John Harvey: Off Minor

In the shared living room a sagging three-piece suite, burn marks on its arms, was arranged around the communally rented TV, the VCR, rented copies of Casual Sex, Desire and Hell at Sunset Motel, American Ninja 4: The Annihilation. Unwashed mugs and encrusted bowls spilled from the sink and draining board onto the kitchen floor; the bacon fat layered round the grill pan could have greased any one of them through a cross-Channel swim. Every so often one of the shifting group of five tenants would draw up a rota and stick it to the door of the fridge; within a few days it would be pulled down to write a note for the milkman, light a cigarette.

Raymond kept himself to himself, mumbled “hi” and “bye”; only got on the others’ nerves the way he would lock himself in the bathroom after work for hours, run the hot water till the tank was empty, all the taps were running cold.

On this particular Saturday, Raymond had restricted himself to forty minutes, though he would have stayed longer had the door not been subjected to a series of sharp kicks and the air blue with suggestions as to exactly which perversions he was practicing under the cover of excessive cleanliness.

He hurried out and down the threadbare stairs to his own room, probing the passages of his ears with a Q-tip as he went. The small, frameless mirror propped on the windowsill revealed a curving line of pimples-whiteheads rather than blackheads-at the corner of his left eye. He popped these with his fingernails, wiping them clean under the arms of his deep blue sweatshirt, where it was unlikely to be seen. He was wearing brown cords, ten quid in the sale at H amp; M, black shoes with a toecap that might have been Doc Martens but weren’t, red and brown paisley pattern socks; he lifted his leather jacket down from its wire hanger in the wardrobe, feeling good about the way the jacket tilted just a fraction to one side-the weight of the knife.

As yet the Polish Club was quiet; recorded music filtered through from another room. The line of vodka drinkers at the bar was only one deep. Resnick allowed himself to be guided to a corner table, well clear of the crowd to come, the dancing that would inevitably start. He had been no more than mildly surprised at Marian Witzak’s call, glad enough that the responsibility for a decision had been removed. A bone of contention from years before, when he had been a young DC and married to Elaine, that his nights off were so few and far between. Now they seemed so many.

“You did not mind that I telephoned?”

Resnick poured the rest of the Pilsner Urquel into his glass and shook his head.

“Such short notice.”

“It was all right.”

“I wondered, perhaps, if you might think it rude.”

“Marian, it’s fine.”

“You know, Charles …” She paused and her fingers, narrow and long, moved along the stem of her glass. Resnick thought of the piano near the French windows of her living room, sheet music for a polonaise, the slowly yellowing keys. “… sometimes I think, if it were left for you to contact me, we would not very often meet.”

Although she had been in England all of her adult life, Marian still talked as if her English had been learned from watching untold episodes of The Forsyte Saga in scratchy black and white, from lessons spent mimicking the teacher’s words.

“ This is a pencil. What is this? ”

“ This is a pencil. ”

She was wearing a plain black dress with a high neck and a white belt, tied at one side into a loose bow. As usual her hair had been tightly drawn back and pinned precisely into place.

“You know, Charles, I was to go to the theater tonight. Shakespeare. A touring company from London, very good, I think. Highly spoken of. All week I have been looking forward to this. It is not so often there is something cultural coming now to the city.” Marian Witzak sipped her drink and shook her head. “It is a shame.”

“So what happened?” Resnick asked. “It was canceled?”

“Oh, no.”

“Sold out?”

Marian sighed a small, ladylike sigh, the kind that would once have made drawing-room pulses race. “My friends, Charles, the ones who were taking me, late this afternoon they telephoned. I was choosing already my dress. The husband is ill; Frieda, she has never learned to drive …” She looked sideways at Resnick and smiled. “I thought, never mind, I shall go on my own, I can still enjoy the play; I run my bath, continue to get ready, but all the time, here in the back of my mind, I know, Charles, that I can never go there alone.”

“Marian.”

“Yes?”

“I’m not clear what you’re saying.”

“Charles, which night is this? It is Saturday night; Friday, Saturday night, it is no longer safe to go into the city, a woman, a woman like myself, alone.”

Resnick glanced at the glass and the Pilsner bottle alongside it: both were empty. “You could have ordered a taxi.”

“And coming home? I telephoned the theater, the performance finishes at ten thirty-five, you know the only places I can get a taxi at that time of the evening, Charles. All the way down to the square, or by the Victoria Hotel. And every pavement, everywhere you go, there are these gangs of young men …” Two bright spots of color showed high on her cheekbones, accentuating the paleness of her face, her concave cheeks. “It is not safe; Charles, not any more. It is as if, little by little, they have taken over. Bold, loud, and we look the other way; or stay at home and bolt our doors.”

Resnick wanted to contradict her, say that she exaggerated, it simply wasn’t so. Instead he sat quiet and toyed with his glass, remembering the senior officer at the Police Federation conference warning that the police were in danger of losing control of the streets; knowing that there were cities, and he did not just mean London, where bulletproof vests and body armor were routinely carried in police vehicles on weekend patrol.

Marian touched his hand. “We do not have to think back so many years, Charles, to remember gangs of young men marauding the streets. It was right to be afraid then.”

“Marian, that wasn’t us. It was our parents. Grandparents, even.”

“And so we should forget?”

“That wasn’t what I said.”

“Then what?”

“It isn’t the same.”

Marian’s eyes had the darkness of marbled stone, of freshly turned earth. “Because of those young men, our families fled. Those who were not imprisoned, not in the ghetto, not already dead. If we do not remember, how can it not happen again?”

Raymond had been sitting in the Malt House for the best part of an hour, two pints and a short, watching the women flocking in and out again, brightly colored and shrill voiced. Off to one side of the room, a DJ played songs Raymond half-remembered, without ever knowing either the singer or the words. Only now and again something would strike a chord, Eddie Van Halen, ZZ Top, one of those white bands that came straight at you with plenty of noise.

Raymond was getting fidgety, trying not to notice the youths near the bar, putting the eye on him every so often, wanting him to stare them back, cock an eyebrow, respond. Oh, he knew they’d not start anything right there; wait till he got up to go and follow him out on to the street. A few shouted remarks as he turned down towards the Council House, jostling him then as they fanned out around him, pushing past. He’d seen another lad bundled into a dress-shop window just the week before, right there, that street. By the time they’d finished with him, both eyes were closing fast, his face like something Raymond might heft on to his shoulder at work, blood smearing his overalls.

Not that they would deal with Raymond that easily; not like before. Not now he had something with which to strike back.