John Harvey - Easy Meat

“Fucking lift!” Diane screamed, kicking at the graffitied doors. “Never fucking working!”

Diane’s neighbor had been looking after Melvin and Diane collected him to show him off to Sheena.

“Gorgeous, i’n’t he? I’n’t he fuckin’ gorgeous?”

Tightly curled black hair, coffee skin, wide brown eyes; Sheena had to admit that he was.

The girls all bundled into Diane’s living room to play with Melvin and watch TV, pass round the bottle of vodka that Irena had lifted from the corner shop. Seated on the floor by the settee, Lesley carefully rolled a couple of spliffs. An hour or so later, when Janie tipped some pills into Sheena’s hand, she didn’t think twice, popped them into her mouth, and swallowed what was almost the last of the vodka to wash them down.

Peter was waiting when Norma got home from visiting Shane at the hospital, sitting on the uneven paving stones where days before Nicky’s flowers had huddled haphazardly against each other. He was leaning back against the wall when Norma saw him, a hand-rolled cigarette between his fingers, his feet bare, shoes neatly placed alongside him, socks rolled into a ball. Something lurched through Norma like a fist and she thought she was going to be sick.

Peter spotted her and stared, then pushed himself slowly to his feet. My God, Norma thought, how he’s changed. Most of the hair had gone from his head and what remained was flat against his scalp and dark. His face had never been full, but now the skin seemed to be stretched too tight across his forehead and both cheeks had sunken in. Inside a striped shirt, his chest appeared to have collapsed inwards, though a little potbelly strained awkwardly against the top of his trousers. How long was it since she had seen him? Twelve years? More? She had never imagined he could look so old. He could not have been more than forty-five.

Norma could no more stop the tears than she could stop time.

Peter tossed the nub end of the roll-up towards the curb and took her in his arms.

“Come away, you great geck! Let’s get inside else we’ll have neighbors goin’ round with a hat.”

In the kitchen she made him tea and toast while he told her how he had hitched three lifts from Peterborough to get there, the last a laundry van on its way in from the RAF base outside Grantham. He asked Norma how she’d been keeping, told her how good she looked in that blue-and-orange dress. Had she lost a bit of weight? Well, it suited her, there was no denying that. He asked her about Sheena and Norma told him she was at work; asked about Shane and looked concerned when she told him about the beating he had received. It was not till Norma had mashed a second pot that he asked about Nicky.

Without crying this time, clear-eyed, Norma told him what she knew.

Peter was silent for a long time and then asked if the inquest had been opened and adjourned.

Norma nodded and Peter, one-handed, rolled another cigarette. “If you like,” he said, not looking at her, looking at the pile of crockery heaped alongside the sink, “I could stay for a while. A few days at least. I’d not be in the way.”

Norma didn’t reply. She didn’t know what Shane, when he got out of hospital, might think. Nor Sheena either for that matter-he was her father, she should be pleased, but after all this time who could tell?

“Just till the funeral, eh? That was what I thought.”

“All right,” Norma said. “All right.”

He reached a hand to touch her but she pulled away.

At six thirty that evening, Bill Aston plunged into the Portland pool and swam the first of twenty slow, deliberate lengths. After showering and drying himself down, he drove the short distance to the Victoria Embankment and walked the Jack Russells along the north bank of the Trent. All things considered it had not been too bad a day.

Khan’s girlfriend was seven years his senior. Light-skinned, lithe-limbed, and blonde, Jill was a divorced woman with three kids who were spending the night at her sister’s. She had trained as a dancer, worked as a model; now she was a part-time receptionist at Central Television and did a dance class four afternoons a Week. Khan liked to imagine he could still smell the sweat on her body.

“What was he like, then?” Jill asked. “This bloke Aston you’re working with?”

“After he’d got over the color of my skin, d’you mean?”

She reached out to stroke his chest. “What’s wrong with your skin? It’s beautiful.”

“Yes, well.” Khan grinned. “You’d not expect Bill Aston to feel the same way about it as you now, would you?”

“Oh, I don’t know.” Jill laughed.

“Not him. I doubt he’s got the imagination.”

Jill raised her legs and slid her bottom a little farther down the bed. “What’s he doing in charge of the inquiry into this kid’s death, then?”

But by then Khan was in no position to answer.

“Old-Fashioned Love.” The opening growl from Vic Dickenson’s trombone sounds like the fanfare from a fairground barker, but once piano and bass have settled into their gentle stride, he nudges the melody along respectfully enough, just the odd hint of jaunti-ness to keep sentimentality at bay; then, rolling out from the lower register with that tart huskiness that marks his playing, Edmund Hall takes the tune through a second chorus before the clipped notes of Ruby Braff’s trumpet start to lengthen and unwind. Which is as far as Resnick gets, because now the phone is ringing and he reaches awkwardly towards it, fiddling the remote onto pause and then dropping it into his lap, where an aggrieved cat wakes with a start and jumps to the floor, one paw tipping the saucer that holds a half-finished cup of coffee growing cold.

“Hello?”

“Charlie. Thought you weren’t there.”

Friday night, Resnick thought, where else would I be?

“Wondered how you were placed for this drink we mentioned?”

Resnick angled his wrist around to look at his watch: twenty-five to nine. “You’ll be wanting me to trek out there, I suppose?” He wondered why it had always been difficult to take them seriously, the suburbs south of the Trent.

“No need, I’m in the city. Just tidying up a bit of paperwork.” Aston paused. “The Partridge, that’s your watering hole, isn’t it?”

“As good as any.”

“Nine o’clock, then?”

“Best make it quarter past.”

“All right, Charlie. See you there.”

Resnick retrieved his cup and rose to his feet, releasing the pause into the beginning of Sir Charles Thompson’s piano solo. Bud’s head nudged repeatedly against the backs of his legs as he stood there listening, the cat urging him to sit down so that he could jump onto his lap. Only after the second trumpet solo and Dickenson’s closing trombone coda, lazy but exact, did Resnick open the tray and drop the CD back in its case, switch off the stereo, carry cup and saucer into the kitchen to rinse, open the fridge on a well-honed impulse and lift out a slice of ham, wrap it around the last half-inch of Emmenthal cheese, something to nibble while he put on his coat and hesitated in a doorway, patting his pockets for his wallet, money, keys.

For whatever reason, the Partridge failed to attract the Friday night gangs of youths who marauded through the city center, clad, whatever the weather, in shirt-sleeves or the shortest of skirts, growing noisier and noisier as they moved from pub to pub, more and more obscene. Even so, it was crowded enough for Resnick and Bill Aston to take refuge in the deep V of the public bar, opposite the door to the Gents.

“Sure that’s all you want, Charlie? Not fancy a chaser?” Resnick glanced at the bottle of Czech Budweiser and shook his head.