the others, turn away, when Sheena came out into the street. Hannah knew her, had taught her in her last year at school, the same school where she had taught Nicky.

  “Hello, Sheena, I’m Miss Campbell. I don’t know if you remember me.”

  She had been a feckless girl, easily led. Left to her own devices she would fidget with her biro, pull at her lank hair, decorate the name of whichever boyfriend she aspired to along the edges of her desk, across the front of her notebook, the back of her arm.

  “Sheena, I’m sorry about your brother. I really am.” From her reaction, Hannah couldn’t tell if the girl remembered her or not, though she supposed she did. “I brought these flowers for your mum,” Hannah said.

  Without speaking, Sheena pushed open the front door and waited for Hannah to step inside.

  “Mrs. Snape?”

  Hannah found them in the kitchen, Norma and Rosa, hunched over the small table, cigarettes and tea.

  “Sheena let me in. I’m … I was Nicky’s teacher, one of Nicky’s teachers.” Neither woman looking at her, she stumbled on. “I wanted to say I was sorry. And to bring you these.” For a few moments longer she held onto the flowers, before laying them down on the table.

  “These from the school then?” Rosa asked.

  “Yes. I mean, no, not exactly. I brought them myself.”

  “So there’s nothing from the school?”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Bastards, not a sodding word.”

  “Look,” Hannah said, “I think I’d better go. I didn’t mean to intrude.”

  “Yes,” Rosa said. “I think you better had.”

  She was at the door when she heard Norma’s voice. “You his special teacher, then? Class teacher, whatever it was.”

  “No.” Hannah turned back into the kitchen. Norma’s eyes were raw and finding it difficult to focus. “Not really. I was his English teacher, that’s all.” Norma blinked and blinked again. “He was a nice lad, cheerful. I liked him.”

  The room expanded to accept the lie, lifted it to the ceiling wreathed in smoke.

  “I will go now,” Hannah said.

  As she shut the front door behind her, Hannah leaned back against it and closed her eyes. The backs of her legs were shaking, her arms burned cold. All my pretty ones? All she could think of were Macduffs words when Malcolm told him that his children had been killed. And what, Hannah, s
he asked herself, what bloody good is that?

  The rain that would saturate the flowers outside Norma’s house, mashing the decorated florists’ paper against the twisted stems, caught Resnick half a mile from home, no raincoat, plummeting down from a darkening spring sky. Like stair rods, his mother-in-law might have said, back when he had a mother-in-law. By the time he had slipped his key into the front-door lock, his hair was plastered flat against his head, water dripping from his nose and squirreling past his collar, down his back. As the door clicked open and swung back, Dizzy darted from the shelter of a neighbor’s shrub, one touch upon the wall, then in.

  Careful, Resnick emptied the contents of his bag, paperwrapped packages nestling in puddles of water. He took off his coat and hung it over a chair, rubbed a towel briskly through his hair. The meeting with Hannah Campbell kept replaying, sporadically, in his mind.

  “Are we having a row?”

  “No, it’s a discussion.”

  Automatically, he forked food into the cats’ bowls. Is that what it had truly been, a discussion? Academic? Impersonal? Certainly that wasn’t the way it had felt. But what did he know? Teachers, perhaps that was what they liked to do, take words and push them back and forth like dominoes, a game to exercise the mind.

  He was building a sandwich, waiting for the kettle to boil. Four slices of fresh garlic salami overlapping across rye bread, a pickled cucumber sliced narrowly along its length, goat cheese that he crumbled between his fingers, a single, thinly cut shallot; finally, the second slice of bread he drizzled with extra virgin olive oil before setting it on top and pressing the sandwich closed, encouraging some of the oil to seep down before he sliced the whole thing in two.

  Tinker, tailor, mother-in-law, wife. Slowly, he poured boiling water onto coffee grounds. He had not heard from his ex-wife Elaine since two Christmases ago, not seen her in twice as long. He knew that she had remarried, redivorced, seen the inside of more than one psychiatric ward. When he had seen her it had been like meeting a stranger, someone who had lived for a long time in another country and spoke a language he didn’t understand.

  “Are we having a row?”

  “No, it’s a discussion.”

  Rather than wait until the lift doors closed across her face, he had walked away.

  When the phone rang, it made him jump.

  “Charles, I am surprised to find you in.” Marian Witczak’s voice, tinged with the accent of a homeland in which she had not been born, which she had not visited until her teens. “I was wondering, Charles, about the dance. This weekend, you remember? 1 wonder if you have made up your mind?”

  “Marian, I’m not sure.”

  He could feel her disappointment as eloquently as words.

  “It’s difficult, Marian, you know that. To promise. I never know what’s going to crop up.”

  “All work and no play, Charles, you know what they say?”

  “Look, I’ll try, that’s all I can do.”

  “You remember, Charles, that time we persuaded the accordion player to forsake his polkas for ‘Blue Suede Shoes’? Well, it is the same band again.”

  “Marian, I’m sorry, I have to go. I’ll be in touch, all right? I’ll let you know.”

  He ate one half of the sandwich standing near the stove, the other sitting in the front room, listening to Frank Morgan play “Mood Indigo,” the wind curling the rain against the tall panes.

  Norma sat up suddenly and opened her eyes. Rosa had been home to sort out the youngest of her own kids and then returned. They had eaten Birds Eye lasagna and chips and drunk two cans of Kestrel, got through the Lord knew how many cigarettes. Norma had slept. “Nicky’s dad!” she shouted, waking. “Peter. How’m I ever going to get in touch with Nicky’s dad?”

  Sheena had an address, written on a sheet of torn paper, in pencil that was beginning to smudge and fade.

  “How long’ve you had this? How long?”

  “On my birthday,” Sheena said, “when I was fourteen. It was tucked inside the card.”

  Norma rubbed her eyes. Peterborough. “No saying he’s still there now, he could be anywhere.”

  “You’ll let him know, my dad?”

  “Here,” Norma pushed the paper back towards her. “You let him know. You’re the one he give his address to.”

  Hannah sat in the chair near the upstairs window, a sweater round her shoulders to foil the draughts. Curtains still open, she could see the rain silvering past the street lights outside, before it was lost against the blackness of the small park facing where she lived. The mug which had held her peppermint tea lay cold in her lap. She was reading a collection of new poems she’d picked up in Mushroom, the soundtrack for The Piano playing in the background.

  As though a man is no more than fear and fire for a woman to feed and carry like a torch. As though a woman is no more than light at the end of a long and hard tunnel. As though my sweet life needs it. As though ache could be enough to smooth the edges of a desperate day.

  How different would her life be if she had married, had a child? The same issues, tugging at her beneath the tide of her life. She had her own house, a job—a good job, one most days she valued, and which she thought of as in some small way doing good. Her Visa bill was paid up at the end of each month, her mortgage was manageable, she went abroad three times a year, enjoyed the company of friends. If she saw a new book or CD she fancied she could buy it without too much thought. Aside from those children she taught, the only person she was feeding and caring for was herself.

  Her choice.

  Why, then, did she feel as empty as the china mug she cradled in her lap, as pale and cold?

  Shane walked up to Peter Turvey in the main bar of Turvey’s local and head-butted him in the face. “You, you bastard! You fucking slime!” Blood was running down Turvey’s forehead into his eyes, half-blinding him. “You’re paying for what you fucking did.” Shane brought his fist back level with his shoulder and punched Turvey in the face, breaking his nose. Shane’s own shirt was ripe with blood and snot. “Here!” As Turvey sank to the floor, Shane brought his knee up hard and broke his nose a second time. It had been Pete Turvey and his brothers who had hurled a fire bomb from their car into Nicky Snape’s path, though it was never proved. Shane caught hold of Turvey’s shirt and hauled him off the ground.

  “For pity’s sake,” called someone, “leave the poor bastard be. You’ll kill him, sure is that what you want?”

  Shane let Turvey go and the back of his victim’s head collided with the bar; then he walked ten feet away, swiveled back, and kicked out at Turvey’s chest, burying the toe of his boot in Turvey’s gut.

  “For Christ’s sake,” came the same voice, “call the law, why don’t you?”

  Shane slapped two pound coins on the table and ordered a pint of best.

  He had it almost finished when the door spun open and Turvey’s two brothers arrived. They had others with them: Gorman, who toured around with the fairs, taking on all comers in the boxing tent; Frankie and Edgar Droy, and Carl Howard, who had served an extra eighteen months in Lincoln for assaulting one of the screws with a bucket, causing him to need twenty-one stitches in his head.

  This was what Shane wanted, to be lost in this. They started on him there, inside the bar, beside Pete Turvey moaning over his twice-broken nose and broken ribs. They hauled him off into the urinal, Shane hardly even bothering to fight back now, almost unable to raise his hands. Finally, they dragged him out into the street and left his body slewed across the road, only the sound of police sirens saving Shane from more of a beating.

  While a young uniformed officer talked to the landlord, who had seen nothing—maybe a little scuffle, nothing to write down in his little book—Shane was in an ambulance, heading for Queen’s. More than an hour later he would be in the cubicle next to Pete Turvey, waiting for the same doctor to examine their injuries.

  It was a bad sign, Resnick knew, when he played Monk last thing at night, the pianist’s fractured atte
mpts at melody obeying no logic but their own. A big man, as Resnick was big, Monk’s fingers stabbed down at single notes, crushed chords into the beauty of an abstract painting, twisted scaffolding seen in a certain light.

  Almost an hour ago, certain it would not be there, Resnick had checked through the phone book and found Hannah’s number, written it, for want of somewhere else, in biro on the back of his hand. Now he stared at it from moment to moment, sitting near the phone. One of the cats jumped onto his lap and he shooed him off as “Solitude” came to an end. He pointed the remote control and set it off again.

  As though a woman is no more than light at the end of a long and hard tunnel. As though my sweet life needs it.

  Wetting his thumb, he rubbed the numbers from his skin.

  While this was happening, Norma Snape lay in the dark of her room and when she slept she cried and then when she woke she cried some more.

  Seventeen

  Where had Bill Aston read that every pound you put on after age forty takes twice as much effort to get off? And eighteen months sitting behind that desk at Police Headquarters hadn’t helped. Fortnightly game of golf aside, for too long the only exercise he had been getting was walking the pair of Jack Russells he and his wife Margaret had bought after their youngest son had left home. Which was why, on the second of January that year, he had instituted his daily swim. There were two pools close to where they lived, Rushcliffe and Portland, and Aston alternated between them pretty much at will. Some days he would stop off on the way to work and put in ten lengths; other times he would call in at home and pick up the dogs, have his swim, and then walk them before returning for dinner.

  “Should have got a real dog, Dad,” his eldest had said on a brief visit home. “A labrador or a retriever, something with some size. Chase those two sorry specimens the length of the garden and they’re worn out. Expect you to carry them back.”

  But Aston was happy enough with his Jack Russells—they would sit in the back of the car if he went for a drive, the pair of them quite content—and as for Margaret … well, if Bill had thought they were going to be her new babies, he was wrong, but just as long as they didn’t get under her feet …