The kiln opens tomorrow

You left the studio key in the letterbox, inside an envelope, with no note. I found it four days later because I hardly ever open that box.

I am writing this to nobody, which is a different thing from writing it to you.

We shared the space for two years and three months. You paid a third because you used a third: the right-hand wheel, two drying shelves and the top shelf of the glaze cupboard, which was the only one you could reach without the steps.

The routine was Tuesday and Thursday evenings and all day Saturday. You arrived after me and you left after me, every time, including the days I stayed late.

We listened to the radio because neither of us was ever willing to decide what got played, and the radio settles that at the cost of hearing a mattress advert twice an hour.

In two years we had three serious arguments, all of them about glaze, none of them about anything else.

The kiln is electric, seventy litres, and it lives in the back room because it draws thirty amps and the wiring in there is from 1990.

A high firing climbs to 1250 degrees over eight and a half hours, with a twenty-minute soak at the top. Then it switches itself off.

And then comes the part nobody outside the trade understands: the cooling takes twelve hours and cannot be hurried. Opening it hot is thermal shock. Thermal shock cracks everything inside, including the pieces that were perfect, and the crack shows up three days later, once you have decided you got away with it.

So the rule is simple and it is absolute. Loaded and switched on, the kiln opens tomorrow.

You found that unbearable. You used to say pottery is the only craft where a person makes the thing and is then obliged to go away and come back the next day to find out whether it worked.

I used to say that is exactly why it teaches you something.

Neither of us was discussing pottery.

The firing on the eleventh of August was the biggest we ever did together.

You had seventeen pieces for the September fair, I had nine, and a seventy-litre kiln does not hold twenty-six pieces unless two people agree about every centimetre of shelf.

Loading a kiln with somebody is a three-hour negotiation. A glazed piece cannot touch anything, because glaze melts and sticks. Each one goes on three stilts, and the stilts leave three marks underneath that you grind off afterwards. The shelves sit on props, and the height of the props decides how many layers fit.

You wanted your big bowl, the thirty-two centimetre one, on the bottom layer. I said the glaze runs more down there, because the bottom element is the oldest one in the kiln.

You insisted. I gave way, and I did not give way because you convinced me.

I switched it on at ten past nine on a Tuesday night.

The studio has an industrial sink, a polished concrete floor we squeegeed every Friday, and a two-seater sofa that came out of my mother's house in 2019 and that neither of us ever admitted was comfortable.

At ten past nine the kiln was on and there was nothing left to do in the studio. Nothing. Clay wrapped, wheel washed, glazes shut.

You did not go home and I did not ask you to.

We stayed because of the kiln, which is the reason we gave, and the kiln was in the back room making the low noise an element makes, and the back room is seven metres from the sofa.

There was dry clay on your forearm up to the elbow, the way it goes on anyone who has been centring all afternoon, and it comes off in sheets when it gets wet.

I know that because it got wet.

A polished concrete floor is cold all year round, and we found out that night that this stops being a problem after a while.

At half six in the morning the kiln read 340 degrees and there were five hours to go.

You drank your coffee standing up against the sink, with your shirt inside out, and said you were going home to change and would be back at midday for the opening.

You did not come back at midday. You did not come back on the Thursday. You sent a message on the Saturday saying you had accepted something down the coast that had been on the table since June and that you had never once mentioned.

I replied that it was all fine, because that is what you reply.

The key arrived in the letterbox the following week.

I opened the kiln on my own on the Wednesday, ten past twelve, with twenty-six pieces inside and seventeen of them yours.

They all came out. Not a crack, not a blowout, which is rare in a full load and is the only thing that week that went the way it was supposed to.

Your seventeen went to the September fair in a taxi, wrapped in newspaper by me, and you sold fourteen, and the transfer landed in my account with your share already taken out.

The big bowl, the thirty-two, stayed.

The glaze ran on the bottom layer exactly the way I said it would run, and it pooled into about two centimetres of glass down one side, where it touched a stilt and fused to it. It is on the top shelf of the glaze cupboard, which is the one I can reach without the steps.