Clay Girl drove only at night. The graveyard shift. Then, the roads were quiet and the DJs and musicians sat right in the car with her, laughing and joking, and she spoke to them as she drummed on the steering wheel in time to their songs. Windshield wipers shuffled away the rain like metronomes (impressionist | realist | impressionist | realist), and Clay Girl sang along, drifting lightly across lanes in her effort to hold the tune. Folk or country or rock’n’roll, medieval choral or techno: whatever the passing pirate stations threw at her, she rolled with it. Anything so long as it was music, and not ads, jingles or news. Ahead of her, light and dark ribbons twisted and shimmered in league with the sounds, and Clay Girl sat forward, one hundred per cent there as she searched out each curve in the road from the inky rain-drenched Beyond.

     At dawn, she pulled over to rest. The days were short this time of year. Six or seven hours after curling up on the back seat, she was back on the road. All week she drove, the car a hurtling musical comet trailing cats-eyes slick with rain, the red tail lights of the cars in front giving pointers to the lay of the road ahead, and yet still the City, and her mother who lived in it, remained unreachably far: last on the list of destinations, and often omitted from the road signs entirely.

     Finally, out of petrol and out of funds, Clay Girl abandoned the car. Her last coins she spent on a bus ride. Bereft without the company of the travelling audio collective, she sat up front behind the driver and slept to the white noise of his untuned radio. Later she woke in a small country town, resting against her backpack as the bus drove off without her. But this did not stop Clay Girl. She had strong legs and she liked to use them. She hoisted her backpack and started out across country.

     A bright yellow moon was rising, nearly full. Its light looked good to hold for a week. More than time to reach the City, surely? Clay Girl strode over grassy hills and wet ditches through nights longer than days. She crossed fords and footbridges over winter streams that roared and bubbled seawards, and bit by bit the distance to the City diminished.

  But one night when the moon was slow to rise, Clay Girl tripped over a dead branch and slept in the ditch where she fell. When she woke the sky was a dirty yellow. A thick white frost covered the hills, and proper snow looked sure to follow. Worse, her leg had disappeared in the frozen mud of the ditch. Clay Girl pulled and pulled but it was swallowed nearly to the knee. She grabbed a stone, tried to dig her foot out. No luck. Unto clay it had returned. Either she must leave it behind, or remain trapped here until the thaw. Clay Girl was not squeamish, she had repaired her own body parts before.

     Her limbs and head were fired clay, but her middle and joins were of raw clay, and she could raid them for repairs. She took out her pen-knife and trimmed her leg neatly at the knee. Then she lifted her top. After a spate of recent patch-ups, her middle was looking flimsy. If she took clay from here she’d have trouble carrying her backpack, so instead she knifed off most of her hair. A blue leg would look odd, but that was a fixable problem. And no one much would see her between here and the City except the cows and sheep, who already stared and often commented blatantly on her strange appearance as she hurried over the fields. This would give them something to talk about. Soon the blue clay was moulded into a ball, stretched to form a calf and a foot, and firmly attached. Now she must rest an hour, give it a chance to harden. Clay Girl wasn’t sleepy, so she opened her pocketbook, palmed the smooth grey pebble she found there and took two photos from the pile. One black and white, the other near monochrome, its colour origins apparent in a pinkish warmth to the greys.

     She studied the black and white print. Clay Girl’s mother is always the prettiest girl on the beach, on the black and white beach of flat skimmer stones, Tragumna maybe, or Castletownshend, her dark lipsticked smile so Hollywood glam that she seems way older than sweet sixteen or sweet fifteen or whatever age she had in fact been in the photo, her sister and brother beside her in swimsuit and summer school uniform, and next to them Clay Girl’s gran, her mother’s mother, fortysomething but white-haired with the years upon years that seven children and a sea-going husband have heaped upon her. This past belongs not to Clay Girl but to her mother, yet it holds echoes too of her own past, and her gran’s. All five of the Nolan girls were lovely, which of them was the loveliest is hard to say, but in this photo it is her mother, Nanette, who is the prettiest because this is a print that Nanette saved, and in it her eyes are not closed nor her face bored. When Clay Girl saves photos of her own, she makes sure her eyes are open, too.

     In her photo, Clay Girl is not sitting pretty on a sharp-focussed black and white beach but dangling inches from death on a high balcony, grey city walls out of focus behind her. She wears a smile of pure bravado, a black sawn-off teeshirt and a rough black straw hat, its crown gaping, just a huge flat brim to shade her face. Here in this hot city, Clay Girl’s hair spidered darkly from the hat’s empty centre, but on days when they drove to the sea at Sounio she would pull the hat off and send it spinning down the beach. It was a strange unrepeatable hat that made people stare, a frisbee hat that inevitably one day bowled out of her life, never to return. Just like that whole life, that whole city.

     Other photos of Clay Girl which could tell more ordinary truths have been edited out of the heap, unframed, crumpled or burned, or simply left in the card folders in which they arrived from the print shop. These paper prints are relics of a time before scrolling or deleting or online sharing, a time when the past was a physical thing, saved, lifted, handed round and gifted long after the day on which it was recorded in negative. This jukebox single of a hat scored a 45-degree diagonal across Clay Girl’s head for only a summer or two, the span of her life in a foreign city, a barely documented life which appears from the evidence to have been lived mostly under cover of darkness.

     The summers were hotter than any she’d known, and their expeditions were largely nocturnal: driving around back streets so narrow the streetlights were suspended in the middle of the road, or slung from the trees like outsize fairy lights. Convoluted journeys to collect friends that ended with dancing on a runway at Aerodromio, where the wing of a plane served as a summer bar, or at Kuckoo or Rodon, wherever people were heading that week. But besides the velvety humid night, Clay Girl also knew the blinding afternoon heat, a heat that burrowed deep in the wells and canyons of the graffitied buildings near the university, the wood shutters of their bedroom drawn against it. Some afternoons her man lay with her on the low bed at siesta, and those afternoons passed swiftly.

      Other days he was in the army, for in his country men still had to do military service so he reluctantly wore a part-time uniform, and during those long afternoons when he was gone Clay Girl would dart barefoot on to the balcony and up the metal stairs, soles burning, to the sky-touching roof, and pour water on the hard red earth in the ceramic pots, on roses struggling to survive and banana plants spawning tall feathery leaves with which to shade their future fruit.

Only after sundown, when his clients returned to the suburbs and traffic slowed to the occasional sputter of a Vespa or Lambretta, did she and her man ever spend time on the roof. Rarely, they ate up there. Three or four nights a week in summer, Alphaville open cinema showed old films in the evening and from the rooftop deckchairs they watched if they wanted, giving a wave to neighbours tuning in from their own balconies.

     The mostly black and white movies played out blurrily on a screen formed by the windowless bricks of an adjacent apartment building. Most of the films were subtitled, and though the lines of dialogue changed too fast for her to read them, Clay Girl learned this strange new alphabet by reconciling the names of the foreign stars with the heavily consonanted local versions of their names. Ζάν-Λυκ Γοντάρ was Jean-Luc Godard, Ζαν Πόλ Μπελμόντο and Τζιν Σίμπεργκ, Jean-Paul Belmondo and Jean Seberg, and Μέριλιν Μονρό, Marilyn Monroe.

     It is a period with little but worn-out clothes and broken habits to call it to mind, yet sometimes even today Clay Girl dances in and out of this heat-wavy city, treading lightly on the flat stones of forgotten beaches, which are maybe not skimming stones at all but thick black vinyl discs, still spinning. Her mother’s stones would have been The Inkspots and Dickie Rock and The Beatles. One of the car radio DJs, Sé, had jokingly posited the existence of a direct line between the girls calling out to Dickie Rock to ‘Spit on me Dickie!’ and the later habits of young punk rockers, much bemoaned at larks in the park by Siouxsie, Annie Lennox and even Joe Strummer. But it seems a little late now to prove this theory. Certainly too late to confirm whether her mother’s schoolfriends ever said such things. Clay Girl’s own stones, of course, are different to her mother’s. Unpredictable, often hard to locate.

     Her half-life in this overheated city commenced days after the explosion at Chernobyl, yet musically it falls within a time-warp era. Songs from some golden and seemingly American past would fill the apartment, or the rooftop terrace, or the old open-top car with its massive leather seats: My Boy Lollipop, The Spotnicks who had perhaps defected from Russia to Sweden, sassie Brit-girl Alma Cogan with the huge vampy voice, and who was it — Rumble-something or Rawhide? — a gang of actual American rock’n’roll boys who twanged on wooden instruments that they or their dads had built in the garage, and Peggy Lee clicking her fingers and singing Fever.

     These sounds are fading now, were fading even then, and Clay Girl knows she should have scooped her vinyl from the record collection when she travelled north, wrapped it in a beach towel and slid it carefully into her backpack, her skimming stones, because if she had them with her she could travel back inside that time whenever she wanted: feel again the dead heat of the early hours and hear the long post-midnight discussions about all that was so vitally important then, so strongly felt and lived amid the continual intoxication of sex and heat and night and day and lost sleep and uncertain movement in the triangulations and linguistic confusions of that familiar, unknowable city, which carries in its bone hills more pasts than any of its present-day citizens cares think about.

     Clay Girl’s mother’s time, too, is fading. The fades and blades more complete in her case, the cuts pretty severe in fact, the gaps wider than what remains. Sure I suppose I’m past it now, her mother would say herself, laughing, were she capable of appreciating the situation. Even now her mother laughs some days, but rarely. Once, she takes her husband for her little brother, the schoolboy in the beach photo who died out of sequence, and with immaculate childlike logic asserts that this is why they no longer share a room. Clay Girl’s mother does not laugh when she says this, and her father is a little shocked because it is over fifty years that they have been together and this is the first time his wife has not known him. A moment they knew was approaching, but which still shocks them when it comes. A glitch in the drive. Afterwards, however, the incident is normalised, even becomes a surprise entrant to the repertoire of family jokes.

     Clay Girl’s mother continues to interrogate her family about her life and continues to lose track of the answers. Where am I? Why are we here? What are we doing here? To save time, Clay Girl’s father writes their address in huge black letters on a piece of squared paper which he hangs at the end of her bed, adding in brackets the words AT HOME, because the where am I question is huge, and he knows from experience that a mere postal address does not satisfy it. There have been other homes before in different times and places, the years and addresses all run together now. When Clay Girl’s mother looks through her old green address book with the crossings-out still showing, she can trace the progress of her family from flat to house, from one country to the next. But her own address was never written in the book, never crossed out when they moved. She was meant to know it. But however often she asks where she is, the answer never seems right. Other more practical questions also need to be asked, about actions that take place daily. Have I to take some pills now? How many? What are they for? Each time Clay Girl’s mother hears the answers to these questions she converts her newfound knowledge to slightly different questions: So I take them for my memory, is it? Three of them? This conversation takes place every morning and every evening, when the pills are taken, something almost mass-like in the call and repeat of it, the certainty of the lines. Yes, you take three of them, hold on, I’ve dropped one, OK, there it is. Yes, three of them, for your memory. With a glass of water, is it, I take them?

     Once, as her mother is swallowing the third pill, by mistake, Clay Girl cries while holding on to her hand. It has become difficult, these past years, to tell who is holding on to whom. A confusion that began one day while crossing the Millennium Bridge: her mother felt dizzy and was unsure which river they were crossing, perhaps because new buildings had shuffled in between the old streets, altering the horizon. They swapped places and Clay Girl led her mother across the bridge, and now it feels as if her mother is the little girl clinging on to her, the way she once clung to her mother for a sense of direction, or to the handle of the pram on days when her mother had no hand free to give her. Her mother’s hand has shrunk so much now that it looks and feels wrong, a slack freckled claw, the wedding ring slipping, the diamond back to front and sticking into her palm, only the gold band showing, and when her mother sees Clay Girl crying she is anxious and wants to know who has upset her.

     Did he say something to upset you? Did he shout at you? she asks, without clarifying which he she is talking about, which is just as well because there is only one he on Clay Girl’s horizon presently and this is a man her mother will never meet, a complicated mess of a man far away on a horizon that never gets any closer, so it is difficult-stroke-impossible to speak of him. And Clay Girl herself can’t be sure if she is crying about her mother or about the mess on the horizon, or both. Probably both. I can’t stand to see people cry. I’ve never seen you cry like that before, her mother says, and Clay Girl assures her mother she often cried when she was little. Then she wipes her eyes on the back of her hand and takes a deep breath, because now is not the time.

     There is never a time for this stuff. Never. She gives her mother a bockety smile. Only it is too late, because Clay Girl’s mother has stepped out of the black and white photograph and has felt something. An inkling. A feeling from before, like she is actually here. Part of her is here anyway, and she speaks to Clay Girl now like a real person, not a little girl. She rubs her forehead and says in a puzzled but matter-of-fact voice, I think maybe there’s something wrong with me, is there? What is wrong with me? Is there something wrong with my head?

     Clay Girl scrubbed at her eyes to take the salty wet off her face. Her skin stung from the salt because she had not washed in days, and somehow she let go of the pebble. Immediately, she lost sight of her mother. Clay Girl stood without thinking and hunted for the pebble and when she found it again she nestled it safely in her palm, enjoying the smooth rounded feel of it. Then she slipped it back in her pocket-book and drew the ribbon tight.

     She looked down at her blue foot and realised the new leg was holding up fine. She must have been skimming awhile, or perhaps the cold had helped harden it off. Clay Girl gathered up her things, took one final look at the ditch where her foot had disappeared, and set off again, humming a song by one of her recent back seat passengers. It was close to dark when Clay Girl realised that the oscillating orange glow on the horizon was not in fact a sunset, but some more permanent fixture. A giant haze of electricity. At last. The City. Soon she would be with her mother.