Blackberry Wine

the pile and found a sleeping bag and a pillow rolled snugly against the wall, along with a cardboard box which contained paint tins and a bundle of wax candles.

Candles? What the hell…?

He reached into his jeans pocket for a lighter. It was only a cheap Bic, and almost out of fuel, but he managed to strike a flame. The candles were dry. The wick spluttered, then flared. The room was mellowly illumined.

‘That’s something, I suppose.’

He could sleep here. The room was sheltered. There were blankets and bedclothes and the remains of that lunch-time’s sandwiches. For a moment the pain in his foot was forgotten, and he grinned at the thought that this was home. It deserved a celebration.

Rummaging through the duffel bag, he pulled out one of Joe’s bottles, and cut open the seal and the green cord with the tip of his penknife. The clear scent of elderflower filled the air. He drank a little, tasting that familiar, cloying flavour, like fruit left to rot in the dark. Definitely a vintage year, he told himself, and despite everything he began to laugh shakily. He drank a little more. In spite of the taste the wine was warming, musky; he sat down on the rolled-up bedding, took another mouthful and began to feel a little better.

He reached into his bag again and took out the radio. He turned it on, half expecting the white noise he had heard on the train all the way from Marseilles, but surprisingly the signal was clear. Not the oldies station, of course, but some kind of local French radio, a low warble of music, something he didn’t recognize. Jay laughed again, feeling suddenly light-headed.

Inside the duffel bag the four remaining Specials began their chorus again, a ferment of yahoos and catcalls and war cries, redoubling in frenzy until the pitch was wild, feverish, a vulgar champagne of sounds and impressions and voices and memories, all shaken into a delirious cocktail of triumph. It pulled me along, dragging me with it, so that, for a moment, I was no longer myself – Fleurie, a respectable vintage with just a hint of blackcurrant – but a cauldron of spices, frothing and seething and going to the head in a wild flush of heat. Something was getting ready to happen. I knew it. Then, suddenly, silence.

Jay looked around curiously. For a moment he shivered, as if a sudden breeze had touched him, a breeze from other places. The paint on the wall was fresh, he noticed; beside the box containing paint cans was a tray of paintbrushes, washed and neatly aligned. The brushes were not yet dry. The breeze was sharper now, smelling of smoke and the circus, hot sugar and apples and midsummer’s eve. The radio crackled softly.

‘Well, lad,’ said a voice from the shadows. ‘You took yer time.’ Jay turned round so fast that he almost overbalanced.

‘Steady on,’ said Joe kindly.

‘Joe?’

He had not changed. He was wearing his old cap, a Thin Lizzy T-shirt, his work trousers and pit boots. In one hand he held two wineglasses. In front of him, on the table, stood the bottle of Elderflower ’76.

‘I allus said you’d get used to it one day,’ he remarked with satisfaction. ‘Elderflower champagne. Gotta bittova kick, though, annit?’

‘Joe?’

A flare of joy went through him, so strong that it made the bottles shake. It all made sense now, he thought deliriously; it was all coming together. The signs, the memories – all for this – all finally making sense.

Then the realization slammed him back, like awakening from a dream in which everything seems on the brink of being explained, but falls away into fragments with the light.

Of course it wasn’t possible. Joe must be over eighty years old by now. That is, if he was alive at all. Joe left, he told himself fiercely, like a thief in the night, leaving nothing behind but questions.

Jay looked at the old man in the candlelight, his bright eyes and the laugh-wrinkles beneath them, and for the first time he noticed that everything about him was somehow gilded - even the toes of his pit boots – with an eerie glow, like nostalgia.

‘You’re not real, are you?’ he said.

Joe shrugged.

‘What’s real?’ he asked carelessly. ‘No such thing, lad.’

‘Real, as in the sense of really here.’

Joe watched him patiently, like a teacher with a slow pupil. Jay’s voice rose almost angrily.

‘Real, as in corporeally present. As in not a figment of my deluded wine-soaked imagination, or an early symptom of blood-poisoning or an out-of-body experience while the real me sits in a white room somewhere wearing one of those coats with no arms.’

Joe looked at him mildly.

‘So, you grew up to be a writer, then,’ he remarked. ‘Allus said you were a clever lad. Write any gooduns, did yer? Make any brass?’

‘Plenty of brass, but only one good one. Too long ago. Shit, I can’t believe I’m actually sitting here talking to myself.’

‘Only one, eh?’

Jay shivered again. The cold night wind sliced thinly through the half-open shutter, bringing with it that feverish draught of other places.

‘I must really be sick,’ said Jay softly to himself. ‘Toxic shock, or something, from that sodding trap. I’m delirious.’

Joe shook his head. ‘Tha’ll be reight, lad.’ Joe always used to slip into dialect when he was being satirical. ‘It were only a bit of a fox trap. Old feller used to live here kept hens. Foxes were allus in an out at night. He even used to mark where traps were with a bit o rag.’ Jay looked at the piece of flannel in his hand.

‘I thought…’

‘I know what yer thought.’ Joe’s eyes were bright with amusement. ‘You were allus same, jumpin in half cocked before you knew what were goin on. Allus askin questions. Allus needin to know summat an nowt.’ He held out one of the wineglasses, now filled with the yellow elderflower wine. ‘Get this down thi,’ he suggested kindly. ‘Do yer good. I’d tell yer to go out back an get yersen some bishop’s leaves, but planets are all wrong for pickin.’

Jay looked at him. For a hallucination, he seemed very real. There was garden dirt under his fingernails and in the cracks in his palms.

‘I’m sick,’ whispered Jay softly. ‘You left that summer. Never even said goodbye. You’re not here now. I know that.’

Joe shook his head. ‘Aye,’ he said kindly. ‘We’ll talk about that another time, when you’re feelin more yerself.’

‘When I’m feeling more myself, you won’t be there.’

Joe laughed and lit a cigarette. The scent was pungent in the cold air. Jay noticed, with no surprise, that it came from an old packet of Player’s Number 6.

‘Want one?’ asked Joe, handing him the packet.

For a moment the cigarette felt almost real in Jay’s hand. He took a drag, but the smoke smelt of the canal and bonfires burning. He flicked the butt against the concrete floor and watched the sparks fly. He felt slightly dizzy.

‘Why don’t you lie down for a while?’ suggested Joe. ‘There’s a sleeping bag and some blankets – pretty clean anall. You look all-out knackered.’

Jay looked doubtfully at the pile of blankets. He felt exhausted. His head ached and his foot hurt and he was beyond confusion. He knew he should be worried. But for the moment he seemed to have lost the ability to question. He lay down painfully on the makeshift bed and pulled the sleeping bag over himself. It was warm, clean, comforting. He wondered fleetingly whether this might be a hallucination brought on by hypothermia, some sick adult version of The Little Match Girl, and laughed softly to himself. The Jackapple Man. Pretty funny, hey? They’d find him in the morning with a red rag in one hand and an empty bottle of wine in the other, frozen and smiling.

‘Tha’s not goin to dee,’ said Joe in amused tones.

‘Old writers never do,’ muttered Jay. ‘They just lose their marbles.’ He laughed again, rather wildly. The candle guttered and went out, though Jay’s mind still insisted he saw the old man blow it out. Without it the room was very dark. A single bar of moonlight touched the stone floor. Outside the window a bird loosed a brief, heartrending