Clay (9 page)

There was nowhere to sit in the takeaway, but TC lingered at the counter, making the chips last. It was clear to Jozef that he didn’t want to go home.

‘Eh, kid,’ he said. ‘You play chess?’

TC shook his head.

‘You want to learn?’

He went to the back room and retrieved a stool for TC, put it in front of the counter. From his holdall he fetched the chess set he’d found in the old man’s house; he often took it to the Polish cafe after his shift for a game. Musa, appearing behind the counter, raised an eyebrow at him. ‘It’s quiet, boss,’ said Jozef. ‘Nobody here. If customers come I stop playing, OK?’

The dog had been gone for weeks, and Jozef no longer whistled for her when he cut through the little park or across the common. Yet as he walked back from the Polish cafe that night, warm from the cherry vodka they’d given him, there she was at his side, grinning and steadfast, her flat head as soft as satin under his hand. ‘
Gdziety ty byla
ś
, Znajda?
’ he whispered, crouching down to look her over. But wherever she had been she did not seem harmed, and Jozef was surprised by the strength of his relief. ‘Znajda! Znajda!’ he called out, and broke into a run, the dog jumping and bounding joyfully at his side.

They jogged the length of the common together, the exercise and the cold night air chasing the alcohol from Jozef’s blood. The night was clear, the moon keeping pace with them through the black branches and turning the grass silver, illuminating their twin trails through the dewfall where they ran.

All around them, the common was alive: the brambles full of roosting songbirds, the little copse stalked by foxes and the leaf litter rustling with voles, hunted, now and then, by a kestrel who had a nest high on a housing block three streets away. It was intoxicating and familiar; it smelled of new life and decay, and though bound about by roads and regulations Jozef understood then that it was a wild place, and not subject to anyone or anything at all.

As they neared the road they slowed, and it came to Jozef that he did not want to take Znajda back to Denny and the dark little room above the shop. He rested his hands on his knees and looked at her, his breath forming brief clouds in front of his face. The dog sprawled blissfully on the wet grass at his feet and smiled.

At first, Musa did not want to let Jozef leave the dog at the takeaway.

‘Please. Just one night,’ repeated Jozef. ‘I pick her up tomorrow, I swear.’

‘Joe, you should take her back to Denny, you know,’ replied Musa; but his hand was gently massaging her scarred ears. ‘Is his dog. He gonna breed from her again soon.’

‘He makes her live upstairs, Musa, he never even walk her. You know that.’

Musa shook his head. ‘You think you can keep her secret, my friend? Where will you go? She can’t stay here.’

‘I’ll find a new place to live,’ Jozef replied, realising suddenly that he should have done so a long time ago. ‘I’ll ask around tomorrow. I don’t want to work for Denny no more, anyway.’

‘Where will you get money, then?’ asked the little Turk; but he already knew what Jozef would say next.

The second-hand furniture shop was dark when Jozef got back, the stairs unlit. He let himself into his room and switched on the light. He had lived there for months, but it bore barely any trace of him at all.

He lay on the bed and stared at the ceiling. It would be good to find some extra work to supplement his money from the takeaway; he would definitely need more cash, even with the extra shifts Musa had given him. At least he had not gambled away his wages for the last couple of weeks.

A little bedsit would do fine. Somewhere warm where he and Znajda could sleep and where he could cook for himself. He would buy his own sheets and towels, kitchen things; he’d walk Znajda every morning, and find new places for them to explore at the weekends.

The mattress with its dent was like the shallow scrape a hare makes in a field, and as he lay there Jozef was reminded of his dream. He could already imagine the coiled and graceful musculature of the hare he would carve; but first he would finish the creature he had begun. He got up and went to the window. There it was on the sill, smiling up at him. He picked it up and ran his thumb over it, picturing how Znajda’s strong chest would push bravely out of the wood, and how her broad head with its soft ears would acquire a patina over time.

The pigeons lined up fat and flea-ridden on the ledges across the street regarded the yellow window for a moment, where behind the glass a big man leaned on the sill and began to coax a dog’s form from an end of old wood.

8

Candlemas

January had been dull and mild. But as the new year wore on, the temperatures dropped, and the month went out on a hard frost which silvered the city from the suburbs to its asphalt heart. By the afternoon of 1 February the lawns had thawed, but that night the frost came again, and the next day they stayed white until nightfall. And each night after that the frost drove deeper and deeper down into the ground.

First the puddles in the park formed a thin skin of ice, then a rocking lid; a few more days into February and they were solid, even the mud around them frozen hard under the dog walkers’ feet. Beside the railway embankment the brambles’ dauntless leaves looked suddenly limp and drab.

Along Leasow Road ice had bound the gravel on the driveways so that it no longer gave so readily underfoot. In pots and front gardens the last surviving pelargoniums now drooped bletted and blackening; the north-facing back gardens, deprived even of the cold sun, were claimed utterly, the frost reaching even to the dankest, most sheltered corners. Only a few early snowdrops raised their heads from the frozen ground.

The birds became bold; hundreds were lost to the ammil every night, and hunger drove them to new braveries with each unrelenting day. They froze where they slept in the hedges and trees, their bodies falling secretly to the ground like leaves. They were merely feet and feathers, hardly a mouthful for the city’s sleek cats and opportunistic foxes.

Monday was Bristol, and a dim, early start. Linda hurried to her car with her arms crossed, each breath forming a cloud that hung in the still air even after she had moved through it. In the car she turned the heating up full and decided against removing her coat, although she knew that halfway there she’d be uncomfortable. She thrust her hands between her knees for a moment, her shoulders hunched, leg muscles taut against the icy air of the footwell. Something crackled in her coat pocket: her mother’s letter to Daisy. She had had supper with them the night before, only remembering to give Linda the letter on the short drive back to the estate.

Something about her mother’s visit rankled. What was it? Idly, she turned it over in her mind; there was always something. That was it: Daisy’s school project. ‘Is it all right if I help Daisy at the weekend?’ Sophia had asked. ‘Or does it have to be handed in before then?’ It wasn’t that she hadn’t known about the ‘Our Seasons’ project, just that she hadn’t realised Daisy had asked her grandmother for help. She must have looked surprised. ‘Well, love, you mustn’t mind. You’re not a very outdoors person,’ her mother had said.

Impatiently she stuffed the letter in the glovebox, and tuned the radio to a talk station to keep her company on the long drive. The weather report sounded like an incantation against the gods.

In town she drove aggressively, but without the fine judgement to back it up. She knew all the routes out of the city well, and she was confident in her choices, but she wasn’t good at anticipating other drivers and once or twice had to brake hard; several times she chose to cut people off, dealing with it simply by refusing to meet the other driver’s eyes.

Once she was on the motorway and clear of the city she began to relax. The sun had begun to throw the trees’ shadows long across the silver fields, and by nine it was warming the left side of her face. The sky was a theatre of clouds, the hard shoulders patrolled by pairs of crows, and red kites wheeled overhead, riding the road’s rising thermals in wide, sweeping curves.

The frost was disappearing fast from the flanks of the fields facing the sun, though it lingered in the lees and in the pockets. Where it had gone, the fields were mostly ridged and brown, although one or two were baized with green. Linda wondered vaguely what could be growing in them at this time of year – weeds, perhaps.

In a few of the fields left fallow, wrecked lorries acted as makeshift advertising hoardings. One was fashioned from an old shipping container which had been gently collapsing for several years. It was for a debt-collection agency, although the telephone number, with its outdated dialling code, was now partly missing. Below it the sheltered field was grazed by sheep, lit golden, as the sun crested the rise, like a Constable pastoral.

She pulled over because something hit the windscreen, and once she had stopped she found she was shaking. What the hell was it? She thought she had seen feathers, a brief flash of black and white like a subliminal message thumping on the glass, but what on earth would a bird be doing flying around on the motorway? But then, they were notoriously stupid, flying into aeroplanes’ engines and the like. The windscreen wasn’t damaged, anyway, and for that she was grateful.

Whatever it was it had gone; there was no dead bird anywhere that she could see. Linda got out of the car, pulling her coat around her, and took a breath. The motorway was busy, and she turned her back on the lorries thundering past. On the other side of the crash barrier was a wood, the winter trunks faintly green with algae. Some of the trees were lagged with ivy, the trunks teacosied in glossy leaves, the branches jutting bare.

Something moved deep in the trees. Linda peered in, but could make nothing out. There it was again: a little brown bird running up a trunk like a mouse. It circled around the trunk, moving out of view.
Not an outdoor person
, she thought, bipping the car doors locked and stepping over the barrier into the wood.

Beyond the tangle of saplings and undergrowth at its margins the wood was trackless, but dry underfoot: there was a thick covering of brown leaves and little husks on the ground, and few plants grew between the smooth trunks. Almost immediately, the roar of the motorway receded behind her.

To Linda’s surprise, it was more than just a windbreak for the road. She had expected a field on the other side, but after a couple of minutes’ walking she was still surrounded by trees. What was the point of it? It didn’t look as though people were cutting it for timber, and it was too close to the motorway for paintballing. She wondered if it had a name, and who it belonged to. At least there was no danger of getting lost. The sound of the traffic was still a dull hum behind her; she could follow it back to the car any time she liked.

She knew that what she was doing was out of character, but perhaps that was the point. ‘You’ll never guess what I did today,’ she’d say to Steven that night, when she got in. How surprised he’d be, and who could blame him? But, ‘Nothing wrong with a walk in the woods, sweet pea,’ her father would have said. She could see him now, striding in front of her in his long black coat. And if she put her foot down she could still be in Bristol on time.

She pushed on, and it began to seem as though she was in another world. The trees had closed around her, and for a moment she felt that the wood could well go on forever, in all directions, her imaginary map of the country covered with an ancient tangled darkness instead of the straight lines of her car journeys. Of course it wasn’t so, but she stopped anyway and listened for the distant, reassuring sound of the traffic. Was that it? She wasn’t sure. Yet she hadn’t walked for very long; it should be easy enough to find the car again.

All around her the smooth grey trunks reached up straight and leafless to the sky, the ground beneath mulched in russet leaves. Yet something near her foot snagged her eye. Pushing through the leaf litter was a tiny green shoot, with all the unmistakable energy of a bulb. Once she had seen one, she saw they were everywhere. It came to her from somewhere that felt like childhood that these were bluebells, and that in a couple of months this tiny, forgotten corner of woodland would be a paradise, the cars speeding by unheeding as the wood performed a miracle entirely of its own making, designed only for itself and for no human eyes at all. She wondered if anybody in the entire world knew it but her.

Back on the hard shoulder the car ticked as it cooled. The GPS on the dashboard reflected the sky; in the glovebox was Sophia’s reply to her granddaughter, a clutch of black honesty seeds in their milky discs sleeping in its folds.

What had begun with a few grey clouds chasing their shadows across the fields had become a legion, and the sky was heavy and dull. A flock of lapwings, nearly a thousand of them, took off as one from a field in which the winter wheat was just coming through, their broad, blunt wings flashing white and black as they turned. They had arrived nearly six weeks ago, riding a north-easterly from Scandinavia, to eat insects and invertebrates on the Somerset Levels, just as they had been doing for time out of mind – although the big flocks, tens of thousands strong, were a rarity these days. They wheeled and resettled further upwind as Linda emerged from the beech hanger into the field and turned to toil back along the field margin to the road. The wind picked up, gusting over the contours of the frozen land, and brought with it the smell of snow.