The Bricks That Built the Houses (10 page)

She glances over, catches him looking and she smiles her acknowledgement. It’s all he needs. The smile is enough to transform the whole vomit-inducing rolling sea of nothingness. The prospect of sleeping with her thunders in the sky and rains heavily down against the windows. He prepares his most cavalier attitude, but notices with a jolt of shame that she isn’t looking over any more.

Plates and forks and bread and ketchup. Endless tea-stained wash pots. Becky’s spatula moves expertly over the griddled strips of swine. She pours the coffee, thick fuel steaming in white china, and moves, assured as always, to his table.

This morning she’d had the two builders who barked orders, ignored her and didn’t say thank you. Then there was that couple that came in arguing. Shovelled eggs in a cloud of stress and fury and left in heavy silence. At least the men she massages look her in the eye. This man shut the door behind him. And he waited patiently for her to get back round the counter before ordering.

‘There you go, love,’ she says, putting the plate and the cup down gently. He sits up quickly from his slouch and rubs his hands with glee.

‘Thank you,’ he says, dripping gratitude. ‘Looks lovely.’ He reaches for the coffee cup. ‘How’s your day been?’

A shocked smile spreads its wings and soars across her cheeks. ‘It’s been alright,’ she says happily. The stock answer. ‘How’s yours been?’

He rolls his eyes, heaves an exaggerated sigh. ‘Oh you know. Not bad.’

She notices the book face-up on the table. It’s simply bound, a pale yellow front cover. No graphic, just dark red lettering in bold type. She reads it in slow motion and then rereads in fast forward, fifteen times per second, her eyes stuttering on every letter.
How We Can Take Power Without Power Taking Us
. And across the top, as if it’s no big deal:
John Darke
.

She doesn’t know where to look. She hurries back to the counter, ducks clumsily into the store room, spinning. She leans her forehead against the wall, her throat dry, her breath paper.

The little bell above the door rings and she grows busy with a sudden flurry of customers, but even as she serves them she is aware of him at all times. She sees him take his last chew, wipe his mouth and sit in quiet contemplation for a long moment, tonguing the shreds in his teeth. He checks his cup
and drains the last swigs, holding it in the air as he swills them round his mouth. Everything is happening in half-time. She sees him stand and lope towards her out of the corner of her eye. Her body is a frequency. A low rumble without shape. The world is slow and she feels sick.

‘Can I settle up?’ He stands, swaying slightly, in front of the picture of Giuseppe.

‘Yep,’ she says. Her voice leaps strangely out of her mouth. She flattens it, speaks low now, measured. Fixes her eyes on a point in the middle distance. ‘Three ninety, please.’ He digs around in his pocket for a fiver. Hands it over. Stares dumbly at the salads on the counter while she jangles through the till.

‘There you go.’ She hands him his change.

He puts it away slowly and stands there for too long wondering what to say. He’s sure that she’s been giving him the eye.

The pressure in her head is unbearable. She thinks she’s going to faint or die or something. She wants to rip her skin off and reveal herself, all blood and sinew and pulsing fag-stained lungs and poor exhausted heart. John Darke. John Darke. John Darke. Her fingernails repeat it. Her eyelashes repeat it. She clears her throat.

‘See you later then.’ She keeps her voice level, her tone calm and friendly.

‘See you later,’ he says over his shoulder as he shuts the door behind him.

She watches him through the window as he walks off down the high street.

Alone at the end of her shift, Becky sits with a beer at the table opposite Giuseppe’s photo. She stares at him. There’s definitely something in his posture that reminds her of her mother. She presses the cold beer bottle against her brow, drags it over her nose and mouth.

‘What’s it all about, Giuseppe?’ Her voice is a stranger in the empty room. Terrified of its own shape.

She comes from a long line of people who fought like dogs for everything they had. Who pushed themselves onwards to impossible places.

Her dad gave his life for the words in that book. Now he’s ticking days off in some lonely cell. She wonders if he’s still alive. She’s sure she would have felt it if he wasn’t.

Images flicker across the room, still fragments of prison doors, pale blue lunch rooms, barbed wire crouched menacingly on the tops of high walls, white sunlight in a brick yard, the windows barely slits, a man’s arms pushed through, dangling, just enough room to let his wrists feel the breeze. Inherited images from the internet. She hates him so much she can’t bear it.

Her mum had the impossible dream of being a photographer on her own terms. She never saw it through but she was close. She got so close.

She owes it to them both to not just stagger blindly but to choose the route and walk it.

The muscles in her face are tense and she rubs her jaw and temples. It burns through her. Conviction so heavy it hurts in her throat. When she dances, it needs to be everything she’s ever needed to say. She’s got so lost in arse-licking, posing and pushing for roles, playing it cool behind vulnerable pop stars. The girls she dances with are all really sweet and they all get on great, say they’re a family until the job’s over, but then, they’d trample her bones to get to her part. It needs to be truer. It needs to be bolder and as heavy as this feeling in her throat and in her empty guts. It needs to kick her face open and flood her skull with light. She wants to make a piece of work for a company to dance that will terrify an audience and smash them back to feeling. But how? She can’t even get seen in auditions. She hangs around the studio after class, chatting to the dancers about phrases that she’s thinking of, running certain things again. Talking to the teachers. The dancers there are tired and their eyes are dark and their skin is bad and their feet are sore and broken, but they have a steel in them that Becky lacks. A sure, smiling steel that they got from sticking with it. Not like the girls she works with, who have glossy hair and sexy lips and satiated, peaceful eyes.

She wants to join a company. Really be a part of something. Dance beneath the guidance of a choreographer that she respects. Push herself before it’s too late. For every member of her family who ever lived and died.

She used to vomit every meal. The enamel on her back teeth has been eroded from the stomach acid. It was all about
control, she realises now. Her body was what haunted her. The ghosts of both her parents were inside it, somehow more than her, and less than her, and everybody staring at it. Dance teachers pinched her arms, and she would squeeze handfuls of herself, standing shell-shocked in the shower, staring at the bits she hated. This body. It was all she had. She needed it to work for her. Starved and gorged. The toilet doors. It was so sad and lonely there. But hers. All hers.

She would be more than the sum of her parts.

She swigs at her beer and two thin jets of foam drip down her chin. She lets them course towards her neck, swallowing in fast, hard gulps until the bottle’s dry.

Giuseppe was uncle ron’s father. His real name was actually Louis but, for a while, everyone called him Giuseppe.

In 1939, Louis was a young man living in Manchester, the son of two poor Jewish immigrants. His father had sickened and died, leaving Louis, his mother and his seven brothers and sisters to fend for themselves. His younger sisters would have to go to the synagogue at least once a week to beg for food. Louis was training to be a tailor. He was a charismatic, well-liked young man and was working hard to learn his trade.

When war broke out, Louis had just asked his girlfriend Joyce to marry him, but Joyce’s mother refused. ‘He has the look of a man who will never come back!’ she fretted, clapping her hands dramatically to her brow as she worried the washing.
‘My youngest daughter, and she wants to make a widow of herself before she’s even seventeen?’ So Joyce told Louis to make sure he came back home and, if he did, she’d marry him. He promised that he would, and off he went to war.

He was on the beaches at Dunkirk. They died and were killed and they died and were killed and the sand turned putrid with men’s insides. Blood and shit and sweat, the rancid stench of war. He was commanded to stay where he was and hold the fort while the rest of the battalion went for help. He was left with twenty-nine others, and they dug in as fiercely as they could, but the company never came back for them. He would often say later that he learned more about life in those couple of hours than he’d ever learned before or since. Seven of the thirty men were killed, and the twenty-three that stayed breathing were captured. Including himself.

In the coming days, more than 200,000 British troops would be evacuated from the bloodied beach, but Louis would not be among them.

Louis’s best friend in the regiment was a tall, lopsided, skinny man named Joseph. His hair was black as onyx and his smile wrapped itself around anyone who saw it. His constant laugh sounded like he’d swallowed a siren, and he was never still, he moved like a bouncing ball, no matter what he was doing. Everyone called him Giuseppe because he was in love with an Italian girl and was prone to outbursts of song in struggling Italian late at night when he was drunk and out of his mind with missing her.

When Louis was left on the beach, Giuseppe was one of the other twenty-nine men who were with him. They had been through a lot together in the short time they’d been friends, and as Giuseppe approached his final moment, shot through the stomach and bleeding all over the sand, Louis crouched beside him and whispered into his dying ears, ‘You’re walking along with all the people you love, it’s a sunny day. You’re somewhere you haven’t been for a while, it’s beautiful, the trees are swaying, your family are all there, your girl’s there too, holding your hand. Everybody’s smiling and happy and the sky is blue blue blue. You’ve got a picnic, all your favourite food, nice cold bottles of beer. Your girl’s giving you a nice kiss. The sun’s warm on the top of your head. It’s a lovely day, it really is.’

As the Germans came to round up the prisoners, Louis had to think fast. He knew Hitler was killing the Jews. He didn’t know the extent of what was happening in the camps, but he’d heard enough to know he didn’t want the Germans to find out who he was. He kissed Giuseppe’s forehead and swapped identity discs. He left Louis Shogovitch dead on the beach, and joined the other prisoners as Joseph Jones, ‘Giuseppe’ to his friends.

They were stripped of their arms and lined up in single file, and they began the march to the prisoner of war camp. This sorry line of captured men, haggard and gun-struck, was headed and tailed by clean-shaven German soldiers, who marched with their guns and their dogs and their dignity. As
well as the soldiers at the head and the tail of the line, there were two soldiers who patrolled the length of the line constantly, each holding a fearsome German Shepherd. They walked either side of the POWs, one on the right, the other on the left, starting from opposite ends, so that one began at the head of the line, the other at the tail, and they crossed in the middle.

The ground was even as the prisoners walked, each one thinking, or not thinking, staring at the back of the head of the man in front. They entered a forest. It was thick and the trees smelt fresh and clean after the stench of battle. The air became softer, light tangling in the leaves, trickling down through branches that clasped other branches like praying hands.

Louis studied the soldiers that passed him on his right and on his left. He noticed that they walked in step, and that each time they marched the length of the line, it took them exactly the same amount of time to reach the end, turn round and walk back.

When he was passed, he counted the seconds until he was passed again. The gap was exactly the same. He counted forty seconds between the soldier to his left and the soldier to his right passing him. And each one of those forty seconds stretched his skin a little tighter.

He thought of the dogs and their teeth, and he thought of the guns. He saw the blood and the smoke of the battles he’d been fighting for days on end. Then he thought of the other
end of this marching line. When the destination was reached they’d find out who he was and he’d never get home alive. He would be killed. He thought of his mother, saw her face in his mind. He summoned the faces of his seven siblings. He whispered their names. He thought of his Joyce, the promise he’d made her. There was nothing else for it, he had to get home.

This was his chance.

Louis carried on counting, and each time, the delay between the two guards crossing seemed to be more pregnant, more weighted. He breathed deeply, waited for the guard on his right to pass him. He did. He counted ten seconds for the guard to get further down the line, glanced back to see the other guard, thirty seconds from him, and then time stopped. He jumped. He launched himself as hard as he could into the forest beside the path. Thick and green and giving after the sparsity of sea and sand and blood. He felt it take him and felt his breathing change. He began to run. And he could hear the gunshots, the barking dogs, the shouting men. He could feel the ground shake with heavy German boots but he ran with the forest not through it, ducked branches before he’d seen them, jumped dips before falling, and he kept on running, until eventually, his limbs in ribbons from thorns and brambles, his ankles twisted, his chest and throat thick with blood, he saw that it was dark, and quiet, and no one was chasing him any more.

He began his journey home. His mission was to head to Paris and then south towards Spain, for the Gibraltar Straits,
where he knew he could get in a boat and sail back to Manchester.

He lived on what he could find, and the hospitality of the people in the houses he passed. Especially the children, who were usually kind to him and gave him as much food as they could sneak past their parents. He made it to Paris eventually. Living every day as Giuseppe. The way he figured it, with his complexion, he was safer an Italian on the run from Mussolini than a Jewish British soldier on the run from Hitler.