Clay

by Melissa Harrison

  At first, Musa did not want to let Jozef leave the dog at the takeaway.

  ‘Please. Just one night,’ repeated Jozef. ‘I pick her up tomorrow, I swear.’

  ‘Joe, you should take her back to Denny, you know,’ replied Musa; but his hand was gently massaging her scarred ears. ‘Is his dog. He gonna breed from her again soon.’

  ‘He makes her live upstairs, Musa, he never even walk her. You know that.’

  Musa shook his head. ‘You think you can keep her secret, my friend? Where will you go? She can’t stay here.’

  ‘I’ll find a new place to live,’ Jozef replied, realising suddenly that he should have done so a long time ago. ‘I’ll ask around tomorrow. I don’t want to work for Denny no more, anyway.’

  ‘Where will you get money, then?’ asked the little Turk; but he already knew what Jozef would say next.

  The second-hand furniture shop was dark when Jozef got back, the stairs unlit. He let himself into his room and switched on the light. He had lived there for months, but it bore barely any trace of him at all.

  He lay on the bed and stared at the ceiling. It would be good to find some extra work to supplement his money from the takeaway; he would definitely need more cash, even with the extra shifts Musa had given him. At least he had not gambled away his wages for the last couple of weeks.

  A little bedsit would do fine. Somewhere warm where he and Znajda could sleep and where he could cook for himself. He would buy his own sheets and towels, kitchen things; he’d walk Znajda every morning, and find new places for them to explore at the weekends.

  The mattress with its dent was like the shallow scrape a hare makes in a field, and as he lay there Jozef was reminded of his dream. He could already imagine the coiled and graceful musculature of the hare he would carve; but first he would finish the creature he had begun. He got up and went to the window. There it was on the sill, smiling up at him. He picked it up and ran his thumb over it, picturing how Znajda’s strong chest would push bravely out of the wood, and how her broad head with its soft ears would acquire a patina over time.

  The pigeons lined up fat and flea-ridden on the ledges across the street regarded the yellow window for a moment, where behind the glass a big man leaned on the sill and began to coax a dog’s form from an end of old wood.

  8

  Candlemas

  January had been dull and mild. But as the new year wore on, the temperatures dropped, and the month went out on a hard frost which silvered the city from the suburbs to its asphalt heart. By the afternoon of 1 February the lawns had thawed, but that night the frost came again, and the next day they stayed white until nightfall. And each night after that the frost drove deeper and deeper down into the ground.

  First the puddles in the park formed a thin skin of ice, then a rocking lid; a few more days into February and they were solid, even the mud around them frozen hard under the dog walkers’ feet. Beside the railway embankment the brambles’ dauntless leaves looked suddenly limp and drab.

  Along Leasow Road ice had bound the gravel on the driveways so that it no longer gave so readily underfoot. In pots and front gardens the last surviving pelargoniums now drooped bletted and blackening; the north-facing back gardens, deprived even of the cold sun, were claimed utterly, the frost reaching even to the dankest, most sheltered corners. Only a few early snowdrops raised their heads from the frozen ground.

  The birds became bold; hundreds were lost to the ammil every night, and hunger drove them to new braveries with each unrelenting day. They froze where they slept in the hedges and trees, their bodies falling secretly to the ground like leaves. They were merely feet and feathers, hardly a mouthful for the city’s sleek cats and opportunistic foxes.

  Monday was Bristol, and a dim, early start. Linda hurried to her car with her arms crossed, each breath forming a cloud that hung in the still air even after she had moved through it. In the car she turned the heating up full and decided against removing her coat, although she knew that halfway there she’d be uncomfortable. She thrust her hands between her knees for a moment, her shoulders hunched, leg muscles taut against the icy air of the footwell. Something crackled in her coat pocket: her mother’s letter to Daisy. She had had supper with them the night before, only remembering to give Linda the letter on the short drive back to the estate.

  Something about her mother’s visit rankled. What was it? Idly, she turned it over in her mind; there was always something. That was it: Daisy’s school project. ‘Is it all right if I help Daisy at the weekend?’ Sophia had asked. ‘Or does it have to be handed in before then?’ It wasn’t that she hadn’t known about the ‘Our Seasons’ project, just that she hadn’t realised Daisy had asked her grandmother for help. She must have looked surprised. ‘Well, love, you mustn’t mind. You’re not a very outdoors person,’ her mother had said.

  Impatiently she stuffed the letter in the glovebox, and tuned the radio to a talk station to keep her company on the long drive. The weather report sounded like an incantation against the gods.

  In town she drove aggressively, but without the fine judgement to back it up. She knew all the routes out of the city well, and she was confident in her choices, but she wasn’t good at anticipating other drivers and once or twice had to brake hard; several times she chose to cut people off, dealing with it simply by refusing to meet the other driver’s eyes.

  Once she was on the motorway and clear of the city she began to relax. The sun had begun to throw the trees’ shadows long across the silver fields, and by nine it was warming the left side of her face. The sky was a theatre of clouds, the hard shoulders patrolled by pairs of crows, and red kites wheeled overhead, riding the road’s rising thermals in wide, sweeping curves.

  The frost was disappearing fast from the flanks of the fields facing the sun, though it lingered in the lees and in the pockets. Where it had gone, the fields were mostly ridged and brown, although one or two were baized with green. Linda wondered vaguely what could be growing in them at this time of year – weeds, perhaps.

  In a few of the fields left fallow, wrecked lorries acted as makeshift advertising hoardings. One was fashioned from an old shipping container which had been gently collapsing for several years. It was for a debt-collection agency, although the telephone number, with its outdated dialling code, was now partly missing. Below it the sheltered field was grazed by sheep, lit golden, as the sun crested the rise, like a Constable pastoral.

  She pulled over because something hit the windscreen, and once she had stopped she found she was shaking. What the hell was it? She thought she had seen feathers, a brief flash of black and white like a subliminal message thumping on the glass, but what on earth would a bird be doing flying around on the motorway? But then, they were notoriously stupid, flying into aeroplanes’ engines and the like. The windscreen wasn’t damaged, anyway, and for that she was grateful.

  Whatever it was it had gone; there was no dead bird anywhere that she could see. Linda got out of the car, pulling her coat around her, and took a breath. The motorway was busy, and she turned her back on the lorries thundering past. On the other side of the crash barrier was a wood, the winter trunks faintly green with algae. Some of the trees were lagged with ivy, the trunks teacosied in glossy leaves, the branches jutting bare.

  Something moved deep in the trees. Linda peered in, but could make nothing out. There it was again: a little brown bird running up a trunk like a mouse. It circled around the trunk, moving out of view. Not an outdoor person, she thought, bipping the car doors locked and stepping over the barrier into the wood.

  Beyond the tangle of saplings and undergrowth at its margins the wood was trackless, but dry underfoot: there was a thick covering of brown leaves and little husks on the ground, and few plants grew between the smooth trunks. Almost immediately, the roar of the motorway receded behind her.

  To Linda’s surprise, it was more than just a windbreak for the road. She had expected a field on the other side, but after a couple of minute
s’ walking she was still surrounded by trees. What was the point of it? It didn’t look as though people were cutting it for timber, and it was too close to the motorway for paintballing. She wondered if it had a name, and who it belonged to. At least there was no danger of getting lost. The sound of the traffic was still a dull hum behind her; she could follow it back to the car any time she liked.

  She knew that what she was doing was out of character, but perhaps that was the point. ‘You’ll never guess what I did today,’ she’d say to Steven that night, when she got in. How surprised he’d be, and who could blame him? But, ‘Nothing wrong with a walk in the woods, sweet pea,’ her father would have said. She could see him now, striding in front of her in his long black coat. And if she put her foot down she could still be in Bristol on time.

  She pushed on, and it began to seem as though she was in another world. The trees had closed around her, and for a moment she felt that the wood could well go on forever, in all directions, her imaginary map of the country covered with an ancient tangled darkness instead of the straight lines of her car journeys. Of course it wasn’t so, but she stopped anyway and listened for the distant, reassuring sound of the traffic. Was that it? She wasn’t sure. Yet she hadn’t walked for very long; it should be easy enough to find the car again.

  All around her the smooth grey trunks reached up straight and leafless to the sky, the ground beneath mulched in russet leaves. Yet something near her foot snagged her eye. Pushing through the leaf litter was a tiny green shoot, with all the unmistakable energy of a bulb. Once she had seen one, she saw they were everywhere. It came to her from somewhere that felt like childhood that these were bluebells, and that in a couple of months this tiny, forgotten corner of woodland would be a paradise, the cars speeding by unheeding as the wood performed a miracle entirely of its own making, designed only for itself and for no human eyes at all. She wondered if anybody in the entire world knew it but her.

  Back on the hard shoulder the car ticked as it cooled. The GPS on the dashboard reflected the sky; in the glovebox was Sophia’s reply to her granddaughter, a clutch of black honesty seeds in their milky discs sleeping in its folds.

  What had begun with a few grey clouds chasing their shadows across the fields had become a legion, and the sky was heavy and dull. A flock of lapwings, nearly a thousand of them, took off as one from a field in which the winter wheat was just coming through, their broad, blunt wings flashing white and black as they turned. They had arrived nearly six weeks ago, riding a north-easterly from Scandinavia, to eat insects and invertebrates on the Somerset Levels, just as they had been doing for time out of mind – although the big flocks, tens of thousands strong, were a rarity these days. They wheeled and resettled further upwind as Linda emerged from the beech hanger into the field and turned to toil back along the field margin to the road. The wind picked up, gusting over the contours of the frozen land, and brought with it the smell of snow.

  In the city it was simply another miserable winter day. Home time: TC decided against going to the common because of the cold. Craning up from the street he could see the lounge light was off; that meant his mum was out and it was OK to watch TV and mess around.

  The flat was dark and cold when he let himself in, but he switched the fire on and soon the lounge was warm enough. He made himself toast and found a Coke in the fridge, and sprawled on the settee. It would be brilliant to live all by yourself, he thought. You could do anything you wanted. You could watch TV all night or never, ever wash, and nobody could say anything.

  You’d smell, though. He hoped he didn’t smell. Did he smell? It was one of those things other kids said, but that didn’t mean it was true. How often did people wash their clothes? he wondered. It would be easier if they had a washing machine. Or if he had more clothes. Who cared, anyway. He did wash, every day. And did his teeth. He’d even bought the toothpaste. Well, he’d stolen it, but it was the same thing.

  In olden times nobody brushed their teeth or washed every day. Yeah, but they got plague and all their teeth fell out. It would be awful to have false teeth. Or bad breath. He hoped he didn’t have bad breath. If he were to breathe on someone – if someone came close enough. What happened if you lived in the wilderness, like doing survival? You didn’t get to wash all the time then. You must just stink. Or maybe you stopped after a bit, like if you don’t wash your hair it starts cleaning itself. His dad would’ve been able to tell him; his dad had been out on manoeuvres. You didn’t care about washing in the army.

  Or maybe after a while you just stopped being able to smell yourself. That would be awful – if you stank and you didn’t know it. Did he stink? He sniffed his armpits; they smelled warm and close. It wasn’t horrible – was it? – but it was something.

  Maybe he should go to the launderette. But that cost money. He could save up his lunch money, if maybe that man would give him lunch. Jozef. But the other kids went to the takeaway at lunch; he couldn’t. And anyway, he’d been getting too much free food off him recently; it was probably a bit weird. His dad would’ve put a stop to it, TC was sure. ‘What’s in it for him?’ he’d’ve asked, and told TC to wise up, not to be so trusting. But then, he wasn’t here.

  That evening it began to snow. It drifted down all night, and in the morning the schools were closed. Steven was freelance and worked from home, but the road outside was ungritted and treacherous, and so Linda had a rare day off.

  The garden had looked so perfect when she first woke up. Everything seemed hushed, for one thing; the world holding its breath. The lawn was perfectly level, even the tallest grass blades covered, the fence posts each topped with a white loaf, the shrubs sugary and hunched.

  Before long the silence was broken by shrieks and squeals as the neighbourhood children tumbled out into the snow. Daisy pleaded strenuously to be allowed to play in the street, but you couldn’t be too careful, said Linda, not with the estates all around. They watched her play in the garden instead; Steven showed her how to squeeze a snowball so that it stuck, and they built the obligatory snowman, and it quickly began to look churned up and messy.

  There were no buses all day and few trains. With no official word on what to do the city awarded itself a holiday, although the recriminations – the lost revenue, the lack of snowploughs, the inevitable safety issues – would come thick and fast later on. So the short winter’s day had no rhythm; no rush hour topped or tailed it, and it was only as the light failed and the cold regripped the air that the grimy, misshapen snowmen were abandoned, and the snowballers, feet cold, hands numb, retreated indoors from the treacherous and darkening streets.

  At five o’clock the winter afternoon reached that brief fulcrum when the sky outside takes on a deep, almost luminous blue, lasting for just a few minutes before shading into dark; Linda, gazing out of the living-room window, hesitated to turn on the lights lest they drive out the last remaining light from the sky. Candles were what a day like today called for, but the only ones in the house were perfumed, and ruinously expensive. To hell with it, she thought, and fetched the Cook’s matches from the kitchen. It wasn’t as though they couldn’t afford more. Daisy was upstairs on her computer, her gloves and hat steaming gently on the radiator, and it was time for Linda to start thinking about supper. Drawing the curtains and turning away from the window, she thought about the day before.

  The first few flakes had drifted down while she was in Bristol. Driving back the sky had been a dull orange either side of the bypass, the flakes whirling dizzily in her headlamps, and for one brief stretch of road the street lights flickered on pair by pair on either side, keeping pace with her car as though to light her way and her way alone.

  She had been so tired when she got home that she hadn’t even mentioned her walk, and now it seemed too late to bring it up. Besides, what was there to tell? She had walked into a wood for no reason at all, and afterwards she had not wanted to get back into the car. It was hardly much of an anecdote, although an image, detailed and finely drawn, of a
secret carpet of bluebells had remained at the back of her mind all day.

  Sophia sat at her kitchen table with a whisky soda and watched the snow in the little park turn briefly pink as the last light drained from the sky. On the paths it was becoming compacted into ice, and she knew that if it froze tonight they would be impassable for her tomorrow, stick or no stick. Still, she had a cupboard full of tins and a bottle of excellent Scotch, and doubtless Linda would call to check she wasn’t doing anything daring or ill-advised.

  She wondered if Daisy was enjoying the snow – if Linda was letting her. There was no after-school club for playing in the snow, no educational aspect either. That was part of its magic: that for once the streets would be full of children released briefly from the strictures of their daily routines, outside with no purpose at all but to kick about and have fun together, as children should. Tough city kids were rendered giggling and silly; protected middle-class children were gifted with brief freedom by the temporary saturnalia of snow.

  Yes, a spell of real winter was a good thing. Another generation would be able to remember proper snow, inches deep, and in a while it might come to seem to them as though every winter had been like this one. Anyway, a good freeze was just what the bulbs needed, and it would help kill off the pests so that things would grow well next spring.

  Jozef waited by the benches, his arms folded against the cold, the chess set inside his jacket pressing hard against his chest. He needed to get some warmer clothes, that was for sure. It was almost as cold as Poland. His father had always seemed to know when the first big snowfall was coming and would get the herd in just in time, but after he died Jozef found he hadn’t the knack. He lost a heifer that first winter; the melting snow revealed it in March, huddled against a wall like a hide stretched over a frame. Its eyes had been neatly picked out by crows.