Blackberry Wine (10 page)

‘You told me you’d lost your fingers in Dieppe,’ insisted Jay. ‘During the war.’

‘Aye. Well.’ Joe was unembarrassed. ‘It were a kind of war down there any road. Lost em when I were sixteen – crushed between two trucks back in 1931. Wouldn’t take me in the Army after that, so I signed up as a Bevan boy. We had three cave-ins that year. Seven men trapped underground when a tunnel collapsed. Not even grown men, some of em – boys my age and younger; you could go underground at fourteen on a man’s wage. Worked double shifts for a week tryin to get em out. We could hear em behind the cave-in, yellin and cryin, but every time we tried to get to em another bit of the tunnel came down on us. We were workin in darkness because of the gas, knee-deep in slurry. We were soaked an half suffocated, an we all knew the roof could fall in again any minute, but we never stopped tryin. Not till at last the bosses came and closed down the shaft altogether.’ He looked at Jay with unexpected vehemence, his eyes dark with ancient rage. ‘So don’t go tellin me I never went to war, lad,’ he snapped. ‘I know as much about war – what war
means
– as any o them lads in France.’

Jay stared at him, unsure of what to say. Joe looked off into the middle distance, hearing the cries and pleading of young men long dead from the quiet scar of Nether Edge. Jay shivered.

‘So what will you do now?’

Joe looked at him closely, as if checking for any sign of condemnation. Then he relaxed and gave his old rueful smile, at the same time digging in his pocket to produce a grubby packet of Jelly Babies. He chose one for himself, then held out the packet to Jay.

‘I’ll do what I’ve allus done, lad,’ he declared. ‘I’ll bloody well fight for what’s mine. I’ll not let em get away with it. Pog Hill’s mine, an I’ll not be moved onto some poxy estate by them or anyone.’ He bit off the head of his Jelly Baby with relish and chose another from the packet.

‘But what can you do?’ protested Jay. ‘There’ll be eviction orders. They’ll cut off your gas and electricity. Can’t you—’

Joe looked at him.

‘There’s allus
somethin
you can do, lad,’ he said softly. ‘I reckon maybe it’s time to find out what really works. Time to bring out sandbags and batten down hatches. Time to fatten up t’black cockerel, like they do in Haiti.’ He winked hugely, as if to share a mysterious joke.

Jay glanced around at the allotment. He looked at the charms nailed to the wall and tied onto the tree branches, the signs laid out in broken glass on the ground and chalked onto flower pots and he felt a sudden, terrible hopelessness. It all looked so fragile, so touchingly doomed. He saw the houses then, those blackened, mean little terraces, with their crooked pointing and outside toilets and windows sheeted over with plastic. Washing hanging on a single line five or six houses down. A couple of kids playing in the gutter in front. And Joe – sweet old crazy Joe, with his dreams and his travels and his
chatto
and his millions of seeds and his cellar full of bottles – preparing himself for a war he could never hope to win, armed only with everyday magic and a few quarts of home-brewed wine.

‘Don’t take on, lad,’ urged Joe. ‘We’ll be reight, you’ll see. There’s more than one trick up me sleeve, as them buggers from council’ll find out.’

But his words sounded hollow. For all his talk it was really just bravado. There was nothing he could do. Of course Jay pretended, for his sake, to believe him. He gathered herbs on the railway embankment. He sewed dried leaves into red sachets. He repeated strange words and made ritual gestures in imitation of his. They had to
seal the perimeter
, as Joe called it, twice a day. This involved walking around the property – up the railway embankment and round the allotment, past Pog Hill box, which Joe counted as his, then into Pog Hill Lane and through the ginnel which linked Joe’s house to his neigh-hour’s,
past the front door and back over the wall to the other side – carrying a red candle and burning bay leaves steeped in scented oil while they solemnly incanted a string of incomprehensible phrases, which Joe claimed were Latin. From what Joe said, this ritual was supposed to shield the house and its grounds from unwanted influences, deliver protection and affirm his ownership of the territory, and as the holidays came to an end it increased daily in length and complexity, growing from a three-minute dash around the garden to a solemn procession lasting fifteen minutes or more. In other circumstances Jay might have enjoyed these daily ceremonies, but whereas last year there had been an element of mockery in everything Joe said, now the old man had less time for jokes. Jay guessed that behind this screen of unconcern his anxiety was growing. He spoke increasingly about his travels, recounted past adventures and planned future expeditions, announced his immediate decision to leave Pog Hill Lane for his
château
in France, then in the same breath swore he’d never leave his old home unless they carried him out feet first. He worked frantically in the garden. Autumn came early that year and there was fruit to be harvested; jams, wine, preserves, pickles to be made; potatoes and turnips to be dug and stored, as well as the increasing demands of Joe’s magical barrier, which now took thirty minutes to complete and involved much gesticulating and scattering of powders, as well as preparation of scented oils and herbal mixtures. There was a haunted look to Joe now, a stretched look to his features, a glittery brightness in his eyes, which came of sleeplessness – or drink. For he was drinking far more now than he had ever done, not just wine or nettle beer but spirits, too, the potato vodka from the pot-still in the cellar, last year’s liqueurs from his downstairs store. Jay wondered whether, at this pace, Joe would survive the winter at all.

‘I’ll be reight,’ Joe told him when he voiced his concern. ‘It just needs a bit more work, that’s all. Come winter I’ll be reight again, I promise.’ He stood up, hands in the small of
his back, and stretched. ‘That’s better.’ He grinned then, and for a moment he was almost the old Joe, eyes brimming with laughter under his greasy pit cap. ‘I’ve looked after mesself for a few years before you came along, lad. It’d take a sight more than a few council monkeys to get the better of me.’ And he immediately launched into a long, absurd story from his travelling days about a man trying to sell cheap trinkets to a tribe of Amazonian Indians.

‘And the chief of the tribe – Chief Mungawomba, his name were – handed back the stuff and said – I’d been teachin him English in me free time – “Tha can keep thi beads, mate, but I’d be really grateful if tha could fix me toaster.” ’

They both laughed, and for a time the unease was forgotten, or at least dismissed. Jay wanted to believe Pog Hill was safe. On some days he looked at the arcane jumble of the allotment and the back garden and he almost did believe it. Joe seemed so sure, so permanent. Surely he would be there for ever.

HE STOOD BESIDE THE ROADSIDE FOR A MOMENT, DISMAYED AND
disoriented. By then it was almost dark; the sky had reached that luminous shade of deep blue which just precedes full night, and the horizon beyond the house was striated with pale lemon and green and pink. The beauty of it –
his
property, he told himself again, with that breathless, unreal feeling inside – left him feeling a little shaken. In spite of his predicament he could not shrug off a sensation of excitement, as if this, too, were somehow meant to happen.

No-one –
no-one
, he told himself – knew where he was.

The wine bottles rattled against each other as he picked up the duffel bag from the side of the road. A scent – of summer, of wild spinach or shale dust and stagnant water – rose briefly from the damp ground. Something fluttering from the branch of a flowering hawthorn tree caught his eye and he picked at it automatically, bringing it closer towards him.

It was a piece of red flannel.

In the bag the bottles began to rattle and froth. Their voices rose in a whispering, crackling, sighing, chuckling of hidden consonants and secret vowels. Jay felt a sudden
breeze tug at his clothing, a murmur of something, a throbbing deep in the soft air, like a heart. ‘Home is where the heart is.’ One of Joe’s favourite sayings. ‘Where the art is.’

Jay looked back at the road. It was not really so late. Not too late, in any case, to find somewhere to stay the night and to buy a meal. The village – a few lights now, winking over the river, the distant sound of music from across the fields – must be less than half an hour’s walk away. He could leave his case here, safely hidden in the roadside bushes, and take only his bag. For some reason – inside the bottles joltered and chuckled – he felt reluctant to leave the duffel bag. But the house drew him. Ridiculous, he told himself. He had already seen that the house was uninhabitable, at least for the moment.
Looked uninhabitable
, he amended, recalling Pog Hill Lane, the derelict gardens and boarded-up windows and the secret, gleeful life behind. What if, maybe, just behind the door …

Funny how his mind kept returning to that thought. There was no logic in it and yet it was slyly persuasive. That abandoned vegetable patch, the scrap of red flannel, that feeling, that certainty, that there really was someone
inside
the house.

Inside the duffel bag the carnival had begun again. Catcalls, laughter, distant fanfare. It sounded like coming home. Even I could feel it – I, grown in vineyards far from here, in Burgundy, where the air is brighter and the earth richer, kinder. It was the sound of home fires and doors opening and the smell of bread baking and clean sheets and warm, friendly unwashed bodies. Jay felt it, too, but assumed it came from the house; almost without thinking he took another step towards the darkened building. It would not hurt to have another look, he told himself. Just to be sure.

SEPTEMBER CAME. JAY WENT BACK TO SCHOOL WITH A SENSE OF
finality, a feeling that something at Pog Hill had changed. If it had, then Joe’s short, infrequent letters gave no sign. There was a card at Christmas – two lines, carefully inscribed with the round printing of the barely literate – then another at Easter. The terms crawled to an end as usual. Jay’s fifteenth birthday came and went – a cricket bat from his father and Candide, theatre tickets from his mother. After that came exams; dorm parties; secrets told and promises broken; a couple of hot-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.