The Bricks That Built the Houses (21 page)

While her brothers were free to work and study and take girls out and smoke cigarettes, she was expected to follow her mother’s example and be careful and quiet and kind. She hit puberty and learned to feel shame. Began to wish that she was different. Came to hate the noise and stench of her father’s shops. She came to see that life was not what you made of it, but what you persevered with. She felt she wasn’t quite enough. Not a proper girl somehow.

She turned seventeen and moved away from her parents’ home. She crossed the river and found a room above a pub in Camberwell. She took a job licking stamps and stuffing envelopes at an accountant’s firm. She hated every minute but she made the rent with cash to spare. She found another job in the evenings as a waitress in the bingo hall and started saving diligently so that when she turned eighteen she could buy herself a motorbike. Her mother hated the room above the pub, the motorbike, the jobs. She couldn’t understand what had happened to her precious daughter. She wanted her Miriam to meet a nice man and get settled.

Miriam read voraciously at night, listened to albums by her favourite bands – the Jam and the Clash and the Buzzcocks and Patti Smith. She wore tight black jeans and boots and men’s jackets. She studied movies, she studied poetry. She studied people in the bingo hall. She revved her engine and drove the bike down to Brighton at weekends. She slept with men she liked but didn’t want the hassle of a boyfriend. She had a group of friends she loved who worked as nurses and receptionists and life models. They went out dancing at night and walked each other home when the morning came.

When she turned twenty-two she was living in a cold-water squat in King’s Cross with two Marxist postmen, a tube driver and a lab technician. They imagined it to be a commune, but Miriam found herself doing the majority of the housework, the cooking and the killing of the mice. She was working on the front desk of the library at King’s College,
doing the late shift. She was saving up to travel. She wanted to see the mountains of Afghanistan. She spent her days nannying for well-to-do families in Hampstead and her evenings at the front desk of the library, reading textbooks.

Graham was studying law at King’s. In the evenings he pored over books in a hash cloud, memorising cases. At first they nodded at each other, and soon the nods turned into smiles. When it was closing time, Miriam began to look forward to waking Graham up and telling him he had to go. The third time it happened, she asked him out for a drink. They found a late-night seedy King’s Cross bar and giggled easily.

He was clumsy and charming and they lingered in the corridors when she was making her rounds, delivering the books back to their shelves. She found herself staring at pages and not being able to take in a word, just waiting for his shape to loom through the turnstiles.

She took Graham out on her motorbike one evening. He fell off before they’d even started and seeing him there, fragile and awkward, sprawled in the road, laughing like a baby, she felt something happening in her guts that hadn’t happened before.

She went away travelling, he finished his studies. They wrote each other long letters. Graham was frustrated by the distance. He wanted them to move in together, start a life, the kind of life that couples are supposed to have. But she had a world she wanted to see. He didn’t know if she would come back to him or not. But she did. And the minute she settled, he forgot to love her in the same way.

For the next twenty-two years Miriam threw herself into being a housewife and a mother and it flooded her with a happiness she’d never known. But the girl she used to be crept around inside her in her quietest moments.

Her only daughter, Harriet, had always been a tomboy. She wanted her hair cut short and didn’t play with girls’ toys or wear girls’ clothes. Her boyishness, harmless at eight, seemed stranger as she got older. At twelve she was getting into trouble all the time; violence followed her around in a way that shocked Miriam. Harriet would come home bloody and bruised and not say a word, just stagger into the kitchen for the frozen peas and then go quietly up to her room. She grew into a very private and independent teenager. Miriam didn’t know how to reach her. Harriet hated going shopping; she couldn’t bear even setting foot inside a clothes store. She was too embarrassed to walk over to the boys’ section where they sold the shirts she liked, and standing in the girls’ section made her feel like an alien. Nothing ever fitted, and she’d think it was her fault. She hated the hairdresser’s too; in fact, Miriam noticed, she found most public places difficult.

Miriam was sure it was just a matter of time before Harriet met the right man, in the way she’d met Graham, and then she would settle down and become a wife and a mother and realise that was where true happiness lived. It wasn’t that she didn’t believe that her daughter thought she was gay. It was more that she didn’t believe that women could be, really, deep down.

Miriam gradually became stuffy with age and blinkered by comfort, and told herself that nothing was drastically wrong and things would work out OK in the end.

‘So, what have you been up to then, Pete? Any developments on the work front?’ David looks at him over the top of his glasses, a piece of spinach sticking out of his mouth, chewing.

‘I had two weeks moving office furniture. That was good. And then I set up an eBay account for a friend’s nan and helped her sell off some of her late husband’s suits. She gave me fifty quid. So, that was good.’ He talks to the piece of spinach.

‘And are you any closer to working out what you want to do, in the, erm, long run?’ David wipes his face with his serviette. The spinach comes out of his mouth. Sticks to his chin.

‘Erm. No,’ Pete says. ‘Nope.’ His family watch him, waiting. He looks at them. ‘There is nothing for me out there.’ He raises his palms, lifts them, speaking in an Italian–American accent. ‘But heyyyyy, wa ya gonna do?’ The family eat. Pete finishes his wine. Pours another glass. ‘You have some spinach on your face, David,’ he says.

‘Oh,’ says David. Miriam looks at him.

‘So you do,’ she says and wipes it off with her serviette.

Harry finishes the last mouthful on her plate and sets her knife and fork down.

‘Been to the pictures lately anyone?’ David pipes up. No one responds. David looks at each of them, waiting patiently.

‘No. I haven’t.’ Harry says. ‘Have you, guys?’ She points the question at Pete and Becky.

Becky looks at Pete. ‘No. We haven’t,’ Becky says. ‘What about you, David, have you?’

‘No,’ David says thoughtfully. ‘I haven’t either.’

Becky finishes eating and rests her knife and fork on her plate. Wipes her mouth with her serviette. Notices that it matches the frieze around the walls. Miriam puts her knife and fork down too.

‘Just wondered if any of you young people had seen anything good recently,’ David says. ‘That was all.’

Pete puts his cutlery down. ‘Is there any more wine, Mum?’

David stands and walks to the side. ‘Yes, there’s another one here. Have we finished two bottles already? How naughty.’ Pete winces at the expression. David opens the wine and pours everyone another glass. Everyone drinks. ‘Well,’ he says. ‘That. Was. Delicious.’ Everyone agrees.

‘All finished?’ Miriam asks. Everyone nods. She stands to clear the plates.

Becky jumps up. ‘No, no,’ she says. ‘Let me.’

‘Oh don’t be silly, love, you’re our guest, you don’t have to do that.’

Becky shakes her head. ‘No,’ she says. ‘I wouldn’t offer if I didn’t want to.’

Miriam, touched, sits down again. ‘But you don’t know where anything goes,’ she says.

‘I’m sure I can work it out,’ Becky says, piling up the plates and heading for the kitchen.

Miriam looks sternly from David to Pete to Harry. Pete takes a leisurely swill of his wine. Knocks it back. Leaves barely a sip in the bowl of the glass.

Harry springs up to help. ‘I’ll give her a hand,’ she says.

‘Cheers, Harriet!’ David smiles.

‘More wine, darling?’ Miriam tops up Pete’s glass. Gazing at him softly.

‘Thanks, Mum,’ he says. Nearly pissed.

‘How’s your dad doing?’ she asks him, in the careful tone she uses every time she asks that question.

‘He’s OK. He’s volunteering at the hospice.’ It’s a lie but Pete believes it as he says it.

‘Good for him.’ Miriam seems almost hurt with surprise. ‘What a kind thing for him to be doing.’

Becky moves towards the kitchen, letting her face relax at last, hyper-aware of herself, her beginnings. The kitchen is new and everything’s shining, eager.
This room
, Becky thinks,
looks quite a lot like David
. She puts the dishes down beside the sink, and runs some water. Two rectangular windows along the wall behind the sink give out to a small, neat back garden, fruit trees in pots, a gnome fishing by the back fence.

Harry walks in and puts a load more dirties down on the side and takes a tea towel from its hook, slings it over her
shoulder. ‘You wash, I’ll dry?’ she asks her. The air between them prickles and roars with dense pressure.

‘Yeah. Great,’ Becky says. Squeezing some washing-up liquid into the sink that’s still filling up.

Harry takes the plates and scrapes them into the bin. Everything is slow and edged with static. She puts them back on the side. Turns to head out of the room.

‘Nice to see you again,’ she says quietly before going to the dining room to get the big pot and the serving dishes. Becky smiles to herself and turns off the taps. Harry comes back, puts the dirties down and moves past her to stand beside her. ‘I’ll do the pots though.’

‘Sadist,’ Becky says, without looking up from the sink.

Harry can’t help sneaking stills out of the corner of her eye. Becky’s body washed gold in the late-afternoon sun, her open mouth, smiling, the light across her lips, the occasional glimpse of her dimples. Her nose-piercing. Harry’s heart is cooked.

‘I did wonder if I was ever going to bump into you again,’ Becky tells her and the pressure wails between them and pushes down on them.

‘Mental, eh?’ They both laugh. ‘Fucking mental.’ Becky looks around the sink for a sponge or a cloth. Finds what she needs.

‘So, how’ve you been?’ Harry asks. Speaking quietly.

‘I don’t know. Pretty good. I think.’

‘How’s the dancing?’

Harry seems more confident than before. Lighter. ‘Yeah, it’s good. How’s yours?’

‘My dancing?’

‘Mmm-hmm.’

‘Well, I’m still excellent at the bogle.’ Becky lets a snort of laughter out, surprised. Harry concentrates on the plate in her hands. The tea towel. The stoic gnome outside. ‘Can’t believe it’s you, here,’ she says.

Becky shakes her head, smiling.

Harry points out the window. Her face disappears in a mask of confusion. ‘The gnome, though,’ she whispers. ‘The gnome!’ And the absurdity of the whole afternoon strikes them like a mallet and they begin to ring like gongs; the two of them break into unbearable laughter that winds upwards through them, unfurling new depths as each wave dies away. Weakened, clutching the worktop until the laughter ebbs. They sigh like old women after a good joke.

Harry wipes her eyes, and turns to Becky, suddenly grave. ‘Look, look, Becky,’ she says quietly.

Becky laughs again, the severity of her expression striking her as part of the joke. But Harry’s face doesn’t change, and Becky’s laughter stutters to a stop. ‘Sorry, yes. Serious talk.’ Becky puts down the sponge she’s holding and concentrates.

‘Them things I told you? When we met?’

‘Uh huh?’

‘About what I
do
.’ Harry knots her eyebrows desperately, panic in her eyes. ‘For a
living
?’ she whispers.

‘Yeah, I remember.’ Becky fishes for the cutlery in the soapy water. ‘What about it?’

Pete keeps glancing at the doorway, trying to see down the hall into the kitchen. He hears a peal of laughter build and break and ebb away. It pulls him down.

‘You OK, son?’ David asks him. Pete looks at him. Stares at his face thinking cruel thoughts. David pushes his glasses up his doughy nose.

Pete stands up without speaking or showing any kind of emotion and walks slowly out of the room.

David looks at Miriam, shrugs his shoulders. ‘Beats me,’ he says.

Miriam folds her hands in her lap, drops her head and breathes deeply.

‘He’s a complicated sort of young man,’ he tells her. ‘Too many books probably.’

She looks into his eyes despairingly. ‘“Son”?’ she hisses.

David throws his hands up and covers his face. ‘Oh my God, I didn’t even think. Oh my God. I hope I haven’t upset him?’

Pete creeps along the hallway, not thinking about why he’s doing it, just doing it. He tiptoes, back against the wall, until he arrives at the kitchen door and peeks through the crack to see Harry close to Becky, her lips leaning down towards her ears, her eyes glistening.

‘Have you told Pete?’ Harry’s voice is too familiar.

‘No.’ She shakes her head. ‘Of course not.’

‘Well, don’t.’ Harry is urgent, pleading. ‘Don’t say a word. No one can know. Please, Becky. This is really important.’

‘It’s fine,’ Becky reassures her, looks at her kindly. ‘Don’t worry. We shouldn’t even be talking about it here.’

Sudden heat roars in his torso and limbs. His wrists get fizzy with tension and his chest and neck and jaw grow rigid, like static is pumping through his veins instead of blood. His breath is not breath, it is a picture of breath, an idea of breath, but not air, not breathing. His mouth is gulping and drawing in air but it’s not going into his blood. His head is hard inside. He watches the room, hidden from view, feeling like a stalker or something, some shaky weirdo, peering through the crack in the door, and Harry is close and relieved and smiling, and Becky is breathing fast, her lips are parted, she’s smiling deeply, head inclined, laughing now, the soapy water sparkling in the sunlight, she steps towards it, plunges plates and Harry’s there, saying something, her voice too low to hear, and Becky’s laughing over shoulders, hair drops down, she tucks it back. Blinking. It feels to Pete that Becky hasn’t laughed like that with him for months. She never enjoys the things he has to say. What can Harry have to say that makes her laugh like that? How has Harry managed to get her on her own? He looks at his sister and sees her body carved from alabaster. Knows that Becky sleeps with girls and boys.
Maybe Becky wants his sister. He’s sure his sister must want Becky. Nothing is safe when Becky is near him. Every single person in the world is a threat. He would burn the whole world to have her to himself. But even if he did, she’d be more interested in staring at the embers than looking lovingly at him. But still. She doesn’t like him. She doesn’t like what he’s becoming. He doesn’t know how to stop it happening. He stares at them and wants to do something terrible. He breathes into it, the panic rising in his throat, gripping his ears. Everything is loud inside him. He turns from the door and walks in fast awkward stamping guilty steps down the hallway and out of the front door. Slamming it behind him.
They can have each other
. He holds his heart with a damp hand.
Fuck ’em
. He holds his throat.