Kate Tempest - The Bricks that Built the Houses

She never gave a fuck what people thought of it before. The way she sees it, bar work’s more degrading. Or some dogsbody office job.

Life, for some people, is just a dry-cleaned suit and boardrooms and shit hotels in faceless towns with deadlines to meet and sleeping pills to fall off the edge of the tedious days. Months at a time living in transit. Going for targets. Sales and accounts.

She was eighteen when she learned the value of her body, a tequila girl in awful bars in town where men, wearing shoes they cherished in the absence of real friendships, wound down after work by pretending they were much happier than they really were. She wore skimpy clothes and learned how to slap drunken hands away when they mistook her professional flirtations for genuine sexual interest. She hated that job. It gave her no power. Playing up to a role to sell shots that she barely made anything out of. That felt dirty. This work, she thinks, doesn’t feel dirty at all.

If Pete had the same job, she wouldn’t have a problem with it.

It’s a few hours before dawn. Becky sits on the night bus, forehead against the dark glass watching memories play out on the streets she passes. Younger Beckys, laughing, kissing, drinking, crying. Back then, the best people she knew were full of love. Gooey-eyed on acid, playing with their fingers, giggling like toddlers at the shape of household objects. But now those same kids are grown-ups, parents with kids of their own, supervising the moving of boxes round factories, or getting chubby in a travel agent’s, answering phones and hunting for deals, biting into cheese-and-meatball melts every lunchtime and taking two sugars with every weak tea.

What makes what I do any different from what they do? Or what he does? Fifty pounds a week or whatever he gets, it’s a pack of fags and a loaf of bread and a shitload of worry about anything else. At least I’m providing. It’s not like he doesn’t spend the money I make . She stops thinking about it. None of it matters.

She wakes up just after midday. Alone at last. But not for long. She rolls over, pulls the covers right up to her chin and closes her eyes. At two o’clock she is supposed to go and meet Pete’s family. She can’t think of anything she’d like to do less. Last night drifts past, everything he said when they were outside the station. She seethes.

Every cell of her body is heavy. Her eyes close and she sinks through the mattress, floating towards sleep.

The doorbell goes. Three times in a row.

Pete is on the doorstep, nervous as she opens it. He gives her some flowers that he’s picked from her neighbour’s garden. Her neighbour is an old lady, a widow, whose garden is the most important thing in her life. Becky imagines her standing at her window, hiding behind her nets, watching the tall scruffy man stepping in her beds and snapping her roses off the bushes.

Miriam answers the door smiling and drying her hands on a tea towel. She beams at Becky.

‘Hi,’ she says, ‘you must be Becky!’

Becky smiles. ‘Hi,’ she says. Wanting to run.

Miriam has a soft, open face, delicate wrinkles tiptoe around the edges. Becky kisses her cheek and follows Miriam into the dining room.

‘Sit yourself down.’

Becky sits on the far side of the table, back to the wall, facing in. They have a dining room . David is standing at the end of the room, holding a bottle of wine and rifling through a drawer for a corkscrew. Pete sits down next to Becky, Miriam stands by the dresser and, once she sees Pete and Becky settled, she joins them, sitting opposite. David opens the wine, sets it on the table, opens another, sets it beside the first one, turns them round so that their labels are facing the same way, smiles and sits down at the head of the table, jiggling on his seat at the excitement of having visitors.

‘And what do you do then, Becky?’ Miriam leans forwards, hands on the table, one on top of the other.

‘I’m a dancer.’ Becky notices how graceful Miriam is, how elegantly she holds herself. ‘I’m a waitress, but dancing is my passion.’ Becky’s voice is edged with exhaustion. This is the last place she wants to be.

‘That’s exciting.’ Miriam’s face lights up. ‘Dancing! What style? Is it much like Strictly ?’

‘No, not so much,’ Becky says, smiling shyly. ‘Do you watch Strictly ?’

‘Oh yes, David and I love it, don’t we, David?’

‘Yes!’ David says gleefully. ‘We do.’

‘I’m in a show actually, at the moment. A very small part, but it’s still exciting to be involved.’ Becky speaks carefully, quietly.

‘A show! In town?’ Miriam’s face is a Catherine wheel. She looks at Pete, Pete nods.

‘Yes,’ Becky says. ‘It’s very exciting.’ And she looks at Pete pointedly, but he’s looking at his fingernails.

‘My goodness me!’ Miriam takes her hands away from each other and lays them flat on the table, parallel. They are slender and gentle-looking, her nails are neat, no wedding ring, but a thin gold band holding two dark green, opaque stones on her middle finger. She leans in towards Becky. ‘I’d love to come and see it!’ David is watching her, smiling to himself. ‘I used to love the ballet.’ Miriam holds her arms above her head, fingertips touching. Laughing.

‘Oh yeah?’ Becky smiles. ‘I haven’t been for years. I went once. ’ Her voice cracks into shards. She breathes, swallows the sharp points. ‘With my mum.’ She doesn’t want to invite discussion of what her mum does or where she might be in the world, but she’s said it now. She carries on. ‘When I was very young but never since.’

‘Oh, we’ll have to go.’ Miriam is sure of it. ‘My mother loved the ballerinas too.’

Miriam hadn’t noticed Becky’s discomfort. Becky relaxes. ‘I’d like that,’ she says softly.

‘Pete, have you seen the show?’ David asks him.

‘Yeah.’ Pete looks up from his fingernails, sniffs, nods.

‘And.?’ David presses him.

Pete flicks his hair out of his eyes, taps his toes on the floor. ‘Yeah, it was good.’

‘He didn’t like it much,’ Becky explains to David.

‘Wasn’t his thing, no?’ Miriam folds her arms and looks disapprovingly at Pete for a moment. ‘I shouldn’t take it personally, Becky, he’s very chalk and cheese about things. He gets it from his father. Some might call it. ’ She pauses, stage whispers, ‘ closed-minded .’

Pete leans back in his chair. ‘What’s for lunch then, Mum?’

‘You’ll see,’ Miriam tells him, looking at him carefully for a hint of the meanness his father was prone to. ‘So, you work as a waitress by day, and then you go off and dance in the theatre by night?’ Miriam asks warmly. ‘You’re putting us all to shame, Becky!’

Becky smiles self-consciously. Wants to disappear into the tablecloth.

‘Well said.’ David slaps the table top. Miriam jumps. Pete stares at him, confused. ‘Smart lady,’ he says to Pete. Pete doesn’t respond. Keeps staring at him. David tries to match the stare but can’t. He picks up his fork and looks at the prongs carefully.

‘So, what do you get up to on your days off?’

‘Normal stuff,’ Becky tells her. ‘Money’s tight so we don’t go out much or things like that, do we?’ She turns her body towards Pete.

He shakes his head sadly. ‘Not so much.’

‘But we go out with friends and that, don’t we?’

‘We do.’ Pete puts his arm around the back of her chair, squeezes her shoulder gently. Becky touches his hand. Miriam’s never seen her son show affection to anyone. She melts, pools and evaporates.

‘We go to the pub, and we go to parties and things. If Pete’s up for it.’