Clay

  “No!”

  She watched me.

  “It’s got to stop,” she said.

  “It will.”

  “When?”

  “Now.”

  “You promise? You promise?”

  “Yes!”

  I drank my tea. Soon Dad came home. She told him about it.

  “Who was it?” he said.

  He knew I wouldn’t tell him. He put his arm around me. He turned me away from Mam.

  “Looks like things are going a bit too far,” he said. “Things can start off as a game, but pretty soon…”

  “I know that, Dad.”

  “Promise me you’ll try to put an end to it.”

  I said nothing.

  “Promise me, Davie.”

  “I promise.”

  All evening they watched me. Mam kept asking.

  “Do you feel dizzy? Do you feel sick?”

  “No.” I kept answering. “No.”

  “I’ll put an end to it,” I lied.

  “I promise,” I lied.

  thirteen

  I stole the body and blood of Christ at Mass that Sunday. I knelt below the priest on the altar. He had the round communion bread in his hands. He murmured the magic words,

  “This is my body.”

  He held the chalice of wine and murmured,

  “This is my blood.”

  The bread still looked like bread. The wine still looked like wine. But a miracle had happened. They’d turned into the body and blood of Christ. Christ himself was with us on the altar.

  The priest ate the body and drank the blood.

  Geordie and I opened our mouths and stuck out our tongues to receive our own communion bread.

  Then the congregation left their seats and headed for the altar rail. Maria was there, and Frances, and my mam and dad, and Crazy Mary, and loads of our family, friends, neighbors. They knelt at the altar rail. I got my little silver tray and went down with Father O’Mahoney to them. They closed their eyes, stuck their tongues out. The priest pressed a communion wafer onto every tongue. “The body of Christ,” he murmured. “Amen,” they said.

  I held the tray below each face, to catch the falling crumbs. They fell like tiny grains of dust. They lay there on the gleaming silver tray. A tiny fragment fell as Father O’Mahoney gave the bread to Crazy Mary. Another fell below the lips of Noreen Craggs. We moved from upturned face to upturned face. The voices murmured, the faces shone, the dust and fragments fell. Then it was done, and the last of the communicants went back to the seats.

  I followed the priest up the altar steps. I tilted the tray, I quickly took a pinch of the fragments and dust. I pressed it into the strip of Sellotape in my cassock pocket. I quickly took another pinch. At the altar, I handed the tray to the priest. He ran his own finger round the tray, and licked away the fragments of Christ’s body. He did it again till none was left. Then he slurped the last of the wine. He wiped the inside of the chalice with a pure white linen cloth and put it on the altar.

  He said the final prayers. He told the congregation to go in peace, the Mass was over. Thanks be to God, they said.

  fourteen

  I stole the wine-stained cloth in the sacristy while the priest was taking his vestments off. I swapped it with a clean cloth from a drawer. Father O’Mahoney put this into a little basket of things that would be taken away to be washed by nuns. I stuffed the cloth and the Sellotape into my pants pocket. Geordie saw me. He looked at me. I glared at him.

  Father O’Mahoney stretched and sighed.

  “What a grand morning it is, lads!” he said. “Did you see those great shafts of sunlight blazing through the church?”

  “Aye, Father,” we said.

  He took an imaginary golf club in his hands. He mimed swinging at a golf ball.

  “Oh, to be in Kerry on a day like this!” he said.

  He looked into the far distance, indicated a huge imaginary landscape with his hands.

  “The mountains, the beaches, the ocean, Dingle and the Blasket Islands and the Skellig Rocks, the call of the curlews and the sound of the surf…You should see it, boys! Ireland! The ball flies straighter there, and oh so true, and the greens are truly green and the ball drops down into the hole with a lovely little…plop! It’s God’s own land, that’s what it is.”

  He grinned.

  “But that’s enough of that. The little course at Windy Nook’s a grand substitute.” He rubbed his hands in excitement. “So. What shenanigans have you two planned for today?”

  Geordie shrugged. I said nowt. Father O’Mahoney grinned again.

  “Getting too old to share it now?” he said. He winked. “Specially when the girls might be involved.”

  He put his arms around our shoulders.

  “You’re a good pair. Always were. Good straightforward lads. Now go on. Off to your adventures. And I’ll get looking for those clubs of mine.”

  As we left, he called after us:

  “You know, boys, I often think we’re already living in the borderlands of Paradise! Good day to you now!”

  Outside the church, Geordie said,

  “What you doing with the cloth?”

  “Nowt,” I said.

  I tried to move away from him.

  “What’s up with you?” he said.

  “Nowt,” I said.

  “You’re always nicking off,” he said.

  “No, I’m not,” I said.

  “Yes, you bliddy are. It’ll be that lass again.”

  “Don’t be daft.”

  “Who you calling daft?”

  “Nobody. You.”

  “That’s right.”

  “What do you mean, that’s right? You mean it’s true you’re daft?”

  “I must be, hanging out with you.”

  “Nick off, then.”

  “I will. And you nick off as well.”

  “I will.”

  So we both nicked off. I ran up the High Street, across the square. I came to a halt. I stared at myself in the Blue Bell’s window. There I was, an ordinary kid. This was home, an ordinary town. I’d stolen the body and blood of Christ and I wouldn’t give them back. I’d go further into the darkness with Stephen Rose. I’d make a monster if I could. I closed my eyes, tried to feel the power in myself, but I still just felt like me. I moved closer to the window, I looked at myself more closely. I was just the same as ever, ordinary, just ordinary.

  “Is this what going crazy’s like?” I whispered. “Is this what being under a spell is like?”

  Then I tore myself away and ran again.

  fifteen

  I inspected the Sellotape in my bedroom. The dust and fragments of Christ’s body were still stuck to it. I folded it and put it into the locket. I cut out the little wine-stained pieces of the altar cloth. I put them into the locket as well. I looked at what I had. A few shreds. Almost nothing. How could there be a power in things like this? I stared hard at them, willing them to do something marvelous.

  “Do something,” I whispered.

  They did nothing, of course. My heart sank. I snapped the locket shut.

  The sun blazed into my bedroom. A crystal-clear sky, nothing in it but a few small birds nearby and the sparrow hawk that spiraled over Braddock’s garden. Lunch was on downstairs: the lovely scents of beef and vegetables and a boiling pudding. Somebody yelled jokes on the radio. Dad roared with laughter. Mam sang along with the radio’s daft songs. She yelled that the food would be on the table in five minutes. I sat there on my bed. I slid the locket right under my mattress.

  “Davie!” yelled Mam. “Davie!”

  I went down.

  Everything was dried out and tasteless.

  Mam kept asking if I was all right.

  “Aye,” I told her.

  She reached out to touch me.

  “I’m all right, man!” I snapped.

  She flinched.

  Dad’s eyes narrowed and he raised his finger at me.

  “That’s enough of that, la
d,” he said.

  He shook his head. We ate in silence. I stuffed a lump of suet pudding into my mouth.

  “Lads,” he muttered.

  Afterwards we put the TV on and an ancient black-and-white film of Frankenstein came on. We watched the monster lumbering about. Mam laughed at how clumsy it all was.

  “Remember when we saw it first?” she said to Dad. “All them folk in the Corona fainting and screaming and running out? What on earth were we so scared of?”

  Dad lurched about the room for a bit with his arms stretched out and his legs dead stiff and he grunted and groaned and pretended to attack us.

  Then Maria and Frances walked past and Frances stared in at the window.

  “Aha!” said Mam.

  “You’ll be off out now, I suppose?” said dad.

  “No,” I said.

  Frances waved. I ignored her, turned my face back to the TV. From the corner of my eye I saw her link her arm into Maria’s and lead her away.

  “You’re sure?” said Mam.

  The monster growled.

  “Aye,” I snapped. “Aye, man!”

  “Davie!” said Dad. “That’s enough!”

  “Stop me then!” I said. “Go on, bliddy stop me!”

  He dropped his Frankenstein act, glared at me.

  “Get to your damn room,” he said.

  I rushed upstairs, back to the body, the blood, the fear. I climbed into the cupboard in my wall. I clambered over toys and games to find my earliest things: rattles and building blocks and crayons and board books, and I found my ancient tub of plasticine. All the colors had blended to earthy gray. The stuff felt hard as stone but as my fingers worked it softened. I remembered making animals, fish, birds, little models of my beloved mam and dad. I made a beast and whispered time and again and time and again, “Live and move. Live and move!” I made a little model of myself and hated it and turned it to a four-legged stupid thing with a heavy head hanging down towards the floor. “Live and move,” I told it. “Live and move.” As dusk came on, the air outside seemed filled with angels, which hovered over the streetlights and peered in at me with disappointed, disapproving faces.

  There was a knock at the door and Mam slipped in.

  She smiled.

  “Plasticine!” she said. “Remember how you used to love it?”

  “No,” I said. “Well, kind of.”

  She smelt a little piece of it.

  “Takes me back. Remember when there were lovely little creatures everywhere?”

  “Dunno,” I said.

  “You were so brilliant at making things. Would you like to come downstairs?”

  “Dunno.”

  She put an arm around me.

  “I’m sorry, Mam,” I said.

  “Is it something to do with a girl?”

  “No. Dunno, Mam.”

  “Or is it Geordie mebbe?”

  “Geordie!”

  She laughed gently.

  “Whatever it is, it’s not nice when somebody you love turns on you like that,” she said.

  “Aye. I know. I’m…”

  “That’s OK. Say sorry to your dad as well and that’ll be an end to it.”

  I did go down again and apologize to Dad, and he too said that was an end to it but nothing stopped. I spent that night awake, making plasticine creatures, breathing prayers and incantations and commands on them while the moon shone down at me. I didn’t dare to open the locket and try to use the power of the body and the blood. Nothing moved, till 4 a.m. “Please move,” I whispered, and a fragment of the plasticine did seem to come to a kind of life, did seem to slither on my palm, but by then I was fighting sleep, I was probably dreaming, or it was just another sign that I was going mad.

  sixteen

  “She’ll chuck you,” said Frances.

  She walked into me in the corridor. We were on our way to Prat’s class. It was Friday, last lesson of the day.

  “Who will?”

  “Marilyn Monroe. Who do you think? You saw us, didn’t you?”

  I shrugged.

  “You saw us and took not a bit of bliddy notice,” she said. “Why should she want a lad that ignores her, then walks round in a dream all day?”

  “Dunno.”

  “Dunno. That says it all.”

  She poked me in the ribs.

  “What’s wrong with you? Can you not see how lovely she is? What’s going on in that stupid skull of yours?”

  I was going to say dunno but I didn’t.

  She clicked her fingers in front of my face.

  “Hello,” she said. “Hello-o. Is anybody there?”

  I shrugged.

  She shook her head.

  “That’s it,” she said. “I’ll tell her today. Chuck him, I’ll say.”

  “Let her chuck me!”

  “She will. You’re a waste of bliddy time.”

  She hurried on. Maria was already in the class. By the time I got in, Frances was hissing in Maria’s ear and waggling her hands about. They both started giggling. They looked straight at me, then turned away and made faces and hooted. I sat down beside Geordie. He slid his chair away from me.

  Prat held up a little sphere of clay between his fingers.

  “The basest thing of all,” he said. “A lump of muck. Soft, oozy, slimy, slithery, formless stuff. Are we drawn to it because it reminds us of ourselves—of our own human formlessness and muckiness?”

  He looked around the room.

  “Muckiness,” he said. “Can we use such a word about ourselves?”

  Nobody answered.

  Frances turned her eyes to me. She nodded.

  “You’re saying yes?” said Prat.

  “Oh, yes, sir,” said Frances.

  “And yet there are some,” continued Prat, “who say that we are the opposite of muck, that we are blessed spirits. Is that true? Who thinks that? Who thinks”—he lowered his voice—“that we are like angels?”

  Geordie raised his hand.

  “Me, sir,” he said.

  “Thank you, George,” said Prat. “I’ve often thought that about you myself. But…” He widened his eyes. He raised a finger, like he always did when he thought he was getting dead profound. “Isn’t the truth somewhere in between? Isn’t it true that we are both? We are muck and we are spirit! Who agrees with that?”

  “Me, sir,” muttered several kids.

  “Excellent! Then let’s move on. Could it be that we love to work with clay because it shows how the creative act can…”

  Prat blathered on. He strode back and forward in front of us, closing his eyes, tapping his temples, gazing at the sky outside.

  Geordie scribbled on a piece of paper and slid it across to me.

  What was Mouldy on about? Kissing stuff.

  “Eh?” I breathed.

  He wrote again.

  Kissing. Lovey-dovey stuff.

  There was a grin playing about his face. He rolled his eyes and puckered his mouth as if to kiss. I started to write something on the note but I didn’t know what to write.

  Nick off, I scribbled at last.

  He pretended to be shocked.

  “Are you all right, George?” said Prat in midstream.

  “Aye, sir.”

  “Excellent. For a second I believed that you were in the process of reacting to my words.”

  “Oh, no, sir.”

  “Excellent.”

  Prat flicked his hand up and caught a jelly baby that was flying through the air. He popped it into his mouth.

  “Sometimes,” he said, “I wonder to myself, ‘Why do I tell them such things? Why do I bother?’”

  “Cos you’re a prat,” muttered Geordie.

  “But I refuse to be downcast. I tell myself, ‘But there are those who do listen, Peter Patrick Parker, as there always have been and always will be.’ So…! Whose are the jelly babies, by the way?”

  “Mine, sir,” said Jimmy Kay.

  “Then I will have another, James, to feed the stream of words.
A red one, please.” Jimmy lobbed one to him; Prat caught it, chewed it, plunged on again. “Could it be,” he said, “that in a lump of this clay we see a body without a soul, and it inspires us to…”

  Kissing, Geordie wrote. Davie and Stephen Rose are…

  He scribbled another note, rolled it up, lobbed it towards Frances and Maria. Frances opened it. She goggled. She giggled.

  “Eeee!” she said, and she passed the note on to Maria.

  Maria looked across at me. Frances nudged her and whispered in her ear again and Maria started giggling as well.

  Prat blathered on.

  “Eeeee!” said Frances.

  “Yes, Miss Malone?” said Prat.

  “Well, sir,” said Frances. “It’s very…er…”

  “Disturbing?” said Prat.

  “Aye, sir,” said Frances.

  “Terrifying, even.”

  “Aye, sir.”

  “Indeed. The thought that we might be doomed simply to return to earth? The thought that we may be dense, solid, heavy, the playthings of our creator…”

  “It’s shocking, sir,” said Frances.

  “Indeed,” said Prat.

  “Appalling,” said Frances.

  She giggled.

  “Disgraceful, degrading, disgusting,” she said. “Maria thinks so as well.”

  “Does she?” said Prat.

  Frances nudged her.

  “Oh, yes, sir,” said Maria.

  Prat beamed.

  “It is just a notion,” he said. “An idea.”

  He put his hands onto the girls’ desk and leaned over them.

  “I am so glad that I have made you think.”

  “Oh, we’re certainly thinking, sir,” said Maria.

  “Eeee!” said Frances. She rolled her eyes at me. “Eeee! Eeeeeee!”

  Afterwards, in the corridor, I just tried to get away. But the girls giggled behind me. Geordie egged them on. I turned back and glared. Geordie gasped, and pretended to be scared.

  “Get stuffed,” I said.

  I tried to catch Maria’s eye. I wanted to say to her: Look how we were together in the quarry. I wanted to say to Geordie: But you’ve always been my best mate. But Maria grinned and wouldn’t meet my eye. Geordie simpered. I clenched my fists.

  “Howay, then,” Geordie said. “Try it, Davie.”

  I hesitated.

  “Howay,” he said. “What’s up? You scared?”