Clay (3 page)

When she rounded the corner of her building, Sophia was relieved to find the park empty. There were no rowdy youngsters occupying the benches, no late-night dog walkers either. On the other side of the grass, cars and buses rumbled by, and some distance off in the direction of the shops a siren wailed and then cut out. The moon was out and nearly full, reefed in cloud; it wasn’t raining, although the air felt damp, and for the most part the park was still.

Sophia realised she was holding her breath. She let it out with a puff and went to sit on the benches for a moment. Behind them, generations of rotting leaves and council indifference had allowed brambles and nettles to run riot, while ivy had swarmed up the chain-link fence, black and glossy-looking in the moonlight. Now the tangled thicket harboured beer cans, mice and, doubtless, rats, given the chicken bones and takeaway boxes in the bin. Michaelmas, she thought; the final day for eating blackberries. Yesterday, rather. Not that anyone did, here. It was a shame, but that meant all the more for the mice, and they were far more deserving.

Here and there among the brambles pale circles shook and gleamed in the moonlight. Sophia had planted the first honesty seeds there – how many years ago? She no longer knew. Their purple flowers came up in spring, when she would come with secateurs and surreptitiously cut the bramble stems to give them a fighting chance, but it was in autumn that she loved them best, when the flowers gave way to flat, round seed pods like little moons. Now she sat down and reached carefully over the back of the bench to strip the silvery discs from the stems, and put them in her pocket.

She got up and approached the hole, which was bigger than it had looked from the kitchen. The pile of earth beside it retained the inner dimensions of the digger’s claw here and there, she saw, in brief angles and surfaces. Leaning heavily on her stick, she managed to lower herself into a kneeling position. It wasn’t elegant, but then so little was these days. Had she ever been elegant? she wondered. Probably not.

Some of the bulbs hadn’t been covered up at all, and so were easy to spot in the faint light falling from her kitchen window on the other side of the fence. She picked one up and brushed the soil from it; its papery skin was not unlike her own. Yet underneath it wasn’t pulpy, but firm and waxy, waiting to push up through the cold soil with all the coiled energy of spring. It smelled of earth and rain.

Painstakingly, Sophia fished the rest of the bulbs from their rows and piled them up on the grass beside the hole. There were fifty-seven. She could feel her knees stiffening, and knew there’d be hell to pay tomorrow. With her bare hands she scooped as much of the soil to one side as she could, feeling the good dirt working its way up under her fingernails, and every so often the cold, wet softness of a worm.

She sat on the edge of the hole for a moment, thinking through what to do next. Then, she began to fill her pockets with bulbs until Henry’s greatcoat was bulging with them, as were her cardigan pockets underneath. Using her stick and the metal fence, she slowly stood up, her moon shadow faint and ghostly on the grass.

In the dark, the hole looked as deep as a grave. Sophia began to throw the bulbs in one by one, letting them land wherever they would.

Finally, the bulbs were all in the ground. Sophia cast into the pit the honesty pods, and the flat seeds which had made their way out of them into the crevices of Henry’s pockets. Finally, and laboriously, she kicked the earth back in from the sides to cover the bulbs. Perhaps it didn’t look exactly as it had when the men from the council had clocked off, but she was willing to bet that tomorrow morning they would simply roll back the turf and move on to the next job.

Back at home, Sophia’s face was a pale blur in the black glass of her kitchen window. Before going to bed she scrubbed her old hands with Fairy and a nail brush, but it would be days before they were entirely clean again.

3

Dog Whipping Day

TC typed the name in again and hit return. There were lots of hits – some of them nothing like his dad, even some from abroad. Some of them were kids on Facebook, or people who had won things or done crimes. He clicked through to the next page, and the next. There must be a way you did it – find people. Like detectives, or police. How did you do it, if you didn’t even know what city to look in, if the person had been gone for months now? He didn’t know.

‘Do you need any help?’ It was the librarian, nosying up behind him.

TC hit the ‘x’, slung his bag on his back and headed for maths. His dad had probably written to him or something, and she’d chucked it. There was no way he’d just have left TC behind. Her, maybe; but not him. He’d have to start checking the post, find a way to be around when it came. Or just go through the bins.

In the corridor he was careful about eye contact, timing too. It was best not to be noticed. Sometimes you got put on the spot, asked questions and there wasn’t a right answer. Or there was something wrong about you, what you were wearing or doing. It wasn’t bullying – that was being punched and kicked – it was just that he was weird, and it was obvious. He couldn’t even blame them for noticing; he could see it himself. It leaked out of him, he couldn’t help it. Like you weren’t allowed to say certain jokes, because it came out wrong in your voice somehow, and then you’d get called a try-hard. It was just how things were, and trying to change it only made it worse.

It had been different with his dad. With his dad he’d felt like he was popular or something; interesting. He could say stuff and his dad didn’t laugh, unless he meant him to. Not that his dad was perfect or anything, not that everything had been like a film or whatever before he had gone, but he did actually like TC. Or love him or whatever.

His mum could see what the other kids thought of him, TC knew, but his dad thought everything was fine. That was good, because if he’d seen it he’d have thought it too. So it all had to be kept separate; inside. The fact that he was used to it didn’t mean it was easy.

When the police brought him home that day it had been awful. That man there, in their flat. First there was the police thing to get through; they wanted to talk to his mum about him, give them both grief. ‘Is this the boy’s father?’ they asked; he’d sworn at them then, got a talking-to.

The man – Jamal, she said his name was, like anyone cared – got lost fast. Then it was just him and his mum, looking at each other while the coppers went on about whatever. When they left, then it kicked off. He tried to imagine his dad, what he would want him to do. But he couldn’t do anything, not really. He was only a kid.

He’d been back since: Jamal, his mother’s . . . what? Friend? He cooked them steaks, the first TC had ever had. And when it got cold he brought TC some gloves. Jamal wanted TC to like him, and with a hard-learned sense of playground ruthlessness TC knew that put him beneath regard.

‘Is he your boyfriend, then?’ TC asked as they watched telly one night.

‘Look, TC –’

‘You shouldn’t have a boyfriend.’

‘Well, luckily it ain’t up to you.’

‘What about Dad?’

‘What about him?’

‘Are you gonna tell him?’

‘Tell him?’

‘When he gets back. Because I am.’

‘TC – your dad ain’t coming back.’

‘Yes he is.’

‘He ain’t, OK?’

‘Why not?’

‘Cos it’s over.’

‘You won’t let him come back. He’d come back but you won’t let him.’

‘It ain’t like that.’

‘What, then?’

But she turned the telly up and told him to get off her back.

Maths went on for years. He was good at it, something he made sure none of the other kids knew; as long as you didn’t put your hand up it was OK.

It was too cold to go to the common, so after school TC went home, climbing the four flights despite the fact that the lift, for once, was working. He hated the lift, though; it was like being eaten by the huge building, going up and down in its throat like an Adam’s apple – and anyway, the stairs were easy.

His mum was asleep on the settee, the lounge stale and close, so he got some crisps and went to his room. It was big enough only for his bed with its old blue covers, and a little chest of drawers; his clothes and things mostly went in a plastic zip-up hamper under the bed. It was OK, though; it had a door he could shut, and a window, level with the tree canopy, that looked down to the waste ground behind the tower blocks. It was almost like a hide.

He got out all his Lego men from a box under the bed and made them fight with his Luke Skywalker. Even though Luke didn’t have a head he was still much stronger than they were, and they couldn’t beat him. TC had almost a whole shoebox of Lego. Other people took it to school sometimes to show what they’d made, but he didn’t want to. What if you lost some, or someone took it? No, it was better just to keep it and play with it by yourself.

When he’d finished he put everything back in the box along with a corvid skull, a stone with a hole all the way through, a lapis-blue jay’s feather and a mysterious, verdigris half-pence piece that he’d found on the common, and pushed the box back under the bed.

That evening the wind shifted direction and began to blow from the north-east. It battered the tower blocks, throwing rain like gravel against the glass only to quieten, take breath, and hurl itself again. TC lay on his bed and felt the windows tremble, and pretended he was out at sea.

Across the high road from the block where TC lived was a dilapidated Edwardian terrace, shops below, flats above. Over the corner premises, a second-hand furniture shop now for many years, the dim shape of a man moved at a grimy sash window. The room behind him had grown dark while Jozef was working, but he whittled mostly by feel anyway.

A man’s voice called his name up the bare stairwell with its stark bulb, the two syllables bouncing flatly off the walls. He stood and stretched his big hands, clicked the knuckles. ‘Yes, I am coming,’ he called. The rain had slowed, the wind was dropping, and the sky was pressed velvet blue against the window. Time for work.

Before leaving his little room, spartan as a monk’s cell, he placed a half-finished carving no bigger than his thumb on the windowsill with its fellows. It was unclear to him what it would become, but it already had the rough lineaments of an animal. He would wait to finish it until its nature declared itself beneath his blunt fingers.

Barely an hour between the end of one job and the start of the next, and nearly all of it spent whittling. Jozef sighed to himself as he jogged down the narrow stairs to where Musa the little Turk waited for him in the darkened shop, his outline barely visible among the stacks of second-hand furniture, lamps and old TVs. The street lights flickered on as he pulled the shop door to behind them, bathing the wooden creatures on the windowsill above in flat, orange light.

It was past three when he returned, bringing with him the smell of hot fat from the takeaway in his hair and skin. A familiar whimpering attended his progress up the stairs. He did not like the dog, yet he would walk it most nights rather than hear it cry in the empty upstairs room until dawn. It was ugly, bullish and simple, with a scarred muzzle and torn ears, bandy legs and a perpetual grin. It didn’t have a name, so Jozef called it Znajda, but only to himself.

As he opened the door it shouldered its way out and clattered down the stairs to wait for him in the hall. There was no lead, or collar for that matter, but it never strayed more than a few paces from him, his soft whistle enough to call it instantly to his side.

Back outside, Jozef turned off the high road, away from the lurid chicken parlours, the busy night buses and the 3 a.m. altercations, and felt the first rumour of rain on his face. By the time he reached the wide open acres of the common the weather had set in, and he wished he had made for somewhere with more shelter. The dog didn’t care, nosing the drifts of wet leaves a few paces ahead or falling behind for a moment to give something its particular attention, but Jozef had little love for the place and wished briefly for bed, the dip in the old grey mattress first formed by other bodies than his, but comforting enough at this time of night.

Now he took the wide path onto the common under an avenue of plane trees, which, unlike the bare horse chestnuts, still afforded a little shelter. Behind him he could hear the occasional car wash past, nearly all of them minicabs at this hour, but the particular silence of a city park was closing about him and was all the more absolute for being surrounded by such distant sounds. A siren corkscrewed up, a borough away, one of only a few that would sound for the rest of that wet night. For as the weather front swept west across the city, driving its inhabitants indoors, the phones rang less frequently at the control room and more cars remained parked up idle at the police stations, the hard rain flensing the grime from their metal flanks.

Jozef and Znajda were not alone on the common. Above them roosted a silent convocation of starlings, their bodies dark balls against the greater darkness of the sky. Now and then one would shake the rain from its feathers, and a few eyed the progress of the bull terrier on the path below before settling back to sleep.

As he felt the first cold dampness enter his trainers, Jozef put his head down and picked up his pace. It was no night to be out, and he took the most direct route off the common, turning into Leasow Road, a wide, gently curving street double-parked with cars and lined with Edwardian villas, their position determined generations ago by a long-forgotten stream. Few who lived there had any idea that it still ran deep below their cellars, tamed, these days, by purposeful Victorian brickwork.