Clay (7 page)

nine

“This is where you go with that Geordie Craggs,” she said. She laughed. “It’s your secret place.”

“How d’you know that?”

She widened her eyes and wobbled her hands.

“Frances Malone and I know everything! Let’s go in.”

I didn’t move. I hadn’t been in since Stephen and the knife. But now the truce was on, and anyway, Maria was already through the gate and on her way. She ducked through the hawthorn, was disentangling her hair.

“Howay, Davie,” she said.

Going in with a girl was different. I smelt the rot and the piss and the oniony smell in the undergrowth. I felt the mud under my feet and the thorns of the wild roses and brambles on my legs. It felt warm and humid after the breezy street, like the year was further on in here. Sluggish flies buzzed around us. There was years of graffiti on the quarry walls. She said her dad used to come here for soil and daffodil bulbs. Like everybody’s dad, I said. Maybe all the gardens in Felling had bits of this garden in them, I said. Everything was coming into leaf. Blossom was breaking out. There were primroses and fading daffodils and fancier flowers that must have grown from ancient Braddock’s seeds. We came through to the clay pond and stood beside it and looked around and I knew what Maria meant when she said it was beautiful.

“There’s talk they’re going to fill it in,” she said. “They’re going to bulldoze the gardens and knock the last of the old house down and fill the quarry in and build a new estate.”

“I know,” I said.

“They’re cretins,” she said. “They’ll call the new streets Pretty Place and Lovely Lane but they’ll not see how they’ve smashed a bit of Paradise.”

She looked into the sky.

“Stop them doing it!” she called.

We stepped around the pond. The pale mud squirmed under our feet. She slipped and I grabbed her hand till she was steady. The fire smoldered outside the cave. We went to the entrance and I caught my breath at what we saw in there.

There were clay figures everywhere. Little goblins sat in niches in the rock. There were little pigs and dragons. There were lumpy unfinished things leaning on the walls. They were all blackened, covered in ash. Maria knelt down and touched a twisted little man.

“He makes them in the fire,” I said.

“Who does?”

“Stephen Rose.”

I kicked at the embers. A curled-up clay body lay in there.

“I saw his apostles,” she said. “They were beautiful. These are all ugly, but they’re still beautiful.”

I scanned the cave again. Geordie would be furious. Mouldy and Skinner and Poke would just smash up everything. Then I saw the sign painted in white on the cave roof. The silly warnings from Mouldy’s lot and from us had been painted out. There was just a single message.

Anything that is destroyed will be avenged. S.R.

“Really weird,” said Maria.

“He’s had a weird life.”

“There but for the grace of God,” she said, like everyone in Felling seemed to say. She crossed herself. We sat close to each other on a pair of stones. I held her hand. The quarry was filled with noises, clicks and buzzings and breezes. There were noises that must have been animals moving in the undergrowth. Birds sang. Something snorted not too far away. It came closer, stopped, moved away again.

“Do you believe in power?” I said.

“What do you mean, power?”

“Dunno. Power. Like the power to do things nobody else could do.”

“Magic, you mean?”

“Something like that. Do you believe somebody could make something and make it live?”

She looked into the sky. She narrowed her eyes.

“That’s what women do,” she said. “Make living babies that come out of them and crawl and cry.”

“Aye, there’s that,” I said. “Flesh and blood. But could you make something that isn’t flesh and blood? Could you make something out of clay, and make
that
live?”

We looked down at the fire. A hip was visible among the fading embers, a foot, the angle of an elbow.

“They say all kinds of things can happen in the world,” she said. “You hear all kinds of stories.”

“Aye.”

“Like that baby.”

“What baby?”

“The one that was born at the Queen Elizabeth. It was all hairy. It had paws where the hands should be. Did you not hear?”

I shook my head.

“Frances’ mam knows somebody that used to be a nurse there. She saw it. She said it was half dog, half human.”

“Half dog?”

“Aye. It stayed alive for a bit, then it died.”

“How could that happen?”

We shook our heads at each other.

“They say it came out of a Stoneygate lass,” she whispered.

“No.”

“Aye. And they say that the lass has been out of her senses ever since. And they say there’s been stranger things than that. Things that’s never known except to the doctors. Deformities. Freaks of nature. Things there seems no reason for. Things that seem impossible.”

She stroked the backs of her hands, her shoulders, her cheeks.

“We should be glad to be just as we are,” she said. “There but—”

“They say that one day we’ll be able to make life in test tubes,” I said. “We’ll be able to create living creatures with chemicals and electricity and nuclear power.”

“Trouble with that is,” she said, “mebbe we won’t know where to stop.”

“And we’ll make monsters.”

“Aye. And mebbe the monsters’ll turn on us, and threaten us, and be the end of us.”

I looked down at the creature in the embers.

“All this is what you asked Prat about, isn’t it?” she said.

“Aye.”

She leaned forwards and turned her face so she could look right at me.

“Is it because
you’ve
got some kind of power?” she said.

“Me? Don’t be daft.”

We were silent then. The snorting thing moved away from us. A dog, I thought. A hedgehog. Maria heard it. She looked at me.

“A hedgehog,” I said.

She nodded.

Hundreds of tadpoles were swimming in the pale water. Already lots of them had lost their tails and were growing legs. Maria stirred the water with a stick and giggled at the way the tadpoles twisted and turned and flickered around it.

“There’s dead dogs in here,” she said.

“So they say. And dead cats.”

“And sacks of puppies and kittens.”

“It’s what the tadpoles live on.”

“And the fish and the beetles.”

“Dead things,” she whispered.

“Death.”

She stirred more quickly and the water swirled and splashed, and as we watched, a frog swam up from the murky depths.

“Oh, look!” she said.

“We called him out,” I said.

“Hello, Mr. Frog,” she said.

She giggled.

“Look at him,” she said. “What a funny thing. Just an ordinary frog! Even the ordinary things can seem dead weird, can’t they?”

I watched it swim to the edge and perch on a stone and it glistened in the sunlight.

“Aye,” I said. “Dead weird.”

We could see the throb in its throat, the throb of its heart. It seemed so peaceful sitting there, so ugly, so lovely, so strange.

“Look, ickle tadpoles!” she said. “There’s your big daddy.”

Then the grass snake came. It darted out of the darkness of the undergrowth. It took the frog in its jaws. It bit and crushed and gripped. The frog struggled and kicked but there was nothing it could do. The snake started to swallow the frog headfirst. It was over in minutes. The snake closed its jaws. The frog was just a great lump in the snake’s body. The snake was dead still for a while; then it slithered sluggishly back to where it had come from.

“Oh,” breathed Maria. “Oh, my God.”

Our hands were clenched tight together. We goggled into each other’s eyes.

“That was…,” I said.

“Astonishing,” she said.

We shuddered. We looked at the dark surrounding undergrowth, at the quarry’s dark rim, at the silent still figures around us in the cave.

“I think we should go,” whispered Maria.

We edged around the pond. High above, the clouds were turning red. I narrowed my eyes. The angels you could imagine up there were thinner darker things now. We stumbled away from the quarry towards the entrance. We heard snorting behind us. We looked back. Nothing. We laughed. But we moved more quickly. The snorting came closer. There was the noise of undergrowth being pushed aside as something hurried through it. We laughed again, but we started running, hand in hand. We ducked through the thorn trees. The thorns caught our hair, caught our clothes. We pushed through towards the gate and we hesitated there. We giggled. We looked back. Nothing there.

“Silly us,” said Maria.

We leaned against a rusted gatepost and kissed each other. We held each other tight and pressed our lips together hard. I tasted her tongue and my head began to reel and when we parted my voice was low and cracked.

“You’re beautiful,” I whispered.

She stroked my cheek.

“And you,” she said.

We kissed again; then she pushed me away. She grunted.

“Look.”

I turned. Stephen was at Crazy Mary’s front door, watching us.

“Creepy weird,” she whispered.

He came towards us.

“Hello, Davie,” he said.

He looked past us into the garden.

“What was after you?” he said. His eyes widened. “Get back!” he yelled. “Get back, I tell you!”

We looked behind, but there was nothing there, of course.

“Just nowt at all,” said Stephen. He smiled. “You were deceived.”

He looked at Maria.

“Who’s this?” he said.

“My name’s Maria, if you must know,” said Maria.

She turned away from him and stepped away from the gate onto Watermill Lane. Stephen caught my arm and held me back and breathed his words into my ear.

“I know what I need you for. I know your purpose, Davie.”

I tried to pull away.

“Don’t bother with the lass,” he said.

He passed his hand before my eyes.

“Oh, look!” he said.

He pointed. I saw Mouldy further down the street, watching.

“It’s OK,” said Stephen. “He won’t come. Not now.”

He suddenly kissed my cheek.

“What you doing?” I said.

I pulled away. He started laughing.

I had to hurry to get to Maria’s side. She slowed down. We looked back and watched Stephen going in, closing Crazy’s door behind him. And we saw Mouldy turning a corner, disappearing.

“Very very creepy weird,” she said. She regarded me. “What’s between you two?”

“What do you mean? Nowt’s between us.”

She looked back. She regarded me.

“Lads are strange,” she said.

I tried to shift from her gaze. Her eyes widened.

“It’s coming!” she said.

I spun around to look. Nothing there. We giggled.

I tried to kiss her again, but she stepped back.

“Silly you,” she said. “Silly us.”

And we walked homewards, awkward with each other again. 99

ten

We met on neutral ground, at dusk. We used the graveyard at Heworth. We stood in the oldest part, where the ancient weathered graves were. There were thin tall trees around us. There were clusters of black nests in the branches. Our grave was a table-high and blackened thing. Skinner and Poke were on one side, Geordie and I on the other. The sky had lost its brightness, blue had turned to gray.

“Where is he?” said Geordie.

Skinner shrugged.

“Probably in the Swan. We told him seven o’clock. It’s not far past.”

“You’re sure he’s OK about the truce?” said Geordie.

“That’s what he said,” answered Skinner. “You telling me you don’t believe him?”

He laughed and rolled his sleeve back and showed his wound, a thin scar on his forearm.

“It’ll be marked forever,” he said.

He looked at us, dead cold.

“Your mate’s a maniac,” he said.

“He’s not our mate,” said Geordie.

“No?” said Skinner.

He was a little wiry kid with knuckles hard as stone. In one of our fights, he’d nutted Geordie and Geordie still had the scar on his nose from it. But he was the one that started pulling Mouldy off me that time. He was the one that yelled, “Don’t! You’ll kill him, man!” And he’d quickly checked my throat and my face before he laughed and ran away.

We waited. I ran my fingers across the names of the people buried below. There was a whole bunch of the Braddocks, all of them dead for a hundred years or more. The stone said they had entered unto glory. I thought of them crumbling away, flesh and blood and bones turning to slime, turning to dust. By now there was probably nothing to separate them from earth, from soil, from clay. I looked towards the graves where we’d buried the two blokes just a few days back. What were those blokes like now? How close to dust were they?

“Mebbe we got the times mixed up,” I found myself saying. “Mebbe we should just abandon it.”

Poke grinned.

“Scared?” he said.

I shook my head. One day months back, I’d fought with him. We’d battled till we were both worn out. Nobody won. I ached for days. The grazes and bruises took an age to go away. “What’s the point of it?” my mam said when she saw all the marks on me. But Dad said not to worry. It was just the way things were. He shook his head. “Lads,” he said.

It got darker. We waited. Then Skinner whispered,

“Look!”

And there was Mouldy, lumbering through the graves.

“Mouldy!” called Skinner. “We’re over here!”

Mouldy came to the head of the grave.

“Hiya, Mouldy,” said Poke.

Mouldy glanced at him, curled his lip. He wiped a fist across his face, lit a cigarette. His eyes settled on me. They were empty, dead.

“So?” he grunted.

No one spoke. He thumped the grave with his fist.

“So?” he said.

“The kid with the knife’s not our mate,” said Geordie.

Mouldy licked a knuckle. I saw him as he would be in five years’ time, sluggish, heavy, slow, a great gut on him, a drunken dope that nobody’d take notice of. He pointed at me.

“He’s his mate. I seen him, talking to him.”

“Aye,” said Geordie. “But—”

Mouldy thumped the grave again.

“Shuddup! I seen him. And I seen lovey-dovey stuff and whispering stuff.”

“Lovey-dovey?” said Skinner.

“I seen the new sod kissing this sod.”

“Kissing?” said Skinner.

“Aye. There was a bint there. She seen it as well.” Mouldy kept his eyes on me. “Say I’m a liar,” he said.

I said nothing. He shaped a fist, pretended to go for me, grinned again when Poke caught his arm.

“It’s a truce, Mouldy,” said Skinner.

“Liars cannot make truces,” said Mouldy. He shaped his fist again. “You’re a lying Catholic Felling bastard,” he said. He blinked. He looked at each of us in turn. “What you going to say to that?” he said.

None of us spoke. High above, beyond the trees, above the church, great streaks of red had appeared in the sky.

“OK, then,” Mouldy said. “I’ll do the lying bastard now.”

“Don’t,” I whispered.

I backed away from the grave.

“Geordie,” I said.

“There’s a truce,” said Geordie, but Mouldy just spat at him, a gobful straight into his face.

I ran. Mouldy came after me. He kicked my feet away. I crashed to the ground. He stamped on my head and my ribs and my back. Everything was black and starry till the others were pulling him away. I curled up against a gravestone.
For they are like unto the angels,
it said.

“Davie, run!” said Geordie.

“Run!” said Skinner.

And I picked myself up and belted out of the graveyard and onto Watermill Lane and kept running till I saw the dark figure waiting. Stephen Rose, leaning against a tree. I slowed, stopped.

“Davie,” he said.

I looked behind. Nothing.

“It’s all right, Davie. There’s nowt there.”

His voice softened.

“Relax, Davie.”