In our classroom there are tall wooden tables and we sit on high stools. Our stools have red, blue and yellow plastic seats, vacuum formed to fit our behinds, and sometimes the rivets on the side come loose because we get bored and fiddle with them, and someone falls through and gets stuck and their stool topples over. Then about half the class laughs, and the rest of us, we’re just glad to be still sitting upright and unnoticed.
Once Gavin MacNeilly snuck into the big damp cupboard where Mr Parks keeps the clay. The clay cupboard has shelves on the inside and the outside and it is usually locked so that none of us steals clay, glass, glazes, rolling pins, bakelite knives, rubber kidneys (that we use for smoothing our pots before they get fired) or wooden boards. Gavin MacNeilly said there are big plastic tubs of slip – white slip, red slip, grey slip – ready mixed up with white labels, but nobody would want to steal slip, that’s what I thought. It would run all over your hands, drip between your fingers onto the floor, you would be like Lady Macbeth in lunchtime drama class, sludgy, sticky, guilty hands. And what use is slip anyway, except in pottery class.
Behind two stacks of boards in the cupboard is a lemonade bottle with the top cut off. It is used to store swirly, shiny marbles and sometimes Mr Parks brings it out onto his desk and doles them out like mint humbugs. The little spheres of glass all catch the light differently and we are sometimes allowed to roll them across wet tablets of clay to make squiggly tracks that we can fill in with different glazes. We dip stubby brushes into special oven baking paints with names like ‘light honey-pewter’ and ‘speckled berry’ and we have to make sure that all the glazes we choose will fix at the same temperature. They all look the same when you paint them on, so you have to be careful not to let them bleed into each other. Then when they come out of the kiln, after something like a two thousand degree chemical reaction, they are distinct and glossy.
The quiet girl of the class, Sarah Dover, was the one who cut the lemonade bottle with a Stanley blade, making it into a container, and she wrote the labels for the slip jars. She’s the only one in our class who Mr Parks lets use real knives and marker pens. She did ten pages of pot designs in her sketchbook on the theme of getting old – long, thin, saggy coil pots and crinkled pinch pots. She drew her grandad’s wrinkled face and his chicken skin neck and she dried out orange peel until it shriveled up and brought it to show everyone in a washed out margarine carton. She thinks of cool things to do, like press the brittle brown-yellow skin right into her rolled out piece of clay, to make bobbly, creased patterns when she prises it off again. She concentrates so hard on it, her hands go white and she presses her knees together on her stool which has a red seat.
Gavin MacNeilly told me he saw Katy Liver’s knickers in the clay cupboard, and he kissed her bottom lip too. Mr Parks was trying to teach us how to get all the air out of the clay by bashing it hard with a rolling pin. There was so much noise going on, tough squelching and sucking of everyone’s grey mud cakes. Slap, squeeze, thud and sharp intakes of breath every time someone rolling pinned their own fingers. I was trying to listen above the racket to Mr Parks explaining why the tiny bubbles have to be popped out before we can start making our pots, but all I could think of was Sarah Dover, her white, careful hands, and how I would love to kiss them.
I cut open my clay to check for air bubbles, counted at least twenty, and got back to pounding for another minute or so. Sarah Dover’s hands were powdered with pale grey dust from her rolling pin. Just one, just one of her white hands, just one finger, one thumb.
‘Sarah,’ I whispered after some more clay bashing, ‘Sarah, could you help me for a second. I had an idea for a pot.’ She looked over. I shuffled my stool a bit nearer, ‘I’m doing a project on fingerprints, right, and I want to have your fingerprints. On my pot, you know.’
‘I don’t know,’ Sarah Dover whispered back. She sounded a bit scared. ‘I don’t know, it’s supposed to be all your own work, isn’t it? It’s probably not allowed.’
I waved my hand to get Mr Parks’ attention. ‘Sir, sir, I had an idea for a pot. I want to get people’s fingerprints, sir.’ Mr Parks made an irritated sigh that sounded something like ‘get on with it then.’ I looked back at Sarah Dover, ‘See, it’s fine. Will you help me?’
‘Oh, go on then, but I have a lot to do myself mind.’
She edged her stool around the corner of the table until she was sitting opposite me. ‘Here,’ I said, ‘put your first fingerprint here.’ Sarah Dover pressed one white finger into my clay and released it leaving faint looped marks like the pattern of worms in wet sand. ‘Do your middle finger as well.’ She found another spot and made another worm pattern. I couldn’t move. I couldn’t lean forward and kiss her thumb as it shyly descended and ascended, nor her little finger, nor her index finger, nor any of the fingers on her right hand. Then there were no fingers left and Sarah Dover quietly dragged her stool back to her own table and began again twisting orange peel into curly shapes.
This piece was first published in super Edinburgh-based Read This Magazine
IMAGE CREDIT: Jay Ballanger
