Clay

  “I said I wouldn’t say it. I said I wouldn’t smoke.”

  “Me as well,” said Geordie.

  We giggled at each other.

  “We’ll go back to confession next week,” I said.

  “Aye,” said Geordie. “And then we’ll really change.”

  “Fishface!” we yelled. “Fishface! Fishface!”

  Then we calmed down and walked on and Geordie told me something new he’d picked up about Stephen Rose.

  eight

  “He didn’t leave,” Geordie said.

  “Eh?”

  “Bennett College. The seminary. He didn’t leave. They had to hoy him out.”

  “Who says?”

  “My uncle Joe.”

  “Oh, your uncle Joe?”

  “I know, but he’s not as daft as he looks. He met a bloke in the Columba Club that told him the tale. They said Stephen Rose was an evil influence. They said there was some kind of devil worship involved. Black Masses and stuff. The Our Father backwards, and upside-down crosses and black candles and stuff.”

  “Ballocks. They wouldn’t allow that in there.”

  “But they didn’t, did they? They chucked him out.”

  “And the lads in there live in dormitories and there’s priests looking after them day and night. We saw that when we went to play that football match against them.”

  “There’s always ways to do things, Davie. You know that.”

  “Mebbe.”

  “There was a couple of lads from Sunderland that was sent round the bend by it.”

  “From Sunderland? Mebbe they deserved it, then.”

  “Ha ha. They had to be sent out as well. And now they’re in a special home in Rome and nuns look after them.”

  I pondered what he was saying.

  “There had to be exorcism and stuff,” he said.

  “You don’t believe in that ballocks, do you?”

  “What ballocks?”

  “All that devil and exorcism stuff.”

  “But if you believe in all the other stuff…”

  “Like?”

  “Like God and goodness. Then mebbe you got to believe in the devil and badness.”

  “If you believe in anything at all.”

  He put his hands on his hips and tilted his head and pursed his mouth.

  “So now you’re telling me you believe in nowt?” he said.

  I shrugged.

  “Mebbe I don’t,” I said. “Mebbe the whole lot of it’s a load of nowt. Just a pack of crazy tales and lies and legends.”

  I threw my cigarette away.

  “That’s ballocks,” he said. “How can there not be nowt?”

  “Dunno,” I said.

  “Exactly. Just got to look around you.” He kicked a tree. “You’re telling me this tree came from nowt? You’re telling me the earth and the sky and the bliddy solar system came from nowt?” He poked my chest with his finger. “You’re telling me you came from nowt?”

  “Dunno,” I said.

  “Dunno? You’re talking ballocks, man.”

  I shrugged again. We walked on through the quiet streets.

  “Anyway,” I said, “if he’s caused that much trouble, how come they’re letting him come here and stay with somebody like Crazy bliddy Mary?”

  “Aha, that’s the other bit. He’s been sent here because of Father O’Mahoney. They reckon he knows about lads and how to keep an eye on them. You watch. You’ll see him in and out of Crazy’s house all the time.”

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  “It’s why they’re keeping him out of school, as well. They don’t want him corrupting kids like us. And Crazy Mary? Easy. It’s because they reckon she’s just too daft to get affected by him.” He laughed. “It all makes sense, you see?”

  He shook his head.

  “You’re too innocent, Davie,” he said. “That’s your problem. You think everything’s nice and everybody’s nice. You’re naive, man.” He pointed at me. “One of these days, somebody’ll start taking advantage of you.”

  “Nick off,” I said.

  “Aye. All right. But it’s true. You’re clever and that, but you’re a simpleton.” He wobbled his eyes and made his voice go spooky. “You do not see the wickedness that’s in the world!”

  I pulled my collar up against the night chill.

  “Nick off,” I said again.

  Geordie put his arm around me.

  “Aye, all right,” he said. “Course the big question is, what really happened to his dad? And why’d his mam go mental?”

  I closed my eyes and said nothing. He laughed and pulled me tight. I felt the excitement burning in him.

  “Poor Mouldy, eh?” he said. “If only he knew what’s waiting for him. Here, have another smoke.”

  nine

  Dinnertime a few days later. I played football with the lads on the school field; then I was heading back into school with the sweat dripping off me and a big rip in my trousers when a lass called Frances Malone came up and pretended to stumble into me.

  She stood right up close to me.

  “I know somebody that fancies you,” she said.

  I said nowt.

  “Well, go on,” she said. “Ask me who.”

  I wiped a drop of sweat away.

  “Who?” I said.

  “Not telling.”

  “OK,” I said.

  I wiped more sweat away. There were kids shoving past us to get to their lessons. There were teachers yelling for everybody to hurry up. I started to move on.

  “Do you not care?” she said.

  I shook my head. My heart was thumping.

  “I know you do,” she said. “You do, don’t you?”

  I said nothing. I moved away. She caught me up.

  “Maria O’Callaghan,” she said. “She thinks you’re gorgeous. She says will you go with her.”

  My heart jumped and jumped. I said nothing. She might be just taking the mick. I moved on.

  “I bet you want to,” said Frances. “I bet you think she’s gorgeous. All the lads do.”

  She giggled as I hurried on.

  “Or do you just want to stay with that daft Geordie?” she called.

  We had art that afternoon. We got it from Prat Parker that had hair drooping down over his eyes and a stupid skimpy beard. He was all right, but he really was a prat. He used to fling his arms about and blather on about creativity and how art was a mix of crazy wildness and tough discipline. Then he’d give out sheets of paper and put flowers and pots and animal skulls and stuff in front of us and tell us, “Draw what you see”—then he he’d hold his finger up and his eyes would get wide like he was saying something dead profound—“but do your seeing with the eyes of the imagination. Off you go, my artists!”

  Usually Geordie and I messed about and splashed paint and flicked it and gave our pictures names like The Message or The Inner Blossom or Chaos or Dark Night of the Sole. Prat thought they were brilliant. He thought they showed great promise. “Perhaps a little too much freedom, though,” he said. “I suggest you need to attend to boring accuracies before you fly so swiftly into fantasy. Lovely things, though. Lovely lovely things.” And he kept sticking them up on the wall.

  This afternoon, though, he seemed dead calm. He said he had something quite wonderful to show us, and he put a couple of clay models on his table. I knew them straight away. Apostles.

  “These were brought to me by the priest,” said Prat. “They’ve been in the kiln overnight. They were made by a boy no older than you are. And they are, quite simply…astonishing.”

  Geordie looked at me. I looked at Geordie. We were dead proud. These things had started off as sloppy lumps of muck from our pond.

  Prat told us to gather round. He told us to see how lifelike they were, how graceful, how beautifully formed.

  “And yet they’re so ordinary,” he said. “Look at these faces. These aren’t idealized heavenly beings. You could almost imagine them walking the streets of Felling.
And they have an inner grace, an inner…light. Can you see this?”

  Some of us murmured. A couple of us sniggered. Somebody farted. A paper plane curved through the air over our heads. Prat ignored it all.

  “There are flaws, of course,” he said. “A clumsiness in the shoulder there, a careless positioning of this ear. But art is not, and never has been, about perfection.”

  He lifted one of them, turned it in his hands.

  “Had I been told that they were the work of a thirty-year-old professional, I would not have been surprised.” He looked into our eyes. “But for them to be the work of a boy, a boy who by all accounts—and I cannot expand—is in a condition of distress. Well, it is humbling. These are living things. Clay. Stone. Things of the earth. But alive!”

  Then he put them away. He lifted a heavy bag of clay to his table.

  “Now let us all,” he said, “in our clumsy human way, begin to seek that inner light.”

  ten

  That evening when we went to the cave we found Stephen sitting there. He was making a clay figure on his lap. A little fire was burning at his side. He looked up and saw us but he just looked down again and didn’t speak.

  “We saw your two apostles,” said Geordie.

  “The art teacher showed us,” I said. “He’s called Prat. He said they were bliddy brilliant.”

  Stephen worked on.

  Geordie pointed down at the clay figure.

  “Who’s that one, then?” he said. “St. Fishface?”

  “No,” said Stephen. “It’s St. Peter, actually.”

  “There’s tons more clay where that come from,” said Geordie. “The clay in that pond goes right to the middle of the world.”

  Stephen looked at him.

  “No, it doesn’t,” he said. “A boy came here earlier.”

  “A boy?” I said. “Here?”

  “Aye.”

  “How big was he?”

  “Small. A bit like me. But a thin and pointy thing.”

  Geordie and I looked at each other.

  “Skinner,” I said. “What did he say?”

  “Nowt. He said he’d heard there were more of us. He said I should be careful who I joined up with.”

  “What did you say?” said Geordie.

  “Nowt. I told him to be gone. I showed him my knife. He went away.”

  He picked up a beetle that was crawling across his foot. He looked at it, then crushed it with his thumb, then lifted it up like he was waiting for it to do something.

  “Where’s it gone?” he said.

  “Eh?” said Geordie.

  “Nowt,” said Stephen.

  He dropped the beetle into the fire and there was a quick little fizz as it burned.

  “You do it just like that,” he said.

  He looked around him.

  “Saints used to live in caves like this,” he said. “In the desert. In the wilderness. They tested themselves.”

  “That’s right,” said Geordie. “Like that skinny bloke that ate all the locusts and that. And the one that never wore no clothes.”

  “Aye,” said Stephen.

  He smoothed the soft wet figure with his palm.

  “At Bennett,” he said, “a priest once said that mebbe I was more suited to the wilderness than to the civilized world.”

  “Felling’s the right place for you, then,” said Geordie.

  “What happened there?” I said. “At Bennett?”

  Stephen shrugged.

  “We learned the catechism,” he said. “We said prayers. We went to Mass. We ate loads of jam and bread. We did the ordinary school stuff—sums and English and geography and stuff. Then we learned about God and miracles and how to be a good priest. There was football, and cross-countries through the woods. Lots of lads seemed happy there.”

  “It looked good when we went,” said Geordie. “Loads of mates. No mothers and sisters getting on your back.”

  “It didn’t suit all of us,” said Stephen. “Some of us couldn’t fit in.”

  Geordie and I sat on stones near him. We smoked and looked at each other and said nowt and there was just the birds singing and the breeze rustling the leaves in Braddock’s garden and the scratching somewhere of tiny beasts. Far away, traffic droned on the bypass. I dropped more sticks onto the flames. Stephen’s fingers slipped across the clay. He kept looking up at me, like he was inspecting me. Between his hands, another lovely figure formed.

  “It was winter when I went away,” he said. “A taxi came for me. There were three other lads in it and a priest. I left my mam and dad at the front door. My mam was crying. It didn’t seem far. Not even an hour away. The college was ancient. Bare trees and empty fields all around it. We went in the gate and passed a pond and one of the kids said that’s where we’d practice walking on water and the priest said aye, that was right. It was already dark when he took us in through the door.”

  He looked up. It was darkening here as well. Sky getting red, the edge of the quarry dark and jagged against it.

  “There were lads and priests everywhere,” he said. “The smell of piss and incense and the sound of kids singing hymns.”

  “Did it feel holy?” I said.

  He glanced at me.

  “Aye, Davie. It seemed dead holy.”

  “Did you cry?” said Geordie.

  “Eh?”

  “Like on the first night in your bed. Did you miss your mam and dad and that?”

  “No,” said Stephen. “The new ones often wept and wailed, but not me. Aye, I mebbe missed my mam and dad at first. But I’d moved on. I thought there was work I had to do, and I couldn’t do it if I stayed with them. When I went to Bennett, it was like I’d left an old life behind. It turned out I hadn’t.”

  Geordie and I smoked another Players.

  “How did you know in the first place?” said Geordie.

  “Know what?”

  “That you wanted to be a priest.”

  Stephen shrugged. He stared into the sky.

  “I knew soon after the angel came,” he said.

  “The angel?” said Geordie. “What bliddy angel?”

  “Tell you in a minute,” said Stephen. Then he leaned closer to Geordie. “Anyway, what do you want to be?”

  “Me?” said Geordie. “Dunno. A footballer! Newcastle United forever!”

  Stephen turned his eyes to me.

  “What about you?” he said.

  I shrugged.

  “A footballer as well,” I said.

  He shook his head like he was disappointed.

  “You tell lies, Davie, don’t you?”

  “What?”

  “It’s OK. We all do. Sometimes lies can help you. Me, I always knew I was going to do something special. I always knew there was something lying in wait for me.”

  He paused and looked at me.

  “Do you not feel like that?” he said.

  I shook my head quickly.

  “No?” he said. “Do you not think there’s something different about you? Do you not think there’s a special purpose to your life?”

  I shook my head again.

  He raised his eyebrows, like he didn’t believe me.

  “What about the angel?” said Geordie.

  “Aye,” said Stephen. “She struck me down and lifted me up again and everything was changed.”

  He licked his lips as we leaned close to him. He rolled clay between his finger and thumb and I saw an arm appearing before me.

  “What d’you mean?” I said.

  eleven

  Stephen paused and breathed slowly, like he was gathering the tale into himself before he told it to us. He worked his clay with his fingers. He carved its features with the point of a knife. It grew more lifelike as he spoke.

  “It was a Tuesday morning. I was down on the beach at Whitley Bay. I was walking all alone like always. It was boiling hot. There were people all around me. People lying flat out in the sun. Screaming kids and yapping dogs splashing in the water. The sme
ll of chips and hot dogs and coffee. Just ordinary, dead ordinary. Then there was a hush. Dead silence, nowt moving, like everything was stopped in time. Then a blast came from the sky and it was like a bolt of lightning went right through me. I found myself crawling on the sand. I was weak as a baby. I could hardly breathe. And there she was.”

  “Bliddy Hell,” said Geordie.

  “Aye,” said Stephen. “She was in the sky over the cliffs with massive wings and a sword in her hand and she was that bright, bright as the sun, bright and burning, and I turned my face away from her. ‘Stephen Rose!’ she yelled. ‘Stephen Rose! You cannot hide!’ And it was like her voice was everywhere, outside me and inside me. I couldn’t do nowt. I had to turn. She came down towards me. She pointed the sword at me. ‘Who is thy lord, Stephen Rose?’ she said. ‘Answer! For you cannot hide. Who is thy lord?’ And I knew what I had to say. ‘My lord is God most high,’ I answered. And everything went dead still again, and dark as night, and I thought I must’ve died, and then the angel was at my side, and was helping me up, and the sword was hanging on its own in the sky, pointing down at us. ‘You have answered well,’ she whispered. And she took my hands in hers and hers were that tender and so strong. And she said, ‘With these hands, you must be about the Lord’s work, Stephen Rose.’ And I felt the power growing in them. ‘Remember that thou art dust and dirt,’ she said, ‘and remember that thou art also holy.’ And she pulled me up till I stood on the sand and the sea started to move again and the folk and the dogs started to stir again. ‘I will watch thee, Stephen Rose,’ she whispered, ‘even unto the end of thy days. Remember to use thy talents well.’ And she was gone.”

  I looked at Geordie. Geordie looked at me.

  “Did anybody else see her?” Geordie whispered.

  “I was the only privileged one,” said Stephen. “The sunbathers went on frying, the kids went on screaming, the dogs went on yapping, but for me, in an instant, everything had changed.”

  “Bliddy Hell,” I said.

  “Aye,” said Stephen. “And she’s been back a couple of times since.”

  “Bliddy Hell,” said Geordie.

  “Do you believe me?” said Stephen.

  “Dunno,” I said.

  “Dunno,” he echoed. He leaned close to me, looked into me. “Some people find it hard to believe anything, Davie. They want proof. What if the angel came to you, Davie? Would you believe me then? Or would you still just say ‘Dunno’? And what if you saw the power of the Lord himself at work here in Felling?”