‘You sure you’re up for it?’ she asked. ‘You’re not chicken, are you, Jay?’ She pumped her arms and squawked, ‘Bwrakka-bwraaak! Not even a teeny-tiny bit?’ The feeling, that moment of mysterious revelation, had passed. Gilly flicked her cigarette butt into the bushes, still grinning. Jay grabbed at her and mussed her hair to hide his confusion, until she screamed and kicked him in the shin. Normality – at least what passed for normal between them – was resumed.
That night he slept badly, lying awake in the dark thinking of Gilly’s hair – that wonderful, gaudy shade between maple leaf and carrot – and the red shale of the scree above the ash pit, and Zeth’s voice whispering I can wait and You’re dead in his ears, until at last he had to get up and take out Joe’s old red flannel talisman from its usual place in his satchel. He gripped it – worn and shiny with three years of handling – in the palm of his hand, and immediately felt better.
Scared? Of course he wasn’t.
He had magic on his side.
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?’
28
Nether Edge, Summer 1977
JAY WALKED TO THE EDGE, JOE’S TALISMAN TUCKED SNUGLY INTO his pocket. The sun was veiled, as it was for most of that summer, but the sky was hot and pale, bleeding the air of oxygen and the countryside of colour. Fields, trees, flowers all looked to be varying shades of grainy grey, like the screen on Maggie’s black-and-white portable. Above Nether Edge a small bright blur hung in the sky like a beacon. A warning, perhaps.
Gilly was wearing cut-off jeans and a striped T-shirt. Her hair was tied back with a piece of red ribbon. She was eating a sherbert fountain, and her tongue was black with the licorice.
‘I wasn’t sure you’d make it,’ she said.
Jay thought of the talisman in his pocket and shrugged. They were safe, he told himself. Safe. Protected. Unseen. It had worked dozens of times before.
‘Why shouldn’t I?’
Gilly shrugged.
‘They’ve got some kind of a den over there,’ she said, jerking her head towards the canal. ‘A tree house, I think, where they keep their stuff. I’ve seen them going there a couple of times. I dare you to go in.’
‘I don’t do dares,’ said Jay.
Gilly gave him a satirical look.
‘They won’t be there,’ she urged. ‘This time in the morning they’re still in town, or nicking stuff from the market. It’s only a poxy den, Jay. Dare you.’
Her eyes gleamed slyly, that cat’s-eye marble green reflecting the colourless sky. She finished the sherbert fountain and lobbed the packet into the canal, keeping the licorice stub in her mouth, like a cigar butt.
‘Unlesh you’re yeller,’ she said, doing a passable Lee Marvin.