Kate Tempest - The Bricks that Built the Houses

She tries to send the memory back to where it lived when it was still forgotten, but its echoes reverberate inside her skull.

‘Think they know you’re with us?’ Leon asks Becky.

‘Pete might work it out,’ she says, and Pete’s name hangs in the air like a shot bird, about to fall out of the sky, then, true enough, plummets softly into their laps, and sits there, warm and bleeding.

Pete.

‘What a little cunt,’ says Leon, with affection.

The car returns to silence. Each alone with their panic rising, falling, rising higher. The tension clogs their mouths. Becky turns in her seat to look at Harry. Her face is lit by passing street lights.

‘We’ll be OK.’ Becky smiles and all the streets in Harry’s heart are on fire, all the windows in all the houses smash at the same time. A tidal wave charges in and puts the fires out and the water floods the houses and comes pouring through the broken windows, carrying debris on its waves. Becky turns back to the window, stares at the brief white lights of the shops they pass. Seen then gone. Seen then gone. Brutal blazing flashes like someone shouting swear words in your face.

The road behind is darker than the road in front and the street is warped with memories. The routine, the working, the practising patience, the sitting with people and not saying anything. Auditions and stage lights, the pull of her muscles. Her face staring back from the lenses. The make-up and powders. The nausea like an endless empty corridor inside, hands on her knees, deep breathing backstage. Doing her hair and waiting for buses and clearing the tables. The ring of applause. The endless exhaustion. She can see it all, out on the street, getting smaller as they drive away. She opens the window and smells the storm coming up from the tarmac and spouts a gasp of laughter.

The roads are getting broader, the houses are getting bigger, fewer chicken shops now, more gastro pubs. Their city is loosening its hold. They’re turning onto the motorway. On the radio, Billy Bragg is singing ‘A New England’.

a year before

It’s coming on for half ten and Becky is on the wrong side of the river; a part of town full of professional creatives with dreams of simpler living — radical, secret aspirations for cottages and nuclear families.

Hundreds of bodies move around each other in the upstairs room of a fashionable bar. Everybody’s talking about themselves. I’m doing this , says everyone. It’s going great. And have you heard about this that I do, and this other thing as well, have you heard about that? Questioning postures and emphatic responses. The air is heavy with cocaine sweat, hidden fragility and the prospect of good PR.

Becky is twenty-six years old but feels like she’s on her last legs. She’s leaning against the bar; all around her are monsters and slimeballs and showgirls, shouting and screaming to prove they exist. Her shoulders are squared, pulled backwards. She looks confrontational but she doesn’t mean to. This is just how she stands. She is gifted with the kind of upright posture and ease in her own limbs that results in a love of movement, a fluidity of physicality that makes dancing her most primal joy. She is dark-browed, sarcastic and occasionally mean-spirited. A knife amongst all this flesh. The kind of woman who starts chaos in strangers all day.

She leans heavily, her elbow aches. Beside her in the busy room, a girl called Aisha is looking around for important people. Aisha is rich with confidence. The brutal, unnerving confidence of a twenty-one-year-old. She has, for some reason, attached herself to Becky and they have been standing together for the last half an hour. They’ve danced together twice before, but Becky is surprised that Aisha has stopped so long to hang out with her. She makes Becky feel old.

Becky smiles as brightly as she can for the faces that dip as they pass. Her head has been pounding for days now. A deep, sharp pound that began in the left temple and has been clawing its way across the entire circumference of her skull.

She entertains fantasies of natural disaster. Sees the people moving in the bar as if they’re the remnants of a dying age. A live camera-feed of some hideous alien invasion. She stares at the faces, desperate to ascertain the flicker of a human, but all she can see are props.

On Becky’s other side, an older woman is speaking to a younger man. He is morose and listening begrudgingly, dressed in the rent-a-personality uniform of obscure-band T-shirt, faded jeans and I-play-guitar leather boots. ‘I love your songs, sweetheart,’ the woman tells him. She is tall, emphasises every word with a flounce of her hands, her hair spins upwards like a coned shell and she is expensively dressed in black. ‘But they’re too short . If I was you, I’d slap a guitar solo on the end and repeat the chorus to fade.’ The man looks unsure but his eyes shine as he allows himself to be persuaded. ‘ No one is doing guitar solos these days,’ she tells him as he runs his ringed fingers through his hair in what seems to Becky a practised gesture. Becky wonders whether she is witnessing the birth of a star. The woman traces her hand across his cheek and then jabs him in the shoulder. ‘Get me ten tracks of that sort of thing and I’ll get you in a room with some shit-hot A and Rs, and you’ll see what happens next, OK?’

Tonight is the video launch for the Cool New Band With The Retro Feel’s new single. It coincides with the launch of the lead singer’s new Fashion Stroke Art range. The band are ignoring each other on different sides of the room. Their managers are giggling into each other’s nostrils in the toilets.

Across the back wall of the venue, three large screens hang end to end, playing the video on a constant loop. Becky watches the screens absent-mindedly, cringing at the face she’s making, the pouts you have to pull to get seen. It feels like she’s watching someone else’s body moving. She can see all the years she spent working on her dancing, loitering amongst the fashionistas and superbloggers. They are either skin and bone or too fat to move, drunker than everyone else, punching each other in the face with shaking hands. There was so much more she used to dream of.

‘He’s amazing, isn’t he?’ Aisha is dressed in vibrant colours. She is slender and tall and her mouth makes up two-thirds of her face. She has at least three different outfits on. Her features are striking and everything about her body is impressive. ‘You’re so lucky that you got to work with him,’ Aisha gushes. Her voice moves up and down like a sound effect in a children’s TV show signifying surprise.

‘Yeah. I know. I feel, like, super blown away.’ Becky finds herself mimicking Aisha’s vernacular. She can see her future: the hype, the push, the rise, the braying bitterness of her peers, the mounting pressure, the slow decline, the inevitable agony of being replaced by someone more malleable, with younger cartilage and better boobs.

‘What was he like?’ Aisha dangles her straw in her mouth. Becky feels flirted at, a welling pound mounts in her throat.

The shoot with Marshall Law had been a nightmare. He was late to every session, and when eventually he did arrive, he spent the whole time on his phone posting photographs of himself to various online identity generators. Becky ended up having to choreograph 80 per cent of the routine because nobody knew what was going on and there was a film crew who needed something to film, even though she knew she would never be credited for the work.

‘Yeah. He was really exciting,’ Becky says. Dying inside. ‘Really cool and exciting.’ Becky has learned that, once a director is a big deal, any ideas that occur in rooms that he’s in, even if they don’t spring from the director’s imagination, are somehow understood as being his by osmosis. Even if he didn’t create the work, he ‘curated’ it.