Clay

by David Almond

  They looked at the grave a last time; then they walked away. I soon followed them. I couldn’t stop thinking of the dead laid out beneath my feet, until I found Maria waiting at the graveyard gate. We walked together. She told me again that I could tell her anything, but I said I didn’t know where to start, I didn’t know how to make her believe. We walked all afternoon. We kissed beneath the trees in Holly Hill park, and as we kissed I began to forget Stephen Rose and Mouldy. It was like I almost started to disappear, until the parkie Mr. Pew was yelling at us: “Hoy! You two! Sling your blinking hook!” And we walked on hand in hand, and it was like Maria was some kind of guardian, sent to stop me sinking even further into gloom.

  three

  At dusk, I said I should go to confession. We went into St. Patrick’s. I knelt in the dark confessional. I could see Father O’Mahoney’s face through the grille. I didn’t try to disguise my voice.

  “Bless me, Father,” I said, “for I have sinned.”

  He waited. I was silent.

  “Go on, my son,” he said. “What must you confess?”

  I imagined the words coming out of my mouth: I stole the body and blood of Christ, I half killed a dog, I created a creature, the creature helped to murder Martin Mould, I helped to kill the creature, I lied to my parents and held back evidence from the police. I…

  “Well?” he murmured, but still I couldn’t speak. We looked at each other through the grille.

  “It’s you, Davie,” he said.

  “Yes, Father.”

  “It is more than calling people Fishface, I suspect.”

  “Yes, but you wouldn’t believe me, Father.”

  “I’ve heard everything in here. You can tell me anything. I’m just a channel for your words. It is between you and God.”

  “I don’t know if there is a God, Father.”

  “Ha!”

  “I think there may once have been a God, but he got sick of us and he left us.”

  “I see that adolescence is truly upon you. This is not a place for discussion. Just confess, do your penance, be done with it. Other penitents are waiting outside.”

  “I hated a person and wished for his death,” I murmured.

  “Ah. That is indeed a sin. And are you sorry for it?”

  “Yes. But the death happened.”

  “Ah. So it weighs on your heart.”

  “Yes. The person was Martin Mould, Father.”

  “The boy who fell.”

  “Yes, the boy who fell.”

  “You must not blame yourself.”

  I was silent.

  “You must not,” he said again. “Each of us has intentions and desires that we must curb. Your wish was indeed a sin. But there is a gap between sinful wishes and sinful deeds.”

  Our eyes met through the grille.

  “You understand, Davie,” he said. “Had you pushed him, it would be different. I take it you did not push him.”

  “No, Father.”

  “That’s grand. What else must you confess?”

  I searched for words.

  “Do you believe in evil, Father?”

  “Davie, I’ve told you, this is not the place.”

  “Do you, Father?”

  “I believe in weakness, Davie. I believe we can be led astray. I have spent many hours in this box. I have heard of a million awful thoughts, a million awful acts. We can be petty little creatures with petty little wickednesses. We gain strength and goodness by turning our hearts to God.”

  “But if you believe in God and goodness, should you not believe in the devil and evil?”

  “Yes, but I am an optimist, Davie. I believe that God and goodness have the upper hand.”

  “But there is evil?”

  “You tell me that you doubt the existence of God, but you want me to tell you to believe in evil?”

  “Please, Father.”

  He sighed in exasperation.

  “Yes,” he said. “I do think there is evil. But it is very rare. It is as rare as true goodness. And just as true goodness produces rare saints, true evil produces rare monsters. The rest of us are semigood, semibad, and we live our lives in a kind of half-happy, half-sad daze. We might hope that one sunny morning we find ourselves in the presence of a saint. And we must pray very hard that we do not encounter the monster. Now, we’ve discussed enough. Tell me another sin. There are others waiting.”

  I said nothing.

  “Davie! Speak now. Or I’ll throw you out.”

  “Stephen Rose,” I whispered.

  “Stephen Rose?”

  “You were supposed to look out for him, Father.”

  I saw the frown cross his face.

  “Yes,” he said. He looked sternly through the grille; then he sighed, and spoke softly, as if in confession himself. “I’m troubled by what has occurred, Davie. I did look out for him. But my flock is large. And I thought that the influence of lads like yourself and George…” His voice trailed off. “They’ll find him,” he said. “They’ll bring him home again. We’ll make a better job of it next time.”

  “What was he, Father?”

  “Ha. Just a boy, a little older than yourself. A boy with problems. There but for the grace of God. But just an ordinary boy. And now, another sin.”

  I searched my thoughts.

  I imagined: I stole the body and blood of Christ. I…

  “I stole a cigarette from my dad,” I said.

  “Oh, Davie. Yet again? And smoked it?”

  “Yes, Father. And the cigarettes of somebody else’s dad.”

  “Oh, Davie.”

  And so I told him the banal old stuff and he blessed me and dismissed me.

  When I went out, Maria was still waiting.

  “Well,” she said. “Do you feel holy and free now?”

  I shook my head.

  “I told him next to nowt.”

  We walked up past the Half Way House and into Felling Square, where we’d have to part.

  She said, “The way to say something is just to start saying the start of it; then everything will come out. Or you can just choose bits of it, and say them in any order. Or…”

  She threw up her hands and laughed.

  “And of course you don’t have to say nowt at all.”

  We looked around the square: the shadowy drinkers behind the frosted glass of the Blue Bell, people queuing to see The Curse of Dracula at the Corona, people climbing aboard the 82 to go to Newcastle. All so ordinary, all so tame.

  “Or you could write it,” she said. “Like a story. Then you could put the craziest things in and they wouldn’t seem so crazy cos it’d just be a story.”

  “I made a creature with Stephen Rose,” I muttered.

  “Eh?”

  “We made a man out of clay. We made him move, Maria. We made him walk. He came alive.”

  I looked into her eyes.

  “Do you believe me?” I said.

  “Yes. It’s crazy, but yes. What else?”

  “Stephen Rose. He isn’t a boy like…”

  I couldn’t go on.

  “I’ll tell you it bit by bit,” I said. “It might take a long time.”

  “OK,” she said.

  Sergeant Fox and PC Ground drove past, stuffed into a little blue police car.

  “Got to go,” I said.

  We parted with a kiss. I ran uphill, and started to feel free at last. My sleep that night was dreamless and deep.

  Next morning I looked out of my window. Dad was kneeling in the garden in the sunlight. Clay was stretched out on the earth beside him.

  four

  Dad turned to me as I stepped out from the house. His eyes were wide with wonder.

  “Davie, come and see!”

  I shuffled across the grass.

  “What is it, Dad?”

  “Found it this morning in Braddock’s garden. All the blokes are getting stuff out—soil and plants and rocks—before they fill the quarry in.”

  Clay’s legs and an arm had fallen off a
nd had been put back in place. A crevice had opened up between his head and shoulders. Clods of him had crumbled away.

  “What do you think it is?” I said.

  “God knows. Something ancient, I thought; then I saw it wasn’t. He fell to bits when I put him into the barrow. I been putting him back together again.”

  He was pockmarked by the rain. There were channels where the water had trickled over him. There were dried-out puddle holes in him. The whole bulk of him had slumped and softened. He was ungainly and twisted. Where he’d lain on the earth, he’d started to merge with it, turning back to the stuff called clay and not the creature Clay. But the sycamore seeds were still in him, and the hawthorn berries, and the ash keys. And he was so beautiful, and I looked at how he was now and I thought of how he had been, when he had walked beside me, when we had looked at each other in a window in the night and had seen each other standing together, so powerful and so lifelike and so strange. Dad reached down, and tried to smooth the clefts and cracks and creases. I touched him too, and I waited for Clay’s voice inside me, but there was just silence.

  “Must’ve been some kids, eh?” said Dad. “Must’ve been some game or something.”

  “Aye,” I said.

  “Nowt to do with you and your mates?”

  “No.”

  “Or mebbe Stephen Rose?” he said.

  “Dunno, Dad.”

  “Anyway,” he said. “A bit of clay’ll come in useful in them sandy borders.”

  “Not yet, though,” I said.

  “No. He’s too lovely right now. We’ll wait till he’s just a pile of muck. It’ll be a while before I dig him in.”

  five

  I brought Maria to him.

  “He lived and walked,” I told her. “I heard his voice inside my head.”

  She gazed at him and said he was beautiful. She narrowed her eyes as she tried to see him as he had been, a living thing instead of lifeless clay. Behind us Dad kept coming into and out of the garden, bringing heaps of soil, rocks and plants for a rockery, yelling how brilliant our garden would be.

  “How did you do it?” asked Maria.

  “It seemed so easy. It was just like this.”

  I scooped a handful of clay out of Clay. I shaped it quickly into the shape of a man. “Live,” I whispered. “Move.” And of course nothing happened. I shrugged and laid the figure on the ground. I thought of Stephen, and wondered where he was now, what he was making now.

  She picked up the figure. She walked it like a puppet on the grass. Then she squashed it into a ball.

  “You couldn’t have been wrong?” she said. “Stephen couldn’t have deceived you?”

  I shook my head. I told her how Clay and I had walked alone together through the streets. How could that have been an illusion?

  “Stephen was all lies and tricks,” I said. “He told me lots of things that I don’t believe. But there’s some force in him, some power that the rest of us don’t have.”

  I said no more, but I knew that one day I’d have to say more, about devilry and madness and death.

  “Do you think I’m mad?” I asked her.

  She laughed.

  “You? Mad?”

  “Yes. What I’ve just told you—surely that’s mad.”

  “But isn’t it the truth?”

  “Yes. But sometimes I think I’ve caught something from Stephen. Sometimes I think I’m losing my mind.”

  “You’re not mad, Davie,” she told me.

  She worked the ball of clay again. She made another figure from it and stood it on the grass.

  “This is you,” she said. “Sane and slightly barmy like all of us.” She took another piece of Clay and made another figure. “And here is me, slightly barmy too.”

  So we went on making clay figures out of the body of Clay, each one better and more lifelike than the one before. We named them as we worked: Geordie Craggs, Frances Malone, Crazy Mary, Prat Parker, Skinner and Poke, Father O’Mahoney, my mam and dad, Maria’s mam and dad, and many more. Soon there was a little crowd before us.

  Dad came up behind us, looked down and laughed.

  “Haha!” he said. “It’s a congregation of the saints!”

  six

  Clay’s remnants still lie there in our garden. Dad can’t bring himself to dig him in. Slowly, slowly, he is being washed into the sandy border, and earth returns to earth. The sycamore seeds and the hawthorn berries and ash keys have hatched and a little forest of saplings grows from him. Now the rose rises from his heart, the tiny conker tree seedling cracks open his skull. Time goes by. The seasons turn.

  There’s still no sign of Stephen Rose. Sometimes I think of him hiding out, practicing his arts in Plessey Woods, or in Kielder Forest or the Cheviots, or in some distant empty wild place that has no name. I can’t believe that he’s gone forever, that he won’t return. I watch for reports of maiming and murder. A man is stabbed in North Shields. A girl is half strangled in Whitley Bay. A teenager falls to his death on Marsden cliffs. There’s no reference to Stephen Rose or a boy like Stephen Rose or to a monster, but I keep on watching, waiting, and at times I’m filled with dread.

  Here in Felling, the memory of him is fading. There are whispers that he must be dead, of course, that he must have been abducted, that he’ll be discovered in a shallow grave somewhere. When I find myself wishing that those things are true, I have to curb my thoughts.

  Whatever happens, Crazy Mary still loves him and will always love him. A few weeks after Stephen went away, I walked through Felling to her door. It was a brilliant cloudless day. She took me in and made me tea and jam and bread. We sat on chairs at her back door and the sun poured down on us. She spoke so shyly, so sadly.

  “The house is empty now,” she whispered.

  I murmured something stupid about things getting better.

  “The whole world is filled with nowt,” she said.

  Her voice got even lower. Her hands trembled.

  “I’m forgetting how to pray, son.”

  I had the locket with me. I took it out and showed it to her.

  “I didn’t know what to do with this,” I said. “I thought of you.”

  I passed it to her. I showed her how to open it. She fiddled at the catch with her scrawny fingers. She gasped as it clicked open.

  “Oh, altar boy!” she said.

  She dropped to her knees. She lifted them out, the stained cloth fragments, the dusty Sellotape. She held them up high. She closed her eyes and put the cloth and Sellotape onto her tongue and swallowed them. She clenched her hands tight and bobbed back and forward. Then she opened her eyes, knelt up, and gazed into the sky.

  “Oh, yes!” she said. “Oh, look!”

  I looked where she looked.

  “Heaven has opened!” she said.

  She tugged me to my knees.

  “Do you see?” she gasped. “Do you see them, son?”

  I knelt there with Crazy Mary. She put her arm around me. She held me close. I looked with her into the sky.

  “Look!” she said. “See how the sky is filled with angels!”

  Did she really see these things? Was this a holy woman? Was she some kind of saint entranced by visions here in Felling, in a little back garden on Watermill Lane? Or was she nothing, just Crazy Mary being crazy?

  “Do you see, son? There and there and there and there!”

  Whatever she was, she saw something that I couldn’t share. I saw her trembling pointing finger. I saw rooftops, branches, twigtips, leaves. I saw the silhouettes of passing birds. And then the dazzling blue void, the gaping emptiness that stretched forever and forever.

  “Yes,” I told her. “Yes, I see.”

  And I lowered my head, and closed my eyes, and gazed into the shifting shadows and the darkness of my mind.

  “God’s good!” she gasped. “He will return! He will come home to us again.”

  Ever since, her eyes have shone with hope.

  This is the first time I’ve told the tale.
I’ve tried to speak it, like Maria said—to speak it from the start and to keep on speaking it until everything is said, but each time I start, the craziness in it just brings me to a halt. So now I’ve written it down, all of it. I don’t care if there’s craziness in it. I’ve learned that crazy things might be the truest things of all. You don’t believe me? Doesn’t matter. Tell yourself it’s just a story, nothing more.

  about the author

  David Almond grew up in a large family in northeastern England and says, “The people and the place have given me lots of my stories.” He has worked as a postman, a brush salesman, an editor, and a teacher. His first novel for children, Skellig, was a Michael L. Printz Honor Book and an ALA Notable Book and appeared on many best book of the year lists. His second novel, Kit’s Wilderness, won the Michael L. Printz Award for excellence in literature for young adults. His most recent novel, The Fire-Eaters, won the Boston Globe–Horn Book Award. His work has been translated into more than twenty languages. David Almond lives in England with his partner and their daughter.

  questions for discussion

  1. The book begins, “He arrived in Felling on a bright and icy February morning. Not so long ago, but it was a different age.” What do you think Davie means by “a different age”? Is it just the period in which the book takes place, or is it also a state of mind?

  2. On Part One: One, Davie chides Geordie for stealing the altar wine: “You’ll burn in Hell, Geordie Craggs.” Geordie disagrees: “You go to Hell for proper sins. Like nicking a million quid.” “Or killing somebody,” Davie adds. Do you agree with Geordie that only “proper sins” are punished? Do you think Davie still agrees with him by the end of the book?

  3. On Part One: Eight, Geordie chides Davie, “You’re too innocent, Davie. That’s your problem. You think everything’s nice and everybody’s nice. You’re naive, man…. One of these days, somebody’ll start taking advantage of you.” Do you agree with Geordie’s assessment? Do you believe this is the only reason Stephen selects Davie to help him?

  4. On Part Two: Two, Davie has a nightmare in which Stephen is shaping him out of clay. Reread this section, and consider it in the light of the rest of the story. Do you think that Davie is only dreaming here after all? If not, what do you think is happening?