Clay (6 page)

When they had first got married they had lived on the other side of the city – almost as far from the estate as it was possible to get. Then, when they were trying for a baby, they decided to move, and the pull of family, an area they knew and a good school, had led them back. Neither of them had meant to end up quite so close to Sophia, yet there were things in life you chose without meaning to, and sometimes – although his wife would never admit it – sometimes the world you grew up in turned out to be stronger than you could predict.

‘I’ll pick you up at about five,’ he said, kissing Daisy goodbye at the entrance to the estate and waving to Sophia where she looked out from her kitchen window.

‘I saw a hedgehog!’ shouted Daisy by way of greeting, as she barrelled into the flat and began kicking off her shoes.

‘Hello, Daisy. Did you now? How exciting,’ replied Sophia. ‘What was he up to?’

‘I don’t know because I didn’t actually see him, but I think he was eating slugs,’ Daisy replied. ‘I heard him, and Mummy heard him. He made a snuffling noise.’

‘Goodness,’ said Sophia, wondering to herself that there were any slugs left in Linda’s tidy garden. ‘I expect he’ll want to hibernate soon.’

‘Yes, and he’ll probably do it in our garden, I think,’ said Daisy.

‘Let’s hope so,’ said Sophia, trying to think whether there was anywhere untidy or undisturbed enough for a small mammal to sleep safely for several months. ‘Now, today we have a very important job to do, and I especially need your help.’

‘Is it outside? Can we have a picnic while we’re doing it?’

‘I think it’s probably too chilly for that, sweet pea – but you’re right, we are going to need to keep our strength up. Let’s make a packed lunch to take with us.’

Daisy’s eyes grew round. ‘Can I have a fizzy drink?’

‘No, but you can have chocolate spread. In fact, I can too,’ said Sophia, assembling a sliced loaf, Nutella and tinfoil on the kitchen table.

Outside in the little park Daisy carried the sandwiches in her backpack, while Sophia took charge of the notebook and pen. They were counting how many dreys the squirrels were building for winter, and they began at the far end where there was a row of plane trees. Now that the leaves were coming down it was possible to see the dreys quite clearly, although left to her own devices Daisy would have recorded every magpie’s nest and trapped plastic bag too.

They ate their sandwiches on the benches, Sophia letting Daisy drink apple juice out of Henry’s old hip flask and both of them pretending it was whisky.

Sophia didn’t spot the boy straight away. He had slipped in near the children’s play area and was crouching beneath the holm oak when she saw him, looking at something on the ground. It was the lonely little lad who wagged school, she realised; and it occurred to her that, at one time, local children used to play with each other.

‘Right, miss,’ she said to Daisy, ‘now for the difficult part. We have to write up all our data – that’s everything we’ve learned – very carefully in this notebook. It could take an awfully long time.’

Daisy looked past her, brow furrowing. ‘OK,’ she said, without enthusiasm. ‘But, Granny, you’ve got the best writing, so you could do all the writing and I could just help you.’

‘Well, I think it would be best if we did it together,’ said Sophia, ‘unless . . . I don’t suppose you’d prefer to go and say hello to that little boy over there, would you? He looks like he might be doing a project that needs some expert help.’

‘Oh, OK then,’ said Daisy, ‘I’ll do that instead. If you can definitely manage by yourself.’

‘I’ll be quite all right,’ said Sophia, settling back on the bench and feeling in her pocket for a Minto. It was a shame there was only apple juice in the hip flask, but you couldn’t have everything.

TC was still squatting and examining the ground when Daisy ran over. ‘What are you looking at?’ she demanded.

He seemed to shrink a little. ‘Nothing,’ he muttered.

‘No it isn’t. What is it? I’m Daisy. What’s your name?’

‘TC,’ he muttered.

‘TC? That’s not a name,’ replied Daisy. ‘But you can be called it if you want. I’m eight. How old are you?’

‘Nine,’ said TC.

‘Nine!’ breathed Daisy, clearly impressed. ‘Have you found something? Is it a secret?’

TC looked up, but there was no mockery in her face. He didn’t want to tell; at least, he didn’t think he did. But he could feel that he was going to. Why?

‘You can’t tell anyone,’ he said.

‘Cross my heart and hope to die,’ the girl said, crouching down too.

‘It’s not a game.’

‘I promise.’

TC took a deep breath. ‘It’s an animal.’

‘What is?’

‘It lives around here.’

‘In the park?’

‘And on the common. You know.’

‘How do you know?’

‘I’ve been tracking it.’

‘What does that mean?’

‘Following it. Its footprints and things.’

Daisy looked down at the ground between them. It was bare where the grass gave out beneath the holm oak’s shade. ‘Is there a footprint here?’

‘Not yet,’ replied TC, smoothing the dusty surface of the soil with his hand, ‘but there might be tomorrow.’

When Sophia opened her eyes she saw that the two children were happily engrossed in whatever they had found under the tree. She hoped Daisy wasn’t being too imperious with the little boy; he could clearly do with gentle handling.

But TC didn’t mind Daisy’s bossiness, had hardly noticed it, in fact. Although he hadn’t exactly been keeping track, the truth was it was the first friendly contact he had had with another child in nearly a year.

Over the weekend it became clear to Jamal that TC was not birdwatching. He saw the boy crawling about in the undergrowth at the end of the flats’ gardens, looking everywhere but at the pigeons and crows and what-all that Jamal could see in the trees. He asked Kelly about it on Sunday night as they watched TV.

‘He’s trying to find animals,’ she said, cracking open a beer. ‘You know, footprints and stuff. He’s got a book on it.’

‘TC got a book?’ asked Jamal. ‘How come we don’t see him reading it?’

‘I told you, it’s a secret. He thinks I don’t know. He’s got a ghost one too.’

‘But why? Why are they a secret?’

‘I don’t know. It’s just . . . kids, yeah? You know, they like to have secret games. Keeps him quiet, anyway.’

‘Can’t be much for him to find,’ said Jamal. ‘Apart from rats.’

‘He used to go on walks with his dad, though, stuff like that. He was good with him.’

‘He hit you, you said.’

‘Yeah. But he never laid a hand on the kid. TC still thinks his dad’s perfect.’

‘Well, tell him then.’

‘Don’t be stupid, Jamal. Why would I do that? Anyway, he would’ve learned it soon enough.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘He would’ve pissed Lenny off sooner or later, challenged him. Then it would’ve started. That fucking man, you know? The kid’s got no idea. You think he’s having a hard time now? You don’t know how hard it would’ve got for him. He thinks I don’t care, but he don’t know what I saved him from.’

She loved the boy, of course she did, but she had had to put the feeling away somewhere, and now it was hard to find. She’d thought it might get easier with Lenny gone, but TC was so much like his father, and he wore the pain of missing him like a badge, held it out mutely to her, when it was as much as she could do to get herself back together. And he didn’t even know the full story, he had no right to judge. Christ, she was only twenty-eight. She was allowed a life, wasn’t she?

Now and then she would go into his room at night and look at him as he slept, and then she would find her feelings for him clear and uncomplicated again. It was just that life – how hard it had become, and how bleak – always got in the way. Somehow, her son was easier to love when he was asleep.

Her vision momentarily blurred, and she lit another cigarette off the back of the last. The dim room floated, flickering with TV light, four floors and forty-two feet up in the night sky.

6

Midwinter

Denny had not mentioned the dog again, and Jozef knew better than to ask. Without her to walk after his evening shifts at the takeaway he got to bed earlier, but slept badly. He found himself picturing the night-time common, the wind stripping the last leaves from the trees, the thickets inky and black. He did no whittling, and the unfinished animal on the sill reproached him for it.

On his day off Jozef took his wages to the bookies’. His luck wasn’t in. It rarely was, but this time the size of his loss sickened him. He did not know why he did it, except that it allowed him to pass the time in some kind of company, although not in conversation.

The grass in the little park was beaten down, defeated, thick with mud on each side of the paths, and the little rowan was hung with icy silver drops. The last of the fallen leaves lay blackening in the gutters, and by half past four each afternoon it was dark. Leaving the bookies’, Jozef whistled for Znajda as he cut across the common, but he knew she wasn’t there.

Where the path drew close to the railway tracks he paused; a train was waiting for the signals to change and he could see through the desiccated stands of rosebay willowherb and nettles that bordered the chain-link fence to its yellow-lit interior, packed with commuters. A woman sat reading, thirty or so, he guessed, her dark hair tucked behind her ears and her brow furrowed in concentration. He willed her to look out to where he stood just fifteen feet or so away, the wind wild in the branches around him; but when she did he could tell that all she saw was her own reflection in the glass. The train shunted on.

The cafe had a sign that said ‘Polski Sklep’. It served the things he remembered from home: cabbage rolls,
pierogi
, potatoes with
koperek
, sour milk. They let him while away the afternoons playing chess and reading the papers, and when it got dark they brought him cherry vodka, or sometimes
krupnik
, a sweet liqueur his sister used to distil at home.

Jozef tried not to let himself think about the farm any more, but it was always with him, every ditch, every stump, every field drain, every hollow. Nearly three years on, the sense of having been torn away from it still had the power to make him gasp, while the thought of it being farmed by other hands than his was like watching another man lay hands on his lover.

Its eighteen acres had been enough to support a small dairy herd and grow a little barley, using the old ways. They milked the cows in the shed – by hand when Jozef was a boy – and his mother made butter, and they sold what they produced to the government, although like everyone else his father kept some back and sold it quietly to their neighbours, or traded it for seeds or flour. They heard rumours of food shortages in the cities, and there were many things – for instance, sugar – for which they had to queue, but his mother grew vegetables and they kept a pig for bacon, and they usually had enough to eat.

Jozef was the middle child of five: two sisters preceded him, and two more came after. For him, the farm was everything: it was his future, and working on it every day with his father was a difficult but rewarding apprenticeship. By the age of twelve he could drive the jeep, trap rats, chop wood and plough a field, walking behind their gentle draught horse Aniolek and guiding the single-furrow plough through the soil. He would not have said that he loved the farm; his feelings about it were far less sentimental. It was only in exile from it that he understood how deeply implicated in its acres he had become.

He left school as soon as he could, at fifteen; his mother wanted him to go on to agricultural college, but he was needed on the farm; and besides, he thought he could learn everything he would ever need to know from his father. During the day they worked, and in the evenings he would sit by the lamp and read their battered old veterinary manual or monographs on such things as lameness and hoof care. His father would listen to the radio and carve figures from linden wood: madonnas, pietàs and St Nicholases, mostly, but sometimes smiling peasant couples and little children.

But then, when he was twenty-two, his father died. It was spring, but a sudden cold snap had iced the fields with rime and killed his mother’s cabbages in the ground; he could remember passing Stefan Gruszka’s orchard as he took the ancient jeep into the village and thinking that he would get no cider apples that year.

The jeep, US-built, sold to Russia and abandoned in Poland with thousands of others after the war, was precious. As the only vehicle on the farm it had to do duty as tractor, and it was battered and patched and bodged far beyond its natural life. For the last week or so, though, the clutch had been slipping. He took it to see Karol Wieczorek; years ago Karol had made himself a kind of tractor from a motorbike and parts of a trailer, and his skill with anything mechanical was unsurpassed. He waited while Karol did the work, and gave him a bottle of his sister’s
krupnik
in thanks.

On his way back to the farm Jozef found the herd blocking the road, the animals agitated and jostling in the narrow space, his father nowhere in sight. Their warm breath steamed and hung above them in a cloud.