Easy Meat E-Book

Rachel Trezise

• Herausgeber: Parthian Books
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 199

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021

Beschreibung

The south Wales Valleys, 23rd June, 2016. It's another long day chopping beef carcasses up at the slaughterhouse for former reality TV star and Iron Man contender, Caleb Jenkins, whose untroubled world unravelled when his old man's carpet business went bust last year, another casualty of the global financial crisis. While he's busy trying to manage the well-being of his conspiracy-theorist brother, the mortgage keeping a roof over his bankrupt parents' heads, his own excruciating grief, internal rage and impossible credit score, politicians of all persuasions are promising the scared and voiceless people around him real change. Desperate for acknowledgement and a transformation he can't quite bring about by his own means, Caleb is on the edge. Easy Meat is a glimpse of a young man and a country on the verge of a momentous decision.

Leseprobe

Contents

About the Author

Title Page

Epigraph

Easy Meat

Acknowledgements

Parthian Fiction 1

Parthian Fiction 2

Copyright

Rachel Trezise’s debut novelIn and Out of the Goldfish Bowlwon a place on the Orange Futures List in 2002. In 2006 her first short fiction collectionFresh Appleswon the Dylan Thomas Prize. Her second short fiction collectionCosmic Latte won the Edge Hill Prize Readers Award in 2014. Her first playTonypandemonium was produced by National Theatre Wales in 2013 and won the Theatre Critics of Wales Award for best production. Her second play for National Theatre Wales,We’re Still Here, premiered in September 2017. Her latest play,Cotton Fingers, also for National Theatre Wales, has recently toured Ireland and Wales. At the Edinburgh Fringe Festival 2019 it was chosen by The Stage as one of the best shows in the festival and received a Summerhall Lustrum Award. Her debut novel has recently been reissued in the Library of Wales series.

Fiction

In and Out of the Goldfish Bowl

Fresh Apples

Sixteen Shades of Crazy

Cosmic Latte

Easy Meat

Drama

Tonypandemonium

We’re Still Here

Cotton Fingers

Non-fiction

Dial M for Merthyr

Easy Meat

Rachel Trezise

All over people changing their votes

Along with their overcoats

If Adolf Hitler flew in today

They’d send a limousine anyway

– Joe Strummer, ‘(White Man) In Hammersmith Palais’

The sound of gunshots came and went, barely penetrating Caleb’s sleep. Steadily he began to register them, and – beneath them – heavy breathing, menacing but familiar. A stench of weed had saturated the tiny bedroom, he could taste it behind his nostrils and feel it coating his tongue. He kept his eyes closed against the artificial light until he heard an urgent clatter of plastic fracturing. He opened his eyes to his younger brother sprawled on the bed opposite, a video game frozen on the TV screen. There was only one bed and his brother was sleeping in it for the month – he’d been lucky enough to call Prince’s opiate overdose in their ongoing game of celebrity death pool. It was a bumper year, David Bowie, Muhammad Ali and the rapper from A Tribe Called Quest, all gone. ‘Sorry bro,’ Mason said. ‘I can’t get the head off the last mannequin in Nuketown. It’s gripping my balls.’ The Xbox controller was on the floor against the skirting board, batteries spilled on the carpet.

Caleb could see through the Spiderman curtains that it was light outside. His phone was plugged in the charger next to Mason’s bed. ‘What’s the time then, butt?’ he asked his brother.

‘Ten to five.’ Mason took a lit spliff from the dirty mug on the floor next to the bed and sucked greedily on it. ‘The fuck is that?’ Caleb asked, tasting the cannabis anew. ‘Smells rank.’ He raised himself onto his elbows, the metal springs hard in the thin mattress of the rolled-out bed settee.

‘Special Kush. Chill as anything. Have a go.’ Mason handed the spliff down to Caleb then produced a can of Lynx Apollo from under his pillow and sprayed it into the air. Before Caleb knew what he was doing the roach of the zoot was between his lips, the bitter smoke burning the back of his throat. ‘Shit, Mase!’ he said, remembering he’d given up smoking six weeks ago. ‘You know I’m trying to stay on the straight and narrow.’ He handed the spliff back to his brother. He tried to cough the weed out of his lungs.

Mason laughed. ‘I ain’t your keeper am I?’

‘Yes!’ Caleb said. ‘We’re supposed to look out for each other.’

‘You are, bro. You’re the oldest.’ He took a hit off the spliff. ‘Guess what happened to me last night anyway,’ he said. ‘Wait ’til I tell you.’ Caleb hoiked his head at his brother as if to say, ‘Go on.’ His alarm hadn’t gone off yet. He still had time. ‘That barmaid in the Centaur,’ Mason said. ‘The ginger one with the rack. She only asked me to fuck ’er, didn’t she? “When’re you gonna fuck me, Mase?” she says when she’s giving me my three quid change. Fuckin’ gob-struck, bro.’

‘That’s why you’re here playing Call of Duty.’

‘I wouldn’t do that to Brandy, would I?’

‘I don’t know. It’s not like Brandy’s your real girlfriend, is it? She’s a million miles away, on the other side of the globe.’

‘Globe?’ Mason said. ‘As if.’

‘She’s eating corn dogs in Central Park.’

‘Bro, I told you she lives where Breaking Bad is set. It’s the desert not New York.’

Caleb broke into the chorus of a song he’d heard the old man listening to in the car: ‘Hot dog! Jumping Frog!’

‘What do you know about real girlfriends anyway?’ Mason said, cutting him off.

Caleb threw the duvet off his chest, the cool morning air hitting his skin like a slap. He sat up, settee springs creaking. ‘What were you doing up the Centaur on a Wednesday anyway? I thought you were skint.’ He took an old polo shirt from the pile of clothes draped over the arm of the settee and pulled it over his head.

‘Had to see Kinsey, didn’t I? He owed me a tenner for that eighth of soap we bought for bank holiday. Kinsey practically lives in the Centaur.’

‘Bank holiday? What’s so special about a bank holiday when you’re unemployed, Mase?’

‘Fuckin’ hell bro! Wind your neck in. It’s none of your business where I go on a Wednesday or on bank holiday or anything.’

‘You’re either half-baked or you’re out on the piss. You’re supposed to be looking for a job.’

Mason shout-whispered at Caleb: ‘There ain’t any jobs to find, Cal. I’m doing all the work the agency will give me. That’s what a zero-hours contract is; zero fucking hours! Not that it’s anything to do with you. You ain’t my boss, butt!’

Caleb zipped the fly of his jeans and reached towards his brother’s bedside for his mobile phone. ‘Man up, Mase,’ he said, unclipping the jack. ‘Unless you want a pasting. I’m sick of being the only responsible one here.’

‘Chillax, bro,’ Mason said. ‘Before you get an ulcer or summin. You’ve been like a coiled spring ever since that fucking court case.’

Caleb dropped his phone and grabbed the neck of his brother’s hoodie, lifting him an inch off the bed. ‘Don’t talk to me like that, you little shit,’ he said glaring straight into Mason’s bloodshot eyes. ‘I’m the one who pays the mortgage here.’ With that the alarm on his phone started up, a high-pitched whir like a siren at a nuclear plant. He let go of his brother to retrieve it, rushing to cut the alarm before it woke his parents in the room next door. He slid it into the arse pocket of his jeans and turned to go.

‘Chuck me that over,’ Mason said, gesturing at the Xbox controller on the floor.

Caleb sighed as he stooped to recover it, then side armed it back to his brother like a pebble into a river, Mason flinching as it landed in his lap, the batteries left where they were. ‘Clean this shit up,’ he said, nodding at the clothes and video game cases piled at the base of Mason’s bed. ‘The least you can do is keep the place tidy.’

‘You clean it,’ Mason said, because he had to have the last word. ‘It’syour fucking house.’

Caleb slammed the door and stood for a microsecond on the landing gritting his teeth, full of an aggressive energy he didn’t know where to put. He had to find a way to harness it, use it for his training when he got back after work. He counted to five in his head, took a breath, then began down the stairs.

✯

Three big bunches of flowers were propped in two vases and a pint glass of water on the worktop in the little kitchenette, roses and lilies and other things Caleb didn’t know the names of. ‘Fuck knows,’ he said breathing in their green scent, failing to guess where they’d come from or where they were meant to go.

He could see a couple of handfuls of wheat bran left in one of the tupperware containers stacked on the table so he took a bowl from the cupboard and the milk from the fridge. Once he’d poured it all out he stood staring out of the window, spooning the tasteless cereal into his mouth, chewing it robotically before swallowing it down. It needed something sweet. Blueberries were an antioxidant, one of the superfoods listed in his guide to the optimal nutrient diet. But he wasn’t the one who did the shopping. His mother never bought any fruit anymore. He felt marginally woozy from being up too early, an odd sensation that reminded him of family holidays in Tenerife; setting the alarm to drive to Bristol in the middle of the night, drinking Guinness with Mason and the old man in the airport bar at five a.m. Eating dinner at the Empire Steak House on the Avenida de Las Américas six hours later. All that felt like a lifetime ago. He hadn’t been on an aeroplane for four or five years.

He put the cereal bowl down on the draining board and stared at his reflection in the window, the fridge whirring across the lonely calm. Behind the outline of himself he could see the mound of earth his father had made in the garden trying to dig out by its roots the clump of Japanese knotweed growing against the boundary wall. He wondered what Savannah was doing now; if she was up yet, eating her own breakfast. She was the one with the restraining order, but it was Caleb who couldn’t get her out of his mind, not even after all this time. He tried to push the thought away before it began to sting. It was ten past five by the grease-splattered wall clock. He was leaving early for once. He flicked the kitchenette light out and traipsed through the murky living room, grabbing his car keys from the wooden serving bowl on the cupboard in the hallway, ignoring the heap of letters addressed to him mounted up next to it.

There was a thin layer of dew on the roofs of the cars parked all the way along the street. The front of Fat Gary’s Nissan was parked on the pavement, arse end sticking out into the road. Caleb walked around it to his own, a third-hand Ford Puma he’d bought with the money left from the sale of his cherished Volkswagen Transporter. A stupid hairdresser’s runaround parked flush against the curb. The clutch of grey heron chicks in the tree behind the old garages brayed like a bunch of hungry donkeys as he opened the car door. The dramatic orchestral prelude to The Streets’A Grand Don’t Come for Free heaved from the stereo speakers as he switched the engine on. He reached for the volume, turning it down a pinch as he manoeuvred out of his space between the Nissan and a white Transit van. A view of the whole width of the valley unfurled in the windscreen as he turned the corner out of the street, the glacial cirques of the Pontio mountain, its lower slopes blackened by grass fires. He drove over the railway bridge into Tregele, going through the red light on Pegasus Square because it rarely changed at that time in the morning. The council bin lorry tailed him up the high street.

He eased his foot onto the brake slowing the car when he saw the handwritten sign stuck in his father’s old carpet shop window: ‘Opening Soon. Amazing Glazing.’ ‘The fuck?’ he said to himself. The bin lorry beeped its horn. Caleb had brought the traffic behind him to a standstill. ‘Amazing Glazing?’ he said to himself as he reluctantly shifted into gear and set off towards Trehumphrey, top lip stretched into a sneer. It would have to be a window installation business with a name like that. But a window place wouldn’t last long in Rhosybol, not with Warmaglaze in Penyrenglyn and Zodiac Windows in Caemawr. Not to mention South Wales Windows at the other end of the valley. The shop had been empty since the bank had repossessed it in February.

His father had owned it outright. Then carpet went out of fashion. There was this DIY programme that came on the telly, interior designers reimagining terraced houses with cheap fibreboards made to look like real wood instead of traditional patterned Wilton. His father thought it was a fad that’d peter out within a few years. ‘There’s a reason we’re calledJust Carpets,’ he’d say pointing his finger at the shop sign hanging up outside. ‘We don’t do rugs or laminate or tiles. We do carpet.’ He had a motto he’d learned on his business course: ‘Invest in what you know – that way it’s either all your credit or all your fault.’ So instead of branching out they’d decided to remortgage. Austerity hit the valleys hard. Caleb remembered reading a story in theRhosybol Herald about the use of a Food Bank in Penllechau quadrupling overnight. Eventually his old man had lost the shop and the Ninian Close villa his parents had put down as security. They had to move in with him. His brother came with them. Caleb’s plan was to get the shop back. If he could source laminate for the same price B&Q got it the business would run itself. Stack it high, sell it cheap. All he had to do was keep paying the mortgage on his house in Iscoed Street. That way he had something to secure a loan against when he’d finally saved enough for the deposit.

It was twenty past five when he rounded the first crook of the Bryn mountain road. Sunrays lit the garlands of gold tinsel strung on the fir tree in the Pen Foel picnic area. Late last year someone had decorated it with Christmas baubles and glitter. It was almost the end of June now, the trimmings had stuck fast. They must have used Gorilla Glue. Caleb remembered when he was little, the last watchman to work in the watchman’s hut had decorated the craggy parts of the lower mountain with strange flowers he fashioned out of plastic grocery bags. The council had already secured the falling rocks with wire mesh so he didn’t have much work keeping the road clear. He kept showing up everyday anyway, working on his art project instead. Then he died and the flowers washed away. Sad all around, Caleb thought. The sun was picking up strength, the landscape coming to life the way a polaroid develops: ferns and clusters of heather, yellow grass peppered with clods of brown reeds. The wind turbines dotted along the ridge stood motionless, the tips of their huge white blades jutting above the mountain’s summit. At the top he could see the rest of the road stretched below, an elongated hairpin like a colossal section of Scalextric and the oily-looking reservoir below. The sun gleamed on the reflective paint of the crash barrier overlooking the old colliery. Apparently there were plans to build Europe’s fastest zip line, and thrill seekers from all over the world were going to travel to fly down the length of the Bryn on a pulley at a hundred miles an hour. His mother loved this idea. ‘Rhosybol could be a tourist goldmine,’ she always said, ‘what with all the mountains and lakes. Why couldn’t it? It’s beautiful.’ As he neared the end of the road he saw a warning sign set up in the middle of the road. He slowed as he approached it, then came to a full stop, brake pedal pushed to the floor. White words on a blue background: Police. Accident.

✯

Blue lights were pulsing beyond the roundabout, but Caleb couldn’t see the problem. He waited a few seconds, Mike Skinner going on about a girl in the queue at McDonald’s who was fit but knew it, guitar chugging. He reversed and slowly steered around the sign, nudging the car ahead a few inches at a time, then stopped. He waited another second then released his seatbelt. The magpies quarrelling in the scrub on the embankment flew off when he slammed the car door. He tramped to the island in the middle of the roundabout where he saw that the lights were coming from a police car parked on the verge of the main road. Behind it a blue car was smashed against the stilts of the Hebron signpost. There was a body slumped out of the driver’s window, tangled into an unnatural shape. A policewoman sitting in the cop car gestured at Caleb to move back. He drifted towards the edge of the island and lingered at the kerb while the woman got out of the car and walked towards him. ‘There’s nothing I can do on my own,’ she said. ‘The paramedics are on their way.’ She looked down at her feet.

‘Is he dead?’ Caleb said. He’d never seen a dead body before. His mother and father and brother had been at the hospital when Gankey Jenkins died but Caleb was in the car park outside, bickering with Savannah. ‘I’m not sure.’ The brim of the policewoman’s helmet cast a shadow over her heavily made-up face. ‘The paramedics should be here soon.’ She pointed at the bonnet of his car. ‘You’ll need to turn around. This road is closed now.’

‘But I’m on my way to work. I need to be in Derwen by six.’

‘I’m sorry. I can’t let you through.’

‘You’re joking,’ Caleb said. He had to get to work.

‘Absolutely not. You can see this is the scene of a serious accident.’ She pressed her brogues into the tarmac, her height gaining a temporary inch.

Morris’d do his nut if Caleb wasn’t there in time to boot up. ‘Going through Pant’ll add an hour to my journey. There wasn’t a sign in Trehumphrey. I wouldn’t have come all the way over the mountain if there’d been a sign over there, would I?’

‘I’ve only just responded. An officer’s on his way with the traffic board for the Trehumphrey entrance.’ She looked sharply away.

‘There’s no harm in letting me through,’ Caleb said as cordially as he could.

‘Sir!’ the policewoman barked at him. ‘You need to turn around now.’

Caleb raised his eyebrows, peering at her with puppy dog eyes. She stared right back into his pupils like an optician searching for a defect. Were his eyes dilated? Could she tell he’d smoked a bit of spliff? ‘Alright,’ he said, turning away from her. It was useless to try to appeal to the sense of humanity in a cog in the corporate machine. He headed back to the car. ‘Bollocks!’ he said to himself as he got inside. He turned the engine on, the stereo starting up with the shrill key of a new song. He turned the car around, the policewoman still watching him from the island in the middle of the roundabout. She shrunk to a stick figure in the rear-view mirror as he sped back up the straight towards the mountain. A car pulled around the curve below the reservoir, heading down into the valley. He flashed his lights as it approached. The driver flashed back at him, mistaking his signal for a warning about a speed camera or a roaming flock of sheep.

Two plods were crouched at the edge of the cattle grid in Trehumphrey, erecting the road sign the policewoman at the accident had promised, their bright yellow hi-vis jackets dazzling against the mossy green of the ferns on the ridge. A delivery lorry was unloading a pallet of shrink-wrapped paint in front of the decorating shop at the top of the high street. Sanjoy was lifting the shutters on the newsagent next door to the laundrette. The lights were on in the old man’s carpet shop, two glowing orbs shining through the brown paper lining the windows. ‘Amazing Glazing,’ he said reading the sign again.

Dai Fib was picking a fag butt out of the ashtray in front of the beauticians, his long white hair slicked back. Caleb had been in the library with the two Joshes one afternoon, bunking off maths when Dai Fib, who practically lived in an armchair in the large-print section, told them he’d grown the biggest pumpkin known to man. ‘I made the Guinness Book of Records, didn’t I? 1989. Look it up.’

‘Bullshit,’ Rod Eynon said from the computer suite. ‘You’ve been sleeping in the bunker under the rugby pitch since 1970. Where the hell would you have grown a pumpkin?’ Dai Fib got up in a huff and marched out of the large-print section.

‘Why does he do that?’ Josh Webber asked Eynon. ‘He told us last week he used to wrestle bears in Russia. He’s only 5´ 4´´.’

‘No idea,’ Eynon said. ‘Sure to be he loves a tall tale. Harmless enough otherwise. Wouldn’t hurt a fly nevermind a bear.’

As Caleb drove out of Tregele into Trefecca, he recognised the heady odour of the petrol tank churning dregs. He’dhad enough fuel to get him over the Bryn, and his plan had been to fill up in the PriceCo garage on Derwen Uchaf; it was only a quid to the litre over there. ‘Bollocks to it,’ he said as he finally acknowledged the fuel gauge needle dipping below the big E. When the Gwynfa Road traffic lights turned green he indicated right into the exorbitant Texaco.

He pulled up at the pump and got out of the car. The train was pulling into Trefecca railway station with a screech as he hooked the petrol nozzle into the tank. He pressed lightly on the trigger, watching over his shoulder as the numbers whizzed around on the electronic screen. He lifted his forefinger off the handle the zeptosecond the digits turned to 19.99 ensuring the total came to a flat twenty quid.

He walked across the forecourt into the garage shop, the door sensor chiming above him. He picked up two KitKat Chunkys from the shelf of chocolates while he waited for the cashier to serve the motorcyclist ahead of him. ‘Yes, mate?’ the cashier said when the motorcyclist moved off, helmet cradled in his arm. Caleb put his chocolate bars down on the counter and the cashier rang them up with the fuel, the total appearing in green on the till’s VDU: £21.22. Caleb handed his debit card over. When the rasp of the printer didn’t start he knew it had been declined. It was Thursday morning. He didn’t get paid until midnight. ‘Try this,’ he said reluctantly sliding his credit card out of his wallet. Without looking at the cashier he handed it over with an irritable sigh, sick to his back teeth of being on his arse. By the time he’d paid the mortgage and the minimum payment on the card, then shelled out for the fuel he needed to get to work and back, he had nothing left for anything nice. But every month he got closer to the credit limit, then the same vicious cycle repeated itself all over again. Whatever Morris threw at him he caught; a freeze on his wages, overtime on demand, the ban on discussing his salary with his co-workers. What else was he going to do? He needed that precious monthly deposit, piddling as it was, to pay the bills and safeguard his credit score. The machine had made it so that nobody could function in the world without a respectable credit score. It had to be high enough to make you look credit worthy but low enough to warrant lending in the first place. A bad credit rating was worse than being in jail. Two late payments in a row and the whole thing went kaboosh. He was trying to walk on a tightrope without bending his knees.

The cashier turned the card machine around to face Caleb. He entered the pin number which was Savvy’s birthdate. He didn’t want to change it because he’d learned it by heart.

‘All done,’ the cashier said as the payment went through.