Blackberry Wine (11 page)

‘It’s amazing,’ he said at last. ‘I really thought you’d gone.’

Joe looked pleased.

‘You’re not the only one that thinks that, lad,’ he said mysteriously. ‘Look down there.’

Jay looked down into the cutting. The signal box which had been Joe’s greenhouse was still standing, though in a
State of dereliction; vines grew out of the punctured roof and tumbled down the peeling sides. The lines had been taken up and the sleepers dug out – all but the fifty-yard stretch between the box and Joe’s house, as if overlooked by some accident. Between the rust-red tracks weeds were sprouting.

‘Come next year no-one’ll even remember there were a railway down Pog Hill. Praps people’ll let us alone then.’

Jay nodded slowly, still speechless with amazement and relief.

‘Perhaps they will.’

THE AIR SMELT OF NIGHTFALL, BITTER-SMOKY, LIKE LAPSANG TEA
, mild enough to sleep outside. The vineyard on the left was filled with noises: birds, frogs, insects. Jay could still see the path at his feet, faintly silvered with the last of the sunset, but the sun had left the face of the house and it was lightless, almost forbidding. He began to wonder whether he should have postponed his visit till the morning.

The thought of the long walk to the village dissuaded him. He was wearing boots, which had seemed like a good enough idea when he left London, but which now, after so many hours of travelling, had grown tight and uncomfortable. If he could only get into the house – from what he’d seen of security that wouldn’t be difficult – he could sleep there and make his way to the village in daylight.

It wasn’t as if he were trespassing, really. After all, the house was nearly his. He reached the vegetable patch. Something on the side of the house – a shutter, perhaps – was flapping rhythmically against the plaster, making a nagging, mournful sound. On the far side of the building shadows moved under the trees, creating the illusion of a man standing there, a bent figure in cap and overcoat. Something whipped across his path with a snapping noise – a
prickly artichoke stem, still topped with last year’s flower, now desiccated almost to nothing. Beyond it, the overgrown remnants of the vegetable patch swayed briskly in the freshening wind. Halfway across the abandoned garden something fluttered, as if snagged on a stiff piece of briar. A scrap of cloth. From where Jay was standing he could see nothing more, but he knew immediately what it was. Flannel. Red. Dropping his bag by the side of the path he strode into the drift of weeds which had been the vegetable garden, pushing aside the long stems as he passed. It was a sign. It had to be.

Just as he stepped forward to take hold of the piece of flannel something crunched briefly under his left foot and gave way with an angry clatter of metal, punching through the soft leather of his boot and into his ankle. Jay’s feet gave way, tipping him backwards into the greenery, and the pain, bad enough at first, bloomed sickeningly. Swearing, he grabbed at the object in the dim light, and his fingers encountered something jagged and metallic attached to his foot.

A trap, he thought, bewildered. Some sort of trap.

It hurt to think straight, and for precious seconds Jay yanked mindlessly at the object as it bit deeper through his boot. His fingers felt slick on the metal, and he realized he was bleeding. He began to panic.

With an effort he forced himself to stop moving. If it was a trap, then it would have to be forced open. Paranoid to imagine someone had set it deliberately. It must have been someone trying to catch rabbits, perhaps, or foxes, or something.

For a moment anger dulled the pain. The irresponsibility, the criminal carelessness of placing animal traps so close to someone’s house – to
his
house. Jay fumbled with the trap. It felt ancient, primitive. It was a clam-shell design, fixed into the ground by a metal peg. There was a catch at the side. Jay cursed and struggled with the mechanism, feeling the teeth of the trap crunching deeper into his ankle with
every move he made. Finally he managed the catch, but it took several tries to push open the metal jaws, and when he finally got it clear he pulled himself back, awkwardly, and tried to assess the damage. His foot had already swollen tight against the leather, so that the boot would be difficult or impossible to remove in the normal way.

Trying not to think about the types of bacteria which might even now be working their way into him, he pushed himself upright and managed to hop clumsily back to the path, where he sat down on the stones to try to remove his boot.

It took him nearly ten minutes. By the time he had finished he was sweating. It was too dark to see very much, but even so he could tell it would be some time before he dared to try walking.

JOE’S NEW DEFENCES WERE NOT THE ONLY CHANGE AT POG HILL
that year. Nether Edge had visitors. Jay still went to the Edge every couple of days, attracted by its promise of gentle dereliction, of things left to rot in peace. Even at the peak of that summer he never abandoned his favourite haunts; he still visited the canal side and the ash pit and the dump, partly to look for useful things for Joe and partly because the place still fascinated him. It must have attracted the gypsies, too, because one day there they were, a shabby foursome of caravans, squared together like pioneers’ wagons against the enemy. The caravans were grey and rusting, axles sagging under the weight of accumulated baggage, doors hanging by a string, windows whitening with age. The people were equally disappointing. Six adults and as many children, clad in jeans or overalls or cheap bright market-stall nylons, they gave off an air of distant grubbiness, a visual extension of the smells which floated from their camp, the permanent odour of frying grease and dirty laundry and petrol and garbage.

Jay had never seen gypsies before. This drab, prosaic group was not what his reading had prepared him to expect. He had imagined horse-drawn wagons with outlandishly
decorated sides, dark-haired dangerous girls with daggers in their belts, blind crones with the gift of far seeing. Certainly Joe’s experiences with gypsies seemed to confirm this, and as Jay watched the caravans from his vantage point above the lock he felt annoyed at their intrusion. These seemed to be ordinary people, and until Joe confirmed their exotic lineage Jay was inclined to think they were nothing but tourists, campers from the south walking the moors.

‘No, lad,’ Joe said as he pointed out the distant camp, a pale string of smoke rising from a tin chimney into the sky of Nether Edge. ‘They’re not trippers. They’re gypsies all right. Mebbe not proper Romanies, but gyppos, you might call em. Travellers. Like I was once.’ He squinted curiously through cigarette smoke at the camp. ‘Reckon they’ll stay the winter,’ he said. ‘Move on when spring comes. No-one’ll bother em downt Edge. No-one ever goes there any more.’

Not strictly true, of course. Jay considered Nether Edge his territory, and for a few days he watched the gypsies with all the resentment he had felt against Zeth and his gang that first year. He rarely saw much movement from the caravans, though sometimes there was washing strung out on nearby trees. A dog tethered to the nearest of the vehicles yapped shrilly and intermittently. Once or twice he saw a woman carry water in large canisters to her vehicle. The water came from a kind of spigot, set into the square of concrete by the dirt track. There was a similar dispenser on the other side of the camp.

‘Set it up years back,’ explained Joe. ‘Gypsy camp, with water an lectricity laid on. There’s a pay meter down there that they use, an a septic tank. Even rubbish gets collected once a week. You’d think more people’d use it, but they don’t. Funny folk, gypsies.’

The last time Joe remembered gypsies on the waste ground was about ten years previously.

‘Romanies, they were,’ he said. ‘You don’t get many proper Romanies nowadays. Used to buy their fruit and
veg from me. There wasn’t many that’d sell to em in them days. Said they were no better than beggars.’ He grinned. ‘Well, I’m not sayin everythin they did was dead-straight honest, but you’ve got to get by when you’re on the road. They worked a way to beat the meter. It took fifty pences, see? Well, they used water and lectricity all summer, but when they’d gone and council came round to empty the meter, all there was at bottom was a pool of water. They never did find out how they’d done it. Lock hadn’t been touched. Nothin seemed to have bin interfered with at all.’

Jay looked at Joe with interest.

‘So how did they do it?’ he enquired curiously.

Joe grinned again and tapped the side of his nose.

‘Alchemy,’
he whispered, to Jay’s annoyance, and would say no more on the subject.

Joe’s tales had renewed his interest in the gypsies. Jay watched the camp for several days after that, but saw no evidence of secret goings-on. Eventually he abandoned his lookout post at the lock to hunt more interesting game, searching for comics and magazines from the dump, combing the railway for its everyday leavings. He worked out a good way of getting free coal for Joe’s kitchen stove. There were two coal trains a day, rumbling slowly along the line from Kirby Main. Twenty-four trucks on each, with a man sitting on the last one to make sure no-one tried to climb onto the wagons. There had been accidents in the past, Joe said; kids who’d dared each other to jump onto the trains.

‘They might look slow,’ he said darkly, ‘but every one of them trucks is a forty-tonner. Never try to get up on one, lad.’

Jay never did. Instead he found a better way, and Joe’s stove lived on it all through that summer into autumn, when they finally closed down the line altogether.

Every day, twice a day, just before the arrival of the train, Jay would line up a row of old tin cans on the side of the railway bridge. He arranged them in pyramids, like coconuts at a shy, for maximum appeal. The bored workman on
the last truck could never resist the challenge they presented. Every time the train passed by he would lob chunks of coal at the cans, trying to knock them off the bridge, and Jay could always count on at least half-a-dozen good-sized pieces of coal each time. He stored these in an empty three-gallon paint tin, hidden in the bushes, and every few days, when this was full, he delivered the coal to Joe’s house. It was on one of these occasions, when he was fooling about by the railway bridge, that he heard the sound of gunfire from Nether Edge and froze, the coalbox dropping from his hand.

Zeth was back.

JAY PULLED A HANDKERCHIEF OUT OF HIS DUFFEL BAG AND USED
it to staunch the blood, beginning to feel cold now and wishing he’d brought his Burberry. He also took out one of the sandwiches he had bought at the station earlier that day and forced himself to eat. It tasted foul, but the sickness receded a little and he thought he felt a little warmer. It was almost night. A sliver of moon was rising, just enough to cast shadows, and in spite of the pain in his foot he looked around curiously. He glanced at his watch, almost expecting to see the luminous dial of the Seiko he got for Christmas when he was fourteen, the one Zeth broke during that last, most dreadful week of August. But the Rolex was not luminous.
Trop
tacky,
mon cher
. Kerry always went for class.

In the shadows at the corner of the building something moved. He called out, ‘Hey!’ hoisting himself up onto his good leg and limping towards the house. ‘Hey! Please! Wait! Is anyone there?’

Something smacked against the side of the building with the same flat sound he heard before. A shutter, perhaps. He thought he saw it outlined against the purple-black sky, flapping loosely in the breeze. He
shivered. No-one there after all. If only he could get into the house, out of the cold.

The window was about three feet from the ground. There was a deep ledge inside, half blocked with debris, but he found that he could clear enough space to push through. The air smelt of paint. He moved carefully, feeling for broken glass, swinging his leg over the ledge and into the room, pulling the duffel bag in behind him. His eyes had become accustomed to the dark and he could see that the room was mostly clear, except for a table and a chair in the centre and a pile of something – sacks, maybe – in one corner. Using the chair for support, Jay moved over to the pile and found a sleeping bag and a pillow rolled snugly against the wall, along with a cardboard box which contained paint tins and a bundle of wax candles.

Candles?
What the hell …?

He reached into his jeans pocket for a lighter. It was only a cheap Bic, and almost out of fuel, but he managed to strike a flame. The candles were dry. The wick spluttered, then flared. The room was mellowly illumined.

‘That’s something, I suppose.’

He could sleep here. The room was sheltered. There were blankets and bedclothes and the remains of that lunch-time’s sandwiches. For a moment the pain in his foot was forgotten, and he grinned at the thought that this was home. It deserved a celebration.

Rummaging through the duffel bag, he pulled out one of Joe’s bottles, and cut open the seal and the green cord with the tip of his penknife. The clear scent of elderflower filled the air. He drank a little, tasting that familiar, cloying flavour, like fruit left to rot in the dark. Definitely a vintage year, he told himself, and despite everything he began to laugh shakily. He drank a little more. In spite of the taste the wine was warming, musky; he sat down on the rolled-up bedding, took another mouthful and began to feel a little better.

He reached into his bag again and took out the radio. He
turned it on, half expecting the white noise he had heard on the train all the way from Marseilles, but surprisingly the signal was clear. Not the oldies station, of course, but some kind of local French radio, a low warble of music, something he didn’t recognize. Jay laughed again, feeling suddenly light-headed.

Inside the duffel bag the four remaining Specials began their chorus again, a ferment of yahoos and catcalls and war cries, redoubling in frenzy until the pitch was wild, feverish, a vulgar champagne of sounds and impressions and voices and memories, all shaken into a delirious cocktail of triumph. It pulled me along, dragging me with it, so that, for a moment, I was no longer myself – Fleurie, a respectable vintage with just a hint of blackcurrant – but a cauldron of spices, frothing and seething and going to the head in a wild flush of heat. Something was getting ready to happen. I knew it. Then, suddenly, silence.