Clay

by Melissa Harrison

  Jamal had not been to the flat for ages, and TC knew that it was over between him and his mother. He wondered what he felt about it, but found he couldn’t tell. It wasn’t like when his dad left; it didn’t change anything much. It wasn’t like Jamal was in his family.

  What was that, anyway – family? The three of them, he supposed: him, his mum and his dad. When they all lived together, when they used to do things together. He thought about Christmas Day, and watching telly together. What else?

  You didn’t have to be related, though; you could be adopted and that would be family, if you said it was, if everyone wanted it to be. Someone who looked after you – that could be family. Who got you toys and clothes, made sure you had your dinner. Jamal did that – he’d tried to, anyway – but he wasn’t family; Jozef, too, and he was practically a stranger. And his mum didn’t, not much, but she was family, they were a family by themselves now. Weren’t they?

  She was hardly in any more, anyway. She had got a job at the bookies and sometimes didn’t finish until gone ten o’clock. He got himself something to eat in the evenings, usually: beans on toast, spaghetti hoops, hot dogs, microwave cottage pie. At least now there were two pound coins on the kitchen table for him most weekday mornings – although not today.

  He humped his school bag further up his back and turned into Curtilage Street. Ten minutes, that was all he wanted. Just to have a look. It was a showery morning, but a brisk breeze moved the weather on quickly enough and between times the sun was warm.

  In the secret garden the undergrowth was damp and the air smelled green. TC dropped from the fence like a stone into a still pool and crouched in the long grass, listening. Minutes passed, and the sun-dappled garden closed around him until he was part of it.

  At noon Sophia emerged from the flats and made for the benches. The desire paths had done brief duty as watercourses in the dark, and testified to it now with little cargos of flotsam caught against the tree roots here and there. Pale sand, light and easiest borne, showed where the fastest runnels had been.

  She held the back of the bench with her free hand and looked up. It was hard to balance, even with her stick, but in the city you had to look up if you wanted to see a good bit of sky. Nothing yet, she thought, though it’s hardly the day for them. And it might be my eyes. She was waiting for the first swifts to appear, their sickle shapes scything the blue and proving that summer had really arrived. Outside the city there’d been swallows and house martins three weeks ago and more, but they weren’t so often to be seen this far into the city; swifts, though, flew in high above the pollution, quartering schools of aerial plankton like sleek little basking sharks. They built their wattle-and-daub nests high on the city’s churches, offices and multi-storeys, the raising of young being their only reason for landing at all. Nesting was a temporary concession to gravity; if they could have raised their chicks on the wing, they would.

  Yesterday would have been a good day for them, Sophia thought, the air still, the gardens full of greenflies wafting up from the city on thermals. All the way from Africa for some insects: it was amazing. But perhaps they were here already, and she had missed them. Once their screams would have been enough to have given them away, but she had lost that register several years ago.

  Always this anxiousness to know if they had made it. A sign that the world was still working, despite everything. A tiny reassurance in her old age.

  A handbell sounded the end of lunch hour at the private school, its lazy notes drifting into back gardens two streets away. Slowly the sun burned off the last of the cloud and the afternoon settled into full-blown and blowsy warmth. The ground in the little park was warm and full of weed seeds secretly germinating, and the grass there and on the common was thick and lush.

  Jozef found he loved the spring afternoons. To walk Znajda in the warm, golden light was to pass from one blackbird’s demesne into another’s, their songs a carillon calling him down the peaceful streets. May blossom clotted the hawthorns by the high road, and here and there wisteria hung in opulent watercolour from the house-fronts. The smell of lilacs and cut privet hung over the pavements and produced in him the same strange intensity of feeling as déjà vu.

  He thought about the city, how ordinary and beautiful it was, and wondered if he would think the same had he been born there. Yet he missed Poland, too; not just his farm, but the way he could make sense of it, because he was born into its stories and its history. In his village you could trace the shape of the past: here was once the ford, before the road bridge was built, here the mill; this was once the old road to the next village. Perhaps the city streets he walked with Znajda told stories, too, but he had not yet learned how to decipher them.

  There was an ancient pollard ash that had once marked the westernmost boundary of his farm. His father, and his father’s father, and his great-grandfather, back and back – all of them must have known it. When Jozef had last seen it, it had been more or less absorbed into the old hazel coppice behind it, but at one time it had stood alone along a cart track flanked by a boundary ditch dug by who could say which of his forebears. For a long time that track was one of the three roads out of the village, and the tree had stood at a slight bend and marked the furthest point at which generations of villagers could turn and wave, when leaving the village for the market, or for Kraków, or for war, before being lost from sight. In his own time the track had fallen into disuse and the ash tree no longer had a place in the life of the village, but he had held the knowledge in himself, given to him by his father, along with a thousand other things about the land he had been born on and had farmed, the very last in his line. Jozef wondered if the tree still stood, or had been grubbed up, the coppice razed for rows of ugly metal pig sheds. He pushed his hands into his pockets and picked up his pace.

  Jozef took a left before reaching the high road. Eventually Denny would hear of Znajda’s return, and then they would have to have a talk, but until then Jozef would not walk her too close to the shop. ‘You gonna keep her, get her fix,’ Musa had said. ‘That way she no good to Denny any more.’ Jozef’s first instinct had been to reject out of hand a plan to cause the dog further harm, but in his private moments he could see there was sense in it. He was putting his money by for his own place, but once that was done, perhaps.

  He waited for TC at the school gate, standing diffidently across the road, away from all the mothers and their disapproving gaze. He’d grown used to people crossing the road at the sight of Znajda, or flinching when she sniffed their passing legs, but while it still pained him from time to time to see her so badly judged he had to admit that outside a primary school was not the best place to put people’s prejudices to the test.

  TC was one of the last children to emerge, and Jozef had begun to think that perhaps he hadn’t been to school that day. But then there he was, struggling with the straps of his backpack behind a group of kids who took off, shouting and cat-calling to one another, towards the high road. Jozef waved him over and took his bag from him as the boy knelt down and greeted Znajda.

  ‘I was coming this way,’ Jozef said, ‘and Znajda, she wanted to see you. It is OK?’

  ‘Yeah,’ replied TC, and grinned.

  ‘Where you going? You going home?’

  TC shook his head.

  ‘Good, then we take her for a walk.’

  The afternoon light lay long and golden on the common, the shadows of the trees reaching out across the grass. As they came off the path Znajda took off for the sheer joy of it, tearing around in wide circles and sending pigeons exploding like skeet out of the thickets. When Jozef whistled her back she thundered to his feet and collapsed, pushing her ears against the ground and rolling shamelessly on her back.

  ‘Glupi pies, Znajda,’ he laughed, nudging her with his foot. ‘Get up, stupid dog.’

  They walked on. ‘So you were at school today,’ said Jozef.

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘That’s good. All day?’

  ‘Nearly all.
I do go, you know. I said I went.’

  ‘I know, I know. Was it OK?’

  TC shrugged.

  ‘Do you have – do you have friends?’

  ‘Not really. They’re all stupid.’

  ‘Is there nobody you play with?’

  ‘I played with that girl Daisy the other day, you know, on the common, but she goes to a different school.’ TC looked up. ‘Can we get chips?’ he asked, colouring slightly. ‘Only, I didn’t have lunch today. I was . . . I wasn’t hungry.’

  ‘Of course. We will walk that way. So. Tell me what you usually do after school – you go and play on the common . . . what else?’

  ‘Homework.’

  ‘Ah, homework. That’s good. You do that at home, though, yes?’

  ‘Yeah. Watch TV sometimes. Why?’

  ‘But you prefer to be outside.’

  ‘Yeah. It’s . . . it’s . . .’

  ‘Where the important things are? I was the same, you know, when I was young. And now, also, I still feel like that.’

  Now it was TC’s turn to ask. ‘Do you miss your farm, then?’

  ‘All the time. When you know some land – properly, you know, really know it – is like . . . is like it never leaves you.’

  TC was nodding sagely. ‘I know the whole common – and lots around here. I know everything, nobody knows the things I know.’

  ‘I believe you.’

  ‘I’ve – I’ve got a secret place, an old garden. You can’t tell anyone. Nobody goes there except me, no one even knows about it, not even the council.’

  Jozef had a brief vision of the abandoned farm three kilometrów from the one he grew up in, with its rusting scythes and uncovered well. At six years old he’d thought it a paradise, but his father had given him a beating after finding him playing there by himself. It was the only beating he had ever had, and now, looking at the boy, Jozef understood why his father had so feared for him all those years ago.

  ‘I am allowed to know where it is?’

  But TC shook his head. ‘Nobody can. It’s mine, and I’m never going to leave it. Never, ever.’

  What was the point of telling the boy it would not be so? To Jozef the thought of the growing up TC would some day have to do – and of all the losses that would entail – was heartbreaking in its inevitability. If only there was some way to preserve the richness of these years to draw on in the bleaker, duller days ahead.

  Yet perhaps that was just what Jozef himself had done; it was, after all, his memories of the farm that both sustained and tormented him, that kept sending him back, again and again, to the idea that a life without land was not enough. And anyway, who was he to wish TC forever a child, forever lost?

  No, perhaps it was better to let it all go, Jozef conceded, as he watched the boy throw sticks for the dog. Perhaps it was better just to grow up and forget. Life would come for the boy in the end, and it would spit him out an adult, and what would any of this matter then?

  14

  Pag Rag Day

  It was the middle of May and TC had not spent a full day in school for over a week. He had been going more – he had been trying to. Jozef sometimes asked him, and he didn’t like to lie; Jozef would look at him and he could tell he was disappointed. So he had been trying to go more, but now the weather was nice and there was too much going on, too much to miss. Sometimes he would leave at lunch; some mornings he would mean to go, but once he was out of the flat his mind would simply turn away from the idea of it, like a horse refusing a jump.

  The school had sent a letter, but he found it easy enough to intercept it. He had worried about them phoning his mum, until he remembered she had lost her mobile a while back and now had a different number. And then he had let himself believe that nothing bad was going to happen.

  But now there she was at the top of the stairwell, smoking, when he got in. She grabbed his arm and marched him through the front door and into the kitchen, a cigarette clamped in her fist.

  ‘Why ain’t you been going to school?’

  ‘I have!’

  ‘No you ain’t. Don’t you lie to me. I had them round here today.’

  TC was silent, looked at the floor.

  ‘Answer me!’

  ‘I don’t like it.’

  ‘I don’t care if you like it; until you’re sixteen it ain’t up to you. Now they say I’m going to get a fine. And you’ve been hiding their letters, don’t tell me you ain’t.’ She stubbed the fag out in a saucer on the kitchen table. ‘Where is it you’re going all day, anyway?’

  TC shrugged. ‘Nowhere.’

  She folded her arms and regarded him keenly. ‘Skulking off by yourself, I bet. Why ain’t you made any friends?’

  ‘They’re all weird.’

  ‘Come off it. Why won’t you play with the other kids?’

  ‘They like different stuff, that’s all.’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘I don’t know. X Factor. Football.’

  ‘You used to like football.’

  ‘Only cos Dad did. I liked playing with Dad.’

  He wasn’t crying, and then he was. She looked away, took a breath. Let it out.

  ‘Listen. Your dad ain’t coming back, OK? It’s better this way; one day you’ll understand. I’m doing my best. I got work now; there’s food on the table. So it would be good if you made some friends, OK? Tried to fit in a bit. Then you’ll enjoy it a bit more.’

  ‘I don’t like being shut up in the classrooms, Mum. I want to be outside.’

  ‘When you’re sixteen you can do what you like. Until then you just gotta try a bit harder, OK? I told them about your dad and they’re going to help you catch up on what you’ve missed; special circumstances, they said. But I can’t afford to pay any fine, TC, and I ain’t having social services round here either. OK?’

  TC nodded.

  ‘Good. Right, I’m going to the shops. There’s never any food in this fucking place.’

  TC watched while she put her jacket on, fumbled for her keys. It was nothing like as bad as it might’ve been; yeah, she had been angry, but he had known it was coming, and in a way it was a relief. She seemed pleased it was over, too; a problem solved, he supposed.

  Yet he wanted her to mention his dad again, ask him more things about school. He wanted to try and answer properly this time. ‘Do you want me to come with you to the shop?’ he asked.

  She was at the door; looked round, surprised. ‘If you want.’

  TC followed her down the stairwell and out onto the litter-blown high road. He thought about what he could say, what she might like, what wouldn’t get him in trouble. In the end, though, he didn’t say anything, just walked along beside her, as though they were just mother and son, as though some kind of understanding had been reached.

  As they neared the bookies’, TC looked up and saw the old lady with the stick heading slowly towards them, and when they passed he gave her a grin that lit up his face. So he has someone, Sophia thought. That’s something, at least.

  The wind picked up, blowing dust and cigarette ends before them down the street, while overhead the swifts circled endlessly, tiny black scimitars feeding thirty storeys up above the city.

  The party ended with the usual squeals and shrieks, but Linda’s ears had learned to tune much of it out. The restaurant, one of a chain which had ‘quirkiness’ built into its marketing profile, was where all the kids were having their birthdays that year.

  On the way back to the car she barely registered the overexcited chatter of Daisy and Susannah, who was coming back to play for a little while. She fiddled unsuccessfully with the air conditioning before giving up and opening her window. The chatter of starlings squabbling over bits of gherkin and lettuce from a dropped burger carton carried over the sound of the engine, over even the sound of Daisy telling Susannah what they were going to do when they got home. It wasn’t that her daughter was bossy, Linda told herself, more that the force of her imagination tended to carry others before her. Yes, it would
have been good for her to have had siblings, but it was too late for that now. And it wasn’t as though Susannah ever seemed to mind Daisy being in charge.

  At home, she called hello to Steven who was working in the study, threw the car keys onto the kitchen worktop and followed the girls out into the garden. The day had started bright but had clouded over since lunchtime, though it was still humid and close.

  Once so neat and symmetrical, the garden was definitely looking untidier since she had let the gardener go. For one thing there were a lot more weeds; she planned to ask Sophia about them next time she visited, but until then she wasn’t sure which might be a plant, and so left them alone until they did something that made them easy to identify.

  It was hard to let go of the image she had of how the garden should look – had looked, in fact: neat and stylish, everything just so. But it doesn’t matter, she kept telling herself. It’s the doing it that’s important. It was what her father would have said.

  Today she wanted to do some pruning. Several of the shrubs had become so bushy they had practically blended into each other and were crowding out the nicotiana and pinks she had planted – too few and too far apart – at their feet.

  She fetched the canvas trug from the shed, a grey mouse shooting into the corner as she drew back the bolt. The nest now held seven tiny pink pups, the third litter to be raised in the shed so far that year, and not the last. It was just as well, as the local cats and foxes, and the pair of sparrowhawks that sometimes visited the garden, saw to it that few survived long after venturing into the garden.

  The air inside was dry and musty, with a particular stillness that wasn’t dispelled by the sound of the two girls whispering behind it. The game they were playing seemed to involve hiding from Linda, and as she shut the shed door behind her and shot the bolt she remembered playing similar games in the park outside the estate with her brother. The aim would be to get from the benches to the chain-link fence without being seen by whoever was in the kitchen. Michael would pretend to be a commando, wriggling doggedly on his stomach, but Linda would watch her mother carefully as she moved about inside the flat and would dart from hiding place to hiding place when her head was turned. She never knew if she had won, as the moment that she touched the house Michael would decide that they had to go and storm a drawbridge, or spy on Blofeld, or land on the moon.