Blackberry Wine Part 6

8e managed to replace his boot. With it on his foot was e, but not as much as he had feared. After eating his Raining sandwich -- very stale now, but he was ravenous -- Ipicked up his things and made his way slowly back ards the road; He left his bag and case in the bushes and tan the long walk into the village. It took almost an hour, 8l many rest stops, to reach the main street, and he had Bity of time to look at the scenery. Lansquenet is a tiny See; a single main street and a few side roads, a square with ^w shops - a chemist's, a baker's, a butcher's, a florist's - a arch between two rows of linden trees, then a long road down to the river, a cafe and some derelict houses staggering along the ragged banks towards the fields. He came up from the river, having found a place to cross where the water ran shallow over some stones, and so he came to the cafe first. A bright red-and-white awning s.h.i.+elded a small window, and a couple of metal tables were set out on the pavement. A sign above the door read Cafe des Marauds.

Jay went in and ordered a blonde. The proprietaire behind the bar looked at him curiously, and he realized how he must look to her: unwashed and unshaven, wearing a grubby T-s.h.i.+rt and smelling of cheap wine. He gave her a smile, but she stared back at him doubtfully.

'My name is Jay Mackintosh,' he explained to her. "I'm English.'

'Ah, English.' The woman smiled and nodded, as if that explained everything. Her face was round and pink and s.h.i.+ny, like a doll's. Jay took a long drink of his beer.

'Josephine,' said the proprietaire. 'Are you ... a tourist?'

She sounded as if the prospect amused her.

He shook his head. 'Not exactly. I had a few problems getting here last night. I ... got lost. I had to sleep rough.'

He explained briefly.

Josephine looked at him with wary sympathy. Clearly she couldn't imagine getting lost in such a small, familiar place as Lansquenet.

'Do you have rooms? For the night?'

She shook her head.

'Is there a hotel, then? Or a chambre d'hote?'

Again that look of amus.e.m.e.nt. Jay began to understand that tourists were not in plentiful supply. Oh well. It would have to be Agen.

'Could I use your telephone, then? For a taxi?'

'Taxi?' She laughed aloud at that. 'A taxi, on a Sunday night?' Jay pointed out that it was barely six o'clock, but Josephine shook her head and laughed again. All the taxis would be on their way home, she explained. No-one would come this far for a pick-up. Village boys often made hoax 118.

alls, she explained with a smile. Taxis, takeaway pizzas . . They thought it was funny.

''Oh.' There was the house, of course. His house. He had ilready slept there one night, and with the sleeping bag and he candles he could surely manage another. He could buy eod from the cafe. He would be able to collect wood and Ight a fire in the grate. There were clothes in his suitcase.

a the morning he would change and go to Agen to sign the yapers and collect the keys.

I, 'There was a woman, back there where I slept. Madame Api. I think she thought I was trespa.s.sing.'

glJosephine gave him a quick look.

1?I suppose she did. But if the house is yours now--'

;S thought she was the caretaker. She was standing ard.' Jay grinned. 'To tell the truth, she wasn't very ndly.'

osephine shook her head. flo. I don't suppose she was.'

Do you know her?' ^ot really.'

Aention of Marise d'Api seemed to have made Josephine ry. The doubtful look was back on her face, and she was thing at a spot on the countertop with a preoccupied air. Bit least I know she's real now,' remarked Jay cheerfully. ^ttidnight last night I thought I'd seen a ghost. I suppose e comes out in the daytime?'

psephine nodded silently, still rubbing the countertop. & was puzzled at her reticence, but was too hungry to vsue the matter.

IpThe bar menu was not extensive, but the plat du your - a ?rous omelette with salad and fried potatoes - was i. He bought a packet of Gauloises and a spare lighter, i Josephine gave him a cheese baguette wrapped in xed paper to take back with him, along with three ties of beer and a bag of apples. He left while it was I light, carrying his purchases in a plastic carrier, and Bde good time.

He brought the rest of his luggage from its hiding place by the roadside into the house. He was feeling tired by now, and his abused ankle was beginning to protest, but he dragged the case to the house before he allowed himself to rest. The sun was gone now, the sky still pale but beginning to darken, and he gathered some wood from the pile at the back of the house and stacked it in the gaping fireplace.

The wood looked freshly cut and had been stored beneath a tarpaper cover to keep it from the rain. Another mystery. He supposed Marise might have cut the wood, but could not see why she might have done so. Certainly she hardly seemed the neighbourly type. He found the empty bottle of elderflower wine in a bin at the back of the house. He didn't remember putting it there, but in the state he'd been in last night he couldn't be expected to recall everything. He hadn't been thinking rationally, he told himself. The hallucination of Joe, so real he had almost believed it at the time, was proof enough of his state of mind. The single cigarette b.u.t.t he discovered in the room where he'd spent the night looked old. It might have been there for ten years. He shredded it and threw it to the wind and closed the shutters from the inside.

He lit some candles, then made a fire in the grate, using old newspapers he had found in a box upstairs and the wood from the back of the house. Several times the paper flared furiously, then went out, but finally the split logs caught. Jay fed the fire carefully, with a slight feeling of surprise at the pleasure it gave him. There was something primitive in this simple act, something which reminded him of the Westerns he'd liked so much as a boy.

He opened his case and put his typewriter on the table next to the bottles of wine, pleased with the effect. He almost felt he might be able to write something tonight, something new. No science fiction tonight. Jonathan Wine- sap was on vacation. Tonight he would see what Jay Mackintosh could do.

He sat at the typewriter. It was a clumsy thing, Spring120actioned, hard on the fingers. He'd kept it out of affectation at first, though it was years since he had used it regularly.

Now the keys felt good beneath his hands and he typed a few lines experimentally across the ribbon.

It sounded good, too. But without paper . . .

The unfinished ma.n.u.script of Stout Cortez was in an envelope at the bottom of his case. He took it out, and reversed the first page as he slipped it into the slot. The machine in front of him felt like a car, a tank, a rocket.

Around him the room buzzed and fizzled like dark champagne.

Beneath his fingers the typewriter keys jumped and snapped. He lost track of time. Of everything.

Pog Hill, Summer 1977 THE GIRL'S NAME WAS GILLY. JAY SAW HER QUITE OFTEN AFTER.

that, down at Nether Edge, and they sometimes played together by the ca.n.a.l, collecting rubbish and treasures and picking wild spinach or dandelions for the family pot. They weren't really gypsies, Gilly told him scornfully, but travellers, people who couldn't stay in one place for long and who despised the capitalist property market. Her mother, Maggie, had lived in a tepee in Wales until Gilly was born, then had decided it was time for a more stable environment for the child. Hence the trailer, an old fish van, renovated and refurbished to accommodate two people and a dog.

Gilly had no father. Maggie didn't like men, she explained, because they were the instigators of the JudaeoChristian patriarchal society, h.e.l.l-bent on the subjugation of women. This kind of talk always made Jay a little nervous, and he was always careful to be especially polite to Maggie in case she ever decided he was the enemy, but although she sometimes sighed over his gender, in the same way that one might over a handicapped infant, she never held it against him.

Gilly got on with Joe immediately. Jay introduced them the week after the rock fight, and knew a tiny stab of jealousy at their rapport. Joe knew many of the region's itinerants, and had already begun to trade with Maggie, swapping vegetables and preserves for the afghans she knitted from thrift-shop bargains, with which Joe used to cover his tender perennials - this said with a chuckle which made Maggie squawk with laughter - on cold nights. She knew a great deal about plants, and both she and Gilly accepted Joe's talismans and perimeter-protection rituals with perfect serenity, as if such things were quite natural to them. As Joe worked in the allotment, Jay and Gilly would help him with his other tasks and he would talk to them or sing along to the radio as they collected seeds in jars or sewed charms into red flannel bags or fetched old pallets from the railway bank in which to store that season's ripening fruit. It was as if Gilly's presence had mellowed Joe somehow. There was something different in the way he spoke to her, something which excluded Jay, not unkindly, but palpably nevertheless. Perhaps because she, too, was a traveller. Perhaps simply because she was a girl.

Not that Gilly conformed in any way to Jay's expectations.

She was fiercely independent, always taking the lead, in spite of his seniority, physically reckless, cheerily foul- mouthed to a degree which secretly shocked his conservative upbringing, filled with bizarre beliefs and ideologies culled from her mother's diverse store. s.p.a.ce aliens, feminist politics, alternative religions, pendulum power, numerology, environmental issues, all had their place in Maggie's philosophy, and Gilly, in her turn, accepted them all. From her Jay learned about the ozone layer and bread- cakes mysteriously shaped like Jesus, or what she called the New Killer Threat, or shamanism, or saving the whales.

In turn she was the ideal audience for his stories. They spent days together, sometimes helping Joe, but often simply loafing around by the ca.n.a.l, talking or exploring.

They saw Zeth once more after the rock fight, some distance away by the dump, and were careful to avoid him. Surprisingly enough, Gilly wasn't in the least afraid of 123.

him, but Jay was. He hadn't forgotten what Zeth had shouted the day they routed him from the lock, and he would have been perfectly happy never to set eyes on him again. Obviously, he was never going to be that lucky.

124.

Lansquenet, March 1999 'WAS EARLY THE FOLLOWING MORNING WHEN HE GOT INTO AGEN.

s learned from Josephine that there were only two buses a y, and after a quick coffee and a couple of croissants at iCafe des Marauds he left, eager to collect his paperwork i the agency. It took longer than Jay had expected. Legal pletion had taken place the previous day, but electricity gas had not yet been restored, and the agency was fetant to hand over keys without all the doc.u.mentation England. Plus, the woman at the agency told him, ' were additional complications. His offer on the farm Itaken place at a time when another offer was under lideration - had, in fact, been accepted by the owner, Ough nothing had yet been made official. Jay's offer - Brior to this earlier one by about 5,000 - had effecty scratched this previous arrangement, but the person Ifhom the farm had been promised had called earlier that 'ning, making trouble, making threats.

l.'You see, Monsieur Mackintosh,' said the agent apoloirtically.

'These small communities -- a promise of land -- iey don't understand that a casual word cannot be said to B legally binding.' Jay nodded sympathetically. 'Besides,'

Iwitinued the agent, 'the vendor, who lives in Toulouse, is a 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 doork.n.o.bs. Best of all was a huge old spice chest of rough black oak, some of its drawers still labelled in faded brown ink - CanneJJe, 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, 128.

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 JackappJe Joe because they were too mired in disillusion to put into words.

He gave a sleepy, sour croak of laughter. JackappJe 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. JackappJe 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- s.h.i.+rt 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 reenactment 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, ut there was something oddly comforting in it, too. Joe eemed to listen, head c.o.c.ked slightly to one side, the mug eld loosely between his fingers.

'You were the one left me. After everything you promised.

bu left me. You never even said goodbye.' Even though it ras 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. eople go to find themselves, or lose themselves, whatever.

ick your own clee-shay. Anyroad, isn't that what you're oing now? Runnin away?'

"I don't know what I'm doing now,' said Jay.

That Kerry, a.n.a.ll.' Joe continued, as if he hadn't heard. 'She 'ere another. You just never know when you've hit lucky.' He ruined. 'Did you know she wears green contact lenses?'

'What?'

'Contact lenses. Her eyes are really blue. All this time and 3U never knew.'

'This is ridiculous,' Jay muttered. 'Anyway, you're not /en here.'

'Here? Here?' Joe turned towards him, pus.h.i.+ng his cap ack from his face in the characteristic gesture Jay rememered.

He was grinning, the way he always did when he 'as about to say something outrageous. 'Who's to say 'here here is, anyroad? Who's to say you're here?'

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

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

'Like what?'

'All that Gra.s.shopper mystical stuff.'

Joe chuckled.

'Philosophy of the Orient, lad. Learned it off of monks in ibet, that time when I were on the road.'

'You were never on the road,' Jay said. 'Nowhere further ian the Ml, anyhow.'

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

130.

Poe Hill, Summer 1977 )E WAS IN SPLENDID FORM FOR THE FIRST PART OF THAT SUMMER.

Ie seemed more youthful than Jay had ever seen him, filled rith ideas and projects. He worked on his allotment most iays, though with more caution than of old, and they took heir tea breaks in the kitchen, surrounded by tomato plants.

iilly came over every couple of days, and they would go down prto the railway cutting and collect treasures in the usual way, irhich they would then bring up the banking to Joe's house.

rThey had moved away from Monckton Town in May, Hlly explained, when a group of local kids had begun ftusing trouble at their previous camp.

'b.a.s.t.a.r.ds,' she said casually, dragging on the cigarette tley were sharing and pa.s.sing it back to Jay. 'First it was .ame-calling. Big f.u.c.king deal. Then they kept banging on tie doors at night, then it was stones at the windows, then [reworks under the van. Then they poisoned our old dog, nd Maggie said enough was enough.'

Gilly had started at the local comprehensive that year.

'he got on with most people, she said, but with these kids it /as different. She was casual enough about the problem, ut Jay guessed it must have got pretty bad for Maggie to love the trailer so far away.

'The worst of them - the ringleader - is a girl called Glenda,' she told him. 'She's in the year above me at school.

I fought her a couple of times. No-one else dares do anything to her because of her brother.'

Jay looked at her.

'You know him,' said Gilly, taking another drag on the cigarette. 'That big b.a.s.t.a.r.d with the tattoos.'

'Zeth.'

'Aye. At least he's left school now. I don't see him much, except down by the Edge sometimes, shooting birds.' She gave a shrug. 'I don't go there often,' she added with a touch of defensiveness. 'Not really often, anyway. I don't like to.'

Nether Edge was theirs now, Jay gathered. A gang of six or seven, aged twelve to fifteen and led by Zeth's sister. At weekends they would go into the town and dare each other to shoplift small items from the newsagent's - usually sweets and cigarettes - then down to the Edge to hang out or let off fireworks. Pa.s.sers-by tended to avoid them, fearing abuse or hara.s.sment. Even the usual dog-walkers avoided the place now.

The news left Jay feeling strangely bereft. After the rock fight he had remained wary of the Edge, always carrying Joe's talisman in his pocket, always on the lookout for trouble. He avoided the ca.n.a.l, the ash pit and the lock, which seemed too risky now. He wasn't going to run into Zeth if he could help it. But Gilly wasn't afraid. Not of Zeth, or of Glenda. Her caution was for him, not for herself.

Jay felt a surge of indignation.

'Well, I'm not going to stay away,' he said hotly. "I'm not afraid of a bunch of little girls. Are you?'