Blackberry Wine

weather fights; a school play, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, with all the parts played by boys, as in Shakespeare’s time. Jay played Puck, much to the chagrin of the Bread Baron, but all the time he was thinking of Joe and Pog Hill, and as the end of the summer term approached, he grew jumpy and irritable and impatient. This year his mother had decided to join him in Kirby Monckton for a few weeks, ostensibly to spend more time with her son, but in reality to escape the media attention following her most recent amorous break-up. Jay wasn’t looking forward to being the focus of her sudden maternal interest, and said so clearly enough to provoke an outburst of outraged histrionics. He was in disgrace before the holidays had even started.

They arrived in late June, by taxi, in the rain. Jay’s mother was doing her Mater Dolorosa act, and he was trying to listen to the radio as she passed between long, soulful silences and girlish exclamations on seeing forgotten landmarks.

‘Jay, darling, look! That little church – isn’t it just the sweetest?’ He put it down to her being in so many sitcoms, but maybe she had always talked like that. Jay turned the radio up a fraction. The Eagles were playing ‘Hotel California’. She gave him one of her pained looks and thinned her mouth. Jay ignored her.

The rain came down non-stop for the first week of the holiday. Jay stayed in the house and watched it and listened to the radio, trying to tell himself it couldn’t last for ever. The sky was white and portentous. Looking up into the clouds, the falling raindrops looked like soot. His grandparents fussed over both of them, treating his mother like the little girl she had been, cooking all her favourite meals. For five days they lived on apple pie, ice cream, fried fish and scollops. On the sixth day Jay took his bike down to Pog Hill, in spite of the weather, but Joe’s door was locked and there was no answer to his knocking. Jay left his bike by the back wall and climbed over into the garden, hoping to look in through the windows.

The windows were boarded up.

Panic washed over him. He hammered on one of the sealed windows with his fist.

‘Hey, Joe? Joe?’

There was no answer. He hammered again, calling Joe’s name. A piece of red flannel, bleached by the elements, was nailed to the window frame, but it looked old, finished, last year’s magic. Behind the house a screen of tall weeds – hemlock and wormwood and rosebay willowherb – hid the abandoned allotment.

Jay sat down on the wall, regardless of the rain which glued his T-shirt to his skin and dripped from his hair into his eyes. He felt completely numb. How could Joe have gone, he asked himself stupidly. Why hadn’t he said something? Written a note, even? How could Joe have gone without him?

‘Don’t take on, lad,’ called a voice behind him. ‘It’s not as bad as it looks.’

Jay whipped round so fast he almost fell off the wall. Joe was standing some twenty feet behind him, almost hidden from sight behind the tall weeds. He was wearing a yellow sou’wester on top of his pit cap. He had a spade in one hand.

‘Joe?’

The old man grinned.

‘Aye. What d’you think, then?’

Jay was beyond words.

‘It’s me permanent solution,’ explained Joe, looking pleased. ‘They’ve cut off me lectrics, but I’ve wired mesself up to bypass the meter, so I can still use em. I’ve bin diggin a well round back so I can do waterin. Come over and tell me what you think.’

As always, Joe behaved as if no time had passed, as if Jay had never been away. He parted the weeds which separated them and motioned the boy to follow him through. Beyond, the allotment was as ordered as it had always been, with lemonade bottles sheltering small plants, old windows arranged to make cold frames, and tyres stacked up for potato-planters. From a distance the whole thing might just have been the accumulated detritus of years, but come a little closer and everything was there, just as before. On the railway banking, fruit trees – some shielded with sheets of plastic – dripped rain. It was the best camouflage job Jay had ever seen.

‘It’s amazing,’ he said at last. ‘I really thought you’d gone.’

Joe looked pleased.

‘You’re not the only one that thinks that, lad,’ he said mysteriously. ‘Look down there.’

Jay looked down into the cutting. The signal box which had been Joe’s greenhouse was still standing, though in a State of dereliction; vines grew out of the punctured roof and tumbled down the peeling sides. The lines had been taken up and the sleepers dug out – all but the fifty-yard stretch between the box and Joe’s house, as if overlooked by some accident. Between the rust-red tracks weeds were sprouting.

‘Come next year no-one’ll even remember there were a railway down Pog Hill. Praps people’ll let us alone then.’

Jay nodded slowly, still speechless with amazement and relief.

‘Perhaps they will.’

19

Lansquenet, March 1999

THE AIR SMELT OF NIGHTFALL, BITTER-SMOKY, LIKE LAPSANG TEA, mild enough to sleep outside. The vineyard on the left was filled with noises: birds, frogs, insects. Jay could still see the path at his feet, faintly silvered with the last of the sunset, but the sun had left the face of the house and it was lightless, almost forbidding. He began to wonder whether he should have postponed his visit till the morning.

The thought of the long walk to the village dissuaded him. He was wearing boots, which had seemed like a good enough idea when he left London, but which now, after so many hours of travelling, had grown tight and uncomfortable. If he could only get into the house – from what he’d seen of security that wouldn’t be difficult – he could sleep there and make his way to the village in daylight.

It wasn’t as if he were trespassing, really. After all, the house was nearly his. He reached the vegetable patch. Something on the side of the house – a shutter, perhaps – was flapping rhythmically against the plaster, making a nagging, mournful sound. On the far side of the building shadows moved under the trees, creating the illusion of a man standing there, a bent figure in cap and overcoat. Something whipped across his path with a snapping noise – a prickly artichoke stem, still topped with last year’s flower, now desiccated almost to nothing. Beyond it, the overgrown remnants of the vegetable patch swayed briskly in the freshening wind. Halfway across the abandoned garden something fluttered, as if snagged on a stiff piece of briar. A scrap of cloth. From where Jay was standing he could see nothing more, but he knew immediately what it was. Flannel. Red. Dropping his bag by the side of the path he strode into the drift of weeds which had been the vegetable garden, pushing aside the long stems as he passed. It was a sign. It had to be.

Just as he stepped forward to take hold of the piece of flannel something crunched briefly under his left foot and gave way with an angry clatter of metal, punching through the soft leather of his boot and into his ankle. Jay’s feet gave way, tipping him backwards into the greenery, and the pain, bad enough at first, bloomed sickeningly. Swearing, he grabbed at the object in the dim light, and his fingers encountered something jagged and metallic attached to his foot.

A trap, he thought, bewildered. Some sort of trap.

It hurt to think straight, and for precious seconds Jay yanked mindlessly at the object as it bit deeper through his boot. His fingers felt slick on the metal, and he realized he was bleeding. He began to panic.

With an effort he forced himself to stop moving. If it was a trap, then it would have to be forced open. Paranoid to imagine someone had set it deliberately. It must have been someone trying to catch rabbits, perhaps, or foxes, or something.

For a moment anger dulled the pain. The irresponsibility, the criminal carelessness of placing animal traps so close to someone’s house – to his house. Jay fumbled with the trap. It felt ancient, primitive. It was a clam-shell design, fixed into the ground by a metal peg. There was a catch at the side. Jay cursed and struggled with the mechanism, feeling the teeth of the trap crunching deeper into his ankle with every move he made. Finally he managed the catch, but it took several tries to push open the metal jaws, and when he finally got it clear he pulled himself back, awkwardly, and tried to assess the damage. His foot had already swollen