Kate Tempest - The Bricks that Built the Houses

He is sitting in a chair at the table watching Miriam’s back as she cooks vegetables. She talks to him without looking at him.

‘It’ll be fine,’ she says. ‘Nice lunch, that’s all. Nothing to worry about.’

He is chopping an onion. He’s never had the knack for it. It slides across the chopping board. The kitchen is bright. The sun floods the surfaces.

‘Do you think they’ll like me?’ He leans back in his chair, looks up from the onion.

‘Of course they will. They just want me to be happy.’ Her voice is melodic, gentle. With a tendency to let her words roll upwards at the ends of her sentences. The kind of speaking voice David associates with hairdressers. His favourite kind of speaking voice for a lady.

‘And are you?’ He waits for her affirmation, face tipped up to catch it all.

‘Yes, David.’ She looks over her shoulder at him. ‘You know I am.’

He goes back to his chopping board. Satisfied. The onion, at last, gives. David blinks rapidly and opens his mouth to fight off the onion tears. Grimaces silently for a moment, waits for the sting to pass.

‘Harriet’s the eldest?’ he asks her, rubbing his nose with the back of the hand that holds the knife.

‘Don’t do that, please, David, you’ll have your eye out,’ she tells him, without turning round. He puts his hand back down obediently. ‘Yes. Harriet’s the eldest,’ she says.

‘Which makes Peter the youngest?’

‘Yes.’ Her voice is level, her tone is kind.

‘Pete. Right.’ He stores the information in his brain. ‘And Harriet works in recruitment. And Pete is looking for work?’

‘That’s right.’

‘And Pete likes. reading, was it? And football? Does he like football?’

Miriam takes a deep breath, wipes her hands on her apron.

‘Relax.’ She turns to face him. ‘Everything is going to be fine. And pass me the stock cubes from the cupboard.’

He gets up and walks to the cupboard, looks for the stock cubes. ‘Do you think they’ll like the house?’ He can’t find them. He can never find anything.

‘It’s a nice house.’ She watches him struggle at the cupboard.

‘Must be strange for them though. Mum’s new house? I know I’d find it strange, if it was my mum.’

She walks over, reaches behind a jar of pasta and finds the stock cubes without looking. ‘It’s all arranged, and they’re coming now, so we’ll just have to see what happens, won’t we?’ Her face is set in a mask of unflinching calm, but her eyes are pale with panic.

He sits back down at his chair again, surveys the mess he’s made of the onion. The sunlight through the window is dazzling; he closes his eyes and watches the patterns underneath his lids.

‘Backwards’ is what his father had said. ‘Backwards in coming forwards.’

When David was fifteen, his father had left and he never saw him again. Never, not once. Not even at his mother’s funeral. Imagine that — you spend your whole life with a woman, you have a child with her, and then one day you go to work in the morning and you never think to come home. Not even to bury her.

After his father had been gone a week, David went out to find a job. He went to the optician’s on the high street, Bright Eyes. He walked in, in his best shirt and his hair combed to the side and his glasses cleaned with his mother’s silk scarf. The manager was called Susan and she had beautiful big eyes and broad shoulders and she laughed from her breasts, and it made her shake. She gave him a job. He’d never had a job before. ‘No good’ is what his dad had said.

No good, good for nothing, useless dumb lump. Fifteen years old and never worked a day in your life. Hard to believe you’re a son of mine. I don’t believe it. Must be the milkman’s .

‘You’ll open the door for customers, and you’ll sweep the floor and you’ll clean the display cases,’ Susan told him. And he did. He left school and worked with pride and single-mindedness, and Susan liked him.

He worked his way through that spring and into the summer, and on through the summer, and into the autumn, and then Isaiah, the optician, took him for his first pint of beer in the Horse and Groom across the street. David didn’t have many friends, but Isaiah was kind to him and didn’t mind how slowly he drank that first beer, or any after it. He told him that day, ‘You won’t like it at first, but you’ll get used to it, it’s better than you think.’

Every second Friday he got his pay cheque and he took it home and he gave it to his mother, and she was soft and full of pride. Watching her soaps or making their dinner or reading her crime or her romance. Always big, hardback books that she got from the library and read constantly. She’d leave the books open by her chair, with her glasses, while she dusted her ornaments or washed the clothes, and David would never touch them, but he would read the page she was on when he got home from work. Stooping over the book. Never picking it up. He was happy with the way things were. He wasn’t a sociable young man. The only girlfriend he’d ever had was a nervous twenty-two-year-old called Joanne who ate her lunch on the same bench as him, outside the supermarket. She was three times David’s size and she had dry, angry skin around her mouth that she was constantly applying ChapStick to. They had sex in her Honda Civic, nestled in a dark corner of the Lewisham Centre car park. Three storeys up. He can still recall climbing the stale stairwell, not saying much, walking a foot apart, staring intently at the winding ramps and low ceilings, light-headed from the petrol fumes. The hot air inside the locked car, her endless underwear, the gear stick, the steering wheel, the comforting folds of her flesh.

It had been a year. Isaiah left Bright Eyes to go to Canada with his young Canadian wife and his wife’s sister and his wife’s sister’s fiancé. They were going to buy a house and plant a garden and start their own practice and think about children. Then it was just David and Susan, until Hong came, the new optician. Years melted away. David turned twenty. Hong and Susan laughed in the stock room at lunchtime. David, happier than ever, meticulously polished the display cases and brought the pay cheques home to his mother.

David was promoted. He wasn’t just sweeping up now; he helped the customers choose the best frames for their complexions. Watched them as they tried on the pairs he recommended. Talked about face shapes with businessmen whose eyes were failing, and showed his favourites to mothers with nervous young children who wanted colourful frames decorated with cartoon characters.

The clothes in the charity shops were getting better, more expensive. Cafés were replacing the greasy spoons, and a rash of bistros and boutiques with names David couldn’t pronounce without feeling embarrassed sprang up overnight. The rent went up and Susan didn’t seem to laugh so much.

It began with forgetfulness, then there were the sudden inexplicable rages. One day he came home to find his mother standing in the garden wearing his clothes, shouting at her nasturtiums. She was complaining of headaches. Mysterious blotches appeared and disappeared on her arms. She often saw things that weren’t there. Miniature people sitting on top of her glasses. Two greyhounds sleeping in the corner of the bathroom.

The doctors took blood tests and samples and measured her pulse but found nothing irregular. It broke David’s heart to see her in the hospital, hooked up to machines.

He took her home, made her comfortable, cooked her favourite foods, read her books out loud to her and thought she was improving, until he woke one dazzling morning and found her dead in her bed.

She looked like she was sleeping. The sunlight through the windows clogged his eyes like bright white liquid.