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Issue 15 - March / April 2009 - Prose
Pottery Class by Becky Hunter
In our classroom there are tall wooden tables and we sit on high stools. Our stools have red, blue and yellow plastic seats, vacuum formed to fit our behinds, and sometimes the rivets on the side come loose because we get bored and fiddle with them, and someone falls through and gets stuck and their stool topples over. Then about half the class laughs, and the rest of us, we’re just glad to be still sitting upright and unnoticed.
Once Gavin MacNeilly snuck into the big damp cupboard where Mr Parks keeps the clay. The clay cupboard has shelves on the inside and the outside and it is usually locked so that none of us steals clay, glass, glazes, rolling pins, bakelite knives, rubber kidneys (that we use for smoothing our pots before they get fired) or wooden boards. Gavin MacNeilly said there are big plastic tubs of slip – white slip, red slip, grey slip – ready mixed up with white labels, but nobody would want to steal slip, that’s what I thought. It would run all over your hands, drip between your fingers onto the floor, you would be like Lady Macbeth in lunchtime drama class, sludgy, sticky, guilty hands. And what use is slip anyway, except in pottery class.
Behind two stacks of boards in the cupboard is a lemonade bottle with the top cut off. It is used to store swirly, shiny marbles and sometimes Mr Parks brings it out onto his desk and doles them out like mint humbugs. The little spheres of glass all catch the light differently and we are sometimes allowed to roll them across wet tablets of clay to make squiggly tracks that we can fill in with different glazes. We dip stubby brushes into special oven baking paints with names like ‘light honey-pewter’ and ‘speckled berry’ and we have to make sure that all the glazes we choose will fix at the same temperature. They all look the same when you paint them on, so you have to be careful not to let them bleed into each other. Then when they come out of the kiln, after something like a two thousand degree chemical reaction, they are distinct and glossy.
The quiet girl of the class, Sarah Dover, was the one who cut the lemonade bottle with a Stanley blade, making it into a container, and she wrote the labels for the slip jars. She’s the only one in our class who Mr Parks lets use real knives and marker pens. She did ten pages of pot designs in her sketchbook on the theme of getting old – long, thin, saggy coil pots and crinkled pinch pots. She drew her grandad’s wrinkled face and his chicken skin neck and she dried out orange peel until it shriveled up and brought it to show everyone in a washed out margarine carton. She thinks of cool things to do, like press the brittle brown-yellow skin right into her rolled out piece of clay, to make bobbly, creased patterns when she prises it off again. She concentrates so hard on it, her hands go white and she presses her knees together on her stool which has a red seat.
Gavin MacNeilly told me he saw Katy Liver’s knickers in the clay cupboard, and he kissed her bottom lip too. Mr Parks was trying to teach us how to get all the air out of the clay by bashing it hard with a rolling pin. There was so much noise going on, tough squelching and sucking of everyone’s grey mud cakes. Slap, squeeze, thud and sharp intakes of breath every time someone rolling pinned their own fingers. I was trying to listen above the racket to Mr Parks explaining why the tiny bubbles have to be popped out before we can start making our pots, but all I could think of was Sarah Dover, her white, careful hands, and how I would love to kiss them.
I cut open my clay to check for air bubbles, counted at least twenty, and got back to pounding for another minute or so. Sarah Dover’s hands were powdered with pale grey dust from her rolling pin. Just one, just one of her white hands, just one finger, one thumb.
‘Sarah,’ I whispered after some more clay bashing, ‘Sarah, could you help me for a second. I had an idea for a pot.’ She looked over. I shuffled my stool a bit nearer, ‘I’m doing a project on fingerprints, right, and I want to have your fingerprints. On my pot, you know.’
‘I don’t know,’ Sarah Dover whispered back. She sounded a bit scared. ‘I don’t know, it’s supposed to be all your own work Jack, isn’t it? It’s probably not allowed.’
I waved my hand to get Mr Parks’ attention. ‘Sir, sir, I had an idea for a pot. I want to get people’s fingerprints, sir.’ Mr Parks made an irritated sigh that sounded something like ‘get on with it then.’ I looked back at Sarah Dover, ‘See, it’s fine. Will you help me?’
‘Oh, go on then, but I have a lot to do myself mind.’
She edged her stool around the corner of the table until she was sitting opposite me. ‘Here,’ I said, ‘put your first fingerprint here.’ Sarah Dover pressed one white finger into my clay and released it leaving faint looped marks like the pattern of worms in wet sand. ‘Do your middle finger as well.’ She found another spot and made another worm pattern. I couldn’t move. I couldn’t lean forward and kiss her thumb as it shyly descended and ascended, nor her little finger, nor her index finger, nor any of the fingers on her right hand. Then there were no fingers left and Sarah Dover quietly dragged her stool back to her own table and began again twisting orange peel into curly shapes.
Murder in the suburbs by Georgina Brown
They say you can tell a lot about a person from their shoes. I'd have missed them if I hadn't been reaching down for a sack of rice. Frivolous, pointed and with high heels, when I knew for a fact that there were a couple of inches of snow in the car park. I crouched down by the basmati in my sensible flat boots, not wanting to be seen, and peered sideways at her ankles. I recognised a little scab on her instep, and a few hairs she'd missed while shaving. It was definitely her, oblivious to me as she deliberated over the instant ramen. I thought I had killed her. But she was still very much alive.
The baby started squalling and drumming his heels against the wire, so reluctantly I straightened up to soothe him, keeping my head down. His tiny legs dangled from the child seat in the loaded shopping trolley and I thought how terrifying it must be to be suspended so many times higher than your own height above the ground. I passed him a cracker from the stash of supplies in my knapsack and kept my eye on her. She didn't seem to be in a hurry. She had no trolley, just an empty basket on the floor by her foot, and now she seemed to be examining bottles of soy sauce with absorbed attention. Her bare legs under the hem of her smart black coat looked skinny and brave. I willed her to move on so I could follow her - I'd already heaved my sack into the trolley and I knew it was only a matter of time before the baby finished gnawing on his cracker.
I swung the trolley further down the aisle to look at the noodles, trying to look casual but keeping one eye all the time on her pony tail of shiny, surely artificially dark, long hair. She moved at last, and I followed her as discreetly as I could to the drinks section. She drew ahead while I heaved a box of shiraz down from the shelf, but I caught up with her as she chose a bottle of gin. No hesitation this time - she obviously had a preferred brand. It was just a little after five on Friday afternoon, so perhaps she had slipped out early from work to buy provisions for this evening. I wondered who she was expecting.
The baby suddenly tossed his cracker to the floor and gave a warning wail. His face quickly turned purple, and his tiny body went rigid as he took in a breath for a scream. Nappy change time. Regretfully I abandoned my trolley and bundled him into the baby change room with our combined baggage – knapsack, change bag, bulky winter jackets. When I looked behind me I caught one last glimpse of her hovering by the salad dressings, no doubt checking the calories on each label.
In the car park I threw the heavy shopping bags into the back of the car, strapped the baby into his seat and backed the car out aggressively. Usually I would have waited patiently for the little old lady in her tiny Fiat to negotiate the bend by the trolley store, but today I overtook her and roared towards the exit. I drummed my hands on the wheel when other drivers dithered at junctions, and even beeped the horn peevishly at a pedestrian who stepped absent-mindedly off the pavement when the lights were still green.
The baby fell asleep on the way home, despite my erratic progress. I switched off the engine outside the house and slumped for a while in the dark, listening to the ticking of the engine as it cooled down. Ahead of me was the struggle into the house with the baby under one arm and the groceries under the other. I knew the baby shouldn't sleep now or he'd be awake later, but for the moment I just needed to sit.
I'd thought I’d finished her off . The last time I had seen her, at the nightclub after my best friend's engagement party, had been the last straw. I had spent the evening watching her dancing with her girlfriends, smilingly shaking off the attempts by various men to buy her drinks. We left before her, but later I went to her single-girl flat, and I was still there the next morning when the baby woke me up at 5. All through that hungover Sunday I hated her, as she slept until noon, took a long shower and met her friends for lunch. Monday morning, when the three of us - Sam, the baby and me, curled up together in bed before we had to get up, was the moment when I killed her off. She had been struggling to work in the rain, grey-skinned from another late night and instant coffee for breakfast. The baby had helped, pulling her hair and beating her senseless with his pudgy fists.
I sighed and got out of the car. She came into the house with me, as I knew she would, rolling her eyes in disgust as I fed and changed the baby, disinterestedly burying her head in a magazine while I tackled the dishes, and perching on the kitchen counter filing her nails while I chopped onions for dinner. She disappeared while I gave the baby his bath, but when I popped into our bedroom for a clean towel I found her flicking through my wardrobe in amused distaste.
By the time Sam came home from work I had it more or less under control. After a dirty fight over the nappy bin, when her sardonic expression wrong-footed me for precious minutes, I had managed to stifle her with a giant teddy bear and bury the body under a mound of pastel baby clothes. It was only when my husband left the toilet seat standing proud as we got ready for bed that she struggled free for a moment and squawked urgently through the Peter Rabbit elastoplast that did for duct tape. I knocked her out with my bedtime book and she subsided back into the heap of tiny sweaters. For now.