Clay Read Online Free Page B

battered the tower blocks, throwing rain like gravel against the glass only to quieten, take breath, and hurl itself again. TC lay on his bed and felt the windows tremble, and pretended he was out at sea.
     
    Across the high road from the block where TC lived was a dilapidated Edwardian terrace, shops below, flats above. Over the corner premises, a second-hand furniture shop now for many years, the dim shape of a man moved at a grimy sash window. The room behind him had grown dark while Jozef was working, but he whittled mostly by feel anyway.
    A man’s voice called his name up the bare stairwell with its stark bulb, the two syllables bouncing flatly off the walls. He stood and stretched his big hands, clicked the knuckles. ‘Yes, I am coming,’ he called. The rain had slowed, the wind was dropping, and the sky was pressed velvet blue against the window. Time for work.
    Before leaving his little room, spartan as a monk’s cell, he placed a half-finished carving no bigger than his thumb on the windowsill with its fellows. It was unclear to him what it would become, but it already had the rough lineaments of an animal. He would wait to finish it until its nature declared itself beneath his blunt fingers.
    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