My Year Without Matches

by Claire Dunn

  With the fire crackling away, I settle back on my swag and open Women Who Run with the Wolves to a random chapter. It is a fairytale titled “Red Shoes”.

  “Once upon a time in a village there lived a poor motherless child who had no shoes …” I read.

  Over time the child saved scraps of cloth and sewed herself a pair of red shoes. Even though she was poor, and spent her days foraging for food in the woods until past dark, the shoes made her feel rich. They were rough but she loved them.

  One day as she walked down the road in her red shoes, a gilded carriage pulled up next to her. Inside was a wealthy woman who promised her a world of riches, and so the girl went with her. Despite her new and fine garments, the girl grew sad, for she was made to sit still and not speak. When she asked after her red shoes, the woman told her they were burnt along with the rest of her clothes.

  I’m unable to stay awake and drift into a dream. I, too, am wearing a pair of bright red shoes. However, instead of being homemade, these are mail-order, cheap Chinese copies of the original. The left strap is broken, and I stick both legs up in the air in a compromising position while a man tries unsuccessfully to fix it.

  I wake heavy and read to the fairytale’s end. The girl forgets her homemade shoes when she’s given a brand-new, fire-engine-red pair. So enchanted is she by their beauty, she is deaf to any warnings. Dancing and dancing in her precious red shoes, her ecstasy turns to horror when she discovers that she cannot stop. Instead of dancing the shoes, the shoes dance her, onwards and onwards, threatening to dance her to death. In desperation, she eventually begs an executioner to cut off her feet.

  Tears of recognition spill down my cheeks. I know that girl, I know that dance – that relentless, spinning, crazed dance. All this time I’ve been wearing someone else’s shoes, dancing someone else’s dance. A wave of exhaustion sweeps over me, and I collapse back onto the swag.

  How long ago did I trade in my own shoes? When did I exchange them for inferior reproductions? The feeling of a memory whose image won’t surface causes me to shed fresh tears.

  It has been Wild Woman calling me all these years, rapping at my door, howling in my ears, winding roots around my ankles. She watched as I allowed myself to be seduced by counterfeits, to follow dead-end roads paved with inherited expectations, but still she came looking for me, leaving a trail of breadcrumbs dropped from a hole in her skirt pocket, in the hope that I would someday come to find her. I’m here now, with a homemade patchwork shelter and the wild woods all around me, but there’s no telling yet if it’s all smoke and mirrors.

  Malcolm’s words take on a new gravitas. I need to find my original shoes and stitch back together what I lost years ago, what was taken from me. And, at the same time, I must find a way to shed the shiny imitations before it’s too late.

  4.

  “Darlings, by the end of this workshop, you will hand me every single metal item from your kitchen,” Claudia, our primitive pottery teacher, informs us with a deadpan German twang.

  Seated on the ground, she spreads her legs, as thick as fence posts, around a tub. Her hands form a dragnet in the murky water, fishing out a grapefruit-sized chunk of red clay, which she begins to knead ferociously. Blood-red water runs up her forearms, staining the edges of the khaki shirt rolled to her elbows. At intervals, she brushes back the loose brown curls that have fallen over her eyes with her left wrist, leaving a smudge of rust across her forehead.

  “Sweeties, this is how it goes. You will rise at dawn. You will join me for two hours of yoga. You may swim. You may eat. If you’re lucky you may even sleep. Otherwise you will be with the clay. If you sit on the toilet you work the clay. If you walk to the kitchen you work the clay. We have such short three days, and much to do. Do I have your 100 percent?”

  The six of us are straight-backed and silent, spellbound by the sight of this Amazonian woman punishing an innocent ball of clay.

  She raises one eyebrow. We’re obviously meant to answer.

  Shaun clears his throat. “Well, if it’s okay with you, I’d like to keep it pretty flexible. I’m not sure that I’m really into … you know … pottery.” His voice trails off when his suggestion is met with a steely glare.

  “Really? Girls’ stuff? Too easy for you?” Claudia says, arching one eyebrow higher than I thought possible.

  “Sweetie, that not okay with me and not okay with the clay. The flesh of Earth Mother deserves more respect than that. You either stay now or go.”

  Shaun looks down.

  Wow, I like this woman. Kate said she was known as the primitive Martha Stewart when she lived for a time in the US wilderness, her thatched shelter emanating the smells of slow-roasted roadkill and blueberry acorn pancakes, all cooked – of course – in her own pottery. To enter her domicile with a skerrick of plastic or metal on your body was to do so at your peril.

  I’ve been looking forward to meeting her. I’ve also been looking forward to the workshop. Not just because pottery sounds plain fun, but mostly because I share her vision of a metal-free kitchen. In just three days’ time I could be stirring a bubbling ceramic pot, hung with homemade string over a homemade fire, spooning out my meal with a short-handled clay ladle into a bowl made so my fingertips just touch as they wrap around the warm earthenware. That’s when things will really start feeling primitive. That’s when Wild Woman can really feel at home.

  Claudia throws us each a smooth ball. The clay is cold and harder than I imagined. I struggle to make a dent in it with the base of my palm.

  “We not try to make anything. We say hello to the clay,” Claudia says. “Tune into what it wants to give, how it wants to be moved.”

  My clay seems to be telling me it wants to be a rock. After a few minutes my fingers are tired. I look over at Claudia, her sausage-thick fingers massaging deep into her clay.

  “You are not controller of the clay but servant to it. Ask not what you want, but what it wants of you.”

  I’m impatient to start a bowl. There’s no need to rush, I remind myself, we’ve got three days. The clay gradually begins to yield, the warmth from my fingers softening the ball.

  Claudia eventually moves us onto pinch pots. The good ol’ pinch pot. It’s a term I have not heard since I was making play dough in preschool. It puts me right back there, the smell of salty red dough and squashed bananas in lunch boxes. This is a bit like adult preschool, I think with a smile. Shelters and mud pies and fires and berry picking and bare feet.

  “Finished,” says Shaun, holding up a lopsided pot.

  Claudia looks over in disdain. “Would you build a house on top of that? The pinch pot is the foundation. We don’t go anywhere until is perfect.”

  I concentrate hard to make the walls even, the base not too thin or thick. None of us dare to suggest ours is perfect, and my belly is growling by the time Claudia directs us to the next step, demonstrating wordlessly how to build the pot up by rolling long, even clay snakes and laying them around the top rim, integrating them with a sweep of her thumb inside and out. Her hands work deftly, snakes coiling up quick and strong. In a matter of minutes she is cradling a bowl in her hands that I would be happy to take home. If it’s that easy, by the end of this workshop I’m going to have a complete dinner set.

  It’s not. My snakes are lumpy sausages, breaking at the skinny points when I pick them up. The sides keep thinning out under the enthusiasm of my thumb, leaving a rim thin and brittle. I try to patch it up, but Claudia reaches over and squeezes it back into a ball with one hand and a firm, “Begin again.”

  We fall into silent clay-absorption. Dan’s tongue hangs out as he works. He looks almost calm, which is quite a difference from our last intensive session. He actually did try his hardest to leave after his dramatic dummy spit at the cordage workshop. After his van wouldn’t start, he walked all night with Jessie to get to the highway and stuck his
thumb out. A day later and he still had no ride, which he took as a sign and limped back into camp, collapsing into his “rocking chair” (a sheet suspended from the rafters) where he stayed for the next two weeks, staring blankly out into the bush, even turning his phone off. When he appeared at the evening fire one night he was subdued, cutting off any questions with a cheerful, “Well, folks, seems like this place won’t let me go.” Something had popped, not just in him, but in all of us. We weren’t schoolkids here by law anymore. We could check out if we wanted to. It was our entirely our choice to stay, and our choice what we did with our days.

  For me that choice had suddenly become a lot more complicated. I wasn’t here to just learn skills and unwind anymore. Apparently I was here to learn how to be a woman. A Wild Woman. The whole question of doing what I felt like was proving to be deceptively hard (like pottery). The two-day holiday was easy, because it was a finite amount of time during which I was permitted to do whatever I desired. It was fun, and outrageously self-indulgent, but I couldn’t keep that up day to day. Who would thatch my shelter? The question of what I feel like doing has lately been countered by a terse voice telling me, “We can’t always do what we feel like.” And then I get confused about whether I’m doing something I want to do or feel like I should do. Other times I feel like doing two different things, and when my body droops and looks longingly at the hammock, I pretend I don’t hear it.

  *

  An hour later my bowl is still struggling to progress past halfway, the middle-aged spread blowing out the top. My fingers are beginning to cramp, and I’m starving but don’t dare mention it. Neither do the others, despite Ryan already having produced a damn good-looking bowl and started on his second.

  “Chloe, sweetie, fetch me the tin,” Claudia says, pointing in the direction of a round metal container on the trestle table.

  Chloe opens it gingerly, as if expecting something to leap out and bite. She gasps. We crowd around the overflowing assortment of homemade chocolates. There are dainty milk-chocolate stars and moons, white shells, toffee-caramel crunches, and strawberries and citrus peels dipped in dark chocolate.

  “Whoa,” exclaims Dan, his eyes opening wide.

  “Chocolate is antioxidant,” Claudia explains, a smile playing at the edges of her mouth. “Two each.”

  I pick out a dark-chocolate almond cluster and a raw cacao bliss ball, and close my eyes to savour the taste. Good God, chocolate. I’d almost forgotten. The tin’s presence proves an equally effective way to tame the herd. After lunch, even Shaun settles in without his usual ants-in-pants restlessness.

  The sun arcs up and over our circle as we learn how to pummel, preen and paddle clay. On my eleventh attempt I manage to forge a reasonable bowl, albeit one with a definite tilt. Claudia gives it a wary glance but lets me sit it on the drying mat. I know it’s far from pottery perfection, but I’ve got a whole kitchen to kit out. I reach for another clay chunk.

  Nikki stops with a heavy sigh and stretches her head slowly from side to side.

  “How’s your neck, Nik?” Chloe asks, smiling at her unintended poetry.

  “Not so great,” Nik says, turning stiffly in Chloe’s direction.

  “Could you … help … move my chair?” she soon asks Ryan timidly. Annoyance flickers over his face momentarily before he jumps up to shift the folding camp chair out of the sun. Nik whispers a thank you and lowers herself slowly back into a seated position.

  Poor Nik. She and Ryan have an arrangement whereby he pulls grass for her and she helps bundle his. But in reality she needs more help than that. Even craning her head to tie a knot is painful. It’s a strain a new relationship doesn’t need. I was surprised the other day when Ryan cooeed down my trail for no particular reason. I had the feeling he wanted to talk, but he stayed as clammed up as ever.

  Claudia stands behind Nik, wrapping her large hands around Nik’s neck. Tears well in Nikki’s eyes at the unexpected touch. “At least I’ve got lots of time to spend at my sit spot,” she says, with forced cheer. Claudia takes a long, noisy breath in through her nose, her half-closed eyes wavering almost imperceptibly. Nikki closes hers, two tears washing clear paths down her clay-stained cheeks.

  “It was same with me in woods,” Claudia says quietly, looking out into the fading light as if reliving a memory. “You get what you need … not what you want.”

  Towards dusk Claudia appears from behind her campervan with a steaming pot of pumpkin soup, home-baked rye bread and another round of chocolate.

  We are now as pliable as the clay in her hands, happy to be patted and prodded with matriarchal tough love. At first light the next day we all obediently appear for the “hour of power” yoga and pilates regimen, before settling cross-legged at the pottery circle.

  My hands seem to have been practising overnight, guiding a new bowl upwards with some measure of skill I didn’t have yesterday. Still, it doesn’t come easy, and I struggle to contain the rim. Claudia has been eyeballing me all morning but not saying much. I get the sense she wants to, then pulls back.

  Instead of our needing a chocolate incentive, today Claudia needs to remind us to eat and drink. Our entire focus is channelled into the bowls, pots, mugs and cutlery manifesting in our hands. She shows us how to attach handles using a slurry and cross-hatch surface glue, giving rise to an entirely new range of decorative dinnerware. On occasion she steps in, and with a few sure strokes massages the contrary piece back into line. Like ours, her fingers are never idle. If we flatter ourselves that we are getting good, Claudia sets a new benchmark with another gorgeous bowl, an exquisite ladle or new decorative print.

  The completion of each piece is like a birth, and I’m flooded with oxytocin each time I deliver the final polish with the burnishing stone. It’s only when I finally release it onto the drying mat that I remember I’m busting for the loo and starving. None of us have washed since we started, and we are all coated with a similar shade of ochre. Hour after hour we sit, as if under a spell, our usual fractious energy focused on the clay. There is a synergy to our learning too. Somebody will master a new skill (usually Ryan), and soon the whole group catches on.

  My back and neck are aching, but I am almost oblivious to the pain, too intent on the clay creation. After a quick pee, a quick stretch in the sun and a handful of nuts, I’m back on the floor reaching into the clay bucket. This is what I love about this year. I’m crafting the tools for living from my own hands, from the earth; beauty and functionality are one and the same, transforming the mundane into the sacred. My shelter, my fire-kit, and now my pottery are my babies. Each piece is infused with the effort, struggle and inspiration that went into making them. I’m reminded of how I felt during that first skills course – giddy, like I was falling in love.

  It’s unusually cool tonight, and I’ve dug out the first of my woollen jumpers. The evening fire is like late summer sun on my skin, and we huddle around it as steam rises from our soup mugs. Chloe is giving Nikki a neck rub, while Jessie has collapsed on top of my feet. Claudia stands behind us just short of the firelight. I glimpse her face when the twigs Shaun is throwing on the fire flare momentarily. Her forehead is furrowed. Is she worried or just thoughtful?

  “Sweeties, you have until first light to finish your pottery. Tomorrow we get ready for firing,” she says.

  Tiredness is heavy behind my eyes, my neck contracted in knots from hunching. I have a couple of decent bowls, and a cooking pot I’m fairly proud of. I could stop here. But I won’t, not without at least trying for more. I’ve dreamt of having a water urn since I arrived. It’s ambitious, at least twice the size of my cooking pot, but I’ve got all night.

  “Should I stoke the fire?” Claudia asks, eyeing us curiously.

  I look around the circle at the others, waiting for their responses. “Count me in,” Ryan says. The others nod. “Definitely,” I add, smiling.

  “A
lright, bring on the pottery party!” Dan says, jumping up to fetch more wood.

  I arrange my nest for the night, sitting cross-legged on a grass mat with my back to the fire. Drawing out a large chunk of pure white clay, I close my eyes as the water drips down my fingers, imagining from what seam or riverbed it was drawn, how long it lay in the earth before excavation. Breaking off a small piece, I begin to work it between my palms. The others amble in, forming a loose circle around me. Nikki hums a familiar tune to which I add a quiet harmony. A plump moon rises above the tree line.

  There is little talk as bowls and mugs, cooking pots, forks, spoons, plates and beads take their place around the fire. Every so often someone rises to turn the pottery a few degrees, baking the pieces on a slow all-night rotation, mirroring the moon’s track above us.

  The moon is tracking too fast for my task, though, the urn struggling to maintain integrity past its widest point. “Damn it,” I say under my breath, as yet again it collapses inwards. Hot anger bubbles in my chest, and I slap more water on the rim. It’s a quick fix, and one Claudia warned us against. She is watching me but still offers nothing when I smash it back into a ball and begin again.

  “Fuck it,” I say, as my third attempt ends in a flop. My neck is killing me and I bend over, groaning. Shaun has gone to bed, and I wonder whether I should too.