Kate Tempest - The Bricks that Built the Houses

‘That was banging,’ Dale says.

‘Smashed it, yeah.’ Pete shakes his hand. Sniffing, desperate to swallow, mouth too dry. Feels like he’s got a pip in his throat. A few pips. When he was young, a boy at school told him if you eat an apple core an apple tree grows in your belly and branches stick out of your ears.

‘I’ll see you again soon, mate,’ he says, flagging the bus down. It pulls up in front of them.

‘Oh yeah. Go safely now,’ Dale says as Pete climbs into the bus.

‘Easy then mate.’ The doors close and the bus pulls away. Pete gives Dale a little wave out the bus window. More like a salute, then he sits down, head moving forwards, body moving backwards. He stares out into the night and counts the lamp posts to keep himself from vomiting.

He gets off the bus in New Cross, walks towards Lewisham Way, turns left, under the railway bridge and down through the park by the flats and up the hill. He sees his house at the end of the road. He lets himself in using the same keys he’s had for ten years. His dad’s asleep upstairs. The lights are on in the front room and an empty wine bottle mopes on the coffee table next to a pile of papers and two boxes of half-eaten cold curry and rice. He picks the rubbish up, turns the lights off and heads to the kitchen. He hears the mice scatter as he approaches. He throws the food and the bottle away, takes a beer from the fridge and goes upstairs to his room.

He sits down on the chair by his desk, takes out his sketchbook and starts drawing. Just lines and shapes; the same cartoonish character always appears when he puts pen to paper. A long, haunted face, hood up over a wrinkled brow, troubled, wonky eyes staring out. He writes his tag a few times, bores and lets his pen go. He sees it fall and settle into stillness. It strikes him as very beautiful. He drops his forehead onto the desk in tribute but it doesn’t feel as good as he thought it might.

He sits on the floor and wrenches his socks off. Wriggles out of his jeans at last. Stands again and gets his beer and looks at the pictures on his wall. Photographs of mates he hasn’t seen all year. Sitting at a rave together, grinning out from their hoods. Skinny, dark-eyed boys and girls, faces full of bass. The girls in lurid neon, the boys in baggy black and blue. The cocaine is charging around in the space behind his forehead. A sudden pain stabs itself across his chest. He holds his heart and breathes until it passes. Would I be happier without her? He finishes his beer, lies down under his covers without brushing his teeth. Closes his eyes and watches the changing shapes of his brain.

At some point he must have fallen asleep, because he wakes up the next day. He stands on shaky legs and heads to the tap for water — last night already faded. All he remembers is Mitch playing his guitar and the white tiles of the toilet cubicle.

In seven days he turns twenty-seven. That’s the age that rock stars die at. If he died at twenty-seven, he would leave nothing behind him. No legacy. Nothing of note. Nothing to separate him in any way from the countless other bodies that he’s spent his life amongst. A man in the mass. Part of the crowd.

He sits at his kitchen table and sips water. This is the same kitchen table that he ate his dinners at when he was four. He sees his younger selves, occupying all the chairs and slouching in the corners. The passionate ten-year-old with answers for everything. The bullied twelve-year-old, getting trouble from the neighbourhood gangs, the fourteen-year-old graffiti writer who lived for his outcast friends. The desolate eighteen-year-old, black-eyed from the ketamine. The cynical twenty-year-old, miserable at uni.

All the years of hopes and drugs and shit jobs and big ideas, the dole, the booze, the weed, the heartbreak. The funerals he’d attended. The promises he’d broken to girls he never cared about. The boy he’d been, smart and careful. Book club, karate club. Playing guitar at lunchtime.

He puts the coffee on the stove.

‘It’s time,’ he says. ‘It’s time to sort this out.’ He enters into slow-motion montage footage of himself running laps around the park and getting fitter. Lifting weights in the gym. Wearing a suit in an office. Laughing with the boys in the bar. His head in his hands, he’s listening to the coffee as it begins to percolate. He looks out the window; it’s raining. The rain is hard and fat. He watches it for a while. Fuck it . He pours the coffee and walks into the front room, turns the telly on. It’s a daytime chat show. He watches four smug women sat behind a desk in front of a studio audience.

‘How can we trust our partners,’ one says, extending her hands out to encompass her audience, ‘when we can’t even trust our selves ?’

Dale waits in his room at the Hotel Hacienda. He called the number on the business card a few hours ago and arranged for a masseuse called Jade to come and visit him. He has spent the last hour tidying up a spotless room, showering and putting on his lucky pants. He checks the time, walks around the room and stares out of the window at the busy street below. He picks up all the tea bags and the sachets of sugar and examines them carefully before putting them back in their little pots. He takes his lucky pants off. Folds them. Puts on the dressing gown that’s hanging on the bathroom hooks. He’s not really one for wearing dressing gowns. He stares at himself in the mirror, breathing in the nerves and panic. He walks away from the mirror, stroking his belly, holding on to himself. He feels like he might be having heart palpitations.

Becky steps off the tube and walks against the flow of bodies towards the Hotel Hacienda. A buttery mansion, all spa-baths and dead pleasure. Opulent bedspreads. Inside, a degenerate businessman flashes his credit card and his tooth-enamel at the young father behind the bar before heading up to his room, gripping wine in a cold bucket, to peel his cashmere socks off and let his belly slump. Becky hates this place. She prepares herself for the switch in reality. She leaves Becky on the street outside, and enters the hotel as Jade. She walks confidently past the receptionist, straight to the lift. Hoping this isn’t the kind of lift you need a key card to operate. There’ve been times where she’s had to wait in the closed lift for someone to call it or enter with a room key, which she always finds embarrassing.

She checks the information on her phone: James, 316 . It’s been a long mission, crossing town in the rain. The grime of the tube still clings to her skin and the mood of the crush and the flickering adverts and the checking of Twitter still quicken her thoughts. She hopes that when she knocks on the door she’s got the right room. A shiver of nerves flutters and pinches her stomach as usual. She doesn’t fight the feeling, but checks her make-up in the mirrored wall at the back of the lift and breathes deeply.

Dale hears the knock on the door at last. He opens it carefully. She’s tall, her hair is nearly black but with a deep red shining through it. Strands hang over her face and swing down towards her shoulders behind her ears. She has dark brown endless eyes, her eyelashes leap and fall like the legs of a chorus line. Her lips are full and explode in the middle, her cheekbones are high. He smiles, his mouth is dry. He can’t feel his feet.

Becky sees a stocky man with bulging eyes and a gormless face in a white fluffy robe; his thick legs stick strangely out the bottom. He’s heavily built. Broad-chested, but cowed by nerves. He stares at her shyly.

‘James?’ she asks. He nods. ‘Hi,’ she smiles. ‘I’m Jade.’

He steps back as she walks in and she closes the door behind her. He doesn’t know whether to kiss her cheek or shake her hand. He stands still. His brain as empty as a broken bucket. Becky moves softly, her job is to relax him, to put them both in a calm space. He swallows hard and laughs at nothing. She eyes him kindly.