Blackberry Wine

13

Paris, March 1999

JAY SPENT THE NIGHT AT THE AIRPORT. HE EVEN SLEPT A LITTLE on one of Charles de Gaulle’s contoured orange chairs, though he was still too jumpy to relax. His energy seemed inexhaustible, a ball of electricity punching against his ribs. His senses felt eerily enhanced. Smells – cleaning fluid, sweat, cigarette smoke, perfume, early morning coffee – rolled at him in waves. At five o’clock he abandoned the idea of sleep and went to the cafeteria, where he bought an espresso, a couple of croissants and a sugar fix of Poulain chocolate. The first Corail to Marseilles was at six ten. From there, a slower train would take him to Agen, where he could get a taxi to… where was it? The map attached to the brochure was only a sketchy diagram, but he hoped to find clearer directions when he reached Agen. Besides, there was something pleasing about this journey, this blurring of speed to a place which was nothing yet but a cross on a map. As if by drinking Joe’s wine he could suddenly become Joe, marking his passage by scratching signs on a map, changing his identity to suit his whim. And at the same time he felt lighter, freed of the hurt and anger he had carried for so long, such useless ballast, for so many years.

Travel far enough, Joe used to say, and all rules are suspended.

Now Jay began to understand what he meant. Truth, loyalty, identity. The things which bind us to the places and faces of home no longer applied. He could be anyone. Going anywhere. At airports, railway stations, bus stations, anything is possible. No-one asks questions. People reach a state of near-invisibility. He was just another passenger here, one of thousands. No-one would recognize him. No-one had even heard of him.

He managed to sleep for a few hours on the train, and dreamed – a dream of astonishing vividness – of himself running along the canal bank at Nether Edge, trying vainly to catch up with a departing coal train. With exceptional clarity he could see the somehow prehistoric metal of the train’s undercarriage. He could smell coal dust and old grease from the trucks’ axles. And on the last truck he could see Joe, sitting on top of the coal in his orange miner’s overalls and a British Railways engineer’s cap, waving goodbye with a bottle of home-brewed wine in one hand and a map of the world in the other, calling in a voice made tinny by distance words Jay could not quite hear.

He awoke, needing a drink, twenty miles from Marseilles, with the countryside a long bright blur at the window. He went to the minibar for a vodka and tonic and drank it slowly, then lit a cigarette. It still felt like a forbidden pleasure – guilt laced with exhilaration, like playing truant from school.

He pulled the brochure out of his pocket once more. Decidedly crumpled now, the cheap paper beginning to tear at the folds. For a moment he almost expected to feel differently, to find that the sense of must-have was gone. But it was still there. In the duffel bag at his side the Specials lolled and gurgled with the train’s movement, and inside the sediment of past summers stirred like crimson slurry.

He felt as if the train would never reach Marseilles.