Kate Tempest - The Bricks that Built the Houses

Graham is a thickset, bullish man, but age and stress have shrunk him. His shoulders stand apart like two warring kingdoms, his neck the vast bridge that connects them. He walks with wide, heavy steps. Self-assured and slow-moving, but he still has the power to charge if he needs to. In the company of people he doesn’t know well, he tries to make himself sound posher by rolling his Rs and smudging his vowels. It’s a trait that makes his children wince in restaurants.

‘What we doing?’ Pete whispers.

‘Shhh.’ Graham holds a finger up to his lips. ‘Wait and see.’ He mouths it. A minute passes. Nothing happens. Pete watches his old man. He has a long, noble face, his nose straight and level, his brown eyes round and wide like cow’s eyes. They are set deep and blink out from tired wrinkles. His skin is thick and tanned to the colour of leather, even in winter.

‘Dad?’

‘I told you!’ his Dad whispers. ‘Shhh.’

Pete frowns at him. ‘What you doing, Dad?’

‘Listen.’ Graham tugs Pete’s earlobe. ‘Just listen.’ Pete can hear footsteps on the street. They slow down. Stop outside the house.

‘This is the house I was telling you about!’ says a woman’s voice. She sounds like she’s in her thirties maybe, south London accent. ‘Look!’ she says, ‘you could get twenty pence each for these down the car boot!’

‘Ooh, I don’t know about these.’ Someone else. A man. A much older man, maybe her grandad. ‘I’m not so sure.’

‘Well, how about this one then, eh? I’ve heard of this one.’ Pete can hear her picking up books and putting them down.

‘Oh yes, I think I’ve heard of that one too.’

‘ Wuthering Heights ,’ says the woman.

‘The Concise Book of Eastern European Fertility Myths ,’ says Grandad.

Pete looks at his dad. ‘You’re throwing her books out?’ he whispers.

Graham’s eyes blaze and his whisper is coarse as a brush. ‘She doesn’t want them any more. She won’t come and get them. It’s been a year. It’s part of the healing, son. You wouldn’t understand. Not till your wife has walked out on you . Which, I hope, never happens.’ Pete leans his head back into the sofa, enjoying the darkness of the room. ‘Sit further down, will you, they’ll see the top of your head through the gap in the curtains.’ Pete wriggles himself down into the sofa. Bends his head to the side.

‘ War and Peace , look!’ Grandad says. ‘I’ve always wanted to read that.’

‘They’re not for reading, they’re for the car boot.’

‘And Call of the Wild , look.’

‘Oooh,’ the woman says. ‘ Yoga with Pets .’ They can hear her open it and flick through. ‘There’s some nice pictures in this one.’

‘Come on.’ Graham stands up as quietly as he can, and, staying low so he can’t be seen, starts to walk into the kitchen. Pete gets up slowly and follows him, also staying low. They stand either side of the kettle and listen to it boil. Strange how much you hear in an empty house. Pete watches the steam, passes his fingers through it, tickles it.

‘What’s he like then?’

Pete visualises David’s eager grin. ‘He’s nice,’ he says.

Nice . It tugs at Graham’s small intestine. ‘Who’d win in a fight though?’

‘I’m not answering that, Dad.’

‘You don’t have to. I already know.’

‘Are you drunk?’ Pete asks him, but he doesn’t really need to.

‘I’m old. That’s the problem. This is when you’re meant to be with the woman you love. Now . When your face looks like this, and you’ve got older than you ever thought you’d get. This is the time for love. Not, I mean. ’ He sends his hand up into the cupboard above, finds two cups, tangles his fingers around their handles. Her cups. She chose them . He brings them to the counter and places them side by side. They wobble and settle. He fetches the tea bags. ‘Imagine, son, five years’ time, I’ll be old and grey and fat and frail, and if you ever find a job I’ll be all alone in this house. Do you understand me, scout?’

Graham looks at his son, misty-eyed, claps him on the back affectionately, touches his cheek. Pete stays still. Doesn’t respond. Just watches him.

Graham pulls his trousers up over his paunch and rhapsodises, painting his words in the air with his hands. ‘Years of marriage are meant to end up in wrinkles and cuddles by the telly, fish and chips on the beach, woolly hats and a Freedom pass. Who’s gonna love me now? Eh?’

‘We could make you an online dating profile. If you’re serious.’

‘Online, pah.’ He spits, not actual spit, just the motion. ‘Hard enough to find a girl at twenty, let alone. ’ He starts to pour the water into the cups. ‘Should have loved her better when I had the chance.’ He stops pouring and holds the kettle in mid-air. ‘Let this be a lesson to you, Pete.’ He turns to his son. ‘I was too selfish.’ He raises a finger to point out the importance of what he’s about to impart. ‘Let this be a lesson to you, OK, son? You got to work hard at it mate, OK? You got to treat them good when you got them. Coz when they leave, it’s too late.’ Graham’s eyes burn as he stares into his son’s face. ‘Learn the lessons that I couldn’t learn.’ He points the words out. ‘ You be the improvement of me . OK?’ He rocks on his toes. ‘OK?’ he says, pointing. ‘That’s evolution, ain’t it?’

‘Sit down, Dad.’ Pete pulls a chair out. ‘You been in the pub today?’

‘Maybe for a little while. I might have been,’ Graham says. ‘It’s Saturday, isn’t it?’

‘Sit down here.’ Pete reaches for the sugar and stirs two spoonfuls into each of their teas.

‘I’ll tell you what, son,’ Graham says. ‘All I ever wanted to be was good enough.’

Graham chapel had been a solicitor all his life. He believed in the innate goodness of people, and despite the horrors he witnessed, he held on to his belief that people only went astray because of damage done to them by abuses of one kind or another. It was the unbearable violence of life that bred the unbearable violence in life.

It was like poetry to him. A soaring, difficult poetry that sought to offer all people peace. Graham knew in his guts that it was absolutely right that people should not murder, steal, torture, subjugate, defraud or deceive one another. But in an unequal society there was not enough air to breathe. Which was why he became a defence lawyer, and would find himself absorbed in the harrowing details of his cases, desperately trying to clutch on to his belief that people were good.

He rode from Brixton Prison to Wormwood Scrubs on his rickety bicycle, his casework stuffed in his threadbare rucksack. At first he worked for a dismal firm with premises above a pub in Elephant and Castle. The files were all faded and the walls shook each time a train came past. The practice was called McCallum, Diamond and Strauss. Diamond and Strauss were a long time dead. Graham’s boss McCallum was a tender old man with flyaway white hair and a passion for Tchaikovsky who worked Graham to the bone because he knew that he could.

He had no weekends, took no holidays, sat coffee-high in police interview rooms in the middle of the night. He took on legal aid cases for people being tyrannised by landlords, bosses or local councils. He couldn’t help but take the cases personally. Every failing was his failing and the thrumming guilt that followed a loss sent him into long nights of silence and drunkenness.

Eventually he got a job in the West End in a bigger firm with more high-profile cases. He had two small children at home, and although he kept their pictures on his desk, his mind was busy with the allegations levelled at his clients. He knew Miriam was struggling with how preoccupied he was — they fought about it constantly — but the way he saw it, this was his vocation and people’s freedom was in his hands. ‘What about my freedom though, Graham?’ she would ask him, but he couldn’t understand how it related to the conversation and told her he was not going to get dragged into an argument. He had work he had to finish and he was tired.