Clay

by Melissa Harrison

  Jamal got up. ‘Child support, kid. Your mum’s been on to his sister or someone, but apparently he don’t want to know. So it ain’t all your mum’s fault, OK?’

  TC took the dank stairs down two at a time, sobs racking his chest. Outside it was still raining, and he wished he’d grabbed his coat.

  He made blindly for the little park and the shelter afforded by the trees behind the benches. One was already occupied; Jozef was smoking a quick cigarette before the start of his evening shift at the takeaway.

  TC sat with his knees up on the other bench, swallowing sobs and knuckling his face with his sleeve. Already he was shivering.

  Jozef watched the child, careful not to stare. The rain was already making tails and spikes of his dark hair, like an otter’s fur. It fell on the back of the boy’s neck, and darkened the shoulders of his sweatshirt.

  Jozef looked around, but there were no other children, no friends of the boy coming after him; and it was clear that he did not expect anyone to come. Jozef thought of home, how in the village everyone had known him, and how one of their neighbours would have taken him in without question had he ever been found in tears, alone, in the rain.

  Yet here, in the city, talking to someone else’s child seemed far from simple. But surely the greater wrong would be to walk away, no matter how streetwise the kids here seemed to be, no matter how a grown man talking to a child might look to some. He turned it over in his head: yes, to go to work and leave the little boy alone there on the bench, crying, was unthinkable.

  He looked at his scarred hands, took a breath and held it briefly. Then he took his phone out of his pocket and dialled. Across the road he could see Musa pick up.

  ‘Eh, boss,’ he said, ‘I might be a little bit late. No, I don’t know. Sorry.’

  When he slipped the phone back in his pocket he saw that the little boy was looking over at him. He wondered how to begin, but, ‘You phoned him in the chicken shop, over there,’ the boy said.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I . . . I want to sit here for a bit.’

  ‘It’s raining.’

  ‘I know that. What about you?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘You don’t mind the rain?’

  ‘I don’t care,’ said TC, but by now he was shivering hard.

  ‘Sometimes . . . it is better to be outside, no?’

  TC looked away.

  ‘Home is not always good. Sometimes a man needs some fresh air.’

  TC nodded.

  ‘That is OK. But sometimes the weather does not agree. Now, my friend at the shop tells me he has made too many chips. Perhaps you could help us out by eating some?’ He knew better than to hold out a hand, or to cajole. The boy studied him for a moment and then got up.

  On the high road the night buses and scooters and minicabs and stolen motors, the squad cars and couriers and pizza boys and company cars all halted for the big Pole and the little boy as together they crossed the road.

  7

  Plough Monday

  Outside the grocer’s the fruit was stacked in bright tiers, their colours improbable in the grey January light. A man in a grubby apron chased pigeons away from them with a broom; they lifted from him like flakes of dull sky, whirled once, and streamed up the high road to where the lady from the bakery fed them dustpanfuls of crumbs.

  The offices were open again after Christmas, and the morning buses were full of blank white faces staring out at Sophia where she sat on one of the benches in the little park, the drizzle a soft bloom on her face and hands. The bus windows were steaming up, full of damp coats and breath, and Sophia was very glad not to be on one. Growing old had its compensations, being allowed to please yourself all day being one of them. It was the first whole day she had had to herself since Christmas, and once she had got her doctor’s appointment out of the way she intended to do very little.

  She gripped the handle of her stick and got up. The trees were bare and still, even the ivy’s vigour held in temporary abeyance, and only the robin spoke from a sweet chestnut, his song somehow reedier and more subdued than in spring. She paused and looked again at the park, as though committing it to memory, then crossed the grass to the high road and headed slowly north, past the second-hand furniture shop where Denny stood in the doorway with arms crossed, past the chicken takeaway and the betting shop and the post office, its door set between towers of multicoloured buckets and stacking stools and cheap plastic crates.

  The pavement – scarred with tarmac, a patchwork of slabs and wounds and make-dos – was a palimpsest, a downtrodden witness to the hardware feeding the street and all its faults and secret requirements. As she walked Sophia pictured the pipes and wires down there beneath her feet, none the less actual for being invisible, like the locket with its tiny diamond chip she had lost in the park twenty years ago and which must have worked its way down into the soil by now, treasure for some future city dweller to find. Perhaps at death she would know what had become of it; perhaps every mystery, every last thing she had ever wondered about or tried to imagine, would be revealed to her. Perhaps that was what heaven was, or would be for her: a lifetime’s curiosity about the world finally sated.

  Outside the mobile phone shop was tethered a street cleaner’s cart, and Sophia had to edge around it, trespassing dizzily into the roaring bus lane. ‘Nuisance,’ she muttered, but equably enough; she rather admired the little carts, with their neat, no-nonsense practicality, their place for the broom, litter picker and bin bag. They were iconic, in a way; a perfect solution to a problem, and she could recall when the issue of dirty, grimy streets wasn’t even addressed. These days they even sent a little ride-on machine at night to steam the chewing gum off. It had whirling brushes at the front, and a mahout to direct it. She had told Daisy about it on one of her visits to the house on Leasow Road, and Daisy had been properly sceptical. ‘Who is it that’s chewing all the chewing gum, anyway?’ she had asked. ‘I don’t even know one single person that does it.’

  Sophia had spent Christmas at Linda’s, and it had been very pleasant. She had to admit that the house was lovely, although to her mind it could have done with more books. Linda’s taste was very good, and Sophia rather wondered where she got it from; when the children were still at home the flat had been characterised, at least in her memory, by chaos; even in its better moments it may have been clean and neat, but never stylish.

  Her daughter’s house made her feel careful, although Daisy seemed to treat it fairly cavalierly. The towels were all the same colour, and the saucepans all the same kind. A cleaner came once a week, and between times Linda kept it all very tidy. Even when it wasn’t, it wore its disorder elegantly. It was as though the house was allowed to demonstrate what family life could look like, but in a coordinated, artful manner: the good olive oil left out on the sunlit worktop, its cork adrift in a chrism of spilt oil; the Sunday papers strewn over the battered chesterfield; the heirloom doll’s house with its contents disordered. At times it reminded Sophia of something in a magazine.

  They had had a goose on Christmas Day, not turkey. There were no fairy lights on the outside of the house, no crackers and no tinsel, which at first she had thought a shame, but then had very much enjoyed making paper chains with Daisy on the day before Christmas Eve. The paper chains came in a special kit, were made of recycled paper and, according to the packaging, helped support women’s education in Uganda. Sophia’s feelings about this were ambiguous. She eyed the neat stacks of glossy magazines in the recycling box and said nothing.

  Daisy was curious and demanding and charming when she least meant to be, although she got away with a lot, which was what happened with only children. Nonetheless, Sophia had always been smitten with her. She had given up on grandchildren by the time Daisy came along; Linda was by then nearing forty, after all, and Michael, twice married and twice divorced, was living in Toronto, and if he was seeing anybody she didn’t know about it. She wished Henry could have met Daisy, but
at the back of her mind she wondered if the little girl would have loved her quite as much had she also had Henry’s doting attention to bask in. He was better with children, always had been; the kids had adored him, and while they loved her, of course, she always felt they treated her with more circumspection. She was not quite as predictable, perhaps; and she had never been one of those mothers who could get down on the floor and play with the children for hours on end. She had loved them both beyond measure, but they had never completely absorbed her in the way that other mothers she had known seemed to be absorbed by their children. Now she was old and these things didn’t matter, but back then she had envied Henry his nature walks with Linda and his wrestling matches with Michael, his easy way of being with the children that made them feel special and loved, and her obliquely left out.

  As time went on it had seemed that she and Linda were not destined to be close. Everyone said that daughters were difficult, and even as a little girl Linda had been impatient, always wanting things to be different, better – by which she usually meant more like her friends’ houses, more like their parents, probably. Yet there wasn’t the money for it, and anyway, half of the stuff she wanted was trivial. Books they would have found the money for, if she’d asked. But magazines and make-up didn’t matter, not in the long run. She and Henry had stuck to their guns – though it was her mother who Linda most blamed for it at the time. Michael, on the other hand, had been an easy baby and grew up into a sweet-tempered man. She mourned both his divorces, but particularly his first, a Scottish girl he’d been devoted to. He was just like his father in that, for Henry had loved nothing more than when they all did something together, like camping, or a day by the sea. He was a good man, who had loved his family simply, and whom she had adored for every day of their lives together.

  When he had the heart attack – in the bathroom, while she was at the council offices complaining about the brutal pollarding of six lime trees outside the flat – her daughter’s helpless, illogical anger had beaten Sophia’s own tears back before it. She had been too raw, too mired in guilt, to defend herself against the thought that belled at the back of her head and which, quite mistakenly, she ascribed to her daughter and let harden into fact: It should have been you.

  And so, for the most part, she had done her grieving alone. There had been a moment with Michael, the day after the funeral, when she could have howled; but she knew that the two of them had been discussing who should look after her, and the last thing she wanted was to make Michael stay. His life was in Canada now, and the thought of her children’s pity – and later, their resentment – was too much to bear. She had the flat that she and Henry had lived in together, and the trees she loved outside. She would not be a dependant; she would sooner die.

  Although hopefully not just yet. After her doctor’s appointment she took Glebe Road back, past St Francis’s Church with its faded lettering on the gateposts directing carriages where to wait, its ‘We need to talk – God’ and ‘You, me, my place, Sunday!’ posters and its noticeboard crowded with well-intentioned activities for the feckless and the elderly. Somebody had dumped a Christmas tree on the pavement outside, and the council was ignoring it. Now it was rusty and brown, the axe marks on its trunk brutally revealed by the flat January light.

  The doctor had said they wanted to run some tests. For a while now her heart had been skipping beats; she pictured it fluttering briefly in the cage of her chest, and then quieting again. She felt all right, apart from that, and there was no sense in worrying Linda; in any case, a conversation about heart problems, given Henry, was more than she could face. It was probably nothing; age came with all sorts of inconveniences and frailties, most of which were better ignored.

  At the door of her block she noted with approval that the stunted old quince was struggling into bloom, its waxy coral flowers for now locked in tight little fists. She loved the way they unfurled on the bare black branches long before the leaves came out, reminding her every year of kimonos. Bees loved them, too, and there was precious little else about for them this early in the year.

  You could buy insect hotels these days, and special bee nests; she had seen it on TV. Henry would have called it faddy. What they wanted was a woodpile, or failing that a compost heap; one they could get into, not those plastic bins like big black Daleks. She wished she could have one in the little park, somewhere for her potato peelings and tea bags, and for the clippings she stuffed in her pocket while she was surreptitiously doing the rounds with her secateurs.

  Sophia cut the thought off, because to indulge it was to entertain a whole list of wishes, from a mixed border along the back wall of the estate to a cold frame, some bird boxes and a half-hundredweight of wild-flower seeds. Instead, she let herself into the flat and switched the radio on for company.

  Yesterday Daisy had given her a letter, with strict instructions not to read it until she got home. There it was on the kitchen table, and once she had put the shopping away Sophia sat down to read it.

  At four o’clock she made tea: a clean tea cloth on the tray, the brown teapot, the Cornish jug, two biscuits on a worn plate that had once had flowers on and still did, in Sophia’s mind. Outside, starlings, their individual ribaldry lost in the solemn mystery of the flock, wheeled and bellied and folded over the little park before sweeping west and pouring down on the oaks on the common to roost, as they did every winter evening, a daily urban miracle that went almost completely unremarked.

  Once it was over, Sophia took the tray to the sitting room, switched on the little lamp by her favourite chair and settled down to read. By six it was getting dark; ‘dimmity’, Henry would have called it. It was the hour when foxes began to materialise in the streets outside, neat sepia shapes that flickered silently at the edges of the local dogs’ knowing and haunted the margins of their dreams. Sophia got up to do the washing-up and stood for a moment, her hands in the sink, looking past her reflection at the dim outlines of the trees and the bright traffic beyond. She thought about the dying of the light, and in her mind’s eye she saw Henry on the bathroom floor, his dear eyes closed, his big heart stilled, his pepper-and-salt stubble unrinsed from the washbasin for the first and only time in their lives together.

  It was late when she went to bed, somewhere between Book at Bedtime and the midnight news. Outside she could hear shouts, a burst of drunken song: kicking-out time. January, she thought. Soon enough it will be screams. But it was foxes she was thinking of: the vixens would soon start looking for mates, and the unearthly sounds of their clicketting would haunt the park outside her window for weeks.

  In the night Sophia woke, swimming slowly up through sleep like a bubble through black oil. One by one she assumed control of each of the elements of her dream, until at last she was not dreaming it, but thinking.

  Awake in the dark room, beached in her too-big bed, she pictured the country stretching out around her in the dark: the West Country far away beyond the bedroom window, Scotland off somewhere to her right. She pictured it quiet and sleeping, herself but a frail, passing creature, lost in the vastness of the familiar land mass and the even greater vastnesses beyond.

  Musa often seemed to be on a cigarette break when the boy called in at the takeaway. At first Jozef wondered whether TC waited for him to disappear from behind the counter before coming in, or whether Musa somehow didn’t like the kid, and was avoiding him; eventually he realised the taciturn little Turk was making it easier for him to give the boy food.

  ‘Nobody cook at home tonight?’ he asked, as TC appeared diffidently at the counter for the third evening in a row. TC shook his head; Jamal did cook when he came round, but he wasn’t there all the time.

  There was nowhere to sit in the takeaway, but TC lingered at the counter, making the chips last. It was clear to Jozef that he didn’t want to go home.

  ‘Eh, kid,’ he said. ‘You play chess?’

  TC shook his head.

  ‘You want to learn?’

  He went to the back
room and retrieved a stool for TC, put it in front of the counter. From his holdall he fetched the chess set he’d found in the old man’s house; he often took it to the Polish cafe after his shift for a game. Musa, appearing behind the counter, raised an eyebrow at him. ‘It’s quiet, boss,’ said Jozef. ‘Nobody here. If customers come I stop playing, OK?’

  The dog had been gone for weeks, and Jozef no longer whistled for her when he cut through the little park or across the common. Yet as he walked back from the Polish cafe that night, warm from the cherry vodka they’d given him, there she was at his side, grinning and steadfast, her flat head as soft as satin under his hand. ‘Gdziety ty bylaś, Znajda?’ he whispered, crouching down to look her over. But wherever she had been she did not seem harmed, and Jozef was surprised by the strength of his relief. ‘Znajda! Znajda!’ he called out, and broke into a run, the dog jumping and bounding joyfully at his side.

  They jogged the length of the common together, the exercise and the cold night air chasing the alcohol from Jozef’s blood. The night was clear, the moon keeping pace with them through the black branches and turning the grass silver, illuminating their twin trails through the dewfall where they ran.

  All around them, the common was alive: the brambles full of roosting songbirds, the little copse stalked by foxes and the leaf litter rustling with voles, hunted, now and then, by a kestrel who had a nest high on a housing block three streets away. It was intoxicating and familiar; it smelled of new life and decay, and though bound about by roads and regulations Jozef understood then that it was a wild place, and not subject to anyone or anything at all.

  As they neared the road they slowed, and it came to Jozef that he did not want to take Znajda back to Denny and the dark little room above the shop. He rested his hands on his knees and looked at her, his breath forming brief clouds in front of his face. The dog sprawled blissfully on the wet grass at his feet and smiled.