the work was flowing. He was inspired. Like he hadn’t been since he was twenty years old, when he was too young and too stupid to have doubts about what he was doing. He could slip away into it, like diving into the deepest part of the lake: the same pressure in his head, the tightening in his ears, the hurt in his chest, aching for air.
When he surfaced, blinking in the fluorescent light in the basement, hours had gone by. Days maybe. His body reasserted itself with all its tiresome urges. His stomach roiled with hunger, his back ached, his hands were cramped, with fresh calluses. But he had new work, in new materials, finally making use of all the things he had squirreled away in his basement over the years; pieces made of clay and wire and newspaper and reclaimed wood. Strange and beautiful work, like he’d never made before. The sculpture he’d promised Patrick languished untouched in the yard. It seemed brutish and clumsy now. But he couldn’t be sure. He couldn’t trust himself to judge. He could be going mad, he decided.
The last time he had black-outs was nearly ten years ago, when he was drinking too much at the squat in Eastern Market. He’d hustled his way in among the youngsters, because it felt alive and vibrant: a real arts scene, like Paris in the twenties, or New York in the seventies, nineties Berlin. But he didn’t fit in. He was too old, his work was too strange, he didn’t know how to talk to the endless stream of girls, with their tattoos and bright hair, who came to hang out, to pose for portraits or be photographed, usually topless, sometimes naked.
He never took to acid or any of those other drugs, although they were going around among the kids. Coke, speed, mescaline. The late-night parties where he was always the odd one out, sitting on his own on the couch. They would come and sit right next to him and not talk to him. He would drink to make it bearable, and wake up oblivious to whatever had happened the night before, stumbling out into the shared living space to ice-cold vibes. He would spend the day miserable, waiting for someone to finally confront him about what he’d done. Some inappropriate thing he’d said, some dumb practical joke that everyone had taken too seriously.
But he hadn’t been drinking. Or sleeping, or eating, or taking his pain pills. He avoided the refrigerator, the thin Plexiglas shelves yanked out and set beside it. He also took care not to look at the black stains on his wall, which seemed to swell when he passed them. A trick of the light, mold from the newspapers piled up in teetering stacks in the hallway.
He opened a can of beans in tomato sauce, poured it into a dish and put it in the microwave. The device hummed and the glass plate turned round and round and round until PING. He was reassured by the normalcy of this, even if the act of eating seemed repulsive.
Spooning the food in, chewing the soft pulp, his tongue rolling it back toward his throat, swallowing – it was all automatic, like he was functioning on the muscle memory of someone he used to be. He patted his pocket for cigarettes and realized he didn’t want them, the chemical taste in his mouth, the way they sucked away his breath.
He felt unlike himself. ‘Unlike.’ He said it aloud. Words sounded strange. The meaning unraveled. It was as if Clayton was the skin and bones he pulled on.
He had to get out of the house. He had to talk to someone. Show them what he’d done.
(Don’t look in the refrigerator.)
He had to fire these clay figurines – the ones he doesn’t remember making, but that seem familiar. It’s why he doesn’t normally work in clay – because he doesn’t have an oven, but he reckons Miskwabic Pottery would let him use their student kiln. He used to help pack tiles into boxes and move big bags of wet clay for Betty Spinks in exchange for pottery lessons.
He packed up the figurines and took them out to the garage, ignoring the cracks webbed out across the windscreen – he’d have to get that fixed. He hauled the tarp out of the back and flipped it over to hide the rusty stains.
Yanking up the garage door, some part of him expected it to open onto nothingness. But it was a bright late-autumn day, the low cloud cover catching the sunlight and spreading it around.
He drove past rows of wooden houses with peeling paint and overgrown grass, the bare trees reaching up their branches as if to rip a hole in the sky, and took a shortcut through Indian Village, where the houses got a lot nicer, and all dolled up for Halloween, with pumpkins in the windows and spooky floss draped over the big old oaks and elms lining the driveways of the historic homes.
He pulled into the gravel parking lot of the cosy Tudor-style building and nudged the truck right up against the fence under the tree near the road, away from the other cars, to make it harder to spot his broken windscreen.
The fat security guard held open the door for him as he carried his load in, warm air wafting out.
‘Help you there, sir?’
‘I’m fine,’ Clayton said. It almost felt true, here in this bright shop with its shelves of arts and crafts tiles with their iridescent glaze. Historic buildings all over the city were decorated with Miskwabic mosaics, hallways turned into geometries of light, cornerstones and edgings marked out in bright patterns. But they don’t sell anything like that here. Instead they have ‘gift tiles’, botanicals and devotionals and simple geometrics, the city skyline, a Tigers D, street numbers, a little ballerina girl, pumpkins for Halloween. You take all the beauty in the world and you boil it down to kitsch, he thought.
Inside, a family was browsing while a hipster with wild hair talked them through the history, paying special attention to the twenty-something daughter. Betty was behind the counter, her graying hair in a loose plait, wearing a red sweater and a necklace of colored beads. She looked up at the sound of his voice, peering over her glasses at him. ‘Knock me down. Clayton Broom, where have you been hiding yourself?’
‘I got this,’ he said, lamely, indicating the box in his arms.
‘I can see that, sweetie,’ she replied. He’d always thought of her as no-nonsense apple pie. ‘You want to bring that in back? Hey, Robin, when you’re done flirting, can you mind the register?’
‘Sure, Betty.’ The youngster with the twists of hair nodded at him in a friendly way, but his attention was already swinging back to the daughter, who absolutely had to look at the earrings in the display case. Clayton watched them circling each other with the documentary dispassion of someone who had never got that right.
Betty marched through to the firing room, past the two industrial kilns sitting alongside each other like a history lesson – the old brick oven with the burn marks down the front beside the aggressively shiny steel kiln – to her office.
She cleared a space on the desk, shoving her files onto her chair, so he’d have space to set down the box. ‘Now, what have we got here? Can I take a peek?’ But she was already folding back the cardboard flaps and taking out one of the figurines, a woman with a bird’s head, like a skinny Degas ballerina, her arms flung wide as if she could lift off. There were a flock of them in the box, with various faces. ‘Hmmf,’ she said, but he could tell she was impressed. ‘You been practicing?’
‘Trying new things,’ he said.
‘That’s important. I got my little god-daughter to try pottery, and now her parents are complaining they haven’t got room for all her masterpieces.’
‘Me too. I don’t have space. I’ve been on a … binge. It all came out of me. It keeps coming.’
‘Well, that’s great. You got some of the muse pixie dust to share around, you let me know. I’ve been experimenting, too. What do you think?’ She gave a self-deprecating nod at the workspace countertop, where an elaborate vase of overlapping folds glazed in delicate greens and whites running to dusky pink at the tip sat next to a decrepit old laptop. ‘I’ve been playing with shapes in nature. Flowers, insects, sea anemones.’
Clayton examined the tulip vase, the twirl of petals unfurling from the base. ‘It’s pretty,’ he managed and then blurted it out. ‘I think I have a brain tumor, Betty.’
Her eyes softened. ‘That’s a big jump, honey. Have you seen a doctor about