Easy Meat (2 page)

She met Peter at Rosa’s sister’s wedding; after the reception they went back to the house together, Norma and Peter, Rosa and some bloke none of them had set eyes on before or since. Rosa found a bottle of Drambuie and they drank it from chipped mugs; the man nobody knew passed round a few splifs. When they paired off, Norma went with Peter. What harm was there in that? A quick shag between friends.

The harm was she fell in love.

Small and gentle was Peter, with delicate fingers that could read her body as if it were Braille, soft dark eyes and lashes, long and curving like a girl’s. Whenever Norma rolled on top of him in the night, she was frightened she might crush the breath from out of him.

He played with Shane and rocked him on his knee, even though Shane was slow to laugh and quick to cry. Norma read the look in his eye. Sheena was born when Shane was two, and Nicky no more than eleven months later.

It was you drove your father away.

Nicky screamed whenever Peter touched him, kicked out if ever he picked him up. It got so that he would start to cry whenever Peter walked into the room. The only one who could quieten Nicky was Norma herself; his eyes would follow her from place to place, as soon as he could crawl he would only crawl to her, the only way she could get him to sleep was to take him into her bed.

Peter spent nights on a borrowed mattress laid on the floor, nights on the couch, nights away from home. “I can’t take this,” he told Norma. “I can’t take this any more.”

“It’s all right, love,” Norma said. “Nicky’ll come round, you see. You’re his dad, after all.”

But Peter stopped coming round himself before the boy had the chance. When Norma arrived back from the shops one afternoon, all of his things had been cleared out of the cupboards, the suit he had worn for best, so strangely like the one her own father wore in one of those old photographs, no longer hung in its place inside the wardrobe.

There was no note. Twice a year, Christmas and birthday, he would send a card to Sheena, always with a different postmark, never with a return address.

Norma told everyone she didn’t care: hadn’t she and Rosa always said, men were shits. But when Shane suddenly went off the rails a few years later, she was forced to admit she couldn’t cope, not with them all, and Shane went off for the first of his two spells in care. Just to give your mum a break, love, the social worker had explained. He’s a good lad, she’d said to Norma, I’m sure he understands. If he did or not, Shane never said. Especially after being released back home the second time, Shane never said much at all.

“You not going into work this morning,” Shane asked, “or what?”

Norma was sitting at the kitchen table, smoke drifting from her cigarette. “Yes,” she said. “Yeh, soon.”

Shane shrugged. “Suit yourself. I’m off out, right?”

Norma nodded: one more cup of tea, one more cigarette, one more something, she’d pick herself up and get on her way.

Two

“I don’t want anyone to get too carried away about this,” the Head of Geography said, wriggling out of his anorak as he came into the staff room, “but there was a rumored sighting of a lesser spotted Snape earlier this morning.”

“In the general vicinity, is that?” asked one of the Maths staff, glancing up from the crossword. “Or actually, you know …?”

“On the premises, apparently. Somewhere in the vicinity of the toilets. Natural habitat.”

“We ought to put a sign on the notice board, perhaps? Must be quite a few members of staff who’ve never had the chance to see one at close quarters. After all, I don’t suppose he’ll be here long.”

“Difficult to predict,” the Head of Geography said, “the migratory habits of the Snape.”

From her seat across the room, where she was vainly trying to get another set of English folders marked before the bell, Hannah Campbell didn’t think it was so funny. The last time Nicky Snape had showed up in her class, a perfectly decent lesson on haiku had been fatally disrupted in less time than it took to count to seventeen. Then again, she knew that if Nicky weren’t in school, the chances were he was out getting himself into even more trouble, adding to the list of offenses and misdemeanors that, even in this catchment area, was truly impressive. She knew all of that, but even so … Hannah sighed as the bell sounded, assigned a mark to the open folder, capped her red uni-ball micro deluxe, and climbed to her feet. Another day.

Nicky was letting a couple of the younger kids examine the label of his black cotton Hugo Boss shirt—not the right size for his skinny frame, but it was difficult to be particular when you picked up clothes the way Nicky did most of his. Today he wore it loose, so that was fine, unbuttoned over a black T-shirt that had been yanked high to hide as much as it could of the burns which spread up from his chest. His black denim jeans turned over at the waist. On his feet were Reebok trainers, scuffed and coming away at one heel; they would have to be replaced.

“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 glasses 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.”