Joanne Harris - Blackberry Wine

Nether Edge, Summer 1977

THEY WENT TO THE EDGE MORE OFTEN AFTER THAT. THEY KEPT out of sight most of the time, visiting when they were fairly certain no-one would be there. There were a couple of clashes with Glenda and her mates – once at the dump, over ownership of an old deep-freeze (Glenda won that encounter) and once at the river crossing (one-up to Gilly and Jay). Nothing serious ensued. Name-calling, a few flung stones, threats and gibes. Gilly and Jay knew Nether Edge better than the others, in spite of their out-of-town status. They knew the best hiding places, the short cuts. And they had imagination. Glenda and her mates had little but spite and swagger to sustain them. Gilly liked to lay traps. A bent sapling with a taut wire across the base, designed to fly in the face of anyone who tripped it. A paint tin of dirty canal water balanced, precarious, on the door of their den. The den itself was raided again and again, until it was finally abandoned, then Jay found the new den – in the dump, between a rusty hulk and an old fridge door – and raided that. They left their signature everywhere. On disused ovens in the dump. On trees. On the walls and doors of a series of dens. Gilly made a slingshot and practised shooting at discarded tins and jam jars. She was a natural. She never missed. She could break a jar at fifty feet without even trying. Of course there were a few narrow escapes. Once they almost cornered Jay near the place where he hid his bike, close to the railway bridge. It was getting dark and Gilly had already gone home, but he’d found a stash of last year’s coal – maybe as much as a couple of sacksful – in a patch of weeds, and he wanted to shift it before anyone else came across it by accident. He was too busy bagging coal chunks for Joe to notice the four girls coming out from the other side of the railway, and Glenda was almost on him before he knew it.

Glenda was Jay’s age, but big for a girl. Zeth’s narrow features were overlaid with a meatiness which squeezed her eyes into crescents and her mouth into a pouty bud. Her slabby cheeks were already raddled with acne. It was the first time he had seen her so close, and her resemblance to her brother was almost paralysing. Her friends eyed him warily, fanning out behind Glenda, as if to cut off his escape. The bike was ten feet away, hidden in the long grass. Jay began to edge towards it.

‘Iz on iz own today,’ remarked one of the other girls, a skinny blonde with a cigarette butt clamped between her teeth. ‘Wheer’s tha girlfriend?’

Jay moved closer to the bike. Glenda moved with him, skidding down the shingle of the banking towards the road. Pieces of gravel shot out from under her sneakers. She was wearing a cut-off T-shirt and her arms were red with sunburn. With those big, fishwife’s arms she looked troublingly adult, as if she had been born that way. Jay feigned indifference. He would have liked to say something clever, something biting, but the words which would have come so easily in a story refused to co-operate. Instead, he scrambled down the bank to where he had hidden his bike and pulled it out of the long grass onto the road.

Glenda gave a crow of rage and began to slide towards him, paddling the shingle with large, spatulate hands. Dust flew.

‘I’ll fuckin ave thee, tha bastard,’ she said, sounding alarmingly like her brother, but she was too busy watching Jay to control her slide, and she overshot the banking with comical suddenness, tipping into the dry ditch at the bottom, where a stand of nettles was just coming into flower. Glenda screamed with rage and chagrin. Jay grinned and straddled his bike. In the ditch, Glenda thrashed and struggled, her face in the nettles.

He rode off while Glenda’s three friends were hauling her out, but as he reached the top of the street he stopped and turned. He could see Glenda, half out of the ditch now. Her face was a dark blur of fury. He gave a small, insolent wave.

‘I’ll ave thee!’ Her voice reached him thinly across the space which separated them. ‘Mi fuckin brother’ll ave thee anall!’

Jay waved again and did a wheelie as he turned down the lane and out of sight. He was laughing-gas dizzy, his jaw aching with laughter, his ribs tight. The talisman tied to the loop of his jeans fluttered from his hip like a banner. He whoop-whooped all the way down the hill to the village, and his voice whipped past his face, stolen by the wind. He was exhilarated. He felt invulnerable.

But August was drawing to an end. September loomed like a nemesis. A single week to go before his downfall.

Lansquenet, March 1999

DURING THE WEEK THAT FOLLOWED JAY WROTE EVERY NIGHT. On Friday the electricity was finally restored, but by then he’d become accustomed to working by the light of the oil lamp. It was friendlier somehow, more atmospheric. The pages of his manuscript formed a tight wedge on the table top. He had almost a hundred now. On Monday Clairmont arrived with four workmen to make a start on the repairs to the house. They began with the roof, which was missing a great number of tiles. The plumbing, too, needed attention. In Agen he managed to find a car-hire company and rented a five-year-old green Citroën to carry his purchases and speed up his visits to Lansquenet. He also bought three reams of typing paper and some typewriter ribbons. He worked after dark, when Clairmont and his men had gone home, and the stack of typed pages mounted steadily.

He did not reread the new pages. Fear, perhaps, that the block which had afflicted him for so many years might still be waiting. But somehow he didn’t think so. Part of it was this place. Its air. The feeling of familiarity in spite of the fact that he was a stranger here. Its closeness to the past. As if Pog Hill Lane had been rebuilt here amongst the orchards and vines.

On fine mornings he walked into Lansquenet to buy bread. His ankle had healed quickly and completely, leaving only the faintest of scars, and he began to enjoy the walk and to recognize some of the faces he saw along the way. Joséphine told him their names, and sometimes more. As the owner of the village’s only café, she was in an excellent position to know everything that happened. The dry-looking old man in the blue beret was Narcisse, a market gardener who supplied the local grocer and the florist. In spite of his reserve, there was wry, hidden humour in his face. Jay knew from Joséphine that he was a friend of the gypsies who came downriver every summer, trading with them and offering them seasonal work in his fields. For years he and a succession of local curés battled over his tolerance of the gypsies, but Narcisse was stubborn, and the gypsies stayed. The redhaired man from Clairmont’s yard was Michel Roux, from Marseilles, a traveller from the river, who stopped for a fortnight five years ago and never left. The woman with the red scarf was Denise Poitou, the baker’s wife. The wan-looking fat woman in black, her eyes shaded from the sun by a wide-brimmed hat, was Mireille Faizande, Marise’s mother-in-law. Jay tried to catch her eye as she passed the café terrasse, but she did not seem to see him.

There were stories behind all of these faces. Joséphine, leaning over the counter with her cup of coffee in one hand, appeared more than willing to tell them. Her early shyness of him had vanished, and she greeted him with pleasure. Sometimes, when there were not too many customers, they talked. Jay knew very few of the people she mentioned. But this did not seem to discourage Joséphine.

‘Do you mean I never told you about old Albert? Or his daughter?’ She sounded amazed at his ignorance. ‘They used to live next door to the bakery. Well, what used to be the bakery, before it became the chocolaterie . Opposite the florist’s.’ At first Jay simply allowed her to talk. He paid little attention, letting names, anecdotes, descriptions wash past him as he sipped his coffee and watched the people go by.