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.
2
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-grass 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 association, 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 passed, 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 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 glass 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 circumstances 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.