Joanne Harris - Blackberry Wine

He lit some candles, then made a fire in the grate, using old newspapers he had found in a box upstairs and the wood from the back of the house. Several times the paper flared furiously, then went out, but finally the split logs caught. Jay fed the fire carefully, with a slight feeling of surprise at the pleasure it gave him. There was something primitive in this simple act, something which reminded him of the Westerns he’d liked so much as a boy.

He opened his case and put his typewriter on the table next to the bottles of wine, pleased with the effect. He almost felt he might be able to write something tonight, something new. No science fiction tonight. Jonathan Winesap was on vacation. Tonight he would see what Jay Mackintosh could do.

He sat at the typewriter. It was a clumsy thing, spring-actioned, hard on the fingers. He’d kept it out of affectation at first, though it was years since he had used it regularly. Now the keys felt good beneath his hands and he typed a few lines experimentally across the ribbon.

It sounded good, too. But without paper…

The unfinished manuscript of Stout Cortez was in an envelope at the bottom of his case. He took it out, and reversed the first page as he slipped it into the slot. The machine in front of him felt like a car, a tank, a rocket. Around him the room buzzed and fizzled like dark champagne. Beneath his fingers the typewriter keys jumped and snapped. He lost track of time. Of everything.

Pog Hill, Summer 1977

THE GIRL’S NAME WAS GILLY. JAY SAW HER QUITE OFTEN AFTER that, down at Nether Edge, and they sometimes played together by the canal, collecting rubbish and treasures and picking wild spinach or dandelions for the family pot. They weren’t really gypsies, Gilly told him scornfully, but travellers , people who couldn’t stay in one place for long and who despised the capitalist property market. Her mother, Maggie, had lived in a tepee in Wales until Gilly was born, then had decided it was time for a more stable environment for the child. Hence the trailer, an old fish van, renovated and refurbished to accommodate two people and a dog.

Gilly had no father. Maggie didn’t like men, she explained, because they were the instigators of the Judaeo-Christian patriarchal society, hell-bent on the subjugation of women. This kind of talk always made Jay a little nervous, and he was always careful to be especially polite to Maggie in case she ever decided he was the enemy, but although she sometimes sighed over his gender, in the same way that one might over a handicapped infant, she never held it against him.

Gilly got on with Joe immediately. Jay introduced them the week after the rock fight, and knew a tiny stab of jealousy at their rapport. Joe knew many of the region’s itinerants, and had already begun to trade with Maggie, swapping vegetables and preserves for the afghans she knitted from thrift-shop bargains, with which Joe used to cover his tender perennials – this said with a chuckle which made Maggie squawk with laughter – on cold nights. She knew a great deal about plants, and both she and Gilly accepted Joe’s talismans and perimeter-protection rituals with perfect serenity, as if such things were quite natural to them. As Joe worked in the allotment, Jay and Gilly would help him with his other tasks and he would talk to them or sing along to the radio as they collected seeds in jars or sewed charms into red flannel bags or fetched old pallets from the railway bank in which to store that season’s ripening fruit. It was as if Gilly’s presence had mellowed Joe somehow. There was something different in the way he spoke to her, something which excluded Jay, not unkindly, but palpably nevertheless. Perhaps because she, too, was a traveller. Perhaps simply because she was a girl.

Not that Gilly conformed in any way to Jay’s expectations. She was fiercely independent, always taking the lead, in spite of his seniority, physically reckless, cheerily foul-mouthed to a degree which secretly shocked his conservative upbringing, filled with bizarre beliefs and ideologies culled from her mother’s diverse store. Space aliens, feminist politics, alternative religions, pendulum power, numerology, environmental issues, all had their place in Maggie’s philosophy, and Gilly, in her turn, accepted them all. From her Jay learned about the ozone layer and bread-cakes mysteriously shaped like Jesus, or what she called the New Killer Threat, or shamanism, or saving the whales. In turn she was the ideal audience for his stories. They spent days together, sometimes helping Joe, but often simply loafing around by the canal, talking or exploring.

They saw Zeth once more after the rock fight, some distance away by the dump, and were careful to avoid him. Surprisingly enough, Gilly wasn’t in the least afraid of him, but Jay was. He hadn’t forgotten what Zeth had shouted the day they routed him from the lock, and he would have been perfectly happy never to set eyes on him again. Obviously, he was never going to be that lucky.

Lansquenet, March 1999

IT WAS EARLY THE FOLLOWING MORNING WHEN HE GOT INTO AGEN. He learned from Joséphine that there were only two buses a day, and after a quick coffee and a couple of croissants at the Café des Marauds he left, eager to collect his paperwork from the agency. It took longer than Jay had expected. Legal completion had taken place the previous day, but electricity and gas had not yet been restored, and the agency was reluctant to hand over keys without all the documentation from England. Plus, the woman at the agency told him, there were additional complications. His offer on the farm had taken place at a time when another offer was under consideration – had, in fact, been accepted by the owner, although nothing had yet been made official. Jay’s offer – superior to this earlier one by about £5,000 – had effectively scratched this previous arrangement, but the person to whom the farm had been promised had called earlier that morning, making trouble, making threats.

‘You see, Monsieur Mackintosh,’ said the agent apologetically. ‘These small communities – a promise of land – they don’t understand that a casual word cannot be said to be legally binding.’ Jay nodded sympathetically. ‘Besides,’ continued the agent, ‘the vendor, who lives in Toulouse, is a young man with a family to support. He inherited the farm from his great-uncle. He had no real contact with the old man for some time, and has no responsibility for what he might have promised before his death.’

Jay understood. He left them to it and went shopping for supplies. Then he waited in the café across the road while papers were faxed from London. Frantic phone calls were exchanged. Bank. Solicitor. Agent. Bank.

‘And you’re sure this person – this previous offer – has no legal right to the property?’ he asked as, at last, the agent handed over the keys.

She shook her head.

‘No, monsieur. The arrangement with Madame d’Api may be of long-standing, but she has absolutely no legal right. In fact we have only her word that the old man accepted her offer in the first place.’

‘D’Api?’

‘Yes, a Madame Marise d’Api. A neighbour of yours, in fact, with property adjacent to your own. A local businesswoman, by all accounts.’

That explained a lot: her hostility, her surprise at being told that he’d bought the house, even the fresh paint on the ground floor. She had assumed the house would be hers. She had done what he himself had done: moved in a little early, before completion. No wonder she looked so angry! Jay resolved to see her as soon as he could, to explain. To reimburse her, if necessary, for the work she had done on the house. After all, if they were going to be neighbours…