Page 56 of Tell No One
“Why do I need that?” Tag asked. “Are you dumping me? It’s novel, I’ll give you that.”
“You never know what’s going to happen. At least with some cash you have choices. A chance.”
Tag nodded. “Thank you.”
“Talk some more about you,” Delaney said. “What do you like to do?”
Tag hesitated. Whenever he’d told people he liked working with clay, most of them had asked to see something he’d made, then laughed when all he had to show them was a couple of bowls.
“I like making things with clay,” he said quietly.
“How did you get into that?”
“Mersham Wood. It was one of the art activities. Before I was sent there, I was a hundred-mile-an-hour kid, rushing everywhere, never still. I had a…bicycle. I went everywhere on it. Then I suddenly found myself locked in a room, trapped in a building. No one was allowed to walk fast let alone run, you couldn’t even go outside when you felt like it. Clay calmed me. The moment I coiled my first pot, I felt I’d finally found my thing.”
He glanced at Delaney to check he wasn’t smirking. He wasn’t.
“I had to do a lot of pleading to be allowed air drying clay in my room. I don’t know what they thought I was going to do with it. Make a key? The stuff broke when you looked at it funny. But they did let me have it eventually. I had to earn the money to buy it. Everyone else was buying food and sweets and phone time, and all I wanted was clay. Couldn’t have the tools though. Potential weapons. I had to make my own as best I could and they kept getting taken away, but I coped.”
“What sort of things did you make?”
Delaney was twisting Tag’s hair in his fingers. Tag wasn’t sure he was aware he was doing it, but he really hoped he didn’t stop because it felt so good.
“I made animals when I was in there. I still do. When I can rent time in a studio, I book a session on the wheel. I like throwing bowls and mugs and stuff.”
“I didn’t see anything like that in your room.”
“I did slam the door in your face, so you couldn’t have seen much. There were a couple of bowls, but I mostly never fired what I made. I’d have had to pay for colours and glazes, and space in a kiln, and what was I supposed to do with endless bowls and mugs and vases?”
“Sell them?”
Tag laughed. “Who to? There’s thousands of potters making better stuff than me.”
“How often do you do it?”
“Whenever I can. Making models I can do in my room, but practising on a wheel is harder to fit in and costs money. But I’m not going to give up. One day I’ll make something brilliant. Well,I’llthink it’s brilliant even if no one else does.”
“What do you like doing best?”
“Probably making animals with air drying clay.”
“But you’ve not kept any?”
“No. I keep reusing the clay while I can.”
“I don’t understand why you wouldn’t keep what you made.”
Tag closed his eyes for a moment. “I did once. I had a shelf full of little horses and dogs and cats and elephants, and…they got broken. I thought my heart was going to break too and when you’re locked up, that’s a dangerous thing. You can’t show anything has hurt you or it just happens again and again.”
“Someone broke all your models?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“Because they wanted me to keep drugs in them and I wouldn’t. I came back to my room and found the mess. All I could do was clean it up. They thought I’d say yes next time they asked, but I didn’t. That was when I ended up in the hospital.”
“But once you were released, you could make things and keep them then.”
