Free Clay by David Almond Page A

eyes.
    “Oh, look!” he said.
    He pointed. I saw Mouldy further down the street, watching.
    “It’s OK,” said Stephen. “He won’t come. Not now.”
    He suddenly kissed my cheek.
    “What you doing?” I said.
    I pulled away. He started laughing.
    I had to hurry to get to Maria’s side. She slowed down. We looked back and watched Stephen going in, closing Crazy’s door behind him. And we saw Mouldy turning a corner, disappearing.
    “Very very creepy weird,” she said. She regarded me. “What’s between you two?”
    “What do you mean? Nowt’s between us.”
    She looked back. She regarded me.
    “Lads are strange,” she said.
    I tried to shift from her gaze. Her eyes widened.
    “It’s coming!” she said.
    I spun around to look. Nothing there. We giggled.
    I tried to kiss her again, but she stepped back.
    “Silly you,” she said. “Silly us.”
    And we walked homewards, awkward with each other again. 99

ten
    We met on neutral ground, at dusk. We used the graveyard at Heworth. We stood in the oldest part, where the ancient weathered graves were. There were thin tall trees around us. There were clusters of black nests in the branches. Our grave was a table-high and blackened thing. Skinner and Poke were on one side, Geordie and I on the other. The sky had lost its brightness, blue had turned to gray.
    “Where is he?” said Geordie.
    Skinner shrugged.
    “Probably in the Swan. We told him seven o’clock. It’s not far past.”
    “You’re sure he’s OK about the truce?” said Geordie.
    “That’s what he said,” answered Skinner. “You telling me you don’t believe him?”
    He laughed and rolled his sleeve back and showed his wound, a thin scar on his forearm.
    “It’ll be marked forever,” he said.
    He looked at us, dead cold.
    “Your mate’s a maniac,” he said.
    “He’s not our mate,” said Geordie.
    “No?” said Skinner.
    He was a little wiry kid with knuckles hard as stone. In one of our fights, he’d nutted Geordie and Geordie still had the scar on his nose from it. But he was the one that started pulling Mouldy off me that time. He was the one that yelled, “Don’t! You’ll kill him, man!” And he’d quickly checked my throat and my face before he laughed and ran away.
    We waited. I ran my fingers across the names of the people buried below. There was a whole bunch of the Braddocks, all of them dead for a hundred years or more. The stone said they had entered unto glory. I thought of them crumbling away, flesh and blood and bones turning to slime, turning to dust. By now there was probably nothing to separate them from earth, from soil, from clay. I looked towards the graves where we’d buried the two blokes just a few days back. What were those blokes like now? How close to dust were they?
    “Mebbe we got the times mixed up,” I found myself saying. “Mebbe we should just abandon it.”
    Poke grinned.
    “Scared?” he said.
    I shook my head. One day months back, I’d fought with him. We’d battled till we were both worn out. Nobody won. I ached for days. The grazes and bruises took an age to go away. “What’s the point of it?” my mam said when she saw all the marks on me. But Dad said not to worry. It was just the way things were. He shook his head. “Lads,” he said.
    It got darker. We waited. Then Skinner whispered,
    “Look!”
    And there was Mouldy, lumbering through the graves.
    “Mouldy!” called Skinner. “We’re over here!”
    Mouldy came to the head of the grave.
    “Hiya, Mouldy,” said Poke.
    Mouldy glanced at him, curled his lip. He wiped a fist across his face, lit a cigarette. His eyes settled on me. They were empty, dead.
    “So?” he grunted.
    No one spoke. He thumped the grave with his fist.
    “So?” he said.
    “The kid with the knife’s not our mate,” said Geordie.
    Mouldy licked a knuckle. I saw him as he would be in five years’ time, sluggish, heavy, slow, a great gut on him, a drunken dope that nobody’d take notice of. He