Clay Read online

  contents

  title page

  dedication

  one

  chapter one

  chapter two

  chapter three

  chapter four

  chapter five

  chapter six

  chapter seven

  chapter eight

  chapter nine

  chapter ten

  chapter eleven

  chapter twelve

  two

  chapter one

  chapter two

  chapter three

  chapter four

  chapter five

  chapter six

  chapter seven

  chapter eight

  chapter nine

  chapter ten

  chapter eleven

  chapter twelve

  chapter thirteen

  chapter fourteen

  chapter fifteen

  chapter sixteen

  chapter seventeen

  three

  chapter one

  chapter two

  chapter three

  chapter four

  chapter five

  chapter six

  chapter seven

  chapter eight

  chapter nine

  chapter ten

  chapter eleven

  chapter twelve

  chapter thirteen

  chapter fourteen

  chapter fifteen

  chapter sixteen

  chapter seventeen

  chapter eighteen

  chapter nineteen

  chapter twenty

  chapter twenty-one

  chapter twenty-two

  chapter twenty-three

  chapter twenty-four

  four

  chapter one

  chapter two

  chapter three

  chapter four

  chapter five

  chapter six

  about the author

  Clay

  questions for discussion

  —in his own words—

  a conversation with david almond

  related titles

  readers circle books

  also by david almond

  copyright

  For Sara Jane,

  who works wonders with clay

  ONE

  one

  He arrived in Felling on a bright and icy February morning. Not so long ago, but it was a different age. I was with Geordie Craggs, like I always was back then. We were swaggering along like always, laughing and joking like always. We passed a Players back and forward between us and blew long strings of smoke into the air. We’d just been on the altar. We were heading for Braddock’s garden. We were on Watermill Lane when a red taxi rattled past us. Black fumes belched from it. The sign at the top said it was from down at the coast.

  “What’s that doing up here?” said Geordie.

  A bit of communion wafer was still stuck to my teeth. I poked it free with my tongue and swallowed it, then drew on the cigarette again.

  “God knows,” I said.

  The taxi stopped fifty yards away, outside Crazy Mary’s house. Crazy came lolloping out with her red hair flying. She had a big flappy flowery dress and tartan slippers on. The kid got out of the taxi. He pulled a battered brown suitcase after him. Crazy paid the driver; then the two of them headed for her front door. She looked back at us. She tried to put her arm around the kid but he twisted away and went inside. Crazy followed him and the door slammed shut.

  The taxi driver leaned out of his window as he went past.

  “What you two nebbing at?” he said.

  “Nowt much,” I said.

  “Why don’t you nick off back to Whitley Bay?” said Geordie.

  “Aye,” I said. “Nick off, Fishface.”

  And we laughed and belted on towards the garden yelling,

  “Fishface! Fishface! Fishface!”

  We went through the ancient iron gate, ducked through the thorns, splashed through the edge of the clay pond, went into the quarry, went into the cave. There was writing on the wall again. We held matches up to it. All it said was ‘We’re watching you. Your doomd,’ then a big black X. Somebody had tried to draw a skull as well but it looked like they’d given up because they were too useless.

  I wiped dirt over it all.

  Geordie sharpened his knife on a stone.

  He pointed it at me.

  “Soon there’ll be a proper battle,” he said.

  “Aye,” I said.

  “It’ll be just them and us,” he said.

  I shivered. I tried to laugh.

  “The Battle of Braddock’s Garden,” I said.

  I looked out at the sheer craggy quarry walls, the thick weeds, the deep clay pond, the ruins of Braddock’s house above. The sparrow hawk flew out from its stony nest and flapped up into the open sky.

  “Who was that at Crazy’s?” I said.

  He shrugged.

  “God knows,” he said. “Wouldn’t like to be him, though, holed up with that loony.”

  He took a syrup of figs bottle out of his pocket and lobbed it over. It was half full of the wine that he’d stolen after Mass that morning. I screwed the top off and swigged and smacked my lips. The wine was sticky and sweet and you could soon feel the little bit of dreaminess it brought.

  “Pinching altar wine’s a sin,” I said.

  We laughed and snapped some sticks, getting a fire ready.

  I pointed to the ground.

  “You’ll burn in Hell, George Craggs,” I said.

  “Naa,” said Geordie. “Not for that. You go to Hell for proper sins. Like nicking a million quid.”

  “Or killing somebody,” I said.

  “Aye.” He stabbed the knife into the ground. “Murder!” He swigged the wine and swiped his hand across his lips. “I dreamed I killed Mouldy the other night.”

  “Did you?”

  “Aye.”

  “Was there loads of blood?”

  “Gallons. Blood and guts everywhere.”

  “Great!”

  “I did it here. I stabbed him in the heart, then I chopped his head off and I hoyed it in the pond.”

  We giggled.

  “Prob’ly that’d not be a sin at all,” I said. “Prob’ly you’d go straight to Heaven for getting rid of a thing like Mouldy.”

  “Course you would,” said Geordie. “The whole world’d be better off without things like Mouldy.”

  “Aye.”

  We were quiet while we thought of Mouldy. We listened to the noises in the quarry.

  “You seen how big he’s getting?” I said.

  “Aye.”

  “Bliddy Hell,” I whispered.

  “Aye. Bliddy Hell. He’s turning to a monster.”

  two

  There was no mystery. It turned out the kid was called Stephen Rose. He was from Whitley Bay. He was just a bit older than us. The story was he’d gone away to Bennett College to train to be a priest. He went when he was eleven, which wasn’t strange back then in the 1960s. We knew loads of lads that did it. Like lots of them, though, Stephen couldn’t stand it and he came back out again two or three years later. He’d just been home a month when his dad dropped dead with a stroke. Then his mother went mad and was taken away in the middle of a stormy night to Prudhoe. Stephen was all alone. The Poor Clares were going to take him in; then somehow they found out there was a distant aunt, Crazy Mary, up here in Felling, and so he came to her. The plan was that his mother’d be out soon, they’d set up home down at the coast again, everything would settle down again. But when I heard my parents on about it, it seemed there wouldn’t be much chance of that. They’d heard she was truly barmy. She’d gone way way round the bend.

  “Worse than Crazy Mary?” I said.

  Mam glared at me
.

  “Don’t call the poor woman that,” she said. “She’s just a devout and troubled soul.”

  “Sorry,” I said.

  “You don’t know how lucky you are,” she said. “There but for the grace of God…”

  “What?” I groaned. “You worried about my sanity, Mother?”

  I twisted my mouth and stuck my tongue out and drooled.

  “Stop it!” she snapped. “Don’t tempt fate.”

  She crossed herself.

  “Maybe we should call her Holy Mary,” she said. “Have you seen anybody else so devout, anybody else that prays so hard, anybody else so filled with yearning?”

  I shook my head.

  “Well, then,” she said. “Did you know there’s stories that there’s saints in Mary’s past?”

  “Saints?”

  “Way back in her family. Back in Ireland, where the Doonans came from long ago.”

  Dad laughed.

  “In the olden days,” he said, “when saints walked in every village and an angel sat in every tree.”

  At first we hardly saw Stephen Rose. He didn’t turn up at school like we’d expected him to. Mam said he must still be grieving, poor bairn. Dad said aye, he’d been through too much for a young’n. Geordie reckoned there was something dead weird about him. Geordie knew somebody that lived just down the street from Crazy. They’d seen Stephen in the garden at night, staring up at the moon.

  “At the moon?” I said.

  “Aye.” He grinned. “Like he was moonbathing, like he’d mixed the sun up with the moon. Have you seen his skin?”

  “What d’you mean?”

  “It’s like wax, man. And have you smelt him?”

  “How would I smell him?”

  “I have. I passed him in the street. He was out walking with Mary, a pair of loonies. You know what she smells like.”

  “Aye.” Old, even though Mam said she was no age at all, and kind of sickly and sweet.

  “He’s worse, man. Yuck. Just imagine being in there with the pair of them.”

  We were walking home from school, passing close by Crazy’s house. We looked at the windows, the ancient net curtains there, the silhouette of the Sacred Heart medallion there like in all the Catholic houses. There was white smoke drifting up from the chimney.

  “And he does other stuff in the garden as well,” said Geordie.

  “Stuff?”

  “So they say. Some days he’s out there in Crazy’s shed for hours at a time. There’s banging and thumping and whimpering and howling.”

  “Howling?”

  “Aye, so they say. Oh, my God! It’s Mouldy!”

  We stopped quickly. We squeezed into a privet hedge. My heart was thumping. I could hardly breathe.

  “We’re safe,” said Geordie. “He’s going the other way.”

  I peeped out from the hedge. There he was, Martin Mould, Mouldy, heading down to Heworth. Even from this distance you could see how big he’d got. He seemed bigger every time we saw him. He was already loads bigger than when there’d been the last battle. He and his mates had ambushed us outside the graveyard that day. I remembered Mouldy’s massive hands around my throat. I remembered the thump of his winklepicker boots across my cheek. I remembered his evil eyes, his fierce breath, his vicious spit. Sometimes I woke up in the night from dreams of it all happening again.

  I waited with Geordie in the hedge and watched and trembled. Mouldy went into the Swan. He was only sixteen but already he drank like a man.

  “We got to get more kids,” said Geordie.

  “Aye,” I said.

  We moved on. I tried to shift my mind from thoughts of Mouldy.

  “Howling?” I said.

  “Aye. That’s the story. Howling. Yowling fit to wake the dead….”

  three

  The next Saturday was a good one. There were two funerals, one at nine o’ clock, one at ten. I served at both of them with Geordie.

  The first was for a bloke from Stoneygate. He’d fallen out of a bus on Sunderland Road. He was ancient, so there wasn’t that much weeping and wailing. We did the usual stuff in church; then we got into the black car that followed the hearse down to the graveyard at Heworth. We swung the incense there and splashed the holy water and Father O’Mahoney said the words about being dust and unto dust we shall return. Sometimes one of the family came straight out with a tip when it was all over, but sometimes you had to drop a hint or two. This time the likely-looking one was a bloke in a natty blue suit. He was the old bloke’s son. He’d come up specially from London. I caught up with him as the mourners headed back to the black cars.

  “Sorry for your loss,” I said quietly.

  “Thank you,” he said.

  “My name’s David,” I said.

  “Thank you, David.”

  “And that’s my friend, George. We were happy to serve this morning.”

  The woman he was with nudged him and whispered to him.

  “Thank you,” he said again.

  He shoved a folded note into my hand.

  I grinned when we were back in the car. I put my hand on Geordie’s knee and opened it and showed the note.

  “Ten bob!” he said.

  Father O’Mahoney coughed. He was in the front with the undertaker and watching us through the driver’s mirror.

  “Now, then, boys,” he said. “A bit of respect, eh?”

  “Sorry, Father,” we said together.

  “Ten bob!” we whispered, and I saw the priest look down and smile.

  The next one wasn’t so easy. It was another bloke, but younger this time and with a son and a daughter just a bit older than us. He’d been killed by cancer. Even Father O’Mahoney had a tear in his eye and he had to keep blowing his nose in a big blue handkerchief. The bloke’s wife broke down at the graveyard and yelled, “Why? Why? Why?” Geordie and I had seen it all before so we knew to just ignore it and go through the motions. Funnily enough it was at funerals like those that the tips came easiest. A bloke in a black trilby came over and gave us a half-crown each and told us we were good lads.

  “Life’s the thing, boys,” he said. “You understand that?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Be sure you make the most of it, now. Before you know it, you’ll be…”

  “We will, mister,” said Geordie.

  “Good lads.”

  “Five more bob!” we whispered.

  Then I saw Stephen Rose. He was standing among the graves. Like Geordie said, his face was like wax. We passed really close to him. He had a slab of yellowy clay under his arm.

  “Are you all right, Stephen?” said Father O’Mahoney.

  It was like he didn’t hear at first; then he blinked and said,

  “Aye, Father.”

  “And where’s your aunt today?”

  “Don’t know, Father. In the house, Father.”

  “Tell her I was asking. I’ll make another visit in a day or two.”

  “Aye, Father.”

  The priest walked on; then he paused again.

  “This is two good lads I’ve got with me,” he said. “Maybe they could make pals of yours.”

  “Aye, Father.”

  “That’s grand, then.”

  Stephen moved closer to me. I understood what Geordie had said about the smell of him.

  “The gravediggers gave me this,” he said. “It came from deep deep down.”

  He ran his hand over the clay. He licked his fingers and pressed them into it. He picked a stone or something out of it and inspected it.

  “A bit of bone,” he said.

  He quickly pressed three holes and a slit: two eyes, a nose, a mouth. He held it up and rocked it in the air like it was a puppet. He made it talk in a squeaky voice.

  “Hello,” it said. “What’s your name?”

  “Davie,” I said.

  “Davie, man!” called Geordie from the door of the car.

  “It’s hopeless clay,” said Stephen. He scratched with his finger
nail and showed how it just crumbled away. “See?” he said.

  “Aye.”

  He waved his hand across my eyes; then he stared at me and grinned.

  “You didn’t say hello to it,” he said. “Go on, say hello to it.”

  I turned to Geordie.

  “Go on,” said Stephen. “It’s just a joke.”

  “Hello,” I murmured.

  “Hello, Davie,” squeaked the clay. “Thank you for believing in me.”

  I shook my head and rolled my eyes, like I’d fallen for a trick. I grinned back at Stephen.

  “I’m Stephen Rose, Davie,” he said.

  “Davie!” yelled Geordie.

  I ran to the car. We headed out of the graveyard. The priest watched me through the mirror.

  “Are you all right, Davie?” he said.

  “Aye, Father.”

  “That’s grand,” he said. “You could be just what that lad needs.”

  Then he smiled.

  “A profitable morning, then?” he said.

  “Aye, Father,” we answered.

  four

  “They’re crackers,” said Geordie.

  “What?” I said.

  “Wacko. The whole damn lot of them. Always have been. Always will be. So my dad says.”

  “Aye?” I said.

  “Aye. And Stephen’s granda was the biggest nutter of the lot.”

  “How does your dad know?”

  “He used to see him, man. They called him Rocky Rose. He did hypnotism tricks in the bars in Cullercoats and Whitley Bay. Got people to drop their trousers and wet their pants and that….”

  “He didn’t.”

  “He did, man. He used to do tricks and get paid in pints. He did it on the beach as well. My dad says he seen him when he was a bairn. Said he seen one old biddy dive in the sea with all her clothes on. And there was a bloke flapping his arms and screaming cos he thought he was a seagull.”

  “Bliddy Hell.”

  “Aye. Bliddy Hell. That’s the lot that he comes from. One part of the family ran a freak stall at the fairs. There were derelicts and down-and-outs and dreamers. It seems Rocky ended up living in a tent in Plessey Woods, all horrible and hairy and running away if anybody come near.”

  “Bliddy Hell.”

  “Aye. I know. He’s dead now, and the freak stall’s gone. But no wonder Stephen’s a bit…”