Clay (20 page)

But it wasn’t his tree they were looking at. They dragged the yellow dog by its chain over to the oak next to his and one of them pulled a branch down; they made the dog bite the branch. Then they let it go. The branch swung up and the dog hung there, kicking, yelping, growling. TC felt sick or like crying. It was horrible to watch, it was like they were hanging it. Why? The dog went limp for a moment, but it wouldn’t let go. Then it struggled and growled again. He thought about Znajda, tried to picture someone doing that to her, but it was too awful so he stopped. She wouldn’t let them, anyway. Jozef wouldn’t either, no way.

TC couldn’t stop looking, he couldn’t stop. He didn’t see the other kids come until they were right in the clearing. They had a dog too, a bit smaller and darker; it began baying and lunging at the yellow dog, and had to be dragged back, half choking, by its chain. They were all smoking weed, and the sweet, familiar smell drifted up to TC where he sat. The embers glowed red when each spliff was inhaled, then the spark arced downwards with each arm. The yellow dog kicked and growled where it hung from the branch; they kept the darker one a bit away and held his head and looked at its teeth. They were all talking, excited. TC felt sick.

They turned back to the yellow dog. The kid with the stick got it out again and landed it a blow on the back of the neck; it let go of the branch with a yelp – but when it hit the ground the other dog went for it, dragging the chain out of its owner’s hand, the two animals locked together in a sudden and terrifying frenzy. Then it was all yelping and shouting, all of them trying to pull the dogs apart, trying to grab the chain, the kid with the stick wielding it over and over, the dull, sickening thumps as it fell and all the fine young grass of the clearing torn up in a wide circle as the dogs’ dark blood flicked out to spatter the surrounding trees.

When TC came down from the tree it was proper night. Before leaving he snapped off the twig he had tied in a knot all those months ago. It had been a stupid idea; there was no point in it.

He didn’t think about anything as he left the wood. He didn’t look at the torn-up earth, or the wounded trees. He tried not to think about the dogs. Their faces, when they were finally separated, had been ruined: swollen, bloody, torn. They didn’t look scary any more, they looked pitiful. One had to be carried; both of them looked sad, and somehow ashamed. It all felt familiar to TC, as though it had all happened before.

He made for the secret garden. Such things could not exist in there.

He crawled under the rhododendron, where the fox sometimes slept. He imagined it would not begrudge him a night there. Ivy had crawled up and over much of it, making a kind of bower. He breathed the fox smell in, curled into it, and closed his eyes.

Around the sleeping boy the garden slowly resettled itself, but beyond that the vast city winked and glittered, the grass pollen, unchanged for millennia, settling invisibly over everything like a cloud.

17

Midsummer

Warm and humid air moved in from France, then dry air slid above it from the plateaus of Spain. The June skies turned low and grey; the upper atmosphere cooled, and the weather became unpredictable.

Jozef was scouring the high road for Flat 131A, fat raindrops splashing on the warm pavement and down his neck. It didn’t make sense; there were big gaps in the numbers, and it didn’t help that most of the shops didn’t display a number at all. He checked the plastic key ring again and decided to retrace his steps.

Finally he found a puddled alley that led off the high road and turned at right angles to run behind the shops for several hundred yards. Metal staircases led up from it to the flat roofs that formed the rear elevation of the shops, and a row of front doors – back doors, really – gave access to the flats above at first-floor level.

The alley housed the shops’ huge metal bins. Most had flattened boxes stacked around them, and there was quite a lot of litter and old fruit. Jozef thought of rats, and hurried up the clanging stairs.

Number 131 had a faded pink door that had probably once been red; two long-dead tiger palms in plastic pots stood outside. He tried the key, and pushed the door open cautiously.

The little hall was dark, and the light didn’t work. Jozef left the front door open so he could see which of the three inner doors was Flat A, pizza flyers slipping and whispering under his trainers.

The bedsit smelled a little stale, but it was better than he had expected. The main room had a divan base, but no mattress, a low table and a storage heater, and there was a little kitchen to one side and a bathroom with a shower curtain decorated with fish.

The main room looked out onto the high road; the kitchen and bathroom were windowless. Jozef tried to picture the shape of the original flat before it had been subdivided, but you’d have to have a look at the other two bedsits if you wanted to be sure.

He wondered what the neighbours were like; maybe Agata could tell him. It was she who had found him the place, really; she’d overheard one of the customers at the cafe complaining about a tenant and had introduced them. The landlord was a big man from Lód
z
´ with one eye, whom Jozef had instinctively liked. Znajda had too, struggling up into a lopsided sit from her place under Jozef’s table to nose at the man’s broad hand. Jozef left the cafe in the small hours with the man’s phone number in his wallet, and a week later he had the key.

Outside there was a distant rumble, and a downpour beat a tattoo on the glass. Jozef looked out; he was above the halal butcher’s, he worked out, the minimarket to the left. If he put his forehead to the glass and craned to the right he could see the old lady, Sophia, making her slow way through the little park towards her flat.

He closed his eyes for a moment. It wasn’t the farm; it wasn’t even his. But it was something.

An hour later Sophia was still sitting in the kitchen and looking out of her window at the rain. Saturday: she was due at Linda and Steven’s for lunch, but at this rate she’d be wet through by the time she got there.

Eventually it eased, although the sky remained grey and low overhead. She put on a coat – not Henry’s, her own – and the shoes Linda had bought her, and went back out.

In the little park blackbirds ran, paused and ran, and wrens shouted alarums from the undergrowth. The water on the high road fizzed under the buses’ tyres. Sophia hunched her shoulders and tried to pick up her pace.

On Leasow Road she rang the doorbell and heard it chime sonorously deep inside the house. The front door was dove grey; at first she’d thought it an undercoat, and had been surprised to discover it was staying like that. Now she had got used to it, though, she had to admit it looked rather smart.

Linda answered the door just as the rain began to ease and embraced her gently, as though she were a bird – or perhaps it was just that she was wet. ‘Hello, Mum,’ she said. ‘Here, let me take your coat.’

Sophia handed over a bread bag, tied at the top with string. ‘For you.’

‘What on earth is it?’

‘Seeds,’ she replied, taking off her coat with some difficulty. ‘And a cutting. Honeysuckle. I did it just now, coming up your road. Do you have a pot and some compost? Only we don’t want it to dry out.’

‘You took it from someone’s front garden? You stole it?’

‘Yes, I suppose so.’

After a moment, Linda laughed. ‘OK then, why not. I think the rain’s stopped. Shall we?’

They went into the back garden. ‘Here it is,’ said Linda, dragging a plastic sack to the teak garden table. ‘Is here all right? I don’t have a potting bench.’

‘Oh, fine. Got a pot?’

Linda fetched one from the shed, and Sophia showed her how to cut the woody stem diagonally, just below a bud, and push it gently into the half-filled pot. Some cling film and a rubber band finished the job.

‘Lovely. Leave it in the shade and keep an eye on it. Don’t let it dry out, or get mouldy. It should root within a fortnight.’

‘Then what?’

‘Well, then you’ve got yourself a new plant, free.’

‘You mean – that’s it?’

‘I do. And your neighbour’s is none the worse for it, so it’s all . . . hunky-dory. Or whatever.’

Linda made tea and they took a tour of the garden, Linda pointing out plants whose names she didn’t know, or that she had questions about. Sophia found it was lovely to be asked, lovely to be useful, and if she sometimes sounded more certain than she felt it was only because she was so enjoying her daughter’s attention. She made a mental note to look up one or two things in her plant encyclopedia when she got home, just to be sure. Though it would be awful to have to admit she’d got it wrong.

Daisy was at Susannah’s house, so lunch was just the three of them. Linda made salmon fishcakes with a rocket salad, and Steven emerged from the study to make a vinaigrette.

‘People think of rocket as being exotic,’ said Sophia, between mouthfuls, ‘but it’s been grown in this country for centuries. The medievals had it. Did you know that?’

Linda shook her head.

‘Not that there’s anything wrong with a nice gem lettuce, in my opinion. Do you remember your father’s little gems? He grew a good lettuce, your father.’

‘I remember his radishes,’ said Linda. ‘Oh, how I used to hate them.’

‘No you didn’t, you loved them! You’re thinking of . . . of . . .’

‘I’m not, Mum, I’m thinking of radishes. They always looked so wonderful – the pretty leaves with their red veins, and then the little radish like a ruby in the dust. But it was like eating a raw onion. I used to pick them out.’

‘Rot. I wouldn’t have let you.’

‘You didn’t, as I remember. Me and Michael used to sneak them into our pockets.’

‘Did Linda tell you we’re thinking of growing some vegetables?’ Steven interrupted smoothly. ‘I know it’s a bit late for this year, but we thought there might be time for some chard and some carrots, perhaps some garlic, later.’

‘Where?’

‘Here, in the garden.’

‘Well, I don’t know about that. Why don’t you get an allotment? Much better.’

‘There are waiting lists these days,’ Steven replied. ‘It’s become rather fashionable.’

‘What, vegetables?’

‘Growing your own, yes.’

Sophia was silent a moment. ‘Well, that’s good, I think,’ she said. ‘Gracious, your father’s come back into fashion! How he’d laugh.’

She got up from the table and began opening the kitchen cupboards, coming back to the table with a bottle of ketchup. ‘Sorry, Steven. The fishcakes were crying out for it,’ she said.

‘Not at all.’

Linda briefly closed her eyes.

‘So where do you think we should put our vegetable patch?’ Steven asked.

‘Well, which side gets the most sun?’

‘The left – but that’s where Daisy’s flower bed is. You know, the one –’

‘The one she’s doing with me, the one where we were going to see what germinated naturally. Only she isn’t; I’m not sure she’s really – what is it?
on board
with the idea. I keep asking her to tell me what’s growing in it, but she seems to have lost interest. Oh, root it up, they’re only weeds. She’s had her chance.’

‘But we gave it to her.’

‘You’re her parents, aren’t you? You can take it back again. She can help with the veg, if she wants to. Promises get broken, sometimes. That’s life, and she’ll have to get used to it sooner or later.’

On the way home Sophia reflected on what she had said. ‘Tough love’ they called it these days, and it was true she’d never believed in mollycoddling. But it wasn’t like her to be so callous when it came to Daisy. Surely she wasn’t piqued by the failure of a nine-year-old girl to be interested in her silly flower bed project?

Or perhaps she was. And behind that was the uncomfortable knowledge that she was guilty of another betrayal, a bigger one. She wondered why Daisy hadn’t told her mother that she sometimes let her play in the park by herself; it would have got her out of trouble that day at the flat, after all.

Sophia hadn’t seen much of her granddaughter since then, although that could be for any number of reasons. It was silly to worry about it, she knew; Daisy was many things, but she wasn’t a sulker. Yet she had to admit that she felt obscurely in the little girl’s debt.

When she left the house Linda had given her a letter from Daisy, and now she decided to sit on the bench in the park and read it. Her granddaughter’s childish phrases were just the thing to dissipate the cloud she was imagining had fallen over their friendship.

‘
Dear Granny
,’ the letter began. ‘
I do still love you but I don’t want to write to you any more. Yours sincerely, Daisy
.’

It was nearly dawn the next day when they arrived in the little park, three of them, hoods up, pushing a scooter across the grass and under the trees.

The tallest one unscrewed the petrol cap and then set the scooter down on its side. Squatting down, he took something from his back pocket – a dishcloth? a headscarf? – and pushed it deep into the tank. Then, drawing it out a little way, he took a lighter and lit the end that hung out.