The Bricks That Built the Houses by Kate Tempest Read Free Book Online Page B

in her flat? The obedient niece washing dishes in her uncle’s caff? The erotic masseuse, lipsticked and high-heeled, crossing town with her money to make?
    She could have brought her home with her.
    No strings and flings, and one-night stands, she’s not after any more than that. She prefers to keep things simple. Shelikes girls and she likes boys. If something is exciting, she lets it be exciting. But the minute people get too keen, she cuts them off. She can’t handle any more than casual things. It gets too painful. You give too much, they take too much, they want too much, or not enough, and suddenly you find yourselves emptied out and open-handed, grabbing for some more.
    She doesn’t like to think of her mum, but it happens late at night when she’s alone and chopped up like this, when she’s rushing and caked and her defences are weak. The ever-repeating motif that she tries to escape, building momentum, the age-old crescendo. And then, through the dark and churning sea, looming up from the depths, she senses the bad thought approaching. She tries to escape it, swims hard against the current, but she’s smashed back down and she can’t get away, and she feels it approach, the lumbering, formless dread.
    ‘Fuck off, Dad,’ she says, and the words drop softly. Her voice is sticky in the darkness, throat raw from smoke. She allows herself to think of him for the first time in months, years maybe. She tries to remember his face. If she thinks hard enough, forces her brain back to remember an image, there is one that still lurks beneath her lungs somewhere. Her dad, young and smiling, curly-haired and handsome, big enough to fill a doorway, in the armchair in the front room of the flat they used to live in, smiling, maybe at her or maybe at her mother’s camera.
    She turns over in bed, agonising, squirming, fidgeting. Body so tired, but head so busy, head so sore and sharp and whirring.
    She gets up, drags her doughy limbs to the shelf in the corner where she keeps her drugs box and digs around through the small chunks of hash and half-pills for the pack of diazepam. She takes one out and holds it in her mouth, finds a swig of water in a glass by the bed and waits to pass out.
    In the space between the cocaine and the alcohol and the diazepam, her brain expands, floods her with the past.
    Becky’s mum was a woman named Paula, pronounced like the Italian – Powler, and she had been a professional photographer. Her dad, John, pronounced like the Elton – John, had been a lecturer in politics at the University of London.
    John Darke was a young and brilliant PhD student, working on a book that would, by all accounts, change the way we thought about politics in this country. His mother was a sitar player from Jaipur, his father a double bass player from Bromley. They had met in the summer of 1952, playing together as part of an orchestral exchange programme set up for young players by the London Symphony Orchestra.
    John had grown up in Catford in the 1960s. The only mixed-race kid in his class. Skinny white boys in army-green balaclavas had thrown bags of dog shit through his mother’s letterbox. They set fire to his school bag at the bus stop and pushed him in the playground.
    When he was thirteen he won undying schoolyard respect by swinging his arm back and punching a bully out cold. Something changed in his guts after that. He stood over his attacker as he came round from the blow, watched him snivel on the ground like a blind pup, and he understood that to his surprise he felt no sense of victory. Only sadness. After that, John Darke could be relied upon to stand up for every young boy in the school. He became a hero. With his new-found respect, he built an alliance. Every suffering hurt him, not just his own. But he wanted the bullies to be a part of it too. He wanted all the kids in the school to stand together.
    They caned him. They tensed their foreheads and ground their teeth. Their nostrils flared and