Kate Tempest - The Bricks that Built the Houses

‘We need to sleep,’ she says. Leon agrees, nodding his head, opening his eyes fast. Harry necks the last of her coffee. Cold now. ‘Do I look alright to drive?’ she asks him. Leon looks at her. Harry shows him sober, composed .

‘Yeah, fine.’ Leon digs in his pocket for some notes. Leaves thirty quid on the table. They stand, walk delicately out to the car, smiling at the waiter as they go.

By the time they get to their flat it’s well and truly morning. Leon nods at the neighbours as Harry looks for her key. It’s just a briefcase . Every braking car is the coming of a killer. Every distant footstep is police. Harry’s heart is racing like a fox who smells the hunt.

The day is up, the high street’s becoming clogged with early-rising working people. Ron and Rags are behind the closed blinds of Giuseppe’s wishing it wasn’t morning yet.

‘Look,’ Rags says. Having abandoned his elaborate gin fizz ritual, he is now drinking his gin straight, with a dash of tap water. ‘I think we should call it a night.’

‘Why? Where are you going?’

‘Well, I’ve got to get myself spruced up, haven’t I? I’m off to a matinee with a nice girl I met last week. And after that, if all goes to plan, I imagine I’ll be drinking some wine in a posh restaurant and hopefully cracking into an oyster or two.’ Rags looks like his face has been assembled by a drunk child. Nothing fits right. The booze, the stress, the lack of sleep, the lines of coke have all contributed to a bulging, vacant edginess lingering behind every movement. He stands and stretches and strolls purposefully to the counter, walks behind it and watches himself in the mirror above the worktop. ‘Nothing a shower won’t put right.’

Ron is racking another line. Getting stuck in to the gear as if it hasn’t been a minute since he last indulged. Old habits die hard , he thinks to himself.

Rags steps back out from behind the counter, walks over to the table he was sitting at, gets his coat from the back of the chair and swings it over his shoulders.

Ron bends down and takes the line up his nose. Everything behind his face is concrete. Most of the line falls back out onto the table. Exasperated, he wiggles his nose vigorously with his thumb and forefinger. ‘Fucking nose,’ he says.

‘Mate, clear up in here, and get yourself home to Linda.’

Ron looks up at his brother. ‘Linda? I can’t let her see me like this.’

‘Why not?’ Rags asks him, confused. ‘You look fine to me.’

Ron shakes his head. ‘No,’ he says, ‘I still got some stuff to work out.’

‘There’s nothing to work out. Go home, sleep.’

Rags roots around in the inside pocket of his coat. Retrieves a plastic pill sheet, pops a small blue pill out and places it tenderly in front of his brother. ‘Valium,’ he says. ‘No worries.’

Ron has both hands on the table top, his shoulders are tensed, his head down, his chest tight, his body like a bombed-out building. ‘Thanks.’

‘Have a nice day, won’t you? Don’t stay in here with the blinds shut. You’ll get the bullies knocking on. Go home. Get some kip.’ Rags pulls black-leather gloves from his pocket, stretches them over his hands. ‘We’ll find her. She can’t be too hard to find.’

The brothers stare at each other, considering the statement.

‘Go on then, fuck off,’ Ron says tenderly.

‘Thanks for the drinks.’ Rags unlocks the door.

‘Don’t mention it.’ Ron stands and stretches, surveys the damage to the café.

Rags opens the door and steps through it. ‘Don’t do anything on your own, OK? Call me if you find something?’

Ron locks the door behind Rags and sits down at the table by the window, peering out onto the high street through a crack in the closed blinds. In a couple of hours it will be well and truly daytime.

He gets up, breathing deeply, and takes the glasses to the sink. Puts the radio on while he washes up. ‘China In Your Hands’.

Harry is holding her head in the bathroom, leaning over the sink. Cold water hurls itself against her cheeks and breaks against her closed eyes. She lifts her face; the water falls off her nose and eyebrows, T-shirt wet at the neck. Her body hurts. Every muscle aches. She stares at her reflection and doesn’t look away. A wet face, pale and blotched with stress, stares out. The cheeks are hollowed. Wisps of hair stagger upwards from the head. A thin-lipped mouth is hanging open. She looks inside it. Opens it as wide as it will go until it hurts her jaw and then she clenches her fists and she holds them up by her face and she closes her eyes and she convulses wildly for a short burst and her open mouth shouts without sound. It’s not like she hasn’t heard what Pico is capable of. All her life she’s been so careful.

She has no girlfriend, no children, she sells drugs for a living to people she can’t stand. She can feel the city caving in on itself. She wakes up in the morning and stares at Facebook profiles of people she never liked and sees photographs of their wedding days and their charity runs and their children’s birthday parties and their wild nights out.

If they came for her, today. If they’d followed them, or something. If they found out who she was and they came for her today and they came into the house and grabbed her body in their hands and took her out into their car and drove away with petrol in the boot, what would it all have been for?

She takes her T-shirt off. Stares at her body in her bra. Watches awkwardly and sees herself. As if she wasn’t there before she looked. She unhooks the bra, lets it drop. Watches. Always surprised to see what lives in the mirror. It seems so far away from who she feels she is.

She remembers being twelve or so. Staring like this. Topless, lifting her arms above her head and clasping her wrists and pulling as hard as she could to try and make her new breasts disappear.

She is still that child.

She feels the presence of danger. She sees head-on collisions in her mind’s eye.

Images spark and flare in her brain. Her most shameful moments. All of her lovers. Piles of cocaine. Leon’s eyes. The day she bought the Ford Cortina. The seaside wind and Becky’s earrings dangling when she laughed, those holy dimples rising. She’s worked like this for what? She’s just been going round in circles. She’s nowhere closer really. Not really. The loneliness that’s always known her is curled around her ankles, getting comfy.

It moved through her like lightning when girls walked past and the shame of it threw her against the walls of her school buildings, head hanging. The hard bones in her body showed black against her skin after fighting again. What are you? they asked her, laughing. Ran across the street to say, Excuse me, what are you? Not even laughing sometimes. She grew with it a part of her, a secret part. And while the others she knew started to investigate each other, she couldn’t bear the thought of undressing. Secret things she did with boys from her street. Let them touch her body. Hump her, fully dressed. The older boys caught on and she let them do whatever they wanted. She’d never tell a soul. She didn’t know what else she could be for. She thought that when she grew up she would grow up to be male.

There were things she wanted to know. What happened underneath girls’ clothes? Were there other people like her?

She was fourteen. Their weaving limbs in little tops in summer on the darkening heath. The girls, their interest spiked, would lead her into foliage and sit down with her. Pull her T-shirt off her shoulders. Let her kiss them, kiss them harder till their breathing became heavy, lips like storm clouds, opening.