Clay Read Online Free Page B

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