The Bricks That Built the Houses (15 page)

The world in all its frenzied injustice seemed someone else’s problem now. He’d fought the good fight for as long as he could. Raised two children. Buried his parents. Lost the love of his wife. Watched helplessly as his only brother fell
into madness and addiction. Saw innocent people go to jail, and guilty people walk free. Felt the shudders cross his palms when murderers returned home to their girlfriends because he’d been their champion.

Even as a boy he’d had a strong sense of right and wrong and would often be called upon to settle disputes in the playground. But as a man now in late middle age, he had no burning sense of injustice left. He was worn out from carrying the hate of the world on his shoulders. He just wanted to build his boat and write his play and invent his synthesiser, and as long as his children were healthy, the world was OK by him. Other people’s pain had lost its potency. The world outside his garage walls was a hideous, feverish mess, and the days of trying to make a difference were far, far behind him.

THE BEIGENESS

Pete watches the blue smoke curl like Chinese dragons towards the ceiling. In his hand his phone screen shines, more vivid than the real world; he stares into it at the text message he’s been composing for an hour.

hi its Pete met u yesterday. Wanna hang out later? X

In a wave of conviction he presses send and grins firmly about it. The wave lasts about two minutes, and then breaks, churning and foam-tipped, filling him with sneering doubt. He fidgets in the dim room, stupid, one hand in his boxers, the other pushing against his closed eyes. Shuddering. Twenty minutes pass in stillness. Wrenched and hopeless, he hates himself until he feels the buzz against the mattress, the short stab that sits him up and he sends his hand blindly beneath the duvet.

Yeah. that would be good. I’m working in town till
10.
Wanna meet me Soho?

He jumps to his feet and punches the air. Gets a grip. He plays it cool for as long as he can but sends his reply back in a matter of minutes.

I’ll find a bar and text u.
10.15
? X

He waits, shaking, slapping his cheeks and drumming his belly. Paces the room, distracts himself, flicking through a newspaper that’s on the floor. Time is a revolving door. As it passes he feels increasingly stupid for getting in touch and he begins to hate himself again for everything he’s ever done or said. Flashes of himself in her café, lurking by the counter with nothing to say, make him shake with shame.

The phone buzzes in his hand. He reads:

Very assertive. See you later
.

And he is the god of all things.

Becky puts her phone back in her bag and watches the street light opposite. It’s dented in the middle and it’s pouring its cheap orange squash into a puddle on the pavement. A siren rolls a few streets away. A man with a huge moustache and a large fur hat walks past her and his footsteps echo wetly. There is an awning above a shop window across the street and the corner is ripped; its edges are shredded, epileptic in the wind.

She walks into the hotel lobby. It’s bright and wide, the floor is shining like an ice rink, gilded luggage trolleys sit like empty birdcages. The lady at reception perches behind a vast desk, her uniform is light purple and grey. Becky passes the desk, nods at the lady, who stares at her briefly, shuffling paperwork; her nails are filed to triangle points, painted the colour of drying blood. A group is checking in, European, students maybe, they are laughing at something. One has long hair and he throws it around.

She heads for the bar and takes a seat at the furthest-left bar stool. The bar looks out onto the street. Behind the barman the bottles stand far apart on a clean shelf. Everything is symmetrical. There is no dust. All the chairs are square. Everything is light purple and white and grey. Long lines and oblongs. She picks at a loose thread on the knee of her jeans. Pulls it till it’s taut.

She thinks his name to herself. Thinks his shape in the crowd, standing close. Sees his hair and his ear and his neck. It has to be a sign. She presses her palms against the bar top and studies the lines on the backs of her hands. Wonders about the client she is about to meet. Wonders where her mother is right now. Across an ocean, in some epic canyon. The red rock American hills. She wonders if her parents are in contact. Whether they send each other postcards. She can feel them, their presence is stronger today than it has been in years. They are who she is. But she doesn’t even know them. Her mother used to write. Every month, but she told her to stop. She moved flats and wouldn’t
tell Paula the new address. She knows Linda keeps the letters. She knows they’re stacked up in a file in the cupboard above the bookcase in Linda’s living room. Maybe she should read them.

She stands up and heads to the bathroom to apply fresh make-up. She passes the window. She can’t take her eyes from the awning. She stares as it flaps in the wind.

As Pete rides the escalator down into the depths of the underground, he feels himself growing uneasy.
Underneath the city, there are tunnels, and in those tunnels all the people sit in metal tubes and go to where they need to go
. He descends, one level at a time, deeper down, feeling the air change, feeling the heat rise in his cheeks. He takes his coat off and holds it over his arm; he shivers in his shirt, but the sweat is panting in his pores, like runners on the start line, just waiting for the gun to blast.

He boards the tube, treading carefully, and he sits amongst aliens and feels himself dying but focuses on where he is going and what he is going to do and, as he climbs out into the air of Oxford Circus, he is jubilant again. Terrified, but thankfully not bordering on losing it any more. At least, not for the minute.

He walks in and out of seven different bars trying to find the one that feels right.

Eventually he finds a place, a trendy restaurant that’s got a bar in the basement. He heads down the stairs and out into a low-ceilinged room, with an old wooden bar along the wall at the end. The chairs are old cinema chairs, dark purple
velvet, threadbare arms. The lighting is dim, groups of drinkers sit and talk over one another, slapping each other’s backs now and then, one or two are drinking alone. Music is playing, Joy Division. He strolls to the bar for a pint.

She sees him on the other side of the room. She hasn’t seen him enough times to know what he really looks like. The shape of his legs, bowed slightly. The back of his head, where his hair stops. Her eyes catch on things as she approaches the bar, the texture of the battered velvet on the chairs, looking as tired as she feels. The people drinking, the lonely-looking man trying not to watch the couple sitting at the next table kissing.

Pete turns and sees her as she walks towards him. Lean and agile, like a serpent, full of movement. She is wearing a baggy shirt and scruffy jeans, swinging her hips, and beneath her clothes he can sense the outline of her body. In that moment, she is the most beautiful woman he has ever seen. Her hair is up and longer bits fall over her face, deep dark black brown. He attempts to smile but his features are water leaving a sink. She stops beside him. He kisses her cheek.

‘Drink?’

‘Yeah. I’ll get it though,’ she says.

She commands a seriousness that Pete isn’t used to. There is an intensity in the way she inhabits her body and space that cuts Pete right through the middle but they talk easily, drifting from one thing to another, without hurry or awkwardness. They drink beer then wine then whisky then gin.

They are nearly drunk when, at last, she decides it’s time to find the words.

The room smudges and darkens. There are no edges to shapes. There are no edges to sounds. Everything is mulch and vacuum. Becky swims towards the point of speech. Her mouth is the funnel of a gramophone, her chest a spinning vinyl. The words are slow; they come out steeped in mud.

‘The book you were reading, when you came in the caff yesterday?’ She is swimming upwards from the sea bed, about to break the surface and return to life.

‘Yeah?’ Pete is not aware of Becky’s agony.

‘What was it?’ she says, time returns and she is disorientated. A snap in her ears and her neck and things move as they should. The edges of objects paint themselves back on.

Pete thinks hard, everything exaggerated in the fug of drink.

‘It was maybe, a book by John Darke, I think his name is. A politics book. Why?’

‘Have you read it before?’ she asks carefully. Her breath is a broken wing.

‘No, I just got it. I’ve been trying to get hold of it actually for ages. Have you heard of John Darke?’ They are sitting across from each other at a small table near the wall. He is leaning forwards onto his elbows; she is leaning back into her chair, her feet up on the chair opposite.

‘Where did you get it?’

‘Online.’

‘What, did you just search for it?’ Her voice is trembling slightly.

‘No, it’s . . . I subscribe to this website thing, it’s, like, banned books, censored authors, you know. Shit like that. I get, erm, updates when things are found in print and stuff.’ He watches her. She sits and thinks for a while, staring into the middle distance. He waits, drinks his gin. ‘Why do you ask?’

She takes her feet off the chair and swivels so she’s facing him, then studies him. He doesn’t smile into her look, just sits there; her eyes cook him till he’s tender. Her heart is slicked with oil. She is a Francis Bacon painting, yelling silently and staring out. His face is innocent. He has a nose, two ears, two lips just like a human, but he’s bearing something mythical, carrying her dad towards her.

‘John Darke?’

‘Yeah?’

‘Who’s he then?’

Pete purses his lips, frowns. ‘Well.’ His tone is cheerful, he’s feeling warm inside. ‘He’s a legend. Quite the man.’

‘Why? What did he do?’

‘Ah, well, now you’re asking! He was a politician? I think, yep, and a writer. Teacher, too. He was, erm, a brilliant mind. Definitely. I mean, the book, it’s amazing so far, he had this idea, about how to make democracy accountable, how to reinstall democracy in the West, take power back from corporations and empower people again, but . . . what happened to
him? Something awful. Stitch-up. Framed for something. Murder? Something horrible. Rape? Reputation in tatters, whole nine yards. Locked him up for a long time, but his legacy lives on. His ideas, I mean. Think he’s still inside somewhere.’

Her heart is pounding. She is sitting very still, mouth open slightly, clutching her glass.

Pete spreads his arms. ‘Quite a guy.’ He shakes his head. ‘But I’m into all that, you see. You can look him up. Wikipedia or whatever.’ She holds his eyes for longer than he can bear. He can’t read the look. She gets up suddenly.

‘I’m just gonna pop to the bathroom, Pete,’ she says, her legs shaking in her jeans. She walks carefully to the Ladies, stands in front of the mirror and stares for a full minute at the features on her face.

They’re out on the street, clouded with drink, smoking. Talking in friendly voices about the schools that they went to, the jobs that they’ve had. They are walking to the bus stop, Becky has taken Pete’s arm and is holding on to his sleeve, feeling the side of his body against hers.

As the bus rolls over the bridge, back south, they both feel the same tug, the wash and blast of home.

She wants to take him to bed. He’s booze-confident and he swings his arm round her shoulder and she walks close to him up the howling main road. They bundle up the stairwell, out into the fourth-floor corridor and lean over the railings of
the balcony, looking out at the streets, London’s bleeding gums. He follows her into her flat and stands beside her in the tiny kitchen as she opens the whisky and looks for something clean to pour it into. She leans across him for the glasses and he feels the charge of proximity, reaches out for her, and she responds. Slowly stopping, turning herself to stand a centimetre from his face, moving her nose across his skin. He is paralysed, watching her. They start to kiss, they pull each other down and undress heavily, banging their knees on the hard tiles and their heads on the kitchen units. Laughing, slipping apart, reaching out again.

In the morning she kisses him goodbye on the main road. A world-shrinking gut-smashing kiss on the mouth. She walks away, her body like machinery; he notices the perfect symmetry of every pump and thrust, skewered by the economy of her movement. She doesn’t look back once. He watches her smash through the street until she’s out of sight. And even then, he watches the last space she occupied until his eyeballs feel sore.

She is already thinking of other things. She’s on her way to her uncle’s caff. She wonders whether her uncles were kind to her mother when they were children. Whether her mother remembers the days before they moved into Uncle Ron’s, when they slept in a phone box.

She thinks of a group of dancers that she studied with who have a show on in town. On the flyer they are all in black
under beams of serious light. She’d laughed at the picture when she saw it online, but it comes to her now and it pains her. The thought of them meeting, rehearsing together. She had always found their ideas simplistic and their routines unsurprising. In class, they were loud, domineering characters who lacked originality. It was easier to laugh at them than acknowledge the fact that, for all the years she’d known them, she’d felt superior, but now they are doing it and she is not.

She thinks of Kemi Racine. Her dark monobrow set low like Frida Kahlo’s, wanting to dance, talking about people who come to auditions wanting to be dancers more than wanting to dance. Racine is Becky’s favourite living choreographer. She never gets the big commissions. She’s only really known by those who seek her out. She is not famous or particularly highly regarded. Her work is often poached and passed off as the work of her more successful male peers. She teaches at an unimportant school in Copenhagen. Becky had read her newspaper article the week before. It was a call for women to stick to choreography and not be scared off by the lack of opportunity, funding or support. Build your own networks, she had said. Fuel your own engine.

Becky watches the people, the street, hears the noise and feels the pavement and dares to think of what she might like to say about it all one day, with her body, in a piece of her own.

Pete starts walking. The city lurches all around him. People push past and swear at him and he feels lost amongst it all.
Flashes of their bodies riddle him with secret glee, but he can feel the fear coming. He wards it off but feels it pushing. He never knows when it will trip him up.

He decides to knock on at Nathan and Mo’s. They’re two of his oldest friends and he hasn’t seen them in months. They live about fifteen minutes’ walk away, up towards Honor Oak Park. He turns off the main road and heads up the wide, tree-lined street with the big old houses bruised from the years, glancing up at the ornate roofs and big proud windows. He walks past the church and takes a left and strolls back out into the dirt and grit of squat brick buildings, broken window frames, road-blackened house fronts. Snarling children. Smiling dogs. He goes slowly past the chip shop, the newsagent’s, the off-licence, some girls on their bikes shouting at each other, the chicken shop, the barber’s, three men in prayer robes leaning against the bicycle racks outside the Co-op, the jerk shop, the Good News Bakery, the funeral parlour, the block of flats, a man moving a fridge on two skateboards, the garage with the arsehole woman who works at the counter, the carwash, the kebab shop, the houses with their whitewashed walls and gravel drives, the pub, the other pub. The nice Caribbean restaurant. Pete ducks through the iron gate and cuts across the cemetery, overgrown and rich with green. Trees everywhere. He stares up into them; they sway in sunlight, the crumbling stones, the angels and monuments, the crunch of the path under his quick feet. The smell in the air of spring.