Blackberry Wine

27

Lansquenet, March 1999

I’VE BECOME FOND OF JAY. WE HAVE MATURED TOGETHER, HE and I, and in many ways we are very similar. We are complex in ways which are not immediately apparent to the casual observer. The uneducated palate finds in us a brashness, a garrulousness which belies the deeper feelings. Forgive me if I become pretentious with age, but that is what solitude does to wine, and travel and rough handling have not improved me. Some things are not meant to be bottled for too long.

With Jay, of course, it was something else. With Jay it was anger.

He did not remember a time when he was not angry at someone. His parents. His school. Himself. And most of all, there was Joe. Joe, who vanished that day without warning or reason, leaving only a packet of seeds, like something out of a mad fairy tale. A bad vintage, that anger. Bad for the spirit, mine and his. The Specials sensed it, too. On the table, the four remaining bottles waited in subdued, ominous silence, their bellies filled with dark fire.

When he awoke in the morning Joe was still there. Sitting at the table with his mug of tea, elbows propped on the wood, his cap at an angle, his little half-moon reading glasses perched on the end of his nose. Dusty sunlight came through a knot-hole in the shutters and gilded one shoulder into almost-invisibility. He was made of the same airy fabric which filled his bottles; I could see right through him where the light hit him full-on, though he looked solid enough to Jay, sitting bolt upright from one dream into another.

‘Morning,’ said the old man.

‘I see what this is,’ whispered Jay hoarsely. ‘I’m going crazy.’

Joe grinned.

‘You allus were a bit daft,’ he said. ‘Fancy throwin them seeds out over the railway. You were supposed to keep em. Use em. If you ad of done, like you were meant to, then none of this would ever ave appened.’

‘What do you mean?’

Joe ignored the question.

‘You know, there’s still a good old crop of tuberosa rosifea growin under that railway bridge. Probly the only place in the world with such a good crop. You ought to go and see it some time. Make yerself some wine.’

‘What do you mean, use them? They were only seeds.’

‘Only seeds?’ Joe shook his head in exasperation. ‘Only seeds, after everything I taught you? Them jackapples were Specials, I telled you. I even wrote it on the packet.’

‘I didn’t see anything special about them,’ Jay told him, pulling on his jeans.

‘You never? I tell you, lad, I put a couple of them rosifeas in every single bottle of wine I ever made. Every bottle I ever made, since I brought em back from South America. Took me five years just to get the soil right. I tell you-’

‘Don’t bother.’ Jay’s voice was harsh. ‘You never went to South America. I’d be surprised if you ever even made it out of South Yorkshire.’

Joe laughed and brought out a packet of Player’s from his coat pocket.

‘Mebbe not, lad,’ he admitted, lighting one. ‘But I saw it all the same. Saw all of them places I telled you about.’

‘Course you did.’

Joe shook his head sorrowfully.

‘Astral travel, lad. Astral bloody travel, how the bloody else d’you think I’d be able to do it if I was underground half me bloody life?’

He sounded almost angry. Jay eyed the cigarette in his hand with longing. It smelt like burning paper and Bonfire Night.

‘I don’t believe in astral travel.’

‘Then how’d you bloody think I got here?’

Bonfire Night, licorice, frying grease, smoke and Abba singing ‘The Name of the Game’ at Number One all that month. Himself sitting in the empty dorm smoking – not out of pleasure but just because it was against the rules. Not a letter. Not a card. Not even a forwarding address.

‘You’re not here. I don’t want to have this conversation.’

Joe shrugged.

‘You allus were a stubborn beggar. Allus askin for explanations. Never happy just to take things as they were. Allus wantin’ to know how it worked.’

Silence. Jay began to lace his boots.

‘Remember them Romanies that beat the meter at Nether Edge that time?’

Jay looked up for a moment. ‘Yes, I remember.’

‘D’you ever figure out how they did it?’

Jay shook his head slowly.

‘Alchemy, you said.’

Joe grinned.

‘Layman’s alchemy.’ He lit a Player’s, looking smug. ‘Made emselves some moulds shaped like fifty pences, see? Made em out of ice. Lad fromt council thought them fifties had melted into thin air.’ He laughed hugely.

‘He were right anall, wan’t he?’