The Bricks That Built the Houses (17 page)

He gives her back her tea.

He sits in the pub with his friends, a ghost in a hoodie. Nothing to say; he kills time. And his friends are growing bored of his dejection. He gets home and waits for her to finish her shift. It’s three in the morning, He’s reading. Sketching in his notebook. He’s all right. He’s not thinking of the hotel rooms, the men’s faces, the men’s bodies, their cocks in her hands. Does she smile for them when they come the way she smiles for him? He’s not thinking of that. Her knocking on the hotel-room door. He’s not thinking of it. Her voice in his head.
It’s nothing to be jealous of
. And he knows
it’s no threat
. But it’s not like he can say, ‘Don’t work tonight, I’ll cover the rent this month, you just focus on your dancing.’ He’s got no fucking money.
It’s no threat
. He’s crumpling. He gives himself a good talking-to.

An hour later she rings him to say she’s outside. He opens the door and he knows where she’s been and it’s so good to see her face there in the street light, those eyes that he loves, that smile rising over those lips that are his favourite lips, but he knows where she’s been and it hurts, he can’t help it. ‘Give me your mouth,’ she says, and he does but he doesn’t.

II

Love to faults is always blind,

Always is to joy inclined,

Lawless, wingèd, unconfined,

And breaks all chains from every mind.

The souls of men are bought and sold

In milk-fed infancy for gold,

And youth to slaughter-houses led;

And beauty, for a bit of bread.

William Blake, ‘Freedom and Captivity’

HOT NIGHT COLD SPACESHIP

Harry is holding a brick of money. She’s about to count it for the fourth time. Her socks are too big for her, baggy round her ankles. She hates that, but she hasn’t had time to put a wash on and she uses all her best socks first. She is wearing bright red lipstick. Sometimes when she counts her money, she likes to put on lipstick and slick her hair back like a matador.

Leon is walking down the stairs and into the living room. His footsteps are soft but Harry hears him the way you hear your own legs moving. Places him in the house by feeling. Leon stands in the doorway of the kitchen.

‘Alright?’ Harry asks him, not taking her eyes off the money.

‘All good,’ he replies, sloping to the fridge, opening it and bending down to peer in. ‘Want a beer?’ he asks.

‘Go on then,’ she says, counting.

Leon pulls one out of the fridge, opens it, passes it over, gets one for himself and sits heavily down at the table,
opposite Harry. ‘How much we got?’ he asks, not looking up from his bottle.

‘Six hundred and seventy bags.’ Harry blows out air through pursed lips. ‘Between this and what’s put away. Give it seven or eight months we’ll be there, maybe sooner.’

Leon taps his heels on the lino. ‘Fuck!’ he says, and he makes the word last a long time.

Leon had grown up in the block of flats by the shops at the top of Harry’s road. As kids, the two had been inseparable. They played fighting games and football and hatched plans to make their millions; they were going to buy a submarine that they would live on, pulled by a fleet of sharks who would come to them like dogs when they whistled.

Leon was a quiet kid with a beautiful complexion. English mother, indigenous Venezuelan father, and a constant power surging beneath his skin. As a ten-year-old, he would spend his evenings reading up on revolutions and civil wars. He hid under the covers with library books, reading by torchlight, some nights till breakfast time. History fascinated him, maybe because he knew nothing of his own.

He never met his dad, never saw a photograph, never heard his name. Didn’t know one scrap of a story about him, but the older he grew, the more he resembled him, and the more his mother seemed to shrink away.

They had met in another age, his parents. Leon’s father, Alfredo, had journeyed to England at eighteen, brought over by the renowned British journalist and eco-activist James Peake, who had been living with Alfredo’s people, the Wotuja, for three years, learning their ways and recording their struggle, in the Orinoco region of the Amazon rainforest.

James was a well-meaning but painfully unaware Englishman with a large amount of inherited wealth at his disposal and a hero complex. His anthropological interest was genuine, but his reverence of the indigenous people bordered on perverse. At his core, he desperately wanted to help, but he had a tendency to patronise and romanticise the tribe. He found in Alfredo an opportunity to really ‘make a difference’ and he seized it with all his strength.

Alfredo’s spirits hardened after years of bearing witness to the destruction of everything he knew to be holy. These were the last days that the priests and the poets all sang of. He’d felt the forest shrink and scream. He’d heard the stories from his uncles of the day the men from the big American company had come with their contracts, how they had smiled at the elders as they exchanged bags of sugar and white rice and big kegs of gasoline for a mark on a piece of paper. And then, weeks later, he’d heard how they’d come back with their trucks and their machines and opened the mines. He’d seen his tribe grow sick from illnesses the shamans couldn’t cure with the leaves that had always cured his people. He’d seen the miners tear the earth apart, dig the
roots up from the trees and kill the gods inside them that protected the forest. He’d seen them rip the skies apart and set the clouds on fire. He’d seen the cancers come from the huge black clouds of smoke that streamed out of the mine all day and all night and he’d seen the children born with red blotches on their faces, blotches that wept and bled and meant the child would die.

Alfredo was a young man, and as with young people all over the world, he saw injustice and it hurt him and he couldn’t ignore it. His rage was wild and shook in his chest like an animal. He was not yet old enough to tell himself that there was nothing he could do.

In an effort to protect his home and his people from total destruction, Alfredo, with James Peake’s instruction, had learned English. He had a talent for it and read until James had no books left to bring him. Under James’s diligent tutelage, he’d applied for a place at Oxford University. He was going to fight this fight in the only way that he could see working: on his enemy’s terms.

He was going to speak the language, learn the laws and understand the hateful logic of his oppressor. Then, he thought, he would be better equipped to explain to them that they were murdering his people and that they couldn’t last much longer. He was convinced that once they knew what was happening, once they could understand the cost of the destruction, there could be no way that whoever was responsible for what was happening to his people could
choose money over human life. Not if he made them see that the choice was really that simple and that absolute.

Leon’s mother, Jackie, had run away from home when she was fifteen to find an uncle she’d never met but who she’d heard stories of all her life. Alistair McAlister was her mum’s twin brother. He was a famous jockey with a big house and a pop-star wife. He lived in London, where everyone was beautiful and rich. Jackie’s pale spectre of a father had lost his job and couldn’t find his dignity. They lived in a coastal town near Middlesbrough; there was nothing really going on for her there. Just the sea and the pubs and her dad looking for work. Her mother, into heavy drugs, had drifted slowly out of their lives. She hadn’t lived at home for years. There were no tearful rows, no slamming doors. She just left one day; quietly. Her addiction was a slow and sad and silent thing. Jackie saw her sometimes sitting with the others on the high street, crumpled up and thin as rain. Jackie didn’t think she missed her, but her mother’s absence made her dad detached. The silence in the house was stronger even than the smell of damp.

Jackie would sit with her dad and watch the lives of others on TV. Soap stars had affairs and leather jackets. Schoolkids had dreams and adventures. Young people had romance and fashion. Jackie was a lonely teenager and didn’t know what to believe. One dark winter evening, an advert exploded into the front room. Her Uncle Alistair smiled out at them from a glowing studio. He was launching a new talk show. Sports personalities
laughed as he attempted to beat them at an egg and spoon race. He wore an expensive suit and shiny shoes. The colours broke all over their drab furniture like waves. The two of them, sitting there on the sofa, found themselves suddenly drenched in a fizzing multicolour brightness. Jackie’s father clucked his disapproval, but Jackie knew that there was awe in it.

Jackie’s mother had always hated her brother and had made no secret of it. Jackie had only met him a few times, when she was too young to remember. It was the way he had wanted something and never once thought he shouldn’t have it that had bothered her mother so much, his stamina, she didn’t trust it at all. But here he was. On the TV. Jackie felt her heartbeat deepen; all sub, no mid-range.

Jackie’s friendships were fleeting, if not non-existent. She never had best friends or boyfriends or even invisible friends. She was the quiet one with nervous eyes and she smelt bad and was bullied because of it. At home there was no bathing, no clean clothes, her quick grey eyes had to find their own food. But one cold day in June, she woke with a heat in her temples, maybe a fever, maybe a rage. As noon came, she found herself running the wet stones of her home town to the train station. In the sky she saw a sudden flash. A siren wailed within her. She was sure the flash was disc-shaped. A bright white light. She had always believed in aliens. She knew that they were out there and they were on her side. She looked again but the sky was grey and empty. She knew it was their way of telling her she was right to be running. It spread
a guilty smile across her face as she hurried through the turnstiles. Pressed up close to the woman in front, she slipped through without a ticket.

Jackie arrived in London with nothing. She had hidden in the toilet from the ticket man the entire journey. Petrified. She stepped off the train and into the vast concourse of St Pancras and suddenly felt the weight of her escape. All these strangers, tall adult strangers, bustling and meaning business. Hurrying for trains to take them to places Jackie imagined to be full of love and supermodels. She started to scold herself. Heard her father’s clipped vowels in her head and pinched her arms as punishment. She tried to fight it, but she could feel it coming. She began to weep.

Lily Peake, James Peake’s wife, was on her way home from visiting her mother’s grave. In a reflective mood she walked the concourse of St Pancras, feeling her mother more forcibly than she’d ever felt her while she’d lived. Alive, her mother had been a source of embarrassment to Lily. A strange creature who seemed so intent on weakness that Lily could hardly bear the occasional visits, sitting with cream cakes in a London tea room. But in death, Lily saw her mother in a new light. Realised it wasn’t weakness but honesty she cultivated. She walked the station and felt this unbearable desire to be near her mother one more time. To watch the way the wrinkles moved to reveal the expressions she’d looked up into since her eyes had first opened. She felt a desolate tenderness and realised she
would give anything for an awkward hour listening to her mother’s outdated opinions. Lily couldn’t help herself; she began to cry.

And there they were, crying woman and crying child. Not ten feet apart. Jackie, half crouched but still moving through the crowd. Lily, more composed but letting the tears flow freely. And suddenly, through their tears, they saw each other. Lily was shocked by this frightened child. This dirty-faced weeping girl. Tiny-bodied and gaunt and desperate but with a calmness she hadn’t seen since she’d seen her own mother’s eyes. Lily Peake had always believed in signs. She dried her eyes and pulled herself together and offered Jackie a smile from the depths of her being.

Jackie took fright. She ran through the station, and tripped over bag straps and hurtled past snarling adolescents. Bony shoulders struck fleshy midriffs, people shouted at her as she ducked and made towards the exit. Lily, shocked and moving slowly, watched the child escaping. Her mind raced. She followed without knowing she was following.

‘Hey!’ Lily heard a voice. ‘What do you think you’re doing?’ A pompous man, shiny-headed. Fat and outraged, the contents of his briefcase spilled. Important papers on the floor, lifted and carried on the winds of the departing trains, fluttering off in every direction. He tutted and huffed and shouted and as Lily came through the crowd, she saw he was holding the girl’s shoulder.

‘Look what you’ve done!’

The girl looked petrified, weak. Lily hurried to her aid. She shared a little of her husband’s tendency to cast herself as the saviour. It was a product of their wealth, their fine education, their strong morality and their genuine, although frequently misguided, sense of liberal goodness.

‘You should be ashamed of yourself,’ she told the fat man. ‘Handling a poor child like that.’

‘With you, is she?’ The man still held the shoulder. Hard. Jackie felt her bone ache beneath his thumb. She didn’t move.

‘Yes, she is,’ Lily said, winking at the girl.

‘Well, keep her under control. She’s just run into me out of nowhere, knocked my case out of my hand, and look at the mess she’s made.’

‘Oh we’re terribly sorry, aren’t we, darling?’ Lily put her arm around the child, and as she did so, the man let go of her shoulder. ‘It’s just we’re running for a train.’ And with that, Lily, heart beating in a way it never had before, began to run with the child. Together they sprinted clumsily out of the station and burst into the doorway of the first lit building they came to. A pub. Full of smoke and tweed and loud laughter. They caught their breath and smiled at one another.

‘Well,’ said Lily, wiping the tears from her face. ‘As we’re here, why don’t we have something to eat?’

Jackie found herself going home that night with Lily Peake, and this was how, the next morning, she met Alfredo, the young friend of Lily’s husband James. Alfredo was a foreign man who lived in the attic annexe of the large house by the
park. The pipes were fat with water heated by the furnace in the basement. James bought the leftover olive stones from the man who owned the Greek deli at the bottom of the road and fed them to the furnace to heat the house. Jackie was so excited by everything she saw; whole days passed when she was sure she hadn’t blinked once. She lay in her bed at night exhausted and confused.

Alfredo’s company excited her. When she saw him, the roof of her mouth and the bottom of her tummy ached. He was quiet like she was. He stepped carefully, like she did.

Alfredo thought that Jackie was fascinating. She was as out of place as he was, as driven and as full of pain. They sat there at the dinner table with Lily and James Peake, the friendly, wealthy, childless couple who had taken them both in.

They crossed in the hall and they felt each other’s bodies change in the proximity, some inside parts of them pushing out. Wanting to be near each other. Alfredo could feel her smallness and it made him want to carry her. He himself was a small man. Well, hardly man, a boy still.

This is how they fell in love. In their own soundless way. They barely spoke, but she slipped up to his room at night, unable to not be near him.

Quiet, desperate touching. His eyes like pits of wet, black earth, hers as blue and quick as wind.

Upstairs, in his annexe, Alfredo repeated phrases, committed text to memory, prepared himself for his entrance exam beneath the watchful, pacing mentorship of James. Downstairs,
by the back door, Jackie – riddled with fear – slipped out into the night and ran and ran and ran.