Clay (10 page)

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.”

“That’s why you were thrown out?”

“No, that time they threw Joseph Wilson out, and told us he was a bad influence on us. Then another kid. Danny Keegan. He drew a thing out of the night.”

I just look at him.

“A little stumpy thing with horns. We were messing about in the night again and we were praying and conjuring and Danny found it running under his feet. We tried to catch it but it ran; then we saw it in the corridor, flapping wings, flying away. Danny said he’d been praying, ‘Send me a sign, Lord.’”

“You did all sorts at Bennett?”

“Seems that long ago. We were little kids, took from home. Aye, we did all sorts till they trapped us.”

“How did they do that?”

“They sent a viper. Logan. Smooth and smarmy. He was one of the older ones, nearly ready to be a proper priest. He’s working in a parish in Jarrow now. He tricked us. He said he could give us secrets, the secrets that were supposed to be kept from us till we were old. Secrets of life and death and when Christ would come again and what the saints knew and what the Pope keeps hidden from the rest of the world. So we let him come to us in the night and we did things with him like levitating tables and doing Ouija boards and doing trances and hypnosis, and we told him about Joseph and Francis and about a kid called Plummer that could hold his breath for half an hour and talk to ghosts. We should’ve known. He was a spy. He told the priests. They said it was me that led the others to the sinners’ path. And so they sent me home.”

He leans down, runs his fingers across the lovely body.

“They told me I was evil, Davie. They told me I was an agent of the devil.”

His eyes are glittering in the candlelight.

“Do you think I’m evil?”

I shake my head. I pray. I touch the body. I look up at the moon. It hasn’t moved.

“Live,” I whisper. “Live and move.”

And our voices rise again, and begin a weird wordless song again, and the body between us stays dead still.

five

And we sprinkle ashes on the man, for Stephen says he might rise like new life from the old, and we sprinkle water from the clay pond on him, for we think he might grow like seed, and I lean right over him and breathe into his nostrils like the Lord God did when he formed man from the dust of the earth, and we whisper weirdly and we stand and sway and we start dancing and we beg him and implore and I begin to think that nowt will happen this night, that nowt will ever happen, and then Stephen starts talking about the night that he went home again.

“I was sent back home in a car again. No time to think, to pray, to confess or say goodbye. Can you believe it? One day I was in, the next I was cast out. And I left the heavy doors and all the boys and all the priests and all the prayers and the smell of piss and all the jam and bread and the trees and we went out past the pond through the ancient gates and headed back to Whitley Bay. The priest that was with me was pointy-nosed, sloppy-lipped, miserable and old. He never once looked at me but whispered prayers all the way to Whitley Bay. And Mam and Dad didn’t know what was coming to them. Mam was boiling bacon in the kitchen, Dad was planting cabbages in the garden. I left the car with the priest and with my ancient suitcase in my hand. He gave them a letter with my sins in it. ‘Here is a devil, come back home again,’ he said. ‘Protect yourselves.’ And he was gone.”

And Stephen points down at the man and raises his voice: “Move! Live!” And his voice echoes in the cave and out into the quarry and the night, but nowt happens to the man of clay.

“And your mam and dad,” I start, “how did they…?”

“Cried their hearts out. Floods of tears. They said they had tried to live right. They had tried to bring me up right. And I said that mebbe all that trying to do right was what was wrong. Mebbe we should have lived crazy like all the Roses, mebbe we should go now and live in a tent in Plessey Woods like Rocky did and get hairy and wild and scary and scared. And Dad shook me and said, ‘You cannot mean that!’ And I said I did and they wept more floods and Mam held me and told me to confess to her the things I’d done.”

“And did you?”

“I told her some things, aye. I told her that loads of the things in the letter were lies. I told her a few of my own truths and a few of my own lies. In the end I started to forget myself which parts of it were truth and which parts were lies. Pretty soon, looking back at the days and nights at Bennett was like looking back into a time of dreams and it was like there was no way of knowing where the truth was, and certainly no way of knowing what was right and what was wrong.

“But we settled. We stayed on in the little terraced house in Whitley Bay and didn’t head out to the woods. I went to school and I was like any of them kids that’s come back from a place like Bennett—a little bit distracted, a little bit wild. They went on with their jobs. She was a waitress in a Tilly’s Tea Shack next the sea. He cleaned the machines in a factory that made tires in Blyth. Everything went on like everything was normal and we were normal people living normal lives. But there was too much bubbling inside.

“Mam started swigging bottles of sherry and smashing cups and plates on the kitchen floor. She shaved all her hair off and started talking about slashing her wrists. I was scribbling spells on my bedroom walls and calling spirits out the night. I got expelled from school for calling a curse down on the headmaster and saying God had died in 1945. Dad just couldn’t stand it all. He said we should all go to Australia and start again; then one night we were eating a steak and kidney pudding and watching
Look North
and he had a stroke and died.”

He pauses and gazes through the flickering light at me, like he’s checking if I’m following him, if I’m keeping up with him.

“You were there?” I ask.

“Sitting across the table from him, Davie. Close to him as I am to you now. I thought he was choking on his pudding, but he wasn’t. He fell off his chair and died.”

We’re silent for a time. We sit on the cave floor beside the man.

“I’m sorry,” I whisper.

“It’s OK,” says Stephen.

But I look across, and see that Stephen Rose has started to cry.