The Bricks That Built the Houses (14 page)

Drugs.

He swallows. Shakes a gurn off.

‘Harriet.’ Miriam tries to sound inquisitive and friendly, but her tone is clipped with distrust. ‘How are things with you?’ Harry is dumb suddenly. Her mind blank. Mother and daughter eye one another warily. Harry pulls her lips into a timid half-U. ‘Are you . . .?’ Miriam begins to ask
something but fails to think of a question. ‘How’s Leon?’ she settles for.

‘He’s good, yeah. We’re both fine.’ Harry wonders whether she is meant to pick up this thread and sew a tapestry with it. She looks back to her plate. Moves some mash around.

Harry’s brain is still catching on stills from the party the night before last; those eyes that chin those smiling lips the way she left like that and winked and left and how might it feel to have a person there. Here was someone strange and dark as she was. The things they’d told each other. Some stupid hope that spiked and hurt like nails digging in, a slapped face in the throes of it. She coughs a couple of times. Miriam passes her some water without looking at her. Harry drinks it without saying thank you.

Miriam would like to know if her daughter is OK. If she is in love or going out with friends to watch bands after work, but something stops the words from forming. There has been a wide silence between them since Harry was young and Miriam told her that two girls together was wrong. It just couldn’t last, she had said. It wasn’t
real
was the word she had used. Those words, although tattooed on Harry’s mind, have faded from Miriam’s. Harry often wonders if two people remember the same situation completely differently how either of the memories can be trusted.

‘Harriet?’ Miriam tries again, Harry looks up.
It’s not your job to educate her
, she tells herself.
She doesn’t mean to hurt you
. ‘It’s a nice shirt you’re wearing.’

A parade of past insults marches along the promenade inside Harry’s brain. Her mum sneering at her outfits as she hurried past her, out the door. ‘You look like such a tramp,’ she’d say. ‘Do you want people to think you’re a boy?’ or the more frequent, ‘You have such a pretty face, why do you hide yourself like this?’

Harry can’t respond, not even a smile. Pete shakes his head in disapproval; he thinks she’s being stubborn. At least his mum is trying.

Miriam, her head tipped to the side, waits for acknowledgement. Puzzled, as ever, by her daughter’s behaviour. She looks back to her plate, eats delicately. She cuts her food up precisely and evenly so that she always has an equal amount of everything she started with at the end of her meal. ‘Nothing,’ she says to Pete. ‘You see?’ She raises her eyebrows and lets out a pantomime sign. Harry pickles in her own vinegar.

Pete’s suffering. His head is pounding. Brain shrivelled, dried out, jaw aching from the pills, and it pounds in his cheekbones and his stomach is grease-foul, recalling last night, retching up nothing. But no matter how rough he feels, everything’s fine because she gave him her number. He shakes the rising smile off his lips, shakes away the thought of her and looks up at the awkward scene before him: poor David, trying so hard to be liked. Harry and Miriam exchanging silences. Suddenly Pete feels like laughing, he can’t help himself. He gives in to it.

‘What’s so funny?’ Miriam asks, giggling a little.

Pete has his hand over his mouth, eyes closed, shoulders jumping around in their sockets. ‘I’m sorry,’ he says. ‘I’m sorry.’

David smiles enthusiastically, but his smile is from a different place. He lets out a laugh like a horn honking. Just once.
HA
. It makes Pete nearly choke trying to get the breath to laugh harder. He doubles up in his chair, feet off the floor, head lowered. Laughing till his belly aches. Miriam reaches over to rub Pete’s back and starts laughing too, gentle rocking, silent laughter; her cheeks go red, she’s got tears in her eyes. Her whole body shaking. Pete recovers, then notices his mum laughing, which he hadn’t at first because she’s so quiet, and that sets him off again, her shaking there in her chair, mouth so small, the way it gets when she’s cracking up, she looks like she’s crying. Fanning her face. David is beaming around at them all. Harry sits still in her chair, plays with her hands. Not sure where to look. Pete and Miriam calm down. Pete finishes his mouthful. Harry reaches for her beer.

This is great,
thinks David.
Couldn’t be going better
.

When Pete gets back home it’s growing dark, purple light draws the sky towards the pavement, and all the shapes on the street are silhouettes. He is carrying a plastic bag full of stuff from his mum. Tupperwares of leftovers and things to freeze, a loaf of bread, some cheese, a carton of juice, some toothpaste, some deodorant and two new pairs of boxers. As he
approaches the house Pete sees a load of boxes hunched grumpily on the front garden wall; as he gets closer he sees that the boxes are full of books. He stops before the books and examines them, picks them up in his hands and turns them over, flicks through them and puts them back. They’re Mum’s books. There’s her lamp. And there’s her gardening gloves.

He lets himself in and finds his dad sitting on the sofa in the dark.

‘Shhh,’ his dad says. ‘Come here. Get down, you plank. Can’t you see I’m doing something?’ He beckons him over to the sofa and pulls him down next to him.

Graham is a thickset, bullish man, but age and stress have shrunk him. His shoulders stand apart like two warring kingdoms, his neck the vast bridge that connects them. He walks with wide, heavy steps. Self-assured and slow-moving, but he still has the power to charge if he needs to. In the company of people he doesn’t know well, he tries to make himself sound posher by rolling his Rs and smudging his vowels. It’s a trait that makes his children wince in restaurants.

‘What we doing?’ Pete whispers.

‘Shhh.’ Graham holds a finger up to his lips. ‘Wait and see.’ He mouths it. A minute passes. Nothing happens. Pete watches his old man. He has a long, noble face, his nose straight and level, his brown eyes round and wide like cow’s eyes. They are set deep and blink out from tired wrinkles. His skin is thick and tanned to the colour of leather, even in winter.

‘Dad?’

‘I told you!’ his Dad whispers. ‘Shhh.’

Pete frowns at him. ‘What you doing, Dad?’

‘Listen.’ Graham tugs Pete’s earlobe. ‘Just listen.’ Pete can hear footsteps on the street. They slow down. Stop outside the house.

‘This is the house I was telling you about!’ says a woman’s voice. She sounds like she’s in her thirties maybe, south London accent. ‘Look!’ she says, ‘you could get twenty pence each for these down the car boot!’

‘Ooh, I don’t know about these.’ Someone else. A man. A much older man, maybe her grandad. ‘I’m not so sure.’

‘Well, how about this one then, eh? I’ve heard of this one.’ Pete can hear her picking up books and putting them down.

‘Oh yes, I think
I’ve
heard of that one too.’

‘
Wuthering Heights
,’ says the woman.

‘The Concise Book of Eastern European Fertility Myths
,’ says Grandad.

Pete looks at his dad. ‘You’re throwing her books out?’ he whispers.

Graham’s eyes blaze and his whisper is coarse as a brush. ‘She doesn’t want them any more. She won’t come and get them. It’s been a year. It’s part of the healing, son. You wouldn’t understand. Not till
your
wife has walked out on
you
. Which, I hope, never happens.’ Pete leans his head back into the sofa, enjoying the darkness of the room. ‘Sit further down, will you,
they’ll see the top of your head through the gap in the curtains.’ Pete wriggles himself down into the sofa. Bends his head to the side.

‘
War and Peace
, look!’ Grandad says. ‘I’ve always wanted to read that.’

‘They’re not for reading, they’re for the car boot.’

‘And
Call of the Wild
, look.’

‘Oooh,’ the woman says. ‘
Yoga with Pets
.’ They can hear her open it and flick through. ‘There’s some nice pictures in this one.’

‘Come on.’ Graham stands up as quietly as he can, and, staying low so he can’t be seen, starts to walk into the kitchen. Pete gets up slowly and follows him, also staying low. They stand either side of the kettle and listen to it boil. Strange how much you hear in an empty house. Pete watches the steam, passes his fingers through it, tickles it.

‘What’s he like then?’

Pete visualises David’s eager grin. ‘He’s nice,’ he says.

Nice
. It tugs at Graham’s small intestine. ‘Who’d win in a fight though?’

‘I’m not answering that, Dad.’

‘You don’t have to. I already know.’

‘Are you drunk?’ Pete asks him, but he doesn’t really need to.

‘I’m old. That’s the problem.
This
is when you’re meant to be with the woman you love.
Now
. When your face looks like this, and you’ve got older than you ever thought you’d
get.
This
is the time for love. Not, I mean . . .’ He sends his hand up into the cupboard above, finds two cups, tangles his fingers around their handles.
Her cups. She chose them
. He brings them to the counter and places them side by side. They wobble and settle. He fetches the tea bags. ‘Imagine, son, five years’ time, I’ll be old and grey and fat and frail, and if you ever find a job I’ll be all alone in this house. Do you understand me, scout?’

Graham looks at his son, misty-eyed, claps him on the back affectionately, touches his cheek. Pete stays still. Doesn’t respond. Just watches him.

Graham pulls his trousers up over his paunch and rhapsodises, painting his words in the air with his hands. ‘Years of marriage are
meant
to end up in wrinkles and cuddles by the telly, fish and chips on the beach, woolly hats and a Freedom pass. Who’s gonna love me now? Eh?’

‘We could make you an online dating profile. If you’re serious.’

‘Online, pah.’ He spits, not actual spit, just the motion. ‘Hard enough to find a girl at twenty, let alone . . .’ He starts to pour the water into the cups. ‘Should have loved her better when I had the chance.’ He stops pouring and holds the kettle in mid-air. ‘Let this be a lesson to you, Pete.’ He turns to his son. ‘I was too selfish.’ He raises a finger to point out the importance of what he’s about to impart. ‘Let this be a lesson to you, OK, son? You got to work hard at it mate, OK? You got to treat them good when you got them. Coz
when they leave, it’s too late.’ Graham’s eyes burn as he stares into his son’s face. ‘Learn the lessons that I couldn’t learn.’ He points the words out. ‘
You
be the improvement of
me
. OK?’ He rocks on his toes. ‘OK?’ he says, pointing. ‘That’s evolution, ain’t it?’

‘Sit down, Dad.’ Pete pulls a chair out. ‘You been in the pub today?’

‘Maybe for a little while. I might have been,’ Graham says. ‘It’s Saturday, isn’t it?’

‘Sit down here.’ Pete reaches for the sugar and stirs two spoonfuls into each of their teas.

‘I’ll tell you what, son,’ Graham says. ‘All I ever wanted to be was good enough.’

Graham chapel had been a solicitor all his life. He believed in the innate goodness of people, and despite the horrors he witnessed, he held on to his belief that people only went astray because of damage done to them by abuses of one kind or another. It was the unbearable violence
of
life that bred the unbearable violence
in
life.

It was like poetry to him. A soaring, difficult poetry that sought to offer all people peace. Graham knew in his guts that it was absolutely right that people should not murder, steal, torture, subjugate, defraud or deceive one another. But in an unequal society there was not enough air to breathe. Which was why he became a defence lawyer, and would find himself
absorbed in the harrowing details of his cases, desperately trying to clutch on to his belief that people were good.

He rode from Brixton Prison to Wormwood Scrubs on his rickety bicycle, his casework stuffed in his threadbare rucksack. At first he worked for a dismal firm with premises above a pub in Elephant and Castle. The files were all faded and the walls shook each time a train came past. The practice was called McCallum, Diamond and Strauss. Diamond and Strauss were a long time dead. Graham’s boss McCallum was a tender old man with flyaway white hair and a passion for Tchaikovsky who worked Graham to the bone because he knew that he could.

He had no weekends, took no holidays, sat coffee-high in police interview rooms in the middle of the night. He took on legal aid cases for people being tyrannised by landlords, bosses or local councils. He couldn’t help but take the cases personally. Every failing was his failing and the thrumming guilt that followed a loss sent him into long nights of silence and drunkenness.

Eventually he got a job in the West End in a bigger firm with more high-profile cases. He had two small children at home, and although he kept their pictures on his desk, his mind was busy with the allegations levelled at his clients. He knew Miriam was struggling with how preoccupied he was – they fought about it constantly – but the way he saw it, this was his vocation and people’s freedom was in his hands. ‘What about my freedom though, Graham?’ she would ask him, but he couldn’t understand how it related to the conversation and
told her he was not going to get dragged into an argument. He had work he had to finish and he was tired.

He’d taken to wearing shoes with thin metal plates fixed to the heels, so that as he marched down the hushed corridors of the appeal courts, with their mosaic marble floors, his footsteps banged and reverberated off the walls as if an invisible army marched behind him. When he struck down hard enough, sparks flew. The judges in their chambers would send their thin-fingered clerks to see what all the noise was, and they would return, ghostly faced, saying, ‘My Lord, there is a man out there with fire at his feet, a true Daniel come to litigate.’

But all that was in his younger days. His beliefs had lost their potency some time ago, and now all he really cared about was getting home at the end of the day so that he could sit in peace. He had many projects. He was writing a play. He was inventing a synthesiser. He was building a boat in the garage, which some day he planned to sail. He had accepted the wrecked remains from a man who couldn’t pay his fees; it was still mainly a rotten hull but even so, it was his project, and the joy was in the job at hand, not in the thought of finishing. These days he worked in corporate law at a big firm in St Pancras where nobody took him seriously and he got away with not doing too much.