“I didn’t realize you knew him that well.”
“I didn’t. Not really. To be honest I don’t think anyone at the school did, not in the last couple of years anyway. He was scarcely there.” She sipped at her coffee and cradled it in her hands. “It’s awful to say it, but I’d go into my English class, the one Nicky was supposed to be in, and if I saw he wasn’t at his desk I’d be relieved. It’s not that he was disruptive exactly. Not all the time anyway. Mostly, he’d just sit there and let it wash over him. Never say a word. But occasionally he’d latch onto something, some idea of his own, at a complete tangent from what the rest of the class were doing, and keep on and on about it, question after question, till it was all I could do to get the lesson back on track.”
Hannah stopped and drank a little coffee, looked across into Resnick’s patient face, the skin that wrinkled past the corners of his eyes. “Perhaps I shouldn’t have let that matter. The plan for my precious lesson, I mean. Aim, method, conclusion. Perhaps there were more important things.”
“My guess, by the time he got to you, there’d not have been a great deal you could do.”
Hannah gave a wry smile. “Give me a child until he’s seven, isn’t that what the Jesuits say? Or is it nine? Either way, they’re probably right, don’t you think? Or in your book, are criminals born and not made? Nature or nurture, Charlie, which are you?” Even as she said it, she was surprised at the ease with which she used his name.
He had noticed a green fleck in her right eye, close to the iris, and was trying not to stare. “Some people,” he said, “they’ll engage in criminal behavior no matter what. Maybe it’s psychological, something in their genes, deep in their childhood, who’s to say? But average, run-of-the-mill crime, you just have to look at the figures. Unemployment, housing …” Resnick gestured with the palm of one hand. “… worse those problems are, higher the rate of crime.”
“Tell that to the government,” Hannah said sharply.
Resnick tasted his coffee; despite the paper cup, it was better than he’d thought. “This last election,” he said, “local. How many? Sixteen Conservatives kicked out. For Labour almost a clean sweep. Fifty seats on the council now to one Tory, couple of the other lot. I’ll be interested to see, by the year’s end, how much difference it’s made.”
“You don’t think that’s a little too cynical?”
“How about realistic?”
“And kids like Nicky, you don’t think there’s anything that can be done? Not with things as they stand?”
He sighed. “If it can, I’m buggered if I know what it is.”
“Locking them up, though? Prison. Short, sharp shocks. Boot camps, isn’t that what they’re called? Do you really think that’s the answer?”
“I doubt it puts them on the straight and narrow; figures disprove that.”
“But still you carry on, shutting them away.”
Resnick shifted a little awkwardly on his seat. “No. The courts lock them up. Or they don’t, whatever. What we do, what I do, if I can, is arrest those who’ve broken the law. Not my laws, not my punishment either.”
“But you must agree with them, the courts, what they do, or you wouldn’t carry on doing it.”
Resnick pushed back his chair, crossed his legs. “Are we having a row?”
Hannah smiled. “No, it’s a discussion.”
“That’s all right, then.”
“But is this your way,” she asked, “of avoiding the question?”
Resnick grinned and shook his head. “Youths Nicky’s age and younger, persistent offenders, they might get arrested-what? — thirty or forty times in a year. More in some cases. They’re too young to be put in prison. Bail, supervision orders, none of that does a scrap of good.”
“You think they should be shut away.”
“I think society needs protecting, yes …”
“And Nicky?”
“Look.” Resnick was conscious of his voice being louder than it should, louder than the space allowed. “I saw that old woman after she’d been beaten about the head, the old man. I’m not saying what happened to Nicky, whatever the reasons, is right, of course I’m not. But he was accused of a serious crime, he had to be kept in custody. Surely you don’t think he should have been let back on the streets?”
“If it were a choice between that and him ending up dead, yes, I do. Don’t you?”
Resnick glanced around at the people at other tables, just about pretending not to listen to their conversation. The coffee was beginning to grow cold.
“I’m sorry,” Hannah said, “I’m not trying to make you feel guilty.”
“You’re not.” Resnick shook his head. “I’m sad about what happened. Sad for Nicky’s mother. Nicky himself. But what I don’t feel is guilt.”
“I do,” Hannah said quietly. “I do.”
“I don’t suppose I can give you a lift anywhere?” she asked. They were standing in front of the telephones, near the glass doors that opened out onto the Mansfield Road.
“Thanks, no. I’m fine.”
“Okay, ’bye then.” She started to walk away. “The flowers,” Resnick said, “shall you be taking them or not?”
“Yes, I think so.”
“Good. I think Norma’ll be pleased.” He stood his ground as she walked off in the direction of the lift, plastic bag of shopping swinging lightly from his fist.
When Hannah turned round moments later, before the lift doors closed in front of her, he had gone.
Sixteen
A social worker from the Youth Justice Team had called twice and on each occasion the door had been slammed in her face. A reporter from the local BBC radio station had her DAT Walkman hurled back into the street and the crew from Central TV had buckets of water emptied down on them and a spade taken to one side of their van. Shane threw a punch at a stringer for several national tabloids when he came across the man quizzing neighbors in the local pub. “We’d not said a thing to him, had we, duck?” Hard-eyed, Shane had stared them in the face, smashed an empty bottle against the bar and slammed out: all that rage and nowhere, so far, to bleed it out.
Norma’s friend Rosa arrived mid-afternoon with a bottle of white port and a dozen roses, convinced Norma to go into the bathroom and wash her face, put on some makeup, and change her clothes. With the afternoon racing from Market Rasen as whispered commentary, the two of them sat on the settee while Rosa plied her friend with glass on glass of port, seizing Norma’s wrists in her sudden, flailing fits of anger, holding her tight whenever she gave way to tears. Norma’s body shaking inside Rosa’s stubborn arms. “The stupid, stupid geck! Why ever did he want to go and do a thing like that?”
Sheena hovered at the edges of the room, watching the two women, riven by the force of her mother’s tears, which she could not hope to replicate. She went into the kitchen and made tea she never drank, smeared slices of bread with jam she never ate. In her room, she turned her radio up high to drown the sounds of mourning: Lisa I’Anson in the afternoon. Blur. Oasis. Nirvana. Pulp. Take That.
As the racing gave way to Terrytoons and All American Girl, Norma slept in Rosa’s arms, twitching suddenly with the vividness of her dreams. “Michael. Oh Michael,” she moaned.
“Ssh, now.” Rosa gently stroked her head. And then, as Norma opened her eyes, “Who’s Michael? You kept saying Michael.”
“The baby I lost.”
Rosa squeezed her hand. “That was Nicky, sweetheart. You’re confused, that’s all.”
But Norma knew what she had meant. “No, it was Michael. My little Michael.” And felt again the final thrust and tear, saw him small and bloodied in the midwife’s hands.
When Hannah arrived outside the Snape house there were twenty bunches of flowers lining the pavement, others leaning beside the front door. She hesitated, thinking it through, uncertain what she might actually say; she was bending to place her bouquet with the others, turn away, when Sheena came out into the street. Hannah knew her, had taught her in her last year at school, the same school where she had taught Nicky.