Blackberry Wine Read online

  It was dark in the cellar, the only illumination a dim light bulb hanging from the ceiling. Rows of bottles – most negligible, chosen by Kerry – in the racks on the wall; others in crates on the flagstones. Jay touched the bottles fleetingly as he passed, bringing his face very close, as if to catch the scent of those imprisoned summers. Two or three times he pulled out a bottle and turned it in his hands before replacing it in the rack. He moved aimlessly, without direction, liking the dampness of the cellar and the silence. Even the sound of the London traffic was stilled here, and for a moment he seemed tempted simply to lie down on the smooth, cool floor and go to sleep, perhaps for ever. No-one would look for him here. But instead he felt very wide awake, very alert, as if the silence had cleared his head. There was a charged atmosphere in spite of the stillness, like something waiting to happen.

  The new bottles were in a box at the back of the cellar. A broken ladder had been laid across the top of it, and he moved this aside, dragging the box out with an effort across the flagstones. He lifted out a bottle at random and held it up to the light to decipher the label. Its contents looked inky-red, with a deep layer of sediment at the base. For a moment he imagined he saw something else inside there, a shape, but it was only sediment. Somewhere above him, in the kitchen, the nostalgia station was still tuned to 1975 – Christmas now, ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’, faint but audible through the floor – and he shivered.

  Back in the kitchen he examined the bottle with some curiosity – he had barely glanced at it since he brought it back six weeks before – the wax seal at the neck, the brown cord, the handwritten label – ‘Specials 1975’ – the glass grimed with the dust of Joe’s root cellar. He wondered why he had brought it back from the wreckage. Nostalgia maybe, though his feelings for Joe were still too mixed for that luxury. Anger, confusion, longing washed over him in hot-cold waves. Old man. Wish you were here.

  Inside the bottle something leaped and capered. The bottles in the cellar rattled and danced in reply.

  Sometimes it happens by accident. After years of waiting – for a correct planetary alignment, a chance meeting, a sudden inspiration – the right circumstances occasionally happen of their own accord, slyly, without fanfare, without warning. Jay thinks of it as destiny. Joe called it magic. But sometimes all it is is simple chemistry, something in the air, a single action to bring something which has long remained inert into sudden, inevitable change.

  Layman’s alchemy, Joe called it. The magic of everyday things. Jay Mackintosh reached for a knife to cut the seal.

  3

  IT HAD WITHSTOOD THE YEARS. HIS KNIFE SLICED IT OPEN AND THE cork was still intact beneath. For a moment the scent was so immediately pungent that all he could do was endure it, teeth clenched, as it worked its will on him. It smelt earthy and a little sour, like the canal in midsummer, with a sharpness which reminded him of the vegetable-cutter and the gleeful tang of fresh-dug potatoes. For a second the illusion was so strong that he was actually there in that vanished place, with Joe leaning on his spade and the radio wedged in a fork in a tree, playing ‘Send in the Clowns’ or ‘I’m Not in Love’. A sudden overwhelming excitement took hold of him and he poured a small quantity of the wine into a glass, trying not to spill the liquid in his eagerness. It was dusky-pink, like papaya juice, and it seemed to climb the sides of the glass in a frenzy of anticipation, as if something inside it were alive and anxious to work its magic on his flesh. He looked at it with mingled distrust and longing. A part of him wanted to drink it – had waited years for just this moment – but all the same he hesitated. The liquid in the glass was murky and flecked with flakes of brownish matter, like rust. He suddenly imagined himself drinking, choking, writhing on the tiles in agony. The glass halted halfway to his mouth.

  He looked at the liquid again. The movement he thought he saw had ceased. The scent was faintly sweetish, medicinal, like cough mixture. Once again he wondered why he had brought the bottle with him. There was no such thing as magic. It was something else Joe had made him believe; one more of the old fraud’s trickeries. But there was something in the glass, his mind insisted. Something special.

  His concentration was such that he didn’t hear Kerry come in behind him.

  ‘Oh, so you’re not working.’ Her voice was clear, with just enough of an Irish accent to guard against accusations of having a privileged background. ‘You know, if you were planning on getting pissed you could at least have come to the party with me. It would have been a wonderful opportunity for you to meet people.’

  She put special emphasis on the word wonderful, extending the first syllable to three times its natural length. Jay looked back at her, the wineglass still in his hand. His voice was mocking.

  ‘Oh, you know. I’m always meeting wonderful people. All literary people are wonderful. What I really like is when one of your bright young things comes up to me at one of these wonderful parties and says, “Hey, didn’t you used to be Jay somebody, the guy who wrote that wonderful book?” ’

  Kerry crossed the room, her perspex heels tapping coolly against the tiles, and poured herself a glass of Stolichnaya.

  ‘Now you’re being childish as well as antisocial. If you actually made the effort to write something serious once in a while, instead of wasting your talent on rubbish—’

  ‘Wonderful.’ Jay grinned and tipped the wineglass at her. In the cellar the remaining bottles rattled boisterously, as if in anticipation. Kerry stopped, listened.

  ‘Did you hear something?’

  Jay shook his head, still grinning. She came closer, looked at the glass in his hand and the bottle still standing on the table.

  ‘What is that stuff, anyway?’ Her voice was as sharp and clear as her icicle heels. ‘Some kind of cocktail? It smells disgusting.’

  ‘It’s Joe’s wine. One of the six.’ He turned the bottle around to see the label. ‘Jackapple, 1975. A wonderful vintage.’

  Beside us and around us the bottles were in gleeful ferment. We could hear them whispering, singing, calling, capering. Their laughter was infectious, reckless, a call to arms. Château-Chalon muttered stolid disapproval, but in that raucous, carnival atmosphere his voice sounded like envy. I found myself joining in, rattling in my crate like a common milk bottle, delirious with anticipation, with the knowledge that something was on the way.

  ‘Ugh! God! Don’t drink it. It’s bound to be off.’ Kerry gave a forced laugh. ‘Besides, it’s revolting. It’s like necrophilia, or something. I can’t imagine why you wanted to bring it home at all, in the circumstances.’

  ‘I was planning to drink it, darling, not fuck it,’ muttered Jay.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘Please, darling. Pour it away. It’s probably got all kinds of disgusting bacteria in it. Or worse. Antifreeze or something. You know what the old boy was like.’ Her voice was cajoling. ‘I’ll get you a glass of Stolly instead, OK?’

  ‘Kerry, stop talking like my mother.’

  ‘Then stop behaving like a child. Why can’t you just grow up, for God’s sake?’ It was a perpetual refrain.

  Stubbornly: ‘The wine was Joe’s. I don’t expect you to understand.’

  She sighed, exasperated, and turned away.

  ‘Oh, please yourself. You always do. The way you’ve fixated on that old bugger for all these years, anyone would think he was your father or something, instead of some dirty old git with an eye for little boys. Go on, be a mature adult and poison yourself. If you die they might even do a commemorative reprint of Jackapple Joe, and I could sell my story to the TLS—’

  But Jay was not listening. He lifted the glass to his face. The scent hit him again, the dim cidery scent of Joe’s house, with the incense burning and the tomato plants ripening in the kitchen window. For a moment he thought he heard something, a clatter and glitzy confusion of glass, like a chandelier falling onto a laid table. He took a mouthful.

  ‘Cheers.’

  It tasted as dreadful as it did wh
en he was a boy. There was no grape in this brew, simply a sweetish ferment of flavours, like a whiff of garbage. It smelt like the canal in summer and the derelict railway sidings. It had an acrid taste, like smoke and burning rubber, and yet it was evocative, catching at his throat and his memory, drawing out images he thought were lost for ever. He clenched his fists as the images assailed him, feeling suddenly light-headed.

  ‘Are you OK?’ It was Kerry’s voice, resonant, as if in a dream. She sounded irritated, though there was an anxious edge to her voice. ‘Jay, I told you not to drink that stuff, are you all right?’

  He swallowed with an effort.

  ‘I’m fine. Actually it’s rather pleasant. Pert. Tart. Lovely body. Bit like you, Kes.’ He broke off, coughing, but laughing at the same time. Kerry looked at him, unamused.

  ‘I wish you wouldn’t call me that. It isn’t my name.’

  ‘Neither is Kerry,’ he pointed out maliciously.

  ‘Oh well, if you’re going to be vulgar I’m going to bed. Enjoy your vintage. Whatever turns you on.’

  The words were a challenge which Jay left unanswered, turning his back to the door until she had gone. He was being selfish, he knew. But the wine had awakened something in him, something extraordinary, and he wanted to explore it further. He took another drink and found his palate was becoming accustomed to the wine’s strange flavours. He could taste old fruit now, burnt to hard black sugar, he could smell the juice from the vegetable-cutter and hear Joe singing along to his old radio at the back of the allotment. Impatiently he drained the glass, tasting the zesty heart of the wine, feeling his heart beating with renewed energy, pounding as if he had run a race. Below stairs the five remaining bottles rattled and shook in a frenzy of exuberance. Now his head felt clear, his stomach level. He tried for a moment to identify the sensation he felt and eventually recognized it as joy.

  4

  Pog Hill, Summer 1975

  JACKAPPLE JOE. AS GOOD A NAME AS ANY. HE INTRODUCED HIMSELF as Joe Cox, with a slanted smile, as if to challenge disbelief, but even in those days it might have been anything, changing with the seasons and his changing address.

  ‘We could be cousins, you and me,’ he said on that first day, as Jay watched him in wary fascination from the top of the wall. The vegetable-cutter whirred and clattered, throwing out pieces of sour-sweet fruit or vegetable into the bucket at his feet. ‘Cox and Mackintosh. Both apples, aren’t we? That must make us nearly family, I reckon.’ His accent was exotic, bewildering, and Jay stared at him without comprehension. Joe shook his head, grinning.

  ‘Didn’t know you was called after an apple, did you? It’s a goodun, an American red apple. Plenty of taste. Got a young tree meself, back there.’ He jerked his head towards the back of the house. ‘But it’s not taken that well. I reckon it needs a sight more time to get comfortable.’ Jay continued to watch him with all the wary cynicism of his twelve years, alert for any sign of mockery.

  ‘You make it sound like they’ve got feelings.’

  Joe looked at him.

  ‘Course they ave. Just like anythin else that grows.’

  The boy watched the rotating blades of the vegetable-cutter in fascination. The funnel-shaped machine bucked and roared between Joe’s hands, spitting out chunks of white and pink and blue and yellow flesh.

  ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘What’s it look like?’ The old man jerked his chin at a cardboard box lying by the wall which separated them. ‘Pass us them jacks over there, will you?’

  ‘Jacks?’

  A slight gesture of impatience towards the box: ‘Jackapples.’

  Jay glanced down. The drop was easy, five feet at the most, but the garden was enclosed, with only the scrub of waste ground and the railway line at his back, and his city upbringing had taught him wariness of strangers. Joe grinned.

  ‘I’ll not bite, lad,’ he said mildly.

  Annoyed, Jay dropped down into the garden.

  The jackapples were long and red and oddly pointed at one end. One or two had been cut open as Joe dug them up, showing flesh which looked tropically pink in the sun. The boy staggered a little under the weight of the box.

  ‘Watch your step,’ called Joe. ‘Don’t drop em. They’ll bruise.’

  ‘But these are just potatoes.’

  ‘Aye,’ said Joe, without taking his eyes from the vegetable-cutter.

  ‘I thought you said they were apples, or something.’

  ‘Jacks. Spuds. Taters. Jackapples,. Poms de tair.’

  ‘Don’t look like much to me,’ said Jay.

  Joe shook his head and began to feed the roots into the vegetable-cutter. Their scent was sweetish, like papaya.

  ‘I brought these home from South America after the war,’ he said. ‘Grew em from seed right here in my back garden. Took me five years just to get the soil right. If you want roasters, you grow King Edwards. If you want salads, it’s your Charlottes or your Jerseys. If it’s chippers you’re after, then it’s your Maris Piper. But these’ – he reached down to pick one up, rubbing the blackened ball of his thumb lovingly across the pinkish skin – ‘Older than New York, so old it doesn’t even have an English name. Seed more precious than powdered gold. These aren’t just potatoes, lad. These are little nuggets of lost time, from when people still believed in magic and when half the world was still blank on the maps. You don’t make chips from these.’ He shook his head again, his eyes brimful of laughter under the thick grey brows. ‘These are me Specials.’

  Jay watched him cautiously, unsure whether he was mad or simply making fun.

  ‘So what are you making?’ he asked at last.

  Joe tossed the last jackapple into the cutter and grinned.

  ‘Wine, lad. Wine.’

  That was the summer of ’75. Jay was nearly thirteen. Eyes narrow, mouth tight, face a white-knuckle fist closing over something too secret to be examined. Lately a resident of the Moorlands School in Leeds, now with eight weeks of holidays stretching strange and empty till the next term. He hated it here already. This place with its bleak and hazy skyline, its blue-black hills crawling with yellow loaders, its slums and pit houses and its people, with their sharp faces and flat Northern voices. It would be all right, his mother told him. He would like Kirby Monckton. He would enjoy the change. Everything would be sorted out. But Jay knew better. The gulf of his parents’ divorce opened up beneath him, and he hated them, hated the place to which they had sent him, hated the gleaming new five-speed Raleigh bike delivered that morning for his birthday – bribery as contemptible as the message which accompanied it – ‘With love from Mum and Dad’ – so falsely normal, as if the world wasn’t coming softly apart around him. His rage was cold, glassy, cutting him from the rest of the world so that sounds became muffled and people were walking trees. Rage was inside him, seething, waiting desperately for something to happen.

  They had never been a close family. Until that summer he had only seen his grandparents half a dozen times, at Christmases or birthdays, and they treated him with dutiful, distant affection. His grandmother was frail and elegant, like the china she loved and which adorned every available surface. His grandfather was bluff and soldierly and shot grouse without a licence on the nearby moors. Both deplored the trade unions, the rise of the working class, rock music, men with long hair and the admission of women into Oxford. Jay soon understood that if he washed his hands before meals and seemed to listen to everything they said he could enjoy unlimited freedom. That was how he met Joe.

  Kirby Monckton is a small Northern town similar to many others. Built on coal mining, it was in decline even then, with two of the four pits shut and the remaining two struggling. Where the pits have closed, the villages built to supply them with labour died, too, leaving rows of pit houses staggering towards dereliction, half of them empty, windows boarded up, gardens piled with refuse and weeds. The centre was little better – a row of shops, a few pubs, a mini-market, a police station with a grille across its window. To o
ne side, the river, the railway, the old canal. To the other, a ridge of hills reaching towards the feet of the Pennines. This was Upper Kirby, where Jay’s grandparents lived.

  Looking towards the hills, over fields and woodland, it is almost possible to imagine that there have never been any mines. This is the acceptable face of Kirby Monckton, where terraces are referred to as mews cottages. At its highest point you can see the town itself a few miles away, a smear of yellowish smoke across an uneven horizon, with pylons marching across the fields towards the slaty scar of the open-cast mine, but the hollow is relentlessly charming, shielded by the ridge. The houses are for the most part larger, more elaborate here. Deep Victorian terraces of mellow Yorkshire stone, with leaded panes and mock-Gothic doorways, and huge secluded gardens with fruit-trees en espalier and smooth, well-tended lawns.

  Jay was impervious to these charms. To his London-accustomed eyes Upper Kirby looked precarious, balanced on the stony edge of the moor. The spaces – the distances between buildings – dizzied him. The scarred mess of Lower Monckton and Nether Edge looked deserted in its smoke, like something during the war. He missed London’s cinemas and theatres, the record shops, the galleries, the museums. He missed the people. He missed the familiar accents of London, the sound of traffic and the smells. He rode his bike for miles along the unfamiliar deserted roads, hating everything he saw.

  His grandparents never interfered. They approved of outdoor pastimes, never noticing that he returned home trembling and exhausted with rage every afternoon. The boy was always polite, always well groomed. He listened intelligently and with interest to what they said. He cultivated a boyish cheeriness. He was the cleanest-cut comic-book schoolboy hero imaginable, and he revelled sourly in his deception.