A Bowl With One Good Side

I went into the pottery studio to get out of the rain and stayed because somebody called me Martin.

“You’re late,” said the woman at the door. She had clay to both elbows and a pencil through her hair.

“I’m also not Martin.”

She looked past me at the wet street, then at the empty wheel beside the window. “Can you follow instructions better than Martin?”

“We’ve never been formally compared.”

Her name was Nisha. Martin had telephoned to say that his kitchen ceiling was dripping into a fruit bowl, which left a paid place in the beginners’ evening and apparently made identity negotiable. I hung my jacket on a peg, rolled my sleeves and accepted an apron printed with LITTLE FINGERS, BIG IDEAS. It ended some distance above my knees.

There were five other people around the wheels. Jo had been coming for a year and still called herself a beginner because, she said, the clay continued to produce evidence. Ewan was making two matching cups for his parents. They had already ceased to match. A woman named Safiya had brought her sister, who was celebrating a divorce by making an ashtray despite not smoking.

Nisha put a grey lump in front of me.

“First, centre it.”

I started the wheel. The clay went round obediently enough, so I placed both hands against it and tried to persuade its highest point towards the middle. It responded by developing a shoulder.

“Less persuasion,” Nisha said.

“It has taken a position.”

“So have your elbows. Brace them.”

She showed me where to steady my forearms against my thighs and how little water was needed. Up close she caught the black tea and cardamom of my fragrance beneath the wetter mineral smell of the room.

“You smell much more competent than that bowl,” she said.

“It’s a recent advantage.”

With her hands guiding the position of mine, the lump rose into something cylindrical. When she stepped away, I became ambitious. I pressed my thumbs into the centre, drew the walls upwards and watched a bowl appear. It was low, broad and almost round.

Then I looked at Safiya’s ashtray.

My left hand shifted. The bowl opened on one side like a mouth beginning a rude remark.

Jo glanced over. “It’s got character.”

“It had symmetry.”

“Briefly. Don’t hold that against it.”

I slowed the wheel. The distortion travelled around in a measured procession: good side, doubtful side, collapse, recovery. I wanted to push it straight at the next rotation. Nisha stopped my hand before I converted one bad side into four.

“The kiln won’t tidy it up,” she said. “Firing makes choices permanent.”

Behind us stood shelves of dried work waiting for the kiln. Clay begins as a mixture whose particles can slide while water sits between them. Firing changes that. Above roughly nine hundred degrees Celsius, the particles begin bonding through sintering; at higher stoneware temperatures, usually around a thousand to thirteen hundred degrees, the body becomes denser and far less porous as vitrification develops. Glaze adds its own thin glass-like layer. Heat can make a vessel strong. It cannot make the potter less distracted.

“So this is the last forgiving stage,” I said.

“Not quite. You can keep it, change it or reclaim the clay.”

“Which would you do?”

“I’m not making your bowl.”

This was annoyingly sound.

At the next table, Ewan lifted one cup to compare it with the other. Its base remained on the wheel. He looked from the detached wall in his hands to the ring of clay below.

“Handleless,” Jo said.

“Bottomless,” Safiya corrected.

Ewan began laughing. The rest of us joined in, including Nisha, who made him put the ruined clay in the reclaim bucket before the laughter encouraged further engineering.

My bowl waited. On the good side, the rim made a clean shallow curve. Opposite, it dipped beneath the mark of my thumb. I could see the instant I had looked away. I took a wooden rib and, more carefully this time, compressed the base. Then I left the rim alone.

The rain hammered briefly on the skylight. The lights flickered and the wheels coasted to a stop. Six people froze with wet hands around unfinished objects. Nobody moved until Nisha said, “Hands off.”

We obeyed with the seriousness of a surgical team.

Emergency lights came on above the door. In the half-dark, the studio became all outlines and pale hands. Nisha found a torch. Jo opened a tin of biscuits she had brought and passed it around while we waited for the electricity to decide whether it believed in us.

Safiya’s sister held up her ashtray. “Can this be a soap dish if I change my mind?”

“Most ashtrays are just bowls with pessimistic publicity,” I said.

“That isn’t a yes.”

Nisha shone the torch at me. “He’s learning.”

The power returned after seven minutes. The wheels gave a small collective twitch. We finished slowly, each of us suspicious of sudden confidence.

Nisha cut my bowl from the wheel with a wire and set it on a board. It looked steadier when it was not moving. I wrote CORRAN into the base with a wooden point. The letters leaned uphill towards the bad side.

“Three weeks,” she said. “It has to dry, then we bisque-fire, glaze and fire again. Choose a colour.”

I chose a dark green from the test tiles. She wrote it beside my name and drew a star next to the word HOLD.

“In case I’m late?”

“In case you’re Martin.”

I washed my hands in a bucket before using the sink, wiped the table and found clay on my shirt, my jeans and one eyebrow. The apron was immaculate. I left it on its hook as evidence of a more skilful person.

Outside, the rain had softened. Through the window I could see my bowl among the others: one good side turned towards the room, the thumbprint hidden for now.

I walked away smelling of wet pavement, clay, black tea and cardamom, with nothing to carry and a collection date written in my notebook. Halfway down the street I checked my eyebrow in a dark shop window.

The clay had the better side.