Kate Tempest - The Bricks that Built the Houses

The pressure in her head is unbearable. She thinks she’s going to faint or die or something. She wants to rip her skin off and reveal herself, all blood and sinew and pulsing fag-stained lungs and poor exhausted heart. John Darke. John Darke. John Darke. Her fingernails repeat it. Her eyelashes repeat it. She clears her throat.

‘See you later then.’ She keeps her voice level, her tone calm and friendly.

‘See you later,’ he says over his shoulder as he shuts the door behind him.

She watches him through the window as he walks off down the high street.

Alone at the end of her shift, Becky sits with a beer at the table opposite Giuseppe’s photo. She stares at him. There’s definitely something in his posture that reminds her of her mother. She presses the cold beer bottle against her brow, drags it over her nose and mouth.

‘What’s it all about, Giuseppe?’ Her voice is a stranger in the empty room. Terrified of its own shape.

She comes from a long line of people who fought like dogs for everything they had. Who pushed themselves onwards to impossible places.

Her dad gave his life for the words in that book. Now he’s ticking days off in some lonely cell. She wonders if he’s still alive. She’s sure she would have felt it if he wasn’t.

Images flicker across the room, still fragments of prison doors, pale blue lunch rooms, barbed wire crouched menacingly on the tops of high walls, white sunlight in a brick yard, the windows barely slits, a man’s arms pushed through, dangling, just enough room to let his wrists feel the breeze. Inherited images from the internet. She hates him so much she can’t bear it.

Her mum had the impossible dream of being a photographer on her own terms. She never saw it through but she was close. She got so close.

She owes it to them both to not just stagger blindly but to choose the route and walk it.

The muscles in her face are tense and she rubs her jaw and temples. It burns through her. Conviction so heavy it hurts in her throat. When she dances, it needs to be everything she’s ever needed to say. She’s got so lost in arse-licking, posing and pushing for roles, playing it cool behind vulnerable pop stars. The girls she dances with are all really sweet and they all get on great, say they’re a family until the job’s over, but then, they’d trample her bones to get to her part. It needs to be truer. It needs to be bolder and as heavy as this feeling in her throat and in her empty guts. It needs to kick her face open and flood her skull with light. She wants to make a piece of work for a company to dance that will terrify an audience and smash them back to feeling. But how? She can’t even get seen in auditions. She hangs around the studio after class, chatting to the dancers about phrases that she’s thinking of, running certain things again. Talking to the teachers. The dancers there are tired and their eyes are dark and their skin is bad and their feet are sore and broken, but they have a steel in them that Becky lacks. A sure, smiling steel that they got from sticking with it. Not like the girls she works with, who have glossy hair and sexy lips and satiated, peaceful eyes.

She wants to join a company. Really be a part of something. Dance beneath the guidance of a choreographer that she respects. Push herself before it’s too late. For every member of her family who ever lived and died.

She used to vomit every meal. The enamel on her back teeth has been eroded from the stomach acid. It was all about control, she realises now. Her body was what haunted her. The ghosts of both her parents were inside it, somehow more than her, and less than her, and everybody staring at it. Dance teachers pinched her arms, and she would squeeze handfuls of herself, standing shell-shocked in the shower, staring at the bits she hated. This body. It was all she had. She needed it to work for her. Starved and gorged. The toilet doors. It was so sad and lonely there. But hers. All hers.

She would be more than the sum of her parts.

She swigs at her beer and two thin jets of foam drip down her chin. She lets them course towards her neck, swallowing in fast, hard gulps until the bottle’s dry.

Giuseppe was uncle ron’s father. His real name was actually Louis but, for a while, everyone called him Giuseppe.

In 1939, Louis was a young man living in Manchester, the son of two poor Jewish immigrants. His father had sickened and died, leaving Louis, his mother and his seven brothers and sisters to fend for themselves. His younger sisters would have to go to the synagogue at least once a week to beg for food. Louis was training to be a tailor. He was a charismatic, well-liked young man and was working hard to learn his trade.

When war broke out, Louis had just asked his girlfriend Joyce to marry him, but Joyce’s mother refused. ‘He has the look of a man who will never come back!’ she fretted, clapping her hands dramatically to her brow as she worried the washing. ‘My youngest daughter, and she wants to make a widow of herself before she’s even seventeen?’ So Joyce told Louis to make sure he came back home and, if he did, she’d marry him. He promised that he would, and off he went to war.

He was on the beaches at Dunkirk. They died and were killed and they died and were killed and the sand turned putrid with men’s insides. Blood and shit and sweat, the rancid stench of war. He was commanded to stay where he was and hold the fort while the rest of the battalion went for help. He was left with twenty-nine others, and they dug in as fiercely as they could, but the company never came back for them. He would often say later that he learned more about life in those couple of hours than he’d ever learned before or since. Seven of the thirty men were killed, and the twenty-three that stayed breathing were captured. Including himself.

In the coming days, more than 200,000 British troops would be evacuated from the bloodied beach, but Louis would not be among them.

Louis’s best friend in the regiment was a tall, lopsided, skinny man named Joseph. His hair was black as onyx and his smile wrapped itself around anyone who saw it. His constant laugh sounded like he’d swallowed a siren, and he was never still, he moved like a bouncing ball, no matter what he was doing. Everyone called him Giuseppe because he was in love with an Italian girl and was prone to outbursts of song in struggling Italian late at night when he was drunk and out of his mind with missing her.

When Louis was left on the beach, Giuseppe was one of the other twenty-nine men who were with him. They had been through a lot together in the short time they’d been friends, and as Giuseppe approached his final moment, shot through the stomach and bleeding all over the sand, Louis crouched beside him and whispered into his dying ears, ‘You’re walking along with all the people you love, it’s a sunny day. You’re somewhere you haven’t been for a while, it’s beautiful, the trees are swaying, your family are all there, your girl’s there too, holding your hand. Everybody’s smiling and happy and the sky is blue blue blue. You’ve got a picnic, all your favourite food, nice cold bottles of beer. Your girl’s giving you a nice kiss. The sun’s warm on the top of your head. It’s a lovely day, it really is.’

As the Germans came to round up the prisoners, Louis had to think fast. He knew Hitler was killing the Jews. He didn’t know the extent of what was happening in the camps, but he’d heard enough to know he didn’t want the Germans to find out who he was. He kissed Giuseppe’s forehead and swapped identity discs. He left Louis Shogovitch dead on the beach, and joined the other prisoners as Joseph Jones, ‘Giuseppe’ to his friends.

They were stripped of their arms and lined up in single file, and they began the march to the prisoner of war camp. This sorry line of captured men, haggard and gun-struck, was headed and tailed by clean-shaven German soldiers, who marched with their guns and their dogs and their dignity. As well as the soldiers at the head and the tail of the line, there were two soldiers who patrolled the length of the line constantly, each holding a fearsome German Shepherd. They walked either side of the POWs, one on the right, the other on the left, starting from opposite ends, so that one began at the head of the line, the other at the tail, and they crossed in the middle.