Harris, Joanne.

Blackberry Wine.

Acknowledgements

Many thanks go to the following: Kevin and Anouchka for bearing with me, to G. J. Paul, and the Priory Old Boys'

Club, to Francesca Liversidge for her inspired editing, to Jennifer Luithlen, to my splendid agent, Serafina Clarke, for showing me the ropes, but not giving me enough to hang myself with, and to Our Man in London, Christopher Fowler. To all my colleagues and pupils at Leeds Grammar School, goodbye, and good luck. I'll miss you.

WINE TALKS. EVERYONE KNOWS THAT. LOOK AROUND YOU. ASK.

the oracle at the street corner; the uninvited guest at the wedding feast; the holy fool. It talks. It ventriloquizes. It has a million voices. It unleashes the tongue, teasing out secrets you never meant to tell, secrets you never even knew. It shouts, rants, whispers. It speaks of great things, splendid plans, tragic loves and terrible betrayals. It screams with laughter. It chuckles softly to itself. It weeps in front of its own reflection. It opens up summers long past and memories best forgotten. Every bottle a whiff of other times, other places; every one, from the commonest Liebfraumilch to the imperious 1945 Veuve Clicquot, a humble miracle. Everyday magic, Joe called it. The transformation of base matter into the stuff of dreams. Layman's alchemy.

Take me, for instance. Fleurie, 1962. Last survivor of a crate of twelve, bottled and laid down the year Jay was born. 'A pert, garrulous wine, cheery and a little brash, with a pungent taste of blackcurrant,' said the label. Not really a wine for keeping, but he did. For nostalgia's sake. For a special occasion. A birthday, perhaps a wedding. But his birthdays pa.s.sed without celebration; drinking Argentinian red and watching old Westerns. Five years ago he laid me out on a table set with silver candlesticks, but nothing came of it. In spite of that he and the girl stayed together.

An army of bottles came with her - Dom Perignon, Sto- lichnaya vodka, Parfait Amour and Mouton-Cadet, Belgian beers in long-necked bottles, Noilly Prat vermouth and Fraise des Bois. They talk, too, nonsense mostly, metallic chatter, like guests mingling at a party. We refused to have anything to do with them. We were pushed to the back of the cellar, we three survivors, behind the gleaming ranks of these newcomers, and there we stayed for five years, forgotten. Chateau-Chalon '58, Sancerre '71 and myself.

Chateau-Chalon, vexed at his relegation, pretends deafness and often refuses to speak at all. 'A mellow wine of great dignity and stature,' he quotes in his rare moments of expansiveness. He likes to remind us of his seniority, of the longevity of yellow Jura wines. He makes much of this, as he does of his honeyed bouquet and unique pedigree.

The Sancerre has long since turned vinegary and speaks even less, occasionally sighing thinly over her vanished youth.

And then, six weeks before this story begins, the others came. The strangers. The Specials. The interlopers who began it all, though they too seemed forgotten behind the bright new bottles. Six of them, each with its own small handwritten label and sealed in candle wax. Each bottle had a cord of a different colour knotted around its neck: raspberry red,.elderflower green, blackberry blue, rosehip yellow, damson black. The last bottle, tied with a brown cord, was no wine even I had ever heard of. 'Specials, 1975,'

said the label, the writing faded to the colour of old tea. But inside was a hive of secrets. There was no escaping them; their whisperings, their catcalls, their laughter. We pretended indifference to their antics. These amateurs. Not a whiff of grape in any of them. They were inferiors, and we begrudged them their place among us. And yet there was an appealing impudence to these six freebooters, a hectic clash of flavours and images to send more sober vintages reeling.

It was, of course, beneath our dignity to speak to them. But oh I longed to. Perhaps it was that plebeian undertaste of blackcurrant which linked us.

10.From the cellar you could hear everything that went on in the house. We marked events with the comings and goings of our more favoured colleagues: twelve beers Friday night and laughter in the hallway; the night before a single bottle of Californian red, so young you could almost smell the tannin; the previous week -- his birthday, as it happened -- a half-bottle of Moet, a demoiselle, that loneliest, most revealing of sizes, and the distant, nostalgic sound of gunfire and horses' hooves from upstairs. Jay Mackintosh was thirty- seven. Unremarkable but for his eyes, which were pinot noir indigo, he had the awkward, slightly dazed look of a man who has lost his way. Five years ago Kerry had found this appealing. By now she had lost her taste for it. There was something deeply annoying about his pa.s.sivity and the core of stubbornness beneath. Precisely fourteen years ago Jay wrote a novel called Three Summers with Jackapple Joe.

You'll know it, of course. It won the Prix Goncourt in France, translated into twenty languages. Three crates of vintage Veuve Clicquot celebrated its publication -- the '76, drunk too young to do it justice, but then Jay was always like that, rushing at life as if it might never run dry, as if what was bottled inside him would last for ever, success following success in a celebration without end.

In those days there was no wine cellar. We stood on the mantelpiece above his typewriter, for luck, he said. When he'd completed the book he opened the last of my companions of '62 and drank it very slowly, turning the gla.s.s round and round in his hands when he'd finished. Then he came over to the mantelpiece. For a moment he stood there. Then he grinned and walked, rather unsteadily, back to his chair.

'Next time, sweetheart,' he promised. 'We'll leave it till next time.' You see, he talks to me, as one day I will talk to him. I'm his oldest friend. We understand each other. Our destinies are intertwined.

Of course there was no next time. Television interviews, newspaper articles and reviews succeeded each other into silence. Hollywood made a film adaptation with Corey Feldman, set in the American Midwest. Nine years pa.s.sed.

Jay wrote part of a ma.n.u.script ent.i.tled Stout Cortez and sold eight short stories to Playboy magazine, which were later reprinted as a collection by Penguin Books. The literary world waited for Jay Mackintosh's new novel, eagerly at first, then restless, curious, then finally, fatally, indifferent.

Of course he still wrote. Seven novels to date, with t.i.tles like The G-sus Gene or Psy-Wrens of Mars or A Date with d'Eath, all written under the pseudonym of Jonathan Wine- sap, nice earners which kept him in reasonable comfort for those fourteen years. He bought a computer, a Toshiba laptop, which he balanced on his knees like the TV dinners he made for himself on the nights - increasingly frequent now - that Kerry worked late. He wrote reviews, articles, short stories and newspaper columns. He lectured at writers' groups, held creative-writing seminars at the university.

There were so many things to occupy him, he used to say, that he had scarcely any time to do any work of his own -- laughing without conviction at himself, the writer who never writes. Kerry looked at him, narrow-lipped, when he said this. Meet Kerry O'Neill - born Katherine Marsden - twenty-eight, cropped blond hair and startling green eyes, which Jay never suspected were coloured contact lenses. A journalist made good in television by way of Forum? a late-night talk show, where popular authors and B-list celebrities discussed contemporary social problems against a background of avant-garde jazz. Five years ago she might have smiled at his words. But then, five years ago there was no Forum.', Kerry was writing a travel column for the Independent and working on a book ent.i.tled Chocolate - a Feminist Outlook. The world was filled with possibilities. The book came out two years later, on a wave of media interest. Kerry was photogenic, marketable and mainstream. As a result she appeared on a number of lightweight chat shows. She was photographed for Marie CJaire, TatJer and Me.', but was quick to rea.s.sure herself 12.that it hadn't gone to her head. She had a house in Chelsea, a pied-o-terre in New York and was considering liposuction on her thighs. She had grown up. Moved on.

But, for Jay, nothing had moved on. Five years ago he had seemed the embodiment of the temperamental artist, drinking half a bottle of Smirnoff a day, a doomed, damaged figure of romance. He had brought out her maternal instincts.

She was going to redeem him, inspire him and, in return, he would write a wonderful book, a book which would illuminate lives and which would all be due to her.

But none of that happened. Trashy sci-fi was what paid the rent; cheap paperbacks with lurid covers. The maturity, the puckish wisdom of that first work, had never been duplicated, or even attempted. And for all his brooding silences Jay had no temperament to speak of. He had never given in to an impulse. He never really showed anger, never lost control. His conversation was neither brilliantly intelligent nor intriguingly surly. Even his drinking - his one remaining excess -- seemed ridiculous now, like a man who insists upon wearing the outmoded fashions of his youth.

He spent his time playing computer games, listening to old singles and watching old movies on video, locked in his adolescence like a record in a groove. Maybe she was mistaken, thought Kerry. He didn't want to grow up. He didn't want to be saved.

The empty bottles told a different story. He drank, Jay told himself, for the same reason he wrote second-rate science fiction. Not to forget, but to remember, to open up the past and find himself there again, like the stone in a bitter fruit. He opened each bottle, began each story with the secret conviction that here was the magic draught that would restore him. But magic, like wine, needs the right conditions in order to work. Joe could have told him that.

Otherwise the chemistry doesn't happen. The bouquet is spoiled.

I suppose I expected it to begin with me. There would have been poetry in that. We are linked, after all, he and I.

But this story begins with a different vintage. I don't really mind that. Better to be his last than his first. I'm not even the star of this story, but I was there before the Specials came, and I'll be there when they've all been drunk. I can afford to wait. Besides, aged Fleurie is an acquired taste, not to be rushed, and I'm not sure his palate would have been ready.

14.London, Spring 1999 IT WAS MARCH. MILD, EVEN FOR THE CELLAR. JAY HAD BEEN.

working upstairs - working in his way, with a bottle at his elbow and the television turned on low. Kerry was at a party -- the launch of a new award for female authors under twenty-five - and the house was silent. Jay used the typewriter for what he thought of as 'real' work, the laptop for his science fiction, so you could always tell what he was writing by the sound, or lack of it. It was ten before he came downstairs. He switched on the radio to an oldies station, and you could hear him moving about in the kitchen, his footsteps restless against the terracotta tiles. There was a drinks cabinet next to the fridge. He opened it, hesitated, closed it again. The fridge door opened, Kerry's taste dominated here, as everywhere. Wheat-gra.s.s juice, couscous salad, baby spinach leaves, yoghurts. What he really craved, Jay thought, was a huge bacon-and-fried-egg sandwich with ketchup and onion, and a mug of strong tea. The craving, he knew, had something to do with Joe and Pog Hill Lane. An a.s.sociation, that was all, which often came on when he was trying to write. But all that was finished. A phantom. He knew he wasn't really hungry. Instead he lit a cigarette, a forbidden luxury reserved for when Kerry was out of the house, and inhaled greedily. From the radio's scratchy speaker came the voice of Steve Harley singing 'Make me smile' - another song from that distant, inescapable summer of '75 - and for a moment he raised his voice to sing along - 'Come up and see me, make me smi-i-i-ile' forlornly in the echoing kitchen.

Behind us in the dark cellar the strangers were restless.

Perhaps it was the music, or perhaps something in the air of this mild spring evening seemed suddenly charged with possibility, for they were effervescent with activity, seething in their bottles, rattling against each other, jumping at shadows, bursting to talk, to open, to release their essence into the air. Perhaps this was why he came down, his steps heavy on the rough, unpolished stairs. Jay liked the cellar; it was cool, secret. He was always coming down there, just to touch the bottles, to run his fingers along the dust-furred walls. I always liked it when he came to the cellar. Like a barometer, I can sense his emotional temperature when he is close to me. To some extent I can even read his thoughts.

As I said, there is a chemistry between us.

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 pa.s.sed, 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 16.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 gla.s.s 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 circ.u.mstances 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.

HAD WITHSTOOD THE YEARS. HIS KNIFE SLICED IT OPEN AND THE.

irk was still intact beneath. For a moment the scent was i immediately pungent that all he could do was endure it, ieth clenched, as it worked its will on him. It smelt earthy ad a little sour, like the ca.n.a.l in midsummer, with a larpness which reminded him of the vegetable-cutter ad the gleeful tang of fresh-dug potatoes. For a second ie illusion was so strong that he was actually there in that anished place, with Joe leaning on his spade and the radio 'edged in a fork in a tree, playing 'Send in the Clowns' or 'm Not in Love'. A sudden overwhelming excitement took old of him and he poured a small quant.i.ty of the wine into gla.s.s, trying not to spill the liquid in his eagerness. It was usky-pink, like papaya juice, and it seemed to climb the ;des of the gla.s.s in a frenzy of antic.i.p.ation, as if something iside it were alive and anxious to work its magic on his esh. He looked at it with mingled distrust and longing. A art of him wanted to drink it - had waited years for just lis moment - but all the same he hesitated. The liquid in ie gla.s.s was murky and flecked with flakes of brownish latter, like rust. He suddenly imagined himself drinking, Poking, writhing on the tiles in agony. The gla.s.s halted alfway to his mouth.

He looked at the liquid again. The movement he thought e saw had ceased. The scent was faintly sweetish, med;inal, like cough mixture. Once again he wondered why he 18.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 gla.s.s, 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 p.i.s.sed 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 winegla.s.s 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 gla.s.s 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 winegla.s.s at her.

In the cellar the remaining bottles rattled boisterously, as if in antic.i.p.ation. Kerry stopped, listened.

'Did you hear something?'

Jay shook his head, still grinning. She came closer, looked at the gla.s.s 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 c.o.c.ktail? 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. Chateau-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 antic.i.p.ation, with the knowledge that something was on the way.

'Ugh! G.o.d! 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 circ.u.mstances.'

'I was planning to drink it, darling, not f.u.c.k 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 gla.s.s of Stolly instead, OK?'

'Kerry, stop talking like my mother.'

'Then stop behaving like a child. Why can't you just grow up, for G.o.d'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 b.u.g.g.e.r 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 gla.s.s to his face.

20.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 gla.s.s, like a chandelier falling onto a laid table. He took a mouthful.

'Cheers.'

It tasted as dreadful as it did when 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 ca.n.a.l 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 a.s.sailed him, feeling suddenly lightheaded.'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 gla.s.s, tasting the 21.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.

22.4.Pog Hill, Summer 1975 JACKAPPLE JOE. AS GOOD A NAME AS ANY. HE INTRODUCED HIMSELF.

as Joe c.o.x, 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. 'c.o.x 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.'

23.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.

'Pa.s.s us them jacks over there, will you?'

'Jacks?'

A slight gesture of impatience towards the box: 'Jack- apples.'

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.