The Bricks That Built the Houses (31 page)

Harry doesn’t move. She stares at Ron, his bulk held together in a perfect stillness, like an elephant on its tiptoes. Something around the cheeks, the chin, something there does remind her of Becky a little. Something. The prospect of a swinging blow that lays her body down, beneath a speeding car; it’s all very close now, the end. She feels it. Woozy as booze. Is he going to smash her face in? He is close enough for her to smell the cocaine in his nose. The beer on his lips. His aftershave. The money’s in the suitcase. The suitcase is in Leon’s hand.

‘You owe me, Harry. What you stole was mine. OK? And so we are going to need to talk about that.’ He leans down, his voice a quiet croak, his face as taut and pained as a chess master losing. Veins stand out all over his neck and head. He offers a smile but it dies on his lips and its corpse is too heavy to lift.

Harry says nothing, studies his face in enthralled disgust.
Is he going to take all my money? Is he going to break my bones
and take all the money I’ve saved and we’ll have to start again, with nothing?
She looks at him, feeling very small. He looks pretty serious
. Is he going to kill me?
She feels light with excitement. Like something is actually happening and the prospect of danger makes her sure that she’s breathing. Alive at last. She runs her hand through her hair and scratches her scalp. Levels her gaze at Ron, her legs shaking.

Becky feels nothing but rage. She looks at Pete and doesn’t recognise him. Can’t see him. All she can see is disgust and guilt and blame and months of silent, moody control.

Pete is shrivelled up in his clothes, his body racked with guilt. He stares at his girlfriend, his eyes like open graves, and gesticulates his innocence wildly. Shaking his head, throwing his arms towards her as she backs away. ‘It’s not like that,’ he tells her. ‘It wasn’t like that, Becky,’ and his voice is so high it’s hardly there. A desperate scratch. The yell of ten stubbed toes.

‘You little fucking shit,’ she says, and her voice isn’t loud but her body is loud; her body is shouting. The party pretends not to notice as she rears up like a charging horse, stares down her nose at his simpering mess, and then walks away from him, taller with every stride.

‘Becky, wait?’ Pete tries to put his arms out for her, for her waist. He just had her in his arms, just five minutes ago. ‘Come back!’

She stops walking, turns, raises a finger and points at him. ‘You fucking
liar
. You set me up.’ She is shaking all over. She drops her finger. Balls her fists. ‘I’ve been SO HONEST with you. You fucking . . .’ Her voice dies. She feels dizzy. ‘I can’t,’ she says, moving away from him as he moves towards her. ‘I don’t.’

Dale watches her shape, fascinated. Excited to be near her again.

‘Don’t you dare fucking touch me, Pete,’ she shouts as he reaches out for her. Chaka Khan is on the jukebox.
I feel for you .
. . ‘I can’t look at you,’ she tells him. Shaking, holding her head.

‘Becky, look. Wait . . . Please.’ His arms are flailing, his forehead creased. She scowls at him. He feels himself becoming what she sees. ‘I love you, Becky,’ he says, but it sounds hollow. Hopeless. ‘PLEASE?’ he shouts.

She walks off. Fuming. Gloria runs out from the bar, follows her, but Becky shakes her head. ‘I need to be on my own,’ she tells her. Gloria stops following, Charlotte is behind them both.

Pete heads for the door, but hesitates. He turns, for Harry, for someone. Sees Dale, massive and still and grinning at him. Pete throws himself towards Dale. All of his strength shakes in his hands. ‘I’ll kill him!’ he shouts. ‘I’ll fucking—’

They collide, like a rock thrown at a bottle, and smash. Pete grabs Dale’s neck, but Dale is the bigger man and
elbows Pete in the crown of his head and kicks him off him. Pete is skinny but drunk and full of indignant rage and charges at Dale again and throws two quick hard punches at Dale’s nose. Dale sits back into thin air and falls, dragging Pete with him.

Graham, seeing his son switch, runs drunkenly to help and falls into the mess. He knocks over a row of glasses and drenches himself with beer. He slips on the beer he spilled and knocks a bottle off the bar. As he falls, the bottle lands on his head and he sits, stunned, where he lands, shouting drowsy encouragement at his son until he finds the strength to stand and launch himself at Dale.

David is outraged to see Graham trying to get involved. He throws himself towards the falling Graham and stands over him feeling his heart beating hard in his chest.

‘Go on!!’ Graham says. ‘Hit me!! You can’t hurt me!’ He staggers to his feet and swings a blow that knocks David against the jukebox and makes Chaka Khan start again from the top.

Graham moves over towards him and is ready to kick his head in when he sees Miriam, horrified, emerging from the toilet.

Ron is firm and focused. Harry can see the curve of his eyeballs, two bloodshot moons.

‘So, go on back inside and raise a glass with your old man and celebrate your baby brother getting another year older.
But . . .’ He stares at Harry, hard. ‘But, Harry, you need to lay your hands on that cash you took and that gear you took, and you need to bring that cash to Giuseppe’s – and leave it with me. That’s what you need to do.’ Ron holds one massive hand up in front of Harry’s face, index finger extended, pointing upwards. ‘I know who you are, Harry. I know where your dad lives, I know your little brother’s National fucking Insurance number. OK? I’m not fucking around, you with me?’ His other hand reaches for Harry’s neck. Ron holds Harry’s throat for a brief moment, squeezes it. A slight smile curling around his lip.

Harry’s getting dizzy, shooting pains are wrenching her insides. ‘Fuck off, mate, you’re all talk,’ she croaks. Her head is pounding with the lack of oxygen. Her throat hurts from his grip. She stares him out, trying to keep calm, holding her breath.

Ron squeezes harder, enjoying himself. Looking at Harry like a cat with a wounded bird. He loosens his grip on her throat, lets her get a breath, takes her shoulder in his other hand and grips it hard. Pushes his fingers down into her muscle, pinching the bone. Smiling.

Becky runs out of the pub, falling towards the road. Sees Harry talking to Ron. Sees the face on her uncle, the menace at the edges of his mouth. Harry is holding herself together, or at least trying to. She hurries over, threads her arm through Harry’s and smiles at Ron.

‘What’s this?’ she says. ‘Mothers’ meeting?’ She walks Harry off. ‘Sorry, Ron,’ she calls back over her shoulder. ‘I need her for a sec.’

Harry says nothing.
Where’s Leon?
Ron stands merciless and still like an iceberg.

Becky’s breath is tearing in and out of her lungs. They turn the corner, slow the pace.

‘Are you OK?’ Harry asks. Becky shakes her head. ‘What’s happened?’

‘I don’t want to talk about it.’ She holds Harry’s arm tighter, leads her across the road and on to the high street. After a hundred yards or so Harry stops walking, ducking under the awning of a closed greengrocer’s, pulling Becky to a stop beside her. Rubbing her throat.

‘Why’ve you stopped?’

‘I need to tell you something,’ Harry says, looking around for Ron, for Leon. Staring back behind her over her shoulders, looking down the street the way they’ve just come and then swivelling to stare ahead at every figure, shrinking from every face that passes. Her eyes as wide and crazed as a panicked factory calf.

‘What’s wrong?’ Becky watches Harry’s screwed-up face. Harry stares dumbly at the sky, tears prickling. ‘You got yourself in trouble with my uncle?’ she offers.

‘Yeah,’ she says, reaching for a cigarette, putting it into her mouth the wrong way round. Becky stops her hand before she can strike the lighter. Harry looks at her, confused,
and Becky takes the cigarette out of her mouth and turns it the right way round. Harry nods her thanks, looking worried, grateful. ‘I think he’s going to kill me,’ she says as she lights up.

‘What have you done?’

Harry can feel herself sweating despite the cold wind. The cigarette churns her stomach. She wobbles a little. ‘I need to get out of here,’ she whispers. Becky leans close so that she can hear her above the street sounds. ‘I need to leave town.’ Becky narrows her eyes. ‘Tonight.’ She tries not to be too dramatic about it. Becky stands with her, watching the trouble on her face. Harry pushes her knuckles into her forehead, holds the back of her skull.

‘It’s OK,’ Becky tells her and Harry nods grimly. Stares around the street for looming silhouettes, aware of every dark doorway.

She looks back at Becky and feels the punch to the throat she always feels when she looks into Becky’s face. She fights for breath, clambers off imaginary ropes and claws her folded body back to standing. Her heart rattles her ribs. The storm’s coming; she can smell it rising up from the tarmac.

‘Will you come with me?’ She tries to say it quiet but it comes out fast and loud. It’s been a long time coming but now there’s no more time. She holds her breath, and waits. Everything is very slow. She watches Becky’s chin, Becky’s ears, Becky’s left shoulder. She can feel Becky’s eyes on her
like cameras. Time is passing cruelly, every second bringing greater danger.

Becky notices the little curves beside Harry’s nostrils, the smile lines, scared eyes as bright as wet stones. The sharpness of her cheekbones, the roundness of her cheeks. The little open face, small and tough and pretty. Stood there biting her bottom lip, back straight, holding her fag, knuckles pressing into her forehead. Becky walks towards her slowly. She gets up as close as she can and stands an inch from Harry’s body, breathing, looking at her neck, her cheek, her eyebrows. They hug for a thundering minute, holding tightly to each other, like they’d fall down if they let go. Harry pulls away. Stares around her. No one’s coming. She looks back, breathless, at Becky’s lips, and everything evaporates. She sees Becky’s kiss before she feels it. Slowly at first. A searching kiss, hot small tonguefuls of each other’s mouths. Becky’s hands on Harry’s collar like Harry always dreamed of, fingertips across her neck, finding her ears, the tops of her small cheeks. They stand there kissing in the glow of the shopfronts and street lights, not blinking, the two of them breathing like animals.

The clouds open. The rain falls out all over the street.

Becky laughs then, and it takes Harry by surprise and she wants to kiss more, but before she can try Becky grabs her hand and they are running, up towards the roundabout. They take a breathless left and there’s Leon, sitting in the car with the motor running. The money in the case on the back seat.

She lets go of Harry’s hand, walks round to the passenger side, smiling a quick, dark smile that shakes Harry’s blood before she gets in the car and closes the door behind her.

Harry tries to make sense of it, feels the clouds throwing their darts at her back. She glances over her shoulder towards the shouting voices outside the pub. She holds her forehead, taps her fingers against the drum of her skull. To run? Or stay and try and sort this out? Either way, they risk losing everything. Even if they give it all back, it’s not safe here any more. She looks at Becky in the car. Thinks of her brother. Her arm pounds from where Ron had gripped it. She can still see his eyes burning down, feel his thumb on her windpipe. What will he do to them? She can’t think. She opens the door and gets in the back, next to the suitcase.

They pull up outside Becky’s flat. She lets herself in and runs to her room, looks at all the things that she has that she doesn’t need or want or understand the use for any more.
Passport. Underwear. Phone charger. Wash stuff. How many clothes? These jeans? Phone charger. Passport. Where’s that blue jumper? Which coat? Underwear
. She gets a bag and fills it quickly, moving round her room, seeing everything as if for the first time; all the things that are Pete’s things, and all the things that are her things, that were either from him or about him or hold some spiteful memory. The phantom Pete follows her around while she packs; she can sense him there, sobbing in
her knicker drawer as she digs around for socks. She’s getting out. She’s leaving.

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.

RETURNING

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.

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.