Clay (13 page)

‘What’s the posh school?’

‘The girls’ one.’

‘Oh. It’s not posh, though. I think it’s just normal.’

TC pictured the hats. They definitely weren’t normal – or maybe they were if you were a different person. But if that was true, how did you ever know how things really were? Who was right about the hats, in the end? The thought was weird, and he pushed it away.

‘D’you want to be friends?’ he asked instead.

‘OK.’

‘D’you want to play after school sometimes?’

But Daisy looked doubtful. ‘My mummy – I’m always busy after school.’

‘Doing your homework?’

‘Sometimes. But other things – I do French and drama sometimes and I do ballet. What do you do?’

The trunk was warm and reassuring against his back. ‘I come here,’  TC replied.

From their perch they could see the path below, the train tracks, the football pitch and even the distant clay courts where a fat spaniel was cocking its leg on the one remaining net post. A lady with a pram passed below, and Daisy held her breath.

‘We can see everything!’ she whispered.

‘And nobody can see us,’ said TC. ‘It’s like we’re birds, up here. Or squirrels.’

‘Or secret spies!’ she breathed. ‘We can spy on everyone. We can collect evidence. We can find out about everything and have a secret code. Then, when they need evidence we’ll show them everything we’ve collected and we’ll be the best spies ever.’

‘When who needs evidence?’

‘You know . . .’

‘The police?’

That wasn’t right. Sometimes pretending was hard. ‘No, the grown-ups. The grown-up spies who are rubbish.’ By way of diversion she began whispering into her pink watch. ‘Saturday morning,’ she said, ‘a man comes. He is tall and he has got a plastic bag.’

‘That’s stupid. Lots of people have plastic bags.’

‘What then?’

‘I know, let’s go and look at his footprints!’

And so they spent the morning deep in covert operations, hatching plans in which Daisy would be crowned the cleverest and TC the most invisible – ‘the sneakiest,’ Daisy said, meaning it kindly. A kind of shorthand developed between them, so that while what they were each picturing was not quite the same, it was close enough not to matter. They moved through a world in which the motives of adults were mysterious and suspect and their own superior skills went unrecognised, and little imagined how true it actually was.

Linda was on her way into town to do the department stores. She had decided to kit herself out with a good set of gardening tools. There were some in the shed, but they were mismatched and dirty, and if she was going to get into gardening it would be nice to have her own set. She was well aware that Steven would have gone to one of the big hardware centres, but it was much more fun to go into town.

She hadn’t visited the local shops on the high road in years. There was nothing, absolutely nothing, there for her. It was grim: litter and pound shops and fast food and tacky clothing boutiques with sequinned polyester creations in the window, split to the thigh. The people who hung around there looked desperate or aggressive, even the children. Particularly the children.

Not only had she not shopped locally in years, she’d pretty much erased it from her mental image of where she lived. She rarely even drove along the high road, preferring to take a different route out of the area, one that led along the common, over the railway lines and then through some pretty Georgian squares. She took that route now, overtaking Denny, indicating left in his grimy van (‘Dennis Webb: Clearances’) and speeding past the white-painted bicycle that had recently appeared, chained to the railings near the station. Art project or something? she wondered. Probably.

She’d always loved shopping, ever since she was a little girl looking through catalogues, playing ‘What would you choose on this page?’ Back then there had not been the money for her to have what her mother called ‘fancy’ clothes, and even if there had been Sophia wouldn’t have indulged Linda’s wish for them; such things were frivolous, they weren’t what was really important in life. Oh, but they were, they
were
; and Linda could still recall the shame of never having the right things, of always standing out at school. Nowadays she made sure that Daisy, at least, fitted in.

When she was a teenager it got worse; everything became a kind of code, everything somehow advertised your worth. For instance, the really smart girls at school had different make-up, not the kind that was advertised in
Jackie
, and their clothes were different, too. Where did they get them, and how did they know which were the right things to buy? It was years before she realised that it wasn’t the clothes that were ‘right’, it was the girls, and that whatever they wore would have been invested with the same allure.

Now she lingered in the fragrance and skincare department, her practised eye skimming over the displays, looking for new product launches. She could still remember the first time she realised that someone normal – someone her own age and not famous or foreign – used posh toiletries, the kind you got from department stores rather than the local chemist. She was staying the night with a friend she had made at her first job, a chic girl called Patricia who was now, Linda was slightly aggrieved to recall, chief exec of an organic baby clothes company – or possibly baby food, she could never remember. They were both in their early twenties then, and seeing the expensive pots and bottles in the bathroom had made her look at Patricia with new eyes – yet when she finally dared to buy some too she was disappointed to find that, while it was nice enough to have, it refused to confer on her the same . . . what was it? Class?

There was a person Linda wanted to be, stylish and effortlessly confident; she could get within a hair’s breadth, but the goalposts seemed always to shift slightly, and despite keeping up with the glossy magazines she could never quite get it right. Nevertheless, every trip to the shops was another chance to transform herself once and for all, and more immediately an opportunity to exercise her ability to choose. It was good to know which things
not
to buy, at least, and to understand the nuances of price and brand and positioning; it was good to play the game as well as you could. The alternative was invisibility.

Linda rose smoothly up through the atrium in a glass lift. The gardening section, when she found it, wasn’t huge, but the things in it spoke to her in a way that the racks of tools in a DIY hangar never would have. She chose a canvas trug full of ‘heritage’ hand tools with lathe-turned ash handles, a pair of floral gardening gloves, a wooden dibber and a set of copper plant labels, and arranged for a matching ash-handled border spade and fork and six distressed terracotta pots to be delivered to the house.

At home she took her purchases out to the shed. The tools that were already there looked reproachful and untidy, and she stacked them in one corner, making room for her new spade and fork when they arrived. She set the trug on the shelf; dusty sunlight filtered through the Perspex panes and lent it a look of something that had always been there. The floral gloves, though, looked brash, and she could see they would have to go back.

‘Glass of wine?’ she called to Steven as she went back into the house. He emerged from the study with the dazed, close-focused air of someone who had been staring at a screen for far too long. ‘Go on then,’ he said. ‘I’m about finished for the day, anyway.’

‘What is it?’

‘A bottle – you know, the sports type, to fit on a bike. Needs to have hand grips, but space for the fixings, too.’

‘Tricky.’

‘Not really . . . it shouldn’t be. I just hate working on weekends.’

‘I know.’ She handed him a glass. ‘Oh, wait – hadn’t one of us better collect Daisy first?’

‘Don’t worry, your mum’s going to drop her back.’

‘Really? When?’

‘Oh . . . sometime before supper.’

Linda put her glass down and turned away. ‘Well, I can’t start making it, then.’

‘Why not?’

‘Because, Steve, she’ll see I’m cooking and she’ll want to stay.’

‘No she won’t. And anyway, is that so bad?’

‘Of course not, but you know I like to know. In advance, so I’m ready. And I wouldn’t have opened the wine.’

‘I’d’ve thought that would help,’ said Steven, smiling; but he could see from the set of her shoulders that it wasn’t going to be as easy as all that.

Daisy and TC were walking back from the common behind Sophia. Daisy had had a lovely time; one of her best times ever, probably. She thought about what TC had said, but she knew she wouldn’t be allowed to play after school, not unless it was all arranged. And although she couldn’t have said why, she didn’t think, somehow, that the arranging would be able to happen.

‘What do you want to be when you grow up?’ she asked, skipping a bit as they went. ‘I’m going to be a spy, or famous. Or do parties, like my mum.’

TC shrugged.

‘Come on, you must want to be something. Is it a footballer?’

‘No.’

‘What then?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Yes you do,’ she said, nudging him a little. ‘Go on, say!’

‘I
told
you, I don’t know,’ he muttered, something in his voice making Sophia look round.

‘Give over, Daisy,’ she said. ‘He doesn’t have to decide now.’

‘He could be a spy, too; I don’t mind. Or a soldier.’

‘
Daisy!
’

‘But I’m not even doing anything!’

It was too late. ‘I’ve got to go,’
TC said. ‘Bye, Daisy. Bye, Mrs . . .’

‘Sophia,’ Sophia supplied, as the boy slipped through the traffic on Litten Close and away.

‘He doesn’t want to be
anything
,’ Daisy pronounced conclusively. ‘Come on. Are you having supper at our house tonight?’

When Jozef got to the cafe he saw that the boy was already there. He was at the same table they’d sat at last time, the one by the window, which he held, eyes wide, looking very young among the garrulous Polish crowd. He looked relieved when Jozef arrived.

Znajda grinned indiscriminately at people’s legs and feet as they edged through the tables. She greeted TC enthusiastically, pushing her nose at him and wagging her tail ecstatically before subsiding with a thump onto her side and presenting her ribs for a scratch. Jozef liked the way she was with TC, and could see the confidence the boy took from being around the dog, how pleased he was that she recognised him each time. It was such a small thing to give the boy, and he wondered how little there must be in TC’s life that it would show.

‘You hungry?’

TC nodded.

‘OK.’ Jozef hung his jacket on the back of the chair and put his holdall on the seat, then made his way to the counter. While he waited to order he looked over at the boy and saw Znajda wag the stump of her tail at Agata, the waitress; she had once dropped a half-eaten blood sausage, only partly by mistake. Jozef was her favourite customer; he was polite to her, for one thing, and unlike many of the other regulars he had not tried to sleep with her.

‘Food is coming,’ Jozef said to TC, taking his seat. ‘First we eat, then we play. You remember how?’

‘Yeah,’ said TC.

‘OK, good. Because this is serious now. Man to man, OK?’

TC grinned and drank his Coke.

‘You want to know why it is so serious?’

‘Why?’

‘I show you. So. Today we don’t play with the usual pieces, OK?’ He slid a cardboard box from the plastic bag and placed it reverently on the table. ‘Today, we play with a new set.’ He turned the box to face TC, opening the lid and watching the boy’s face.

TC reached in and took out a lynx, and then a hare.

‘They’re all animals.’

‘Yes.’

‘You made them.’

‘Yes, I made them.’

‘Are they wood?’

‘Yes.’

‘How did you do it?’

‘With a knife – my father’s knife. He taught me. Is not easy – see these scars? And here? – but I have been doing it for a very long time.’

‘How long?’

‘Since I was your age.’

‘Will you teach me?’

Jozef considered the boy. ‘What do you think your mother would say?’

‘My . . . ? She won’t mind.’

‘Does she know you are here, even?’

TC put the animals down and looked past Jozef to the street outside. ‘Spect so.’

Jozef sighed.

‘Look, mister, you don’t have to teach me. I don’t care.’

‘TC, it is a different thing to have a knife here, in the city, than for a small Polish farm boy, OK?’

TC looked at his lap. ‘I’m not gonna do anything stupid.’

‘I know that.’

‘Well then.’

Jozef regarded him for a long moment. ‘I will think about it. OK? So. What have you been doing this week?’

‘Not much.’