John Harvey: Easy Meat

He left his old Reeboks in the shop and was wearing his new boots when he met his mate, Martin Hodgson, in the bowling alley by the Ice Stadium. Martin was not so many months younger than Nicky, but more slightly built; his oversized check shirt hung loose and open over a beige Sweater Shop jumper, black jeans rolled up over high-top trainers. At first glance, it was tempting to dismiss him as soft, but that would have been a mistake.

“Fuck!” Nicky exclaimed. “Thought you was fucking locked away.”

“Nah. Only that kids’ place, weren’t it? Not a real fuckin’ prison at all.” Martin pushed the fall of dark hair from where it shielded his dark eyes and grinned.

Martin was about the only person Nicky had ever gone on jobs with, breaking and entering in and about the Meadows, which was where Martin lived. Most times, Nicky preferred to stay on his own, a low-profit, low-risk sort of business. Martin, though, was a laugh, which was why Nicky went with him; the only thing was, Martin didn’t seem to know what risk meant.

“So what you doing, hanging about here?” Nicky asked.

Martin nodded in the direction of the nearest lane. “Seeing how many spares I can get in a single game.”

They bowled for the best part of an hour and then, when Martin went to buy more cigarettes, Nicky noticed he was holding what had to be close to a hundred pounds.

“Up on the Forest last night,” Martin explained, offering Nicky a king-size. “Would’ve scored more’n this, but the coppers came sniffin’ round. Bastards! Had to clear out.”

Nicky stared at him in fascination. “What d’you have to do?” he asked.

“Easy.” Martin laughed. “Hang around, just down towards the trees, like, till some punter comes along …”

“But how d’you know?”

“You always know. Sometimes they want you to go in their car, I always charge extra for that, mostly you just do it there. Cemetery’s a good place.”

“Yeah,” Nicky said, “but what d’you have to do?”

“Jesus! What d’you think? Wank ’em off, that’s the easiest. That’s a tenner. Sometimes they want to suck you off, that’s twenty. Nothin’ to it.”

“But you don’t let ’em …”

“Stick it up me arse? What d’you think I am? Fuckin’ mental? Think I want to get AIDS or something?”

“No. No, course not.”

“This bloke once though, dead rich, Mercedes, nearly new. Offered me a hundred if I’d go with him, back to his hotel.” Disgust and dismay mingled on Nicky’s face. “He had a condom,” Martin said, “so it was okay. Give me these poppers, you know, amyl nitrate, after a bit it never hurt much at all.”

Nicky thought he was going to throw up. He nipped out his cigarette and started to walk quickly away.

“Hold up!” Martin called. “Where you off to now?”

“Home,” Nicky said. “Supposed to have been in school, haven’t I.”

“Nah,” Martin said, catching him up. “You don’t want to do that. I’m meeting Aasim later. You want to stick around, chill out, we’ll have some fun.”

Sharon Garnett was wearing a short red skirt over ribbed tights, a dark cotton jacket buttoned over a cream shirt; as if she weren’t tall enough already, she was wearing boots.

“Blending in with the scenery?” Lynn asked, the hint of a smile in her eyes.

“Something like that.”

“I got you half of bitter, that all right?”

“’S fine.”

They had agreed to meet in the Lincolnshire Poacher, a pub that promised good beer, good food, and a courtyard out back, which was where they now sat. It was early evening and there was a decided nip in the air, the temperature down below fifty.

“You working?” Lynn asked.

“Yes, later. You?”

Lynn shrugged. “Depends.”

“Martin Hodgson?”

“Yes.”

Lynn had first arrested the youth when he was thirteen, on the run from a children’s home and caught by an alert store detective in Woolworth’s with several hundred pounds’ worth of computer games stashed inside the Head sports bag he’d stolen just an hour before. Since then, he’d been arrested and charged more than thirty times, running a succession of social workers, short-term foster parents, and police officers ragged. Unable to find sufficiently secure local authority accommodation within the county, Martin had finally been sent to a custom-built facility in Northumberland on a temporary basis. When a place became available at the Ambergate Secure Unit, reasonably close to the city, he was brought back and placed there. Eight days later he had escaped and had been living rough ever since.

“Fifteen, isn’t he?” Sharon asked.

Lynn shook her head. “Fourteen.”

“Some future ahead of him.”

Lynn nodded and drank her beer.

By that time, Nicky Snape and Martin Hodgson had met with Martin’s friend, Aasim, and they had decided to go off to Derby, where one of Aasim’s cousins worked as an attendant at the multiplex cinema and could get them in free. The first car Martin broke into they couldn’t get started, but the second, a two-year-old Honda Civic that had been parked on Lenton Road in the shadow of the Castle, that was fine. Aasim had stolen his older brother’s license, so Aasim drove.

“You still applying for CID?” Lynn asked Sharon. They were walking up the Mansfield Road, heading round the block to where Lynn had parked her car.

“Not really,” Sharon said. “Not since the last time.”

“What did they say?”

Sharon laughed. “Asked me if I was interested in a place in the Domestic Violence Unit.”

Sharon had begun her police work in London, for her a second career after a spell in community theater, and domestic violence was where she had quickly become sidelined. Not that it wasn’t important, even interesting, but Sharon bridled at the obviousness of the thinking-woman, black woman, area with high ratio of Afro-Caribbean and Asian families, let her deal with them, she speaks the language. But she didn’t want to be the token friendly face and she didn’t want to be a social worker-she had done her share for her sisters, up and down the motorways of the country, putting on agit-prop plays about incest and wife battering, What she wanted was to be out on the street, solving crime, serious crime, something that would further quicken her wits, sharpen her already sharp reflexes; something to make the adrenaline flow.

And now? Well, most nights, one way or another, she was on the streets at least.

“How d’you feel about Vice?” Lynn asked.

“You mean, am I for it or against it?”

It was Lynn’s turn to laugh. “I meant working it.”

They paused at the corner. Ahead of them, the Victorian headstones of the cemetery on Forest Road East were beginning to stand out, white against the gathering dark. Lower down the hill, the floodlights of a five-a-side soccer pitch were sharpening into focus. The broad expanse of the Recreation Ground eased away to the left, trees shielding the open tarmacked car-park for the daily Park and Ride and, beyond that, the Goose Fair site. It was early yet for many of the prostitutes who worked the area to be on the street, and most of the cars that passed Lynn and Sharon seemed to be heading for other destinations rather than seeking out business. Give it another hour and the curb crawling would have begun in earnest.

“The girls,” Sharon said. “I even like them, sort of. The regulars, anyway. Not the little scrubbers who train over on an Away Day, then scuttle back home on their high heels like Cinderella. They’re the ones who’ll do it without a rubber, some of them, take risks, the stupid tarts.”

“And the boys?” Lynn asked. They were turning the corner into North Sherwood Street, Lynn pleasantly surprised to see her car still there where she’d left it.