Kate Tempest - The Bricks that Built the Houses

Outside in the car, Harry grips her knees. Rocking from the panic. Every muscle tensed and sore. Her body diced to mincemeat, her mouth a mess of bullet holes from Becky’s burning kisses.

a year later

Becky gets off the plane at Gatwick and walks through the arrivals gate without breathing.

London.

She moves, zombie-like, towards a faceless coffee counter, orders and sits at a table in a shiny armchair. In the bleached fake light of the airport arrivals lounge she is reminded of the ferry they crossed the Channel on together.

They were eight hours into France when she had phoned her uncle Ron.

‘I’ve left town,’ she told him. ‘I’m OK.’ She wouldn’t tell him where she was. He shouted at her, called her irresponsible. Spoilt. As mad as her mother. ‘Please don’t hurt Pete or Pete’s parents,’ she asked him. She’d never got involved in her uncle’s affairs before. She knew they were into some back-alley stuff. When she was young, things would turn up at the house; three hundred scented candles or fifteen massive boxes of Fairy Liquid or a crate of universal TV remotes. She didn’t know where they came from. They were in and out usually within a week. He had supported her and her mother, and Becky was eternally grateful. She would never think to challenge what had put food in her mouth when she had no other means of feeding herself.

But this was different. She leant against the metal ledge in the phone booth; it was freezing cold against her back and she could feel it through her coat. They were deep in the French countryside, a village somewhere in the northeast. It was winter and there was ice on the ground. Harry paced at a respectful distance. Staring at the woods beyond, shrunken in the cold. ‘I don’t know what’s gone on,’ she said, ‘but please, Ron, for me, leave Harry and Pete and their family alone.’ Ron turned the phone blue with swear words. Screamed and shouted. Called her things she’d never been called. But she knew this to be a good sign. His silence was much more dangerous. This noise meant he was hearing her. ‘I don’t know when I’m coming back,’ she told him. ‘Tell Auntie Linda that I love her.’ And she hung up and his screaming stopped abruptly and the birds sang in the cold quiet.

They’d spent eight months on the road. They kept away from borders. Neither of them had ever had nothing to do before. They couldn’t stop touching: unbearable, electric, fanatical touching.

People tutted and huffed to see them kissing against petrol pumps. People frowned and shouted in Flemish or German or French as they paid for dry sandwiches and watery service-station soup and killed more hours, going nowhere together. The Pyrenees, Toulouse. Amsterdam and Utrecht. Hamburg, Berlin, Cologne. Places passed beneath them. Touching and holding and kissing and staring at each other’s bodies and shouting with pleasure. They felt safe. Leon had journeyed to Barcelona with three quarters of the cash and left Harry with the rest, which she kept in her battered suitcase. They swapped it for euros in 500 bundles in various bureaux de change and made regular deposits into the bank account Leon had set up. Becky went to dance classes, Harry read biographies of notable club owners and sat peacefully in cinemas.

They entered a dream state. A time that would be recalled in future misery as the happiest they had known, and it was heavy, it made them both dizzy to carry it.

They found themselves in Belgium, where they went to seedy nightclubs and laughed with thin men who nodded to slow techno behind elaborate moustaches, and they stayed in rooms in old buildings with balconies that opened out onto car parks or busy market squares or the red light district. They spent days in bed and lay across each other, watching the world outside the balcony doors. Weeks and weeks and weeks of fucking and sleeping and sitting in bathtubs and fucking and smoking and fucking and waking up hungry and watching each other and thinking of breakfast, the light through the blinds, the light on the water as they walked beside the canal not saying much and then on to the next place, driving, hands on each other, the most boring song in the world on the radio and it didn’t matter, it sounded quite good actually. They stood and drank coffee at high tables on the pavements in little towns with pretty names where the women carried shopping bags and babies and wore work clothes and the men got pissed all day.

They cruised down the Autobahn listening to Kraftwerk. They ate sausages and drank black beer in high-altitude Bavarian bars where the air smelt of bread and snow and they wrapped themselves around each other at night and fell asleep.

They crossed the Alps. Harry couldn’t help herself, she burst into tears the first time she saw those mountains rising up into the sky and plunging down at the same time, reflected for ever in the perfect mirror of those Italian lakes.

Leon was back in London, keeping his eye on things. There was an email account that was checked every other day.

Summer began and everything was becoming increasingly intense.

Harry retreated into herself. Started biting her nails. Becky wondered where her life had gone. Itching to dance. The years she’d put into her training. For this? To run away like this?

She began to write a long letter to her mother and in the back of her mind was the thought that if she ever finished it, this one she would send.

The news came in June. They were in an internet café in Montepulciano. Harry’s face went green as glass as she read it.

Pico was out of jail. He had requested that they meet. She felt like all the days that had passed since they left had just been treading water. Her body was a mess of panic. A walking ulcer. She drank constantly the rest of that day and passed out in the hotel lobby. Becky found her at nine in the evening, useless, frowning like a newborn baby, and carried her up in the lift.

Harry was to travel to a hotel in Fribourg the following Tuesday where she would find Leon.

The morning came up bright and warm. Becky spent the day thinking hard. She went walking round the old town, stumbled on a small gallery and she made her decision staring at stained-glass depictions of illuminated saints. She felt peeled. Shuddery and not herself. Harry’s arms were like a vice these days, tightening, squeezing her into an impossible flatness. She stood, staring at these saints, these broken women, in attitudes of servitude and beatification, and they horrified her. She couldn’t see them at all, only the idea of them. She felt like that. Not herself. Just whatever Harry saw. She gazed and saw time passing. Somebody’s legacy. Not the women depicted but the person who had laid the lead and placed them there. Someone had made something beautiful and terrifying and left it for her to see. She walked slowly round the room. Her mouth hung open before vast images of sacrifice and contrition that seemed to chant the word ‘purpose’.

That night Becky lay on top of her love and held her face and kissed her eyes and told her she was going to go back home.

They drove to the Italian coast and said their goodbyes to the roll of the ocean. Drank wine and ate pasta and smoked cigarettes and didn’t speak much about what was going to happen next.

Becky told her it was better that they enjoyed their last night together rather than cry and fight. ‘Let’s just have this time and then let each other go.’

Harry was floundering. Nothing was clear. Her mouth was a trapped animal. And everywhere she looked, Pico stalked the background; his moustache, his bright white teeth. Pico, Pete. Ron and Pico. Pete and Ron and Becky. Leon. Pete. Pico. Becky. Becky. Pico. The eternal carousel within. Her bones felt ground to spice. Don’t leave , she thought. But she said nothing.