John Harvey: Easy Meat

“When I did that, Miss, you wouldn’t even give me a mark.”

“I don’t think, John, Shakespeare copied it out word for word, right down to the spelling mistakes.”

Laughs and jeers.

Hannah glanced at her watch. “How many of you have seen Pulp Fiction? ” About half the class, but almost everyone had seen some clips on TV. “And Natural Born Killers? ” Two-thirds.

“Right. Two films with quite a lot of violence …”

“Not enough, Miss.”

“Bloodshed, violence, criminals and murderers as central characters, quite a lot like Macbeth , in fact. But tell me, apart from the basic stories, Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction and Oliver Stone’s Natural Born Killers , what’s one of the most obvious differences between them?”

“John Travolta.”

“ Pulp Fiction ’s longer.”

“ Natural Born Killers is crap.”

Hannah raised a hand for quiet. “Isn’t one of the most important differences in the dialogue, the use of language? Isn’t the Oliver Stone film all quick-editing and MTV effects, whereas Pulp Fiction is full of scenes with people just talking.”

“Like the bit where they’re in the car, going on and on about when you’re in France, what d’you call a Big Mac?”

“In Reservoir Dogs , Miss, when they’re all sitting round that table …”

“Yeah, talking ’bout Madonna …”

“Right,” Hannah said, “that’s it. Talking. Language. Isn’t that what Tarantino loves? If you took all that dialogue out of Pulp Fiction , that would change it so much it wouldn’t any longer be his film. It certainly wouldn’t be as good. And if you took the language out of Macbeth …”

“It’d be over quicker.”

“… it wouldn’t be as good either. It certainly wouldn’t be Shakespeare.”

Before Hannah could say anything else, the bell had sounded for the end of the lesson and everything was lost to a scraping of chairs, the clamor of private chatter, and the movement of thirty-one pairs of feet.

“Nicky,” Hannah tried, “can I just have a word?”

But Nicky, like the witches, had vanished without trace. As had Hannah’s purse, which had been pushed down to the bottom of her bag, between her NUT diary and a Snickers bar she’d been saving for break.

Nicky had a grin that left room for him to eat his pizza slice and speak at the same time. “Roland, you’re lucky I bumped into you, right? Just the thing you’ve been looking for. Exact.”

Roland tipped sugar into his coffee, two sachets, and then a third; the last occasion he had bought something from Nicky, a pair of Marantz speakers for thirty quid, he had ended up paying twice that amount to get them repaired after only ten days.

“Here,” Nicky said, sliding what looked at first glance like a glasses case across the table.

“What the fuck’s that, man? Polaroids or shit?”

“Look at it, here. Look.”

Roland shook his head. “You got to be joking, man, wha’do I want with that?”

Nicky couldn’t believe it. How could Roland be so thick? “Business appointments, that’s what this is for. Business. You’re the one, always telling me how you’ve got to be this place or that place, meeting someone here, somebody there, doing some deal or other. And sometimes you forget, right? You’ve told me. Sat there and told me. Well, now if you had this …” Experimentally, Nicky fingered a few of the tiny buttons. “See, this is perfect, right? Neat. What d’you call it? Compact. Slips into your top pocket, inside pocket, anywhere. But everything you want to know, Roland, okay-phone numbers, addresses, appointments-you can store it right in here, yeah? SF-835O. Do anything you want except send a fax or e-mail and there’s probably some way you can adapt it to do that. And look, look here, look-how about this? — it can only translate stuff into nine languages. Nine. You believe that? Bet you didn’t know there were nine fucking languages.”

Roland picked up the digital organizer and stared at the word mercredi , blinking faintly back at him from the top of the oblong screen. “Fuck, man. Why you fussin’ me with this shit?”

“Gonna do you a deal, aren’t I?”

Roland laughed and bit into his cherry pie, coming close to burning his tongue. “Shit! Why’s the stuff in these things always so bleedin’ hot?”

“Thirty quid,” Nicky said, easing the last piece of mushroom away from his pizza and scraping it onto the side of his paper plate. Never could stand mushrooms, they made him sick. “Come on, Roland, yeah? Thirty quid.”

Roland pressed a button and the screen went blank. “Nothing, man. Not interested, okay?”

“Twenty-five.”

Roland shook his head.

“Okay, twenty.”

“Nicky, how many times I got to tell you? Now get this piece of junk out of my face.”

Shit! Nicky dropped the pizza crust onto the table, screwed up the paper plate, snapped the organizer shut, and pushed it down into the back pocket of his jeans as he got to his feet. “See you, Roland.”

“Yeh.”

Fifteen meters short of the door, Nicky spun round on the heels of his Reeboks and hastened back. “Here,” leaning over Roland from behind. “Fifteen. You can sell it for twice that.”

“Ten.”

Nicky balanced the machine across Roland’s cup. “Done.”

Roland laughed and laid the note in the palm of Nicky’s hand.

Ten, Nicky was thinking as he headed back for the street, ten and the fifty that was in old Campbell’s purse, I can get myself something decent for my feet instead of this old crap I’m wearing now.

If Mark Divine noticed the few daffodils that remained unpicked or untrampled on the wedge of green beside the school entrance, he gave no sign. Four hours’ sleep was the most he’d caught last night. How many pints of bitter? Six or eight, and then the woman he’d been stalking round from bar to bar had only laughed in his face as she’d climbed into a cab. Two o’clock it must have been before he’d stumbled into bed. No, nearer three. And this morning there’d been Graham Millington, lip curling up beneath his mustache as he delivered a bollocking over some petty bit of paperwork Divine had somehow neglected to get done. “What are you now?” Millington had asked. “Twenty-seven, is it? Twenty-eight? Ask yourself, maybe, why it is you’re still stuck at DC when there’s others, give you three year or four, shooting past like you’re standing still?”

It had been on the tip of Divine’s tongue to say, “What about you, Graham? Sergeant since before I bloody joined and about as like to move on as one of them statues stuck round the edge of Slab Square.” But he’d said nothing, had he? Bit his tongue and sulked around the CID room till this call came through, some teacher who’d got her purse nicked from her bag in class. Serve her right, most like, Divine had thought, for taking it in with her in the first place. But it gave him a reason for getting out and about, at least. Hannah Campbell, he could picture her now. Short frizzy hair and flat-chested, blinking at him from behind a pair of those bifocals. Hannah, anyway, what sort of a name was that? Somewhere on the back shelf of his memory, Divine remembered an Aunt Hannah, the kind with whiskers on her chin.

“Can I help you?” The woman in the office looked up from her typewriter and regarded Divine with suspicion.

“DC Divine,” he said, showing her his card. “CID. It’s about the incident this morning. Hannah, er, Campbell. You’ll know about it, I reckon.”

“Please take a seat.”

Why was it, Divine wondered, he only had to set foot inside a school, any school, to feel the cold compress of failure shriveling his balls, packing itself around his heart?