Clay (17 page)

‘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.

Linda took the secateurs and began attacking the choisya. There was probably a specific method she should follow, but it looked vigorous enough; it would surely survive. She had read that the cut stems smelled of basil, but to her they were more like cat. She threw them onto the grass behind her.

Next to the choisya was the area she had dug over for Daisy to have as her own. They had gone on a day trip to see the bluebells at a big National Trust property out of town, and on the way back Daisy had asked for her own flower bed. So Linda had marked out a bed a couple of metres long, ruthlessly rooting up French lavender, stachys and several allium corms, and the next day had edged it with little rolls of split logs. She had pictured neat rows of seedlings, the two of them tending the bed together, and to that end had bought Daisy several packets of seeds: forget-me-nots, sweet williams and nasturtiums, chives, salad leaves and rocket. But so far none of them had gone into the ground, and weeds were coming up instead.

‘She’ll do it in her own time,’ Steven reassured her. ‘Don’t make it a chore.’ He was right, Linda knew; and anyway, there was no sense in feeling snubbed. At nine years old now and with a houseful of toys, only Daisy’s desire for a kitten had lasted longer than a couple of months. That, and her correspondence with her grandmother.

Sophia’s letters often came by post, Daisy taking her replies with her when she visited her grandmother. Sometimes she would ask her mother for help with a long word, but for the most part Linda had little idea what they wrote to each other about.

‘Mummy, when will it rain?’ asked Daisy now. Linda stood back and looked critically at the choisya. Her daughter was gazing fiercely at the sky, one grubby hand shading her eyes, Susannah like a grave little shadow behind her.

‘I don’t know, darling. Why?’

‘We need the worms to come up and they only come up when it rains,’ sighed Daisy. ‘I’m going to ask Daddy,’ and she ran inside, leaving Susannah hesitating on the lawn.

‘Why do you need worms, Susie?’ Linda asked. ‘Is it for a game?’

‘No, it’s . . .’

‘Not a game.’ Linda’s mind was half on the choisya, now showing rather more of its pale trunk than she had planned.

‘For mud pies. Daisy says worm casts are the best kind of mud. Her granny told her.’ And with that Susannah ran off after Daisy into the house.

The sudden rush of memory sent Linda’s hand to her chest. Of course! You collected the worm casts in the morning and mixed them with a little water, and you got the smoothest mud, without any bits in it. Then you put it in fairy-cake cases and let them dry in the sun. The little grey cakes were suddenly so vivid to her, stacked on the flat’s outside windowsills to dry; and there was a feeling to the memory, too, of her and her mummy doing something together, and it being nice. Why had she never thought to show Daisy how to make them herself?

She had a vision of the little park in blazing summer, Michael pedalling away from her across the cracked, straw-brown grass in the tin jeep Dad had painted with old gloss paint because it rusted, herself a little girl making a house for her Womble behind the benches. And there was the little bike she and Michael shared, with its fat white tyres, and her mother’s gardening gloves, shaped by long use like carapaces of her strong brown hands.

And there, of course, was her father: sanding the spindles of a chair-back at the side of the flats, or sitting inside in his favourite chair with his evening drink. How proud she had been when he taught her to make a Tom Collins: two ice cubes, a finger of gin, a little Jif lemon, some icing sugar and then soda water to the top. Mother preferred a whisky soda, and would make it herself.

Nothing was ever lost, she reflected, and wondered what Daisy would remember from her own early years. Making a snowman together, perhaps? Though you didn’t get to choose.

Before going inside she carried the pile of cuttings to the heap at the back of the garden. On the back wall of the house the barometer was falling.

The rain began quite suddenly, while she was making supper. Steven came in from dropping Susie home and switched the kitchen light on, and Linda realised it had grown dim outside. Then came the rain, fat drops that darkened the patio and ran down the window in sheets. A distant flicker of lightning brought Daisy scuttling downstairs from her room.

‘I like storms,’ she announced staunchly, to no one in particular. Linda rattled the saucepan lid over the sound of the thunder.

But no more came. While they were eating the rain thinned to a patter and then petered out, and as the breeze picked up it tore a ragged hole in the cloud, a low sun returning to light up the sparkling garden in which every living corner dripped and steamed.

Steven opened the back door and breathed in petrichor, the rich green smell that follows rain. On the gable above him a blackbird shook the rain from its feathers and cocked a beady eye down at the sunlit lawn where worms rose and weeds were sending down secret roots, and where tomorrow a small girl would set about the worm casts before breakfast with a bucket and spade.

After Daisy had been persuaded to bed, Steven and Linda sat at the kitchen table with a bottle of Bordeaux and the back door open, watching as the last of the light drained from the sky. Linda wore an old cardigan of her mother’s, left there after a visit, and picked at the earth under her fingernails. ‘My hands look the oldest,’ she said, holding one out for Steven’s inspection. ‘They’re even worse than my neck.’

‘Don’t be silly. They’re perfectly fine.’

‘All right for you to say, you’re the Younger Man,’ she replied, the soubriquet so old now it was threadbare. Still, though, he smiled.

‘Ten years is nothing. I’m a man, I’ll still die first.’

Like Dad, Linda thought, but didn’t say it. ‘Do you think she should have had brothers and sisters?’

‘Maybe, maybe not. Why are you worrying about it again?’

‘I’m not worrying. I was just thinking about Michael today. We used to play together, you know? All the time.’

‘She’s got plenty of friends to play with.’

‘I know, but it’s different with siblings. You have to get along. And you have to share. You don’t get everything your own way.’

‘You think she’s spoiled.’

‘No, I just think . . . it’s just her and us, you know? She gets all our time, all our attention.’

‘Paradise, I’d say.’

‘Well, now it is, I’m sure. But maybe there should be more people in her life.’

‘There’s your mother.’

‘That’s not what I meant; I meant people to share us with. Mum’s a grown-up.’

‘Hardly.’

‘What do you mean, hardly? She’s still got all her faculties, you know.’

‘I know, I didn’t mean that. I meant she’s more like a friend to Daisy. They’re as bad as each other half the time.’

Linda was silent.

‘I don’t mean she does any harm, love,’ said Steven. ‘It’s lovely that Daisy gets on with her gran.’

‘I know,’ Linda sighed. ‘I know. It’s just . . . I look at them, and I wish that things were better. Easier. You know, with me and Mum. I love her – of course I do – but when we’re together it’s like – it’s like –’

‘I know, love,’ said Steven. ‘But she doesn’t mean to rub you up the wrong way. She’s just . . . forthright. She means well, you know that. She loves you, darling –’ but Linda looked away.

The wine was low in the bottle, and it was fully dark outside. Steven fetched some notepaper from the study and handed it to Linda. ‘Your mum’s handwriting is getting worse, so Daisy asked me to help read it. Go on.’

It was Sophia’s most recent letter. ‘
Dear Daisy,
’ it began,

I have found where the swifts are nesting. They are in the tower of St Francis’s Church! It’s not a very high tower, but it’s got lots of nooks and crannies for them to get in and out. Have your baby swallows fledged yet?

You mustn’t worry about the hedgehog. It’s summer and he will be roaming far and wide, eating slugs and snails and having adventures. You probably won’t see him again until the days get shorter and he starts to think about finding somewhere to hibernate. Your garden is definitely his favourite, but I think he probably visits a few different ones near you as well.