Clay

by Melissa Harrison

  ‘He’s trying to find animals,’ she said, cracking open a beer. ‘You know, footprints and stuff. He’s got a book on it.’

  ‘TC got a book?’ asked Jamal. ‘How come we don’t see him reading it?’

  ‘I told you, it’s a secret. He thinks I don’t know. He’s got a ghost one too.’

  ‘But why? Why are they a secret?’

  ‘I don’t know. It’s just . . . kids, yeah? You know, they like to have secret games. Keeps him quiet, anyway.’

  ‘Can’t be much for him to find,’ said Jamal. ‘Apart from rats.’

  ‘He used to go on walks with his dad, though, stuff like that. He was good with him.’

  ‘He hit you, you said.’

  ‘Yeah. But he never laid a hand on the kid. TC still thinks his dad’s perfect.’

  ‘Well, tell him then.’

  ‘Don’t be stupid, Jamal. Why would I do that? Anyway, he would’ve learned it soon enough.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘He would’ve pissed Lenny off sooner or later, challenged him. Then it would’ve started. That fucking man, you know? The kid’s got no idea. You think he’s having a hard time now? You don’t know how hard it would’ve got for him. He thinks I don’t care, but he don’t know what I saved him from.’

  She loved the boy, of course she did, but she had had to put the feeling away somewhere, and now it was hard to find. She’d thought it might get easier with Lenny gone, but TC was so much like his father, and he wore the pain of missing him like a badge, held it out mutely to her, when it was as much as she could do to get herself back together. And he didn’t even know the full story, he had no right to judge. Christ, she was only twenty-eight. She was allowed a life, wasn’t she?

  Now and then she would go into his room at night and look at him as he slept, and then she would find her feelings for him clear and uncomplicated again. It was just that life – how hard it had become, and how bleak – always got in the way. Somehow, her son was easier to love when he was asleep.

  Her vision momentarily blurred, and she lit another cigarette off the back of the last. The dim room floated, flickering with TV light, four floors and forty-two feet up in the night sky.

  6

  Midwinter

  Denny had not mentioned the dog again, and Jozef knew better than to ask. Without her to walk after his evening shifts at the takeaway he got to bed earlier, but slept badly. He found himself picturing the night-time common, the wind stripping the last leaves from the trees, the thickets inky and black. He did no whittling, and the unfinished animal on the sill reproached him for it.

  On his day off Jozef took his wages to the bookies’. His luck wasn’t in. It rarely was, but this time the size of his loss sickened him. He did not know why he did it, except that it allowed him to pass the time in some kind of company, although not in conversation.

  The grass in the little park was beaten down, defeated, thick with mud on each side of the paths, and the little rowan was hung with icy silver drops. The last of the fallen leaves lay blackening in the gutters, and by half past four each afternoon it was dark. Leaving the bookies’, Jozef whistled for Znajda as he cut across the common, but he knew she wasn’t there.

  Where the path drew close to the railway tracks he paused; a train was waiting for the signals to change and he could see through the desiccated stands of rosebay willowherb and nettles that bordered the chain-link fence to its yellow-lit interior, packed with commuters. A woman sat reading, thirty or so, he guessed, her dark hair tucked behind her ears and her brow furrowed in concentration. He willed her to look out to where he stood just fifteen feet or so away, the wind wild in the branches around him; but when she did he could tell that all she saw was her own reflection in the glass. The train shunted on.

  The cafe had a sign that said ‘Polski Sklep’. It served the things he remembered from home: cabbage rolls, pierogi, potatoes with koperek, sour milk. They let him while away the afternoons playing chess and reading the papers, and when it got dark they brought him cherry vodka, or sometimes krupnik, a sweet liqueur his sister used to distil at home.

  Jozef tried not to let himself think about the farm any more, but it was always with him, every ditch, every stump, every field drain, every hollow. Nearly three years on, the sense of having been torn away from it still had the power to make him gasp, while the thought of it being farmed by other hands than his was like watching another man lay hands on his lover.

  Its eighteen acres had been enough to support a small dairy herd and grow a little barley, using the old ways. They milked the cows in the shed – by hand when Jozef was a boy – and his mother made butter, and they sold what they produced to the government, although like everyone else his father kept some back and sold it quietly to their neighbours, or traded it for seeds or flour. They heard rumours of food shortages in the cities, and there were many things – for instance, sugar – for which they had to queue, but his mother grew vegetables and they kept a pig for bacon, and they usually had enough to eat.

  Jozef was the middle child of five: two sisters preceded him, and two more came after. For him, the farm was everything: it was his future, and working on it every day with his father was a difficult but rewarding apprenticeship. By the age of twelve he could drive the jeep, trap rats, chop wood and plough a field, walking behind their gentle draught horse Aniolek and guiding the single-furrow plough through the soil. He would not have said that he loved the farm; his feelings about it were far less sentimental. It was only in exile from it that he understood how deeply implicated in its acres he had become.

  He left school as soon as he could, at fifteen; his mother wanted him to go on to agricultural college, but he was needed on the farm; and besides, he thought he could learn everything he would ever need to know from his father. During the day they worked, and in the evenings he would sit by the lamp and read their battered old veterinary manual or monographs on such things as lameness and hoof care. His father would listen to the radio and carve figures from linden wood: madonnas, pietàs and St Nicholases, mostly, but sometimes smiling peasant couples and little children.

  But then, when he was twenty-two, his father died. It was spring, but a sudden cold snap had iced the fields with rime and killed his mother’s cabbages in the ground; he could remember passing Stefan Gruszka’s orchard as he took the ancient jeep into the village and thinking that he would get no cider apples that year.

  The jeep, US-built, sold to Russia and abandoned in Poland with thousands of others after the war, was precious. As the only vehicle on the farm it had to do duty as tractor, and it was battered and patched and bodged far beyond its natural life. For the last week or so, though, the clutch had been slipping. He took it to see Karol Wieczorek; years ago Karol had made himself a kind of tractor from a motorbike and parts of a trailer, and his skill with anything mechanical was unsurpassed. He waited while Karol did the work, and gave him a bottle of his sister’s krupnik in thanks.

  On his way back to the farm Jozef found the herd blocking the road, the animals agitated and jostling in the narrow space, his father nowhere in sight. Their warm breath steamed and hung above them in a cloud.

  He left the jeep idling and climbed up the hedge bank, craned, called his father’s name. There was nothing. Then, pushing his way in sudden dread among the beasts, he found the body, as he had known he would, battered and despoiled.

  He drove back to the farm with his father slumped beside him, held in place absurdly, tenderly, with rope tied like a safety belt around the seat. He could still remember the terrible sound his mother made when he laid the body on the kitchen table and went back out to bring in the herd.

  Everything on the farm changed on that day, but within months the whole country had changed. Jozef remembered the euphoria of the election well, and the sadness that Poland was moving forward so fast without his father. But there was little time to mourn; with the fall of Communism farmers like him had to scramble to find a way to sell t
heir produce. The village was suddenly full of men trying to sell their milk, and at first the price dropped below even what the government had paid; but it wasn’t long before new companies had sprung up, their milk tankers the same decrepit ones as before, but now bearing new, hastily painted logos.

  Jozef had grabbed the opportunity to make money with both hands, increasing the herd and buying milking machines for the dairy, and an Ursus tractor to replace the old jeep. By the time he was thirty the farm was prospering, his sisters married. His mother still cooked, tended the vegetable patch, canned tomatoes and beans from the garden and went to church every Sunday, but since his father had died she hardly spoke. In the evenings they sat together with the television on, but she often seemed to him to be looking somewhere past the screen.

  ‘Czy znalazleś żony?’ she asked him quietly every few months, smoothing her apron down nervously and looking past him. ‘Have you found a wife?’

  At first he had thought that she wanted him to marry, was impatient for it; but as time went on he wasn’t so sure whether it was hope behind her question, or fear. And so he waited. The women he knew did not interest him, in any case.

  He had voted yes to Europe – they all had. It was a yes to cheap seeds, cheap fertiliser and new markets; why wouldn’t he? He filled out form after form about the farm and its yields, laboriously, his mother helping when she could. He took out a loan, modernised the dairy in the way the health officials said he must. He did everything they told him to.

  The nearby slaughterhouse was the first to go, unable to cope with the barrage of new regulations. Now Jozef had to send his beef calves away to be killed, and the meat was bought there too. He could no longer sell it in the village, and it was the same for all his neighbours. The market began to dwindle, but a new supermarket came.

  Then one of Jozef’s neighbours sold up and left for Kraków. Jozef borrowed more money, bought his land and planted wheat.

  But then his new dairy failed an inspection. Jozef got a fine, and couldn’t pay. The bank foreclosed. It was so quick; one day he was expanding, the next everything, everything, was gone. He could not understand what had happened.

  He remembered waiting helplessly in the kitchen for his youngest sister to come and collect his mother. She sat at the scarred old table, the same one he had laid his father on seventeen years before, turning a box of matches nervously over and over. When eventually she left she pressed the little blue box into his big hands and muttered a blessing, or it could have been a prayer.

  A big pork producer – Polish in name, but linked, so the village said, to America – moved in and bought Jozef’s land. When the first of the company men arrived to raze the old farm buildings, they found that the house, with its steeply pitched roof and weathered cedar shingles, had already burned almost to the ground.

  It was definitely a wolf; the second set of prints had confirmed it. TC thought hard about where it could be living and decided it must have a den somewhere in the woods where the playing fields met the railway line. There wasn’t anywhere else with enough cover, and besides, there were lots of squirrels on the common, and probably rats. He began to comb the woods for fur-filled droppings or the debris from fresh kills, though he knew the carcasses themselves would either be eaten or buried for later. He found more prints, but he did not search for the den, or for the animal itself; it was enough to know that it was there, the two of them inhabiting the same thickets and coverts, his passing perhaps regarded now and then by grave yellow eyes.

  He was up and out most mornings before Jamal or his mother were even awake, his tracking book in his backpack, yesterday’s mud still on the knees of his school trousers. Now, when he climbed his favourite tree and sat motionless, he often found himself picturing his father’s admiration as he told him what he had done. He would bring the wolf to him, somehow, or bring his father to the wolf. And there would be an understanding between the three of them, and it would make his father stay.

  When he left school each day the light was already draining from the sky, which bore down, those winter afternoons, like slate. Usually he would go to the common for a bit; sometimes he would go and sit by the railway embankment and watch the trains. The older kids often went to the newsagent or the chicken shop on the high road, so he tended to keep away; or they took their dogs to the little park and hung about on the benches.

  TC did not like dogs. Was that true? His mum said he didn’t. She told people that he was scared of them, but it was she who walked fast past them and flinched when they sniffed at her. Maybe she was right, though, maybe he didn’t like them either. Dogs definitely bit people, and most of the ones on the estate were the fighting kind. TC did not want to stroke them anyway.

  One afternoon after school TC found himself wandering north up the high road, away from the little park and the estate. It had rained a thin, icy rain all day and the pavements were wet, and now the bright shop lights were reflected in the puddles under his feet.

  Some of the street lights had flashing Christmas decorations strapped to them: stars, a tree, a reindeer, each with its ‘Sponsored by . . .’ tag. The shops, open late, were a misery of festive music and overheated air.

  Last year his dad had taken him to look at the toys. He had understood that he wasn’t to ask for anything, that they were just looking, because sometimes his dad had money and sometimes not, and who knew which it would be by Christmas. But he had picked up one or two things from the shelves and held them a moment before putting them carefully back, his dad asking, ‘You like that one, then?’ casually, TC nodding casually back. And then on Christmas Day there’d been a big box to unwrap: a monster truck, the exact same kind some of the other boys at school had. They’d taken it out to the yard behind the flats and his dad had driven it around for ages, the whine of its wheels bringing their neighbours up to the windows behind them like shooting targets flipping up. His dad had caught him looking nervously around at them. ‘Fuck ’em,’ he’d said. ‘Jesus, it’s Christmas fucking Day.’ Yet now, in the toy store, TC found that his eyes seemed to slide off the toys on the shelves; he couldn’t get a purchase on them, somehow, or understand what they were about. Maybe the shops were like EastEnders; if you stopped keeping track for a bit then none of it made sense and you didn’t care anyway. It was just as well, really, he thought, turning and suffering the hot downward blast at the exit.

  Outside it was raining again and the pavements were thick with umbrellas and shopping bags banging against hurrying legs. His backpack was too big for him, the straps set too wide apart for his narrow shoulders, and he had to hold them with his hands to keep it on, which made cold rain fall into his cuffs and run towards his elbows. He put his hood up and his head down, picturing the monster truck and how, powered by his dad, it had motored so indefatigably on.

  Jamal was at home; he could hear their voices from the stairwell. As he let himself in he heard his mother shout at him from the lounge.

  ‘Oi. Come ’ere.’

  TC came to the doorway, his heart thumping.

  ‘You been at my purse?’

  Mutely he shook his head.

  ‘Yes you fucking have. You’ve been stealing off me, you little shit.’

  ‘Hey, hey . . .’ This was Jamal, appearing in the kitchen door, a beer in his hand and a dishcloth slung on his shoulder.

  ‘You can fuck off an’ all, Jamal, he has, and I ain’t having it. What’ve you got to say for yourself?’

  TC listened to his own blood pound in his ears. His eyes felt wide, pinned open. What was the right answer? What was it?

  ‘Well?’

  ‘My dinner money, Mum,’ he whispered, looking down at the floor. ‘You never leave it out any more.’

  For a moment Kelly remained silent and perfectly still. Jamal turned and looked at her, put his beer down. But her eyes slid away from both of them, and she subsided back into the settee.

  ‘Fucking . . . just leave me alone,’ she said tiredly, and picked up the remote.


  TC could hear raised voices through the two closed doors between his room and the lounge. It was all so familiar, although now he felt so much older, as though there were years between him and the little boy who had listened to his father and mother fight time and again, and had listened again as his father’s feet had thumped away down the stairs.

  He thought about what would happen if Jamal left, wondered whether it would be better or worse. Wondered if he would get the blame.

  After a while there was a knock at his door. TC jumped and thrust his animal book under the duvet.

  ‘Thought you might want something to eat.’ Jamal handed him a plate: sausages and mash. ‘Proper mash, that,’ he said. ‘Not packet.’

  TC took the plate and put it on his lap. ‘Is there ketchup?’

  ‘Sorry.’

  ‘Doesn’t matter.’

  The mash was a world away from what they had at school, and TC began to eat. Jamal crouched in front of him, awkwardly, then sat on the bed beside him.

  ‘Look, TC, money’s tight for your mum, you know?’

  TC said nothing.

  ‘Course she wants you to have your dinner money. You’ve just got to ask for it, yeah?’

  TC looked up, held his gaze. ‘Yeah?’

  ‘Yeah, course. I mean, you gotta eat, right?’

  ‘She doesn’t care.’

  ‘What? Course she does, kid. She’s just . . . things are hard right now, OK?’

  ‘She should get a job, then.’

  ‘Yeah, well, she’s trying, but things aren’t always that easy.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because . . . because you can’t just walk in somewhere and get a job. It can take a bit of time to find the right one. And anyway, your dad ain’t paying either.’

  TC put his fork down, went still. ‘What do you mean?’