Clay by Melissa Harrison Read Free Book Online

years even. And they had been glad, then – hadn’t they? – to see that she would cope by herself after all.
    In the fourteen years since Henry died Sophia had stubbornly refused to leave the estate, despite its growing squalor. They had even offered to find her a little garden flat nearby – at considerable expense – but the old woman wouldn’t budge, and Linda simply could not understand why. After all, it might have been smart once, but now the upstairs balconies were cluttered with bikes and dead plants and satellite dishes, and it was so removed from the place of her childhood memories as to be, in her mind, almost a different place. These days the Plestor was yet another part of the city she tried to blank out, like the awful high road, the tower blocks and the terraced row of squats near the station.
    Linda sighed and checked the satnav: nearly an hour to go. Every couple of hundred yards, it seemed, the motorway exhorted her: check your distance, take a break, keep two chevrons apart. She passed signs for villages and towns she could barely believe in. Cars turned off to go to them, their drivers taking their familiar turnings home; people spending their whole lives in places she had never even heard of.
    Except for the odd pine plantation, or stand of silver birches with their dazzling white trunks and fuzz of plum-coloured branches, the thickets that flashed past were low and uniformly dun. From the car it was impossible to say what kind of trees they were.
    Once, her journey would have taken several days, and would have required an intimacy with the lineaments of the landscape that is now almost unimaginable. It could have taken many routes, rather than the few today prescribed by roads, and would have negotiated hills, plains, forests and escarpments which were now little more than antique words on a map – and which did not even appear on the A3-sized road atlas tucked into the pocket behind the passenger seat of Linda’s car, nor on the satnav suckered to the screen. The journey Linda made was mostly formed from letters and numbers, and the waymarks weren’t rivers or even towns but service stations, with their liminal populations and wagtail-haunted car parks, and interchanges that looked like Scalextric tracks on her GPS.
    Yet although all she saw of the shape and texture of the country she lived in was what was visible in a varying strip either side of the road, it was still there, unseen yet unchanged in its essentials for centuries: the ancient contours of the land over which the cars now crawled in inconsequential lines, contours which would persist long after the roads had gone. The hamlets and tiny churches, founded for good reason on bluffs or by streams, endured despite the motorway which now scythed past and left them unmoored, while under the tarmac slept the detritus of a thousand lives: coins and bones, belt buckles and curses, things that had been lost and things that had been thrown away.
     
    Daisy was bored of writing her letter. She wanted to play in the garden, but the gardener was there and she wasn’t supposed to disturb him. She went to her playroom to look at her toys, instead; she had a toy cupboard and a wooden chest, both stuffed with fashion dolls, computer games and boxes of things she hadn’t even opened. Each birthday more came, especially if she had a proper birthday party, and although her mum gave some to the poor children there were still loads left. They were mostly pink, and they were all boring. Boys got all the best toys, everybody knew.
    ‘Come on, love,’ Steven called up the stairs, ‘bottle bank.’
    ‘In a second!’ Daisy shouted back. ‘Nearly finished.’
    ‘I want to play in the garden but I can’t because the man is here doing cutting and tidying,’ she wrote. ‘Your park is much nicer. If I run away one day I will come and live in it. You can play in it with me but only when I say. Now I am going to the bottle bank, which is fun. Goodbye.