Kate Tempest - The Bricks that Built the Houses

What she had with Leon she could trust. They shared a bed when they were growing. Fought each other. Kept each other safe. Leon was a bullied kid before he learned his own strength. His mum’s boyfriends would too often slap him hard across the floor. He was taunted by the tough lads who waited round outside the sweetshop on the main square of his block. He preferred the company of books. What Harry offered him, what Leon offered Harry was a kinship that allowed them both to grow into much stronger people than they could have been without each other.

She loved to feel them buck beneath her, their eyes widening in desperation, staring at her, disbelieving. Shaking with the power of it. But they were only ever hers for moments. They all went back to real life eventually. She’d see them on the bus weeks later, holding hands with their boyfriends and flicking their hair.

Her name was Talia. She was taller than Harry by an inch or two. Her breasts were moons, they governed Harry, pulled her around and affected her moods. And the curve of her hips, the curve of her hips. The Curve Of Her Hips was an altar. Her hair was thick black shiny oil and it fell long long down her back and around her shoulders. Her skinny arms were scarred from cuts. She worked behind the counter in the bong shop. She had a birthmark on her neck that looked like a skull and crossbones. She was a local myth. They said her sister was a prostitute. They said her dad was a killer. None of it was true. Her legs were flowing lava when she walked. She stopped Harry in her tracks and knew it and she started smiling over her shoulder in the street when they walked past each other, and one night at a party Harry found the courage, walked up close and they danced and she had never danced like that with a girl before. Talia hung off Harry’s shoulders, traced her fingertips across her back, leant in close and giggled. Deep dark pull a total opiate. Talia. There was no other human in the world. Five years it lasted.

After heartbreak, loneliness. After loneliness, a new conviction, an all-consuming work ethic. A new recklessness with women.

She never went to gay bars. She never said the words out loud. Some girls just seemed to know and they approached and threw their kisses down like swords. But the loneliness of it was unbearable. Smiling at a stranger, thinking maybe, maybe them? All her friends were blokes and she would sit and listen to them bullshit about girls and it hurt her what they said and how they said it.

There were other women. Baking-hot summer days with nothing moving but their bodies. Lying impossibly close, learning how to feel how the other wanted it and voices rising, shouting wet loud screams of joy. But she never fell in love again. She concentrated on her dream. She put everything she had into buying splitting selling. Life was good. She laughed at things and snorted lines of powder off the edge of the pub pool table. Impressing girls who felt her strangeness and wanted it for theirs.

All of this she sees. Naked in the mirror.

She wants to be more than she’s been. She wants to hold Becky’s hand and run around the city smashed on pills and dance in raves again like she used to, or eat mushrooms in the woods beneath the sky the clouds the sun the rain and fuck the afternoons away. She wants to stop this endless circling. She wants to be an adult with a life. She wants to be in love and travel and eat food in the evenings. She feels screwed up so tight and small. She wants to stretch out underneath somebody’s hands.

Becky’s in her brain like wasps trapped in a sticky classroom. It’s just like her to want someone impossible. She thinks they understand each other, but they hardly know each other.

Maybe they might get away with it? Maybe Pico will understand; they’ve done business together a long time and Pico always seemed to like her, they were friends, or something similar. The thought of leaving south London, her family, Honeyjar, the Caribbean takeaway where she gets her steam fish on a Friday, the wall outside her house where all the old men gather in their robes and hats every evening and talk in melodious Arabic. Her friends. Her streets and roads and alleyways. Her little brother. As annoying as he is. Poor Pete . Her mind is ripped apart by guilt and terror.

She watches as the skin around her nipples puckers in the cold bathroom. She tenses the muscles in her abdomen. Punches herself in the stomach weakly. If they came in now. Right now. Smashed through this door, there’d be nothing she could do.

Maybe she should call her mum and tell her that she loves her.

Dale is massive; his features are twice the size of Pete’s. When they are introduced, Pete feels he is in the presence of some ancient behemoth, trapped in a pair of designer jeans. Graceless, slack-jawed, unsmiling, loud. His skin dirtied with pockmarks and scars. But Pete has spent a lifetime playing sidekick to boys like this and he knows that they are sweet deep down. Pete can’t understand how this man could have sprung from David.

‘Nice to meet you, mate,’ Pete says as they shake hands in the hallway, Dale looks him up and down. He looks to Pete like he could lift the whole house up with his hands. It’s meant to be a relaxed evening, but it feels to Pete like a chaperoned blind date. Miriam clasps her hands in front of her stomach and walks busily out from the kitchen, smiling at them.

Dale eats fast and without chewing his food. He doesn’t listen and speaks constantly. Pete eats slowly and watches the room with the same derisory attentiveness as always. David seems happy, as usual. But behind those calm and eager eyes Pete can see a deep-seated panic, a dread that, at any minute now, it’s all going to go horribly wrong. This makes him warm to David. He can trust eyes like that.

The dinner is long and full of dead ends and Pete can’t work out what’s expected from him and Dale. Are they meant to be forming a brotherly bond?

‘Pete likes bands, don’t you, Pete?’ Miriam tells the table.

‘Yeah, I like bands,’ Pete says.

‘Dale likes bands too,’ David says, more to Miriam than to anyone else.

‘Oh right, what kind of bands do you like, Dale?’ Pete asks, bored of his question before he’s finished asking it.

Dale looks up from his steak. ‘Once I went to an all-you-can-eat steak buffet.’

‘Steak buffet? I like them too.’ Pete speaks to his knife and fork.

‘Mate of mine told me about it,’ Dale continues, shifting his weight in his chair. The chair creaks beneath him.

‘Right?’ Pete signifies he is listening, although he doesn’t need to, Dale doesn’t need his participation to feel that what he’s saying is interesting.

‘Imagine that,’ Dale says, wide-eyed. ‘All-you-can-eat steak buffet.’ He leaves a pause. Looks at the steak on his plate for effect. Looks back to the table. ‘Cooked fresh, you know! You go in, and the waiter comes over, and you order whatever you want. But the only thing is, if you don’t finish it, you have to pay for what you don’t eat. If you do finish though, it’s only £12 and you can have like, £100 worth of meat.’ He nods, eyebrows raised. ‘I ate about four steaks just sat there, and took the rest home in my pockets! I was eating ribeye out a tissue for the next three days!’ He points at them all, nodding.

‘Ha. That was very clever of you, Dale.’ David chews his steak thoughtfully. ‘Very economic.’

Silence approaches the table like an overeager waiter. Hovers around making everyone feel looked at.

‘You know, my father was a butcher. I always liked watching him cutting steaks.’ Miriam’s eyes seem to glaze slightly as she journeys back towards that bustling shop. Her brothers on their tea breaks. The smell of fresh meat and soap. ‘But even with that in my family, we still fell into the habit, didn’t we, David, of buying from Tesco’s like everyone else.’ She smiles at him.