Easy Meat

Thirty-seven

He saw her rounding the corner into Broad Street, hurrying a little, but not so much that she didn’t pause to check her reflection in the window of an Italian restaurant: a linen jacket over a pale-blue top, dark-blue, wide-cut linen trousers. She looked, Resnick thought, lovely.

“Charlie, I’m sorry I’m late.”

“No, it’s me. I was early.”

In a slightly proprietorial way, Hannah touched her lips to his cheek. “I phoned ahead,” she said, “and reserved two tickets, just in case.”

Resnick reached for his wallet, but she stopped him, her fingers circling his wrist. “My treat.”

They took their seats just as the film was about to start. A street scene in what Resnick presumed was New York: the Alfreton Road it certainly was not. Too bright, too brash, too fast-moving-all those garish signs and yellow cabs. But then the camera followed a number of the people into the calmer space of an old theater, men and women dressed casually, greeting one another as old friends. Actors, Resnick supposed. Hannah had told him-all she had said by way of warning-it was about actors rehearsing a Russian play. Well that, he supposed, was what this was.

A fortyish man complaining to an older woman about how hard he has been having to work, so many jobs, different times of the day. When they sat down, she asked him if he would like a drink, and the man shook his head ruefully and told her he was trying to stop drinking vodka in the middle of the day.

Vodka: Resnick’s attention perked up. And as they continued to talk, this couple, their language barely changing, he gradually realized that what he was hearing was the beginning of the play. Without announcement or much preamble, the thing itself had begun. Uncle Vanya. They were watching it now.

For close to two hours, Resnick fidgeted a little in his seat-legs too long, body weight not distributed quite right-but his attention rarely wavered from the screen; and when it did, it was only to glance across at Hannah, her close profile, the degree to which she was held rapt. Near the end, the way she pulled a tissue from her bag and dabbed away the tears.

“Well, Charlie, what did you think of that?” They were on their way downstairs, people milling round them in a haze of conversation.

What did he think?

That he had recognized them, these people, quarrelling endlessly about the estate on which they lived and worked, promises not clearly made and never kept, love which remained undeclared until it was too late. The best hopes of their lives had passed them by because they had been afraid to act. To speak. To say what they felt. These people he knew.

“I mean,” they were down at the ground floor now, others spilling round them on all sides, “did you like it? The film.”

Smiling, Resnick surprised her by taking her arm. “Yes, I did. Now,” steering her over towards the Café Bar, “did you say something about eating in here?”

It was busy but they found a table close against the back wall and Resnick ate small pieces of chicken steeped in garlic, while Hannah picked at something spicy with red peppers and aubergine and talked about the film. Resnick content for the most part to listen, sneak occasional glances around the room, chip in the odd word or two, sip his wine.

“Come on,” he said, outside, “let’s get a cab. I’ll see you home.”

“It’s a nice night,” Hannah said. “We could walk.”

And they did, through the square and up Derby Road, Hannah asking him about his marriage, what had happened, no need for him to talk about it if he didn’t want to or if it made him feel uncomfortable, it wasn’t any of her business, but talk he did, mapping the slow shifts of his and Elaine’s relationship in a way that moved her, as she had been moved earlier, in the cinema. His slow, careful telling of it affecting her with the pain it still rekindled for him, the sense, still there, of loss; the generosity, finally, with which he spoke about Elaine, despite her leaving him, falling in love with another man.

“Do you ever hear from her, Charlie?”

“Not really, no.”

They were crossing at the lights below the Savoy, not so far to go, down past the small hotel and then a left turn onto the path beside the park which led to Hannah’s house. Which was where, some fifty yards along, the man stumbled out of the bushes directly in front of them, Hannah jumping back with a stifled scream and Resnick instantly on guard, adrenaline firing in. The man swayed, face a pale blur in the light from the upstairs windows opposite, and then made to hurry past, but when Resnick moved across to block his path, raised a hand to detain him, he cowered back and began to shout.

“It’s okay, it’s okay,” Resnick said, cautiously moving close, the man not shouting now, but mumbling over and over, words draining into one another, “Keepbackkeepbackkeepback.”

He made a sudden dart, trying to squeeze past between Resnick and the fence and Resnick caught him by the arm and swung him round and all resistance went out of the man and he cried. There were cuts, Resnick could see now, high on his face, a broad gash above his left eye, a graze all down one cheek.

“It’s all right,” Resnick said quietly, and then, to the man, taking another careful step towards him, “No one’s going to hurt you, it’s okay.”

“What can we do?” Hannah asked anxiously.

“Nip home. Phone for an ambulance.”

The man began to scream.

“Go on,” Resnick said, Hannah hesitating. “Do it now.”

“Not the hospital,” the man was moaning. “Please not.”

“Why don’t we take him to my place?” Hannah said. “He could sit down a minute, calm down. The hospital’s only up the road after all.”

Resnick was thinking, thinking about the marks on the man’s face, how they might have been caused. “All right,” he said. “Maybe that’s best.”

Hannah moved past him to the man, who flinched when she made as if to touch him, but agreed finally to walk beside her towards the terraced houses at the end, walking slowly as if each step hurt.

He was older than Resnick had first judged, mid-thirties he now would have said, wearing black jeans with patches of dirt down one side and below the knees, a collarless black shirt spotted with blood, white Nike Air trainers with a blue stripe.

“Here.” Hannah coming towards him with a dampened cloth to wipe away some of the blood, the man sitting up to her kitchen table, blinking at the light.

Resnick stopped her with her name, not loud but firm, and she looked across at him, head tilted in a question. “Gloves,” Resnick said. “Kitchen gloves, something like that. Use them. Just in case.”

Hannah hesitated on the verge of questioning him, challenging, then did as he said. While she cleaned the man up, Resnick made tea.

“What’s your name?” Hannah asked, and when he didn’t reply, said, “I’m Hannah. Hannah Campbell, this is my house.”

“Declan,” he said, so quietly they had to strain to hear. “Declan Farrell.”

“Would you like to tell us, Declan,” Resnick said, sliding a mug across the table towards him, “just what happened?”

Farrell stirred sugar slowly into his tea, eyes flicking from one to the other, never still in his seat, forever shifting, forward and back, crossing and recrossing his legs, tugging at his jeans, not making any attempt to lift the cup to his mouth.

“You were going to tell us,” Resnick said, “how this happened.”

Farrell started, stopped, started again. “This man … This man …” He closed his eyes, began, almost silently, to sob. There was a wedding ring, Resnick noticed, broad and dull, on his hand.

“Go on,” Resnick said gently when the crying had ceased. “This man …”

Farrell sniffed loudly, wincing, rubbing tenderly at his eyes. “I was in the park,” he began, then stopped a second time.

“Isn’t it locked up at night?” Hannah asked. “The park.”

He nodded, fidgeting again on his seat. “You can get in, it’s easy. Over the fence. People do.”

Resnick nodded, sitting forward; he knew what people did. “I think you should tell us what happened,” he said.

“I was in the park, walking, cutting across like, you know. On my way home from the pub. I was caught short. Needed to use the Gents.” He paused and looked at the floor. “I was just coming out when this bloke, he … he just come at me with this thing, this-I don’t know what it was-bat, I suppose.”

Resnick thinking, remembering: mud and grass stains on the dead man’s clothes, a smear of earth thick on the fleshy palm of his right hand, a varnished implement, a bat of some kind, baseball seemed the more likely.

Farrell continuing, saying, “He just started hitting me, here, you can see. I yelled at him, tried to get away but he wouldn’t stop. I couldn’t run any more, all I could do was lie down on the ground and cover my head until … until he stopped.”

“He just stopped, no reason?”

“One minute he was hitting me, shouting, you know, bastard, things like that. Then he ran off. I heard him going, but I was too frightened to look up. Not for ages. And then, when I did, well, that was when I met you.”

“He didn’t take your wallet, ask for money, nothing like that?”

Farrell shook his head, not able to look at Resnick for more than moments at a time, squirming on his chair.

Resnick leaned a little towards him and Farrell flinched. “Would you like a cushion?” Resnick said. “You don’t seem comfortable at all.”

“No, no, no, it’s okay. I really ought to-my wife, she’ll be worried, you know …” Half out of his seat now, the wooden chair on which he had been sitting patched with blood.

Watching Farrell all the while, Resnick beckoned Hannah to the doorway between the two rooms. “Phone the ambulance,” he said. “Then the police. Tell them to bleep Graham Millington, have him call Maureen Madden and then contact me here. Tell them assault and suspected rape.”

In the quiet of her house, shock leaped from Hannah’s eyes. Resnick touched her hand and held it for a moment, the fingers unnaturally cold. Farrell was sitting with his eyes tight shut, arms clenched across his chest as if it were the only way to hold himself together.

Quietly Hannah rose and went to the telephone and when Declan Farrell started to cry, tears that would never stop, Resnick sat and held him till the ambulance arrived.