Easy Meat

by John Harvey

  On this particular Saturday there seemed to be at least two players in home team shirts—minimum wage recruits from a youth training scheme, most likely—that Resnick was at odds to recognize and, from the way they began playing, the rest of the side were none the wiser.

  Trying to defend their goal, two County defenders collided with each other, jumping for the same ball. For Resnick it was the last straw. Fifteen minutes before the end, head bowed, he turned and headed for the exit, shoulder to shoulder with all those other supporters who had opted to do the same.

  After that he knew a night in his own company was not a good idea: he considered phoning Hannah on the off-chance she wasn’t already going out, and if that were so she might consider going out with him. But by the time he had reached the main road, he had dismissed the idea from his head. Against all of his previous inclinations, he would go to the Polish Club instead.

  He had bought the light-gray suit six years ago or more and in so far as he had a favorite, this was it; there was only one small stain that he could find, a dark patch near the lapel which mostly came away when he scraped at it with a fingernail. He ironed a pale-blue shirt and knotted his dark-blue tie with more than usual care. The bar in the Polish Club divided the large room into two unequal halves, and in the larger of these, the one with a small stage for the band, he found Marian seated at the bar.

  “Charles! You are here! Come, come, come over and join us. Oh, you don’t know how good it is to see you.” As Marian squeezed his hand and enthusiastically kissed both of his cheeks, Resnick thought he was beginning to get the idea.

  Wearing a black dress with a discreet white bow, a single strand of pearls at her neck, she was surrounded by several of those married men in late middle age whose fortnightly frisson came from flirting with her out of earshot of their wives. Her hair had been pushed up high on her head and was held in place with a silver barrette; silver earrings accentuated the slenderness of her neck. She was an elegant woman, some would say beautiful; some of those standing by her, Resnick assumed, frequently did. They had stepped back reluctantly to let him through and now continued to stand there, grudgingly, while Marian plied Resnick with questions, offered to buy him the vodka of his choice, smiled into his eyes. Ten minutes more and they had slunk away, back to their wives.

  “You’re looking happy, Marian.”

  “Not beautiful?”

  “Of course.”

  “Desirable?” She was laughing at him with her eyes.

  Why was it, Resnick wondered, and not for the first time, that in all the years he had known her—since, almost, they had been children—he had never entertained about her one sexual thought? Was it that, along with her beauty, she wore her Polishness so obviously on her sleeve? That to think of her as a partner—any kind of serious partner—would be to step back into a life that he had all but rejected. His parents’ life, a life in exile. Strangers in a strange land.

  He looked around the room at the women in their flared dresses, the men, some of them, in bow ties, the children who skittered between the tables got up like miniature editions of their elders; out on the dance floor, two couples essaying a waltz to the accordion-led band; photographs of fallen generals on the walls.

  “Charles, what are you thinking?”

  Resnick smiled. “Oh nothing important.”

  “Some dreadful crime?”

  He shook his head. “Marian, I promise you it wasn’t that.”

  For a moment she rested her hand on his arm. “You know, Charles, one of the things that would make me most happy? If one evening, like this evening, you would walk in here with a beautiful woman on your arm, someone with whom you are in love.”

  Despite himself, Resnick laughed. “Marian, you’re just a dreamer.”

  “Oh.” She brought her face close. “And you are not?”

  “I think,” Resnick said, finishing his vodka and turning towards the band, “it might almost be time for us to have that dance.”

  Waltz over, the elderly couples moved slowly back towards their seats, the accordionist tested his fingers with an exploratory flourish and announced the first polka of the evening. Marian slipped out of her high heels into a pair of flat shoes she had brought expressly for the purpose, and took Resnick’s arm as they stepped onto the floor.

  Forty minutes later, with only two brief intervals, they were still there, perspiring lightly, Resnick’s tie loose at his neck, top button of his shirt unfastened.

  “You see.” Marian laughed, colliding with his chest as the number came to an unruly end. “You see what fun you are having? And why you should come here more often?”

  Resnick dabbed at his temples and looked longingly towards the bar. “I think I need a drink.”

  She caught at his hands. “In a little while.” Mischief danced in her eyes. “I had a talk with my friend the bandleader earlier. I think I know what they are going to play now.”

  When Carl Perkins wrote it, it’s doubtful if he ever imagined it sounding exactly this way, but Polish rock’n’roll was what it was, “Blue Suede Shoes” what it is. One of the things Resnick had learned from his uncle, the tailor who had been to America and returned with a love of jazz and the jitterbug, was how to jive; who Marian had learned it from, Resnick had never known. But together, Resnick’s unbuttoned jacket performing a dance of its own, while not sensational they were pretty good.

  “Roll Over Beethoven.”

  “Tutti Frutti.”

  “Little Queenie.”

  Resnick missed his footing, failed to catch Marian’s outstretched hand, and came close to trampling a small child underfoot. It was enough. And this time he would brook no argument.

  They walked around into the second bar and found two seats; while Marian went to refresh herself in the Ladies, Resnick chatted with the waistcoated barman and came away with two cold beers. I wonder, he thought, whether Hannah can dance like that? Oh, Charles, and you are not a dreamer? He should never have let her into his mind. When Marian returned, he excused himself and went outside to the phone. He had no real expectation that she would be in, but she picked up on the third ring.

  “Hello?”

  “Hannah?”

  “Yes.”

  A slight pause, and then, “I didn’t think you’d be there.”

  “Who is this?”

  When he told her there was a small silence before she said, “And was that why you phoned, because you thought I wouldn’t be here?”

  “No.”

  He could hear music, faint and distant, something she was listening to, guitars. “Is it too late,” he asked, “for you to meet me for a drink?”

  Twenty

  Hannah had gone to the smaller of the two Broadway cinemas that afternoon and seen a Tunisian film, The Silences of the Palace; herself and perhaps half a dozen others watching a woman returning from exile to a newly independent country and slowly coming to terms with the demands of present and past. The woman, a singer, among other women for whom silence was the only option. Hannah had sat at the end of one row, close against the wall, trying not to fight against the deliberately slow passing of time, fighting her prejudice against the harsh sounds of Arabic. Gradually, the film had won her over, so that, by the end, she was immersed in its rhythm, and when she left, the voices and the movement in the Café Bar next door seemed relentless and loud. She resented the traffic and the crowds out on the streets. Crossing the end of Clumber Street towards the Old Market Square, she thought she spotted Sheena Snape among a group of half a dozen or so girls, noisily blocking the pavement outside the bank.

  There were young men in the square wearing football shirts with black and white stripes, threatening to push one another into the fountain. Hannah maneuvered around them and walked up St. James Street and past the Tales of Robin Hood, heading uphill towards Lenton, where she lived in a terraced Victorian house overlooking a swathe of grass and a children’s playground, a church, and a crown bowling green.

  The light wa
s blinking twice on her answerphone.

  There were people, she supposed, who could take off their coat, change their shoes, put on the kettle, empty the rubbish, do any number of other things before pressing the button marked “play.” She was not one of them.

  The first voice was her father’s, calling from the French village to which he had moved three years before. Now his time was taken up in restoring a crumbling barn with the woman for whom he had left Hannah’s mother, an architectural student and would-be writer almost ten years younger than Hannah herself.

  “She’ll leave you, Dad,” Hannah had said, out there to visit last year, the pair of them sitting in the shade while Alexa busied herself inside. “You know that, don’t you?”

  He had taken both Hannah’s hands in his and kissed the bridge of her nose. “Of course she will. In time.” He winked. “Just so long as we get this place finished first, eh? Then at least she’ll leave me with a roof over my head to be miserable under.”

  On the tape, his voice was robust, happy; happier than she could ever remember him seeming in that commuter town in Kent, in every day on the seven twenty-three, home on the six fifty-four.

  Hannah thought the second caller might be her mother, the family symmetry perfect, but it was Joanne, a colleague from work; she had a doubles court booked at the tennis center at ten tomorrow morning and someone had dropped out, did Hannah want to take their place? Hannah thought that she might; she dialed Joanne’s number, but the line was engaged.

  She would try later. Now she made the tea and drank it with a slice of coffee-and-almond cake and that day’s Independent. There was a frozen lasagna she could pop into the microwave, the makings of a salad, two piles of folders on the table waiting to be marked. She had treated herself to the new Marge Piercy and it sat, fat and white, on the arm of her chair in the window, asking to be read. The Longings of Women. Ah, yes, Hannah thought, we all know about those.

  She was just pouring herself a glass of wine when the phone called her into the other room; certain it would be Joanne, checking about the tennis, she was ill-prepared for her mother’s brittle cheeriness, wanting Hannah’s advice about holidays—walking in Crete or painting water colors at Flatford Mill? Hannah understood it was her mother’s way of saying, see how well I’m surviving, being positive, still turning your father’s desertion into an oasis of opportunity. Go to Crete, Hannah wanted to say, you’re more likely to meet a man. Some swarthy shepherd who will adore your trim, well-articulated body and white skin. As if that were all she—her mother—any of them—needed. The Longings of Women indeed!

  Fifteen minutes later, not unkindly, Hannah told her mother there was marking she had to finish, replaced the receiver, and took wine and book upstairs to the bay windowed room which she used as her study and which looked out over the park. She had arranged a wicker armchair stuffed with cushions close against the window and, curtains open, she liked to sit there in the evenings, reading, glancing out at intervals to watch the light fading through the tops of the trees.

  Her father had met Alexa in the same year that she had started living with Jim, her second attempt at a stable relationship and, she had been certain, the one which would succeed. Jim’s predecessor, Andrew, had been a volatile Irishman she had met when he was on a sabbatical from Queen’s College, Belfast: a robust, round-faced scholar who wrote long, earnest—and, Hannah now realized, extremely bad—poems about the blackness of peat and the saving grace of the pudendum. Andrew, who on a good day could put an entire bottle of Jameson’s away without blinking, and whose idea of good sex was to push her up against a convenient table and hoist her skirt up around her neck. On the first couple of occasions, though she thought it was politically incorrect to admit it, Hannah had found this distinctly exciting; after that, it had been a case of diminishing returns until all she associated Andrew’s love-making with were sore thighs and bruised hips.

  Jim was different: a peripatetic music teacher whom she had first encountered schooling a nervous thirteen-year-old in National Health glasses through the first movement of the Mozart clarinet concerto. Jim had taken Hannah’s musical education in hand, too, had got her to realize there was more to Benjamin Britten than his love affair with Peter Pears and that it was possible to see a day of concerts featuring all six Bartók string quartets as more than an endurance test. They had lain in her bed and listened to Schubert, talking about where they would live when they were married, making up names for their children—Bela and Tasmin had been Jim’s favorites—and laughing about which reed instruments they would learn to play. A little less than two years later, Hannah still found signs of him around the house, a clarinet reed stuffed down behind the cushions of the sofa, the score of Billy Budd among the dusty folders in which she kept her old college lecture notes. Peripatetic had proved to be the word.

  At the end of another chapter, Hannah closed the book and stood for a while at the window, gazing out. Lights blinked like fireflies from across the park. Downstairs, she called Joanne and said yes to tennis, picked up a folder of work and put it back down, told herself she shouldn’t really have another glass of wine, and then, after she had poured it, crossed the room to the stereo and rummaged through the piles of CDs which, since Jim’s departure, had resumed their previous disorder. Mary Chapin Carpenter, Nanci Griffith, Rosanne Cash? She thought “Blue Moon with Heartache” might be a little difficult to take. “Shut up and Kiss Me!”, though, that was positive, nothing wrong with that. Maybe she should buy an extra copy and send one to her mum, something to put in her bag for Crete, along with sunblock and a Greek phrase book. Hannah had just set Mary Chapin Carpenter to play when the phone rang again. She nearly decided to ignore it.

  “Hello?”

  “Hannah?”

  “Yes.” She had no idea who it was.

  “I didn’t think you’d be there.”

  Then why on earth did you call, she thought, still trawling through the file of possibilities. Someone on the staff? A friend of Joanne’s? Her partner for tomorrow? “Who is this?”

  “Charlie Resnick, you remember me …”

  Of course she remembered. She did now, now she recognized the voice. She could even picture him standing there, bulky, telephone to his ear, his mouth. “And was that why you phoned?” she said, smiling a little. “Because you thought I wouldn’t be here?” She was surprised at how pleased she was that he had.

  “No,” he said, and then, “Is it too late for you to meet me for a drink?”

  It was only when she put down the phone that Hannah realized she didn’t know exactly where the Polish Club was; she hoped the taxi driver would.

  She had changed outfits three times waiting for the cab to arrive, reverting finally to what she had been wearing when Resnick phoned, a soft gray cotton round-neck top over recently washed blue jeans, black shoes, flat and comfortable, on her feet. Front door open, she lifted a stone-colored linen jacket from the coat rack in the hall.

  Resnick was waiting for her when she arrived, moving from the shadows at the top of the steps as her taxi drew away.

  “You found it okay?”

  “The driver did.”

  “You’ve been here before?”

  Hannah shook her head.

  The elderly man with white hair brushed back and a blue blazer, buttons shining, looked up at Resnick as he signed Hannah in, Resnick avoiding the questions in his watery blue eyes.

  “Look,” Resnick said; he had stopped her in the hallway beyond the desk, hand barely touching her arm. She was vaguely aware of deep red wallpaper, framed photographs, music from another room. “There are people here I know, I can either introduce you or …”

  “Or we can hide in a corner.”

  He smiled. “Something like that.”

  Hannah smiled back. “I’m not the hiding type.”

  Marian Witczak took Hannah’s hand as a doctor might receive a slide on which a rare and potentially dangerous specimen had been prepared. She made the smallest of sm
all talk while Resnick was at the bar and, when he returned, excused herself onto the dance floor. So much for her wanting to see me on the arm of a beautiful woman, Resnick thought.

  Hannah accepted the glass of lager and relaxed against the worn leather seat. “When did that finish?” she asked, looking off in the direction Marian had taken.

  “What exactly?”

  “Your whatever-you’d-call it. Relationship. Affair.”

  “With Marian?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  Resnick shook his head. “It never started.”

  Setting down her glass, Hannah smiled. “Well, that explains the welcome, at least.”

  They sat and talked for maybe half an hour, respective jobs, contrasting afternoons, Notts County seemingly as foreign to Hannah as Tunisia was to Resnick.

  “You never go to the cinema?”

  “Not really.”

  “I go to Broadway most weeks, I suppose. They show all kinds of stuff. You know, things you’re not likely to see elsewhere, except on Channel Four.”

  “Like films from Tunisia.” Resnick smiled.

  Hannah nodded. He looked years younger when he did that, the broadening of the mouth, brightening of the eyes.

  “You should go,” she said. “They have some good films. They’re not all Tunisian. And besides …”—smiling—“… they serve good food.”

  What had it been, she was thinking, the sauce that he had dripped onto his suit and failed to wipe away? Bolognese? Matriciana?

  The call for last orders came from behind the bar. They were on their feet when the accordion swayed into the last waltz.

  “Should we?” Resnick said, head angled, fingers reaching again for her arm.

  “I don’t think so,” Hannah said.

  But once outside she slipped her arm through his and suggested they walk a little. He asked her where she lived and she him. At the junction of Sherwood Rise and Gregory Boulevard, a black-and-white cab came towards them with its For Hire light shining and Resnick stepped out into the road, arm raised.