The Bricks That Built the Houses (30 page)

Gloria’s boyfriend Tommy and Becky’s cousin Ted, who knows Pete from school, are opening a bottle of Prosecco and organising glasses.

‘How many are we?’ Tommy asks.

‘Fuck knows. Hold on.’ Ted stands on his tiptoes and counts the heads. ‘We’ll need another bottle, I think.’

‘How many glasses though?’ Tommy stares at the glasses on the bar, lost.

‘Just start pouring, mate, we’ll work it out,’ Ted tells him.

Charlotte and Becky help them pass the glasses out. When everyone’s got a glass in their hands, they raise them up to Pete. Pete is leaning on Becky’s shoulder. Becky is smiling beneath the point of his elbow, but she looks tired, far away.

Rags is having a great time. ‘SPEECH, SPEECH, SPEECH!’ he shouts, laughing. Leon and Harry join in.

Pete clears his throat, acts all tearful. ‘Oh it’s all too much,’ he says. ‘I don’t know what to say . . .’ He breaks off, mimes being overwhelmed, one hand on his heart, frowning with emotion. ‘I’d just like to thank my mum and my dad for making me . . .’ Everyone laughs.

‘Come on, say something proper,’ Nathan tells him, slapping him on the back.

Pete thinks about it, nods, raises his glass. ‘OK.’ He clears his throat. ‘I’d just like to say . . .’ He pauses for effect, looks around the faces in the room. ‘Let’s get fucking shitfaced!’

Everybody yawls and stamps, displaying their best affection. They raise their glasses. Their smiles are wide enough to fall in.

Danny puts his arm around Charlotte. ‘Lovely, innit?’

‘Yeah,’ she says. But she’s not sure. She watches Becky floating in the background, not saying much, just fiddling with her glass and keeping a foot away from conversations.

Harry walks up from the other side of the room, and joins the circle round Pete, puts her arm around her little brother. ‘Happy Birthday, kid,’ she says, gripping him tight.

‘Oh. Thank you,’ Pete says, slapping her on the back. The drinks are flowing and spirits are high. ‘I’m sorry we’ve not seen so much of each other recently,’ he says quietly.

Harry looks at the ground, nodding. ‘Yeah, me too,’ she says, still holding on to her brother’s waist. ‘Just the way it goes, I suppose. You like the party then?’

‘Was it you? You did this?’ Pete grins, gobsmacked.

‘I just thought, you know, might be nice for you, see all your friends and family in one place.’ Harry kisses her brother’s cheek and strokes his head a few times, messing his hair up and smoothing it down.

Pete brushes her off, laughing. ‘Soppy twit,’ he tells her, voice heavy with booze and camaraderie.

Graham grins at Harry and clasps her in a fierce hug. ‘Hello, love,’ he says. ‘When you coming round to see me then, eh?’

Harry slaps her dad on the back a few times. ‘Soon, Dad. I’ll be over soon, I promise.’

‘How you keeping?’ Graham asks her, studying her. Brushing his daughter’s shoulders, rubbing her arms, holding on to her wrists, admiring his eldest.

‘I’m well, Dad,’ Harry tells him. ‘I’m good.’

Ron wanders up to the circle, puts his arms around Pete. ‘Happy birthday, mate,’ he proclaims. ‘All grown up, eh? Far cry from that little wretch mooning around my café all day staring at my niece. Eh?’

Pete is tipsy already and wobbling from all the affection. ‘This is Ron,’ he explains to the circle, ‘Becky’s uncle, and Ron, this is Graham, my dad, and Harry, my sister.’

Ron smiles and shakes hands with Graham. ‘Hello, Graham, good to meet you.’ He turns to Harry. ‘Hello,’ he says, looking her dead in the face before leaning in and kissing both of her cheeks deliberately, his stubble coarse as sunburn. ‘Harry?’ Ron asks her.

‘That’s right, yeah,’ Harry tells him. Something about the intensity of his gaze rattles her. He is staring into her face, eyes shining like blades in the sun.

Ron can feel his veins growing heavy with rage. ‘Good to meet you too,’ he says, attempting a charming tone but speaking in gruff, dissonant sing-song. On the other side of the room, by the jukebox, Leon can feel his shoulders tensing.

Dale is looming cheerfully around. He watches Pete and Becky as they stand at the bar. Becky looks up and sees him
staring. She recognises him but she can’t place him. She smiles vaguely and looks back to the Prosecco she’s pouring but she can feel his eyes lingering on her body and it’s making her uncomfortable.

‘Who’s that over there?’

Pete turns, drunk, happy. ‘Oh, that’s Dale,’ he says. ‘Believe it or not, that’s David’s son.’

Becky looks over at him, surprised, Dale’s face lacking even a trace of David’s eager veneer.

Pete beckons him over, grinning amiably. ‘Dale!’ he shouts. ‘Come over here, mate.’ Pete watches Dale walk over, grinning intensely. Nose fidgeting on his face like a kid bursting for a wee. He admires the expanse of his chest. ‘This is Dale,’ Pete tells Becky. ‘Dale, this is Becky, the love of my life.’

Becky winces and sends an elbow towards Pete’s ribs. ‘Cheesy bastard,’ she says.

‘What?’ Pete plays crestfallen before sneaking a kiss of her neck, then another.

Suddenly, publicly, Pete is in love with her. But an hour before, he couldn’t even hold her hand. Becky finds herself looking behind her, checking to see if Harry has noticed the kisses.

‘Nice to meet you, Dale,’ she says, looking back at them.

‘Actually, we’ve met before,’ Dale says. His voice is hoarse. His heart is butter. Thick and shivering in his chest.

Becky stares blankly at his strange, solid face.

‘Thanks for coming along, mate,’ Pete says warmly. ‘I didn’t expect a thing. Honest, I thought we was just going for a drink, me and her, and then, look at all this. What a treat. Eh? What a treat.’

‘You was at work,’ he tells her, ignoring Pete.

‘At the caff?’ she suggests.

‘No, it wasn’t the caff. Your other job.’

She feels the gradient of the floor increase. She’s being pushed up a hill into a vacuum. There is an unwritten rule between people involved in a professionally intimate exchange: if they meet out in the real world, they respect each other enough not to mention it. Becky stares at the man, daggers in her eyes.

Pete’s stomach rips itself apart as it all comes screaming back.

‘Let’s not do this here,’ she says quietly but with violence behind the words.

‘You remember, don’t you, Pete?’ Dale asks him. The drunken mist blown clear.

‘What?’ Pete’s voice tremolos, in its highest register. He shakes his head at Dale, but Dale isn’t looking at him. Dale is looking at Becky, front on, bearing down.

‘Yeah, you remember,’ Dale says. ‘I met you in the Hotel Hacienda.’ Pete pushes Dale, but Dale doesn’t stop, doesn’t flinch. Pete’s push is absorbed by Dale’s mass. ‘You said your name was Jade and I said my name was James.’

Becky is silent. She looks at Pete who’s covering his mouth with his hand, stepping from one foot to the other. Around them, people are drinking, singing at each other, swearing fondly. Low bursts of laughter rip through the room like accordion solos.

Pete snaps out of his stupor. ‘Come on, Becky,’ he says. ‘Fuck this.’ And he starts to usher Becky away from Dale but Becky roots herself, leans away from Pete’s arms.

Dale leans round Pete’s bony shoulders. Pete stands between them both but neither acknowledges him, only each other. Becky forces her mind back through last week’s clients. Unless something particularly interesting happens, she forgets them as soon as she leaves the hotel room. She watches his paddle-shaped head, his anonymous doughy features. She glimpses a memory, his awkward body and predatory eyes. He’d asked her for extras.

‘Pete was worried,’ Dale says. ‘About how you’d been carrying on and that, with the clients? So he asked me to go undercover, if you like, check it out for him.’ He nods, winks at Becky. Slaps Pete on the back from behind, grips Pete’s shoulder. Pete sinks. ‘Eh, Petey?’ Dale leans in closer to Becky.

Her body is on fire. She stands in her bones, but her tissues, her organs, her guts have burnt to a crisp. ‘Pete?’ Her voice is not her voice. Her voice is her mother’s voice that night when they left the flat and the paparazzi bulbs made the street into a nightclub.

Ron is outside the toilets, drying his face with his handkerchief. Harry breezes out of the door to the Ladies, covering her nose with the fingers of her right hand. She snorts, loud and long. A sniff that starts in the mouth and ends in the back of the brain. Ron takes the handkerchief from his face and Harry sees him standing there as she lets the door swing closed behind her. ‘Oh hello,’ she says, big smile.

‘Alright, Harry.’ Ron dips his head, speaks low, pushes a hoarse whisper out through a conspirator’s smile. ‘Haven’t got a spare one, have you?’ He taps the side of his nose. ‘I’m flagging here.’

Harry grins. ‘Oh yeah. No sweat,’ she says, digging the wrap out of her pocket and passing it on. ‘Help yourself,’ she says. ‘I’m going for a fag.’ Ron nods, holds the wrap in his fist, still damp from the taps. ‘See you at the bar in a sec?’ Harry squeezes his arm briefly.

‘Yeah, lovely,’ Ron says. ‘I’ll get ’em in.’

‘Nice one.’

‘What you having?’ Ron asks her.

‘Mine’s a pint of Sea View,’ Harry tells him, smiling.

Ron heads into the Gents, closes the door of the cubicle, opens the wrap. He studies the coke. So dense it looks beige. Clumped into wet rocks, stinking. The smell so strong his belly responds before his nose knows it’s smelt it. The lurch of his gut is the telltale sign. He splits a few granules off with his little fingernail, watches the spread of the powder as he pushes his nail down into it. He takes a small
pinch to his nose and inhales it. He fucking knew it. He’d know this gear anywhere.

David leans against the bar, top button of his shirt undone, drinking his pint slowly.

Graham is slaughtered and leaning in close. ‘Look,’ he says, ‘all I’m saying is you better take care of her, you. I’ve seen your type before, with your . . .’ He stops talking and makes gestures David doesn’t recognise. Curling his hands around in the air, waving his palms and swinging his head from side to side. ‘Hair.’ He spits. ‘And your—’

‘Look, it’s OK, Graham,’ David interrupts him.

‘What’s OK?’

‘I owe you an apology,’ David says calmly.

Graham stops gesturing. Watches David suspiciously. ‘An apology, eh? A likely story.’ In his mind he is debonair and cavalier. In reality he is swaying, eyebrows scrunched up, face red and blotchy, pointing vaguely like a weathervane on a windless afternoon.

‘I didn’t know she was married when I met her,’ David tells him. ‘When I found out she was married, I very respectfully kept my distance. But I loved her very much, and when it became apparent that things were not going so well with you, and that she might be having similar feelings for me, well, I told her how I felt.’

Graham is expanding slowly. Becoming tight with air.

‘The thing is, Graham, I want only the best for her. And it would mean the world to her if we were able to be civil.
She cares very much for you. And I would like it if we could one day be, well . . . Friends is probably a bit steep, but you see what I’m getting at?’ David finishes speaking, lays his eyebrows down.

Graham filters David’s words through a complicated lens of suspicion and booze. He thinks for a minute. ‘I don’t trust you, David,’ he says, swaying. ‘You’re not to be trusted. That’s all I have to say on the matter.’ He walks away to find Miriam and throw himself at her feet.

Outside, the wind blows hard and cold and the sky is angry. Harry smokes her cigarette and leans her head against the bricks. Thinks that Becky looks so lovely this evening. Nice to see Pete smiling too.

Ron steps through the doors carefully. Feeling the floor through the soles of his shoes. Concrete. Steady now. He walks up very close to Harry before Harry notices him coming. He stands beside her.

Harry smiles at him. ‘All good?’ she asks. Ron says nothing. Harry feels uncomfortable but waits it out. Stares straight ahead.

Ron looks up at the clouds, rolls on his heels and then back onto the balls of his feet, leans against the wall, speaks in a slow growl. ‘I know what you did, darlin’.’

His voice is as dark as the sky. Harry’s fingertips start tingling; the onset of simultaneous pins and needles attacks every digit. Her pulse picks up its feet and starts to run.
‘What you talking about?’ Harry looks at him out of the corner of her eye.

Ron turns to face her, places a hand on her arm, above the elbow, and stares at her with eyes like dirty water. Thick and oily. Full of dead things. ‘I know who you
are
.’

‘Leave it out,’ Harry tells him, her arm rotting beneath his touch. She tries to shake herself free but he clings on.

‘No more bullshit, missy.’

‘What is this?’ Harry asks him, speaking calmly. Gently. Ron stares into her face, looking for something, Harry meets his stare for as long as she can, but can feel herself weakening.

‘I work for Pico,’ Ron tells her, matching her tone.

Harry’s body is propelled through the air at great speed and lands in a heap at the bottom of a cliff. She can feel every bone as it breaks into a million splinters. His hand still on her arm, she waits out the initial shock and tries to engage her brain with what this means. She looks up into this man’s face. She can’t work out how
this
could be happening
here
. Her entire family are metres away. The care she’s taken all her life to keep things separate . . . The weird basement room looms before her. The shark swims in Ron’s eyes.

‘Pico?’ Her voice is strong as she pulls her arm out of Ron’s hand. Ron lets her go. She speaks Pico’s name like it means nothing.

‘Yeah.’

‘I ain’t seen Pico in a long time.’ Harry puts her hands on her hips, stares off into the middle distance, acts as casual as she can. Frowning slightly as she mimes trying to recall the last time she’d seen him.

‘Stop it, Harry.’ Ron holds up a finger. ‘I know what’s happened here, OK? We don’t need to fuck around.’ Harry straightens her back, looks about. Is Leon in the shadows? She can’t be sure. Ron carries on. ‘I know you came to have a party. So, no trouble right now, OK? But hear me, listen up good.’