John Harvey: Easy Meat

The last words Norma Snape said to her youngest that Thursday: “You let me get my hands on you, you little tripeshanks, and I’ll wring your miserable neck!” Like so much of Norma’s life, their memory would haunt her, words like angry fingers down her throat, again and again until she all but choked. And Nicky-it’s doubtful if, between the slam of the door and the ring of his own high-pitched laughter, Nicky heard a thing.

It had started the way it so often did, the four of them tumbling over one another inside the small, flat-fronted terraced house: Nicky’s sister, Sheena, out of the bathroom at last and slamming from room to room in search of a clean blouse, her green factory overalls, a right shoe; Nicky, barely fifteen, down the stairs three at a time, chanting along to the Walkman that hung from the belt of his jeans. “Mum, you seen my blouse?” Sheena called. “Mum, where’s all the toast?” “Mum, I thought you were going to iron these?” Only the eldest, Shane, fair hair and slate-gray eyes, eight days short of his eighteenth birthday, was still flush in the center of the worn settee, eating toast and drinking his third mug of tea while he watched The Big Breakfast on TV.

“Mum …”

Norma, hair not combed out, still not properly dressed, opened the back door to let out the gray cat, and the dog, which had been scratching at the outside of the door unheeded, scuttled to its empty bowl and began to bark.

“For Christ’s sake,” Norma said. “Don’t you start.”

On the enamel drainer alongside the sink, used tea bags bled orange onto spilled milk; a half-eaten bowl of soggy Coco Pops sat speckled with coffee granules. Shane’s best shirt hung drying from the back of a chair; cotton knickers made a patchwork quilt along the radiator top. Norma pulled a can of dog food from the back of the fridge and began to search for the opener.

“Nicky, get out of my bloody way!” Sheena’s voice.

“Get out of the way yourself!”

From the other room, Norma heard a punch and a slap and then, above the sound of the TV, Shane’s warning shout. Norma stubbed out the smoldering end of the cigarette she had lit earlier and forgotten, and fished another from the packet. Unable to find her lighter, she bent her head and lit the cigarette from the stove.

“Mum, I thought you were going to iron this blouse?” Sheena stood in the doorway, cream blouse in one hand, outline of her ribs visible between her off-white bra and the top of her short black skirt; she still didn’t seem to have found her other shoe.

“Will you cover yourself up, for Christ’s sake,” Norma said.

“Yeh,” said Nicky, pushing past her into the kitchen, “nobody wants to see your feeble tits anyway.”

“No? Then how come you’re always hanging round outside the bathroom every morning?”

“’Cause I’m nearly shitting myself, that’s why, waiting for you to plaster your spots with Polyfilla.”

Sheena swung out at him with her blouse, flicking it at the kidney-shaped burn mark discoloring the left side of his face. Dancing out of the way, laughing, Nicky collided with the table and then, as he stumbled off-balance, kicked the dog’s food all across the floor.

Jesus, Norma thought, when’s he ever going to grow up? “Right!” she shouted. “That’s enough. Nicky, you get down there and clean up that mess. And Sheena, get shifting out of here or you’ll miss your bus. A few more times late and you’ll be for the sack.”

“Again,” laughed Nicky.

“Shut it!” Norma said.

“I don’t suppose,” said Shane, stirring himself during a commercial break, “there’s any more tea in the pot?”

“That’s right,” said Norma, “there’s not.”

As Nicky went to move the dog’s bowl, the animal nipped at his hand and Nicky hit it smack on the nose with the bowl’s edge. Straightening its front legs, the dog showed its teeth and growled but then, thinking better of it, backed off into the corner and whined instead.

“Pick on someone your own size,” said Shane, fetching his brother a kick in the shin.

“Nicky.” Norma pointed from the doorway. “I want that cleared up by the time I’m back down here. And you can sort out that crap by the sink as well.”

“Why bloody me?”

“Because I told you to, that’s why.”

Shane chuckled and went back to watch the TV.

When Norma came back down ten minutes later, wearing an old jumper and sagging stretch pants to do her morning stint of cleaning in the pub, she found Nicky with his hand inside her bag, purse open, the last ten pounds she had about to make their way into his pocket.

“You scuttering little bastard! What d’you think you’re doing?”

They both knew the answer to that.

Fear for a moment brightening his eyes, Nicky squeezed around the back of the table and made a dash for the back door. For a big woman, Norma moved fast, faster than Nicky might have thought. He had the door six inches open when with the flat of one hand she slammed it shut and with the other she slapped the side of his face, where the skin wrinkled liverish up from his neck.

“You thieving geck!”

“Here.” Nicky held the two five pound notes towards her, high above his head.

As Norma reached for them, he swiveled fast and left her catching air, the door yanked open wide enough and then pushed shut.

“You let me get my hands on you, you little tripeshanks, and I’ll wring your miserable neck!”

She followed his laughter out into the yard, the bins and the empty rabbit hutch, the rusting trolley that had somehow found its way from Kwik Save and never made its way back. Stepping through the gate into the narrow alley that ran between the rows of houses, she started after her son as he ran, not hurrying now, a lazy jinking step between the dog shit and the broken glass. At the alley’s end he stopped and waved the stolen money once in triumph, before disappearing from sight into the street.

Norma shivered and turned back towards the house.

“Locking up, that’s what he wants.” Sheena was standing with her overall buttoned, ready to leave.

“Here,” Shane said, offering his mother his packet of Silk Cut. “How much did he get this time?”

Lighting the cigarette, Norma drew in the smoke and slowly exhaled. “Only all I had.” And then, as she lowered herself onto a chair, “You’d think somewhere along the line he’d learn his bloody lesson, wouldn’t you?” But even the petrol bomb, thrown by an angry neighbor whose house Nicky had burgled twice within the same week, hadn’t done that. Oh, yes, when he’d been laid up in the hospital, sure enough, Nicky had confessed the error of his ways; and those evenings when Norma had patiently tended to the burn marks on his arms and legs, blistering across his chest up to his neck and face, then Nicky had promised her, time and again, that he would change.

From his trouser pocket, Shane took a small fold of tens and twenties and pressed one of the twenties into her hand. Norma looked into the gray of his eyes. Don’t ask, a voice told her, if you don’t want to know. “Thanks,” she said. “Thanks, love. Thanks.”

Norma had grown up in Rotherham, the daughter of a steelworker and a mother who, in the lengthening intervals between six children, had worked behind the counter in the local shop. Norma had been the last born, the one who broke her mother’s spirit and finally her heart.

By the time she was three years old, her father had thrown in his lot with a wall-eyed girl of seventeen who had come to the house one evening selling lucky heather; Norma knew him only as a memory, an envelope of curling photographs, an edge of bitterness, sharp on the blade of her mother’s tongue.