The Bricks That Built the Houses (12 page)

She sits at her kitchen table looking at commercial properties on the internet, eating Vietnamese soup. She sees a massive double-fronted place in Peckham that she likes the look of. Flats upstairs as well. Used to be a hairdresser’s. Could be perfect. But Peckham’s changed. It’s unrecognisable now. She’d heard the rumours start five, six years before that Peckham was becoming desirable, trendy. But she didn’t believe it. She thought south London would hold its own for ever. But her home town is dying, it’s half-dead already. All that she knows to be true is suddenly false. Communities flattened to make room for commuters.

She closes her laptop and walks to the fridge. No beer. She gets her shoes on, keys, jogs across the road to the offie. It’s cold out.

She pays for the beer, opens it and sits on someone’s front-garden wall, looking up at the moon. Trying to shake off the slow-motion replay of spilling her guts out to that girl at the party that’s been haunting her since she woke up. She exhales deeply. Shakes her head. Shudders.

‘Idiot,’ she says sadly.

A couple wander past her, hanging off each other’s hips. It wrenches her to see it. She scratches the back of her head, scrunches her hair. Sighs and looks up at the street lights. Tells herself she’s doing fine. She’s smashing it. She’s making it happen. And as she sits she feels the hum of all the endless houses she has lived amongst since she was born. She holds on to the comfort of this road, this wall, this corner. Hers. She looks around. The houses are filled with people. The people are filled with houses.

The city yawns and cracks the bones in her knuckles. Sends a few lost souls spiralling out of control; a girl is digging through a skip with cold hands, looking for copper piping, another girl is at home reading. Another girl is sleeping deeply. Another girl is laughing in her friend’s flat, getting her hair done, another girl is in love with her girlfriend and lying beside her and feeling her breathing. Another girl is walking her dog round the park, tipping her head back to listen to the wind as it shouts in the trees.

Becky is dancing with Charlotte and Gloria. Pete is in the club basement studying the yellow powder Neville just took off a teenager. Leon’s in bed with a girl named Delilah. Harry’s drinking her beer on the wall. Everybody’s looking for their tiny piece of meaning. Some fleeting, perfect thing that might make them more alive.

CHICKEN

The sun rises and nothing is left of the night. People wake up and drink water, shake off their hangovers and head for the shopping centre. It’s Saturday. Dads have their children and couples are planning their weddings and old friends on a golf course talk about finance.

Pete and Harry walk beside each other up a quiet road towards their mother’s new house. The grime that clings to the walls is the same grime they’ve lived with all their lives. They pass dirty bricks, grand old gate posts, charcoal-grey slate roofs with TV aerials sticking up like bad hair. They pass graffiti-ed lamp posts and a UKIP poster in a front window and Polish words across the shop fronts and a group of men in thobes talking outside a café.

They turn onto a residential side road that ends in a cul-de-sac. The sky is grey and muggy. It wants to rain. Skinny trees grow in cages along the pavement, litter shivers in threadbare hedges. Two girls play football in the road; their dad is washing
his car. The ball sails a little too close to his windscreen and he drops his sponge and screams at them. ‘YOU DO THAT AGAIN, AND I WILL SKIN YOU BOTH ALIVE!’ His daughters shriek and giggle, grab their ball and run off down the road. ‘NOT TOO FAR,’ he shouts. ‘YOU HEAR ME, GIRLS?’ They slow their pace and loiter on the kerb.

‘How’s Dad?’ Harry asks her brother.

‘Fine.’ Pete’s voice is flat as the sky. Pete is tall and Harry’s tiny, but they have the same posture, the same lolloping gait. The same bony arms swinging the same rhythm as they walk.

‘Is he?’ she asks. Pete kicks a stone towards the hubcap of a parked car. Scores. ‘Shot.’ Harry admires his skill.

‘He’s getting dressed again. He’s going to work,’ Pete says, offering a watery shrug.

‘Are you taking care of him?’

‘Why don’t you go round and see him if you’re so worried?’

‘I’m busy. You know I’m busy.’ Harry whines the familiar refrain.

Pete shakes his head. ‘I’m busy too.’

Harry looks at him. He seems unwell. Huge bags under his eyes and dry skin and he keeps sniffing and coughing. She wants him to sort himself out. Move out of their dad’s place and stand on his own feet. But if he wants to mug himself off, let him crack on. ‘Couldn’t you get, like, labouring work even?’

Pete’s forehead tenses. He shakes her question off with a wave of his hand, as if it’s beneath him to answer it. They go back to silence and listen to the girls singing together on the kerb.

Pete checks the door numbers of the houses they pass. ‘Well,’ Pete’s smile stabs itself in the guts, ‘it’s good that you’re making an effort today.’ He cracks the bones in his neck, a jerky rolling movement.

‘You think I’ve not made an effort?’ Harry says carefully. Pete kicks at a stone again, misses it. Doesn’t say anything. ‘Pete?’ Her voice sharpens.

Pete sighs heavily. ‘Don’t start. Alright?’

‘No, what do you mean? I
have
made an effort, Pete. I’ve made—’ She’s cut off by him buckling under a coughing fit. His hand covers his mouth, she watches his body pumping with each rattle.

Harry sticks her hands into her pockets, listens to their footsteps.

‘It’s that one, there,’ Pete says, getting his breath, pointing to the corner house.

The kitchen is beaming. Pleased with itself. The worktops are beech, the cupboards are teal. Recently refurbished with all the mod cons. This is David’s kitchen.

He is sitting in a chair at the table watching Miriam’s back as she cooks vegetables. She talks to him without looking at him.

‘It’ll be fine,’ she says. ‘Nice lunch, that’s all. Nothing to worry about.’

He is chopping an onion. He’s never had the knack for it. It slides across the chopping board. The kitchen is bright. The sun floods the surfaces.

‘Do you think they’ll like me?’ He leans back in his chair, looks up from the onion.

‘Of course they will. They just want me to be happy.’ Her voice is melodic, gentle. With a tendency to let her words roll upwards at the ends of her sentences. The kind of speaking voice David associates with hairdressers. His favourite kind of speaking voice for a lady.

‘And
are
you?’ He waits for her affirmation, face tipped up to catch it all.

‘Yes, David.’ She looks over her shoulder at him. ‘You know I am.’

He goes back to his chopping board. Satisfied. The onion, at last, gives. David blinks rapidly and opens his mouth to fight off the onion tears. Grimaces silently for a moment, waits for the sting to pass.

‘Harriet’s the eldest?’ he asks her, rubbing his nose with the back of the hand that holds the knife.

‘Don’t do that, please, David, you’ll have your eye out,’ she tells him, without turning round. He puts his hand back down obediently. ‘Yes. Harriet’s the eldest,’ she says.

‘Which makes Peter the youngest?’

‘Yes.’ Her voice is level, her tone is kind.

‘Pete. Right.’ He stores the information in his brain. ‘And Harriet works in recruitment. And Pete is looking for work?’

‘That’s right.’

‘And Pete likes . . . reading, was it? And football? Does he like football?’

Miriam takes a deep breath, wipes her hands on her apron.

‘Relax.’ She turns to face him. ‘Everything is going to be fine. And pass me the stock cubes from the cupboard.’

He gets up and walks to the cupboard, looks for the stock cubes. ‘Do you think they’ll like the house?’ He can’t find them. He can never find anything.

‘It’s a nice house.’ She watches him struggle at the cupboard.

‘Must be strange for them though. Mum’s new house? I know I’d find it strange, if it was my mum.’

She walks over, reaches behind a jar of pasta and finds the stock cubes without looking. ‘It’s all arranged, and they’re coming now, so we’ll just have to see what happens, won’t we?’ Her face is set in a mask of unflinching calm, but her eyes are pale with panic.

He sits back down at his chair again, surveys the mess he’s made of the onion. The sunlight through the window is dazzling; he closes his eyes and watches the patterns underneath his lids.

‘Backwards’ is what his father had said. ‘Backwards in coming forwards.’

When David was fifteen, his father had left and he never saw him again. Never, not once. Not even at his mother’s funeral. Imagine that – you spend your whole life with a woman, you have a child with her, and then one day you go
to work in the morning and you never think to come home. Not even to bury her.

After his father had been gone a week, David went out to find a job. He went to the optician’s on the high street, Bright Eyes. He walked in, in his best shirt and his hair combed to the side and his glasses cleaned with his mother’s silk scarf. The manager was called Susan and she had beautiful big eyes and broad shoulders and she laughed from her breasts, and it made her shake. She gave him a job. He’d never had a job before. ‘No good’ is what his dad had said.

No good, good for nothing, useless dumb lump. Fifteen years old and never worked a day in your life. Hard to believe you’re a son of mine. I don’t believe it. Must be the milkman’s
.

‘You’ll open the door for customers, and you’ll sweep the floor and you’ll clean the display cases,’ Susan told him. And he did. He left school and worked with pride and single-mindedness, and Susan liked him.

He worked his way through that spring and into the summer, and on through the summer, and into the autumn, and then Isaiah, the optician, took him for his first pint of beer in the Horse and Groom across the street. David didn’t have many friends, but Isaiah was kind to him and didn’t mind how slowly he drank that first beer, or any after it. He told him that day, ‘You won’t like it at first, but you’ll get used to it, it’s better than you think.’

Every second Friday he got his pay cheque and he took it home and he gave it to his mother, and she was soft and full
of pride. Watching her soaps or making their dinner or reading her crime or her romance. Always big, hardback books that she got from the library and read constantly. She’d leave the books open by her chair, with her glasses, while she dusted her ornaments or washed the clothes, and David would never touch them, but he would read the page she was on when he got home from work. Stooping over the book. Never picking it up. He was happy with the way things were. He wasn’t a sociable young man. The only girlfriend he’d ever had was a nervous twenty-two-year-old called Joanne who ate her lunch on the same bench as him, outside the supermarket. She was three times David’s size and she had dry, angry skin around her mouth that she was constantly applying ChapStick to. They had sex in her Honda Civic, nestled in a dark corner of the Lewisham Centre car park. Three storeys up. He can still recall climbing the stale stairwell, not saying much, walking a foot apart, staring intently at the winding ramps and low ceilings, light-headed from the petrol fumes. The hot air inside the locked car, her endless underwear, the gear stick, the steering wheel, the comforting folds of her flesh.

It had been a year. Isaiah left Bright Eyes to go to Canada with his young Canadian wife and his wife’s sister and his wife’s sister’s fiancé. They were going to buy a house and plant a garden and start their own practice and think about children. Then it was just David and Susan, until Hong came, the new optician. Years melted away. David turned twenty.
Hong and Susan laughed in the stock room at lunchtime. David, happier than ever, meticulously polished the display cases and brought the pay cheques home to his mother.

David was promoted. He wasn’t just sweeping up now; he helped the customers choose the best frames for their complexions. Watched them as they tried on the pairs he recommended. Talked about face shapes with businessmen whose eyes were failing, and showed his favourites to mothers with nervous young children who wanted colourful frames decorated with cartoon characters.

The clothes in the charity shops were getting better, more expensive. Cafés were replacing the greasy spoons, and a rash of bistros and boutiques with names David couldn’t pronounce without feeling embarrassed sprang up overnight. The rent went up and Susan didn’t seem to laugh so much.

It began with forgetfulness, then there were the sudden inexplicable rages. One day he came home to find his mother standing in the garden wearing his clothes, shouting at her nasturtiums. She was complaining of headaches. Mysterious blotches appeared and disappeared on her arms. She often saw things that weren’t there. Miniature people sitting on top of her glasses. Two greyhounds sleeping in the corner of the bathroom.

The doctors took blood tests and samples and measured her pulse but found nothing irregular. It broke David’s heart to see her in the hospital, hooked up to machines.

He took her home, made her comfortable, cooked her favourite foods, read her books out loud to her and thought she was improving, until he woke one dazzling morning and found her dead in her bed.

She looked like she was sleeping. The sunlight through the windows clogged his eyes like bright white liquid.

The post-mortem revealed a brain tumour.

David was thirty-one. Until this point in his life it had never even occurred to him that sooner or later his mother would die.

She left him money. It was strange. All these years of giving her everything he made, and here she was, giving it back. She’d never spent a penny of it. She’d been getting money from his father since the day he left. It was a strange, tumultuous realisation, to discover that his mother kept secrets from him. After a lifetime of steady, trustworthy reality, suddenly nothing was certain. He imagined the letters, the phone calls between them. Why wasn’t he told? Did she write longingly to his father, beg him to come home? When did they arrange for him to give her money every month? Was it agreed between them? As far as he knew, his dad had just disappeared. The idea that they carried on talking without telling him gutted him, arsehole to jugular.

The funeral was simple. A cremation. A restrained service attended by eight staunch old ladies who were friends he never knew his mother had and the three family members that he could find phone numbers for. A cousin he’d met
twice. His great-uncle who arrived with his new Filipino wife and her two teenage sons, and his mother’s last surviving cousin, Irene, who came with her spaniel Samuel. Afterwards, at the wake, nobody said much to each other apart from the eight old ladies, who spoke quietly amongst themselves.

David watched these strangers in his house eating vol-au-vents and felt like it was happening on telly. He said goodbye at the end, cleaned up the glasses, put them away, took out the rubbish, boiled the kettle for a cup of tea and couldn’t shake the feeling that he was in another room, watching himself from behind glass.

Weeks passed. A month. He thought he was coping. People assured him he was. One evening he walked home from work, nothing unusual had happened that day, and as he let himself into the house he heard himself shout, ‘Only me, Mum,’ as he shut the door.

The silence that swallowed his words was so total he dropped in the hallway and lay face down on the floor. Suddenly crying. Retching and shaking and punching the carpet, punching the walls, sitting up briefly to breathe, shaking his head and punching his thighs. He lay there for hours. Crying and calming and crying again, howling, groaning, whimpering, until he dozed off. He slept there for a moment, could have been a minute or a second or an hour, and woke up with a feeling that someone had called to him from a long way away. He found himself there in that elusive waking moment before reality catches up. He could have been
anywhere, at any time in his life. Until he blinked and saw the skirting board. The dark house. The night outside. The hallway was achingly quiet, he was on the floor and his face was cramped from crying, and the carpet was wet with snot and tears.

And then it was the meeting with the accountant, and coming home to his mother’s house, every corner full of her presence and full of her absence. He sat in his bedroom reminding himself that she wasn’t downstairs reading her books. It was the most desolate, confusing time of his entire life.

He sold the house and rented a new place, just for him. A one-bed flat, and he walked around it, cavalier, deciding what he would put where. More alive with every minute. And feeling guilty for it.