Kate Tempest - The Bricks that Built the Houses

Ron wanders up to the circle, puts his arms around Pete. ‘Happy birthday, mate,’ he proclaims. ‘All grown up, eh? Far cry from that little wretch mooning around my café all day staring at my niece. Eh?’

Pete is tipsy already and wobbling from all the affection. ‘This is Ron,’ he explains to the circle, ‘Becky’s uncle, and Ron, this is Graham, my dad, and Harry, my sister.’

Ron smiles and shakes hands with Graham. ‘Hello, Graham, good to meet you.’ He turns to Harry. ‘Hello,’ he says, looking her dead in the face before leaning in and kissing both of her cheeks deliberately, his stubble coarse as sunburn. ‘Harry?’ Ron asks her.

‘That’s right, yeah,’ Harry tells him. Something about the intensity of his gaze rattles her. He is staring into her face, eyes shining like blades in the sun.

Ron can feel his veins growing heavy with rage. ‘Good to meet you too,’ he says, attempting a charming tone but speaking in gruff, dissonant sing-song. On the other side of the room, by the jukebox, Leon can feel his shoulders tensing.

Dale is looming cheerfully around. He watches Pete and Becky as they stand at the bar. Becky looks up and sees him staring. She recognises him but she can’t place him. She smiles vaguely and looks back to the Prosecco she’s pouring but she can feel his eyes lingering on her body and it’s making her uncomfortable.

‘Who’s that over there?’

Pete turns, drunk, happy. ‘Oh, that’s Dale,’ he says. ‘Believe it or not, that’s David’s son.’

Becky looks over at him, surprised, Dale’s face lacking even a trace of David’s eager veneer.

Pete beckons him over, grinning amiably. ‘Dale!’ he shouts. ‘Come over here, mate.’ Pete watches Dale walk over, grinning intensely. Nose fidgeting on his face like a kid bursting for a wee. He admires the expanse of his chest. ‘This is Dale,’ Pete tells Becky. ‘Dale, this is Becky, the love of my life.’

Becky winces and sends an elbow towards Pete’s ribs. ‘Cheesy bastard,’ she says.

‘What?’ Pete plays crestfallen before sneaking a kiss of her neck, then another.

Suddenly, publicly, Pete is in love with her. But an hour before, he couldn’t even hold her hand. Becky finds herself looking behind her, checking to see if Harry has noticed the kisses.

‘Nice to meet you, Dale,’ she says, looking back at them.

‘Actually, we’ve met before,’ Dale says. His voice is hoarse. His heart is butter. Thick and shivering in his chest.

Becky stares blankly at his strange, solid face.

‘Thanks for coming along, mate,’ Pete says warmly. ‘I didn’t expect a thing. Honest, I thought we was just going for a drink, me and her, and then, look at all this. What a treat. Eh? What a treat.’

‘You was at work,’ he tells her, ignoring Pete.

‘At the caff?’ she suggests.

‘No, it wasn’t the caff. Your other job.’

She feels the gradient of the floor increase. She’s being pushed up a hill into a vacuum. There is an unwritten rule between people involved in a professionally intimate exchange: if they meet out in the real world, they respect each other enough not to mention it. Becky stares at the man, daggers in her eyes.

Pete’s stomach rips itself apart as it all comes screaming back.

‘Let’s not do this here,’ she says quietly but with violence behind the words.

‘You remember, don’t you, Pete?’ Dale asks him. The drunken mist blown clear.

‘What?’ Pete’s voice tremolos, in its highest register. He shakes his head at Dale, but Dale isn’t looking at him. Dale is looking at Becky, front on, bearing down.

‘Yeah, you remember,’ Dale says. ‘I met you in the Hotel Hacienda.’ Pete pushes Dale, but Dale doesn’t stop, doesn’t flinch. Pete’s push is absorbed by Dale’s mass. ‘You said your name was Jade and I said my name was James.’

Becky is silent. She looks at Pete who’s covering his mouth with his hand, stepping from one foot to the other. Around them, people are drinking, singing at each other, swearing fondly. Low bursts of laughter rip through the room like accordion solos.

Pete snaps out of his stupor. ‘Come on, Becky,’ he says. ‘Fuck this.’ And he starts to usher Becky away from Dale but Becky roots herself, leans away from Pete’s arms.

Dale leans round Pete’s bony shoulders. Pete stands between them both but neither acknowledges him, only each other. Becky forces her mind back through last week’s clients. Unless something particularly interesting happens, she forgets them as soon as she leaves the hotel room. She watches his paddle-shaped head, his anonymous doughy features. She glimpses a memory, his awkward body and predatory eyes. He’d asked her for extras.

‘Pete was worried,’ Dale says. ‘About how you’d been carrying on and that, with the clients? So he asked me to go undercover, if you like, check it out for him.’ He nods, winks at Becky. Slaps Pete on the back from behind, grips Pete’s shoulder. Pete sinks. ‘Eh, Petey?’ Dale leans in closer to Becky.

Her body is on fire. She stands in her bones, but her tissues, her organs, her guts have burnt to a crisp. ‘Pete?’ Her voice is not her voice. Her voice is her mother’s voice that night when they left the flat and the paparazzi bulbs made the street into a nightclub.

Ron is outside the toilets, drying his face with his handkerchief. Harry breezes out of the door to the Ladies, covering her nose with the fingers of her right hand. She snorts, loud and long. A sniff that starts in the mouth and ends in the back of the brain. Ron takes the handkerchief from his face and Harry sees him standing there as she lets the door swing closed behind her. ‘Oh hello,’ she says, big smile.

‘Alright, Harry.’ Ron dips his head, speaks low, pushes a hoarse whisper out through a conspirator’s smile. ‘Haven’t got a spare one, have you?’ He taps the side of his nose. ‘I’m flagging here.’

Harry grins. ‘Oh yeah. No sweat,’ she says, digging the wrap out of her pocket and passing it on. ‘Help yourself,’ she says. ‘I’m going for a fag.’ Ron nods, holds the wrap in his fist, still damp from the taps. ‘See you at the bar in a sec?’ Harry squeezes his arm briefly.

‘Yeah, lovely,’ Ron says. ‘I’ll get ’em in.’

‘Nice one.’

‘What you having?’ Ron asks her.

‘Mine’s a pint of Sea View,’ Harry tells him, smiling.

Ron heads into the Gents, closes the door of the cubicle, opens the wrap. He studies the coke. So dense it looks beige. Clumped into wet rocks, stinking. The smell so strong his belly responds before his nose knows it’s smelt it. The lurch of his gut is the telltale sign. He splits a few granules off with his little fingernail, watches the spread of the powder as he pushes his nail down into it. He takes a small pinch to his nose and inhales it. He fucking knew it. He’d know this gear anywhere.

David leans against the bar, top button of his shirt undone, drinking his pint slowly.

Graham is slaughtered and leaning in close. ‘Look,’ he says, ‘all I’m saying is you better take care of her, you. I’ve seen your type before, with your. ’ He stops talking and makes gestures David doesn’t recognise. Curling his hands around in the air, waving his palms and swinging his head from side to side. ‘Hair.’ He spits. ‘And your—’

‘Look, it’s OK, Graham,’ David interrupts him.

‘What’s OK?’

‘I owe you an apology,’ David says calmly.

Graham stops gesturing. Watches David suspiciously. ‘An apology, eh? A likely story.’ In his mind he is debonair and cavalier. In reality he is swaying, eyebrows scrunched up, face red and blotchy, pointing vaguely like a weathervane on a windless afternoon.