The Pottery Class – Part 1: Wet Clay

“You’re strangling it,” said the woman at the next wheel.

Ivy Chen looked down at the lump of grey clay spinning in front of her. It was, in fairness, not going well. It had started the evening as a ball. It was now something closer to a crime scene.

“It’s fighting me,” Ivy said.

“It’s not fighting you. You’re fighting it.” The woman stood up from her own wheel, wiped her hands on a stained canvas apron, and came over. “May I?”

Ivy hesitated. Then nodded.

The woman knelt beside her stool. She had dark curly hair tied up in a scarf, silver rings on every finger, and a small gold stud in her nose. She smelled of clay and oranges.

“Hands wet,” she said. “Elbows on your knees. Like this.” She placed her own hands over Ivy’s on the spinning clay. “Now. Don’t push. Just let it come up between your fingers. Slowly.”

Ivy felt the clay move. Felt it rise. Felt, much more strongly, the warmth of the stranger’s hands over hers, and the brush of her arm, and her breath, very close, on Ivy’s neck.

The clay rose into a small, wobbling cylinder.

“There,” the woman said softly. “You see? It just wanted you to stop trying so hard.”

---

Her name was Noor. She was the assistant teacher, a ceramic artist with work in galleries in London and Marrakech. She came to the Thursday night class at the studio in Hackney to help beginners, she said, because she liked watching people find out they could make things.

Ivy had signed up for eight weeks because her therapist told her to find a hobby that wasn’t work.

She had been dumped in January. By text. After four years. Her ex, Claire, had said Ivy was so busy being a lawyer that she forgot how to be a person. Ivy had spent February proving her right by working ninety hours a week.

The pottery class was supposed to fix that.

“How is it going?” her therapist asked in week three.

“I’m terrible at it,” Ivy said.

“And?”

“And it’s the only two hours of the week I don’t check my phone.”

She didn’t mention Noor. She didn’t mention that she thought about Noor’s hands on the spinning clay for most of the other one hundred and sixty-six hours.

---

By week four, Ivy could make a bowl.

A small, uneven bowl, slightly lopsided, with a thumbprint pressed into the rim by accident. She held it up when it came out of the kiln as if it were a trophy.

Noor laughed. “It’s beautiful.”

“It’s wonky.”

“Wonky is beautiful,” Noor said. “Perfect things are boring. Anyone can buy perfect.”

The other students had left. It was just the two of them in the studio, the big windows dark, rain on the skylight, the kiln ticking as it cooled. Noor was cleaning brushes at the sink. Ivy was standing beside her with the bowl, not leaving.

“Can I ask you something?” Ivy said.

“Of course.”

“Do you do this with all the beginners? The,” she gestured vaguely, “the hands.”

Noor turned off the tap. She was quiet for a moment.

“No,” she said. “Only you.”

Ivy’s heart did something very complicated.

“Why?”

Noor dried her hands slowly on her apron. Then she looked at Ivy, directly, with dark eyes that were suddenly very serious.

“Because the first night you came in,” she said, “you were holding yourself like you were afraid you’d fall apart if anyone touched you. And I wanted to show you that you wouldn’t.”

---

They went for a drink after class. Then another. The pub on the corner was warm and loud and full of artists, and they sat in a corner booth and talked until the bell rang for last orders.

Noor talked about her mother, who had been a potter in Fez. About learning to throw at six years old, standing on a crate to reach the wheel. About moving to London at nineteen with one suitcase and a box of tools.

Ivy talked about law school. About Claire. About how she had forgotten, somewhere in the last ten years, what she actually liked.

“You like clay,” Noor said.

“I like clay,” Ivy agreed, surprised.

“And?”

Ivy looked at her across the sticky pub table. At the silver rings and the scarf and the smudge of grey clay she had missed on her jaw.

“And,” Ivy said, “I like the teacher.”

Noor didn’t say anything. She reached across the table and wiped the clay off her own jaw with her thumb, slowly, never taking her eyes off Ivy.

“Walk me home,” she said.

---

Noor’s flat was above a bakery on a narrow street, up three flights of creaking stairs. It was full of pots. On the shelves, on the floor, on the windowsills. Bowls and jugs and vases in every colour, glazes like sea water and burnt honey and midnight.

At the door, Noor turned to her.

“I want to kiss you,” she said. “But I need to tell you something first.”

Ivy’s stomach dropped. “Okay.”

Noor took a breath.

“I leave for Lisbon in thirty days,” she said. “A residency. A year. It’s been planned since before I met you. I should have said something weeks ago.”

The hallway was very quiet. Somewhere downstairs, the bakery ovens hummed.

Ivy thought about Claire. About four careful years. About every safe, sensible decision she had made her whole life.

She thought about clay rising between her fingers.

“Thirty days,” she said.

“Thirty days.”

“Then,” said Ivy, and stepped closer, “we shouldn’t waste any of them.”

She kissed Noor first.

---

Next: Part 2, The Kiln. Thirty days, one wonky bowl, and a decision at the airport.