Sudden, overwhelming anger shot through him. It was beyond reason – it was all the hurt and confusion of the past few months; it was Gilly’s abandonment and Joe’s betrayal; it was his parents, himself, his school; it was Zeth; it was Glenda and her gang; it was the wasps; it was his rage at everything, coalesced for a moment into a single bolt of pain and fury. He flung the magazines across the floor, kicking and stamping on the pages. He tore off the covers, treading the pictures into the mingled dust and mud. He pulled down the maps from the walls. He tipped over the empty seed chest. He ran down into the cellar and smashed everything he could see – the bottles, the jars, the fruit and the spirits. His feet crunched on broken glass.
How could Joe have lied?
How could he?
He forgot that it had been he who had run away, he who had lost his faith. All he could think of was Joe’s deception. Besides, he had come back, hadn’t he? He had come back. But if there had been magic, it was long gone.
His back hurt – he must have strained it when he greyed out in the cellar – and he went back into the kitchen feeling leaden and useless. He had cut his hand on a piece of glass. He tried to rinse it in the sink, but the water had already been turned off. That was when he saw the envelope.
It had been propped up neatly against the draining board by the window, next to the dried-up bar of coal tar soap. His name was written across the top in small, shaky capitals. Too large to be simply a letter, it looked plump, like a small packet. Jay tore the envelope clumsily, thinking perhaps this was it, Joe hadn’t forgotten him after all; this had to be some kind of explanation, a sign…
A talisman.
There was no letter in the envelope. He looked twice, but there wasn’t even a slip of paper. Instead there was a small packet – he recognized it as one of Joe’s seed packets from the chest, faintly labelled in red pencil. ‘Specials’.
Jay tore open a corner. There were seeds inside, tiny blackfly seeds, a hundred or more, rolling between his clumsy fingers as he tried to understand. No note. No letter. No instructions. Just seeds.
What was he supposed to do with them? Anger lashed him again. Plant them in his garden? Grow a beanstalk to the Land of Make-Believe? He gave a furious croak of laughter. Just what exactly was he supposed to do with them?
The seeds rolled meaninglessly between his fingers. Tears of angry, desolate laughter squirted from his eyes.
Jay went outside and climbed up onto the back wall. He tore the packet open and let the seeds float down into the cutting, blackfly on the damp winter wind. He sent the shredded envelope fluttering after them. He felt sourly exultant.
Later he thought that maybe he shouldn’t have done it, that maybe there was magic in those seeds after all, but it was too late. Whatever Joe had left for him to find, he hadn’t found it.
49
Lansquenet, Summer 1999
JUNE CAME IN LIKE A SHIP, BLUE SAILS UNFURLED AND SWELLING. A good time for writing – Jay’s book lengthened by another fifty pages – but even better for planting, picking out the new seedlings and setting them in their raked beds, thinning out potato plants and putting them in rows, or weeding, stripping garlands of goosegrass and ground elder from the currant bushes, or picking strawberries and raspberries from their green hollows to make jam. Joe was especially pleased by this.
‘There’s nothin like pickin yer own fruit from yer own garden,’ he pointed out, teeth clamped around the stub of a cigarette. The strawberries were abundant this year – three rows fifty metres long, enough to sell if he had a mind to – but Jay was uninterested in selling. Instead he gave them away to his new friends, made jam, ate strawberries by the pound, sometimes straight from the field, with the pink soil still dusting the flesh. Joe’s crow- scarers – flexible canes decorated with foil streamers and the inevitable red talisman – were enough to discourage the bird population.
‘You should make some wine, lad,’ advised Joe. ‘Never made any strawberry mesself. Never grew enough of ’em to bother. I’d like to see what it turns out like.’ Jay found he could accept Joe’s presence without question now, though not because he had no questions to ask. It was simply that he could not bring himself to ask them. Better to remain as he was, to accept it as another everyday miracle. Too much investigation might open up more than he was willing to examine. Nor was his anger entirely gone. It remained a part of him, like a dormant seed, ready to sprout in the right conditions. But in the face of everything else it seemed less important now, something which belonged to another life. Too much ballast, Joe always said, slows you down. Besides, there was too much to do. June was a busy month. The vegetable patch needed attention: new potatoes to dig and store in pallets filled with dry earth, young leeks to peg out, endives to cover with black plastic shells to protect them from the sunlight. In the evenings, when the day cooled, he worked on his book as Joe watched from the corner of the room, lying on the bed with his boots against the wall, or smoking and watching the fields with bright, lazy eyes. Like the garden and the orchard, the book needed more work than ever at this stage. As the last hundred pages drew to a close, he began to slow, to falter. The ending was still as hazy in his mind as when he first started. He spent more and more of his time staring at the typewriter, or out of the window, or looking for patterns in the shadows against the whitewashed walls. He went over the typed pages with correcting fluid. He renumbered sheets, underlined titles. Anything to fool himself that he was still working. But Joe was not fooled.
‘Tha’s not written much tonight, lad,’ he commented on one unproductive evening. His accent had broadened, as it did when he was at his most satirical. Jay shook his head.
‘I’m doing all right.’
‘Tha wants to get it finished,’ continued Joe. ‘Get it out of your system while you still can.’
Irritably: ‘I can’t do that.’
Joe shrugged.
‘I mean it, Joe. I can’t.’
‘No such bloody word.’ It was another of Joe’s sayings. ‘Does tha want to finish that bloody book or not? I’m not goin to be here for ever, tha knows.’
It was the first time Joe had hinted that he might not stay. Jay looked up sharply.
‘What do you mean? You’ve only just come back.’
Again Joe gave his loose shrug. ‘Well…’ As if it were obvious. Some things did not need to be said. But Joe was more blunt. ‘I wanted to get you started,’ he said at last. ‘See you in, if you like. But as for stayin…’
‘You’re going away.’
‘Well, probably not just yet.’
‘Again.’ The tone was more than accusing.
‘Not just yet.’
‘But soon.’
Joe shrugged. Finally: ‘I don’t know.’
Anger, that old friend. Like a recurring fever. He could feel it in him, a blush and prickle at the nape of his neck. Anger at himself, at this neediness never to be satisfied.
‘Got to move on sometime, lad. Both of us have. You more than ever.’
Silence.
‘I’ll probly hang on for a while, though. Till autumn, at least.’
It occurred to Jay that he had never seen the old man in winter. As if he were a figment of the summer air.
‘Why are you here, Joe, anyway? Are you a ghost? Is that it? Are you haunting me?’
Joe laughed. In the slice of moonlight needling from behind the shutters he did look ghostly, but there was nothing ghoulish in his grin.
‘Tha allus did ask too many questions.’ The thickening of his accent was a mockery of itself, a dig at nostalgia.
