Clay (2 page)

‘How old are you, son?’ asked the taller of the two.

‘Nine.’

‘And is that an Elmsford’s uniform?’

TC’s chest thumped, and his stomach dropped like a stone.

‘And why aren’t you in school today?’

He didn’t have any answers; yet there was something about the man’s hand on his shoulder as they steered him towards the high-rise blocks that felt almost like relief.

The coppers didn’t like the lift not working.
TC had to follow them at their pace up the stairs, their shoes black and ugly on each step, their trousers shiny and ill-fitting as school uniforms. They spoke to one another on the way up as though TC wasn’t there.

At the fourth floor they stopped. ‘This it, then?’ TC wasn’t even nervous now, not really bothered about what she might say. Something to get through, that was all. And then he could go to his room and look at his book.

But when she answered the door there was someone standing behind her – a man was standing behind her. TC thought for one heart-thudding moment that it was his father, but that was stupid, this man was taller and darker, different, this man was not his father, not his father at all.

2

Michaelmas

In the mornings she would sit by the kitchen window and watch the early-morning dog walkers not picking up after their dogs. Then would come the commuters on their way to work and the parents taking their kids to school, using the little park outside her window as a short cut to the bus stop and dropping cigarette ends into the grass. All so young, and no idea of it! Still, she wouldn’t want to be their age again. Too much to worry about. All the wrong things, too.

It was the end of September, and autumn was in the air. It had been a crisp weekend, brisk breezes chasing clouds across a blue sky and sending sycamore leaves down onto the grass where they would scud about for weeks, eventually forming a dry tide against the chain-link fence through which Sophia now looked and which marked the back boundary of the park. The Plestor Estate had been smart in the sixties and was ugly now, rain and grime staining its white render like tears, but her view of the trees was worth every deprivation that had befallen it since she and her late husband Henry had bought their ground-floor flat, brand new, in 1961.

How wonderful it had seemed when they had first moved in, with its clean white planes, the park next to it like the neat green swathe around an architect’s model, studded with foam trees. They could hardly believe they could afford it. Henry worked in a factory that made transistors and semiconductors; the company was on the up, buying other firms, and they were both optimistic about his prospects. The Plestor had represented a dream, a bright, modern future far away from the bomb sites and empty buildings of their childhoods. Michael was just a baby when they put their money down, another baby on the way; what they were buying into was something neither of them could have articulated, and so the disappointment that attended its failure to materialise – marked by the closure first of the nearby swimming baths, then the art deco cinema, the proliferation of pound shops and the gradual descent of the doctor’s surgery into grimy disorder – had been impossible to talk about either.

Although it was the little park to which Sophia would have said she was most attached, the flat itself had become, over long years, a perfect reflection of the old lady’s spirit. Despite her growing stiffness, and her hip, Sophia kept it spotlessly clean, and light flooded in for most of the day, filtering through the leaves in summer and lending the well-proportioned rooms a cool, almost underwater feel.

The parquet in the hallway was patinated to a deep shine, and in the kitchen a brown teapot, six mismatched mugs and a Cornish striped milk jug gleamed on the dresser. Everything in the flat had a story to tell: some of the furniture had belonged once to Sophia’s mother; some she and Henry had bought second-hand and, together, restored; he had been a practical man who hated to see good things go to waste. The sun-faded curtains and cushions she had made herself; over the years the print had passed in and out of fashion more than once, but Sophia had loved them when she made them, and she loved them now. The other flats in the block – sublet, divided into bedsits, thumping with music – may have descended into relative disorder, but Sophia’s remained a haven of tranquillity. The only note of untidiness was the kitchen windowsill, where stones, pine cones, honesty seeds and dull, wizened conkers spoke of a habit that may have formed when Sophia’s two children were small, but had continued long after they were grown up.

Monday morning had dawned damp and chill, and now she wiped the condensation from the inside of the kitchen window with her sleeve, the better to see if it was a stormcock singing so loudly from the top of the rowan. Its brave red berries made it one of her favourite trees in the park, especially in a breeze when its leaves would flicker to show their silvery underneaths. In truth, though, she loved all of them, and knew them all, too: which of the horse chestnuts unfurled its acid-green leaves first each spring, where the squirrels had a drey in the holm oak and whether the young cherry, its bark stripped by dogs one hot night in June, was likely to survive the coming winter, or was dying already, its sap unable to reach up past the wound.

Today’s main job was to go to the post office and pay some bills. By about ten o’clock the paths that criss-crossed the grass were mainly free of charging dogs, pushchairs and other irritations; ignoring the sensible shoes her daughter Linda had bought her, Sophia Adams, seventy-eight and a half, thrust her feet into the too-big brogues she still could not bear to throw out after fourteen years of widowhood, took up her ash stick and set out.

It wasn’t much of a park, really, more a strip of land between the noisy high road and the flats. The council had laid tarmac paths across it here and there, but narrow tracks of beaten earth – what the planners called ‘desire paths’ – had been made by feet, and better reflected where people actually wanted to go: from the estate to the bus stop, for instance, and from the benches to the pedestrian crossing.

Despite its size and situation the strip of grass was beautiful – if you had the eyes to see. The Victorians had bequeathed it an imaginative collection of trees; not just the ubiquitous planes and sycamores, and not the easy-care lollipops of cherries either, but hornbeams, service trees, acacias and Turkey oaks with bristly acorn cups like little sea anemones. It was alive with squirrels, jays and wood mice, while in spring thrushes let off football rattles from the treetops, and every few summers stag beetles emerged to rear and fence and mate, and begin another perilous generation among the logs that were left to decay here and there by governmental decree.

It was a big city, but it was a small park, and it had its own citizens and supplicants, of which Sophia supposed she was one. Today there was no sign of the little boy she often saw, the one who seemed to miss so much school, but rounding the back of the flats, ah yes, there was the Turkish chap from the fried chicken parlour having his morning cigarette on the benches.

At the other end of the park an elderly Jamaican man in tracksuit bottoms and a grubby vest was limbering up for another day’s work. He spent the mornings and early evenings energetically petitioning the traffic for change and cigarettes, dancing about on the pavement as he waited for the lights to bring the cars to a halt, and sometimes in the road, too. Goodness only knows what he got up to in the afternoons; cards, perhaps. How ever does he know my name? thought Sophia whenever she found herself at the thinner end of the wedge-shaped park. It was a mystery. She always smiled and waved back at him nonetheless, poor man. Good manners cost nothing, after all.

This morning, though, Sophia headed in the opposite direction, towards the shops. A light rain had begun to fall, but she stopped under the rowan and craned her head back as far as she dared to see if she could spot whoever had been singing in it. The branches were empty of birds, but, ‘Quite right, too,’ she said aloud. ‘I could be anyone.’ She pushed her hands deep into the pockets of her coat, finding a shape that could be either a pebble or a Minto. Did she dare suck it and see? she wondered, snorting to think what her daughter would say if she caught her eating stones. ‘She’d pack me off!’ Sophia exclaimed, aloud. The Turkish man looked down and smiled a little to himself as the old lady passed by.

By mid-afternoon the drizzle had cleared, a high breeze sending the weather east where it would dampen the decking in countless suburban gardens and form shallow, dirty puddles on the sky-blue covers of backyard trampolines, most of which would remain covered up now until spring. Over the park the sky was a flat, high white, the autumn sun not quite strong enough to break through or fully dry the rain-darkened tarmac paths.

The tea tray at four was a daily ritual: on it a clean tea cloth, the deep brown teapot, the striped jug, a mug and spoon and two biscuits on a side plate. Sophia took it carefully to her kitchen table and sat down, Basildon Bond and a biro before her. She was trying to write a letter to her pen pal, who also happened to be her granddaughter, but it wasn’t always easy to think of things to say to someone of only eight. They had begun the letters, despite living just round the corner from each other, after the correspondent assigned to Daisy by her school failed to reply to Daisy’s email. At first their letters had been something of a novelty, but now she rather suspected that Daisy’s brief and increasingly dilatory replies were composed rather under duress.

‘
Dear Daisy
,’ she began. While her cramped handwriting came only haltingly, in her mind the lines ran clear and true as thought.

But then, from outside her window came a sudden, clanking roar and a medley of indistinct male shouts. Sophia switched off Radio 4 and craned forward to see. It was a small yellow JCB, and it was being driven into the park followed by two men in council overalls carrying sacks. ‘Goodness me,’ she said, standing up. It stopped under the big plane tree, about a hundred yards away, and the men in overalls threw down their sacks, sat down on them and began to smoke. The driver reversed up a little and raised the JCB’s mechanical arm, before bringing it down and tearing up the grass in a long strip. Before long it had rucked up the turf like an unmade bed, which the two workmen heaved and rolled to one side. The soil beneath was black and startling, like a wound immodestly revealed. Then the machine went to work again, piling the earth to the other side of the wide, shallow trench. Finally the driver switched off the engine. The other two men tore open the tops of the sacks and stepped down into the hole. Bulbs, she thought, picturing the local squirrels and how the smell of disturbed earth was an irresistible challenge to them. She wondered what sort of bulbs they were. Daffs, probably.

The men were rather a long time in the hole, and eventually Sophia went back to her letter. After a while she heard the JCB roar into life, and looked out of the window again. The arm was swinging down to scoop up the black earth from the pile in its claw, before letting it drop again into the hole. Then the men kicked it roughly into place before pushing and rolling the muddy turf back over the top. Once the driver had run over it with his caterpillar tracks you would hardly have known that anything had happened there.

Over the next hour or so the three-man crew repeated the procedure over near the benches and in a long, thin strip by the road. At about five, just as she was considering a walk to the shops and a look at what they had been up to, she heard the JCB’s engine roar closer and closer, until she could almost make out what the men were shouting at each other over it. It drew right up to the chain-link fence, sending Sophia back from her window to the kitchen door, from where she watched as it tore up the grass and the daisies, the stubborn buttercups and next year’s dandelions, revealing the naked soil beneath with its secret cargo of red worms, ants and fat white grubs.

Finally the driver backed off a few feet, switched off the engine and began to roll a cigarette. The men with the sacks stepped into the hole and began to set out the golden bulbs. Sophia craned forward to see: they were placing them in neat rows to make a grid, each one the same distance from its neighbour. How extraordinary, she thought. They must have been told to plant them six inches apart.

‘Half five!’ came a shout, just as she was filling the kettle for more tea. The men were kicking soil roughly over the bulbs and locking up the JCB, which crouched by the strips of torn-up turf, the ends of its tines glinting dully. By the time the kettle had boiled, they were gone. Sophia drank her tea at the kitchen table and considered the regiment of bulbs half buried beneath her window.

It was after midnight when she left the flat, having stayed up late through a combination of television, tea and pacing about. As she grasped her ash stick and pulled the door to behind her, she was aware of several things: that wandering about in the park at night might be considered foolhardy by some; that she was a silly and quite possibly mad old woman; and that this level of subterfuge – including the fact that she was wearing an old black coat of Henry’s – was probably unnecessary. But you can’t always be sensible, she thought, and anyway, some things are too important. They had both always loved the park and had taken a keen interest in its upkeep, but it was after Henry’s death that she had really felt it to be her responsibility. Henry would have had something to say about the grids of bulbs, she felt. And besides, she didn’t want to have to look at them like that next spring.