Macbeth

Hecate took up a position at the end of the room, placed both hands on the top of his stick and just stood there. This was his factory. Here he was the factory owner. In a growing industry. He would soon have to expand. If he didn’t meet the demand others would, those were the simple rules of capitalism. He’d long had plans to take over one of the town’s disused factories, set up some fictitious business as a cover while he concocted his brew in the back rooms. Guards, barbed-wire fences, his own lorries going in and out. He could increase production tenfold and export to the rest of the country. But it would be more visible and would require police protection. It would require a chief commissioner who was in his pocket. It would require a Kenneth. So what do you do if Kenneth is dead? You make a new one and clear a path for him.

He received stiff smiles and brief nods from his choppers and packers before they launched themselves at their tasks with renewed energy. They were frightened. That was the principal purpose of these inspections. Not to stop the cycle — it was inevitable — but to delay it. Everyone in this cellar room would at some point try to cheat him, take a few grams home and sell it themselves. They would be found out, and the sentence would be carried out speedily. By Strega. She seemed to enjoy her varied assignments. Like being a messenger together with the sisters.

‘Well, Strega,’ he said. ‘Do you think the seed we sowed in Macbeth will grow?’

‘Human ambition will always stretch towards the sun like a thistle and overshadow and kill everything around it.’

‘Let’s hope so.’

‘They’re thistles. They can’t help themselves. They’re evil and foolish. If people see the soothsayer’s first prophecy fulfilled they’ll believe the next one blindly. And now Macbeth has found out he’s the new head of Organised Crime. The only question is whether Macbeth has enough of the thistle’s ambition in him. And the necessary cruelty to go the whole way.’

‘Macbeth doesn’t,’ Hecate said. ‘But she does.’

‘She?’

‘Lady, his beloved dominatrix. I’ve never met her, yet I know her innermost secrets and understand her better than I understand you, Strega. All Lady needs is time to reach the inescapable conclusion. Believe me.’

‘Which is?’

‘That Duncan has to be got rid of.’

‘And then?’

‘Then,’ Hecate said, tapping his stick on the ground, tap-tap. ‘The good times will roll again.’

‘Are you sure we can control Macbeth? Now he’s clean he’s probably... moralistic, isn’t he?’

‘My dear Strega, the only person more predictable than a junkie or a moralist is a love-smitten junkie and moralist.’

Banquo lay in the bedroom on the first floor listening to the rain, to the silence in the room, to the train that never came. The railway track ran past outside, and he visualised the wet, glistening gravel where some of the rails and the sleepers had been removed. Well, stolen. They had been happy here, he and Vera. They’d had good times. He had met Vera while she was working for the goldsmith Jacobs & Sons, where the finer folk went to buy wedding rings and gifts for each other. One evening the burglar alarm went off, and Banquo — who was on patrol — arrived on the spot, sirens howling, within a minute. Inside, a terrified young woman was desperately shouting over the ear-piercing bell that she was only closing up, she was new and must have done something wrong when she was putting the alarm on. He had only caught the odd word here and there and had had all the more time to observe her. And when eventually she burst into tears he had put a gentle, consoling arm around her. She felt like a warm, tremulous, fledgling bird. During the next few weeks they went to the cinema, walked on the sunny side of the tunnel and he had kissed her at the gate. She came from a working-class family and lived at home. Right from a young girl she’d had to make a contribution and had worked at the Estex factory like her parents. Until she got a bad cough, unofficial advice from a doctor to work elsewhere and a job at Jacobs via recommendations.

‘The pay’s worse,’ she said, ‘but you live longer.’

‘You still cough?’

‘Only on rainy days.’

‘We’d better make sure you get more sunshine. Another walk on Sunday?’

After six months Banquo went to the jeweller’s shop and asked her if she had an engagement ring she could recommend. She looked so bewildered he had to laugh.

After getting married they moved into a poky two-bed flat, with neighbours beneath them on the ground floor. They had saved up for, bought and made love in the bed where he was lying now. Out of consideration for their neighbours, Vera — who was a passionate but shy woman — would wait for a train until she came. When a train thundered past, shaking the walls and ceiling lamps, she let herself go, screamed and dug her nails into his back. She did the same when she gave birth to Fleance in that very bed — waited until the train came and then screamed, dug her nails into his hand and squeezed out a son.