Jay had to admit that it worked. But it was just herbs, wasn’t it? Herbs and bits of stick tied into a piece of cloth. And yet it had made him…
Joe grinned.
‘Nah, lad. Not invisible.’ He pushed the bill of his cap up from his eyes.
‘What then?’
Joe looked at him. ‘Some plants have properties, don’t they?’ he said.
Jay nodded.
‘Aspirin. Digitalis. Quinine. What woulda been called magic in the old days.’
‘Medicines.’
‘If you like. But a few hundred years ago there were no difference between magic and medicine. People just knew things. Believed things. Like chewin cloves to cure toothache, or pennyroyal for a sore throat, or rowan twigs to keep away evil spirits.’ He glanced at the boy, as if to check for any sign of mockery. ‘Properties,’ he repeated. ‘You can learn a lot if you travel enough, an you keep an open mind.’
Jay was never certain later whether Joe was a true believer or whether his casual acceptance of magic was part of an elaborate plan to baffle him. Certainly the old man liked a joke. Jay’s total ignorance of anything to do with gardening amused him, and for weeks he had the boy believing that a harmless stand of lemongrass was really a spaghetti tree – showing him the pale soft shoots of ‘spaghetti’ between the papery leaves – or that giant hogweeds could pull out their roots and walk, like triffids, or that you really could catch mice with valerian. Jay was gullible, and Joe delighted in finding new ways to catch him out. But in some things he was genuine. Maybe he had finally come to believe in his own fiction, after years of persuading others. His life was dominated by small rituals and superstitions, many taken from the battered copy of Culpeper’s Herbal he kept by his bedside. He tickled tomatoes to make them grow. He played the radio constantly, claiming that the plants grew stronger with music. They preferred Radio 1 – he claimed leeks grew up to two inches bigger after Ed Stewart’s Junior Choice - and Joe would be there, singing along to ‘Disco Queen’ or ‘Stand By Your Man’ as he worked, his old-crooner’s voice rising solemnly above the redcurrant bushes as he picked and pruned. He always planted when there was a new moon and picked when the moon was full. He had a lunar chart in his greenhouse, each day marked in a dozen different inks: brown for potatoes, yellow for parsnips, orange for carrots. Watering, too, was done to an astrological schedule, as was the pruning and positioning of trees. And the funny thing was that the garden thrived on this eccentric treatment, growing strong, luxuriant rows of cabbages and turnips, carrots which were sweet and succulent and mysteriously free of slugs, trees whose branches fairly touched the ground under the weight of apples, pears, plums, cherries. Brightly coloured Oriental-looking signs Sellotaped to tree branches supposedly kept the birds from eating the fruit. Astrological symbols, painstakingly set into the gravel path and constructed from pieces of broken pottery and coloured glass, lined the garden beds. With Joe, Chinese medicine rubbed shoulders companionably with English folklore, chemistry with mysticism. For all Jay knew he may have believed it. Certainly, Jay believed him. At thirteen anything is possible. Everyday magic, that was what Joe called it. Layman’s alchemy. No fuss, no fireworks. Just a mixture of herbs and roots, gathered under favourable planetary conditions. A muttered incantation, a sketched air symbol learned from gypsies on his travels. Perhaps Jay would not have accepted anything less prosaic. But in spite of his beliefs – maybe even because of them – there was something deeply restful about Joe, an inner calm which encircled him and which filled the boy with curiosity and a kind of envy. He seemed so tranquil, alone in his little house, surrounded by plants, and yet he had a remarkable sense of wonder and a gleeful fascination with the world. He was almost without education, having left school at twelve to go down the mines, but he was an endless source of information, anecdotes and folklore. As the summer passed, Jay found himself going to see Joe more and more often. He never asked questions, but allowed Jay to talk to him as he worked in his garden or his unofficial allotment on the railway bank, occasionally nodding to show that he’d heard, that he was listening. They snacked on slabs of fruit cake and thick bacon and egg sandwiches – no Trimble loaves for Joe – and drank mugs of strong, sweet tea. From time to time Jay brought cigarettes and sweets or magazines, and Joe accepted these gifts without especial gratitude and without surprise, as he did the boy’s presence. As his shyness abated Jay even read him some of his stories, to which he listened in solemn and, he thought, appreciative silence. When Jay didn’t want to talk he would tell the boy about himself, about his work in the mines and how he went to France during the war and was stationed in Dieppe for six months before a grenade blew two fingers off his hand – wiggling the reduced limb like an agile starfish – then how, being unfit for service, it was the mines again for six years before he took off for America on a freighter.
‘Cause you don’t get to see much of the world from underground, lad, and I allus wanted to see what else there was. Have you done much travellin?’
Jay told him he had been to Florida twice with his parents, to the south of France, to Tenerife and the Algarve for holidays. Joe dismissed these with a sniff.
‘I mean proper travellin, lad. Not all that tourist-brochure rubbish, but the real thing. The Pont-Neuf in the early morning, when there’s no-one up but the tramps coming out from under the bridges and out of the Metro, and the sun shinin on the water. New York. Central Park in spring. Rome. Ascension Island. Crossin the Italian alps by donkey. The vegetable caique from Crete. Himalayas on foot. Eatin rice off leaves in the Temple of Ganesh. Caught in a squall off the coast of New Guinea. Spring in Moscow and a whole winter of dogshit comin out under the meltin snow.’ His eyes were gleaming. ‘I’ve seen all of those things, lad,’ he said softly. ‘And more besides. I promised mesself I’d see everything.’
Jay believed him. He had his maps on the walls, carefully annotated in his crabby handwriting and marked with coloured pins to show the places he had been. He told stories of brothels in Tokyo and shrines in Thailand, birds of paradise and banyan trees and standing stones at the end of the world. In the big converted spice cupboard next to his bed there were millions of seeds, painstakingly wrapped in squares of newspaper and labelled in his small careful script: tuberosa rubra maritima, tuberosa panax odarata, thousands and thousands of potatoes in their small compartments and, with them, carrots, squash, tomatoes, artichokes, leeks – over 300 species of onion alone – sages, thymes, sweet bergamots and a bewildering treasure store of medicinal herbs and vegetables collected on his travels, every one named and packaged and ready for planting. Some of these plants were already extinct in the wild, Joe said, their properties forgotten by everyone but a handful of experts. Of the millions of varieties of fruit and vegetables once grown, only a few dozen were still commonly used.
‘It’s your intensive farming does it,’ he would say, leaning on his spade for long enough to take a mouthful of tea from his mug. ‘Too much specialization kills off variety. Sides, people don’t want variety. They want everythin to look the same. Round red tomatoes, and never mind there’s a long yeller un that’d taste a mile better if they gave it a try. Red uns look better on shelves.’ He waved an arm vaguely over the allotment, indicating the neat rows of vegetables rising up the railway embankment, the home-made cold frames in the derelict signal box, the fruit trees pegged out against the wall. ‘There’s things growin here that you wouldn’t find anywhere else in the whole of England,’ he said in a low voice, ‘and there’s seeds in that chest of mine that you might not find anywhere else in the whole world.’ Jay listened to him in awe. He’d never been interested in plants before. He could hardly tell the difference between a Granny Smith and a Red Delicious. He knew potatoes, of course, but Joe’s talk of blue jackapples and pink fir apples was beyond any experience of his. The thought that there were secrets, that arcane, forgotten things might be growing right there on the railway embankment with only an old man as their custodian fired Jay with an enthusiasm he had never imagined. Part of it was Joe, of course. His stories. His memories. The energy of the man himself. He began to see in Joe something he had never seen in anyone else. A vocation. A sense of purpose.
‘Why did you come back, Joe?’ he asked him one day. ‘After all that travelling, why come back here?’
Joe peered out gravely from under the bill of his miner’s cap.
‘It’s part of me plan, lad,’ he said. ‘I’ll not be here for ever. Some day I’ll be off again. Some day soon.’
‘Where?’
‘I’ll show you.’
He reached into his workshirt and pulled out a battered leather wallet. Opening it, he unfolded a photograph clipped from a colour magazine, taking great care not to tear the whitened creases. It was a picture of a house.
‘What’s that?’ Jay squinted at the picture. It looked ordinary enough, a big house built of faded pinkish stone, a long strip of land in front, with some kind of vegetation growing in ordered rows. Joe smoothed out the paper.
