Kate Tempest - The Bricks that Built the Houses

‘There you go,’ she said. ‘There’s your fucking father.’ Paula stared at Becky, spiteful, hurt. Wanting love. She waited for Becky to look at the newspaper. Becky didn’t move. Paula waited for as long as her nerves could take, but seeing that Becky was not going to look, she slammed the paper down at her daughter’s feet and left it spreadeagled on the floor before she turned and flounced out, back upstairs. Becky heard the door slam and the music start playing. You don’t have to say you love me .

Becky fell towards the paper, slipped from the sofa and sat awkwardly hunched on the floor next to it. She crumpled her body together, her knees tucked up to her chest, and she read it, weeping till it hurt her face, cover to cover, twice over.

After that episode, Becky grew timid around her mother. She couldn’t stop thinking about what she’d learned. She saw her dad everywhere. Every shop sign she noticed had John’s written on it, every TV show was about dads and daughters. Every lesson in school was about people being punished for what they believed in. And then some girls in her year who she smoked fags with all started boasting about the older guys they were sleeping with, and Becky couldn’t help but imagine the girls themselves. The ones he had apparently slept with. There had been six of them. What did they look like? They can’t have looked much older than she looked. She had nightmares about it. She felt disgusted with herself for missing him. She sat in front of the computers in the library searching for his books, and finding all of them had been recalled. At lunchtimes she hid in the IT department, going online on the old school computers and soaking up all she could find. Every spare minute she had, she found herself back there, logging on and searching and then hating everything she’d just read and wishing she could forget it. She became withdrawn, she lost weight. She started skipping dance classes, punishing herself.

One afternoon, instead of going to her dance class, she was sitting alone on the wall of the playground in the park, watching a cold February rain falling. She stared at the sharp, slanting rain for three hours, getting drenched to the bone. She was laid up in bed with a fever for a week, lost in heated nightmares of monsters and jail cells and internet chat rooms and her dance teacher crying. It was then, sick in bed, feeling too bad to put the telly on or pick up a book, that she promised herself she wasn’t going to let this get the better of her. She wasn’t ever going to skip another dance class, and she wasn’t going to search her dad’s name on the internet, no matter how tempting it was, because it only made her feel shit. She decided she was going to focus on what she loved the most, and slowly she felt the yearning for her dad grow into dull, agonising indifference. She told herself she didn’t have a father. She made herself forget him. She was going to be a dancer and get as far away from her parents as she could.

Paula couldn’t bear the distance she had driven between herself and her daughter. But every time she tried to apologise, she saw herself from above and was consumed with self-loathing. She started attending a local church discussion group, one that advertised itself as being a good place for finding answers, and by the time Becky turned fourteen, Paula was a fully fledged born-again.

Suddenly her mother was always there, at her shoulder, needy and apologetic, wistful for the past and terrified of the present, and clinging on to Becky for everything she had. So Becky started doing what young teenagers do when the whole universe is made of insane adults: she stayed out of the house and she stopped going to school.

She started hanging out on the benches outside the shopping centre in Lewisham. There was a scrappy little patch of grass frequented by drunks that Becky liked because she could watch all the people getting on and off the trains. A few other kids hung out there too. The park backed onto a railway arch and behind that arch was a little estate. Kids that didn’t go to school hung around skinning up under the arch or they sat on the benches waiting for something to happen that they could look at.

Becky was sitting on her usual bench; it was coming on midday and the sky was concrete. Two girls walked over. One was tiny and blonde, coughed constantly and moved like a little bird, jerking her head when she talked, hopping from foot to foot. The other was big and black-haired, her skin was gold as hazelnuts and her eyes were endless rings of amber, black and brown. She was sipping from a carton of strawberry Ribena and moved like a cat, slowly and purposefully, stretching herself out with each stride.

The bigger one looked at Becky for a moment, then sat down next to her on the bench. The smaller stayed standing at the end of the bench, looking around. Becky tensed up; this looked like trouble. The bigger girl sipped from her Ribena. She blew bubbles into the carton. The smaller girl giggled. Becky didn’t respond.

‘I’ve seen you here a lot. Ain’t you got nothing better to do?’ the dark-haired one asked her, looking at the side of her face.

Becky didn’t move, kept staring straight ahead at the hard grey mud beneath her school shoes. ‘I ain’t going nowhere. It’s a free country.’

The Ribena girl laughed loudly, and rocked hard on the bench, backwards and forwards. Threw her head around. The other one smiled softly at Becky and coughed deeply into her hand, moving her weight from foot to foot.

Becky started to get hot, her cheeks were going red. ‘What you laughing at?’ She stared at the bigger girl, frowning, ready to get angry.

‘Nothing.’ The girl stopped laughing and it sounded like a vacuum cleaner being turned off at the mains. ‘Relax.’

Becky didn’t move. Stayed completely still. Hoped that they’d get bored and walk away.

‘Where you live anyway?’ the girl asked her, kicking an empty crisp packet and watching it blow away.

‘Nowhere.’

‘You don’t live nowhere?’ The bird-like one’s voice was quiet and she had a slight lisp.

‘Why you asking? Leave me alone.’

The cat-like one threw her head back again and started creasing up. ‘You’re funny,’ she said. ‘What’s your name?’

Becky’s hands gripped the edge of the bench. She sat on her thumbs, leaned forwards and straightened her arms.

‘I’m Gloria,’ the bigger girl said, ‘and that’s Charlotte, my friend, but I call her Chips. Why ain’t you in school?’

‘Why ain’t you in school?’ Becky turned towards the girls. Looked at them. Charlotte’s face was covered in freckles, like a pear on the turn. Gloria had her hair done in lots of little bunches all over her head with colourful bands tying them in place. The strands that didn’t fit into the bunches were gelled into intricate curls in front of her ears and at the nape of her neck. Becky was impressed.

‘We don’t like school,’ Charlotte said. ‘What music do you listen to?’

Becky looked at them both staring at her, flicked her hair out of her eyes. ‘Garage and that,’ she said.

The sun was bright through the sparse leaves of the bushes that lined the edge of the path. It shone in Becky’s eyes. She squinted at the girls.

‘We like garage too, don’t we, Glory?’ As she spoke, Charlotte sat down in the tiny space between Gloria’s body and the end of the bench. She wiggled Gloria over with her bum and shoulder and leaned all the way forwards so she could see Becky. The point of her toes just about scraped the floor. ‘What school do you go?’ she asked her, blinking and freckly.

‘St Saviour’s, up the hill.’ Becky pointed behind her to the road that led up to the school.

‘Do you know a boy called Reece?’ Gloria swung her feet. Scuffing the bottoms of her shoes. She had black Kickers on with baby-blue laces. Becky liked them a lot.