John Harvey: Easy Meat

There was no note. Twice a year, Christmas and birthday, he would send a card to Sheena, always with a different postmark, never with a return address.

Norma told everyone she didn’t care: hadn’t she and Rosa always said, men were shits. But when Shane suddenly went off the rails a few years later, she was forced to admit she couldn’t cope, not with them all, and Shane went off for the first of his two spells in care. Just to give your mum a break, love, the social worker had explained. He’s a good lad, she’d said to Norma, I’m sure he understands. If he did or not, Shane never said. Especially after being released back home the second time, Shane never said much at all.

“You not going into work this morning,” Shane asked, “or what?”

Norma was sitting at the kitchen table, smoke drifting from her cigarette. “Yes,” she said. “Yeh, soon.”

Shane shrugged. “Suit yourself. I’m off out, right?”

Norma nodded: one more cup of tea, one more cigarette, one more something, she’d pick herself up and get on her way.

“I don’t want anyone to get too carried away about this,” the Head of Geography said, wriggling out of his anorak as he came into the staff room, “but there was a rumored sighting of a lesser spotted Snape earlier this morning.”

“In the general vicinity, is that?” asked one of the Maths staff, glancing up from the crossword. “Or actually, you know …?”

“On the premises, apparently. Somewhere in the vicinity of the toilets. Natural habitat.”

“We ought to put a sign on the notice board, perhaps? Must be quite a few members of staff who’ve never had the chance to see one at close quarters. After all, I don’t suppose he’ll be here long.”

“Difficult to predict,” the Head of Geography said, “the migratory habits of the Snape.”

From her seat across the room, where she was vainly trying to get another set of English folders marked before the bell, Hannah Campbell didn’t think it was so funny. The last time Nicky Snape had showed up in her class, a perfectly decent lesson on haiku had been fatally disrupted in less time than it took to count to seventeen. Then again, she knew that if Nicky weren’t in school, the chances were he was out getting himself into even more trouble, adding to the list of offenses and misdemeanors that, even in this catchment area, was truly impressive. She knew all of that, but even so … Hannah sighed as the bell sounded, assigned a mark to the open folder, capped her red uni-ball micro deluxe, and climbed to her feet. Another day.

Nicky was letting a couple of the younger kids examine the label of his black cotton Hugo Boss shirt-not the right size for his skinny frame, but it was difficult to be particular when you picked up clothes the way Nicky did most of his. Today he wore it loose, so that was fine, unbuttoned over a black T-shirt that had been yanked high to hide as much as it could of the burns which spread up from his chest. His black denim jeans turned over at the waist. On his feet were Reebok trainers, scuffed and coming away at one heel; they would have to be replaced.

“Snape, what the fuck are you doing here?” one of the other youths asked, straggling into the building.

“They begged me,” Nicky said. “All of ’em, down on their hands and knees.”

“Yeh, but you’re here anyway.”

“So what about Macbeth and the witches?” Hannah Campbell asked. “Do you think he believes them or what?”

“Yes, course he does,” said a girl near the front.

“Okay, why?”

“’Cause he does.”

“Yes, but why? I mean, would you?”

“Would I what?”

“If you were on your way home across the Forest …”

“Miss, I don’t go home across the Forest.”

“If you were walking across the Forest and just past the Park and Ride you saw these three weird old women …”

“Tarts,” shouted somebody.

“Scrubbers.”

“Prostitutes.”

One of the lads at the back jumped up and stood beside his desk, hand extravagantly on hip. “Hey, Macbeth, duck, lookin’ for business.”

“All right, all right.” Hannah smiled and allowed the laughter to subside. “Let’s get back to the question. If you were stopped by three people you didn’t know and who looked pretty strange into the bargain, and they told you that something was going to happen in the future, would you believe them?”

“Depend what they said, Miss.”

“All right, Wayne, and why’s that?”

“If they said what you wanted to hear, Miss, you’d believe ’em.”

“Yeh, like winning the lottery.”

“Seven million.”

“That bloke, right, shot himself ’cause he never bought the winning number.”

“He couldn’t know the winning number, stupid.”

“Yes, he could, ’cause it was the one he picked every week only this week he never did it.”

“Daft sod.”

“Okay,” said Hannah, “calm down a minute and let’s think. Isn’t what happens with the witches and Macbeth a bit like what you’ve just been talking about?”

“There’s no lottery in Macbeth , Miss.”

“No, but it is about getting what you want most in the world, isn’t it? Becoming king. All that glory, all that power. All your dreams come true.”

“Never happens, Miss, does it?” A girl off to the side this time, flicking her hair away from her face with a biro. “Dreams comin’ true an’ that.”

“Do you mean in the play or ever? In real life, say?”

“Ever.”

“That bloke,” someone said from near the door, “the one as worked in the factory. Won all that money and couldn’t cope with it, went back to Pakistan.”

“Should’ve took all his mates.”

“Family.”

“Fazal along with ’em,” Nicky said. It was the first time he had spoken during the lesson, happy fiddling with the Casio Digital Diary he’d pocketed on his last visit to Dixon’s.

“I can’t go back, clever,” Fazal called back, “’cause I’ve never bloody been.”

“Right,” Hannah said firmly. “We’ll have no more of that.” And then, taking a few steps towards Nicky, “What do you think, Nicky? D’you think that’s one of the things Shakespeare’s trying to get us to think about, what happens when we get what we want most?”

Nicky pushed a few buttons on the keyboard of the diary and the day of the week came up in French. Why didn’t she leave him alone and ask somebody else?

“Nicky, do you think he’s saying something about ambition in this play?”

“Fuck knows.”

“I’m sorry.”

“I said I don’t know.”

“Why don’t you know?”

Nicky pushed the pocket computer across the desk. “If he wanted anyone to understand what he was on about, he should’ve written in normal English, shouldn’t he?”

“But he did, the normal English of his day.”

“Yeh, but that’s not our day, is it? It’s not now. If you expect us to read it, why doesn’t someone put it into proper English so’s we can all understand?”

“Yeh, Miss,” someone called out. “Or give it subtitles.”

“Then stick it on Channel Four.”

“How many of you think that Nicky’s right?” Hannah asked. “Shakespeare would be better translated into contemporary language.”

A chorus of shouts suggested that many did.

“All right, but if we did that what would we lose?”

“Nothing.”

“All that lousy spelling.”

“Words you can’t understand.”

“Yes,” Hannah said, “you’d lose the words, you’d lose the language. In fact, it wouldn’t really be Shakespeare at all.”

Loud cheers, then: “Story’d be the same, Miss.”

“I know, Wayne, but don’t you think the reason we still bother with Shakespeare after all this time is not so much the stories but the language he told them in? After all, his actual stories weren’t so different from anybody else’s. In fact, he borrowed most of them from other people anyway.”