Then one of the coppers came and crouched over him and said his name, his proper name, and he looked past the copper and saw Jozef struggling, struggling, craning back over his shoulder as they dragged him away through the ivy and the long grass. And Jozef had smiled at him then, he’d tried to smile, and his eyes as they took him away said: Don’t worry, I’ll be OK. But TC didn’t think that it was true.
The swifts had gone, and the skies above the city were blank and empty once more. No more wheeling sickles, no more rooftop dogfights, no more screams. Above the Children and Young Persons’ Unit equinoctial clouds were gathering; it was still muggy, still summer, but the holidays were nearly over and Year Six, for TC, would start in just over a week.
‘OK, TC, I think we’ve finished here.’ The social worker lady began putting her bits of paper back in the folder and looking for her briefcase. ‘Is there anything you’d like to ask before you go?’
TC looked down. Was he allowed? He wasn’t sure. He felt the blood rush to his face.
‘Is – is – do you know what happened to Jozef?’
‘Mr Lopata has been released.’
‘Because he didn’t do anything?’
‘That’s all I can tell you, TC. He is no longer in police custody.’
There was so much TC wanted to tell them about Jozef, but they didn’t want to hear it, not the police, and not the social either. That they were friends, that they cared about each other. That they were the same, somehow: lost. At least TC still had his wild places, though, at least the owls would still be there; Jozef had nothing, not his farm, not TC, not even Znajda any more.
TC’s eyes pricked at the thought, and he decided to be brave. Not much else could happen to him, he felt, and he owed it to Jozef to try. ‘Can I go and see him?’ he asked.
‘TC –’ The social worker’s eyes flicked over to TC’s mum for a moment. ‘TC, I don’t think that would be a good idea. Anyway, you won’t be here for long, it might be best to put it all behind you, OK, love?’
‘What do you mean? Why won’t I be here?’
His mum got up from the sofa, fiddled in her pockets for her fags. ‘Your dad’s taking you,’ she said. ‘They got in touch with him. I meant to say before.’
‘I’m going to live with my dad?’
‘That’s right. Ain’t you pleased?’
‘TC –’ that was the social worker, butting in with a stern look over TC’s head at his mum – ‘TC, I am sorry; I had thought this had already been discussed. Your mum thought – we thought you might like to stay with your father for a while, maybe forever, if you want. It’s a way away, of course, but he’s got a room ready for you, and there’s a school nearby. You’ll be assigned a case worker in his district who’ll help you settle in, of course, but he says he’s happy to have you, and we do always feel that if we can keep a family together – or partly together – then that’s the best thing for yourself. What do you think, TC, do you want to go and live with your dad?’
TC looked over at Kelly, but she wouldn’t meet his eyes. ‘OK,’ he whispered.
That evening dusk drew slowly down, lilac and blue, over the little park with its lone ash tree, over the secret garden and the Plestor Estate and the rows of terraced houses winking with yellow lights, as the city’s gradual tilt on the earth’s grand axis bore it slowly towards the outer dark. The hedges were populous with sparrows, fat with sleep but vaguely quarrelsome still, while above the common, starlings massed and wheeled and bore down on their ancient roosts.
Linda, at the villa on Leasow Road, was closing the curtains, shutting out the city with its noise and its dirt and its dangers. She moved from room to room, pulling the good drapes gently, moving them carefully into place. ‘Glass of wine, love?’ called Steven from the bright kitchen, as Daisy and Susannah giggled and squealed upstairs. ‘That would be lovely,’ she replied, turning her back on the darkening sky and taking her place at the computer, where, lit by its harsh blue glare, she typed in ‘gardening services’, then her postcode, and hit return. ‘Wine is exactly what I need.’
Sophia watched the light fade from her hospital bed. She was wired up to machines, surrounded by them, and all she could see of the sky was a blank square, bereft even of a star this early in the night. She watched it slowly darken, and wondered at how far away the world felt, and how small she was, and frail. The table by her bed was covered in cards, and Linda came every day, but she knew that really, now, she was on her own.
At last the sky was black. The hospital was like a ship, she imagined, blazing with light, sailing away with her on board and leaving the teeming city behind.
Jozef was at the bus stop, a battered holdall in his hand and a wooden chess piece shaped like a dog in his jacket pocket. Where was Znajda now? he wondered. Where was his lovely girl, his sweet girl? It was almost too much to bear.
They had said she was a dangerous breed, they’d snared her around the neck with a catchpole and dragged her, choking, to the van. They’d pushed her into a cramped cage in the back and he had heard her crying, desperately, as he tried to explain about her, how she was a good girl, how they had rescued each other, how she was only protecting him. But they didn’t want to know.
He’d asked around, after his release, about what would happen to Znajda – if she turned out to be the breed they’d said she was, if her head was a certain shape and size. It was obscene. He held the little carving tight and swung the holdall onto his shoulder as the bus drew up. How many buses would it take to forget the dog? he wondered, how many more for the boy? How far would he have to go to leave all this behind?
At last, it was fully dark. A car sped north on the motorway, one among many, dancehall on the radio and the stink of fags seeping from the upholstery. From the front seat a small boy watched as the landscape around him faded into featureless dark, until he could see nothing ahead of him at all, only night. On the back seat a PlayStation, nearly new, shifted and slid, shifted and slid.
Above the road hung an invisible legion of thunderheads, massed and angry in the night sky and heavy with a whole summer’s rain. A drop pelted the windscreen, a dozen, a hundred; and then, from the vast and desolate darkness above, the weather broke.
Acknowledgements
Clay would not have been written without the following people:
The brilliant Kathy Gale (www.kgpublishingservices.co.uk), who told me I was a writer, and that I was writing a book; my agent Jenny Hewson at Rogers, Coleridge & White, who took a chance on something unformed; Robert Macfarlane and Jon McGregor, for their encouragement at an early stage; Michael Fishwick, Anna Simpson, Anya Rosenberg, Oliver Holden-Rea and everyone else at Bloomsbury; my sister Joelle, upon whom I inflicted an early draft; Joanna and Tom Ridge and Margaret and Tony Young, to whose homes I decamped to write; also Diana and Jim Elliott of Shillings Cottage in Hemyock; Magda Pukaluk and Wies Tondryk for help with the Polish language; Simon Wenzel of Watford School for Boys, for advice on school matters; Roy Vickery for his survey of plants on Tooting Common, and Roger Golding for information on ferns; Bianca Neumann at Veolia and Dave Oram and David Everett of the Lambeth Parks Service; the International Coalition to Protect the Polish Countryside; Mandy Barrow of Woodlands Junior School, Kent; John Enfield of the British Postmark Society. Despite all this help, any errors in this book are entirely my own.
A Note on the Author
Melissa Harrison is a freelance writer and photographer whose clients include the Guardian. She was the winner of the John Muir Trust’s ‘Wild Writing’ Award in 2010, and Clay is her debut novel. She lives in South London and writes about her local environment on her website, Tales of the City.
http://www.talesofthecity.co.uk/
Copyright © 2013 by Melissa Harrison
First published in Great Britain 2013
This electronic edition published in February 2013 by Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
The moral right of the author has been asserted
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