Clay

by Melissa Harrison

  Only the little park around the estate, with its legacy of grand Victorian trees, had remained more or less the same. She had always loved it – Henry, too – but after the children left home it had become even more important to her. It was hard to say why she felt such responsibility for it; perhaps because Henry had loved it, perhaps because nobody else seemed to bother about it, not even the council, not really. She had begun picking up litter and, later, planting seeds; it gave her a purpose. And it proved such a consolation after he died that, now, she considered it more or less her own.

  Would that Henry had had the chance to enjoy it with her. When the factory closed he was only a few years off retirement; he had taken it hard, but then had found work at the little garden centre nearby, and had found that he loved it. ‘I wish I’d done it years ago,’ he’d laughed, as though it had been a choice he’d made rather than a circumstance that had terrified him at the time.

  He was good at it, too; he’d had an allotment for years, and he had a gentle way with the customers. ‘Sometimes it’s like they’re scared of the plants,’ he’d say. ‘They’ve lost touch, you see. I tell ’em, “That plant wants to live, see, and he knows how even if you don’t. He’ll be all right – unless you really mess him about, that is.” ’

  Of course, it wasn’t for long. There was no reason they couldn’t have kept him on past sixty-five, not really. ‘Bureaucracy,’ he’d spat, in disgust. But while he’d known it was coming, it was still a blow; one which she had somehow failed to protect him from. ‘I’m useless,’ he had said, more than once. It was no wonder he had died within the year. She had never been able to picture him an old man in any case.

  There they were, Linda’s smart bob swinging with every step, Daisy in her school hat trying to keep up and talking nineteen to the dozen. Sophia waved from the window, held up the teapot – but Linda pointed at her watch, kissed Daisy and turned away.

  The day wore on. At six, cars heading out of the city on the bypass found a fine mist on their windscreens which made rubies of the tail lights ahead, and one by one they switched on their wipers. Rain sifted down, the last remnant of a shower that had discharged itself hours earlier over the Shropshire hills and which would, in under an hour, be nothing but a damp breeze. Now, though, it fell on the grimy pavements, the wheelie bins and pollarded street trees, on the grass of the little park and on the russet roof tiles of the house on Leasow Road. Daisy was back at home, crouching by the back door and ignoring both the drizzle on her arms and her mother’s knocks on the kitchen window, because she was listening for her hedgehog.

  Whether it had actually overwintered in the garden was a matter she had not yet determined. It would have been perfectly possible for her to have rooted through the grass cuttings piled up beside the shed – hot inside and ready to release thrilling curls of acrid smoke when the outer thatch was disturbed – or to have prodded the base of the pampas grass with a stick, but all winter she had felt protective of the garden’s possibly imaginary hedgehog, and besides, it would have been unnecessarily dispiriting to have found nothing there. But now it was March, and mild, and the picture of the newly woken hedgehog shambling across the darkening lawn was so clear in Daisy’s mind it was as though she had already seen it.

  Behind her the back door opened, sticking slightly where the grey wood beneath the flaking white paint met the sill. A wedge of yellow light spilled over the back step and reached across the rain-polished patio to where Daisy squatted, peering across the dark and sparkling lawn. ‘Come on, darling, bedtime,’ called Linda. Then the light sliced away as the door was pulled to.

  ‘Bloody goddamn,’ Daisy whispered experimentally. She sent a thought message to the hedgehog, apologising for not being able to wait; then, with a second brief squeal from the stiff door handle, she went inside, where the smell she brought in of wet earth faded even before the tiny rain-jewels disappeared from her hair.

  Now the garden was returned, like all the gardens around, to the creatures to whom it really belonged. The sharp report of the back door’s bolt being shot behind Daisy was noted not only by next door’s cat, who soon came sidling yellow-eyed and evil-minded along the fence, but also by a hen blackbird who had reared three broods last year in a nest in the hydrangea and now roosted, gravid again, with her beady mate in next door’s apple tree. They watched as the cat dropped soundlessly down the far side of the fence and slunk away, just as a tiny shadow detached itself from under the shed. It zigzagged between the blue-green spears of daffs and across the lawn to where a few fallen seeds and seed husks betrayed the hanging bird-feeder above. The wood mouse shared a nest of leaves and moss with several of its relatives in the shed’s furthest corner, behind a tin of paint, and had nibbled the heads off the last of the crocuses, much to Linda’s dismay. She had made a mental note to get the gardener to do something about it, before remembering she had cancelled him the week before. The reason for that was tied up, somehow, with her discovery of the bluebell wood, but she wasn’t sure exactly how.

  Before bed, Daisy fetched her pencil case and some paper and sat down at her homework table. She had been trying for two days to write to her grandmother, but so far it hadn’t come out very well, and once more she had visited the old lady without the promised letter.

  ‘Dear Grandma, thank you for the seeds. How are you? I am very well,’ she had begun. Next, she would have liked to tell her all about what the hedgehog was doing, but given that she didn’t know if he actually existed she thought it might count as a fib.

  ‘I have just been out in the garden looking for the hedgehog,’ she wrote instead. ‘I didn’t see him again and I don’t know if he is even there. I couldn’t wait very long because I had to go to bed even though I am not tired.’ Then she crossed it all out and sucked the end of her pen for a while.

  Dear Grandma,

  Thank you for the seeds. How are your daffodils? I hope they are all jumbled up.

  The hedgehog has woken up and we are best friends now. I am not going to give him a name because he is not a pet. He comes out when I go in the garden but not if anyone else is there, which is why only I have seen him. I found slugs for him to eat and I picked them up on a stick. He is very hungry because he has been asleep for a long time. But it is bad to give hedgehogs bread and milk because they might explode.

  When you next come to visit me I will let you see him but you aren’t allowed to tell anyone. Susie my friend hasn’t seen him but that is because he didn’t know who she was not because he wasn’t there. So I will tell him about you before you come over so that he knows you are nice.

  It was turning out to be a very good letter after all. Daisy began to draw a hedgehog to fill up the rest of the page. She made him very spiky, and coloured him in brown, and she gave him a big smile. By the time she finished she could hear music and applause filtering up from the TV downstairs.

  The rain faded away. As the darkness deepened, Daisy’s house, and the rows of houses stretching out around it, became bright boxes of human concerns, leaving the gardens, the little park, the wooded common and the silent, faraway hills to their own mysterious imbroglios of fight, flight and survival. Wheeling over the furthest hills came Venus, while Orion hunted the sky to the south.

  In the hawthorn hedge at the end of Daisy’s garden the sparrows were finally still among the blossom, and deep in the motionless pampas a hedgehog scratched and sighed as it slept.

  11

  Lady Day

  A ceanothus outside Sophia’s window produced three or four early, powder-blue blooms and was visited almost at once by a bee; Sophia, at her kitchen table, recorded its visit in her journal, where she had also just described, with enormous satisfaction, the daffodils, ‘butter yellow or still in bud like sherbet twists’, blooming outside her window for all the world as though they were wild.

  It was Saturday morning, and she was looking after Daisy while Linda went to the shops; Steven was on a work deadline and Daisy wasn’t very good at leaving him
in peace. They had begun by working on their scrapbooks together, but when Daisy saw TC in the little park she had asked if she could go and play with him.

  They had a conversation about the dangers – not just of strangers, and the busy road, but of snitching. ‘It’s only that your mummy worries, sweet pea,’ Sophia said; the disloyalty, she told herself, had to stand against the benefits to Daisy of being trusted, and allowed to play for a bit without anyone telling her how. ‘It’s not a bad secret, I promise. Anyway, I’m still your mummy’s mummy, and if I explain it to her properly she’ll understand.’

  ‘Hello!’ Daisy yelled, outside, thundering up to TC.

  ‘Hi.’

  ‘Shall we play a game?’

  ‘What game?’

  ‘I don’t know, any game. Are you still looking for the monster?’

  ‘It wasn’t a monster, it was a wolf.’

  ‘Are you?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Why not?’

  TC was silent.

  ‘Don’t worry, it’s probably hibernating. It’ll wake up soon and then you can pretend again.’

  TC got up and began walking off, Daisy doing hopscotch behind.

  ‘Where are we going?’

  ‘Come on.’

  Where the path met the high road Daisy stopped.

  ‘What’s the matter?’

  ‘I’m not allowed.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Outside the park. I’m not allowed, not by myself.’

  ‘Why not?’

  Daisy shrugged. ‘It’s dangerous. You know.’

  ‘Is it your nan won’t let you?’

  ‘No. Sort of. Where are you going?’

  ‘Only to the common. It’s just there.’

  Daisy looked doubtful. ‘Just a sec,’ she said.

  Sophia followed behind the two children, the Reader’s Digest under her arm and half a packet of Viennese Whirls in her coat pocket. She was pleased with Daisy for asking, and pleased too to see her playing with the little boy. And a morning on the common was no bad thing. Last night had been windy and wet, and the pavements were littered with sycamore tassels and twigs from which the sheath of bark was coming away like flesh around white bone. But now the sky was clean and cloud-chased, and the day was set fair.

  Stepping carefully out onto Glebe Road she saw there were two crossed bones on the traffic island, grimy and talismanic. Fried chicken, said her rational brain, foxes. But the way they were placed was startling, a patteran for those with eyes to see. The world was full of mysteries, she reflected, cities no less so than anywhere else.

  ‘Race you!’ said TC when they got to the common.

  ‘Don’t go too far!’ called Sophia after them, subsiding onto a bench with a crackle of biscuit packaging.

  Daisy caught up with TC over by the oaks. ‘See there,’ he said, pointing to a hole at the base of one trunk.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Sometimes there are flowers there. Shop flowers.’

  ‘Flowers? Why?’

  ‘People put them there at night. Not a whole bunch, just a few. Nobody knows why.’

  ‘That’s stupid.’

  ‘No it isn’t.’

  ‘What do they do it for, then?’

  ‘I told you, nobody knows. Maybe the trees like it. Maybe for magic.’

  Daisy giggled, but she could see that he was quite serious.

  ‘Look!’ she said then, pointing to the branch of an oak that was missing big patches of bark. Rusty sap was bleeding from the wound, and there were scored marks, too, as though from teeth. ‘What’s done that?’

  TC went to look, touching a careful finger to the sap. ‘I don’t know. Not squirrels.’

  His face was troubled, and Daisy threw some leaves at his back. ‘It’s only a tree, it’ll be all right. Anyway, there’s loads. Come on!’ she said, running off. TC followed, wondering whether the stripped bark was in his animal tracking book, and if somehow he had missed it.

  ‘Those are its roots!’ said Daisy, pointing at the huge root ball of the fallen tree. ‘They used to be underground.’

  ‘Come on then,’ said TC, scrambling up. ‘What – are you scared of getting dirty?’

  ‘No!’ Daisy retorted defiantly, but she could picture the look on her mother’s face if she came back from her granny’s with her clothes covered in mud.

  ‘All right then,’ said TC, sliding down, ‘but you have to climb my tree.’

  There were dog walkers and a few joggers on the path through the wood, so the two children lingered a little under the oaks. Finally the coast was clear, and TC boosted himself onto the lowest branch and scrambled up.

  ‘Come on, it’s easy!’ he called, and so, gamely, and for the first time, Daisy began to climb.

  The bark was damp and rough and made her hands sore, but it didn’t matter. It was lovely; not scary at all. You had to think about it – which branch to get on next, and how – but that was all right. I’m super-strong, she thought, hauling herself up onto the same branch as TC and shuffling along to sit next to him. I bet I’m the strongest out of all my friends.

  ‘Why is it your tree?’ she asked.

  TC shrugged. ‘Just is. I’ve been coming here the longest. And nobody else climbs it except me.’

  ‘And me, now.’

  ‘Yeah, but only if I’m here. Not on your own.’

  ‘I’m not allowed on my own anyway.’

  ‘So do you –’ TC stumbled slightly, looked down. ‘D’you have lots of friends?’

  ‘Oh, billions,’ Daisy replied. ‘My best friend is Susie though. She’s got long hair.’

  ‘Do you live with your mum and dad?’

  ‘Yeah, course.’

  ‘Have you got sisters and brothers?’

  ‘No.’ Daisy picked at a bit of skin on her hand that was coming off from the rough bark. ‘I’m an only child. I’m not sad about it, though.’

  ‘Why is it sad?’

  ‘Oh, you know. Being lonely. But I’m not. Not mostly; not at school, anyway.’

  TC thought about this, but it didn’t seem to make any sense. What was he, then, if someone with a best friend and a mum and dad and a nan might be lonely?

  ‘Are you rich?’ he asked.

  Daisy shrugged. ‘Are you?’

  ‘Do you go to the posh school?’

  ‘What’s the posh school?’

  ‘The girls’ one.’

  ‘Oh. It’s not posh, though. I think it’s just normal.’

  TC pictured the hats. They definitely weren’t normal – or maybe they were if you were a different person. But if that was true, how did you ever know how things really were? Who was right about the hats, in the end? The thought was weird, and he pushed it away.

  ‘D’you want to be friends?’ he asked instead.

  ‘OK.’

  ‘D’you want to play after school sometimes?’

  But Daisy looked doubtful. ‘My mummy – I’m always busy after school.’

  ‘Doing your homework?’

  ‘Sometimes. But other things – I do French and drama sometimes and I do ballet. What do you do?’

  The trunk was warm and reassuring against his back. ‘I come here,’ TC replied.

  From their perch they could see the path below, the train tracks, the football pitch and even the distant clay courts where a fat spaniel was cocking its leg on the one remaining net post. A lady with a pram passed below, and Daisy held her breath.

  ‘We can see everything!’ she whispered.

  ‘And nobody can see us,’ said TC. ‘It’s like we’re birds, up here. Or squirrels.’

  ‘Or secret spies!’ she breathed. ‘We can spy on everyone. We can collect evidence. We can find out about everything and have a secret code. Then, when they need evidence we’ll show them everything we’ve collected and we’ll be the best spies ever.’

  ‘When who needs evidence?’

  ‘You know . . .’

  ‘The police?’

  That wasn
’t right. Sometimes pretending was hard. ‘No, the grown-ups. The grown-up spies who are rubbish.’ By way of diversion she began whispering into her pink watch. ‘Saturday morning,’ she said, ‘a man comes. He is tall and he has got a plastic bag.’

  ‘That’s stupid. Lots of people have plastic bags.’

  ‘What then?’

  ‘I know, let’s go and look at his footprints!’

  And so they spent the morning deep in covert operations, hatching plans in which Daisy would be crowned the cleverest and TC the most invisible – ‘the sneakiest,’ Daisy said, meaning it kindly. A kind of shorthand developed between them, so that while what they were each picturing was not quite the same, it was close enough not to matter. They moved through a world in which the motives of adults were mysterious and suspect and their own superior skills went unrecognised, and little imagined how true it actually was.

  Linda was on her way into town to do the department stores. She had decided to kit herself out with a good set of gardening tools. There were some in the shed, but they were mismatched and dirty, and if she was going to get into gardening it would be nice to have her own set. She was well aware that Steven would have gone to one of the big hardware centres, but it was much more fun to go into town.

  She hadn’t visited the local shops on the high road in years. There was nothing, absolutely nothing, there for her. It was grim: litter and pound shops and fast food and tacky clothing boutiques with sequinned polyester creations in the window, split to the thigh. The people who hung around there looked desperate or aggressive, even the children. Particularly the children.

  Not only had she not shopped locally in years, she’d pretty much erased it from her mental image of where she lived. She rarely even drove along the high road, preferring to take a different route out of the area, one that led along the common, over the railway lines and then through some pretty Georgian squares. She took that route now, overtaking Denny, indicating left in his grimy van (‘Dennis Webb: Clearances’) and speeding past the white-painted bicycle that had recently appeared, chained to the railings near the station. Art project or something? she wondered. Probably.