Blackberry Wine

There was no point in being on bad terms with his only close neighbour. He kindled a fire in the grate and lit the oil lamp – one of the day’s purchases – and placed it on the table. He had bought a sleeping bag of his own, and some pillows, as well as a folding camp bed, and with these he managed to make a comfortable enough sleeping area in the inglenook. As it was still light, he ventured as far as the kitchen. There was a gas stove there, old but functional, and a fireplace. Above it a blackened cast-iron pot hung, furry with cobwebs. An ancient enamelled range covered half the space from wall to wall, but the oven was choked with leavings – coal, half-burnt wood and generations of dead insects. Jay decided to wait until he could clean it out properly. The fire was another matter, though. It lit fairly easily, and he managed to heat enough water for a wash and a cup of coffee, which he took with him on his tour of the house. This, he found, was even larger than his earlier search had revealed. Living rooms, dining room, still rooms, pantries, cupboards as large as storerooms, storerooms like caverns. Three cellars, though the darkness down there was too thick for him to risk the broken steps, stairs leading up into bedrooms, lofts, granaries. There was furniture there, too, much of it spoiled by rain and neglect, but some of it usable. A long table of some age-blackened wood, scarred and warped by many years of use; a dresser of the same rough make; chairs; a footstool. Polished and restored, he told himself, they would be beautiful, exactly the type of furniture Kerry sighed over in elegant Kensington antiques shops. Other things had been stored in boxes in corners all over the house – tableware in an attic, tools and gardening equipment at the back of a woodshed, a whole case of linen, miraculously unspoiled, under a box of broken crockery. He pulled out stiff, starched sheets, yellowed at the creases, each one embroidered with an elaborate medallion, in which the initials D. F. twined above a garland of roses – some woman’s trousseau from a hundred, two hundred, years back. There were other treasures too: sandalwood boxes of handkerchiefs; copper saucepans dulled with verdigris, an old radio from before the war, he guessed, its casing cracked to reveal valves as big as doorknobs. Best of all was a huge old spice chest of rough black oak, some of its drawers still labelled in faded brown ink – Cannelle, Poivre Rouge, Lavande, Menthe Verte – the long-empty compartments still fragrant with the scents of those spices, some dusted with a residue which coloured his fingertips with cinnamon, ginger, paprika and turmeric. It was a lovely thing, fascinating. It deserved better than this empty, half-derelict house. Jay promised himself that when he could he would have it brought downstairs and cleaned.

Joe would have loved it.

Night fell: reluctantly Jay abandoned his exploration of the house. Before retiring to his camp bed he inspected his ankle again, surprised and pleased at the speed of his recovery. He barely needed the arnica cream he had bought from the chemist’s. The room was warm, the fire’s embers casting hot reflections onto the whitewashed walls. It was still early – no later than eight – but his fatigue had begun to catch up with him, and he lay on his camp bed, watching the fire and thinking over the next day’s plans. Behind the closed shutters he could hear the wind in the orchard, but there was nothing sinister about the sound tonight. Instead it sounded eerily familiar – the wind, the sound of distant water, the night creatures calling and bickering, and, beyond that, the church clock carrying distantly across the marshes. A sudden surge of nostalgia came over him – for Gilly, for Joe, for Nether Edge and that last day on the railway below Pog Hill Lane, for all the things he never wrote about in Jackapple Joe because they were too mired in disillusion to put into words.

He gave a sleepy, sour croak of laughter. Jackapple Joe never even came close to what really happened. It was a fabrication, a dream of what things should have been like, a naive re-enactment of those magical, terrible summers. It gave a meaning to what had remained meaningless. In his book, Joe was the bluff, friendly old man who steered him towards adulthood. Jay was the generic apple-pie boy, rosily, artfully ingenuous. His childhood was gilded, his adolescence charmed. Forgotten, all those times when the old man bored him, troubled him, filled him with rage. Forgotten, the times Jay was sure he was crazy. His disappearance, his betrayal, his lies; papered over, tempered with nostalgia. No wonder everyone loved that book. It was the very triumph of deceit, of whimsy over reality, the childhood we all secretly believe we had, but which none of us ever did. Jackapple Joe was the book Joe himself might have written. The worst kind of lie – half true, but lying in what really matters. Lying in the heart.

‘Tha should ave gone back, tha knows,’ said Joe matter-of-factly. He was sitting on the table next to the typewriter, a mug of tea in one hand. He’d swapped the Thin Lizzy T-shirt for one from Pink Floyd’s Animals tour. ‘She waited for you, and you never came. She deserved better than that, lad. Even at fifteen, you should have known that.’

Jay stared at him. He looked very real. He touched his forehead with the back of his hand, but the skin was cool.

‘Joe.’

He knew what it was, of course. All that thinking about Joe, his subconscious desire to find him there, his re- enactment of Joe’s greatest fantasy.

‘You never did find out where they went, did you?’

‘No, I never did.’ It was ridiculous, talking to a fantasy, but there was something oddly comforting in it, too. Joe seemed to listen, head cocked slightly to one side, the mug held loosely between his fingers.

‘You were the one left me. After everything you promised. You left me. You never even said goodbye.’ Even though it was a dream, Jay could feel anger crackling in his voice. ‘You’re one to tell me I should have gone back.’

Joe shrugged, unruffled. ‘People move on,’ he said calmly. ‘People go to find themselves, or lose themselves, whatever. Pick your own clee-shay. Anyroad, isn’t that what you’re doing now? Runnin away?’

‘I don’t know what I’m doing now,’ said Jay.

‘That Kerry, anall.’ Joe continued, as if he hadn’t heard. ‘She were another. You just never know when you’ve hit lucky.’ He grinned. ‘Did you know she wears green contact lenses?’

‘What?’

‘Contact lenses. Her eyes are really blue. All this time and you never knew.’

‘This is ridiculous,’ Jay muttered. ‘Anyway, you’re not even here.’

‘Here? Here?’ Joe turned towards him, pushing his cap back from his face in the characteristic gesture Jay remembered. He was grinning, the way he always did when he was about to say something outrageous. ‘Who’s to say where here is, anyroad? Who’s to say you’re here?’

Jay closed his eyes. The old man’s after-image danced briefly on his retina like a moth at a window.

‘I always hated it when you talked like that,’ said Jay.

‘Like what?’

‘All that Grasshopper mystical stuff.’

Joe chuckled.

‘Philosophy of the Orient, lad. Learned it off of monks in Tibet, that time when I were on the road.’

‘You were never on the road,’ Jay said. ‘Nowhere further than the Ml, anyhow.’

He fell asleep to the sound of Joe’s laughter.

26

Pog Hill, Summer 1977

JOE WAS IN SPLENDID FORM FOR THE FIRST PART OF THAT SUMMER. He seemed more youthful than Jay had ever seen him, filled with ideas and projects. He worked on his allotment most days, though with more caution than of old, and they took their tea breaks in the kitchen, surrounded by tomato plants. Gilly came over every couple of days, and they would go down into the railway cutting and collect treasures in the usual way, which they would then bring up the banking to Joe’s house.

They had moved away from Monckton Town in May, Gilly explained, when a group of local kids had begun causing trouble at their previous camp.

‘Bastards,’ she said casually, dragging on the cigarette they were sharing and passing it back to Jay. ‘First it was name-calling. Big fucking deal. Then they kept banging on the doors at night, then it was stones at the windows, then fireworks under the van. Then they poisoned our old dog, and Maggie said enough was enough.’

Gilly had started at the local comprehensive that year. She got on with most people, she said, but with these