He gave a sleepy, sour croak of laughter. Jackapple Joe never even came close to what really happened. It was a fabrication, a dream of what things should have been like, a naïve re-enactment of those magical, terrible summers. It gave a meaning to what had remained meaningless. In his book, Joe was the bluff, friendly old man who steered him towards adulthood. Jay was the generic apple-pie boy, rosily, artfully ingenuous. His childhood was gilded, his adolescence charmed. Forgotten, all those times when the old man bored him, troubled him, filled him with rage. Forgotten, the times Jay was sure he was crazy. His disappearance, his betrayal, his lies; papered over, tempered with nostalgia. No wonder everyone loved that book. It was the very triumph of deceit, of whimsy over reality, the childhood we all secretly believe we had, but which none of us ever did. Jackapple Joe was the book Joe himself might have written. The worst kind of lie – half true, but lying in what really matters. Lying in the heart.
‘Tha should ave gone back, tha knows,’ said Joe matter-of-factly. He was sitting on the table next to the typewriter, a mug of tea in one hand. He’d swapped the Thin Lizzy T-shirt for one from Pink Floyd’s Animals tour. ‘She waited for you, and you never came. She deserved better than that, lad. Even at fifteen, you should have known that.’
Jay stared at him. He looked very real. He touched his forehead with the back of his hand, but the skin was cool.
‘Joe.’
He knew what it was, of course. All that thinking about Joe, his subconscious desire to find him there, his re-enactment of Joe’s greatest fantasy.
‘You never did find out where they went, did you?’
‘No, I never did.’ It was ridiculous, talking to a fantasy, but there was something oddly comforting in it, too. Joe seemed to listen, head cocked slightly to one side, the mug held loosely between his fingers.
‘You were the one left me. After everything you promised. You left me. You never even said goodbye.’ Even though it was a dream, Jay could feel anger crackling in his voice. ‘You’re one to tell me I should have gone back.’
Joe shrugged, unruffled. ‘People move on,’ he said calmly. ‘People go to find themselves, or lose themselves, whatever. Pick your own clee-shay. Anyroad, isn’t that what you’re doing now? Runnin away?’
‘I don’t know what I’m doing now,’ said Jay.
‘That Kerry, anall.’ Joe continued, as if he hadn’t heard. ‘She were another. You just never know when you’ve hit lucky.’ He grinned. ‘Did you know she wears green contact lenses?’
‘What?’
‘Contact lenses. Her eyes are really blue. All this time and you never knew.’
‘This is ridiculous,’ Jay muttered. ‘Anyway, you’re not even here.’
‘Here? Here?’ Joe turned towards him, pushing his cap back from his face in the characteristic gesture Jay remembered. He was grinning, the way he always did when he was about to say something outrageous. ‘Who’s to say where here is, anyroad? Who’s to say you’re here?’
Jay closed his eyes. The old man’s after-image danced briefly on his retina like a moth at a window.
‘I always hated it when you talked like that,’ said Jay.
‘Like what?’
‘All that Grasshopper mystical stuff.’
Joe chuckled.
‘Philosophy of the Orient, lad. Learned it off of monks in Tibet, that time when I were on the road.’
‘You were never on the road,’ Jay said. ‘Nowhere further than the Ml, anyhow.’
He fell asleep to the sound of Joe’s laughter.
26
Pog Hill, Summer 1977
JOE WAS IN SPLENDID FORM FOR THE FIRST PART OF THAT SUMMER. He seemed more youthful than Jay had ever seen him, filled with ideas and projects. He worked on his allotment most days, though with more caution than of old, and they took their tea breaks in the kitchen, surrounded by tomato plants. Gilly came over every couple of days, and they would go down into the railway cutting and collect treasures in the usual way, which they would then bring up the banking to Joe’s house.
They had moved away from Monckton Town in May, Gilly explained, when a group of local kids had begun causing trouble at their previous camp.
‘Bastards,’ she said casually, dragging on the cigarette they were sharing and passing it back to Jay. ‘First it was name-calling. Big fucking deal. Then they kept banging on the doors at night, then it was stones at the windows, then fireworks under the van. Then they poisoned our old dog, and Maggie said enough was enough.’
Gilly had started at the local comprehensive that year. She got on with most people, she said, but with these kids it was different. She was casual enough about the problem, but Jay guessed it must have got pretty bad for Maggie to move the trailer so far away.
‘The worst of them – the ringleader – is a girl called Glenda,’ she told him. ‘She’s in the year above me at school. I fought her a couple of times. No-one else dares do anything to her because of her brother.’
Jay looked at her.
‘You know him,’ said Gilly, taking another drag on the cigarette. ‘That big bastard with the tattoos.’
‘Zeth.’
‘Aye. At least he’s left school now. I don’t see him much, except down by the Edge sometimes, shooting birds.’ She gave a shrug. ‘I don’t go there often,’ she added with a touch of defensiveness. ‘Not really often, anyway. I don’t like to.’
Nether Edge was theirs now, Jay gathered. A gang of six or seven, aged twelve to fifteen and led by Zeth’s sister. At weekends they would go into the town and dare each other to shoplift small items from the newsagent’s – usually sweets and cigarettes – then down to the Edge to hang out or let off fireworks. Passers-by tended to avoid them, fearing abuse or harassment. Even the usual dog-walkers avoided the place now.
The news left Jay feeling strangely bereft. After the rock fight he had remained wary of the Edge, always carrying Joe’s talisman in his pocket, always on the lookout for trouble. He avoided the canal, the ash pit and the lock, which seemed too risky now. He wasn’t going to run into Zeth if he could help it. But Gilly wasn’t afraid. Not of Zeth, or of Glenda. Her caution was for him, not for herself.
Jay felt a surge of indignation.
‘Well, I’m not going to stay away,’ he said hotly. ‘I’m not afraid of a bunch of little girls. Are you?’
‘Of course not!’ Her denial confirmed his suspicions. Jay felt a sudden impulse to prove to her that he could hold his own as well as she could – ever since the rock fight in the ash pit he had felt that, when it came to natural aggression, she had him at a disadvantage.
‘We could go tomorrow,’ he suggested. ‘Go to the ash pit and dig up some bottles.’
Gilly grinned. In the sunlight her hair glowed almost as brightly as the end of the cigarette. There was a pink stripe of sunburn over her nose. Jay felt a wave of some emotion he could not recognize wash over him, so strong that he felt slightly sick. As if something had shifted inside him, tuning into a frequency hitherto unknown and unguessed at. He felt a sudden, incomprehensible urge to touch her hair. Gilly looked at him derisively.