The Bricks That Built the Houses (16 page)

Nathan is big-boned, heavy-set. Bearded. He’s a bass player and a beat maker and he speaks like a subwoofer. Mo is gangly to the point of precarious, walks in long strides, his face is all smile. He works in an energy company call centre. They’re on the sofa watching catch-up TV. They’re halfway through a dating show. Pete sits down between them, stretches his legs out and starts skinning up.

‘What you been up to?’ Mo asks him, glancing at him, eyes red.

‘Not much,’ Pete says. Mo nods.

‘Cool,’ Nathan says, and they settle back in to the telly.

Pete stares at the colours on the widescreen plasma box in front of him. He watches the pixels unravel and merge. Everything starts going fast and he can feel a dread lurking in the corner of the room, a shadow with its mouth open, head back, unleashing maniacal laughter. He blinks. Looks back at the telly. But the world has speeded up and now everything he focuses on slows right down. He watches his hands, they are far away. He can feel things happening that he can’t see. His skin starts prickling, the sweat is preparing itself behind his pores. His vision is fast, jagged, violent.
Breathe
. But his breath is pixelated, too fast.
Calm
. Hard heartbeat. Chest pains.
Calm down
. Eyes on the TV, then down to the Rizla.

‘That guy’s a dick,’ Nathan says. ‘Where do they find these people?’

‘It’s telly, innit,’ Mo says. ‘It invents these people.’

They all watch silently, faces screwed up in disdain.

‘You should go on this, Mo. You’d fuckin’ nail it,’ Nathan tells him.

Pete smiles widely at the thought. Blinks a few times. Feels like his face is coming back to him.

‘Think so?’ Mo glances across him, at Nathan.

‘Yeah, they’d love you,’ Nathan says. ‘Imagine it. You’d fucking boss it.’

The three of them look at the screen. A man wearing a waistcoat open over an oiled chest and baggy chinos slides down a pole into a TV studio where thirty women behind podiums indicate whether or not they’d go out on a date with him by turning on or off their lights. Pete looks at his hands, keeps breathing. Sitting between them, reminding himself where he is, who they are, he’d like to say something to them but the silence in his mouth is a massive apple that he can’t speak around, shoved right into his throat. He’s sure there’s something terrible coming for them all. The dread swells from a point in his middle. Everything that could go wrong goes wrong on repeat in lurid detail. Her body keeps coming back to him. The way she turned him round and climbed across him. How she grabbed his throat like that. He sniffs, wipes his nose on his sleeve.

Pete was twelve when he got into smoking skunk. He started hanging out with the kids from round his neighbourhood who took him out painting with them.

His new mates were passionate conspiracy theorists. They would get high and talk for hours about the secret organisations that controlled the world. It all made perfect sense to Pete. There were reasons and proof, there were ancient prophecies and irrefutable evidence, and a story about the end coming. It would begin with the making of a one-world nation. United under one currency. There would be one global police force. One global justice system. One army under the beast. Once this had come to pass, we would be in the last days, and the last days would drag on until only two good people remained on Earth – the last two who refused the mark of the beast; a computer chip that the one-world government would put inside our hands. These chips, the story went, would be justified in the name of public security and convenience. A cashless economy. One chip and no more banknotes. You couldn’t be robbed. It would be your ID, your credit card. It would be your new smartphone. Your travel card. What did you have to hide? It would be your passport. Without one you wouldn’t be able to move between borders, buy food or pay your water bill. You wouldn’t be able to survive. They’d do it slowly, so we thought it was our choice. We wouldn’t see that it was forced on us, we’d see it as convenient, it would be the new must-have accessory. The solution to our fabricated fears. Why
wouldn’t
you want one?

As he grew up Pete watched the growing prevalence of mobile computer chips with a bellowing, racking dread. He also watched the developments of the so-called war on terror
with a choked heart; he saw it as the start of the obliteration of all nations who stood against Western global dominance.

The stories went that once these computer chips were being implanted, the one world would be divided into those who took the chip and those who wouldn’t. No more racism, class war, gender inequality. Only those with the chip, and those without. All those who wouldn’t take it would be deemed terrorists, enemies of progress, subjected to torture and constant surveillance, and eventually they would die. Living in bands in the wilderness, hunted by soldiers with heat-seeking bullets. And when there were only two left, the last two in the world who had refused the chip, all the souls who’d ever died would come back to Earth to fight each other, good against evil. Marked against unmarked.

Pete sat with his mates in their dark bedrooms with the posters on the wall of metal bands and hardcore rappers, in dingy flats in Catford, and he stroked their dogs while they nodded and whispered and played documentaries in the daytime with the curtains closed. And he was convinced it was true. He was sure he would be one of the last two.

As he got older, he shook himself out of it, but it never left him. Not really. He went to uni and he couldn’t help it, everything he learned he learned through the filter of those heavy, scary, endless stories. It was like a secret faith he couldn’t mention. He’d be reading his textbooks, or sitting in lectures, and the more he learned of the way the world worked, the more convinced he was.

He avoided getting an Oyster card for as long as he could because he didn’t like the way it was made compulsory. It didn’t matter that he didn’t want his movements tracked. He couldn’t get a bus until he did it their way. In the end though, he gave in, and every time he used it to travel or to cut a line up, he felt the tug of shame.

He knew that was the way it was going to go. The chip would come and he would fight it for about as long as he fought the Oyster, and then he’d get chipped just like everyone else, without thinking about it at all.

Pete puffs his joint. His head is as far back into the cushions of the sofa as it could possibly be. He smokes deeply. The TV’s playing adverts, Mo turns the sound down.

Nathan shifts his body, leans his head towards Pete. ‘That nice?’ he asks him, nodding at the spliff, making his widest puppy-dog eyes.

‘Yeah it is nice, thanks, Nathan,’ says Pete.

‘I bet,’ Nathan says, contemplating for a moment. ‘And I could just imagine what would go really lovely with that is a nice cup of tea. Wouldn’t you say?’

Pete looks at him, eyes narrowed, and shakes his head firmly.

‘Oh, go on, make us a cup of tea, will ya, Pete? Please?’

‘I’m in
your
fucking house, you make me a tea, you prick.’

Nathan feigns shock. ‘No need for that now, is there?’

They watch the adverts, sound still down.

Nathan lasts about a minute. ‘Oh go on, Pete,’ he says. ‘No one makes tea as good as you do.’ He smiles sweetly at his friend. Speaks in exaggerated awe. ‘
Perfect
, your tea is. Perfect. Just right. With the tea bag in just long enough, and the sugar just right. Lovely drop o’ milk . . .’ Nathan takes a draw on his spliff, holds it in, exhales deeply, eyes half closed. ‘Shit, Pete,’ he says. ‘You make it an
art form
.’ He holds his spliff up to Pete and nods earnestly. ‘Me?’ he says. ‘I got no grace for it, have I? No affinity with it.’ He picks a tobacco string from his lip. ‘You?’ he says. ‘Your tea?
Wow
.’

‘Ah mate, you just need to practise more, that’s all. You’ll get there, Nathan. I promise,’ Pete says, tapping him sarcastically on the knee.

‘No!’ Nathan says. ‘No, look, right.’ He puts his spliff to his lips and gestures with his hands. ‘No amount of practice could do for my tea-making what natural talent has done for yours.’

Pete rolls his eyes, shakes his head, passes his joint to Mo and stands up.

‘Oh thanks, mate,’ Nathan says, ‘I knew I could depend on you.’ Nathan grins at him, eyes shining and sleepy, exuding gratitude.

Pete heads to the other side of the carpet where the kitchen joins the living room. ‘You’re the best, Pete, honest,’ Nathan tells him as he goes. ‘I been on at Mo to do it for over an hour now.’

Mo turns the telly back up now the adverts have finished, stretches his legs out and takes a puff of Pete’s joint. ‘You can make your own fucking tea, you lazy cunt.’

They didn’t see its shape approaching, but it came upon them. Large and slow and full of blood. They fell towards each other.

She was hesitant. Kept telling him she wasn’t up for anything serious and he agreed, of course, he wasn’t up for that either. But he started popping by the café most days.

Kissing her was like opening a furnace door.

She kept telling herself it was no big deal. They were seeing how it went. No strings. No commitment. She had too much that she was committed to as it was. She didn’t want a boyfriend. She made it clear that she was up for seeing other people. He told her yeah, that’s what he wanted too.

The city opened up to them. Everything was theirs. They wrapped their bodies around each other’s, felt the mornings rise against their naked skin in bed together, endless, dark red bright white lightning flashes, rain clouds bursting outside, while indoors the endless exploration. Close and closer still. ‘Give me your mouth,’ she told him, pushing her fingers in, dragging his chin towards hers with both hands.

She turned him into a man, into a woman, into a child. He’d never known anything like it. He found himself sitting on her lap at a party, looking pretty for her. Liking what her eyes did to his face. One look and it made him go all giggly and bouncy, turning it on for her. Another look would send him serious and smouldering, dark passion at the flash of her lashes. The things she put him through. She was like a foreign body in his body. Metal lodged in a vital part. Some rogue
shrapnel, stuck right in there since he first clapped eyes on her and felt the blast.

A few weeks into it. Four in the morning in her flat in Deptford. Bodies all wrecked from the sex. Laid out on sweat-damp sheets. They knew it was there then, a new giddiness, dark and without any shape, but there in the room in the night in the way that he starved for her profile, the lines of her shape.

She told him who her father was. Told him how her mother made her change her name. That she’d spent fifteen years imagining she never had a dad. He couldn’t believe it was true.

They held hands in cinemas, drank pints in pubs, walked beside rivers, did all the things that lovers do.

She told him who her mother was. How she’d given up her life and how she’d been miserable. Told him she could never do the same. Never sacrifice her dream for anyone. He agreed wholeheartedly that no, she must never do that. She spoke about her mother leaving without tears or sentimentality; he felt awestruck by the things she’d been through.

‘Why don’t you go and visit him, Becky?’

‘I never want to see him.’ And she said it so gently, so simply, there was nothing else to say. Pete’s parents were not in jail, they hadn’t absconded to convents. One was working in the optician’s down the road, the other was in his office up town. All his life he’d trusted them completely. Never had to question whether feeling love was safe.

When she told him what she did for money, it was difficult for him to grasp. But against the backdrop of her past, he had to understand that her framework was different from his. He pulled his morals apart at night, questioned where they really came from. He could feel his dad in him, his dad’s obsession with what governed people’s moral compass. He was turning her work over and over in his head. Under her careful guidance. She explained and explained why all that he felt about it wasn’t necessarily true. ‘It’s like my Auntie Linda says,’ she told him. ‘One man’s flash of lightning, ripping through the air, is another’s passing glare. Hardly there.’

They are in the park, the last spring wind is in the trees. Mighty. Like cymbals, like oceans crashing. All the trees together, dancing in it. Side to side like swaying drunks.

‘It’s really important to me, Pete, that I support myself. You’re on the dole. I’m not being funny, but. You are.’ Pete and Becky stare up into the shaking foliage. Unbound by it. Their hair is blowing back. Becky has a cup of tea in a polystyrene cup and the surface of it whips and curls.

‘You want me to stop dancing?’

He looks at his hands. ‘I’m not saying that.’

‘Yes you are,’ she tells him. And it cuts him open. He watches all his insides wriggling, surprised to see what he is really made of. ‘If I stop giving massages, I can’t afford to be a dancer.’

‘But there’s other things you can do, ain’t there?’

She speaks slowly like he’s a child, like she’s explaining it for the thousandth time. ‘I can work two hours giving massages and make enough to last me a week. That frees me up so that I can go to rehearsals. Go to classes. I got to work at Giuseppe’s, I owe it to my uncle. But they can’t pay me fuck all, Pete. You know this stuff.’ He reaches for her tea, she passes it over. He takes a thoughtful sip. ‘It’s nothing to be jealous of.’ He sits forwards on the bench, trying to listen without feeling angry. ‘I don’t have a problem with it, so why should you?’

‘You know why I have a problem with it,’ Pete says, feeling tiny.

‘Whatever it is you’re scared of them being, it’s not like that, Pete. It’s just one person touching another person’s body.’ The wind is drumming harder. ‘Do you see, Pete? This is no threat to us. It’s just my job. And I’m not going to stop doing the one thing I’ve ever wanted to do because you feel jealous.’

‘It’s not the dancing I’ve got a problem with.’ He feels exasperated. He doesn’t have a leg to stand on.

‘The two things go hand in hand,’ she says. ‘I’m not stopping. This is how I make my living.’ And she looks into his face for his eyes but she can’t find them. He keeps looking down at his lap. ‘I’m on my own,’ she says. ‘Have been since I was fifteen. No savings, can’t run to my parents, can I? Can’t ask my auntie for money, they’ve got none. It’s hard enough for them trying to keep that café going. It’s just me, Pete, just
what
I
can make happen.’ She doesn’t say
not like you
but he can hear her thinking it.