Imogen and Clara arrived early; they had a lot to do. Despite it being Saturday, the best friends were planning on spending the whole day at school and had obtained special permission to use the art studio for the day. The girls were sixth formers, 18 years old and in their last months at the school. They were working on the final practical items for their art 'A' level exams and both were keen to use the normally non-productive weekend for practical benefit.
The girls were prefects, members of the trusted band of pupils sanctioned to operate and administer the school's arcane set of rules. Their status had helped them to persuade Miss Goodrich, the school's art teacher to grant them the favoured access. She had given them the keys and alarm code to the building that contained the school's art studio as well as the home economics classroom and a changing room for the school's squash and tennis courts. The building sat in a secluded corner of the school grounds separate from the school's main building across the sports fields.
Prefects they might have been, but on this day neither girl was dressed in anything remotely close to the school's regulation grey and blue uniform. Blonde Imogen was wearing a pale blue sleeveless summer dress and yellow plimsolls. She was hoping to finish a large and complicated collage formed from hundreds of pieces cut from photographs that she had taken. Redhead Clara was intending to throw a series of pots that she had been planning for a week and had dressed practically for working with clay; she wore paint spattered tennis shoes, a pair of faded blue denim shorts and a white cotton tee-shirt.
Once in the studio, the girls began work. Imogen collected the part finished collage from the store room and her boxes of photograph pieces, all sorted by colour. Clara collected together all of the tools and materials that she needed to make her pots. For the next couple of hours, the pair concentrated on their work, talking little, with just the snipping of Imogen's scissors and the occasional whirring of Clara's potter's wheel to disturb the silence.
Clara had completed four of the dozen pots that she had planned -- each one an evolutionary progression of the previous, growing in size and becoming more elaborate in the shape, ornamentation and decorative details. For the next group she needed a batch of fresh clay from the store room.
"I'm just going to get some more clay from the store, this stuff's beginning to dry out and is becoming unworkable." said Clara.
"Okay." replied Imogen. "Put some coffee on will you when you go by the kitchen. This is not progressing quite as quickly as I hoped. 'Goody' keeps some decent coffee in the red jar. There's a cafeteria in the cupboard by the microwave."
Cafeteria set-up and kettle heating, Clara headed for the art store room. She removed the lid from the small, green, plastic dustbin under the workbench in which the clay was stored and took out the material she needed in two grey lumps. That was when she realised that there was not enough fresh clay left in the bin to make all of the pots.
"Damn, I'm going to have to make up a new batch." she muttered to herself crossly. "I should've checked yesterday that there was enough."
Next to the green bin, there was a much larger blue plastic barrel that came up to her waist. In this was a grey slurry, a mass of sludgy, scrap clay that was mixed with water to reconstitute it ready for reprocessing into usable clay. Clara took a small bucket and dipped it into the barrel several times. Each time, she poured the quantity of the sludge into a fine mesh sieve so that some of the water could drain away back into the barrel leaving a layer of strained clay mush behind on top of the mesh. She dumped this into a second, larger bucket and, when that was full, transferred the contents into the hopper on top of the pug mill. When turned on, the mill squeezed the remaining excess liquid out of the clay, churned it and extruded it from the end as a thick grey sausage of firm, ready-to-use clay.
Clara had the two lumps of clay and two sausages, each about 300 mm long, which, together, was enough for the next four pots, but she decided that she might as well process enough clay for all of the rest in her set as well. As she leaned forward to dip the bucket into the sludge again she heard a plop. Something had fallen into the clay barrel. Puzzled, Clara looked around to see what had caused the sound. All of the tools were in their places on the shelf above the barrel, so she had not knocked one of those into the slurry. Then she realised that the rose-shaped silver pendant that she had been wearing around her neck was gone, chain and all.
Clara realised that it had to have fallen into the barrel. Hoping that it might not have sunk far into the mess, she quickly dragged the small bucket across the surface of the barrel scooping-up the top layer of the sludge. She put the bucket down on the floor and ran her fingers through the sludge. There was no pendant.
Concluding that the pendant must have been too heavy for the sludge and it was likely to be at the bottom of the barrel. She could not leave it there and the barrel was too full to scoop out the whole of its contents one bucket at a time. The barrel was also too tall for Clara to be able to reach the bottom. She needed something to extend her reach. Clara surveyed the collection of tools on the shelf and found one that seemed ideal. She did not know what its true purpose was, but it had a small shallow basket on one end formed from woven, twisted wire. She could use this to scoop the chain and pendant.
Fingers covered in clay, Clara grabbed the tool and pushed it into the clay pushing her hand in up to the wrist. The barrel was too deep. Clara pushed her arm further below the surface. The clay's wet slippery-sticky grip crept further up her arm; past her elbow. Finally, with the plastic edge of the barrel digging painfully into her armpit and the clay almost up to her shoulder, Clara was just about able to feel the bottom of the barrel with the end of the basket tool. She dragged the tool across the base of the barrel. Nothing. Two more attempts yielded the same result. Clara's armpit was sore, so she pulled it out from the clay with a sucking noise. The wet grey clay clung to her arm and hand in a thick layer. Clara turned her hand and flexed her fingers examining her hand. It looks like the arm of a newly made statute she thought to herself. It felt quite nice, clinging wet and cool to her skin, but that was not going to find her pendant, so she used her other hand to scrape most of the clay back into the barrel, leaving her arm streaked grey with the residue Clara swapped the tool to her other hand and plunged that into the clay as well. Again she stirred the clay around with the basket-tipped tool, but still without success.
Clara was pulling her arm out of the barrel again when Imogen walked into the room distractedly picking a scarp of photograph off of the front of her dress.
"Is the coffee ready yet? I need a caffeine boost." She asked. Then she looked up and saw what her friend was doing. "Oh My Lord! What in heaven's name are you doing?" Imogen exclaimed when she saw Clara's sad expression and clay covered arms.
"I've lost my pendant in the clay barrel. The one my gran gave me for my birthday. I though I could find it and scoop it out with this thing," Clara held up the tool, which, covered in clay, was unrecognisable. "I must get it out. Mum will kill me if I lose it and gran will be devastated."
"Okay" said Imogen. "You know it's in the barrel, so all we've got to do is empty the clay out and go through it bit by bit."
"No shit Sherlock!" Clara replied impatiently, frustrated by Imogen stating the obvious. "But what are we going to do with all of the clay and water? I can't just dump it on the floor and the water will just spill everywhere and be impossible to clean up."
"See that floor grating over there?"
"Yeah"
"We can pour some of the water down that. We won't need to clean-up too much and I think I know what we can do with the clay as well."
"What? We can't pour that away like water. It's far too thick for one thing and too wasteful for another. iGoody will notice if half of the clay just suddenly vanishes between Friday and Monday."
"Don't worry. I have an idea. After the builders finished fixing the roof last month, they re-plastered the ceiling in the changing rooms and they left some things behind including a large plastic trough that they used to mix up the plaster. It's like a shallow bath, so it will take most of what's in that barrel. Goody put it in the other store cupboard expecting them to return for it, but they told her that the school can keep it. She said the other day that she's going to use it for mixing up a load of papier-mâché for an art project on masks that she is planning to do with the year sevens. You move the barrel over to the grating and I'll go get the trough."
"Okay. Get a couple of tea towels from the Home Ec. room as well. This could be messy."
