Blackberry Wine

9

London, March 1999

‘EVEN THE DULLEST AND COLDEST OF CHARACTERS’, HE TOLD HIS evening students, ‘may be humanized by giving him someone to love. A child, a lover, even, at a pinch, a dog.’ Unless you’re writing sci-fi, he thought, with a sudden grin, in which case you just give them yellow eyes.

He perched on his desk, next to his bulging duffel bag, resisting the urge to touch it, to open it. The students looked at him with awed expressions. Some took notes. ‘Even’ – writing laboriously, straining so as not to miss a single word – ‘even… at pinch… dog’.

He taught them on Kerry’s insistence, vaguely disliking their ambition, their slavish obedience to the rules. There were fifteen of them, dressed almost uniformly in black; earnest young men and intense young women, with cropped haircuts and eyebrow rings and clipped, public-school vowels. One of the women – so like Kerry as she was five years ago that they might have been sisters – was reading aloud a short story she had written, an exercise in characterization about a black single mother in a flat in Sheffield. Jay touched the Escape brochure in his pocket and tried to listen, but the girl’s voice was no more than a drone, a slightly unpleasant, waspish buzz of interference. From time to time he nodded, as if he were interested. He still felt slightly drunk.

Since last night the world seemed to have shifted slightly, moving closer into focus. As if something he had been staring at for years without seeing it had suddenly come clear.

The girl’s voice droned on. She scowled as she read and kicked one foot complusively against the table leg. Jay stifled a yawn. She was so intense, he told himself. Intense and rather disgusting in her self-absorption, like an adolescent looking for blackheads. She used the word ‘fuck’ in every sentence, probably an attempt at authenticity. He felt the urge to laugh. She pronounced it ‘fark’.

He knew he wasn’t drunk. He had finished the bottle hours ago – even then he had barely felt dizzy. After that day’s business he had decided not to attend the tutorial, but went after all, suddenly appalled at the thought of going back to the house, to face the silent disapproval of Kerry’s things. Killing time, he told himself silently. Killing time. Joe’s wine really should have worn off, but still he felt oddly exhilarated. As if the normal running of things had been suspended for a day, like an unexpected holiday. Perhaps it came of thinking so much about Joe. The memories kept coming, too many to keep track, as if the bottle contained not wine, but time, uncoiling smokily, like a genie from the sour dregs, making him different, making him… what? Crazy? Sane? He could not concentrate. The oldies station, permanently tuned to summers past, jangled aimlessly at the back of his mind. He might be thirteen again, head filled with visions and fantasies. Thirteen and in school, with the smells of summer coming through the window and Pog Hill Lane just around the corner and the thick tick of the clock counting time to the end of term.

But he was the teacher now, he realized. The teacher going crazy with impatience for the end of school. The pupils wanted desperately to be there, drinking in every meaningless word. He was, after all, Jay Mackintosh, the man who wrote Three Summers with Jackapple Joe. The writer who never wrote. A teacher with nothing to teach.

The thought made him laugh aloud.

It must be something in the air, he thought. A whiff of happy gas, a scent of the outlands. The droning girl stopped reading – or maybe she had finished – and stared at him in hurt accusation. She looked so like Kerry that he couldn’t help laughing again.

‘I bought a house today,’ he said suddenly.

They stared at him without reaction. One young man in a Byron shirt wrote it down: ‘Bought… house today’.

Jay pulled out the brochure from his pocket and looked at it again. It was crumpled and grimy from so much handling, but at the sight of the picture his heart leaped.

‘Not a house exactly,’ he corrected himself. ‘A chatto.’ He laughed again. ‘That’s what Joe used to call it. His chatto in Bordo.’

He opened the brochure and read it aloud. The students listened obediently. Byron Shirt made notes.

Château Foudouin, Lot-et-Garonne. Lansquenet-sous-Tannes. This authentic eighteenth-century château in the heart of France’s most popular wine-growing region includes vineyard, orchard, lake and extensive informal grounds, plus garage block, working distillery, five bedrooms, reception and living room, original oak-roof beaming. Suitable for conversion.

‘Of course, it was a bit more than five thousand quid. Prices have gone up since nineteen seventy-five.’ For a moment Jay wondered how many of those students were even born in 1975. They stared at him in silence, trying to understand.

‘Excuse me, Dr Mackintosh.’ It was the girl, still standing, now looking slightly belligerent. ‘Can you explain what this has to do with my assignment?’ Jay laughed again. Suddenly everything seemed amusing to him, unreal. He felt capable of doing anything, saying anything. Normality had been suspended. He told himself that this was what drunkenness was supposed to feel like. For all these years he had been doing it wrong.

‘Of course.’ He smiled at her. ‘This’ – holding up the leaflet so that everyone could see it – ‘This is the most original and evocative piece of creative writing I’ve seen from anyone since the beginning of the term.’

Silence. Even Byron Shirt forgot his notes to gape at him. Jay beamed at the class, looking for a reaction. All were carefully expressionless.

‘Why are you here?’ he demanded suddenly. ‘What are you expecting to get from these lessons?’

He tried not to laugh at their appalled faces, at their polite blankness. He felt younger than any of them, a delinquent pupil addressing a roomful of stuffy, pedantic teachers.

‘You’re young. You’re imaginative. Why the hell are you all writing about black single mothers and Glaswegian dope addicts and gratuitously using the word “fark”?’

‘Well, sir, you set the assignment.’ He had not won over the belligerent girl. She glared at him, clutching the despised assignment in her thin hand.

‘Stuff the assignment!’ he shouted merrily. ‘You don’t write because someone sets assignments! You write because you need to write, or because you hope someone will listen, or because writing will mend something broken inside you, or bring something back to life-’ To emphasize his words he slapped at the heavy duffel bag standing on his desk, and it gave out the unmistakable sound of bottles clinking together. Some of the students looked at each other. Jay turned back to the class, feeling almost delirious.

‘Where’s the magic, that’s what I want to know?’ he asked. ‘Where are the magic carpets and Haitian voodoo and lone gunslingers and naked ladies tied to railway lines? Where are the Indian trackers and the four-armed goddesses and the pirates and the giant apes? Where are the fucking space aliens?’

There was a long silence. The students stared. The girl clutched her assignment so hard that the pages crumpled in her fist. Her face was white.

‘You’re pissed, aren’t you?’ Her voice was trembling with rage and disgust. ‘That’s why you’re doing this to me. You’ve got to be pissed.’

Jay laughed again.

‘To paraphrase someone or other – Churchill it might have been – I may be pissed, but you’ll still be ugly in the morning.’

‘Fuck you!’ she flung at him, pronouncing it properly this time, and stalked towards the door. ‘Fuck you and your tutorial! I’m going to see the head of faculty about this!’

For a second there was silence in her wake. Then the whisperings began. The room was awash with them. For a moment Jay was not sure whether these were real sounds or in his own head. The duffel bag clinked and clattered, rattled and rolled. The sound, imaginary or not, was overwhelming.

Then Byron Shirt stood up and began to clap.

A couple of the other students looked at him cautiously, then joined in. Several others joined them. Soon half the class was standing up, and most were clapping. They were still clapping as Jay picked up his duffel bag and turned towards the door, opened it, and left, closing it very gently behind him. The applause began to tail off, a number of voices murmuring confusion. From inside the duffel bag came the sound of bottles clinking together. Beside me, their work done, the Specials whispered their secrets.