Mr Clay- A short story by Adam Sidaway

Mr Clay

In the classroom, Clay had often lapsed into daydreams, imagining himself as the cosmopolitan intellectual, strolling down London’s endless cafe-lined streets engaging in conversation with anyone who would offer an audience. He pictured how he would write his latest bestseller on a tiny state of the art laptop in the front window of a high street coffee shop, and he imagined how the chief editors of literary supplements to all the national newspapers would buzz with excitement at the prospect of ‘a new, thoroughly audacious offering from one of the greatest cult novelists of his generation.’ It was only when the general squawk of the classroom became positively deafening that he was stirred from such imaginary utopias.

Until the calamitous events of that November morning, the point from which there was really no return, Clay had found a way for his lofty literary dreams, and the rather more humble reality of life as an English teacher in a slightly below average (and, he might add, poorly managed) state school to co-exist. By day he was the average middle aged pedagogue; the kind who would have made an ideal school master in the authoritative and classically aligned grammar school of 100 years ago. But in the present dimension, he represented nothing more than another of the education system's inefficiencies. A running joke amongst the pupils he taught. Having had all enthusiasm for his profession sucked out of him by endless reams of red tape, and beaten out of him by the streetwise working class Damiens he was required to teach, he cut a rather pathetic figure. Despite the nightmarish world he was paid to inhabit, Clay dedicated all his free time to literature. Most evenings he would be either writing, or looking for an avenue through which his work might be better known. The energy and verve he had for literature made him almost unrecognisable from the Mr Clay that everybody knew. Literature was an earthly paradise, a secret garden in which Clay could indulge his fantasies and right all the wrongs of the world. To call Clay a lover of literature would be to cheapen what he felt for the books he read and wrote. Though he was by all accounts a terrible writer, nothing could dampen his spirits; literature was quite simply his life blood.

When it came to literature he was very much like a balloon, and when he wrote the process was always the same. He would read extensively, first he would be inflated by the cynical tirades of an Aldous Huxley, then inflated a little more by the saucy wit of an Oscar Wilde, yet more by the desperation of a Dostoyevsky, and by the time he had finished with the rousing, thunderous prose of a Milton he would simply burst, writing ceaselessly, emphatically and furiously for hours until the work was finished. He imagined himself as something of a Robert Louis Stevenson or a Franz Kafka, creating unconscious masterpieces overnight that seamlessly ingest all elements of human thought and experience. The reality was that his works were at best a little confusing, cluttered, with overly convoluted ideas presented in the most absurdly wordy fashion. His work would have been made tolerable by anything even remotely resembling a plot. Instead, his characters were forced to inhabit a kind of metaphorical limbo in which nothing really happened and problems went unresolved. It made for dreadfully tedious reading.

Nonetheless, at around the 19th attempt, a practically anonymous local magazine documenting current affairs in the area agreed to print a small episode from his latest offering. Sure enough, the excerpt was printed (inconveniently, one might add, between a double glazing and a ‘natural alternative to Viagra’ advertisement) in November's issue. When he first saw the magazine, Clay was positively bursting with pride. The humble dimensions of his achievement could not have mattered less, because there it was; the real beginnings of an imagined literary legacy (albeit a little late at the age of 55). Right there, in black and white. Though to most the achievement would be judged as almost non-existent, the effect that the publication had on Clay was profound. It no longer mattered that he was still living alone. It didn't matter that both his Mother and Father were at that intolerable stage of life in which they insist to exist, in spite of the numerous time consuming and expensive ailments that riddle their failing bodies. It no longer mattered that his only sexual experience was a drunken fumble with a below average girl at the first year of University...All the pestilence, disappointment and compromise he had endured no longer mattered because life had offered him a small but exquisite reprieve; Clay had the feeling that things were finally looking up.

It was like any other November morning when Clay made his way to school. Walking through the torrential rain, he was in the same high spirits as he had been ever since the publication, which had grown in his mind over the last 14 days into a colossal achievement. Not even the prospect of the dreaded year 10s could bring an end to the sense of warmth and comfort that the publication offered him. Having made his way into the classroom with an air of serenity, he took the register. Halfway through, he was required to stop, for the noise of laughter eventually grew to the point that he could not discern the calls of ‘here sir’ from the general racket. Mr Clay, briefly disturbed from the comforting cradle of his thoughts, lifted his head from the register and noticed that all the students were gathered around one desk, pointing and laughing at something that he could not see given all the bodies in the way. In the sternest manner he could muster, he demanded to know what all the fuss was about. The class fell silent, and immediately scuttled back to their respective positions. However, one of the girls could not hide her amusement, and it became apparent to Clay that she was hiding something. Clay lifted his (not inconsiderable) frame from the chair and approached the girl’s desk. Innocently, he enquired as to what was the matter. The girl protested that it was nothing. Clay noticed that in her left hand the girl was gripping something, a paper or note of some sort. He snatched the offending article and began to discern the words on the page. It read:

'‘The End of Them Both’: An Excerpt. Written By Royston Clay'.

At that moment a sharp pang of pain shot through his spine. The sensation was one of complete embarrassment swiftly succeeded by one of overwhelming fear. It was a fear that the world of his hopes and dreams had collided, in the most devastating and spectacular fashion, with the world in which he was now so hopelessly marooned. He knew from that moment, that the world of literature was forever lost; it was a joke, a laughing matter, the subject of idle gossip between school children. It was perhaps a blessed absolution that the pang in the spine was quickly succeeded by one in the heart, a sharp stabbing sensation. Clay fell to the floor and blacked out.

The post mortem revealed that a cardiac arrest was the cause of death. Mr Clay died of a broken heart.