Clay

by Melissa Harrison

  Now TC raced in, climbing the stairs in record time, but once at the kitchen table found he did not know what to say. It was perhaps the first time he had been alone with his mother’s boyfriend, although he had been visiting the flat for a few weeks now.

  Jamal regarded him for a moment, then turned back to the stove and rattled a pan of muffins under the grill. ‘What you doing out there, anyway?’ he asked, more gruffly than he had meant. TC looked down at his hands. He took the gloves off and stuffed them in his pockets.

  ‘Eh? TC?’ Jamal tried, more gently. ‘Yous always out there, huntin’ around. Looks like you got some exciting stuff going on. I’m curious, thas all.’

  ‘Nothing,’ said TC. ‘Just looking at stuff.’

  ‘What stuff?’

  ‘Just . . . birds and stuff.’

  ‘What, you a birdwatcher, TC? For real?’ Jamal whistled through his teeth. ‘Well, well. What do they do then, your birds? Cos when I see ’em, they just walk about and shit on stuff.’

  TC was caught between the urge to tell Jamal to fuck off and inform him that there was a dangerous animal living in the garden. Unable to do either, he stood, his face congested.

  ‘What?’ said Jamal, turning round from the stove. But it was too late. The boy was already clattering down the stairwell, the flat door banging shut behind him.

  The muffins began to send out gentle curls of smoke as Jamal bent to pick up the boy’s gloves from the cracked lino. He pushed one inside the other to make a neat ball, and placed it thoughtfully on the kitchen table.

  TC crossed the road to cut through the little park, and walked down Leasow Road to the common. The bark of the lone ash tree near the children’s play area was wet and black, the branches jutting obscenely smooth from the tumorous bole, their grey fingers beckoning. TC touched it once, for luck, and thought about wolves.

  At Sophia’s daughter’s house on Leasow Road Saturday mornings meant a leisurely breakfast and sport on the radio. Linda was not yet back from Friday’s conference, held at a smart hotel in Chichester, and a faint but unmistakable atmosphere of misrule hung about the house. Daisy had come downstairs in her pyjamas and her father had made them both porridge, and they had maple syrup with it, eating together at the kitchen table as Steven read the paper and Daisy hummed to herself and looked at the things that fell out of it.

  ‘Daddy, can we have chickens?’ she asked, brandishing a leaflet at him over the top of the paper. ‘Look! And then we would get our eggs for free!’

  ‘No, love, they’d ruin the garden,’ replied Steven, deep in Finance.

  ‘No they wouldn’t, they live in the little pink house, see? Or blue, if you wanted. Or green.’

  ‘And they smell.’

  ‘No they don’t, Daddy, chickens don’t smell. They’re birds. Birds don’t smell,’ and she giggled to think of it.

  ‘And they make too much noise, and a fox might eat them.’

  ‘It wouldn’t, Daddy! They live in the little house!’ But she only half meant it. A kitten was what she actually wanted, and she wouldn’t be able to have a cat if they had chickens. She picked up the next leaflet, and began to read out loud about a range of French-style iron cookware instead.

  After breakfast Daisy stayed in her pyjamas for quite a long time, just to see what happened. It turned out nothing did, so she got dressed, putting all her worst things on together.

  ‘What shall we do today, Daddy, make cupcakes?’ she asked hopefully. She liked the mixing bit best, and also the tasting bit, at which she was very good.

  Steven was in the study looking at the computer; Daisy fidgeted in the doorway, something about her right foot suggesting that having a gentle kick at the door frame would not be impossible. ‘I do know how, it’s easy.’

  ‘Don’t kick the door frame, love,’ said Steven. He hadn’t even noticed her clothes.

  ‘Or shall we go out on our bikes?’

  ‘Have you done all your homework?’

  ‘Ye-e-e-es,’ Daisy replied, drawing out the word. His eyes still on the screen, Steven put out one arm, and so she climbed onto his lap and faced the computer. Sometimes he would be making exciting 3D models of things that didn’t yet exist because that was his job, but this time he was writing boring emails.

  ‘Give me five minutes, love. Then we’re going to pop to the bottle bank, and then how would you like to go and see your gran?’

  ‘Yay!’ Daisy cheered and wriggled off his lap. ‘I have to finish my letter first, then.’ And she ran upstairs.

  Linda was heading home on the centre lane of the motorway at a steady seventy, a headache threatening but held at bay with painkillers. The conference had gone well, so far as she could tell. No major disasters; not logistically, anyway. A couple of people had drunk too much, as usually happened, but office politics weren’t her problem.

  Linda was an events organiser. She counted several big firms among her clients, all of which had offices in several cities. Consequently she drove nearly every day, either to see clients or suppliers, or to visit the hotels and conference centres she used for their departmental jollies, quarterly meetings and team-building exercises.

  The hours spent on the road made her car something of a second home. She loved the feeling of freedom it gave her, the sense of being in total control of the little microcosm of her immediate environment: the climate, the soundtrack, the speed, the direction. She even liked the smell of it: warm plastic, air-freshener, upholstery. There was nothing in the car she couldn’t control, and nothing outside it she couldn’t shut out or escape from. In it she was answerable to nobody, inviolable.

  Sometimes she would imagine her journeys criss-crossing a map of the British Isles, like the one her father had pinned to the wall of the flat when she and Michael were small. There were few cities, or even large towns, she hadn’t driven to now. She imagined thumbtacks on the map, threads wound between them like a web. She had covered the whole country over the years, and the routes were all filed away in her head, intersection by intersection. Nobody could say she didn’t know the territory.

  She often wondered what her father would have made of her job. ‘Organising parties?’ Sophia had said when she’d first started. ‘My word, you’d think they could do something as easy as that for themselves, wouldn’t you?’ She hadn’t meant anything by it, Linda knew, but at the same time a simple ‘Well done, love’ would have meant a lot. Her mother had never been like that, though: demonstrative. Not that she hadn’t been pleased with Linda when she did well at school, for instance, but it had never seemed to be enough. She had tried to talk to Michael about it one Christmas, years ago, but he had just laughed, told her she was being oversensitive. It hadn’t mattered so much when they’d both been alive, but now, when she visited the flat she grew up in, she couldn’t help noticing the things her mother didn’t say that her father would have. It was as though part of her blamed her mother for not standing in for him now that he was gone, for not being him.

  And since her father’s death there had been more to it, too, a hard grain of resentment at how little her mother had seemed to grieve. It was as though she had simply picked up the threads of her life and carried on, and if she mourned she gave no real sign of it to Linda. But why should she, Steven had put to her gingerly. Grief was not some kind of debt; her mother didn’t owe her daughter her tears.

  Yet in the days following Henry’s death they had both assumed that Sophia would fall apart; she and Steven had been ready to take her in, had braced themselves for months of dependency, years even. And they had been glad, then – hadn’t they? – to see that she would cope by herself after all.

  In the fourteen years since Henry died Sophia had stubbornly refused to leave the estate, despite its growing squalor. They had even offered to find her a little garden flat nearby – at considerable expense – but the old woman wouldn’t budge, and Linda simply could not understand why. After all, it might have been smart once, but now the upstairs balconies were cluttere
d with bikes and dead plants and satellite dishes, and it was so removed from the place of her childhood memories as to be, in her mind, almost a different place. These days the Plestor was yet another part of the city she tried to blank out, like the awful high road, the tower blocks and the terraced row of squats near the station.

  Linda sighed and checked the satnav: nearly an hour to go. Every couple of hundred yards, it seemed, the motorway exhorted her: check your distance, take a break, keep two chevrons apart. She passed signs for villages and towns she could barely believe in. Cars turned off to go to them, their drivers taking their familiar turnings home; people spending their whole lives in places she had never even heard of.

  Except for the odd pine plantation, or stand of silver birches with their dazzling white trunks and fuzz of plum-coloured branches, the thickets that flashed past were low and uniformly dun. From the car it was impossible to say what kind of trees they were.

  Once, her journey would have taken several days, and would have required an intimacy with the lineaments of the landscape that is now almost unimaginable. It could have taken many routes, rather than the few today prescribed by roads, and would have negotiated hills, plains, forests and escarpments which were now little more than antique words on a map – and which did not even appear on the A3-sized road atlas tucked into the pocket behind the passenger seat of Linda’s car, nor on the satnav suckered to the screen. The journey Linda made was mostly formed from letters and numbers, and the waymarks weren’t rivers or even towns but service stations, with their liminal populations and wagtail-haunted car parks, and interchanges that looked like Scalextric tracks on her GPS.

  Yet although all she saw of the shape and texture of the country she lived in was what was visible in a varying strip either side of the road, it was still there, unseen yet unchanged in its essentials for centuries: the ancient contours of the land over which the cars now crawled in inconsequential lines, contours which would persist long after the roads had gone. The hamlets and tiny churches, founded for good reason on bluffs or by streams, endured despite the motorway which now scythed past and left them unmoored, while under the tarmac slept the detritus of a thousand lives: coins and bones, belt buckles and curses, things that had been lost and things that had been thrown away.

  Daisy was bored of writing her letter. She wanted to play in the garden, but the gardener was there and she wasn’t supposed to disturb him. She went to her playroom to look at her toys, instead; she had a toy cupboard and a wooden chest, both stuffed with fashion dolls, computer games and boxes of things she hadn’t even opened. Each birthday more came, especially if she had a proper birthday party, and although her mum gave some to the poor children there were still loads left. They were mostly pink, and they were all boring. Boys got all the best toys, everybody knew.

  ‘Come on, love,’ Steven called up the stairs, ‘bottle bank.’

  ‘In a second!’ Daisy shouted back. ‘Nearly finished.’

  ‘I want to play in the garden but I can’t because the man is here doing cutting and tidying,’ she wrote. ‘Your park is much nicer. If I run away one day I will come and live in it. You can play in it with me but only when I say. Now I am going to the bottle bank, which is fun. Goodbye. Love from Daisy.’ And she ran downstairs to where Steven waited with a box of wine bottles for the big hopper at the end of the road. The council took glass in the weekly recycling, but Daisy loved to push the bottles into the hoppers’ rubber mouths and hear them crash satisfyingly inside.

  It was only a few minutes further to Sophia’s flat. Unlike his wife, Steven had no problem visiting the Plestor Estate. He couldn’t understand why she behaved as though the place was some kind of ghetto, when it was only just round the corner from Leasow Road’s sought-after properties. Cities could be like that, of course; different areas, different people, all butting up against each other. But he felt that it was good for Daisy to spend time there. Her private school was like a little hothouse, and most of her time off was managed or educational in some way.

  When they had first got married they had lived on the other side of the city – almost as far from the estate as it was possible to get. Then, when they were trying for a baby, they decided to move, and the pull of family, an area they knew and a good school, had led them back. Neither of them had meant to end up quite so close to Sophia, yet there were things in life you chose without meaning to, and sometimes – although his wife would never admit it – sometimes the world you grew up in turned out to be stronger than you could predict.

  ‘I’ll pick you up at about five,’ he said, kissing Daisy goodbye at the entrance to the estate and waving to Sophia where she looked out from her kitchen window.

  ‘I saw a hedgehog!’ shouted Daisy by way of greeting, as she barrelled into the flat and began kicking off her shoes.

  ‘Hello, Daisy. Did you now? How exciting,’ replied Sophia. ‘What was he up to?’

  ‘I don’t know because I didn’t actually see him, but I think he was eating slugs,’ Daisy replied. ‘I heard him, and Mummy heard him. He made a snuffling noise.’

  ‘Goodness,’ said Sophia, wondering to herself that there were any slugs left in Linda’s tidy garden. ‘I expect he’ll want to hibernate soon.’

  ‘Yes, and he’ll probably do it in our garden, I think,’ said Daisy.

  ‘Let’s hope so,’ said Sophia, trying to think whether there was anywhere untidy or undisturbed enough for a small mammal to sleep safely for several months. ‘Now, today we have a very important job to do, and I especially need your help.’

  ‘Is it outside? Can we have a picnic while we’re doing it?’

  ‘I think it’s probably too chilly for that, sweet pea – but you’re right, we are going to need to keep our strength up. Let’s make a packed lunch to take with us.’

  Daisy’s eyes grew round. ‘Can I have a fizzy drink?’

  ‘No, but you can have chocolate spread. In fact, I can too,’ said Sophia, assembling a sliced loaf, Nutella and tinfoil on the kitchen table.

  Outside in the little park Daisy carried the sandwiches in her backpack, while Sophia took charge of the notebook and pen. They were counting how many dreys the squirrels were building for winter, and they began at the far end where there was a row of plane trees. Now that the leaves were coming down it was possible to see the dreys quite clearly, although left to her own devices Daisy would have recorded every magpie’s nest and trapped plastic bag too.

  They ate their sandwiches on the benches, Sophia letting Daisy drink apple juice out of Henry’s old hip flask and both of them pretending it was whisky.

  Sophia didn’t spot the boy straight away. He had slipped in near the children’s play area and was crouching beneath the holm oak when she saw him, looking at something on the ground. It was the lonely little lad who wagged school, she realised; and it occurred to her that, at one time, local children used to play with each other.

  ‘Right, miss,’ she said to Daisy, ‘now for the difficult part. We have to write up all our data – that’s everything we’ve learned – very carefully in this notebook. It could take an awfully long time.’

  Daisy looked past her, brow furrowing. ‘OK,’ she said, without enthusiasm. ‘But, Granny, you’ve got the best writing, so you could do all the writing and I could just help you.’

  ‘Well, I think it would be best if we did it together,’ said Sophia, ‘unless . . . I don’t suppose you’d prefer to go and say hello to that little boy over there, would you? He looks like he might be doing a project that needs some expert help.’

  ‘Oh, OK then,’ said Daisy, ‘I’ll do that instead. If you can definitely manage by yourself.’

  ‘I’ll be quite all right,’ said Sophia, settling back on the bench and feeling in her pocket for a Minto. It was a shame there was only apple juice in the hip flask, but you couldn’t have everything.

  TC was still squatting and examining the ground when Daisy ran over. ‘What are you looking at?’ she demanded.
<
br />   He seemed to shrink a little. ‘Nothing,’ he muttered.

  ‘No it isn’t. What is it? I’m Daisy. What’s your name?’

  ‘TC,’ he muttered.

  ‘TC? That’s not a name,’ replied Daisy. ‘But you can be called it if you want. I’m eight. How old are you?’

  ‘Nine,’ said TC.

  ‘Nine!’ breathed Daisy, clearly impressed. ‘Have you found something? Is it a secret?’

  TC looked up, but there was no mockery in her face. He didn’t want to tell; at least, he didn’t think he did. But he could feel that he was going to. Why?

  ‘You can’t tell anyone,’ he said.

  ‘Cross my heart and hope to die,’ the girl said, crouching down too.

  ‘It’s not a game.’

  ‘I promise.’

  TC took a deep breath. ‘It’s an animal.’

  ‘What is?’

  ‘It lives around here.’

  ‘In the park?’

  ‘And on the common. You know.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘I’ve been tracking it.’

  ‘What does that mean?’

  ‘Following it. Its footprints and things.’

  Daisy looked down at the ground between them. It was bare where the grass gave out beneath the holm oak’s shade. ‘Is there a footprint here?’

  ‘Not yet,’ replied TC, smoothing the dusty surface of the soil with his hand, ‘but there might be tomorrow.’

  When Sophia opened her eyes she saw that the two children were happily engrossed in whatever they had found under the tree. She hoped Daisy wasn’t being too imperious with the little boy; he could clearly do with gentle handling.

  But TC didn’t mind Daisy’s bossiness, had hardly noticed it, in fact. Although he hadn’t exactly been keeping track, the truth was it was the first friendly contact he had had with another child in nearly a year.

  Over the weekend it became clear to Jamal that TC was not birdwatching. He saw the boy crawling about in the undergrowth at the end of the flats’ gardens, looking everywhere but at the pigeons and crows and what-all that Jamal could see in the trees. He asked Kelly about it on Sunday night as they watched TV.