Kate Tempest - The Bricks that Built the Houses

They went to bed and didn’t touch.

Becky stares at all the faces in the plastic airport light, all the families and loved ones reunited in the arrivals lounge, and she wipes her face with rough hands and bites back tears. Hard as she ever was. But coming home.

Pete wakes in a sun-bright bed. The broken slats are letting the morning flood the room in uneven waves. Bare floorboards stretch towards an open door, a threadbare red Moroccan rug. There is singing through the walls. The sound of people talking cheerful morning talk and laughter. In the room he lies in is a stuffed bookcase. A table by the window, a wooden chair before it. A framed Kandinsky print. A portrait of Haile Selassie. Ribbons and strips of cloth hang on hooks and are draped across a mirror. The words of the Desiderata are written in fluid lines across the ceiling. There are clothes all over the floor. And sheets of paper. Charcoal drawings. It is freezing. He listens to heavy boots on the stairs pummelling the bones of the rickety building. He is in a grandiose townhouse, falling apart. Recently squatted, inhabited by Spanish anarchists and trainee welders. They’d seemed alright to Pete the night before.

What was her name? He lies still, investigating his belly button.

She’s standing in the doorway, naked beneath a long shirt, two buttons done up. She’s having a conversation with someone Pete can’t see. They’re talking in a language he can’t place. Turkish maybe. Berber. She has geometric patterns tattooed in white ink across her hips and they wind around her legs. She laughs. French reggae is playing from a distant speaker. There is the sound of frying and banging doors and the smell of toast and coffee. Pete hasn’t been around noise like this in a long while.

Smiling, she shuts the door behind her. The noise is muffled now. She stalks the bare floorboards and places a cup of hot coffee on his chest. He wraps his palms around the cup to warm them. ‘Coffee?’ she says. ‘No milk here. Vegan.’

‘No,’ he says. ‘Fine.’

She sits on the bed and crosses her legs and leans so she can see out of the broken blinds. She holds her cup into her body. Pete watches the steam and her naked stomach. He gets up, scans the floor for his boxers. She watches him. He crouches, searches, aware of his body beneath her gaze. He finds his pants at last, pulls them up clumsily and stands tall in the cold room. They judge one another calmly in the milky morning light.

He has found himself flitting between two states recently. The first is his usual state: strung-out, stalking the streets of his youth, skunk-strange, coke-vexed, wanting to staple himself to strangers and push his body through the shuddering windscreens of accelerating buses. But the second state is newer, one that creeps up on him when he least expects it. He will notice himself pacing peacefully, weightless, enjoying the neon through the chicken-shop windows, aware of how pleasantly it illuminates the pallid faces of the lifesick children that patrol the strip. He’s caught somewhere between raging self-pitying blame and a new softness, a sweet and settled feeling. Relief. To be alone at last.

The best thing is how good it is not feeling useless. He likes his friends again.

He’s been getting out more. He’s not afraid of everyone he meets.

Her shadow haunts every corner. She’s in every woman he speaks to. His sister’s hateful face makes him smash things up when he’s drunk.

He misses her. It’s like a rat’s mouth eating him slowly. But he’s starting to realise how funny and good people are. He’s remembering the sound of his laughter.

He works now. Two jobs. Five days a week. Night porter in a cheap hotel. He reads all night. He’s got new glasses. They make him feel like someone else.

He starts his shift at eleven at night, finishes at seven in the morning, sleeps till three in the afternoon then heads off to work a miserable shift in a pub kitchen washing pots. He finishes there and goes straight to the hotel. He’s never had energy like this before. He likes the tiredness. It gives him something to do. He’s still got no money. The council tax, the electric, the phone bill.

There are women everywhere. Now he knows how to talk to them. Maybe he’s getting older. He seems to know what they are telling him before they’ve even spoken.

He understands her more with every passing day. He sees her much more clearly now she’s gone. Sometimes, when he’s with women, he feels like he’s becoming her. It happens when he least expects it; he’ll take his clothes off and move towards a woman taking her clothes off, and suddenly he’ll feel so much like Becky that he’ll forget how his body moves and he’ll have to relearn what it is to kiss.

Pico greets harry like an old friend. Grips her arms above the elbow gently and pulls her in to kiss both cheeks. He indicates that she should sit beside him. The restaurant is grand, everything brilliant white. A huge domed glass ceiling, mirrors line the walls. The waiters wear waistcoats and smart shoes. Harry sits down beside Pico and gazes around. She wonders what the other people in the restaurant think their relationship might be.

Pico orders for them both. He tips his face towards the waiter and speaks his demands without please or thank you, like a man too used to service. He orders seafood and salad and expensive white wine. Harry sits silently, not smiling. Watching the edge of the waiter’s collar. The perfect slick of his parting. Pico stretches his arms around the back of the banquette they are sharing. Time passes like it’s wounded, dragging itself across the restaurant.

Pico begins to speak quietly in Harry’s ear. ‘I know what happened, so don’t worry for saying it, OK? It’s easy now.’ His breath is warm and smells clean, like cardamom and liquorice. ‘I’m out now, so we start from scratch.’ His accent is round and ripe as fruit. ‘No worry no more.’ Harry swallows, hot and shy. Her throat feels like it is crawling with insects. ‘The man. Joey?’ Pico’s J’s are Y’s. ‘Joey. He try rob you, no? I heard.’ He watches the side of her face carefully. Breathes gently for a long moment, like an optician leaning in with a blazing torch, before he pulls his arm away and reaches across the table for bread, olive oil and the glass bottle of balsamic vinegar, sculpted like an upturned teardrop. His white shirt, his thin moustache. His cufflinks gold-rimmed St George’s flags.

‘Believe or don’t believe, it’s you to choose. But. ’ He widens his eyes, traces his moustache to its end, smiles kindly at Harry. ‘I was going ask you take over, while I was inside.’ He clears his throat, the olive oil held in still hands. Harry feels a wave of heat and sickness passing through her head. A plate of cracked oysters arrives on a tray of ice and they shudder in their shells like her stomach. ‘But now, we see, there is debt.’ Pico surveys the room, leans back into the padded seat and watches the blazing white world of spotless china and napkins and rich women discussing their business while subservient waiters bring them plates of red meat.

Harry looks at her knees and gathers her thoughts before looking up at the opposite wall and speaking in a panicked churn of sound, her voice too high in her chest. ‘I don’t want to owe you anything, Pico. I don’t want to be in your debt.’

A silence stalks the table like a hungry wolf. Pico frowns. Carefully pools yellow olive oil and black balsamic vinegar in a small white plate, making a yin-yang which he admires and grinds pepper into. He wipes soft bread across the pool and folds it, dripping, into his neat mouth. He chews, swallows and wipes the corners of his lips.

‘OK,’ he tells her. ‘Now. Here.’ He taps the table with his thumb and forefinger. ‘You have to pay your debts in life, Harry,’ he says sadly. ‘You work for me now, is what I say. I’m looking for a person who can help me, more direct. It’s hard to trust when there’s, you know, this. the money like this. It make people lose their centre. This money.’ He sighs deeply. Harry watches the serrated edge of the knife on her napkin, the uneaten oysters, cold and snotty. ‘You come back, you work for me.’