Clay

by David Almond

  So I went for him and we battled and loads of kids gathered round us and yelled and chanted:

  “Fight! Fight! Fight! Fight!”

  Geordie thumped me in the gut and winded me but I stood up to it. I swung my fist and caught him in the nose and blood burst out. He squealed and jumped at me. I went for his throat. We sprawled on the ground and we grunted and cried and cursed.

  “You bastard!” we kept yelling. “You bliddy snake!”

  Then Prat was running and yelling for it to stop. I got free and stood up. I leaned down over Geordie.

  “I hate you!” I snarled.

  Then I ran.

  seventeen

  I spat on the ground as I left the school. I cursed them all. Mouldy was sitting on a bench outside the graveyard near the Swan. He was drunk, half asleep, a useless lump. I went closer. He looked at me through glassy eyes. No recognition in them.

  “Fishface,” I hissed. I clenched my fists. “Think I’m scared of you?”

  He growled. I leaned towards him.

  “Fishface. Fishface.”

  He hauled himself forward, tried to stand up, dropped back to the bench again.

  “Fishface fatso slob,” I said.

  I grinned and walked on. I passed right in front of him. I smelt him and hated him.

  “Pig,” I told him. “Think I’m scared of you?”

  I picked a stone up, weighed it in my hand, caught an image of it crashing onto Mouldy’s temple, heard him groan, saw him slump and twitch, saw the blood spurt. I couldn’t do it, of course. The temptation passed. I gently dropped the stone again.

  I knocked on Crazy Mary’s door. Stephen let me in.

  “I got the stuff,” I said.

  “Good lad. Show it to me.”

  “I’ve not got it with me, man.”

  He took me to the kitchen. Crazy Mary was at the table with a cup of tea in front of her.

  “Hello, Miss Doonan,” I said.

  No reply. Stephen sniggered.

  “Hello, stupid crazy bint,” he said.

  No reply. Mary sat dead still.

  “We’ll do it this weekend,” said Stephen.

  He grinned.

  “We’ll make a monster this weekend, Davie,” he said. “Tomorrow night. Right?”

  He held my face in his hands.

  “Right?” he said.

  “Right!”

  I glanced at Mary. What would she be making of our words?

  Stephen giggled.

  “Watch!” he said.

  He dropped his jeans. He stuck his bare backside towards Mary. She did nothing. He pulled his jeans up.

  “Have a go!” he said. “Go on! Drop your trousers and do it as well.”

  He laughed in my face.

  “It’s just a trick, man. Watch.”

  He stretched his hand to Mary’s face. He clicked his fingers.

  “Five, four, three, two, one,” he said. “Wake up, Mary.”

  Crazy Mary blinked and twitched.

  “Look,” said Stephen. “Somebody’s come calling on us, Aunty Mary.”

  Mary smiled.

  “It’s the good altar boy,” she said. “The lad with the lovely mam. Would you like some jam and bread, pet?” She shook her head. “Didn’t hear nobody come in, though.”

  “You dropped off, Aunty Mary,” said Stephen.

  “Aye,” she said. “I must have.”

  She stared at her nephew, then at me.

  “D’you think God protects us when we’re fast asleep?” she said.

  “Course he does,” said Stephen. “He looks down on each and every one of us and keeps us safe. That’s his job.”

  “My boy’s such a comfort to me,” said Mary.

  She got a knife and started sawing at a loaf of bread. She cut a couple of slices. She held them up to Heaven.

  “Everything on this earth is thine,” she said.

  Stephen groaned.

  “Ballocks,” he said. “Time to put her down again. Aunty Mary.” She turned. He passed his hand before her eyes.

  “Put the bread down,” he said.

  She put it down.

  “Sit down.”

  She sat down.

  “You will sleep now, Mary,” he said. “You will wake only when I tell you to.”

  Her eyes stayed open, but the light disappeared from them.

  Stephen grinned.

  “Just a trick,” he said. “Some’s much more susceptible than others. She’s a piece of cake.”

  He watched me.

  “I could teach you if you wanted me to,” he said. He stepped close, waved his hands, spoke in a put-on spooky voice.

  “Sleeeeep,” he said. “Sleeeeeeep.”

  He laughed. He flicked Mary’s nose.

  “Go on,” he said. “Do it, man.”

  “Leave her alone,” I said.

  “Leave her alone,” he echoed in a little childish voice. He came closer. “I could do it to you as well,” he said. “I could put you under just like that. I could make you think anything I wanted you to think.”

  We stared at each other. I clenched my fists, ready to battle again.

  “Mebbe I’ve already done it,” he said, “and you don’t know. Mebbe you’re sitting on a chair like Crazy is and you’re in a dream and you’re like putty in my hands. Sleeep. Sleeeeep.”

  I grabbed his collar.

  “Try it and I’ll kill you,” I said.

  He smiled.

  “Kill?” he said. “You think you’re the kind of kid that could kill, Davie?”

  “Aye,” I said. “Are you? What happened to your mam and dad?”

  “What’s that got to do with anything?”

  “Dunno. Lots.”

  He spat on the floor.

  “I killed my dad, then I drove my mother mad,” he said. “Is that what you want to hear?”

  “Dunno.”

  “Dunno, dunno. Listen to you. Is that the way a killer talks?”

  I let him go. I started to turn away, but he caught my arm.

  “Don’t go, Davie,” he said.

  I tugged free.

  “I need you,” he said.

  I turned back, and we looked into each other’s eyes.

  “When I’m with you,” he said, “I know that I can be different. I know that I can be more than I am by myself.”

  I sighed. Maybe that was true. And maybe it was true for me as well. I felt that something had drawn us together, that somehow we were meant to be together. There was no going back to the life I’d had before. Not until I’d gone through what I had to go through with Stephen Rose.

  “So we’ll do it on Saturday,” he said. “We’ll make a creature out of clay and out of the strength of the Lord and out of the strength of Davie and Stephen Rose. Aye?”

  “Aye. Saturday. Now wake Mary up.”

  He woke her up. She smiled, touched by confusion and wonder.

  “Don’t do it again,” I said. “She’s not a toy.”

  “I won’t, Davie,” he said.

  “Tomorrow,” I said.

  “In the cave. After dark. I’ll be there.”

  “I’ll be there. Goodbye, Miss Doonan.”

  I headed back through the house to the door.

  “But your jam and bread!” called poor Crazy Mary.

  THREE

  one

  Saturday night. Lie on my bed, wait in the dark. No moon. The TV rumbles in the room below. I hear Dad’s barks of laughter. Hell is on my mind, its searing flames, its savage devils, its prodding, poking, sniggering imps. I hear the howls and sobs of the sinners. I imagine an eternity in Hell, time going on forever and forever without an end, with no chance of release or relief. “Let me believe in nowt,” I whisper. “Let there be life and nowt but life. Let the body be nowt but clay. Let God be gone. Let the soul be nowt but an illusion. Let death be nowt but rotting flesh and crumbling bones.” I touch the locket. “Let this be nowt but stains and dust and Sellotape and shreds of cloth.” Dad’s
laughter rises from below again. “Let nowt matter,” I say. “Let it all be nowt but a bliddy joke. God, world, soul, flesh. Jokes, nowt but bliddy stupid jokes. Nowt but nowt, bliddy nowt.”

  Soon they come upstairs. Mam puts her head round the door.

  “Night night, son,” she whispers. “Night night.”

  I pretend to sleep. I don’t say good night back until she’s gone again and closed the door again and then I want to cry and call out,

  “Mammy! Come back, Mammy!”

  But I go on lying there. I try to empty my head of everything, try to enter a place where there’s nothing: no world, no house, no room, no Davie. But it’s Davie, of course, who rises from the bed an hour later, Davie who quietly puts on his clothes, who picks up the locket, who steps from his room, creeps downstairs, hesitates at the front door, Davie who opens the door and holds it open and lets the cold night air into the house, Davie who wants his mam to call, “What you doing, Davie?”, Davie who wants his dad to stamp downstairs and stop him and haul him back, Davie who closes the door behind him when none of this happens, Davie who steps out alone into the night.

  two

  Folk have gone early to their beds. The streets of Felling are deserted. Lights burn in just a couple of upstairs windows. Streetlights are pale and orange. They hardly light the dark beneath the trees that line the lanes. The Swan is all in darkness. A few cars rumble on the unseen bypass. The sound of singing comes from somewhere far away—maybe a family party stretching into the small hours, maybe a wedding or a wake. I try to move as if to cause the least disturbance: breathe shallowly, step gently, hardly swing my arms. I hear growling from a garden and I force myself to keep from flinching. It comes again, from closer by. I keep on walking, stepping gently. It growls again, whatever it is, from close behind. “Don’t run,” I breathe. It growls again and I turn my eyes and see it in the roadway, a pitch-black shape padding on all fours. It moves ahead and when I’m closer to the garden it turns to face me from the gate. Stands there, eyes glittering, teeth gleaming, saliva dangling from its open jaws.

  “Good boy,” I mutter, “good boy.”

  It doesn’t move. I open my empty hands, show them.

  Look, I’m telling it. I’m safe. I’m no threat to you.

  It growls, steps closer.

  “Good boy,” I whisper. “Good boy.”

  It keeps coming. It keeps growling.

  I crouch, and run my hand across the earth. I touch one of the broken jagged stones from Braddock’s house. I grip it, yank it out of the soil. I raise it as the creature comes at me, and I bring it down across its skull. I strike again, again. It yelps, whimpers, slithers away from me. It turns its head, looks back at me, I raise the stone again, it slithers on.

  I throw the stone away and hurry through the gate.

  three

  “Stop!” says Stephen.

  He’s in the cave, surrounded by lighted candles. His hand is raised.

  “We got to do everything properly,” he says. “We got to turn this to a holy place.”

  I hesitate at the entrance.

  “You should cross yourself,” he says. “And ask for your sins to be washed away.”

  I do this; then I reel and shudder. There’s a body on the floor. Then I see it’s not a body. It’s a heap of clay, turning into the shape of a man: a bulk of torso, legs, arms, a clumsy head. I want to run. But Stephen laughs.

  “That’s him,” he says. “Or half of him. Say hello. And careful you don’t tread on him.”

  I daren’t look down as I step over him.

  “You got out the house okay?” says Stephen.

  “Aye. There was a dog or something outside.”

  “There’s always dogs round this place. You got the body and blood?”

  “Aye.”

  I pass him the locket. He clicks it open, inspects the things inside, sighs with pleasure.

  “I couldn’t get the whole things,” I say.

  “That don’t matter. The power’s in the tiniest bits of it.” He puts the locket on a shelf in the rock. “You done good. You’ll be rewarded. Now put this on.”

  He hands me a white shift. There’s a moon and a sun and stars and a cross painted on it. He’s got another for himself.

  “You just put it on like this,” he says. “I made them from one of Crazy’s sheets.”

  He pulls his over his head. It hangs down nearly to his knees.

  “Go on, Davie,” he says. “We got to do it all properly if we want it to work properly.”

  I pull mine on.

  “We look like bliddy priests,” I say.

  “Aye, but like the ancient priests.”

  “What do you mean, ancient?”

  “This is how it started, Davie. All the churches and the mumbo jumbo and the useless Father O’Bliddy Mahoneys. There was no Bennett Colleges back then. There was no St. Patrick’s churches. There was no soft soppy Masses and people in their best clothes saying stupid prayers. Back at the start it was priests finding their powers in the wilderness. It was folk like us, folk with power, folk in caves working magic, folk that was half wild, folk truly close to God. Tonight you’ll be an ancient priest, Davie. Tonight you’ll work your magic on the world.” And he rolls his eyes towards the sky and spreads his arms and says, “Allow the power of the universe to work through us tonight. On your knees, Davie!” He draws me down to kneel beside him. He takes my hand and rests it on the body of the half-completed clay man.

  “This is our creature, Davie,” he says. “Tonight we will make it, and make it live, and make it walk into the world.” And he leans down and speaks to where the creature’s head will be. “This is Davie,” he says. “He’ll be your master just like me.” He grins at me. “Now, Davie. More clay.”

  So we dig more clay out of the clay pond. We kneel and turn the sticky sloppy clay into the shape of man. And we become engrossed in it, and sometimes I forget myself and where I am, and I forget how crazy this would seem if someone else from Felling stumbled into the quarry tonight. We keep telling each other: “Make him beautiful.” We keep packing more clay onto the body. “Make him strong,” we say. We run our damp fingers across the surface of the man: “Make it smooth like living skin.” We keep leaning back from our work. We smooth out the flaws, we touch in details, we smile and sigh at the beauty of our work. Before we finish the man’s chest Stephen presses a wizened rose hip there to make a heart. We close the chest and rake the shapes of ribs with our fingertips. We put a conker inside the skull for a brain. We form the features of his face. Sycamore seeds make eyes, ash keys make the ears, dried-out hawthorn berries make nostrils, twigs and grass stems make his hair.

  “We plant him like a garden,” Stephen says. “We fill him with the sources of life. And this…” He lifts the locket. “This’ll make his soul.”

  He hesitates. We look down at the man, gleaming gently in the candlelight.

  “Where’s the seat of the soul?” says Stephen.

  “When I was little I used to think it was in the heart,” I say.

  “But some’ll tell you it’s in the brain.”

  “Mebbe it’s everywhere.”

  “Mebbe it doesn’t matter. We put it somewhere, and life’ll spread out from it.”

  I press my fingers into the man’s belly, and open up a space.

  “Put it here, eh?” I say. “Somewhere near where his center is.”

  And Stephen slips it deep inside, and closes the man’s flesh again.

  We kneel and look, in awe at what we’ve done. The man’s so beautiful, so smooth, so strong. I feel the clay on the skin of my hands tightening as it dries.

  “What now?” I say.

  “We watch. And we pray.” He passes his hand before my eyes. “And we believe, Davie. We believe in our power to make a man.” He passes his hand before my eyes again. “You will see amazing things tonight.”

  And the moon rises, creeping over the quarry’s rim, casting its light into our cave and onto us
and onto the dead still body on the floor.

  “Move, my creature,” murmurs Stephen.

  And I murmur in time with him.

  “Move, my creature. Move and live.”

  four

  And time passes and we pray and we implore and nothing happens. And the moon climbs until it hangs dead still and its reflection is shining bright at the dead center of the clay pond. And bats move across it, and owls, and little pale moths. And our man lies there so still and the gleam fades on him as he dries, and often I touch him and know that he could be such a lovely creature if he lives and so I keep on praying that he’ll live. And time passes and our whispers change and waver and become like weird singing that comes out of us but that’s somehow not part of us but is part of the night, the air, the moonshine, and the words in the singing are no longer like words but are just sounds drawn from somewhere deep inside ourselves, like creatures’ cries, like complicated birdsong, nighttime-bird song. And we ourselves become somehow not ourselves, but we turn subtler, weirder, less attached to our bodies, less attached to our names. And often I look across the body lying on the floor to Stephen and expect to see him gone, or to see him turned to a shadow or a spirit without any substance to him. And he shimmers and sways, and he does seem to move in and out of sight, so we keep looking at each other, as if to keep each other here in the quarry, here in the world. And between us nothing happens; the man stays lying there on the floor dead still.

  “At Bennett,” says Stephen, and his voice is a wavery squeaky distant thing, “there was a little bunch of us, a little secret bunch. We used to meet together in the night, just like I’m meeting with you now. One night a kid called Joseph Wilson disappeared. One moment he was with us in a cupboard in the night, then he was just gone.”

  I manage to make a word.

  “Gone?”

  “Half a night and half a day. We thought he was dead. We thought he’d been carried body and soul into the world of the spirits. The priests next morning thought that he must have fled from the place in the night when everybody was fast asleep. Then he was seen next day staggering through the birch trees in the college grounds. Clothes all torn, eyes all wild. Remembered nowt. Took him days to get his senses back, and even then he couldn’t tell nobody what had happened, where he’d gone.”