Blackberry Wine

32

Pog Hill, Summer 1977

JAY’S MEMORIES OF THAT LATE SUMMER WERE BLURRY IN A WAY the previous ones were not. Several factors were to blame – the pale and troubling sky, for one thing, which made him squint and gave him headaches. Joe seemed a little distant, and Gilly’s presence meant they did not have the long discussions they’d had the year before. And Gilly herself… it seemed that as July turned into August Gilly was always at the back of his mind. Jay found himself dwelling upon her more and more. His pleasure at her company was coloured by insecurity, jealousy and other feelings he found it difficult to identify. He was in a state of perpetual confusion. He was often close to anger, without knowing why. He argued constantly with his mother, who seemed to get more deeply under his skin that summer than ever before – everything got under his skin that year – he felt raw, as if every nerve were constantly exposed. He bought the Sex Pistols’ ‘Pretty Vacant’ and played it in his room at full volume, to the horror of his grandparents. He dreamed of piercing his ears. Gilly and he went to the Edge and warred with Glenda’s gang and filled bags with useful rubbish and took them over to Joe’s. Sometimes they helped Joe in the allotment, and occasionally he would talk to them about his travels and his time in Africa with the Masai, or his journeys through the Andes. But to Jay it seemed perfunctory, an afterthought, as if Joe’s mind were already on something else. The perimeter ritual, too, seemed abbreviated, a minute or two at most, with a stick of incense and a sachet of sprinkler. It did not occur to him to question it then, but afterwards he realized. Joe knew. Even then he had already made the decision.

One day he took Jay into his back room and showed him the seed chest again. It had been over a year since he had last done so, pointing out the thousands of seeds packaged and wrapped and labelled for planting, and in the semi-darkness – the windows were still boarded up – the chest looked dusty, abandoned, the paper packages crisp with age, the labels faded.

‘It dun’t look like owt, does it?’ said Joe, drawing his finger through the dust on the top of the chest.

Jay shook his head. The room smelt airless and damp, like a place where tomatoes have been grown. Joe grinned a little sadly.

‘Never believe it, lad. Every one of them seeds is a goodun. You could plant em right now an they’d go up champion. Like rockets. Every one of em.’ He put his hand on the boy’s shoulder. ‘Just you remember, it’s not what things look like that matters. It’s what’s inside. The art of it.’

But Jay wasn’t really listening. He never really listened that summer – too preoccupied by his own thoughts, too sure that what he had would be there for ever. He took this wistful little aside of Joe’s as just another adult homily; nodding vaguely, feeling hot and bored and choked in the airless dark, wanting to get away.

Later it occurred to him that perhaps Joe had been saying goodbye.