The class was made up of five women, and the teacher had crazy curly grey hair that came to her waist. Amongst her neighbours’ carefully manicured suburban lawns and electric fences, her house was like Sleeping Beauty’s castle – high hedges covered in creepers, and a wooden gate that you simply pushed open. God knows how she wasn’t burgled daily.
It was just as well I wasn’t doing the class to meet men, I remember thinking. Of the five students, only Claire and I were under fifty, so naturally we gravitated towards each other. In normal circumstances she’s not a person I would have chosen across a room – she’s one of those tall, thin, aristocratic blondes who looks like she’s either away with the fairies or thinking she’s a cut above everyone else. But we were the ‘young ones’, so we found ourselves sitting together during the introduction when we had to go around the circle saying why we wanted to do pottery and what we hoped to get out of it. The old ladies were a group of widows who all lived at the same retirement village down the road, and they basically said a different version of what I said – new hobby, something to do, artistic outlet. But Claire announced that she was probably going to be shocking at pottery, she just needed something to get her away from her family once a week and pottery had been the first thing she’d seen that was reasonably close by. I was a bit shocked, but the old ladies nodded and one laughed and said, ‘Been there.’
Claire wasn’t shocking at pottery – she was the best in the class. I didn’t know it then, but Claire is always the best in the class, no matter what class it is. That first day, we learnt how to make snake bowls – those bowls where you roll the clay into a long snake and then coil it into a bowl. My snake looked like it had swallowed a series of small mammals, and my resulting bowl looked like a child had made it.
When I said that to Claire – who’d rolled her snake so thin, her bowl looked like some sort of perfect and magical air creation – she assured me I was wrong. ‘I have a child,’ she said. ‘Hers would be much, much worse.’
‘If she’s anything like you,’ I said. ‘I doubt that.’
‘Oh no, she’s like her dad,’ said Claire. ‘Totally without any imagination.’ Then she laughed. ‘Oh, I don’t really mean that. Mackenzie has lots of imagination. But two left hands.’
I don’t have lots of married friends or friends with children – other than Mandy, who makes it sound idyllic. I didn’t know you were allowed to say bad things about your children, or say that you wanted to get away from them. I also didn’t know you could slag off your husband. I figured her husband must be awful and her child particularly disappointing. The old ladies weren’t shocked though – they thought Claire was very funny. When she told us, at the second class, about how her husband was floored by the idea that he had to cook himself dinner on pottery night, the old ladies cackled and agreed that men were hopeless.
When the widows laughed, I didn’t like how it felt as if Claire had more in common with them than with me. She’s a person you find yourself wanting to impress. Like the most popular girl at high school – the one who doesn’t do anything special to be popular, and is nice and kind and interesting, but never quite accessible. After the second class, I asked Claire if she wanted to come for a drink afterwards, though I was sure she would say no.
‘A drink? Now?’ She looked at me as if it was the most scandalous proposal. Then she smiled. ‘You know what, I think I will! What a divine idea. How mad !’
Then she turned and asked the widows and the teacher if they wanted to join us, and I plastered a smile on my face and said, ‘Yes, please do.’
But they all chuckled and said it was past their bedtime, and us young things must go and have some fun, and Claire laughed and said she wasn’t as young as me, and I was corrupting her completely.
When we got to the bar – which was more of a restaurant that served drinks – Claire looked around like she was in a foreign country. ‘Look at all these people out so late in the week,’ she said, though it was just after nine. ‘I forget that life goes on for other people.’
‘Life’s hardly stopped for you,’ I said. ‘You have a husband and a daughter. That’s amazing.’
Claire smiled. ‘Yes, I’m sure it is,’ she said, as if we were talking about an entirely hypothetical scenario that had nothing to do with her. ‘Oh damn,’ she added. ‘I’d better tell him I’m going to be late.’ She fished her phone out of her bag and sent a text. ‘He’s going to be so put out.’
‘Is he terribly possessive?’ I asked.
Claire looked confused. ‘God, no.’
I couldn’t figure out why else her husband would be put out by her having a drink after class, so I started to paint a mental picture of a selfish monster, a towering giant, who kept Claire a virtual captive in their house. Because Claire is so tall and aristocratic looking, I pictured him as very good-looking, to have captured her heart. And even that seemed glamorous – if Claire was being kept captive in a tower by an evil prince, then that was obviously this season’s trend.
And Claire seemed fascinated by my life. She made me talk about going out and clubbing and dating, which I hardly even
