Easy Meat

by John Harvey

  “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.”

  “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.

  Three

  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 glasse
s 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?

  She was waiting for him in a small room on the first floor, the only light coming from a long, high window through which he could see bricks and sky. Two of the walls were lined with shelves, sets of tatty books with fraying covers, some of which didn’t seem to have been moved for a long time. Wasn’t there supposed to be a shortage of books? Divine thought. Hadn’t he heard that somewhere? So what was wrong with all these?

  “Miss Campbell?”

  “Hannah.”

  Divine showed her his identification as he introduced himself and sat down across from her, a narrow table in between.

  He could see right off he’d got it wrong. She was younger than he’d imagined, for a start. Middle thirties, maybe; possibly even younger. Scrub the glasses, too. Her hair was longer than he’d pictured, bushing out a little at the sides and back. Light brown. Under a tan jacket she was wearing a lilac top, three buttons to the neck. Lilac or purple, he could never be certain which was which. A black skirt, calf-length, and comfortable shoes on her feet.

  “I spoke with two officers already,” Hannah said. “Explained to them what happened, as best as I know.”

  “Uniform, yes. Routine.”

  “And you’re a detective, isn’t that right? CID, that’s what it means?”

  Divine nodded, resisting the idea that, ever so slightly, she might be sending him up.

  “And you’d like me to tell you what happened?”

  “Yeh, that’s right.”

  She looked at him, the natural cockiness of his face offset by the tiredness round his eyes.

  “Aren’t you going to take notes?” Hannah asked.

  Only when Divine had taken out his notebook and pencil did she begin.

  “So do you think you’ll catch him?”

  “Nicky Snape?”

  “That’s who we’ve been talking about, isn’t it?” They were walking along the bottom corridor, Hannah escorting him off the premises, out of school.

  “You seem pretty certain it was him,” Divine said.

  Hannah shrugged. “My purse disappeared, Nicky disappeared, both at the same time. Added to which, he does seem to have a penchant for this sort of thing.”

  “A what?” Divine wondered again if she were sending him up.

  “Stealing. He’s been in trouble before.”

  The laugh lines crinkled around Divine’s mouth. “Just once or twice.”

  “And you didn’t catch him then?”

  “We caught him right enough, courts bounced him off out again. Can’t hold ’em, you see. Not that young. Twelve when he started, thirteen.” Divine looked around them, windows and doors. “You must know what it’s like, mixing with them every day.”

  Hannah didn’t say anything, carried on walking until they had passed beyond the office and were standing on the shallow steps outside. The building was sending shadows long across the tarmac and there was a bite still in the spring air. Hannah was conscious of Divine looking at her, her neck and breasts.

  “You make it all sound pretty much a waste of time,” she said.

  “Catch him with any of your property still on him, credit cards, say, someone might actuall
y have the nous to stick him away.”

  “And is that likely? Catching him like that, I mean?”

  Divine pushed out his chest a little, stood an extra inch taller. “Best detection figures in the country this year past, you know, Notts.”

  “Really?”

  “Clear-up rate per officer of fourteen cases a year.”

  “That doesn’t seem,” Hannah said, “an awful lot.”

  “Better’n anybody else, though, isn’t it?”

  “Statistics.” Hannah smiled. “To get a real sense of it, you’d need to set that figure against the one for the amount of crime that took place. You know, to see it in the right perspective.”

  “Yes, well,” Divine said, gazing away, “I can’t bring to mind what that was, not exactly.” It was 148 crimes per 1000 of the population, the second highest after Humberside, he knew it by heart. He said, “I’d better be going, then.”

  “All right.” She hesitated a moment longer before turning back into the school.

  “Look, I don’t suppose …” Divine began, a light flush on his cheeks.

  “No,” Hannah said. “I’m sorry, not a chance.”

  Four

  “You’d think,” Skelton said, “when you get something right, the last thing anyone would want to do is mess about with it and run the risk of losing everything you’d gained.”

  From the chair opposite the superintendent’s desk, Resnick grunted something which might be taken for agreement.

  “You know and I know, Charlie,” Skelton went on, “most forces in the country would give their eyeteeth for figures like these.”

  Nodding, Resnick shifted his weight from left buttock onto right. The idea of a Serious Crimes Unit in the county had been mooted before, but now, with changes in the Police Authority, it looked as though it might actually be going to happen.