The Bricks That Built the Houses (18 page)

She never found her uncle. She didn’t even look. Instead, she set out on her own – just another teenage girl, pregnant and alone on London’s heartless streets.

Leon grew to be a slim boy, tall as his father was short, with features like the Mayan kings he’d seen pictures of in books. He knew nothing of his parents’ meeting. Nothing of his father’s tribe. All he knew was Lewisham, his silent mother, his sisters with their different dads. His brown skin, the copper strands that grew amongst the black that girls loved to find with their fingers.

He had no idea that his father had put his life behind a calling or that he had struggled and fought for his people. All he knew was that his dad was a question he couldn’t bring up. He didn’t know the great many women and men who had carried his light from the first days, and whose light he was carrying on into the next. As far as he knew, he was all that he’d ever been.

When Leon and Harry turned thirteen, Leon, at a push, looked nine, but Harry could have passed for twenty. There was something in her face that made her seem much older than she was, and so despite her tiny frame and baby-soft skin, Harry was the only kid in the lower school that could get served cigarettes. A jackpot thing to be. It may have had something to do with the woman who worked in the shop behind the playing field. Harry walked in, awkward and
angular, her clothes baggy, swaggering, her face taut with shame. The woman at the till – late twenties, smile like a bad night out, blue hair, tattooed arms – was always very kind to Harry and called her ‘gorgeous’, which made Harry’s stomach rumble uncontrollably.

Harry and Leon started selling fags to their classmates for 50p each. They could shift two packs of ten in a good lunch break and go home a tenner richer. This was back when you could get ten Sovereign for £1.25. They kept the money in a tin in Harry’s room. Locked up with a padlock that they both had a key to.

The school they went to was normal, full of sex and drugs and bullying, hysterical outbursts and dramatic confrontations. Half of Harry’s schoolmates had never seen the sea, but there wasn’t one among them that had never seen a joint.

By the time they finished school they’d sold enough fags to buy themselves half a bar of skunk. Once they started selling draw, people opened up to them. They found their social role. And then came parties, phone calls, busy days on bicycles, they were seventeen and popular. Life was theirs at last. They had something to live for, work with, throw themselves towards. By the time they were twenty, they’d turned those ounces of weed into ounces of coke, and took the risks that came along with it. As the money got more serious, they found themselves able to save and they began looking to the future. They weren’t gonna shit this money away on new clothes and gold chains. They were going to have their own
place: a bar, a restaurant, a club of their own. Something that was theirs where no one could bully them and where anyone who came in would be safe.

Harry and Leon perfected their service, got the best gear and moved it without any fuss. The love they bore each other was the kind of love that flourishes best in the dismal parts of town, between friends who want more than the cheap drugs, shit sex, casual violence and eventual dullness that all their peers seemed to be settling for. A brother–sister relationship that went deeper than blood, because it was about survival and betterment and they trusted each other completely.

They were very smart and very careful; they never bought expensive things, they only sold to those they knew, had a few different numbers they used, switched the stash every other day. They were aiming for a figure, and when they got there, they’d be out. They wanted to make a million.

Leon had always had a passion for food; when he was nineteen he got a job in a kitchen and started learning how to cook. Something about the atmosphere made him feel more like himself than he’d known how to feel before. He loved the knives, the pace, the way you started with a few things and if you did it right you ended up making something so much more than the sum of its parts.

He threw himself into it, working the hours that chefs have to work. On his days off he hit the gym and trained hard. He let Harry do the bulk of the shotting. She played it sweet
when she had to. She played it smart when she had to. She understood people and how to read them, and people were disarmed by her nature. She was bubbly, conversational. They trusted her judgement. Leon was the muscle. He saw danger everywhere and knew how to stop it. He would often stay hidden until the last minute.

Leon dedicated himself to being ready for anything. He trained in three different martial arts and he practised t’ai chi for strength and grace. He lifted weights, ran circuits of the park for hours. Skipped each night for forty minutes. Fought with anyone who wanted fighting with. He soon got a reputation for being a nutcase hard man. Quiet and watchful. The scariest type. But he never went for anyone unless they went for him.

After a few years, as things got busier and busier with the business, Leon threw the apron in. It was a sad day, hanging up his chef whites, but Leon was committed to Harry and the plan. And one day, when they had their own place, Leon would keep his own kitchen.

When Leon turned thirty, he looked around and noticed how, every time he saw his friends, there would come a time of night when they would be hanging off his shoulder, rubbing their eyes, telling him how unhappy they were.

‘All life is,’ they would say, elegant poets after enough lines, dabs, swigs, ‘is routine and bullshit. Nothing ever changes. Work, eat, sleep, fuck, drink, dance, die.’

But Leon had never seen life that way. Leon saw that life could be hideous or beautiful, often both, but never mediocre.
He knew that every tiny thing that happened had to be considered, felt, enjoyed, either fought with or fought for.

In the kitchen they sit in silence and drink their beers for a time.

‘What’s the deal then?’ he asks her, fiddling with the sticker on his bottle.

‘Well, apparently’ – Harry looks up, raises her eyebrows – ‘it’s all going to be absolutely
fine
.’

Leon looks at her, sceptical. They’re going to reload, but Pico, the dealer they’ve been working with for near enough seven years, has gone to jail, and so they’re going to meet his stand-in. Leon doesn’t like it.

‘Same gear,’ Harry tells him, ‘same supplier, it’s just a new link. That’s all.’

‘You feel OK about it?’ he asks, still fiddling.

‘Yeah,’ Harry says. ‘Don’t you?’

‘Seems a bit dodgy to me, mate. But then again’ – Leon puts his beer down on the table and runs his hand across his head, feels the soft bumps of his hair across his palm – ‘everything does if you think about it too much. Right?’

Harry agrees with him, draws her lips into a silent line.

‘Funny enough, that’s exactly what I thought this morning,’ she says, ‘just that.’

Leon hovers his hand in Harry’s direction without looking at her. Harry gives him her cigarette. Leon takes a burn off it, exhales, goes for another small one, gives it back.

‘You not met this guy before, have you?’ he says.

‘No,’ says Harry, taking the cigarette.

‘You don’t think it’s too hot? With Pico inside and that?’

‘Tell you what, mate, the joke of it is’ – Harry takes a loose swig of her beer, smiling as she swallows – ‘feds don’t have a clue who he is! He’s inside for unpaid parking tickets!’

‘Fuck off?’ says Leon.

‘I’m serious!’ Harry warms to it. ‘He used to just park his car wherever he wanted. He’d just say to himself, fuck it, right, £60 to park here, that’s what it costs. Know what I mean? He kept all his tickets in his dash and then he’d give ’em to his accountant, end of every month or whatever, and get it all sorted. He couldn’t be dealing with fannying about looking for a parking space if he had somewhere to be.’

‘Well, fair enough,’ says Leon.

‘Anyway, turns out his accountant’s gone away for a few weeks, on holiday, with the family. When he gets back, they’ve got much bigger fish to fry, I suppose, coz a couple months go past and everyone’s forgotten about the parking tickets. Little while later, he gets a knock on the door, it’s a fucking court summons!’

They both smile, shake their heads. Enjoy the irony.

‘Why didn’t he just pay it off?’

‘I don’t know for sure,’ Harry tells him, ‘but look.’ She gets her best authoritative voice on. ‘It was up in the
tens
of
grands
apparently . . .’ She looks at Leon, eyes bright, nodding, lips pursed.

‘Was it fuck?’ says Leon, incredulous.

‘I know!’ Harry’s voice is a squeaking trumpet.

‘Tens?’ Leon says, unsure.

‘Apparently.’ Harry lifts her palms up, shrugs.

‘Fuck!’ Leon makes the swear word rhyme with ‘park’.

‘Didn’t wanna arouse suspicion by just coming up with that kind of money, did he? Far as the taxman’s concerned, Pico’s a self-employed interior designer. Best thing he could have done was take it on the chin, I imagine.’

‘Fuck me,’ Leon says, digesting it. Hands on his knees. Leaning forwards. ‘Fuck me!’

‘That’s what I heard anyway,’ Harry says, beginning to pack the money into the bag.

Leon reaches out for the last bit of her cigarette. Harry gives it to him without any reaction.

‘So who is he, whoever it is holding the fort?’

‘Just some guy, some relative probably,’ Harry, packs the bundles carefully. One at a time.

‘Not got a name?’

‘Rags. Rags is his name.’

Their hearts beat the same slow pace. They’ve been doing this so long it’s comforting. Like playing an instrument you’ve played all your life. But this feels different.

Leon looks at the floor, taps his feet. ‘Know anything else about him?’

‘Not yet. Feels weird, right?’

‘S’pose we’ll have to see, won’t we?’ Leon ponders the end of the cigarette. Looking at the butt to judge how much more life’s left in it.

‘The thing is, right,’ Harry stops for impact, seeks out Leon’s eyes, ‘I never met
anyone
else from the team.
Never
. Always just Pico. Dealt with a couple of the muscle now and again, just in passing, just a quick nod or whatever, but
never
dealt with another guy. You know what I mean, Leon? Strange, innit? Don’t you think?’ Harry stares at him, her oldest friend, waits for the advice she knows she can trust.

Leon thinks it over. Turns it around. Weighs it up. ‘You sure we can’t just wait this out?’ he offers. ‘Till he’s out, I mean.’

Harry nods deeply. ‘I don’t know how long he’s going to be away is one thing. And, we’re out of gear
and
things are booming at the minute, my phone is ringing off the fucking
hook
. I swear down, if we do this, and then we move the lot, which I think we will, I’m pretty positive, Leon – that we could be out of this whole fucking game in six months.’

They stare at each other across the kitchen table. Stare. Think about what those words mean.
Six months
.

‘And I mean
out
. Then, I reckon, you know, that we could be cleaned up and ready to put some money down on a property by the end of the
year,
mate. I swear.’

They think about that. Two decades of working for a thing, and suddenly there it is, in plain sight.

Leon studies the feeling, shivers. ‘We’ll just have to do it then, won’t we?’ he says, swigging slowly. Taking his time.

‘That’s it,’ says Harry. ‘Took the words right out my mouth.’

THEME FROM BECKY

Becky tilts her chin upwards, watches the cold sun bouncing off the windows in the tops of the buildings, dripping its yolk across pale stone and glass. The leaves on the trees have crumbled, some ragged scraps still hang on. She watches the bare branches, dotted with hard, sleeping buds. The fractal sunlight dappling everything. She can’t believe how beautiful it is when the seasons change.

Pete has been teaching her about her father’s politics. He tells her that her dad wanted to renationalise all privatised utilities. That he believed in universal nuclear disarmament. He explains that John thought society could be run for the good of all, not the profit of a few. He believed in the importance of getting organised.

Pete reads to her, because when she reads she doesn’t understand the words, but when he reads them, for some reason, they make perfect sense.

It has been strange getting to know her father’s voice this way. Hearing vaguely familiar turns of phrase coming out of Pete’s mouth. Sometimes, she feels herself amped up to shaking point. Inspired and furious, desperate to find him, hear him tell her how it was all a set-up. Have him explain the world and how she can save it. But these feelings are always followed with a sour scrub of shame. A cloying dirge that drags her down.

Her mother’s in her mind these days. She’s been looking at her photographs all morning. She feels closer to her every passing year. Her mum was twenty-six when she had her. Becky’s twenty-six now. Getting older, getting closer to herself.

Marshall Law won two MTV awards for the Cool New Band video. Becky got the phone call from his PA the next day, offering three weeks’ work on his next project. Unpaid rehearsals, a huge amount of effort demanded for no acclaim. It would have worked out at less than minimum wage, as usual. She had felt the old hysteria bubbling up within, the feeling that she had to take any opportunity that arose, so that one day she could be in the position to make her own decisions. She felt it pushing like water up through her body, towards her mouth, the wave about to break and say yes, of course, thanks for thinking of me. But she swallowed it.

‘I can’t do it,’ she said. ‘I’m not available.’

Marshall’s PA was shocked into silence. When her voice at last returned it was devoid of its pleasantries.

‘You understand that Marshall won’t ask again, don’t you?’ she said threateningly. And that was the end of Becky’s relationship with Marshall Law. After four years of working on his shoots.

She had found herself marooned, looking for work. Unable to get auditions. The classes she went to were at The Place, the home of the school she’d trained at. She attended as many as she could afford; she aimed to make three a week but she could feel her fitness slipping.

With every year that passes an out-of-work dancer is more prone to injury, less fit. No company would take her on, given the commercial stuff she’d been doing since qualifying. They would never choose to see her at an audition over an eighteen-year-old. Her CV was laughable and for every part that came up, hundreds and hundreds of women applied. There was no hope for her. And everyone she spoke to exhaled through pursed lips and lowered their eyes.

The Place was running an annual festival of new work. This was, she felt, the last push. She stepped up the classes. Started going daily. She could feel her muscles tightening, her Achilles tendons lengthening. She would have to pay her dancers, rent the studios to work in, conceive the piece and teach it without any support. But The Place would put it on stage and give her a journalist to review it.

She told her agents at the massage company that she would take work in any hotel at any time of the night. Her phone beeped and the text came and she’d have an hour and a half to get ready and get across town. She’d be sitting at her kitchen table, planning for the show, or watching TV in her pyjamas with Pete, or sitting in the pub drinking soda water and lime, and the text would come and she would have to snap herself out of her life and make the journey towards becoming someone else.

She made her money and she booked the studio and she paid her dancers and she was exhausted to the point of collapse, but much more alive than before. Her muscles on fire when she walked down the snail-grey steps of her flat; going backwards to deal with the cramps in her calves.

She conceived a piece for a cast of four women who moved in interlocking bursts and waves across the floor. Pain and poverty and struggle. Family and independence. It was well reviewed and although she received no funding off the back of it, got no parts directly, her name rang out a little louder in the audition process. It seemed to the people who glanced over her CV that although Becky had taken an unusual path, she was doing things her own way and was obviously committed.

Pete hated all the time she was spending in rehearsals, hated her being on call every night. He’d got his CSCS card and found a few weeks’ work labouring. But he shrank from the
banter onsite. It made him feel like an impostor in his own sex. He wanted to take Becky out with the money he made. But she was never around. The work dried up after three weeks, and he was back on the dole.

Every time they have a row it makes him cry. He doesn’t know how it happens, but as soon as her tone hardens, he feels this heat behind his face like being punched from the inside, and tears come and his throat swells and he gets all snotty and stupid. She freezes when she sees him sob, ices over in an instant. She never cries in front of people, she thinks that it’s manipulative.

Pete is ashamed of his behaviour, but he doesn’t really recognise it. When she’s not around he feels chirpy and fine and reasonable. But as soon as they’re together he can’t think straight and he behaves like a madman.

When she asks him about it, it just makes him angry and embarrassed and he gets silent and visualises shooting himself in the face. Over and over. Shooting himself in the mouth, in the temple, in the eye. Over and over.

Bang.

He’s been going through her things. She knows because the most recent batch of letters to her parents that she keeps in the box in her wardrobe are all in the wrong order and the pile of business cards she printed for her massage work is half the size it should be. But something keeps her coming back.

They kiss in the supermarket and smoke spliffs in bubble baths, but his moods are getting worse and worse, and she
begins to keep her distance. When he feels her pulling away from him, he panics, pushes harder. Turns up unannounced outside her flat. Too embarrassed to ring the bell in case he has to talk to her flatmate, he waits on the dark balcony, smoking. Imagining her moving through hotel rooms, hearing the squelch of other men’s parts in her hands. Red-eyed from the weed with a hacking cough that bends him double.

When she’s at work he punches walls until his knuckles bleed and later, in the pub, his wounds seeping and hardening, he hates her for what she’s done to him but still can’t wait to see her, can’t wait to hold her in his arms.

The jobcentre’s killing him. Becky’s love is killing him. Coming home to his childhood bedroom is killing him. Everything is killing him, and yet his life just keeps on dragging; the morning comes and here he is, awake again. Alive.

After her piece went on at The Place, Becky attended some open auditions: a hundred girls in a room, picked off one by one and told to go home. The day split into three sections, a ballet class in the morning to check for correct training. Then, the teaching and performance of a routine to check body and temperament. And finally an improvisation, to check whether the dancers were knowledgeable or creative enough. The whole day racked with pressure. Body like a catapult, pulled right back. Some of the auditions she had to pay to attend. Becky had been out of this world for three years, but was so desperate to shine that she worked harder than the others. No
matter the effort though, she was still too old. Three months later, even after attending open auditions every single day, Becky couldn’t get an audition for a part in a company. But she had made herself visible, and she was a dancer again.

As autumn reared its golden mane and shook the leaves down from the branches, Becky got a call from a rehearsal director who had a show about to open at Sadler’s Wells. They needed a swing.

She had to sit in rehearsals and learn every part from just watching. The choreographer had no time to teach her the phrases. Her arms and her legs were alone in the room. Along with two other swings, she had to learn every single part in the piece, with no support and for even less money than everyone else. The other dancers in the company ignored them, because they weren’t worth their time, and because they knew that at some level they would be hoping for falls, sickness, injuries. But even so, Becky was happier than she’d been in years.

When Nima got sick, Becky stepped in. There was something nasty going round. She had one day to prepare for the part. Nima was too ill to teach her, so she was entirely alone with the transition. Ryan and Mahesh got sick the next night. All three swings had to be ready. Half-sick themselves from stress and fatigue, but burning up. Elated.

Becky stands outside Sadler’s Wells Theatre finishing her cigarette. She drops the butt, stubs it out with her toe and
heads back through the stage door, down into the depths of the building.

In the corridor outside the dressing rooms, she paces for a while, then sits down heavily on the floor, pulls her knees up to her chest, rests her head on her knees and closes her eyes. She tries to calm her nerves but she can’t stop tapping her feet, which means she keeps kneeing herself in the forehead.

The other two swings walk into the corridor. Becky looks up, stands. ‘Hi, guys,’ she says, brushing the backs of her legs off.

Patrice has calm brown eyes, smooth skin. His neat, short hair curls up and clings to his head. His legs are long, his hips are high, his chest is broad; he has a small mouth that is often pouting in disapproval. He walks like a supermodel. Marina, beside him, is small and muscular, solidly built, but all her edges are soft. Her red hair spills out in a perfect circle when she lets it. She hates nobody, has complicated relationships with everyone she sleeps with and writes furiously in her diary at night, secretly imagining that one day, after she is dead, it will be published.

‘Hi, Becky!’ Marina squeals all her greetings.

‘You OK?’ Patrice asks Becky, holding her arms at the wrists, shaking them, loosening her up. ‘You’re nervous?’ He puts his chin down, pouts at her.

‘No. I’m OK,’ Becky says.

They stand in a line between the two walls of the corridor. Becky stretches her hands high above her head, links
them together and points to the ceiling with the flat of her palms. Up onto her toes. As tall as she can make herself, breathing into her belly, she bends at the waist, touching the floor, pushing her palms down, breathing out slowly. Eyes closed. Counting the seconds. On the other side of the frosted glass doors that line the corridor, the dancers from the company are getting ready. Becky and Marina and Patrice can hear voices rising and falling, waves of laughter rolling in and out.

‘Someone’s having fun in their
dressing room
,’ says Patrice.

‘One day,’ says Marina, ‘we will have dressing rooms, and then
we
will have fun.’

Becky checks the clock. Marina sees her doing it. ‘Twenty minutes,’ she says, eyes shining.

‘It’s been twenty minutes for ages.’ Becky shakes her hands gently, rolls her neck from side to side, bends at the waist to lay her hands flat against the floor.

Marina rotates her shoulders, making circles with her arms while jogging gently on the spot with soft feet. Patrice lowers himself to sit on the floor with his legs out to either side of him; he holds the sole of his left foot with both hands, forehead touching his knee like a prayer.

When Becky steps out onto the stage, the blackness beyond the lights is total. Everything is reduced to tiny, precise movements. Her muscles. The music. The bodies on stage. Time is irrelevant.

The applause brings her back to the world. She stands breathing, looking out, re-entering life, sweating like a human. Looking for Pete as the house lights come up.

The three dancers get changed and head down together. Arm in arm. Pete is standing at the bar, facing out, shoulders hunched, staring into space. His hair is getting long; he’s grown it past the stage where it mushrooms outwards and now it falls downwards into his eyes. Becky watches him, tries to work out what kind of mood he’s in. He looks stoned.

‘Hi!’ she says, reaching up to kiss him.

‘Alright,’ he says, his kiss dry.

‘These are my friends, Patrice and Marina. This is Pete, my boyfriend.’ Marina smiles, Pete looks at the floor and back at Becky. ‘Are you OK if we have a drink here with these guys?’ she asks him.

Pete shrugs. ‘Course,’ he says, ‘whatever you want.’

Patrice extends his hand. ‘Pleased to meet you.’

‘Hiya, mate. Alright.’ Pete shakes his hand. Patrice looks over his shoulder at Marina and pouts.

‘Very firm,’ he says to Pete. Pete stares at him, doesn’t respond in any visible way. Just stares. ‘OK,’ Patrice says slowly.

‘And I’m Marina.’ Marina reaches her face up for a kiss on the cheek, Pete bends down clumsily, hesitates, and offers his hand instead. Marina pulls back, laughing. ‘Oops!’ she says. ‘How awkward.’ She shakes his hand.

‘Sorry,’ says Pete. ‘I’m not from round here.’

‘What did you think of the show?’ Becky asks him, her whole face opening up into a hopeful smile.

Pete looks over her head at the wall beyond and doesn’t make eye contact. He rocks back onto his heels. ‘It was good,’ he says.

Becky takes some lip balm out of her pocket, applies some to her lips, rubs them together, waits for him to say more. He doesn’t. ‘OK. Well, thanks.’ Her sarcasm is faint but unmistakable.

Pete says nothing. Puts his hands in his pockets.

‘Drinks?’ Patrice says.

Even here in the bar, the dancers group themselves according to status. The leads are in the middle, sitting with the choreographer and the director, making a literal inner circle; the lesser dancers ripple out around them. Becky, Pete, Patrice and Marina, not even in the company, take a table tucked away in the corner, by the toilets. They are offered small kisses or shoulder squeezes as dancers and tech crew walk in and out of the cubicles.