The Bricks That Built the Houses (26 page)

She finishes her mouthful, wipes the edges of her lips with her napkin. Her stomach waking up to hunger now she’s started feeding it.

‘We’ll have to leave.’

Harry’s voice is gentle and soft. So quiet Leon can hear other people at other tables more easily than he can hear Harry. Leon’s heart pangs for Harry’s panic. He wishes he could think of something. ‘They set
us
up,’ he tells her. ‘If you can get word to Pico—’

Harry interrupts. ‘Yeah but I can’t though. I don’t know what number he’s on till he contacts me.’

‘Fine, but, if you
could
. He might be sympathetic.’

They push mouthfuls down towards their gullets. Grind egg and bread and fruit with heavy molars.

‘We got a lot of money in that car. We could go anywhere.’

‘Where should we go?’ Leon scoops blueberries up with his fork. They fall off on the way to his mouth. He tries again. They fall again.

‘We’d have to go careful, with all that cash.’

‘We can sort it out. Change it up slowly. I’ve got a mate in Barcelona could help us out.’

Harry reaches over, takes Leon’s fork and stabs a few blueberries with the prongs and delivers the fork back. ‘It don’t feel right, man. I don’t feel good.’ Harry is dizzy, she feels far away. ‘We took a lot of money,’ Harry whispers, her voice scratching through the hush of the diner. Her eyes wide. Forehead deeply lined. ‘And what we gonna do with all that gear?’

‘Sell it. One time.’

‘To
who
?’

‘They don’t know who our clients are.’ Leon’s voice is a low rumble.

The day at the beach is shouting at her. Sat there on the stones. And what about her family? What’s she gonna tell them? Will they be safe if she leaves town?

‘I should have been more careful,’ she whimpers. ‘That’s all I’m saying.’ Her voice is sonorous with sadness. ‘Coz now we’ll have to leave, Leon. We’ll have to fucking leave, mate.’

The thought speeds past them and they sit there in its wake, bobbing away.

‘Come on, dickhead, sort it out,’ Leon tuts. ‘Not so bad, is it? We could have an adventure. Go fucking anywhere.’

Harry eyes him warily, not sure.

Even at this hour of the morning, other people are dotted around the diner. A man, alone, in workman’s clothes, is eating steak and eggs. A group of three eager tourists are looking at photos on their cameras and drinking cups of coffee. A woman and a small boy are eating a giant ice-cream sundae. He has a hospital wristband and Batman pyjamas on. Harry sees all this and feels herself collapsing inwards like a bouncy castle at the end of a fair.
To be a person with a normal life
.

‘OK, so let’s just think carefully now, right? What do they know about us?’ Leon’s face is drawn in concentration.

‘Hopefully, nothing?’ Harry answers his questions like it’s a quiz show. Trying to get it right.

‘Does Pico know where you live?’

‘No,’ Harry says.

‘No. That’s right.’

‘He’s never been round.’

‘Course not.’

‘They’ll be looking for us though. Right?’

‘We’ll be OK. We just need to keep calm.’ Leon stretches up, holding his hands above him, and brings them back down. ‘We’ve been very careful. No one knows who you are. No one’s seen the car. Everyone we know thinks you work in recruitment.’ Harry looks at the table top, listening hard. ‘Everyone we sell to, all they know is your name and your
numbers.’ Leon taps the glass of water with the SIM card and the battery in it. ‘And,’ it occurs to him, ‘to be honest, a lot of the people we deal with think you’re a bloke anyway.’ Harry shrinks visibly. ‘Not being funny,’ Leon backtracks, ‘but they do.’ Harry is flying with tiredness, cruising at great height. ‘Look.’ Leon has found his thinking pace. ‘We fought our way out of a set-up, essentially. You took that money for recompense.’

Harry lets Leon’s cool words soothe her panic. She laps them up like milk. ‘Yeah. Yeah, that’s right.’ She knocks back a gulp of coffee. Looks up, startled. ‘Think his goons are gonna see it that way though?’

Leon is not flustered. ‘That’s what happened,’ he says flatly.

‘They’ve got
guns
, Leon, they’re not playing. This is proper dark stuff, man. Some of those boys are fucking ex-military and all sorts.’ She pauses, her thoughts are cold in her head and she shivers. ‘We could die over this.’ Harry’s voice is a broken window, letting the rain in.

Leon holds his friend’s arm across the table. Stares at her intensely. ‘Fairy tales, sis, don’t worry. No one is going to die.’ He looks at her with patience and love. Harry searches his face for a flicker of fear. Finds none. ‘Eat your eggs,’ he tells her.

‘How can you be so calm, you fucking android?’

‘One of us has to be.’ He lets go of her arm and leans back in his chair. His brain feels too big for his skull. His stomach feels strange and he can hear a high-pitched ringing in his left ear.

‘What, am I freaking out?’ Harry asks shyly.

Leon smiles. ‘Little bit, yeah.’

She nods, gets her shit together, eats a mouthful of eggs. Hard to digest. The idea of eggs suddenly occurs to her as monstrous, she puts her fork down.

‘Sorry,’ she says. ‘Sorry, mate.’

He waves it off. He looks up, watches the ceiling, which Harry knows is what he does when he’s thinking. She scrapes the egg off the toast and eats the toast. ‘Pico’s a successful interior designer with a good link in Peru. He’s no gangster. He’s no killer. He’s an opportunist. A clever man. He loves his wife and his home. I don’t think you need to worry about getting bodied or anything like that.’ Harry looks up from her toast and watches Leon’s face with dubious eyes. ‘What?’ Leon asks her defensively. His tone a little edgy.

‘They’ll want this money back.’

‘So what? You think we should give it to them? Pop round, give it all back and carry on like before?’

Harry looks sheepish. Reaches over for Leon’s milkshake and takes a thoughtful slurp. ‘No, course not,’ she mumbles.

Leon’s getting frustrated. What’s happened has happened and now they need to think pragmatically. Harry’s always been too much of a worrier in a crisis. ‘So what do you wanna do then?’ he asks her.

Tired, Harry considers her options. ‘I wanna keep the money.’

Leon nods heartily. Relieved. ‘Thank you,’ he says.

‘Yeah,’ she says seriously, her eyes dry from tiredness. Strained. ‘I want to get out of all this. Stop shotting. Live life.’

‘Well, there you go. That’s what we’re gonna have to do.’ Leon lays his hand on the table for Harry to take. She does. They shake. Grip each other’s hands for a long moment. Leon takes his hand back, wipes his mouth with it. The night before is dragging on, sitting with its arms around them, resting its bleeding head on their shoulders. Leon drinks his milkshake, his eyes closed.

‘We need to sleep,’ she says. Leon agrees, nodding his head, opening his eyes fast. Harry necks the last of her coffee. Cold now. ‘Do I look alright to drive?’ she asks him. Leon looks at her. Harry shows him
sober, composed
.

‘Yeah, fine.’ Leon digs in his pocket for some notes. Leaves thirty quid on the table. They stand, walk delicately out to the car, smiling at the waiter as they go.

By the time they get to their flat it’s well and truly morning. Leon nods at the neighbours as Harry looks for her key.
It’s just a briefcase
. Every braking car is the coming of a killer. Every distant footstep is police. Harry’s heart is racing like a fox who smells the hunt.

The day is up, the high street’s becoming clogged with early-rising working people. Ron and Rags are behind the closed blinds of Giuseppe’s wishing it wasn’t morning yet.

‘Look,’ Rags says. Having abandoned his elaborate gin fizz ritual, he is now drinking his gin straight, with a dash of tap water. ‘I think we should call it a night.’

‘Why? Where are you going?’

‘Well, I’ve got to get myself spruced up, haven’t I? I’m off to a matinee with a nice girl I met last week. And after that, if all goes to plan, I imagine I’ll be drinking some wine in a posh restaurant and hopefully cracking into an oyster or two.’ Rags looks like his face has been assembled by a drunk child. Nothing fits right. The booze, the stress, the lack of sleep, the lines of coke have all contributed to a bulging, vacant edginess lingering behind every movement. He stands and stretches and strolls purposefully to the counter, walks behind it and watches himself in the mirror above the worktop. ‘Nothing a shower won’t put right.’

Ron is racking another line. Getting stuck in to the gear as if it hasn’t been a minute since he last indulged.
Old habits die hard
, he thinks to himself.

Rags steps back out from behind the counter, walks over to the table he was sitting at, gets his coat from the back of the chair and swings it over his shoulders.

Ron bends down and takes the line up his nose. Everything behind his face is concrete. Most of the line falls back out onto the table. Exasperated, he wiggles his nose vigorously with his thumb and forefinger. ‘Fucking nose,’ he says.

‘Mate, clear up in here, and get yourself home to Linda.’

Ron looks up at his brother. ‘Linda? I can’t let her see me like this.’

‘Why not?’ Rags asks him, confused. ‘You look fine to me.’

Ron shakes his head. ‘No,’ he says, ‘I still got some stuff to work out.’

‘There’s nothing to work out. Go home, sleep.’

Rags roots around in the inside pocket of his coat. Retrieves a plastic pill sheet, pops a small blue pill out and places it tenderly in front of his brother. ‘Valium,’ he says. ‘No worries.’

Ron has both hands on the table top, his shoulders are tensed, his head down, his chest tight, his body like a bombed-out building. ‘Thanks.’

‘Have a nice day, won’t you? Don’t stay in here with the blinds shut. You’ll get the bullies knocking on. Go home. Get some kip.’ Rags pulls black-leather gloves from his pocket, stretches them over his hands. ‘We’ll find her. She can’t be too hard to find.’

The brothers stare at each other, considering the statement.

‘Go on then, fuck off,’ Ron says tenderly.

‘Thanks for the drinks.’ Rags unlocks the door.

‘Don’t mention it.’ Ron stands and stretches, surveys the damage to the café.

Rags opens the door and steps through it. ‘Don’t do anything on your own, OK? Call me if you find something?’

Ron locks the door behind Rags and sits down at the table by the window, peering out onto the high street through a crack in the closed blinds. In a couple of hours it will be well and truly daytime.

He gets up, breathing deeply, and takes the glasses to the sink. Puts the radio on while he washes up. ‘China In Your Hands’.

CIRCLES

Harry is holding her head in the bathroom, leaning over the sink. Cold water hurls itself against her cheeks and breaks against her closed eyes. She lifts her face; the water falls off her nose and eyebrows, T-shirt wet at the neck. Her body hurts. Every muscle aches. She stares at her reflection and doesn’t look away. A wet face, pale and blotched with stress, stares out. The cheeks are hollowed. Wisps of hair stagger upwards from the head. A thin-lipped mouth is hanging open. She looks inside it. Opens it as wide as it will go until it hurts her jaw and then she clenches her fists and she holds them up by her face and she closes her eyes and she convulses wildly for a short burst and her open mouth shouts without sound. It’s not like she hasn’t heard what Pico is capable of. All her life she’s been so careful.

She has no girlfriend, no children, she sells drugs for a living to people she can’t stand. She can feel the city caving in on itself. She wakes up in the morning and stares at Facebook
profiles of people she never liked and sees photographs of their wedding days and their charity runs and their children’s birthday parties and their wild nights out.

If they came for her, today. If they’d followed them, or something. If they found out who she was and they came for her today and they came into the house and grabbed her body in their hands and took her out into their car and drove away with petrol in the boot, what would it all have been for?

She takes her T-shirt off. Stares at her body in her bra. Watches awkwardly and sees herself. As if she wasn’t there before she looked. She unhooks the bra, lets it drop. Watches. Always surprised to see what lives in the mirror. It seems so far away from who she feels she is.

She remembers being twelve or so. Staring like this. Topless, lifting her arms above her head and clasping her wrists and pulling as hard as she could to try and make her new breasts disappear.

She is still that child.

She feels the presence of danger. She sees head-on collisions in her mind’s eye.

Images spark and flare in her brain. Her most shameful moments. All of her lovers. Piles of cocaine. Leon’s eyes. The day she bought the Ford Cortina. The seaside wind and Becky’s earrings dangling when she laughed, those holy dimples rising. She’s worked like this for what? She’s just been going round in circles. She’s nowhere closer really. Not really.
The loneliness that’s always known her is curled around her ankles, getting comfy.

It moved through her like lightning when girls walked past and the shame of it threw her against the walls of her school buildings, head hanging. The hard bones in her body showed black against her skin after fighting again.
What are you?
they asked her, laughing. Ran across the street to say,
Excuse me, what are you?
Not even laughing sometimes. She grew with it a part of her, a secret part. And while the others she knew started to investigate each other, she couldn’t bear the thought of undressing. Secret things she did with boys from her street. Let them touch her body. Hump her, fully dressed. The older boys caught on and she let them do whatever they wanted. She’d never tell a soul. She didn’t know what else she could be for. She thought that when she grew up she would grow up to be male.

There were things she wanted to know. What happened underneath girls’ clothes? Were there other people like her?

She was fourteen. Their weaving limbs in little tops in summer on the darkening heath. The girls, their interest spiked, would lead her into foliage and sit down with her. Pull her T-shirt off her shoulders. Let her kiss them, kiss them harder till their breathing became heavy, lips like storm clouds, opening.

What she had with Leon she could trust. They shared a bed when they were growing. Fought each other. Kept each other safe. Leon was a bullied kid before he learned his own strength.
His mum’s boyfriends would too often slap him hard across the floor. He was taunted by the tough lads who waited round outside the sweetshop on the main square of his block. He preferred the company of books. What Harry offered him, what Leon offered Harry was a kinship that allowed them both to grow into much stronger people than they could have been without each other.

She loved to feel them buck beneath her, their eyes widening in desperation, staring at her, disbelieving. Shaking with the power of it. But they were only ever hers for moments. They all went back to real life eventually. She’d see them on the bus weeks later, holding hands with their boyfriends and flicking their hair.

Her name was Talia. She was taller than Harry by an inch or two. Her breasts were moons, they governed Harry, pulled her around and affected her moods. And the curve of her hips, the curve of her hips. The Curve Of Her Hips was an altar. Her hair was thick black shiny oil and it fell long long down her back and around her shoulders. Her skinny arms were scarred from cuts. She worked behind the counter in the bong shop. She had a birthmark on her neck that looked like a skull and crossbones. She was a local myth. They said her sister was a prostitute. They said her dad was a killer. None of it was true. Her legs were flowing lava when she walked. She stopped Harry in her tracks and knew it and she started smiling over her shoulder in the street when they walked past each other, and one night at a party Harry found the courage,
walked up close and they danced and she had never danced like that with a girl before. Talia hung off Harry’s shoulders, traced her fingertips across her back, leant in close and giggled. Deep dark pull a total opiate. Talia. There was no other human in the world. Five years it lasted.

After heartbreak, loneliness. After loneliness, a new conviction, an all-consuming work ethic. A new recklessness with women.

She never went to gay bars. She never said the words out loud. Some girls just seemed to know and they approached and threw their kisses down like swords. But the loneliness of it was unbearable. Smiling at a stranger, thinking maybe, maybe them? All her friends were blokes and she would sit and listen to them bullshit about girls and it hurt her what they said and how they said it.

There were other women. Baking-hot summer days with nothing moving but their bodies. Lying impossibly close, learning how to feel how the other wanted it and voices rising, shouting wet loud screams of joy. But she never fell in love again. She concentrated on her dream. She put everything she had into buying splitting selling. Life was good. She laughed at things and snorted lines of powder off the edge of the pub pool table. Impressing girls who felt her strangeness and wanted it for theirs.

All of this she sees. Naked in the mirror.

She wants to be more than she’s been. She wants to hold Becky’s hand and run around the city smashed on pills and
dance in raves again like she used to, or eat mushrooms in the woods beneath the sky the clouds the sun the rain and fuck the afternoons away. She wants to stop this endless circling. She wants to be an adult with a life. She wants to be in love and travel and eat food in the evenings. She feels screwed up so tight and small. She wants to stretch out underneath somebody’s hands.

Becky’s in her brain like wasps trapped in a sticky classroom. It’s just like her to want someone impossible. She thinks they understand each other, but they hardly know each other.

Maybe they might get away with it? Maybe Pico will understand; they’ve done business together a long time and Pico always seemed to like her, they were friends, or something similar. The thought of leaving south London, her family, Honeyjar, the Caribbean takeaway where she gets her steam fish on a Friday, the wall outside her house where all the old men gather in their robes and hats every evening and talk in melodious Arabic. Her friends. Her streets and roads and alleyways. Her little brother. As annoying as he is.
Poor Pete
. Her mind is ripped apart by guilt and terror.

She watches as the skin around her nipples puckers in the cold bathroom. She tenses the muscles in her abdomen. Punches herself in the stomach weakly. If they came in now. Right now. Smashed through this door, there’d be nothing she could do.

Maybe she should call her mum and tell her that she loves her.