The Pottery Class – Part 2: The Kiln

Day one, Ivy woke up in a flat full of pots, with rain on the window and the smell of fresh bread drifting up from the bakery below, and for a long moment she didn’t know where she was.

Then Noor rolled over beside her, warm and sleepy, and pressed her face into Ivy’s shoulder.

“Good morning,” Noor murmured. “Twenty-nine days left.”

Ivy laughed and pulled the duvet over both of their heads.

What had happened the night before belonged only to them: the creaking stairs and the shelves of glazed bowls catching the streetlight, the slow, astonished way Ivy had discovered that she wouldn’t fall apart if someone touched her. That, in fact, she had been waiting for it for a very long time.

---

They didn’t waste a single day.

Ivy, for the first time in her career, took holiday. Two whole weeks. Her boss stared at her as if she had announced she was joining a circus.

They took the train to the coast and walked along the cliffs at Seven Sisters in a howling wind. They went to every gallery in London where Noor had work, and Ivy stood in front of each piece for so long that Noor had to drag her away, embarrassed and delighted. They ate breakfast at the bakery every morning, and the baker, a large Greek man called Stavros, started saving them the last two almond croissants.

And every night, they went to the studio in Hackney.

Noor taught her properly now. Not beginners’ bowls. Real things. How to centre the clay so it ran true. How to pull the walls up thin and even. How to trim the foot of a pot on the wheel so it sat perfectly flat. How to mix a glaze from ash and stone.

“Why are you teaching me all this?” Ivy asked one night, her arms grey to the elbow.

Noor was sitting on the next wheel, watching her.

“So that when I’m gone,” she said quietly, “you still have something that’s yours.”

---

On day twenty, Ivy made a vase.

It was tall and narrow and slightly crooked, with a long, deliberate thumbprint pressed into the neck. She glazed it in deep blue-green, a colour Noor had taught her to mix, the colour of the sea off the cliffs at Seven Sisters.

When it came out of the kiln, she didn’t show it to Noor. She wrapped it in newspaper and put it in a box and hid the box under the bed in her own flat in Islington, where she had barely slept for three weeks.

---

On day twenty-eight, they had their first fight.

It was about nothing. A late text. A missed call. And then suddenly it was about everything, standing in Noor’s tiny kitchen with the rain on the window.

“You’re already gone,” Ivy said. “You’ve been gone all week. I can see you packing in your head.”

“Because I’m leaving in two days!”

“I know!” Ivy’s voice cracked. “I know you are. I said thirty days. I said we wouldn’t waste them. And I’ve been,” she stopped. “I’ve been trying to make it not hurt. And it hurts.”

Noor stood very still by the sink.

“I know,” she said. “It hurts me too.”

They looked at each other across the tiny kitchen.

“Ask me,” Ivy said. “Ask me to come.”

Noor’s face crumpled.

“I can’t,” she said. “You have a whole life here. Your work. Your flat. I can’t ask you to throw that away for a woman you met five weeks ago in a pottery class.”

“Why not?”

“Because,” Noor said, “that’s what Claire would have said you were doing. Running. Being reckless. And you’re not reckless, Ivy. That’s one of the things I love about you.”

It was the first time either of them had said the word.

Neither of them said anything else that night. They went to bed and held each other in the dark without speaking, until the rain stopped.

---

Day thirty. Heathrow, Terminal 2. Six a.m.

Noor had two suitcases and a box of tools. Ivy carried the box. They stood at the security gate among the crowds and the announcements, and neither of them knew what to say.

“I’ll call,” Noor said.

“I know.”

“Every day.”

“I know.”

Ivy put the box of tools down. Then she reached into her coat and took out a parcel, wrapped in newspaper.

“I made you something,” she said.

Noor unwrapped it. The blue-green vase. Tall, narrow, slightly crooked. The long thumbprint on the neck.

She stared at it. Her eyes filled.

“It’s wonky,” Ivy said.

“Wonky is beautiful,” Noor whispered.

“Look inside,” said Ivy.

Noor tipped the vase. Something slid out into her palm. A folded piece of paper.

It was a printout. A booking confirmation.

London Heathrow to Lisbon. One way. Departing in four weeks.

And under it, a second sheet. A letter on the headed paper of Ivy’s law firm, accepting her request for a one-year sabbatical.

Noor looked up at her, completely unable to speak.

“You didn’t ask me,” Ivy said. “So I asked myself. I’m not running away. I’m running toward something. That’s different.” She was crying now too. “Four weeks to rent out my flat. Then I’m coming. If you want me.”

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Noor kissed her in the middle of Terminal 2, with the vase in one hand and the paper in the other and three hundred strangers flowing around them.

“Yes,” she said against Ivy’s mouth. “Yes. Yes.”

“There’s one condition,” Ivy said.

“Anything.”

“You have to let me use the wheel in your studio.”

Noor laughed through her tears.

“You can have the wheel,” she said. “You can have everything.”

---

The vase sits now on a windowsill in a small studio in Alfama, in Lisbon, looking out over red roofs and the river.

Next to it, there are two more. One blue-green. One the colour of burnt honey.

Both of them are wonky.

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The End.

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