Clay Read online

  Barely an hour between the end of one job and the start of the next, and nearly all of it spent whittling. Jozef sighed to himself as he jogged down the narrow stairs to where Musa the little Turk waited for him in the darkened shop, his outline barely visible among the stacks of second-hand furniture, lamps and old TVs. The street lights flickered on as he pulled the shop door to behind them, bathing the wooden creatures on the windowsill above in flat, orange light.

  It was past three when he returned, bringing with him the smell of hot fat from the takeaway in his hair and skin. A familiar whimpering attended his progress up the stairs. He did not like the dog, yet he would walk it most nights rather than hear it cry in the empty upstairs room until dawn. It was ugly, bullish and simple, with a scarred muzzle and torn ears, bandy legs and a perpetual grin. It didn’t have a name, so Jozef called it Znajda, but only to himself.

  As he opened the door it shouldered its way out and clattered down the stairs to wait for him in the hall. There was no lead, or collar for that matter, but it never strayed more than a few paces from him, his soft whistle enough to call it instantly to his side.

  Back outside, Jozef turned off the high road, away from the lurid chicken parlours, the busy night buses and the 3 a.m. altercations, and felt the first rumour of rain on his face. By the time he reached the wide open acres of the common the weather had set in, and he wished he had made for somewhere with more shelter. The dog didn’t care, nosing the drifts of wet leaves a few paces ahead or falling behind for a moment to give something its particular attention, but Jozef had little love for the place and wished briefly for bed, the dip in the old grey mattress first formed by other bodies than his, but comforting enough at this time of night.

  Now he took the wide path onto the common under an avenue of plane trees, which, unlike the bare horse chestnuts, still afforded a little shelter. Behind him he could hear the occasional car wash past, nearly all of them minicabs at this hour, but the particular silence of a city park was closing about him and was all the more absolute for being surrounded by such distant sounds. A siren corkscrewed up, a borough away, one of only a few that would sound for the rest of that wet night. For as the weather front swept west across the city, driving its inhabitants indoors, the phones rang less frequently at the control room and more cars remained parked up idle at the police stations, the hard rain flensing the grime from their metal flanks.

  Jozef and Znajda were not alone on the common. Above them roosted a silent convocation of starlings, their bodies dark balls against the greater darkness of the sky. Now and then one would shake the rain from its feathers, and a few eyed the progress of the bull terrier on the path below before settling back to sleep.

  As he felt the first cold dampness enter his trainers, Jozef put his head down and picked up his pace. It was no night to be out, and he took the most direct route off the common, turning into Leasow Road, a wide, gently curving street double-parked with cars and lined with Edwardian villas, their position determined generations ago by a long-forgotten stream. Few who lived there had any idea that it still ran deep below their cellars, tamed, these days, by purposeful Victorian brickwork.

  Jozef walked in and out of pools of orange light, and apart from the patter of the rain his footfalls were the only sound. The houses he passed were shut up fast against the dark, the dogs in their beds, the upstairs bedrooms thick with sleeping breath where couples spooned or slept turned away, the digital alarm clocks flicking forward unseen, the bedtime reads splayed or bookmarked neatly on the tables. Wet through and a world away, Znajda paused and shook herself before trotting stoically on.

  That night, Jozef dreamed about a field on the flank of a hill whose shape he had known all his life. It was waist-high in golden grass, the gentle rise of it abuzz with crickets and bees and stroked down silver by the breeze, when it came. Then he saw that it was full of hares, racing and kicking like overwound clocks. He was holding one against his chest, and the strength in its back legs and the speed of its heart were shocking under his hands. Then it was running away from him through the tall, late-summer grass, racing left and uphill to where the dark shape of the beech hanger waited on the skyline; and though Jozef ran and ran, the dear, familiar field would come no closer, and he could not keep up.

  4

  Hallantide

  Across the country the leaves were going out in a blaze of orange and red. From Somerset to East Yorkshire the winter wheat had all been sown, and further north and west the dairy herds had been taken indoors for the winter. On Dartmoor the bracken was dying back to reveal the peat skin and granite bones of the moor beneath. Sheep farmers were busy putting their ewes to the tup, and around the field margins roared tractors with their cutter-bars extended to the side, pheasants spinning and squawking before them and the hedges left square and brutal behind.

  In the city the back gardens were preparing for their long hibernation. The grass’s growth had slowed to a stop, and summer bedding stood sad and tangled in the pots. On sunny days the few remaining blooms seemed even lonelier, as though it was still summer and the lush beds and borders had suddenly gone over, all together, and too soon.

  Jozef woke early, Denny’s brisk double knock on his door reminding him they had a house clearance booked in. Downstairs, the shop, cluttered with who knew how many people’s possessions, stank even more than usual of damp. Musa was sitting idle on a grubby cream sofa, thumbing his mobile phone; he often minded the shop while they were out on a job.

  Denny dragged a chipboard coffee table outside to the pavement while Jozef carried out a fake leather office chair. He found the day had dawned clear and bright, the air washed lucent by the rain and his shadow crisp beneath his feet. He lit a cigarette, and together the two men carried out a sideboard with chipped veneer and a missing handle, six stacking chairs and an old pine kitchen table in two parts: first the trestle, and then the board. Smaller, more thievable items like lamps, mirrors and magazine racks remained inside the shop, as did anything upholstered until all threat of rain had passed. Wet sofas stank, and would not sell.

  The clearance was only a mile or so away. Denny drove and Jozef rode shotgun, looking out at the autumn streets and thinking about home. They pulled up on the way, Denny returning to the shabby van with a bacon and egg McMuffin and a sugar doughnut, but Jozef did not want to eat.

  The building they arrived at had once been a grocer’s, and little had been done to adapt it for use as a home. The green front door had clearly not been used for years; it gave straight into a large room fronted by two deep plate-glass windows, once the shop floor. The lower parts of the windows were papered over with yellowing newspaper, but the room inside was visible from the street around their peeling edges. It was almost empty, bar some sun-bleached leaflets and junk mail like a tide around the edges.

  Now, access to the house was via a side door into the kitchen. A little room at the back was clearly where the old man had lived and died, his armchair watched over by a faded picture of the Sacred Heart. Jozef crossed himself quickly as he entered. It was dark and close, like a den, and despite being full of the dead man’s last and pitiful effects there was clearly nothing there that they could sell. Jozef did not linger.

  The house’s contents betrayed the course of the old man’s slow decline into immobility and death. Upstairs the furniture and knick-knacks dated back to the 1950s and displayed a distinctly feminine influence. A tidy downstairs parlour had clearly been occupied for much longer, and from the curling yellow copies of Radio Times Jozef guessed it had been in use until around the turn of the century. But finally the man had confined himself to the little back room, the galley kitchen and the lean-to lavatory, the detritus of his life hardening around him like the concentric rings left by the slow evaporation of a puddle.

  Denny was upstairs with a clipboard looking over the furniture. ‘We’ll take the big brass bed and the wardrobe,’ he called out, hearing Jozef’s tread on the stairs, ‘and the bedroom mirror and the
dressing table from in there, and anything else catches your eye. Bathroom: nothing. Second bedroom I’m just looking at. What a fucking tip it is. Hardly worth the journey.’

  The bed had already been stripped, which Jozef was glad of. The room was dim, and he pulled back the curtains from the flyblown glass. Ivy had scaled the exterior wall and was making a bid for the inside, its brute tendrils breaching the sash and hauling themselves in across the sill on clusters of tiny grey feet. The curtains drawn, the clear morning sunshine poured in, perhaps for the first time in over a decade, and revealed the waxy vigour of each leaf. Jozef thought about his dream, and about how quick nature is to reclaim what we no longer use. And he thought about his life here, how little, now, he had to leave. A few changes of clothes. Some books. The carvings.

  He found the chess set in a little box on top of the wardrobe. Half the pieces were a rich red wood, the rest pale. All were smooth from having been handled through countless games over countless years. They were crudely made, of a basic design familiar to Jozef from childhood: the knights without eyes, the pawns simply stubs of turned wood. Denny did not want it for the shop, and so Jozef took it. There were no relatives to consider.

  It was mid-afternoon when they finished. They left by the back door with a last load for the skip, closing the door on the pillaged house. School was over and the street outside was raucous with the newly released exuberance of children. A crow hunched high on the chimney pot was joined by another as the van pulled away.

  Denny sang along to the radio all the way back in a flat, nasal tone. At the shop, Musa helped unload the van; then, shrugging on his denim jacket and preparing to leave, he announced, ‘Dog’s gone.’

  ‘What d’you mean, gone?’ asked Denny.

  ‘Is gone,’ replied Musa. ‘It was down here, in shop; then – gone. I look for it, but nothing.’

  Denny was motionless. ‘When?’

  ‘I don’t know. Two, three hours? I just think I should tell you, OK? Now I must go. I am not enough at home with my family these days. Eh, Joe, I see you later. See you tomorrow, Denny.’ And he was gone.

  The light was already leaching out of the autumn sky. Jozef looked at Denny, who remained staring at the shop door. ‘You want I look for her?’ he asked.

  ‘Look for the dog? No, mate,’ replied Denny. ‘It’ll come back when it’s hungry. It knows what’s good for it.’ And with that, the subject was closed.

  That night, returning from his evening shift at the fried-chicken takeaway, Jozef found himself wondering whether Znajda had come back. The silence on the stairs was his answer.

  Earlier he had taken out the chess pieces and lined them up on the windowsill next to his carvings; now he looked at them again. Thirty-two pieces. It would take him a few months to make that many, but he would enjoy the work. The only question was whether the creatures he had already made could be adapted, made to fit, or whether he should start from scratch. A rabbit, a fox, a marmot, a boar: they were animals that spoke to him of home. He recalled his dream, and it came to him that a hare would be the next animal he would make. Then he picked up the half-finished one and ran his thumb over it. Nothing, yet; but sometimes you had to give them time.

  He had known, at some level, that he would have to go out and look for Znajda. He took his usual route across the common, pausing and whistling softly for her every hundred yards or so; but she didn’t come. The night was dry, so rather than turn for home he quartered the little park that sat between the high road and the Plestor Estate. With several bus stops along its length it was rarely deserted, even at night, and he felt foolish whistling for a dog that didn’t come, so he sat on a decaying log under the dark trees and rolled a cigarette, his big fingers deft in the dark. He could see Musa leaning on the counter in the brightly lit takeaway across the road, chewing gum, no doubt, and waiting for customers.

  The dog would have come if she had heard him, he was sure of it.

  5

  Martinmas

  In summer – in spring, even – it is impossible to believe in November. Snow you can picture, picture-postcard style, but the sodden, rotting tangle where the brazen nettles were, the once-secret nests now stark in the bare branches and above all the sheer dead silence of the sky – these things are unimaginable for the rest of the year.

  That year, November shut the living city down without reprieve. Within a week only a few yellow leaves remained on the trees on the common, fluttering like prayer flags against the leaden sky.

  TC loved this time of year. Like most children, he was on intimate terms with the earth. The under-tens deal in little sticks and pebbles; they are artisans of holes, experts in the types and properties of stones; they appreciate the many qualities of mud and its summer corollary, dust. And then they grow up, and the ground is just whatever’s underfoot.

  What TC most liked about the ground in winter were the clues it gave up about everything that went on that was secret. For instance, toads hibernated under the abandoned paving stones at the end of the communal gardens behind his block of flats. They left slick, fat-bodied runnels where they pushed themselves through the chill mud; and if he heaved up a slab, there they’d be, loath and cold and liable to release a bitter flood if picked up, as though his careful hands were a heron’s beak, or an otter’s jaws. And one evening, after the bins had been plundered again, he had taken a twig and swept the earth smooth near the flats’ refuse area, and sprinkled a fine tilth over it; the very next morning it bore the neat, precise pad marks of a fox.

  On the night of the tenth the skies slowly cleared, and for the first time that year the frost penetrated the heart of the city, and cities nationwide. In the morning TC woke early and looked down at the white rime on the grass and the crazed panes on the puddles concealing the icy liquid mud beneath. Already he could see that there were actual animal tracks crossing the yard below.

  It was gloves weather, but the only pair he had were the ones his mother’s boyfriend, Jamal, had got for him, and he didn’t want to wear them. In the past, when he had been given something new, he had always tucked it in with his other things for a night so that they could tell it all about what kind of boy he was, but this time TC had simply left the gloves on his bedroom floor. However, bursting out of the back door into the dazzling winter sun, unwashed and unbreakfasted, it was only a moment before he dived back in, retrieved the gloves and re-emerged, snapping the plastic thread that joined them together and pulling them on. Some things were too important.

  For the most part, birds were too light to leave footprints in the frost, though TC could see a magpie leaving a trail near the back of the yard as its long tail brushed the ground behind it. What he was more interested in was the larger track that traversed the yard in a bold, straight line, starting by the bins on the right and leading across the frosted grass to the hedge on the left where a gap led into the overgrown area behind the neighbouring block of flats.

  He examined what he could of the trail, careful to keep his own footprints clear. It was likely to have been left by a fox, he knew, but that didn’t make it any less interesting. What had it been up to? And where had it gone? Perhaps he could follow the prints to its den. Here and there the ground, still muddy beneath the covering of frost, bore the clear impression of a paw, and suddenly TC’s heart was in his mouth as he saw the size of the pads. Whatever had been in his garden was too big for a fox, and far too heavy.

  The tracks were like a fox’s, but bigger, and badgers didn’t live in the city, he knew that. He knew that none of the prints in the book looked right. The tracks must have been left by something unusual.

  He felt a shiver of excitement at the thought that something lonely and wild lived somewhere near him, something that nobody else knew about. Perhaps he could make friends with it. No, he knew that wasn’t possible. But perhaps it would come to know that he didn’t mean it any harm. He could put food out, if only he could be sure what it was and what it would want to eat. It would learn to trust him, af
ter a while. No one else would be able to go near it; it would only allow him and nobody else, not even police or zookeepers. It would be the two of them, out there together in the forgotten, wild corners of the city, and perhaps one day he would rescue it from something. Or it would rescue him.

  TC knew he did not have long before the sun began to burn off the frost. Ducking low, he pushed himself through the hedge into the shadows beneath next door’s yew. He had played there many times before, and for a while had kept things in a crevice in the trunk, but this time the familiar place was transformed as he felt the thrill of following so exactly in a wild creature’s footsteps.

  The yew was three hundred years old and kept the ground beneath it barren and dry, and useless for tracking. He began to look for clues in the surrounding undergrowth to tell him which way the animal had gone, but it was choked thick with ground elder and brambles, and despite his utter and total concentration he could see nothing.

  Jamal laughed when he looked down from the bedroom window and saw TC creeping around in next door’s yard. The boy was strange, all right, but he was pleased to see him wearing the gloves he had bought.

  He cranked open the window, letting the chill November air drive out the stale smoke inside.

  ‘Come inside, kid,’ he called down. ‘You’ll catch your death. It’s Saturday, anyway. I’m gonna make eggs for you and your mother.’

  Jamal worked in the kitchen of a hotel in town, and his cooking was something else. Once he had made them all pizzas from scratch, even the dough, something TC would not have considered possible until he had seen it done.