‘Joséphine,’ said the propriétaire. ‘Are you… a tourist?’ She sounded as if the prospect amused her.
He shook his head. ‘Not exactly. I had a few problems getting here last night. I… got lost. I had to sleep rough.’ He explained briefly.
Joséphine looked at him with wary sympathy. Clearly she couldn’t imagine getting lost in such a small, familiar place as Lansquenet.
‘Do you have rooms? For the night?’
She shook her head.
‘Is there a hotel, then? Or a chambre d’hôte?’
Again that look of amusement. Jay began to understand that tourists were not in plentiful supply. Oh well. It would have to be Agen.
‘Could I use your telephone, then? For a taxi?’
‘Taxi?’ She laughed aloud at that. ‘A taxi, on a Sunday night?’ Jay pointed out that it was barely six o’clock, but Joséphine shook her head and laughed again. All the taxis would be on their way home, she explained. No-one would come this far for a pick-up. Village boys often made hoax calls, she explained with a smile. Taxis, takeaway pizzas… They thought it was funny.
‘Oh.’ There was the house, of course. His house. He had already slept there one night, and with the sleeping bag and the candles he could surely manage another. He could buy food from the café. He would be able to collect wood and light a fire in the grate. There were clothes in his suitcase. In the morning he would change and go to Agen to sign the papers and collect the keys.
‘There was a woman, back there where I slept. Madame d’Api. I think she thought I was trespassing.’
Joséphine gave him a quick look.
‘I suppose she did. But if the house is yours now-’
‘I thought she was the caretaker. She was standing guard.’ Jay grinned. ‘To tell the truth, she wasn’t very friendly.’
Joséphine shook her head.
‘No. I don’t suppose she was.’
‘Do you know her?’
‘Not really.’
Mention of Marise d’Api seemed to have made Joséphine wary. The doubtful look was back on her face, and she was rubbing at a spot on the countertop with a preoccupied air.
‘At least I know she’s real now,’ remarked Jay cheerfully. ‘At midnight last night I thought I’d seen a ghost. I suppose she comes out in the daytime?’
Joséphine nodded silently, still rubbing the countertop. Jay was puzzled at her reticence, but was too hungry to pursue the matter.
The bar menu was not extensive, but the plat du jour – a generous omelette with salad and fried potatoes – was good. He bought a packet of Gauloises and a spare lighter, then Joséphine gave him a cheese baguette wrapped in waxed paper to take back with him, along with three bottles of beer and a bag of apples. He left while it was still light, carrying his purchases in a plastic carrier, and made good time.
He brought the rest of his luggage from its hiding place by the roadside into the house. He was feeling tired by now, and his abused ankle was beginning to protest, but he dragged the case to the house before he allowed himself to rest. The sun was gone now, the sky still pale but beginning to darken, and he gathered some wood from the pile at the back of the house and stacked it in the gaping fireplace. The wood looked freshly cut and had been stored beneath a tarpaper cover to keep it from the rain. Another mystery. He supposed Marise might have cut the wood, but could not see why she might have done so. Certainly she hardly seemed the neighbourly type. He found the empty bottle of elderflower wine in a bin at the back of the house. He didn’t remember putting it there, but in the state he’d been in last night he couldn’t be expected to recall everything. He hadn’t been thinking rationally, he told himself. The hallucination of Joe, so real he had almost believed it at the time, was proof enough of his state of mind. The single cigarette butt he discovered in the room where he’d spent the night looked old. It might have been there for ten years. He shredded it and threw it to the wind and closed the shutters from the inside.
He lit some candles, then made a fire in the grate, using old newspapers he had found in a box upstairs and the wood from the back of the house. Several times the paper flared furiously, then went out, but finally the split logs caught. Jay fed the fire carefully, with a slight feeling of surprise at the pleasure it gave him. There was something primitive in this simple act, something which reminded him of the Westerns he’d liked so much as a boy.
He opened his case and put his typewriter on the table next to the bottles of wine, pleased with the effect. He almost felt he might be able to write something tonight, something new. No science fiction tonight. Jonathan Winesap was on vacation. Tonight he would see what Jay Mackintosh could do.
He sat at the typewriter. It was a clumsy thing, spring-actioned, hard on the fingers. He’d kept it out of affectation at first, though it was years since he had used it regularly. Now the keys felt good beneath his hands and he typed a few lines experimentally across the ribbon.
It sounded good, too. But without paper…
The unfinished manuscript of Stout Cortez was in an envelope at the bottom of his case. He took it out, and reversed the first page as he slipped it into the slot. The machine in front of him felt like a car, a tank, a rocket. Around him the room buzzed and fizzled like dark champagne. Beneath his fingers the typewriter keys jumped and snapped. He lost track of time. Of everything.
24
Pog Hill, Summer 1977
THE GIRL’S NAME WAS GILLY. JAY SAW HER QUITE OFTEN AFTER that, down at Nether Edge, and they sometimes played together by the canal, collecting rubbish and treasures and picking wild spinach or dandelions for the family pot. They weren’t really gypsies, Gilly told him scornfully, but travellers, people who couldn’t stay in one place for long and who despised the capitalist property market. Her mother, Maggie, had lived in a tepee in Wales until Gilly was born, then had decided it was time for a more stable environment for the child. Hence the trailer, an old fish van, renovated and refurbished to accommodate two people and a dog.
Gilly had no father. Maggie didn’t like men, she explained, because they were the instigators of the Judaeo-Christian patriarchal society, hell-bent on the subjugation of women. This kind of talk always made Jay a little nervous, and he was always careful to be especially polite to Maggie in case she ever decided he was the enemy, but although she sometimes sighed over his gender, in the same way that one might over a handicapped infant, she never held it against him.
Gilly got on with Joe immediately. Jay introduced them the week after the rock fight, and knew a tiny stab of jealousy at their rapport. Joe knew many of the region’s itinerants, and had already begun to trade with Maggie, swapping vegetables and preserves for the afghans she knitted from thrift-shop bargains, with which Joe used to cover his tender perennials – this said with a chuckle which made Maggie squawk with laughter – on cold nights. She knew a great deal about plants, and both she and Gilly accepted Joe’s talismans and perimeter-protection rituals with perfect serenity, as if such things were quite natural to them. As Joe worked in the allotment, Jay and Gilly would help him with his other tasks and he would talk to them or sing along to the radio as they collected seeds in jars or sewed charms into red flannel bags or fetched old pallets from the railway bank in which to store that season’s ripening fruit. It was as if Gilly’s presence had mellowed Joe somehow. There was something different in the way he spoke to her, something which excluded Jay, not unkindly, but palpably nevertheless. Perhaps because she, too, was a traveller. Perhaps simply because she was a girl.
Not that Gilly conformed in any way to Jay’s expectations. She was fiercely independent, always taking the lead, in spite of his seniority, physically reckless, cheerily foul-mouthed to a degree which secretly shocked his conservative upbringing, filled with bizarre beliefs and ideologies culled from her mother’s diverse store. Space aliens, feminist politics, alternative religions, pendulum power, numerology, environmental issues, all had their place in Maggie’s philosophy, and Gilly, in her turn, accepted them all. From her Jay learned about the ozone layer and bread-cakes mysteriously shaped like Jesus, or what she called the New Killer Threat, or shamanism, or saving the whales. In turn she was the ideal audience for his stories. They spent days together, sometimes helping Joe, but often simply loafing around by the canal, talking or exploring.