Joanne Harris - Blackberry Wine

For a second there was silence in her wake. Then the whisperings began. The room was awash with them. For a moment Jay was not sure whether these were real sounds or in his own head. The duffel bag clinked and clattered, rattled and rolled. The sound, imaginary or not, was overwhelming.

Then Byron Shirt stood up and began to clap.

A couple of the other students looked at him cautiously, then joined in. Several others joined them. Soon half the class was standing up, and most were clapping. They were still clapping as Jay picked up his duffel bag and turned towards the door, opened it, and left, closing it very gently behind him. The applause began to tail off, a number of voices murmuring confusion. From inside the duffel bag came the sound of bottles clinking together. Beside me, their work done, the Specials whispered their secrets.

Pog Hill, July 1975

HE WENT TO SEE JOE MANY MORE TIMES AFTER THAT, THOUGH HE never really got to like his wine. Joe showed no surprise when he arrived, but simply went to fetch the lemonade bottle, as if he had been expecting him. Nor did he ask about the charm. Jay asked him about it a few times, with the scepticism of one who secretly longs to be convinced, but the old man was evasive.

‘Magic,’ he said, winking to prove it was a joke. ‘Learned it off of a lady in Puerto Cruz.’

‘I thought you said Haiti,’ interrupted Jay.

Joe shrugged. ‘Same difference,’ he said blandly. ‘Worked, didn’t it?’

Jay had to admit that it worked. But it was just herbs, wasn’t it? Herbs and bits of stick tied into a piece of cloth. And yet it had made him…

Joe grinned.

‘Nah, lad. Not invisible .’ He pushed the bill of his cap up from his eyes.

‘What then?’

Joe looked at him. ‘Some plants have properties, don’t they?’ he said.

Jay nodded.

‘Aspirin. Digitalis. Quinine. What woulda been called magic in the old days.’

‘Medicines.’

‘If you like. But a few hundred years ago there were no difference between magic and medicine. People just knew things. Believed things. Like chewin cloves to cure toothache, or pennyroyal for a sore throat, or rowan twigs to keep away evil spirits.’ He glanced at the boy, as if to check for any sign of mockery. ‘Properties,’ he repeated. ‘You can learn a lot if you travel enough, an you keep an open mind.’

Jay was never certain later whether Joe was a true believer or whether his casual acceptance of magic was part of an elaborate plan to baffle him. Certainly the old man liked a joke. Jay’s total ignorance of anything to do with gardening amused him, and for weeks he had the boy believing that a harmless stand of lemongrass was really a spaghetti tree – showing him the pale soft shoots of ‘spaghetti’ between the papery leaves – or that giant hogweeds could pull out their roots and walk, like triffids, or that you really could catch mice with valerian. Jay was gullible, and Joe delighted in finding new ways to catch him out. But in some things he was genuine. Maybe he had finally come to believe in his own fiction, after years of persuading others. His life was dominated by small rituals and superstitions, many taken from the battered copy of Culpeper’s Herbal he kept by his bedside. He tickled tomatoes to make them grow. He played the radio constantly, claiming that the plants grew stronger with music. They preferred Radio 1 – he claimed leeks grew up to two inches bigger after Ed Stewart’s Junior Choice - and Joe would be there, singing along to ‘Disco Queen’ or ‘Stand By Your Man’ as he worked, his old-crooner’s voice rising solemnly above the redcurrant bushes as he picked and pruned. He always planted when there was a new moon and picked when the moon was full. He had a lunar chart in his greenhouse, each day marked in a dozen different inks: brown for potatoes, yellow for parsnips, orange for carrots. Watering, too, was done to an astrological schedule, as was the pruning and positioning of trees. And the funny thing was that the garden thrived on this eccentric treatment, growing strong, luxuriant rows of cabbages and turnips, carrots which were sweet and succulent and mysteriously free of slugs, trees whose branches fairly touched the ground under the weight of apples, pears, plums, cherries. Brightly coloured Oriental-looking signs Sellotaped to tree branches supposedly kept the birds from eating the fruit. Astrological symbols, painstakingly set into the gravel path and constructed from pieces of broken pottery and coloured glass, lined the garden beds. With Joe, Chinese medicine rubbed shoulders companionably with English folklore, chemistry with mysticism. For all Jay knew he may have believed it. Certainly, Jay believed him. At thirteen anything is possible. Everyday magic, that was what Joe called it. Layman’s alchemy. No fuss, no fireworks. Just a mixture of herbs and roots, gathered under favourable planetary conditions. A muttered incantation, a sketched air symbol learned from gypsies on his travels. Perhaps Jay would not have accepted anything less prosaic. But in spite of his beliefs – maybe even because of them – there was something deeply restful about Joe, an inner calm which encircled him and which filled the boy with curiosity and a kind of envy. He seemed so tranquil, alone in his little house, surrounded by plants, and yet he had a remarkable sense of wonder and a gleeful fascination with the world. He was almost without education, having left school at twelve to go down the mines, but he was an endless source of information, anecdotes and folklore. As the summer passed, Jay found himself going to see Joe more and more often. He never asked questions, but allowed Jay to talk to him as he worked in his garden or his unofficial allotment on the railway bank, occasionally nodding to show that he’d heard, that he was listening. They snacked on slabs of fruit cake and thick bacon and egg sandwiches – no Trimble loaves for Joe – and drank mugs of strong, sweet tea. From time to time Jay brought cigarettes and sweets or magazines, and Joe accepted these gifts without especial gratitude and without surprise, as he did the boy’s presence. As his shyness abated Jay even read him some of his stories, to which he listened in solemn and, he thought, appreciative silence. When Jay didn’t want to talk he would tell the boy about himself, about his work in the mines and how he went to France during the war and was stationed in Dieppe for six months before a grenade blew two fingers off his hand – wiggling the reduced limb like an agile starfish – then how, being unfit for service, it was the mines again for six years before he took off for America on a freighter.

‘Cause you don’t get to see much of the world from underground, lad, and I allus wanted to see what else there was. Have you done much travellin?’

Jay told him he had been to Florida twice with his parents, to the south of France, to Tenerife and the Algarve for holidays. Joe dismissed these with a sniff.

‘I mean proper travellin , lad. Not all that tourist-brochure rubbish, but the real thing. The Pont-Neuf in the early morning, when there’s no-one up but the tramps coming out from under the bridges and out of the Metro, and the sun shinin on the water. New York. Central Park in spring. Rome. Ascension Island. Crossin the Italian alps by donkey. The vegetable caique from Crete. Himalayas on foot. Eatin rice off leaves in the Temple of Ganesh. Caught in a squall off the coast of New Guinea. Spring in Moscow and a whole winter of dogshit comin out under the meltin snow.’ His eyes were gleaming. ‘I’ve seen all of those things, lad,’ he said softly. ‘And more besides. I promised mesself I’d see everything.’