Every day, twice a day, just before the arrival of the train, Jay would line up a row of old tin cans on the side of the railway bridge. He arranged them in pyramids, like coconuts at a shy, for maximum appeal. The bored workman on the last truck could never resist the challenge they presented. Every time the train passed by he would lob chunks of coal at the cans, trying to knock them off the bridge, and Jay could always count on at least half-a-dozen good-sized pieces of coal each time. He stored these in an empty three-gallon paint tin, hidden in the bushes, and every few days, when this was full, he delivered the coal to Joe’s house. It was on one of these occasions, when he was fooling about by the railway bridge, that he heard the sound of gunfire from Nether Edge and froze, the coalbox dropping from his hand.
Zeth was back.
21
Lansquenet, March 1999
JAY PULLED A HANDKERCHIEF OUT OF HIS DUFFEL BAG AND USED it to staunch the blood, beginning to feel cold now and wishing he’d brought his Burberry. He also took out one of the sandwiches he had bought at the station earlier that day and forced himself to eat. It tasted foul, but the sickness receded a little and he thought he felt a little warmer. It was almost night. A sliver of moon was rising, just enough to cast shadows, and in spite of the pain in his foot he looked around curiously. He glanced at his watch, almost expecting to see the luminous dial of the Seiko he got for Christmas when he was fourteen, the one Zeth broke during that last, most dreadful week of August. But the Rolex was not luminous. Trop tacky, mon cher. Kerry always went for class.
In the shadows at the corner of the building something moved. He called out, ‘Hey!’ hoisting himself up onto his good leg and limping towards the house. ‘Hey! Please! Wait! Is anyone there?’
Something smacked against the side of the building with the same flat sound he heard before. A shutter, perhaps. He thought he saw it outlined against the purple-black sky, flapping loosely in the breeze. He shivered. No-one there after all. If only he could get into the house, out of the cold.
The window was about three feet from the ground. There was a deep ledge inside, half blocked with debris, but he found that he could clear enough space to push through. The air smelt of paint. He moved carefully, feeling for broken glass, swinging his leg over the ledge and into the room, pulling the duffel bag in behind him. His eyes had become accustomed to the dark and he could see that the room was mostly clear, except for a table and a chair in the centre and a pile of something – sacks, maybe – in one corner. Using the chair for support, Jay moved over to the pile and found a sleeping bag and a pillow rolled snugly against the wall, along with a cardboard box which contained paint tins and a bundle of wax candles.
Candles? What the hell…?
He reached into his jeans pocket for a lighter. It was only a cheap Bic, and almost out of fuel, but he managed to strike a flame. The candles were dry. The wick spluttered, then flared. The room was mellowly illumined.
‘That’s something, I suppose.’
He could sleep here. The room was sheltered. There were blankets and bedclothes and the remains of that lunch-time’s sandwiches. For a moment the pain in his foot was forgotten, and he grinned at the thought that this was home. It deserved a celebration.
Rummaging through the duffel bag, he pulled out one of Joe’s bottles, and cut open the seal and the green cord with the tip of his penknife. The clear scent of elderflower filled the air. He drank a little, tasting that familiar, cloying flavour, like fruit left to rot in the dark. Definitely a vintage year, he told himself, and despite everything he began to laugh shakily. He drank a little more. In spite of the taste the wine was warming, musky; he sat down on the rolled-up bedding, took another mouthful and began to feel a little better.
He reached into his bag again and took out the radio. He turned it on, half expecting the white noise he had heard on the train all the way from Marseilles, but surprisingly the signal was clear. Not the oldies station, of course, but some kind of local French radio, a low warble of music, something he didn’t recognize. Jay laughed again, feeling suddenly light-headed.
Inside the duffel bag the four remaining Specials began their chorus again, a ferment of yahoos and catcalls and war cries, redoubling in frenzy until the pitch was wild, feverish, a vulgar champagne of sounds and impressions and voices and memories, all shaken into a delirious cocktail of triumph. It pulled me along, dragging me with it, so that, for a moment, I was no longer myself – Fleurie, a respectable vintage with just a hint of blackcurrant – but a cauldron of spices, frothing and seething and going to the head in a wild flush of heat. Something was getting ready to happen. I knew it. Then, suddenly, silence.
Jay looked around curiously. For a moment he shivered, as if a sudden breeze had touched him, a breeze from other places. The paint on the wall was fresh, he noticed; beside the box containing paint cans was a tray of paintbrushes, washed and neatly aligned. The brushes were not yet dry. The breeze was sharper now, smelling of smoke and the circus, hot sugar and apples and midsummer’s eve. The radio crackled softly.
‘Well, lad,’ said a voice from the shadows. ‘You took yer time.’ Jay turned round so fast that he almost overbalanced.
‘Steady on,’ said Joe kindly.
‘Joe?’
He had not changed. He was wearing his old cap, a Thin Lizzy T-shirt, his work trousers and pit boots. In one hand he held two wineglasses. In front of him, on the table, stood the bottle of Elderflower ’76.
‘I allus said you’d get used to it one day,’ he remarked with satisfaction. ‘Elderflower champagne. Gotta bittova kick, though, annit?’
‘Joe?’
A flare of joy went through him, so strong that it made the bottles shake. It all made sense now, he thought deliriously; it was all coming together. The signs, the memories – all for this – all finally making sense.
Then the realization slammed him back, like awakening from a dream in which everything seems on the brink of being explained, but falls away into fragments with the light.
Of course it wasn’t possible. Joe must be over eighty years old by now. That is, if he was alive at all. Joe left, he told himself fiercely, like a thief in the night, leaving nothing behind but questions.
Jay looked at the old man in the candlelight, his bright eyes and the laugh-wrinkles beneath them, and for the first time he noticed that everything about him was somehow gilded - even the toes of his pit boots – with an eerie glow, like nostalgia.
‘You’re not real, are you?’ he said.
Joe shrugged.
‘What’s real?’ he asked carelessly. ‘No such thing, lad.’
‘Real, as in the sense of really here.’
Joe watched him patiently, like a teacher with a slow pupil. Jay’s voice rose almost angrily.
‘Real, as in corporeally present. As in not a figment of my deluded wine-soaked imagination, or an early symptom of blood-poisoning or an out-of-body experience while the real me sits in a white room somewhere wearing one of those coats with no arms.’
Joe looked at him mildly.
‘So, you grew up to be a writer, then,’ he remarked. ‘Allus said you were a clever lad. Write any gooduns, did yer? Make any brass?’
‘Plenty of brass, but only one good one. Too long ago. Shit, I can’t believe I’m actually sitting here talking to myself.’
‘Only one, eh?’
Jay shivered again. The cold night wind sliced thinly through the half-open shutter, bringing with it that feverish draught of other places.
‘I must really be sick,’ said Jay softly to himself. ‘Toxic shock, or something, from that sodding trap. I’m delirious.’