John Harvey - Easy Meat

“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.

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, she 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.