Joanne Harris - Blackberry Wine

‘ Maman! ’

Rosa’s voice cut through the moment with shrill insistence.

‘I’ve found a little room upstairs! There’s a round window and a blue bed, shaped like a boat! It’s a bit dusty, but I could clean it up, couldn’t I, Maman ? Couldn’t I?’

Her hand moved away.

‘Of course. If monsieur … if Jay…’ She looked confused, awoken in the middle of a dream. She pushed the half-empty wineglass away from her.

‘I should go,’ she said quickly. ‘It’s getting late. I’ll bring Rosa’s things across. Thank you for-’

‘It’s all right.’ Jay tried to put his hand on her arm, but she pulled away. ‘You can both stay if you like. I have plenty of-’

‘No.’ Suddenly she was the old Marise again, the confidences at an end. ‘I have to bring Rosa’s sleeping things. It’s time she was in bed.’ She hugged Rosa briefly but fiercely. ‘You be good,’ she advised. ‘And please’ – this was to Jay – ‘don’t mention this in the village. Not to anyone.’

She unhooked her yellow slicker from the peg behind the kitchen door and pulled it on. Outside, the rain was still falling.

‘Promise,’ said Marise.

‘Of course.’

She nodded, a curt, polite nod, as if concluding the business between them. Then she was gone into the rain.

Jay closed the door behind her and turned to Rosa.

‘Well? Is the chocolate ready?’ she asked.

He grinned. ‘Let’s see, shall we?’

He poured the drink into a wide-mouthed cup with flowers on the rim. Rosa curled up on his bed with the cup and watched curiously as he tidied away the cups and glasses and put the empty bottle aside.

‘Who was he?’ she asked at last. ‘Is he English, too?’

‘Who’s that?’ Jay called from the kitchen, running water into the sink.

‘The old man,’ said Rosa. ‘The old man from upstairs.’

Jay turned off the tap and looked at her.

‘You saw him? You talked to him?’

Rosa nodded.

‘An old man with a funny hat on,’ she said. ‘He told me to tell you something.’ She took a long drink of her chocolate, emerging from the cup with a frothy foam moustache. Jay felt suddenly shivery, almost afraid.

‘What did he say?’ he whispered.

Rosa frowned.

‘He said to remember the Specials,’ she said. ‘That you’d know what to do.’

‘Anything else?’ Jay’s mouth was dry, his head pounding.

‘Yes.’ She nodded energetically. ‘He told me to say goodbye.’

Pog Hill Lane, February 1999

IT WAS TWENTY-TWO YEARS BEFORE JAY WENT BACK TO POG HILL. Part of it was anger, another part fear. He had never felt as if he belonged before. London certainly wasn’t home. The places he’d lived all looked the same to him, with small variations in size and design. Flats. Bedsits. Even Kerry’s Kensington house. Places in passing. But this year was different. Pick your own cliché, as Joe would have said. Perhaps it was simply that for the first time there were greater fears than going back to Pog Hill. Nearly fifteen years since Jackapple Joe . Since then, nothing. This went beyond writer’s block. He felt as if he were stuck in time, forced to write and rewrite the fantasies of his adolescence. Jackapple Joe was the first – the only – adult book he had written. But instead of releasing him it had trapped him in childhood. In 1977 he had rejected magic. He had had enough, he told himself. Enough and enough and enough. He was on his own, and that was the way he wanted it. As if when he dropped Joe’s seeds into the cutting at Pog Hill he was also letting go of everything he’d clung to during those past three years: the talismans, the red ribbons, Gilly, the dens, the wasps’ nests, the treks along the railway lines and the fights at Nether Edge. Everything blowing away into the cutting with the litter and the ash of the railbed. Then Jackapple Joe put it to rest at last. Or so he had thought. But there must have been something left. Curiosity, perhaps. An itch at the back of his mind which refused to be scratched. Some remnant of belief.

Perhaps he’d mistaken the signs. After all, what evidence had he found? A few boxes of magazines? A map marked in coloured pencils? Perhaps he had jumped to a false conclusion. Perhaps Joe was telling the truth after all.

Perhaps Joe had come back .

It was something he hardly dared imagine. Joe back at Pog Hill? In spite of himself it brought his heart into his throat. He imagined the house as it was, overgrown perhaps, but with the allotment still well ordered behind the camouflage of Joe’s permanent solution, the trees decorated with red ribbons, the kitchen warm with the scent of brewing wine… He waited several months before he made the move. Kerry was supportive, cloyingly so, imagining perhaps a renewed source of inspiration, a new book which would propel him back into the limelight. She wanted to come with him; was so persistent that he finally agreed.

It was a mistake. He knew it the moment they arrived. Rain the colour of soot scrawling from the clouds. Nether Edge reclaimed as a riverside building development; bulldozers and tractors crawling across the disused railbed and neat identical bungalows. Fields had become car showrooms, supermarkets, shopping centres. Even the newsagent’s, where Jay had gone so many times to buy cigarettes and magazines for Joe, had become something else.

Kirby’s remaining mines had been closed for years. The canal was being renovated, and with the help of millennium funding there were ongoing plans for the development of a visitors’ centre, where tourists could go down a specially converted mine shaft or ride a barge on the newly cleaned canal.

Needless to say, Kerry thought it was charming.

But that wasn’t the worst.

In spite of everything, he was expecting Pog Hill at least to have survived. The main road was still more or less unchanged, with its graceful if slightly blackened Edwardian houses and its avenue of lindens. The bridge, too, was as he remembered it, a new pedestrian crossing at one end, but the same line of poplars which marked the entrance to Pog Hill Lane, and Jay’s heart played a funny little riff against his ribs as he pulled the car up to the yellow line and looked up the hill.

‘Is that it?’ Kerry was checking her reflection in the passenger-seat mirror. ‘I don’t see any sign or anything.’

Jay said nothing and got out of the car. Kerry followed him.

‘So this is where it all began.’ She sounded a little disappointed. ‘Funny. I thought it would be more atmospheric, somehow.’

He ignored her and took a few steps forward up the hill.

They had changed the name of the lane. You won’t find Pog Hill on any map now, or Nether Edge, or any of the places around which his life had revolved for those three long-ago summers. It’s called Meadowbank View now, the houses knocked down to give way to a row of brick-built two-storey flats with little balconies and geraniums in plastic planters. A sign on the nearest building read, ‘Meadowbank Quality Retirement Flats’. Jay went to stand where Joe’s house would have been. There was nothing. A small tarmacked parking area – residents only – to the side. Behind the flats, where Joe’s garden had once stood, was a bland square of lawn with a single small tree. Of Joe’s orchard, of the herb garden, the rows of blackcurrants and raspberries and gooseberries, the vines, plums, pears, the carrots, parsnips, the Specials, nothing remained.

‘Nothing.’

Kerry took his hand. ‘Poor darling,’ she whispered in his ear. ‘You’re not too terribly upset, are you?’ She sounded almost pleased, as if the prospect appealed to her. Jay shook his head.